All Is Gift

Reformation Sunday, 27 October 2024

Jeremiah 31:31-34

³¹The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. ³²It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. ³³But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. ³⁴No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

 

Psalm 46 (7)

¹ God is our refuge and strength,
a very present help in trouble.
² Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change,
though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea;
³ though its waters roar and foam,
though the mountains tremble with its tumult.
⁴ There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy habitation of the Most High.
⁵ God is in the midst of the city; it shall not be moved;
God will help it when the morning dawns.
⁶ The nations are in an uproar, the kingdoms totter;
he utters his voice, the earth melts.
⁷ The Lord of hosts is with us;
the God of Jacob is our refuge.
⁸ Come, behold the works of the Lord;
see what desolations he has brought on the earth.
⁹ He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;
he breaks the bow, and shatters the spear;
he burns the shields with fire.
¹⁰ ‘Be still, and know that I am God!
I am exalted among the nations,
I am exalted in the earth.’
¹¹ The Lord of hosts is with us;
the God of Jacob is our refuge.

 

Romans 3:19-28

¹⁹Now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. ²⁰For ‘no human being will be justified in his sight’ by deeds prescribed by the law, for through the law comes the knowledge of sin.

²¹But now, irrespective of law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, ²²the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, ²³since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; ²⁴they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, ²⁵whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; ²⁶it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus.

²⁷Then what becomes of boasting? It is excluded. By what law? By that of works? No, but by the law of faith. ²⁸For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law.

 

John 8:31-36

³¹Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, ‘If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; ³²and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.’ ³³They answered him, ‘We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone. What do you mean by saying, “You will be made free”?’

³⁴Jesus answered them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. ³⁵The slave does not have a permanent place in the household; the son has a place there for ever. ³⁶So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.

 

 

You may know the old joke about Uncle Bob going to heaven.
How do you know Uncle Bob is going to heaven?
Because his whole life he has not done one good thing!
It’s a perfect joke for Reformation Sunday. We are saved by grace not by works, though our goal need not be not to do a single good thing.

In fact, we can do many good things, just that doing good things isn’t what saves us, it is God who saves us, and the good things we may do are gifts (Philippians 2:13), born of the gift of God’s presence, born of God living in us, born of the gift of learning together to follow Jesus.

Of course, the joke also alludes to the common belief that God looks on us with favour because we may have done good things. As in, “Uncle Bob didn’t go to church but he gave the shirt off his back.”

To say that giving his shirt of his back isn’t what saves Uncle Bob, is not insisting that Uncle Bob go to church, as if going to church was a hoop to jump through, even though the church is the body of Christ. It’s also not saying that Uncle Bob wouldn’t go to heaven, as if that were for any of us to say.

To say that Uncle Bob’s goodness, undoubtedly itself God’s gift, is not going to save Uncle Bob, is only to say that only God can save. Thus our conversation thus far isn’t about Bob, but about God and about giving God the glory.

When Martin Luther insisted that we could only be saved by grace and not by our own effort, this was a move all about God. It was about placing God at the centre instead of ourselves. And in the way that Luther did not read the Bible literally but sought to understand all of scripture through what God had done in Christ, Luther continued his focus on Jesus as the centre of all things. By doing so, Luther avoided mistaking the Bible for a rule book we could follow blindly. Using the Bible as a rule book elevates the Bible to equal status with God and is thus idolatry. And so the move from works to grace is a move from ourselves to God, knowing that anything that may take the place of God is an idol, including the family, the Bible, the economy, technology, or anything else.

Most of us are familiar with the idea that giving the shirt of our back, as honourable as that is, will not buy us salvation. And 500 years after the Reformation this will not be news for most Christians, Lutheran or otherwise.

Yet having made “salvation by grace through faith” our central theological assertion bears the risk of privatizing our faith, of assuming that the shape of my life matters little, rather than allowing ourselves to be shaped by the counter-cultural ways of God. Sort of like the accusation that was levelled against the Apostle Paul, when he said that Gentile Christians did not have to submit to circumcision. His opponents accused him of marketing “Discipleship Light.”

But there is also the danger that salvation by faith remains entirely head knowledge.

Our culture values work, and just keeping busy. We refer to being busy as a way to keep out of trouble. People used to say that the devil finds work for idle hands. We think that keeping our kids busy will keep them out of trouble, yet often we over-schedule our kids, or permit them to over-schedule themselves, and so – from an early age – being busy is the measure of things, despite knowing that we are saved by grace.

It is by being busy that we experience the world. It is by being busy that apprehend the world.

Nikolaus Graf von Zinzendorf, a Moravian bishop of the 18^th century, said that we live in order to work. In our time this word has been turned around – we may say that we work in order to live – at least as wishful thinking.¹ But even so, the modern world has become a point of aggression,² not something to receive but to conquer.

The sociologist Hartmut Rosa who visited the Vancouver School of Theology last March says that expression of the fact that work has come to dominate the way we approach the world begins when we get up in the morning: “We climb onto the scale: we should lose weight. We look into the mirror: we have to get rid of that pimple, those wrinkles. We take our blood pressure: it should be lower. We track our steps: we should walk more.”

He says that for most of us life has become an ever-growing to-do list whose entries constitute the points of aggression that we encounter as the world … all matters to be settled, attended to, mastered, completed, resolved, gotten out of the way.”³

It is perhaps no surprise that the philosopher Immanuel Kant viewed our human ability to perceive the world purely as through the work of investigating, connecting, comparing, distinguishing, abstracting, concluding, and proving. That means that we cannot perceive the world in any other way but through our own effort. There is no gift here and nothing is gifted. It is not a surprise then that we describe such perceiving of the world as work. Kant calls the work of philosophy a herculean task.

Now, if you have read philosophical books or taken classes in philosophy you will know that philosophy is in fact work. It is all the things as which Kant describes it. Yet, what Kant leaves out, and excludes as a possibility, is that the world, and it’s beauty, and understanding it ultimately is only gifted.

Martin Luther’s last words were, “We are beggars, that is true.” This is remarkable for a man who most would consider an overachiever. Consider that his works are published in 119 volumes.⁴

If we indeed are beggars, then experiencing the world as a point of aggression, and apprehending the world and all insight only through work, are likely not the ways to find a fulfilling life. For in this paradigm all good things come to us by our own effort. Yet God’s presence is nothing but grace.

Returning to Immanuel Kant who believed that philosophy and knowledge are only the result of effort,⁵ we may have noticed that Kant leaves no room for revelation, for insight and deep knowledge that is simply given to us.

Think of what happens when our eyes see a rose, or our neighbour. It is the rose, or our neighbour who reveal themselves to us, in their beauty and complexity. We do nothing but open our eyes. Certainly, we can reflect about the kind of rose or neighbour, we can observe and categorize, but when we encounter rose or neighbour, or world, we are not apprehending as much as we are receiving.

Yet in a world in which we only apprehend, we rarely receive.

Aristotle said that the first principle of all action is leisure. Both are required, but leisure is better than occupation and it is its end.⁶ Aristotle said that we work to have leisure, which is pretty much saying that we work to live.

Of course, Aristotle is not saying is that we work in order to be entertained because entertainment cannot give us the leisure required to receive and perceive things as they are. Think of the rose. Think of your neighbour. How often do we miss things because our minds are elsewhere!

Older philosophy made a helpful distinction between the work of investigating, connecting, comparing, distinguishing, abstracting, concluding, and proving on the one hand, and contemplative seeing on the other, the latter being able to see things as they are. These two ways are not in competition. Both are important, but the goal of work as leisure is precisely this contemplative seeing of rose and neighbour.⁷

This can help us find a new understanding of Luther’s discovery of the primacy of grace. For not only have we come to experience the world as a point of aggression but we have come to rely solely on our own ability to discover truth, closing ourselves off to God, one another, and the world. To stop and smell the roses cannot mean to cut them and put them in a vase but to see them as they are, as God’s gift, and even as our companions.

That we are beggars then, as Luther said, is not frightening as it names our limitations, but it is a gift, for it invites us to let God be God.

So, walk the labyrinth, walk the dyke, be silent, choose to be non-productive, pray, receive God in Word and Sacrament, love the world, and receive it and see it, because God does and because God gifts.

Amen.