“A Mighty Fortress is our God” is one of my best hymns! I wrote the music and the words, but it’s from Psalm 46. It’s wonderful to hear it played and all of you singing!
I am glad to be with you on a special occasion, Reformation Sunday. I am Martin Luther, I kicked off the Protestant Reformation.
(To the videographer): Are you painting a picture of me over there? There are people watching through the painting? How can that be? Where are these people? If you are in there, say something! This is so different from my time!
I was born in 1483 in Eisleben, in Germany, the oldest of eight children. We went to church as family. Worship was in Latin, a dead language that we didn’t speak. I never read or saw a Bible until I was 20 years old! There were very few copies of the Bible back then. It was very expensive and time consuming to print a book. The printing press came along and made it easier to print, but a Bible still cost three years wages!
My Father wanted me to be a lawyer. I tried studying law, but it was not like studying about God. I loved the Bible and how God revealed truth through it.
I devoted my life to God and became a monk. I was a good monk, and kept the rule of my order so strictly that I may say that if ever a monk got to heaven by his monkery, it was I. All my brothers in the monastery who knew me will bear me out. If I had kept on any longer, I should have killed myself with vigils, prayers, reading, and other work.
I thought that to receive salvation you had to be very good. And when you sin, you had better confess your sin quickly and thoroughly. If you didn’t ask forgiveness for a sin and do penance, you would in danger of eternal punishment!
All of us monks made promises: we would never get married. We would always obey God. And we would always live on very little money. Our rooms where we slept and studied were very small, and there was no heat in the winter! We woke up very early every morning for 2a.m. worship! Even though we suffered a great deal for God, we felt like we didn’t live up to what we should. We thought we did not please God. We were obsessed with paying for our sins, but we never felt that our sins were erased.
I tried to fast from water and food to see if it would help. “I almost fasted myself to death, for again and again I went for three days without taking a drop of water or a morsel of food.” My advice to you now: if you fast, don’t do it for very long or you could ruin your health!
“I chose twenty-one saints and prayed to three of them every day when I celebrated mass; thus, I prayed to 21 saints a week. I prayed especially to the Blessed Virgin Mary, who with her womanly heart would compassionately appease her Son.” But instead of bringing the relief I wanted, my extra devotion to prayer and fasting “made my head split.”
(By the way: I notice there are very fast carriages passing in front of the church! The carriages are so fast, you cannot see the horses pulling them! What an amazing world this is!)
The loving kindness of the Lord led to me leave the monastery to study to become a professor who taught students the Bible. I began a serious study of the Bible, beginning with the book of Psalms followed by the apostle Paul’s epistles to the Romans and Galatians. Through the Bible God changed how I felt about my sin.
The most important Bible verse that helped me understand salvation was Romans 1:17 It says: “17 For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: ‘The righteous will live by faith.’”
I wondered what that meant. When I thought of the righteousness of God, at first, I felt terrified! I felt God was righteous and good while I needed to be punished! But I came to see that verse was about faith. You are not saved by merit; you don’t earn your salvation and you don’t get what you deserve. You simply trust in God, and God makes you righteous. God saves you by faith!
So, my spirit was thereby cheered. For it’s by the righteousness of God that we’re justified and saved through Christ. These words [which had before terrified me] now became more pleasing to me. The Holy Spirit unveiled the Scriptures for me.
Here I felt as if I were entirely born again and had entered paradise itself through the gates that had been flung open.
Once I understood the free gift of God’s grace, how God makes us righteous, not by our own doing, I began to look at the church differently!
Johann Tertzel, a Dominican friar, was selling indulgences to raise money for the pope. Basically, he was selling salvation! He said you need to pay money to buy your forgiveness, and to buy the forgiveness of your loved ones who have died, so that they may go to heaven! But I knew that this is not salvation! Salvation does not come from doing, and it certainly does not come by purchasing anything! Salvation is the free gift of God’s grace!
That is why, on Oct. 31, 1517, I wrote 95 theses, 95 things I thought the church should consider, because selling indulgences was wrong. There is a legend that I nailed this paper to a church door. That’s a good story. But I mailed the 95 theses to Archbishop Albert of Mainz, and also organized a debate on them. At the time, the church taught there was a purgatory: a place you go when you die if you are a little too sinful for heaven. In the 95 theses I asked things like, “If the pope can get people out of purgatory, (as the sellers of indulgences claim) why doesn’t he in love get those sinners out of purgatory for free?”
Also, the pope was selling these indulgences: these get out of purgatory free coupons, in order to build St. Peter’s Basilica. I asked in thesis # 86: Why does not the pope, whose wealth is today greater than the wealth of the richest Crassus, build this Basilica of St. Peter with his own money rather than with the money of poor believers?”
My 95 theses started a controversy. They started a movement. I was excommunicated from the church. I was declared a heretic. But the German princes protected me, or I might have been killed: burned at the stake!
A reformation happened. And years later, even the Catholic church admits I was right! Salvation is not to be bought or sold. Salvation is the free gift of God’s grace, by faith.
Many things changed through the Reformation. Protestantism began. Ministers could get married. And ordinary people began to read the Bible. That was very important to me! I translated the Bible from the original Hebrew (the Old Testament) and Greek (the New Testament) into German. I worked so hard to use words that a common person might use, to make it easy to understand. So now, rather than reading the Bible in the dead language, Latin, you could read it in your own language!
I see you have many Bibles here! You must be a wealthy church! My German Bible spread to so many people! The printing press was a technology that helped it happen. Technology is so helpful to spread the good news of God’s gift of grace.
When I was a child, the Bible was read in worship by the priest, in Latin. Now it is read in the people’s language, and at home. I encourage you to read the Bible yourself, find the truth of God in it, and do not keep it to yourself, share it!
In closing I want to say, I simply taught, preached, wrote God’s Word: otherwise I did nothing. And then when I slept or drank Wittenberg beer with my friend Philip of Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that never a prince or emperor did such damage to it. I did nothing: the Word of God did it all.
Not by our own power. By the power of God’s Word and by God’s grace our world is renewed.
Now I will put on this mask. I hear you have a plague. I know all about the plague! It is a dreadful thing. Therefore, I shall ask God mercifully to protect us:
May Christ our Lord and Savior preserve us all in pure faith and fervent love, unspotted and pure until his day. Amen. Pray for me, a poor sinner.
October 25, 2020
Maureen Duffy-Guy's blog 