For Lutherans, Halloween is a significant holiday.  It was on the Hallowed Evening before All Saints' Day in 1517 that an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther nailed a parchment of 95 debate proposals to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany.  This event sparked a Reformation over long-simmering problems within the church.  The watchwords of the Reformation became "by grace alone, by faith alone, by Scripture alone," and those ideas still play a significant role in the faith of Christians today.

A young lady in one of my confirmation classes came to me one day. She was a middle schooler in a “Christian” school. She said that her teacher told her that since she was baptized as a baby and hadn’t “taken Jesus into her heart,” she was going to hell. That led to a discussion on the difference between our church’s understanding of baptism and the understanding of her teacher’s church.

First, however, it dealt with a difference in understanding of sin. On the surface sin is something that we do—in thought, word, or deed. We confess that every Sunday. But sin is even deeper than that—sin is the very brokenness of the world in which we live.

Everyone is a sinful human being—from the moment he or she pops out of the womb. For our church, baptism is something that God does. The Holy Spirit is the one who ignites faith in the heart of a person—a faith that leads to forgiveness, and, therefore, the age of the person is immaterial. Baptism is a God-thing. For her teacher baptism is a confession of faith, comparable to our confirmation. For her teacher, baptism is a human-thing.

This Sunday we celebrate Reformation and remember an event which happened on Halloween, the 31^st of October 498 years ago. Halloween, by the way, is a Lutheran holiday—the Hallowed evening before All Saints Day. On that day in 1517 an Augustinian monk by the name of Martin Luther posted a list of ninety five debate proposals on the city bulletin board, the door of the Castle Church in the city of Wittenburg, Germany.

My discussion with my young lady touched the very heart of what the reformation was all about. In those days educated people in academic and church circles communicated in Latin, and so the watchwords of the Reformation were expressed in three Latin phrases: Sola gratia, sola fide, and sola Scriptura.

The Reformation wasn’t about them and us—the good old Lutherans and the bad old Catholics. No, the Reformation was about the church and what was taking place, in at least the Western part of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. There were problems, to be sure—problems of long duration—problems which were widely discussed. Jan Hus, a Czech philosopher and theologian was burned at the stake on 6 July 1415 for raising some of the same questions that Luther and others would raise a century later. Erasmus of Rotterdam, a contemporary of Luther, wrote some biting commentaries on the state of the church.

Local clergy were often untrained, and some hardly knew enough Latin to get through the mass. Canon law, the rules and regulations of the church, were disregarded for a contribution. High offices in the church were opportunities for power and wealth and were available for a substantial contribution.

Albrecht, already archbishop of Magdeburg and administrator of the diocese of Halberstadt, sought to enhance the power and prestige of his family by gaining in addition the archbisopric of Mainz. To do so required a large amount of money to gain dispensations from Rome, money provided by the banking family, the Fuggers. To repay the loan, Albrecht agreed to

promote the pope’s indulgences which were used to complete St. Peter’s in Rome for a share in the proceeds. Everyone would gain. The faithful would benefit from the indulgences they bought; Albrecht would become an elector of the Holy Roman Empire, as well as an archbishop twice over; and St. Peter’s would be completed.

The real problem, however, was that the faith of the church was becoming mechanical. Do this and you will be saved. Salvation was to be earned by what you do. Forgiveness could be sold. “How could a human stand righteous before a holy God,” Luther asked himself and the church. It was during his lectures on Romans in 1515 that Luther discovered what St. Augustine had discovered before, that a human is justified before God through faith in Jesus. Salvation comes by the grace of God. St. Paul explained this even more explicitly in his letter to the Ephesians: “But God, who is rich in mercy, out of great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved.” By grace alone! Salvation is a God-thing. Jesus Christ suffered and died on our behalf, and God washed away all of our failings, all of our faults, all of our sins for the sake of Jesus Christ. It is a gift of God, not of human accomplishment.

St. Paul goes on to say in his letter to the Christians in Ephesus, “For by grace you have been saved through faith.” Note that St. Paul didn’t say “because of your faith, but through faith.” Faith is the channel through which the grace of God is applied to us. It is the hands which simply receive the gift of what God has done through Jesus Christ. By faith alone we are the beneficiaries of God’s action.

How do we know this?

After all, it is contrary to all human expectations. There’s no free lunch. You get what you pay for. You have to earn your keep. How do we know that all of this is a God-thing? God tells us. That’s what the Bible is for. The Bible is God’s communication that helps us to understand that God has loved us to the extent that he has been willing to become accountable for our failings. God has spelled it out for us with a multiplicity of examples. This is what the problem is—sin. This is what sin looks like at every level of humanity—on the personal level, on the community level, even on the government level. These are the ways in which God has demonstrated his care and concern for his people—the Exodus from Egypt, the time in the wilderness, even while they were in Exile in Babylon. This is how God operates in often surprising ways—through a baby born in Bethlehem, through a compassionate teacher, through a violent suffering and death, through an unexpected, amazing resurrection from the dead, which as St. Paul pointed out became our own death and resurrection through baptism.

Paul went further to point out the implications of what God has done. Since God has taken the initiative, then this is what it means, how it plays out in our own lives.

How do we know? Because God has told us, and that it is why we are invited to gather around God’s word—to listen, and, yes, to struggle with the meaning and implication of what God has to say to us. Sola gratia, sola fide, sola Scriptura—by grace alone, by faith alone, by Scripture alone. Yes, maybe the Lutherans have something to offer the broader Christian Church. As the Psalmist wrote: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. We will not fear, though the earth should change.”

One of the things that a young woman who operates drones in the Mid-east from seven thousand miles away said was that she couldn’t stand whiny guys. Maybe we should not have a great deal of patience with whiny church people who continually

complain about the state of the world. Yes, there are many bad things in our world.

Do you think that it was any easier for the people of Jesus’ day than it is for the people of today? Homosexuality, abortion, child endangerment, slavery, corruption of religion—these were all part of their day to day existence. Were things any easier in Luther’s day?

The armies of Islam were at the gates of Vienna and covered a great deal of Spain. That was one of the reasons that Charles the 5th, the Holy Roman Emperor, so desperately wanted to solve the religious problems of his empire, and possibly one of the reasons why the Reformation could succeed. I not only learn from the two year olds. I also learn from young teens in the confirmation class. They ask some interesting and often profound questions. And in this case a young lady helped me to see that the questions of the Reformation are not simply a description of what occurred 498 years ago, but are played out today in the life of a teenager—and in the lives of the rest of us also.

God has made us his own as a gift—we have received it in faith in Jesus Christ, God’s final answer to the problem of sin—we know about what God has done for us because God has spelled it out in his own Scriptures. Be still and know that God is God, and that God is the one who decides who goes to heaven or hell—not us and not a teacher.

As the children come around this Halloween for a gift of candy—rejoice. Rejoice in the gift that God has given us through Jesus Christ our Lord