Pastor's Letter

I want to clear up a big misconception about Martin Luther as we kick off a new year. Because of his doctrine of justification by faith (alone) without the works of the Law, because he taught that we are saved by grace, and not by our own efforts, Luther has been calumniated as the Christian theologian without a system of ethics. Luther, we are told, was "against good works." Nothing could be further from the truth. Listen to Luther himself:

"I would not give up one of my sermons, not one of my lectures, not

one of my treatises, not one of my Lord's Prayers, nay, whatever

small work I have ever done or am doing, for all the riches of the world;

yea, I hold my good works dearer than my own life, which certainly

should be held more precious than all the world; for if what I do is good,

God has done it through me and in me."

My personal belief is that far from disparaging good works, Luther's real goal was to elevate them. When Luther insists that we are not saved because of good works, he is not only relieving me of the burden of worrying about whether or not I have done enough good works, of sufficient quality, to "merit" eternal salvation (who ever could merit such a thing?), but he is also establishing good works, the ethical life, as a thing of importance in its own right. Lutherans don't do good works to earn salvation, we do good works to do good works, because they're good, for their own sake.

Medieval Catholicism devalued good works by making them into something we do just to earn brownie points with God. Just as modern capitalism causes us to calculate value on the basis of an exchange. We moderns have corrupted the concept of value itself by turning it into a matter purely of dollars. Is a Picasso great art because it is worth millions or is it worth millions because it is great art? I don't think we know the difference anymore. Are churches teaching the truth if they have huge buildings, big budgets, and crowds of people? Or does truth have other bases? Do we any longer know how to think about these things?

Luther's ethics is organic. For him, being ethical is not about obeying rules; it is about being planted in Christ, watered by baptism, nourished by the Holy Supper. It is about living out a new identity in Christ. Forgiveness is important ethically (and I'm not talking about forgiving, but about being forgiven) because it frees me to live in a gray world, an ethically complex world, where there may not be clear, absolute, answers to ethical dilemmas. It is scary how often our choices are between two undesirables and we must decide which is the lesser evil.

As we head into 2008, I wish we could all benefit from Martin Luther's wisdom. We live in a world of clashing absolutes, of moral legalism, and of a consequent gridlock. We need to learn to reset our ethical systems toward compassion and goodness and away from self-righteousness and slander. We need to learn to think together toward solutions we can all embrace. Luther's organic ethics, founded on God's grace, is a dandy place to start!

Yours in Christ,

--Pastor Bastien