The first reading from Revelation was thought by some to be a prophetic reference to Martin Luther. They said that Luther was the “ angel flying directly overhead, with an eternal gospel to proclaim to those who dwell on earth.” It sounds good but I am not convinced that Scripture prophesied Martin Luther. That is how this little text got appointed for Reformation but the text itself is an important one for a Reformation Church to consider as honor the events of 500 years ago while confronting the challenges to the faith in our own age.
The first point is that this is an eternal Gospel. The Word of Christ crucified and risen and of the forgiveness of sins and everlasting life that are the fruits of His redeeming work are not a subject for another time but for all time. It is to say that there is no Gospel except the Gospel of Christ crucified and risen. While that was important in the 1500s, it is even more important for the 2020s. The challenges those youth confirmed and the rest of us face are not small or insignificant but go to the core of what the Gospel is. The threat against us is not from the alphabet soup of gender and sexual desire or the wokism and its focus on race, justice, and ecology but the confusion of self-fulfillment with the Gospel.
We live at a time when Christian people have come to proclaim self-fulfillment as the replacement for the cross and empty tomb. The radical nature of this threat is that it presumes what we think is good for us is okay or good for God. That is how the trouble began and it cannot end the reign of sin and death that flowed from a moment of self-expression and self-fulfillment in Eden. We do not need a God to tell us how to get in touch with or better express what we feel inside. We need a God to do just the opposite – a God to end the reign of terror that our feelings imposed upon us and the death caused by choosing self-expression over God.
The Gospel, the true Gospel, is eternal. This Gospel does not have its source in us but in God alone. It is the Gospel spoken first to the destruction sin brought upon man and Eden, turning us into enemies of God and of each other. In Genesis 3:15 the Lord first spoke the promise of one to crush the head of Satan and deal the death blow to death itself. The promise was kept alive through the prophets until the day God had appointed for His one and only Son to be incarnate in the womb of Mary the Virgin and to be born in flesh as the Savior of all. Though God’s ways and timing are often hidden, the prophets revealed God’s plan long ago.
The evening into which Christ was born was filled with self-important people intent upon self-awareness and self-expression. They were so caught up in the status quo that they did not even recognize what God was doing until some Gentile Wise Men showed up asking where the Messiah was to be born. Now we are threatened by the same ignorance and the same darkness by making the Gospel captive to us and to our whims. The Gospel of Christ crucified and risen is the only eternal word that has the power to rescue a people condemned to death. It is the only power to rescue sinners from their sins and give them the new birth of water and the Word. It is the only future possible to a people caught in time but born to eternity and fed here and now the foretaste of the eternal.
We don’t need more opportunities to explore our desires or look inside ourselves for feelings. We don’t need to be brought to a higher level of self-awareness. We need a Savior who can set free a people captive to sin and its death once for all. We need an eternal Gospel to set free a people imprisoned to death, whose future is ashes to ashes and dust to dust unless God intervenes. We need an eternal Gospel to raise a temporal and mortal people from death to everlasting life – to make us an eternal people by connecting us to Christ’s death and resurrection. That is the Gospel Luther contended for against radical Protestants on one side and Rome on the other. His goal was never a new church but a renewed Church, raised from sin’s death with the Gospel of Christ crucified and risen for you and for me. If all his legacy can be reduced to a moment in time or an address for a church head-quarters, then we too traded the eternal for a moment, betraying the Reformation.
But, if it is an eternal Gospel for which we contend, then we might just live up to Luther’s example. If we are battling for the one true and everlasting Gospel in our own age of change and decay, then we just might have something to offer a dead and dying world around us – some thing to raise them from death, restore them through forgiveness, and reform them to be the people God has called them to be. We will have to decide. Will the Church end up being a delayed echo of the world or the sound of the trumpet signaling God’s new creation? What Church are we?
The youth confirmed today are being asked to step out and step up, to confess not a word in time but the eternal Gospel. They are not alone. Those who went before them and we who witness their confession are being asked to do the same thing. To step out and step up. Our cause is not to slow down the wokism of our age or preserve the dying institutions of this world. Our cause is much larger and greater.
We who confess Jesus Christ are standing with the apostles and evangelists, the patriarchs and prophets, the missionaries and martyrs who pledged their fealty not to an idea but a flesh and blood Savior, not to the hope of their fulfillment but to the fulfillment of God’s promise of a new heaven and a new earth, not to a freedom which gives permission to be what they want to be but the power to become the children of God.
Typically we set our sights too low. We would be content with a better life but God is determined to give us a new and everlasting life. We would be content to feel good and feel better about ourselves and the things around us but God is determined to make us uncomfortable enough with this world that we will yearn for the world to come and dissatisfied enough with our progress in righteousness that we will trust only in Christ’s righteousness. We would be content with a moment of happiness but God is determined to give us more than we deserve or dare to dream.
When we contend for the one true catholic and apostolic faith, we are holding onto the one and true eternal Gospel and insisting that only this Gospel proclaimed to the nations can rescue the captive, forgive the sinner, and redeem the dead from the grave. Though we might think that Reformation Day is about being Lutheran, it is really about the one eternal Gospel that can give light, hope, and life to a world in darkness and death.
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