Devotions for the Week of Reformation Sunday

Monday of the week of Reformation – Prayer for the Week

Almighty and gracious Lord, pour out Your Holy Spirit on Your faithful people. Keep us steadfast in Your grace and truth, protect and deliver us in times of temptation, defend us against all enemies, and grant to Your Church Your saving peace; through Jesus Christ, Your Son, our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

When you are a Pastor, you learn that God calls all sorts of people to faith. Some are loud and brassy; others are quiet. Some are smart; others are not so intellectually gifted. Some are competent at fixing the church’s water heater, others not so much. God loves them all, so preachers had better get used to loving them all too. I have found over the years that God has a way of surprising me with people, opening my eyes to things which I, in my educated arrogance, had never imagined.

Had you seen her; you would have found her easy to overlook. I did, at first. She was not an assertive person by nature, the sort of woman who did not say much in a Bible study or voters meeting. She liked being on the altar guild, coming on Saturday to prepare the altar for worship, the sort of job that was behind the scenes. In a larger parish, I think she would have simply been one of those faces who regularly stared back at me from the pews while I preached, always there but unremarkable. This was not a very large parish. I came to know her better through her family. It was an interesting bunch which involved several early morning phone calls to help resolve crises. Her children and husband were, to put it mildly, not a terribly wholesome lot. But they managed, in large part, because she was always there for them and with them, even when they were foolish and difficult to love.

God had answered this prayer for her. She was steadfast in grace and truth. That meant loving people who were at times hard to love. A quiet person by nature, I also discovered that there was a steely and resolute devotion to the truth in this woman. She was dedicated to the truth that God loved her and her family. That meant she expected the truth from them and would settle for nothing less. She could make them squirm under that unflinching expectation. I discovered that she made an excellent presider at council meetings.

How does God answer this prayer for you? It will be different for every human life and yet behind all these blessings stands the same Jesus who is the Truth and who graciously gave himself for you and your justification.

Tuesday of the Week of Reformation – Revelation 14:6–7

6Then I saw another angel flying directly overhead, with an eternal gospel to proclaim to those who dwell on earth, to every nation and tribe and language and people. 7And he said with a loud voice, “Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come, and worship him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the springs of water.”

Anyone who opens their newsfeed or watches the news on TV these days encounters a world of violence, cruelty, and war. As I write these words, the horrific images coming from the Middle East and Ukraine assault my heart. It feels like the social order of the post-world war II time is unraveling in real time. In times like this, people are often drawn to the words of John’s Apocalypse.

The author of these words, John, lived in time when emperors ruled the vast Roman state. Sometimes the emperors were good and able rulers. Augustus and Tiberius had long and stable reigns. Other emperors were unstable personally and the empire might be wracked with unrest. John wrote these words in the days of Diocletian, a particularly unstable man who lashed out at many people, including Christians.

When the emperor died a new emperor would be proclaimed. A herald would come into the community, blow a trumpet, and announce “good news – the reign of…has begun.” The Bible picks up that formula to describe Christian preaching. Paul, Peter, and the rest of the early church apostles and preachers were heralds of a new king with a twist. Instead of announcing that the old emperor had died, and a new rule had begun; they announced that Jesus had risen, and his eternal reign had begun. They used much of the same language that the heralds of a new emperor used. You might think about that when it comes time to inaugurate whoever wins this election.

That Christian proclamation has continued through the rise and fall of republics, monarchies, empires, and dictatorships. For 2000 years, Christians have gathered, heard words of absolution, participated in heaven’s feast, and been welcomed into fellowship with God himself. I make no prognostications about elections or the consequences of victories or losses in the political or international arenas. Such things will make a difference for some things in our lives, but the most important things will remain unchanged, for they are under a different lordship altogether. They belong to Christ and his gracious kingdom. Pray for our country, vote if you have not already, and rest in the assurance that the Kingdom of Christ has been proclaimed.

Wednesday of the Week of Reformation – Psalm 46

1God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.

2Therefore we will not fear though the earth gives way, though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea, 3though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble at its swelling. Selah

4There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High. 5 God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved; God will help her when morning dawns. 6 The nations rage, the kingdoms totter; he utters his voice, the earth melts. 7 The LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress. Selah

8 Come, behold the works of the LORD, how he has brought desolations on the earth. 9 He makes wars cease to the end of the earth; he breaks the bow and shatters the spear; he burns the chariots with fire. 10 "Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!" 11 The LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress. Selah

His friends looked on with growing alarm that day in mid-April of 1521. Luther stood before the Emperor and the assembled members of the imperial nobility. He refused their demand that he disavow his writings. The Emperor was not used to being disobeyed, especially by a lowly monk. Luther could be somewhat politically obtuse. His friends grabbed him firmly by the elbow and escorted him out of the room and they just kept walking. They smiled at the guards, walked through the city gate, and came to the horses and cart which they had prepared for just such an emergency. They sent Luther out of town before he could be arrested. Somewhere outside of town, Luther’s party was surrounded, and he was taken “prisoner.”

Many people thought that was the end of Luther, but it was not. His prince, the Elector Frederick, sometimes called “the Wise” but perhaps the German is better translated “the Crafty,” had arranged for Luther to be kidnapped and brought to a secure fortress high on a hill in Saxony. It still stands and you can visit. It is called the Wartburg.

In the 16 months he spent in the Wartburg, Luther grew a beard and took on a new identity as Knight George. We even have a painting of him at the time. I have included it for you. The psalm this week repeats the phrase: “the God of Jacob is our fortress.” Those words would become the opening blast of Luther’s most famous hymn, “A Mighty Fortress is our God.” As Luther pondered God and the Reformation from that lofty perch in the Wartburg, he probably prayed and meditated upon this psalm. As a monk he recited his way through the psalter. People build fortresses like the Wartburg to defend against an enemy. Luther was safe there, at least from the emperor. But the emperor was not Luther’s only foe. To be safe from those other foes like sin, death, and devil, would take another fortress, a fortress which Luther sings about in that hymn and this psalm describes. Inside that fortress city the river of life flows. Outside is chaos and tumult. You have been brought to that fortress in your baptism and the promise of God to you. Here we may rest unmolested by the world, the devil, or anyone else. A mighty fortress is our God, a trusty shield and weapon; He helps us free from ev’ry need That hath us now o’ertaken

Thursday of the Week of Reformation – Romans 3:19–28

19Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. 20For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.

21But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it— 22the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: 23for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 25whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. 26It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

27 Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? By a law of works? No, but by the law of faith.28For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law.

In late 1945 Colonel Burton Andrus had a difficult task. He was the commandant of a special prison in Nuremberg, Germany where Nazi war criminals were being held, awaiting trial. He had run across a man whom he thought could help, Army Chaplain Henry Gereke who was deployed in nearby Munich to aid in rebuilding a bombed-out hospital. For the next year Pr. Gereke and his Roman Catholic counterpart, Sixtus O’Conner, served the spiritual needs of some of the

most hated men in all the world, the captured leaders of Hitler’s thoroughly wicked regime. There was a recently released movie about it called Nuremberg. I saw it on the plane to Germany last spring.

The sentence which begins at the end of verse 22 and runs into verse 25 would prove to be key to Pr. Gereke’s ministry for that year as the men were tried. Some were acquitted; others were found guilty. Some were sentenced to prison and some to be executed. All of them received the admonition to repent and to be forgiven. Consequences for crimes might still need to be exacted, but Gereke forgave and communed several of the men entrusted to his care.

The New Testament and these verses in particular make a shocking claim about what Jesus has done in his incarnation, death, and resurrection. He has forgiven the sins of the whole world, all of them, not just the sins we understand or the ones which we tolerate. He died for and forgave all of them. We dare not make this into a pat answer. Paul’s message to us is incredibly hard if you are a victim of abuse or some other atrocity. Pr. Gereke received hundreds of letters filled with hatred because he had ministered to these men. Some who had suffered could only see them as monsters who should be killed. They were the enemy and deserved no comfort. But Pr. Gereke listened to his New Testament as he walked with the condemned to their execution. He prayed with them and, if they asked, he absolved them. Jesus had died for them too.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who also suffered terribly in the 20th century, once said, “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” As Paul says, “there is no distinction, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift.”

This troubled world needs to hear those words anew and afresh. In 1945 he called an LCMS Lutheran Pastor to those men in Nuremburg. Today he calls you and me to speak into the conflicts and tensions of this moment. There is so much that is wrong. Jesus died for all it.

Friday of the Week of Reformation – John 8:31–36

31So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, "If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, 32and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." 33They answered him, "We are offspring of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone. How is it that you say, 'You will become free'?"

34Jesus answered them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. 35 The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son remains forever. 36So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. 37I know that you are offspring of Abraham; yet you seek to kill me because my word finds no place in you. 38 I speak of what I have seen with my Father, and you do what you have heard from your father."

I grew up in a little community in rural Missouri. Densely populated with German farmers, it was an archipelago of Lutherans in a sea of Baptists, Methodists, Assemblies of God, and others. In one of the corners of that community was a church in the little gathering of houses which everyone called Flora. That church had a wonderful story to tell. In the days of the American Civil War the ancestors of those German farmers had stood up for abolition and the Union. This was not a distant issue for them. Their neighbors, who had migrated from Kentucky and Virginia, were largely slave-owners, raising hemp for the ropes that bound the bales of cotton. There were many slaves who toiled in fields close to those farmers. After the Civil War, the slaves were freed, and they sought refuge among the Germans. Well into the 20th century, that little country church was thoroughly integrated.

I think the farmers in Flora saw God do something in those days of war and fear. After the war, the formerly slave-holding neighbors had tried violence and intimidation to cow the slaves and the German farmers alike. The violence probably served to drive them together but soon it was not fear but love that kept them there. Some of the members of Flora congregation had been freed from literal chains and bondage. Others, however, had been freed from a more subtle bondage to prejudice and freed to see the world through different, Gospel-oriented eyes.

The descendants of those slaves in Flora, for the most part, joined the great migration of their kindred to the industrial cities of the north in the early and middle part of the 20th century. There were jobs there and a promise of a better future for their children. They often worked in the factories that made automobiles. Those cars replaced horses and that meant that there was no need for a church every few miles. Eventually the little congregation in Flora closed. Several of its members joined my father’s congregation and I got to know them. “The folks from Flora are a little different,” people used to say. But they did not mean it in a bad way. They meant that the folk from Flora could see things a little differently, graciously. They always had room in their heart to lend a hand or welcome someone. They heard Gospel calling them to love.

The Son has set you free. You are free indeed.