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"Claiming Belief and Believing the Claim"
I’ll begin with a quotation from Luther and then from his favorite scripture. One day he said, “For it happens, indeed it is so in this matter of faith, that often he who claims to believe does not at all believe, and on the other hand, he who doesn’t think he believes, but is in despair, has the greatest faith.”

The scriptural text is the one that Mr. Enlund read in a different translation. I’m going to make a good deal of the translation I am using in a moment so let me reread just a few lines from the end of this Romans, chapter 3. Paul asks, “Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. On what principle? On the principle of works? No, but on the principle of faith. For we hold that man is justified by faith apart from works of the law.”

Dear friends — Martin Luther cheated. That’s not a very nice graffito to put on the wall in the week of his 500th birthday party. There are seventy million people in the Christian world who belong to churches that, although he did not want them thus to be named, are called by his name and I am not sure they would have chosen me to put out bumper stickers with that slogan on — “Martin Luther Cheated” — or would they have chosen me as the public relations chairperson for this event had they known I would begin that way.

He did worse things than cheat in the way I am going to describe in a moment, but I won’t tell you about them in his birthday week. He had many virtues that we won’t have to parade. But he cheated in one respect and was caught by virtually the whole Christian church of his day and since.

We have to remember that this person who is remembered now as the Reformer of much of western Christianity, almost 500 years ago, made his living as a professor; indeed a professor of Old Testament, who is remembered by people who have nothing else to do with him but for the greatness of his Biblical translation. Indeed the President of East Germany, a communist nation, kicking off as chairman his nation’s celebration of Luther’s birthday this year, went on for thirty pages and never mentioned that Luther was a religious leader, but paid great tribute to the greatness of Luther’s translation of the Bible, its power, its accuracy, what he did for the language.

Now a professor of Old Testament, who is a Bible translator, who also believes that in the pages he is translating, God speaks, has to take great care in his translation, has to be faithful to the original Hebrew, or in this case — Greek. And now he comes to his favorite passage, Romans 3, and translates, concluding, “For we hold that a man is justified by faith ...” but Luther didn’t stop there where Paul did, he sneaked in a word and that’s where he cheated, “man is justified by faith ALONE apart from works of the law.” That little word “allein” — alone — got him into a good deal of trouble. The ethics of his profession was involved. Would you respect a doctor who cheats on a prescription? Respect a lawyer who cheats on a document that has a great deal to do with your own future?

Now, of course, whenever you translate a document, you are given a great deal of freedom as long as you tell people about the freedom you are taking. It’s only a couple of weeks ago that the Sunday newspapers had as a front-page story a new translation of the Bible that is trying to be inclusive in the use of the words “he” and “she”, “sons of God” and “children of God”, but the people who do that do that with a great deal of fanfare. It is not cheating if you tell us exactly what you are doing, and then shade it in print so there is no doubt about it. We can learn from the arguments over translation.

But how important it is that a translation is faithful when we don’t give any signals. What about an immigrant who has to trust someone who provides a legal document. Instead of saying, “This property shall not pass out of your hands,” the translation says, “This property shall pass out of your hands,” and you don’t know the original language.

Luther, after an act of civil disobedience, standing before an emperor, unwilling to take back his claims of hearing the gospel in words like these, writing books about it, kidnapped off to the Wartburg, where in a matter of months at a little desk that you can still see, writing in a frenzy and a passion of eloquence and trust of God, says that a person is justified by faith “allein” — alone!

How do we explain this cheating? Well, you can let him off the hook a little bit by saying he’s not the first to have done so. Indeed, you can be sure I wouldn’t face you with this challenge and this text, without doing a little study on my own. I learned for example that the greatest of the ancient Biblical scholars and translators originally had done so. Another ancient, indeed a heretic who fudged and taught a good deal differently than Paul on this very subject also had inserted the word “alone”. Marsilio Ficino, an Italian humanist, had done the same, so people of many traditions have done so. It is also the translator’s task to try to be as faithful to the intention of the original writer as possible.

Why did Luther insert the word “alone” if the original Bible text didn’t have it? He wanted to stress, as Paul did, the aloneness of this feature. For how else could someone in despair be reached unless through faith alone?

Luther began his reform in Wittenberg, whose elector, who came to sponsor Luther, was one of the best collectors of relics around. People made pilgrimages to these twenty thousand and more relics that were presented as at a fair, a bazaar, a carnival. And Luther saw that as pathetic or foolish — that they wanted to be just, right, with God on those terms.

Others were casual. They thought they could buy their way into the goodness and presence of God. And he scorned them, the purchasers and sellers of indulgence, and that was the trigger of this reform. But what he cared most about were the serious, good, decent people who really wanted to do everything right, including pleasing God and achieving God’s favor by doing good things. He had tried, and he knew how far the gap was between what he, a good, decent person and serious, could do at his best and what God demanded.

So he focused on faith alone. That’s why he had to change it in the translation. Faith alone meant that the same God who created him, me, and you, initiates everything and it all depends upon this God. If I break off the relation, I cannot restore it. If I come into death, I cannot recreate my life. My errant ways, my folly, the fact that I have as Luther said, “the ability to be curved in always upon myself,” means that only God could break into this. The agency had to be God and God’s promise, God’s claim on me, and I had to believe in that claim.

Well, as I said my first line, I saw people here smile a little. They knew that I wouldn’t admit that he really cheated if I wasn’t going to do something about that cheating, and I’m doing it. It doesn’t take a lot of courage to point out what people have noticed for 400 and some years. Nobody is angry any more with him. It was his Roman Catholic enemies who made the biggest fuss about how he had sneaked in the word faith “alone”. But the Catholics aren’t very mad at Luther any more. They signed documents with Lutherans saying they are in basic agreement. And no less a person than John Paul II, the current Pope, urges Catholics to join the Protestant world in celebrating Luther’s birthday on November 10th.

What’s more, we have been alerted to it because anybody who knows anything about the history of translation knows Luther has done it. Most of all the experts agree that he was very much in line with what a translator ought to do.

If we would read a translation in another language of the Declaration of Independence and it had that all “people” are truly created equal, we would not find that to be unfaithful to the intention of Thomas Jefferson who merely said all “men” are created equal. Luther gave us some clues about translation. He said, “You do not have to teach the letter of the Greek alphabet to know how to talk German. If you want to translate, you ask the mother at home, the children in the street, the common person at the square, and then translate accordingly. They understand you then, and they know you are giving it to them straight.”

So he talked their language which was now the language of faith alone.

This evening we are not having a course in Bible translation and the ethics of translators. This Sunday Evening Club gathers, not for historical lectures and birthday parties, but that through song, and prayer, and praise, and talk, and scripture, we try to reach the needs of the heart. When Luther translated, he translated for himself. And when he translated this passage, he knew how important it was to see what faith alone meant. Let me reread those words with which I began; Luther said, “For it happens; indeed it is so, in this matter of faith, that often she who claims to believe does not at all believe, and on the other hand, she who doesn’t think she believes but is in despair, has the greatest faith.”

Maybe that’s a more shocking thing than to merely insert the word “alone” into a translation. So if we want to find ourselves in this text, in this word of Paul, seen through the prism that Luther provides, we have to see the great division it makes in life.

Two types of people Paul finds, two types of people who care about God — the one type are those who are called the boasters. Luther says, “Those who claim to have faith but don’t necessarily have it.”

“What becomes of our boasting,” says Paul, “it is in vain.” Paul is writing over against the tradition of the children of Abraham who said, “Because we are Abraham’s children, we can boast of faith.” Luther was translating over against a tradition of a Catholic faith that had come to say, “We’re number one! We have the right faith, the right obedience, the right badge, the right club.”

The problem with the boaster is that he or she can live out a life independent of God. God can no longer reach them.

What about today? We are not living in Paul’s time (57 A.D.), or Luther’s (16th century). Is boasting still a problem? It might very well be a problem. For example in the Protestant churches, or the Lutheran churches, let’s not worry about the Jews of Paul’s day or the Catholics of Luther’s. Could it be, could it be that there is boasting in our time by people who say, “I am right with God because I belong to a church that has the right belief. I belong to the club that teaches that one is made just by faith and not by boasting — by works.”

Luther would push them off by saying, “If you claim to believe, you may very well not.”

Or it could be that people of any faith in the Christian fold (any communion) Lutheran, Protestant-at-large, Catholic might take this into the realm and say, “Faith can still be your achievement. We command faith and you better follow it, and then you can boast about it.” But that doesn’t work. You can’t go to someone and say, “Fall in love with Jessica. Fall in love with Michael.” This falling in love is a certain gift, a certain grace, that someone experiences. So we can’t say, “Fall in faith with God.” Then it’s a new achievement. Then we need a bumper sticker boasting and bragging that we achieved it.

But it’s not just a matter of boasting that we belong to the right church, or club. It’s a matter of our private lives. God can’t get through if, in the quiet of our chamber — the little room in which we listen to a message like this, a sanctuary, or anywhere — we line things up so that in any way it depends upon us.

No, his final word — the one he sneaked in — alone — has to go now as the word FAITH. Not who claims to believe but who believes the claim. So Luther concentrated, as Paul had, in trying to spread good news, tell a story. Tell the story that made the difference between the need to achieve rightness with God or to have the gift. It was the story of someone of the tradition of Abraham, Jesus Christ, appreciated in the Catholic tradition of which Luther was a part. The Christ who in the midst of a world of injustice and evil and hatred, experienced these to the end, died, and the disciples who saw that death soon after announced a resurrection. And Paul, one of the first to write about it, could say, “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us,” and Luther translated that to another category and said, “While we were yet doubters, Christ died for us.”

While we were yet in despair, he overcame that. So it made no difference whether you had anything to boast about or not. One of Luther’s own favorite pictures was of two people, each of whom had 100 coins of the same value. One had them in a miserable little old sack and the other in a magnificent chest. The coins were the same value in both. It wasn’t what you brought them in but what they were worth themselves. That’s what Luther, whose birthday we celebrate this week, tried to leave as a legacy to everyone. To point not to himself as being the bearer of coins in his goodness, or his movement as being better than the movement from which he was parted, his whole life, his whole autobiography was really the story of that limp and frail and fragile, and in no way comely, bag or sack.

In his autobiography, he was never able to parade those virtues. Of all the people in history, the one who would be least offended by my saying Martin Luther cheated would be Martin Luther. He told his confessor, and his God, and his readers that every day. Because his was a battle of the sort that we probably take with us to bed this evening, or awaken with at three in the morning, or maybe on a gray Monday — how to fight off the depression of the distance from God, how to fight off despair. Luther said (he knew this gospel), “Yet nothing has so exhausted me as sorrow, especially at night.”

He was a theologian, someone who was supposed to interpret the language of believers. He said, “The whole purpose of theology is to raise our conscience up out of despair.”

In fact, for him, the theologian dare not even be cocksure hiding behind the “mighty fortress,” about which Martin Luther could write and sing so loudly. The theologian might well be a doubter in one side of his or her life. He once said of Paul, “I don’t think he believed as firmly as he talks. I can’t believe it as firmly either as I can talk or write about it” because he knew this suffering, this despair. If one has never suffered, he cannot understand what hope is. But it was precisely in those three AM periods, the lonely nights, the despairing and dreary mornings, that this person, who sneaked this word “alone” next to the word “faith”, found the despair overcome!

And his message to us might very well be — “Don’t despair over your despair. Don’t be ashamed of your shameful doubt, for then God can reach you. Don’t suffer over your suffering. Don’t even feel you need to feel achievement.” He once said, “God is not to be known through feeling, God is to be known only through faith.” Paul had put it this way, “On what principle is the distinction made? By what law? In what system?” As long as you play the system of achievement and boasting, you can never be secure. You’ll be claiming belief. But if you believe the claim, then everything depends upon the character of God — the character of God seen in the face of Jesus Christ on the cross, the character of God that was proven in the risen Christ to be one that is trustworthy, that merits your faith, that lets you live by faith. And yes, it’s not cheating any more to say “by faith alone.” Amen.

BENEDICTION

“A Mighty Fortress is our God” is a translation by Martin Luther of Psalm 46 whose first and last verses provide our benediction:

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will we not fear though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea. “Be still and know that I am God. I am exalted among the nations, I am exalted in the earth!” The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. Amen.

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