Scripture Text: None
(The following is a play-acted paraphrase of the life and times of Martin Luther)
In nomine Patris, et Filli, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.
Those words, spoken at the beginning of every Mass, would come to define my life. My name is Martin Luther. I was born in what is now Germany in the year 1483. I was the son of a coal miner who sought a better life for his son than he had. So, when I came of age, I began schooling to become a lawyer.
God, it seems, had other plans.
One day, when out walking, a sudden thunderstorm came upon me. I was caught out in the open as lightning and thunder roared around me. I was nearly struck several times and in my fright and terror, I called out to St. Anne to deliver me from the storm. I bargained with her and told her that if I survived this, I would pledge my life to the church.
Well, obviously I survived, and made good my word. I entered the Augustinian Order, a monastic order dedicated to the ideals and teachings of St. Augustine. I took my vows and was later ordained as a priest in the Roman Catholic church. All this much to the chagrin of my father.
In nomine Patris, et Filli, et Spiritus Sancti. Those words had become my life. In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
It was an interesting time to be alive and to be a part of the church. The whole world was in the midst of radical and profound change. Muslim Turks had stormed into Europe with their conquest of the last vestiges of the old Byzantine Empire. The efforts of Christian kings and Princes like Vlad Tepes notwithstanding, they were now at the very borders of Germany, threatening us all. But with the Turks came not just the threat of invasion, but also the opening of trade with parts of the world Christian Europe had long forgotten; China, India, and Persia were now open to us again. Christopher Columbus sought a trade passage to these lands that did not require the Muslim middle-man and had inadvertently stumbled a whole new continent.
The world had become far bigger than we had ever realized. But Guttenburg’s invention of the printing press had also made it a lot smaller. Now the secrets of far-away places and knowledge long forgotten was suddenly available to any who could read. Art, science, and learning were flourishing in what your historians would later call the Renaissance.
And in the midst of all of it was the church that I served. It too was undergoing its own growing pains, its transformation, its changes, its Renaissance. It was time. It was overdue. For far too long, the Holy See had been occupied by the basest of men, corrupt scions of powerful Italian families: Borgia, Della Rovere, Medici, and the like. They were the most powerful men in the world and with that power came a loss of vision. They ruled as worldly kings, not as the Vicar of Christ. They served themselves, not God, and not his people.
But, at the time, I was ignorant of all this. That was largely by design. In the Church of those days, the Scriptures were held aloft, held in such high esteem that were considered beyond the grasp of all but the most learned of the Church. A lowly monk such as I had never read the Bible and, like so many others, I remained largely oblivious to what went on behind the walls of the Vatican.
I was a nobody in Germany, doing his best to save his soul. My superiors believed me fit for further schooling, so they recommended me to the university in Saxony. There I was to learn and to teach the Scriptures to new generations of priests and servants of the Church.
And it was there that I began to learn what God was really about. Now I was being called to join that learned elite, those tiny handful who had actually delved into the Scriptures. That did not quite work out the way my betters had hoped. You see, once I began to read God’s Holy Word, I quickly discovered that I had been taught in the Church all my life was very different than what God had revealed in the Bible.
It is easy to swindle and con those who do not know better. And that is what the Church was in those days, one big con game with the people as the marks and the rubes. The latest scam was the Papal Indulgence. Pay money for the building of St. Peter’s basilica in Rome and God will forgive your sins. Forgiveness as a fund-raising strategy.
That is not what I read in the Scriptures. I read that God’s forgiveness comes through grace and mercy, through the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. There was no need for these pious works that Rome taught were necessary. No need for indulgences, no need for relics, no need for penance, and dozens of other practices that were commonplace in my day. I was convinced at the time that this was all the result of simple error, that the leaders and scholars of the Church had simply forgotten what the Scriptures had taught.
So, like any good scholar, I called the Church to debate and discussion. I wrote out 95 points of contention, 95 Theses, if you will. And on All-Hallows Eve 1517, I posted these to the door of the University Church in Wittenberg.
I set off a firestorm. With the printing press, those Theses and many of my other writings began to spread across the whole of Christendom. And corrupt Cardinals, Bishops, and the Pope himself suddenly realize their little scam was up. I made myself quite a threat without even realizing it.
Thus, I was faced with a choice. I could recant my writings, recant my teachings, and live out my days in peace and quiet, leaving the Church to do as it had done for generations, lying to the people and bilking them of their money and energy on pointless piety and blasphemous practices. Or I could hold fast to the truths that I saw in God’s Holy Word. “For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law.”
I held fast. At Worms, I stood before Cardinals and inquisitors who demanded my compliance with the corrupted practice of the Church and I refused. “Unless I am convinced by Scripture and plain reason - I do not accept the authority of the popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other - my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand. God help me. Amen.”
I had condemned myself in the eyes of the Church. But I was not without allies, I had the support of Dukes and Electors in Germany, who had no great fondness for an Italian Pope nor to a petulant Emperor who supported him. As I left Worms, I was kidnapped by my allies and hidden away.
With the Pope and his minions unable to kill me, unable to silence me, the fire that I began erupted all the more across Europe. Oh, they tried. They knew the stakes. But this was still Medieval Europe, this was still feudalism. With the threat of the Turk at our very doorstep, the Emperor could not afford to offend my ducal allies, whose knights and armies would support his war effort. Eventually, he backed down, defied the Pope himself (admittedly reluctantly), and I found my freedom again.
The rest is, as they say, history. There would be no going back after that. Slowly and admittedly not universally, the corrupt and deceptive practices of the Church began to be rolled back. No more indulgences. Relics lost their importance. Priests became Pastors and began to marry and have families. Monasteries and convents were emptied. The Scriptures were translated into the common languages and people began to read for themselves what God had taught his people. Others emerged in other lands to demand change and reformation to the Church: Cramner in England, Calvin in France, Zwingli in Switzerland.
The split was irrevocable and inevitable. Time and again, these Protestants as we came to be called sundered our relationship to Rome and became independent churches. And to its credit, Rome too began to eliminate its own corruption. Wiser popes ascended the throne of St. Peter as the years went on. The corruption of the old ways began to fade into history.
But human beings are what they are. And as I look across five centuries to you who live out the legacy of what I’ve done, I bring with me a warning. The errors and corruption of the Church are never as far away as we’d like them to be. We can all so easily fall into the same traps that twisted God’s Holy Church into what it was in my day. Reformation is not a one time thing, but is something we must all strive toward. We must be ever vigilant, steeped in God’s Holy Word, to prevent evil from rising again while cloaked in churchly garb. That task is yours and I commend it to you.
In nomine...
In the name of...
Amen.
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