And the Greatest of These Is Faith?

Deuteronomy 6:1-9; Psalm 119:1-8; Hebrews 9:11-14; Mark 12:28-34.

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these.”

The effects of the Reformation were far-reaching on almost every aspect of the church’s life. But the whole project of the Reformation is based on a single insight – that we are justified before God by grace through faith, apart from works. This basic principle, which is everywhere in Scripture yet by the sixteenth century had become obscured by much Christian practice, was reclaimed by Martin Luther and the movement inspired by his challenge at Wittenberg. That we have relationship with God, that we are worthy of being loved and forgiven by God and one another, not because we’ve done anything to earn it, but because of God – because of who God is, and what God has done.

Within a few short years, the inspiration for reformation swept across much of Europe. But the reforms were in many ways divisive, and while some political leaders saw advantage in that division, others were worried by it. In the year 1530, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V was in the German city of Augsburg, where he hoped to broker a reconciliation between representatives of the Lutheran churches – actually, they didn’t call themselves Lutheran, but evangelische – evangelical, or gospel-centered – and the Roman Catholic churches.

For the purpose of this meeting, the evangelische representatives prepared a summary of what the evangelical churches in Germany were teaching.  This summary had 28 articles – 21 affirmative things the evangelical churches taught, and 7 abusive practices that the evangelical churches had reformed. Some of the 28 articles were one sentence long, others went on for up to ten pages.

To this day, acceptance of the Augsburg Confession of 1530 is the official test for what it means to be Lutheran. Here at Epiphany, our church constitution says that we accept the Augsburg Confession of 1530 as a “true witness to the gospel” and acknowledge all churches that accept the Augsburg Confession as “one with [us] in faith and doctrine.” Probably not many of us have read the Augsburg Confession lately, or maybe ever – but don’t worry. Part of my job is to make sure that our teaching here stays consistent with it, so if you ever do read it, or read it again, you will probably find it all very familiar.

Article 4 of the Augsburg Confession says that, in our churches “it is taught that we cannot obtain forgiveness of sin and righteousness before God through our merit, work, or satisfaction, but that we receive forgiveness of sin and become righteous before God out of grace for Christ’s sake through faith when we believe that Christ has suffered for us and that for his sake our sin is forgiven and righteousness and eternal life are given to us. For God will regard and reckon this faith as righteousness in God’s sight, as St. Paul says in Romans.”

Now, at Augsburg in 1530, this statement did not go over well with the Roman Catholic representatives at Augsburg. In recent decades Catholic and Lutheran theologians have worked hard to understand one another and our differences are today much smaller than they once were. But at the time, the Roman representatives had issues.

And one of their complaints was based on our gospel reading today. The greatest commandment is love – love of God, and love of neighbor. Not faith, but love. We know St. Paul says there are three things that last – faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is – what? Not faith, love. So, if love is greater than faith, the Catholic representatives at Augsburg asked in 1530, how can Lutherans say that we are saved by faith? Wouldn’t it be better to say that we are saved by love? And therefore isn’t it our deeds of love – our works of love, if you will – that make us right with God?

The evangelische answer to this objection – if you’re interested, you can read it in a document called the “Apology of the Augsburg Confession” by Luther’s colleague Philip Melanchthon – is quite simple, and quite interesting. Yes, of course, love is greater than faith. After all, as 1 John 4:8 says, “Anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love.” God is Trinity, God is a community of persons bound together in mutual love. God made humanity in the divine image, as a community of persons also bound together in mutual love, and God draws us human beings into the community of divine love.

That is salvation – to know that we are deeply and passionately loved by God, that God loves each of us and all of us with all God’s heart and soul and mind and strength, and that we are made able to love in return as God has first loved us. Yes, we Lutherans believe all of this.

But here’s the thing. Do you imagine that God is hovering over us to check up on whether we are fulfilling the commandment to love? Do you think that God has sternly ordered us to love God above all things and love our neighbor as ourselves and is ready to pounce on us, to punish us for every selfish impulse? That God is always on the verge of condemning us to eternal torment in hell for not being loving enough? If we think that the commandment of love is something we have to live up to before God can love us, then we will be deathly afraid of God. And this is a God we can never love. We can fear such a God, but we can never love this God.

It’s a funny thing about God’s law, Luther discovered. The higher and more demanding the Law is – and what could be higher or more beautiful or more compelling than the commandment to love God with all our heart and mind and soul and strength and our neighbor as ourselves? The higher the Law, the harder it is to fulfill, and the more we feel like we have failed and therefore are unworthy of love. The harder we try to love, the harder it becomes to actually love. It’s like the old Navy saying: The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Who among us loves our neighbor as ourselves, all the time, every day, every neighbor? Who among us loves God with all our heart, 100%, holding nothing back? And if God is holding the commandments over us and judging us at every moment – then the law of love, the highest commandment, is actually experienced as the greatest condemnation. And more condemnation is never going to improve morale, or make us more loving.

But – as soon as we believe that God is who God says God is. As soon as we trust the word of God that God is love. If we trust that God really is how God is revealed in Jesus. Then we will discover that God is, in fact, loveable. If we have come to experience that God already loves us, even before we have done anything to earn or deserve it, because God has created us to love and to be loved, because God desires more than anything for us to be joined with the divine community of love, just because – if we can actually believe and trust this, then maybe we can relax a little.  Maybe we can love God with a little bit more of our minds and hearts and strength, not because we have to, but because we get to. Maybe we can be so stunned with gratitude for the amazing grace with which God has loved us that we can show a little grace for our neighbors too.

So, the evangelische representatives at Augsburg explained, faith is not opposed to love. Faith is actually the precondition for love. But this is faith in the older sense of the word, meaning trust and confidence in the goodness and graciousness of God – it’s not just intellectual assent to doctrines. Requiring intellectual agreement to certain facts before God can love us is just as bad as requiring deeds of love before God can love us. Do we think God sits in heaven, sternly looking deep into our thoughts and asking, Do you believe in all 28 articles of the Augsburg Confession? Do you really? Because I won’t love you unless you do! That’s making faith into another kind of work, just another thing we have to do to make ourselves worthy of God’s love.

But this is exactly the problem – if we think we need to do something to earn God’s love, if we think we need to accept the truth of certain facts before God can love us, then we don’t have faith.  In that case, we don’t have confidence or trust in the God who loves us, not for who we are but because of who God is. The God who makes us worthy, not because of what we’ve done but because of what God has done. All we have to do is to believe that this is who God is.

And yet, we Christians seem to have a really hard time letting go of the idea that God is out to get us unless we find the magic words or the secret trick to save ourselves from God’s wrath. Even Lutherans who ought to know better, even Protestants who claim the heritage of the Reformation – how often do we assume that we cannot trust God’s goodness towards us?

There’s a meme going around the Internet that, to me at least, captures really well what’s so wrong with what a lot of people still assume the Christian message is. Jesus knocks on the door asking to come in. Why? So I can save you. From what? From what I’m going to do to you if you don’t let me in. That’s not a promise, that’s a threat. And yet how often do people, even today, present Jesus as someone who can save us from what God would otherwise do to us. But really, we don’t need to be saved from God. We need to be saved from ourselves.

Luther said the church will always be in need of reformation, and so we are. We human beings have a real knack for turning the good news of grace into one more thing we have to do in order to save ourselves from the wrath of God. But what we should really fear is our impulse to trust ourselves and what we can accomplish by our own efforts rather than to trust the goodness of God. We should fear what we do to ourselves when we think we’re not good enough and that we don’t deserve good things and that we aren’t worthy of love. We can keep beating ourselves up hoping that one day morale will improve, and somehow it never does.

Or, we can just trust the good news that we have heard – the good news that God is good. That in fact God is much better than we ever imagined. That we are loved beyond our comprehension, without having to do anything to deserve it – all we have to do is accept it, believe it, trust it.  Until we trust the goodness of God, we have no hope of fulfilling the law of love. And even then we’ll never fulfill it, not completely. But God will fulfill the law of love.  Jesus has already fulfilled it for us.

And when the church allows itself to be reformed by that grace, we can again become the place that knows God’s love, where – despite our idiosyncrasies and flaws, we know that we are among friends, where we gain the strength to love God and our neighbor, where we can remind one another just how good is our good God.