A Moment Aside ---- 10 November 2020
Today is the 537th anniversary of the birth of Martin Luther, the Reformer, the Bible Translator, the Church leader… the human being. He was a friar of the Order of Augustinian Hermits (mendicant friars by that time, rather than true hermits), a scholar, a musician, a husband, and a father of children.
He was – among other things – a person who
influenced and unified the German language by his translation of the Holy
Scriptures from the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. He assumed that everyone
saw things the way he did and couldn’t understand why they didn’t. He had
declared that he would never marry, but finally did… originally to be an
example. That marriage to Katherina von Bora, a former nun, turned out to be
quite happy. He loved his children and was devastated by the deaths of two of
his daughters.
To be honest, Luther was not always a nice
man. He could be angry and he could be short, pointed, and even foul in his
argumentative language. He wrote documents highly critical and condemnatory of
the pope (who was arguably one of the worst popes in history.) He wrote other
documents condemning the Jewish people of his time, sentiments that have been
repudiated by the Lutheran Church in our times. He often had little good to say
about other reformers who took a different path than he in the reforming of the
Church. Physically, he lived with stomach and bowel problems for most of his
life.
Luther knew himself and knew who he was.
His last words are said to have been “We
are beggars. This is true.” His understanding of grace and of the place of
grace in the salvation of the world. We cannot save ourselves by our works, but
our works – of faith, of hope, and of love – are necessary, not for our
salvation but for our lives with others on earth.
We are indebted to him, but I
think he’d point to the Cross and tell us where the real debt lies.
This most certainly true.
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