You may be seated.
Before I say anything else, that was fantastic. Good job, guys.
All right.
February 22, 1546.
We're in Wittenberg, Germany, and it's cold outside.
The castle church is packed.
People are standing in the doorways, standing anywhere they can fit,
and the crowd is beginning to spill out into the street.
And right at the front, right in front of the pulpit,
lays a coffin.
Martin Luther is dead.
He died four days ago in the town of Eiselben, where he had been born.
And as they transported his body home in a wagon,
people lined the streets to see it pass.
Now he's back at the church where it all started,
almost 30 years ago, when he nailed his 95 theses to this very door.
And today, they'll bury him under its floor.
The people in this church are scared, and they've got really good reason to be.
Emperor Charles V wants to end this Reformation movement by any means necessary.
Everyone in this room knows that war is coming.
And in fact, by the spring of this next year, his army will be at the city gates,
and he will take Wittenberg.
For three decades, Luther has stood between them and that storm.
And now, he's lying in a box.
His dear friend and pastor, a man named Johannes Bugenhagen,
climbs into the pulpit.
In his sermon, he reads the same words that we just heard in the readings in the book of Revelation.
It says,
I saw another angel flying directly overhead with an eternal gospel to proclaim.
And it ends by saying,
Fear God, and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come.
And Bugenhagen looks down at the coffin of his dear friend,
and says,
He was, without doubt, that angel.
Now think about it for just a minute.
You're sitting in that church, and Luther's body is right in front of you.
And the pastor says that he was that angel that was carrying the gospel,
which begs the question, if the messenger is dead,
is the message next?
If we go back another 39 years, in May of 1507,
we see Martin Luther, he's only 23 years old at this time.
He's not famous.
He's not a reformer.
He's just a young monk who had just been ordained as a priest.
And today he's going to lead his first Mass.
And so he stands up in front, and he's in his new vestments,
and everything's going fine,
until it reaches these words in the Mass,
where a priest would offer a sacrifice to the living, the true, the eternal God.
And he freezes.
Years later, he'd say that at that moment, he'd nearly ran away from the altar.
Who is he to talk to God like that?
He's just a sinner standing in front of a holy God,
offering up a sacrifice and hoping that it's enough.
And that fear never left him.
Luther tried everything.
He fasted.
He prayed.
He'd go to confession for hours on hours,
digging up every sin that he could even think of remembering,
and then leave the room and turn right back around because he remembered another one.
And there was one phrase in particular in Scripture that he could not stand.
In fact, he said he hated it.
And that phrase is the righteousness of God.
The righteousness of God.
He understood that phrase to be God's measuring stick,
the perfect standard that God would use to judge him.
And he knew that he would not measure up.
And he wasn't wrong.
The law condemned him.
It did, and it condemns all of us.
But his mistake was that he heard everything as law,
even God's promises.
That's one of the most important things that we teach in the Lutheran church.
You keep law and gospel distinct.
The law is what God demands.
It tells you what perfection and righteousness looks like,
and it shows you that you don't measure up.
But 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.
When you mix them up, even good news starts to sound like homework.
What has God done for you in Jesus?
In the small catechism, we teach that Jesus has redeemed me,
a lost and condemned person,
purchased and won me from all sins,
from death and the power of the devil.
Sin, death, and the devil,
the three enemies that we cannot ever beat on our own.
And Jesus came to rescue us from all three of them.
That's the eternal gospel.
Luther finally found it in Paul's letter to the Romans.
And it's actually right here in the reading we had this morning.
Our reading, our epistle reading, starts with the law.
It says, whatever the law speaks,
it speaks to those who are under the law,
so that every mouth may be stopped.
Luther's, mine, yours,
nobody gets to stand before God and make a case for himself.
But then there are two words that Luther said changed his life.
Those two words, but now.
But now.
But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law.
Oh, there's that phrase again.
The righteousness of God.
The one that Luther hated.
But here, it's not a measuring stick.
It's a gift.
Paul would go on to say that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God
and are justified by His grace as a gift.
Paul starts describing Jesus,
that God had put Him forward as a propitiation by His blood.
Propitiation is a fun word.
But it paints an old picture.
Let me give you some context here.
See, in the Old Testament, there was a room called the Holy of Holies,
where the Ark of the Covenant rested.
And the lid of that Ark is called the Mercy Seat.
And once a year, on the Day of Atonement,
the high priest would go in and sprinkle blood on the Mercy Seat.
And that was the place where God's judgment against sin
and God's mercy for sinners came together.
It was the one place where sinners came 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.
Propitiation is a sacrifice that takes God's wrath away.
And the Mercy Seat is where that happened.
So Paul says that the Mercy Seat is now a person,
and His name is Jesus.
So think back to that young monk who's frozen at the altar.
He's standing in this place where he's supposed to meet God.
He's holding up a sacrifice that he's terrified won't be enough.
And he thinks it's up to him to make that meeting happen.
As we learn from Paul, God already set up that meeting place,
and God already provided the blood.
He had had it backwards this whole time.
He thought he was bringing a sacrifice to God when God was already bringing one to him.
Now we go back to the castle church in 1546.
Luther's body is still lying in front of the pulpit for everyone to see,
and the question still hangs in the air.
If the messenger is dead, what happens to his message?
Two days before he died, Luther wrote something on a little scrap of paper,
and they'd found it just a few days later.
This little scrap of paper had one line.
It said, We are beggars. This is true.
The man that they called an angel saw himself as a beggar.
He didn't think he had anything to give God.
He knew that he was just another empty-handed sinner who'd been handed everything in his life.
Jugendhagen also knew this.
And later in that same funeral sermon, he says that 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 into the floor.
And as we celebrate the Reformation today, I'm telling you today that that's what the Reformation is.
It wasn't Luther trying to start a new church or a movement built around one man.
The Reformation is the church hearing the gospel clearly again.
The same good news preached by the apostles.
This whole time they thought Luther was the one standing between them and that storm, but it was never him.
The emperor may have taken Wittenberg the next spring, but he couldn't take the gospel.
So what do we do with the angel's warning?
Fear God and give him glory because the hour of his judgment has come.
Was Luther right to be terrified at that altar?
Well, in one sense, yeah.
The hour of God's judgment is real.
And nobody stands under it.
You hear the words of Jesus in John chapter 12 just a few 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.
All people.
God's judgment against sin was poured out, all of it, on his own son, hanging on a cross outside of Jerusalem.
Jesus is the mercy seat and he's also the sacrifice.
Luther stood at that altar afraid, afraid to lift the sacrifice to God, but on Good Friday, God lifted up the sacrifice himself.
Then on the third day, the tomb was empty.
That's God's verdict. The sacrifice was accepted, the debt was paid, and death lost.
Bugenhagen said it right there at the coffin, 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.
As he died, his dying prayer was the same that Jesus had prayed on the cross, into your hands I commend my spirit.
And he added himself, you have redeemed me, you faithful God.
That sounds like a beggar holding on to the gospel.
And that gospel is for you.
Whatever list you've been carrying like Luther did when he went into the confessional,
whatever you've been trying to make up for, whatever you're afraid that God might see when he looks at you,
it was judged at the cross.
After the sermon we'll come together and this altar will hold what God offers you, the body and blood of Jesus.
The sacrifice that was enough.
Your sins have been forgiven, all of them, not because you measured up, but because Jesus did.
That's how a beggar gives glory to God.
Paul says we all fall short of it, but you give God glory the way Luther finally did.
Not by bringing him something, but by receiving what he gives you.
Our Lutheran confessions say that faith, simply trusting his promise, is the highest worship that there is.
And one more note about that angel.
The word angel used here in Revelation is a word that means messenger.
Messenger.
If we see Luther's note when he said we are beggars, there's a quote by a pastor named D.T. Niles that I think finishes the thought fairly well.
He says evangelism is witness.
It is one beggar telling another beggar where to get 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 a job you get promoted to, it's what happens when hungry people get fed.
They can't help but tell all the other hungry people where the food is.
The messenger in Wittenberg died, but the message didn't.
And the message will outlive all of us too.
Because it doesn't depend on any of us, it depends on Jesus, who died and didn't stay dead.
And that's why it's the eternal gospel.
May the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.