Great job. Man, that's one of my favorites. Good job, guys.
February 22, 1546. We're in Wittenberg, Germany, and as you can imagine, it's cold outside.
The castle church is packed. People are standing in the doorways. They're standing anywhere they can find space.
The crowd is beginning to spill out in the street.
And at the front, near the pulpit, there's a coffin.
And in it lies the body of Martin Luther.
Now, just four days before this, he passed away in the town of Eiselben where he had been born.
As they brought his body home by wagon, people dropped what they were doing and stood along the road to watch it pass.
And now, he's back at the church where it all started, almost 30 years before,
when he nailed his 95 feces to the door of that same church in which he will be buried under.
The people in this church are scared, and they have every right to be.
Emperor Charles V wants to stop this Reformation movement by any means necessary.
Everyone in that room knows that war is coming to their doorstep.
And in fact, by spring of next year, his army will be at the gates, and he will take Wittenberg.
For three decades, Luther has stood between them and that storm.
And now, he's lying in front of them in a box.
His dear friend and pastor, a man named Johannes Bugenhagen, climbs into the pulpit.
And in this sermon, he reads the same words we heard in our readings this morning in the book of Revelation.
It says, I saw another angel flying directly overhead with an eternal gospel to proclaim.
And it says, fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come.
And then, Bugenhagen looks down at his friend in the casket and says, he was without doubt that angel.
Now, think about that for just a moment.
You're sitting in this church.
Luther's body is right in front of you to see.
And the pastor says that the angel spoken about is him.
With the eternal gospel.
Well, that begs the question, if the messenger is dead, what happens to the message?
Well, let's go back another 39 years.
It's May of 1507.
And Martin Luther is just 23 years old.
He's not famous.
He's not a reformer.
He's just a young monk who's just been ordained as a priest.
And he's about to lead his first mass.
And so he stands up front in these shiny new vestments.
And everything is going great until he reaches the words in the mass where the priest offers a sacrifice to the true, living, eternal God.
And then he freezes.
Years later, he would say of that moment that he almost ran from the altar then and there.
How was he to talk to God like that?
He was just a sinner standing in front of a holy God, holding up an offering and hoping it is enough.
And that fear never left him.
Luther tried everything he could think of.
He fasted.
He prayed.
He would go to confession for hours on hours on hours.
Thinking and dredging up every sin that he could remember that he had committed.
And then leaving the room and turning right back around because he remembered another one.
There's one phrase in the Bible he writes about that he could not stand.
In fact, he said he hated this phrase.
And that phrase is the righteousness of God.
The righteousness of God.
See, he hated it because he understood it as God's measuring stick.
The standard by which a perfect God would use to judge him.
And he knew that he would not measure up.
Now, he wasn't wrong that the law condemned him.
It did then and it condemns all of us now.
But his mistake was that he was reading it and hearing every part of it as law.
Even God's promises he was reading as law.
It's one of the most important things that we teach in the Lutheran Church.
You have to keep law and gospel distinct.
The law is what God demands.
It tells you what perfection looks like.
And it shows you that you aren't it.
The gospel is what God has done for you in Jesus.
Both are God's Word.
Both are equally true.
But they do very different things.
And when you mix them up, even good news starts to sound like more homework.
What has God done for you in Jesus?
Well, in the small catechism, we teach it like this.
That Jesus has redeemed me.
A lost and condemned person.
Purchased and won me from all sins, from death and from the power of the devil.
Sin, death and the devil are three enemies that we cannot defeat.
And so Jesus came to rescue us from all three.
Luther finally found the gospel in Paul's letter to the Romans.
And it's actually here in the reading that we have this morning.
In Romans chapter 3.
It starts with the law, actually.
It says that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law so that every mouth may be stopped.
That goes for Luther.
That goes for you.
That goes for me.
No one can stand in front of God and make a case for themselves.
But there were two words that come next in verse 21 that Luther said changed his life.
Two words.
But now.
But now.
But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law.
Well, there's that phrase.
The righteousness of God.
The one he hated.
But we see here that this isn't a measuring stick.
It's a gift.
Paul goes on to say that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified by his grace as a gift.
And then Paul starts describing Jesus saying that God put him forward as a propitiation by his blood.
And propitiation is a fun word.
But it's an old reference.
Paul's audience would certainly know what it means, so let me give you some context so we can be on the same page.
In the Old Testament, in the tabernacle and in the temple, there's a room called the Holy of Holies.
And in that room was the Ark of the Covenant.
And the lid of the Ark was called the Mercy Seat.
Now, once a year on the Day of Atonement, the high priest would walk into that room and sprinkle blood on the Mercy Seat.
That's where God's judgment against sin and God's mercy for sinners came together.
It's the one place where sinners came close and near to God and lived to tell about it.
The word Paul uses for propitiation, it's the same word in the Greek Old Testament that's used for Mercy Seat.
A propitiation is a sacrifice that takes God's wrath away and the Mercy Seat is where it happened.
Paul says that Mercy Seat is now a person and his name is Jesus.
So think back to that young monk frozen at the altar.
He's standing at a place where he's supposed to meet God, holding up a sacrifice and terrified that it won't be enough.
He thinks it's up to him to make that meeting happen.
But Paul says that God already set the meeting place up and God actually provided the blood.
He had had it backwards this whole time. He thought he was bringing a sacrifice to God when God was actually bringing a sacrifice to him.
And so we go back to the Castle Church in 1546 at this funeral.
Luther's body is still right there up front.
Everyone can see and the question is still hanging in the air.
If the messenger has died, what happens to his message?
Two days before he died, Luther wrote almost like a note on a little scrap of paper.
And they found it just after his funeral.
And it was one short line.
It said, we are beggars. This is true.
The man that they saw as this angel saw himself as a beggar.
He didn't think he had anything to offer God.
He knew that he was just another empty-handed sinner who had been given everything.
Bugenhagen knew it too.
Later in that same funeral sermon, he says, the person has indeed died in Christ, but the godly doctrine still lives most powerfully.
The gospel wasn't Luther's to begin with.
He didn't invent it and he couldn't take it with him to the grave.
It's called the eternal gospel because it was God's before Luther was ever born.
And it would still be God's after they lowered him to the floor.
As we celebrate Reformation Sunday today, that's what Reformation is.
It's not Luther trying to start his own church or build a movement around one person.
The Reformation is the church hearing the gospel clearly again.
The same good news preached by the apostles.
They thought Luther was the one standing between them and that storm, but it was never him.
The emperor would take Wittenberg eventually, but he couldn't take the gospel.
Going back to the text, what do we do with the angel's warning?
Fear God and give him glory because the hour of his judgment has come.
Now, was Luther right to be afraid or terrified at the altar?
Well, in one sense, yes.
The hour of God's judgment is real and nobody stands beneath it.
But hear the words of Jesus in John chapter 12, just days before the cross.
He says, Now is the judgment of this world, and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.
So the hour came, God's judgment against sin was poured out, all of it, on his own son hanging on a cross just outside of Jerusalem.
Jesus is the mercy seat and he's also the sacrifice.
So as Luther stood at that altar, afraid to lift up the sacrifice to God, on Good Friday, God lifted up the sacrifice himself.
And on the third day, the tomb was empty.
That was God's verdict.
The sacrifice was accepted.
The debt was paid.
Death lost.
Bugenhagen said it right there towards the end of his sermon.
He says, Christ has conquered death for us.
Why then are we afraid?
Luther's body went into the floor of that church, but it's not going to stay there.
The gospel is for you.
The gospel is for you.
Whatever list you've been carrying, like Luther when he goes into the confessional, whatever you've been trying to make up for, whatever you're afraid God might see when he looks at you, it was already judged at the cross.
And after this sermon, we'll come together and this altar will hold what God has to give you.
The body and blood of Jesus.
The sacrifice that was enough.
Your sins are forgiven, all of them, not because you measured up, but because Jesus did.
No beggar gives glory to God.
Paul says that we all fall short of it.
But you give God glory the way Luther finally figured out.
Not by bringing him something, but by receiving what he gives you.
It says that faith, simply trusting his promise, is the highest worship there is.
One last note about that angel.
The word angel used there in Revelation is a word that just simply means messenger.
Messenger.
And if you go back to Luther's note, we are beggars, there's a quote from another pastor named D.T. Niles.
I feel like he finished that thought quite well.
He said that evangelism is witness.
It is one beggar telling another beggar where to find food.
That's what every messenger of the gospel is.
Luther was one, Bugenhagen was one, whoever first told you about Jesus was one, and now you are too.
It's not something you were promoted to.
It's just what happens when hungry people get fed.
They can't wait to tell all the other hungry people where the food is.
So the messenger in Wittenberg died, but the message didn't.
And the message will outlive us too, because it doesn't depend on any of us.
It depends on Jesus, who died and didn't stay dead.
And that is why it's the eternal gospel.
May the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.