Gods Word at Work in Us

GOD'S WORD AT WORK IN US (October 30, 2005)

“We also constantly give thanks to God for this, that when you received the word of God that you heard from us, you accepted it not as a human word but as what it really is, God’s word, which is also at work in you believers.” 1 Thessalonians 2:13

Have you ever done something for someone only to have your motives misinterpreted? Practically everyone has had that experience. The first letter of Paul to the Thessalonians, which is the earliest document in the New Testament, shows that it happened also to St. Paul.

Some said that his preaching was for his own personal gain: he was in it for what he could get out of it. Paul says he worked “night and day” so he wouldn’t be a burden to anyone. Some said his motives were impure. He replies “you are witnesses” and God also, how pure, upright, and blameless our conduct was toward the believers. Some said he was under some kind of “delusion”. He says absolutely not.

There are always people who will not believe that something could be just what it is, instead they will look for something sinister. It is good to know that St. Paul was no more immune to these slanders than ordinary people like you and me.

Then in verse 13 he comes to the root of his defense: the word he was preaching – the gospel of the good news – had been received and accepted by his hearers, not as a human word but as what it truly is “God’s word at work in you believers.”

There is the proof: the word alive, not something written on tablets of stone, as he says at another point, but on the human heart, and clearly at work in human lives: transforming people, lifting them up and not putting them down, focusing not on human achievements but on God’s grace and mercy, centered not on our pride but on God’s humility in coming to us in Jesus Christ and dying for us on a cross, and rising from the dead, freeing us to live lives of gratitude and joy and service before God and in the community of the church.

And this is really the best defense St. Paul has to the slanders which had been hurled against him.

Today is Reformation Sunday. If there is any Sunday to talk about the Word at work in us this is it. On October 31, 1517, on the eve of All Saints Day, an obscure, stout Dominican monk named Martin Luther nailed his “Ninety-five Theses” to the doors of the castle church in the town of Wittenburg, in what is now Germany. He expected only a debate among scholars – the theses were in Latin, not German.

Instead, he unleashed a firestorm. Luther’s main argument was against what were called “indulgences”, that is, the practice of selling the forgiveness of God for a price, with the price varying according to the nature of the sins being forgiven. This was a fund raising project for St. Peter’s in Rome, and it is a reminder that the ends never justify the means. Indulgences purchased freedom from purgatory for loved ones who had died. God, the thinking went, would “indulge” the purchaser and grant remission for sins, according to the amount purchased.

A monk named Tetzel was the chief salesman of the time and he went around with the crass slogan: “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.” He might have been selling frankfurters at Yankee stadium: “Get ‘em while they’re hot!” He was particularly adept, Tetzel was, in mimicking the voices of souls whose relatives were present and crying out “have pity on me”. Who could resist that?

Luther was appalled. The forgiveness of God, Luther argued, cannot be bought. It was already accomplished “once and for all”, as the book of Hebrews says, in the cross of Christ. Our response should be repentance for our sins and gratitude for God’s grace to us in Christ, and then leading a Christian life in gratitude, not fear. Luther, it turned out, was not keen on the idea of purgatory at all. Who knows, he said, if a person’s present life is not the real testing place, not some future unknown.

As a footnote, it can be noted that indulgences are not dead. The idea was briefly floated again about five years ago by the Vatican. But it is a measure of how times have changed that American Roman Catholic scholars rushed to Rome and told the Vatican to put that idea back in the box.

The watchword of the Protestant Reformation was Romans 1:17, “the righteous shall live by faith.” The emphasis was not on keeping rules, but keeping faith, living by faith, and trusting in the power of faith to carry one through the storms and shipwrecks of life, trusting God and God’s word, and the power of that word to do its work in us – all of us.

And the basic slogan of the Reformation was “the priesthood of all believers”. By putting the emphasis on everyone, not just a few, Protestantism became the incubus for modern democracies.
Tetzel, the indulgence seller, felt he had started the schism and retired in chagrin to a monastery. Luther reached out to him: “Don’t take it too hard,” Luther wrote, “you didn’t start this racket. The child had another father.”

During World War II a minister named J. B. Phillips served a church in London and also began writing a new translation, a paraphrase, of the New Testament. Phillips was an outstanding Greek scholar. This was the beginning of a whole new wave of translations and paraphrases which have sought to put God’s word into ordinary human language,, the kind of language in which the New Testament itself was written. It was a literal way of putting God’s word at work in people, to get them reading the Bible in their own language, absorbing it, appreciating it, loving it, and not being turned off by it. This is the great gift of the Reformation itself – unlocking the Bible for the people.

Here are some of my favorites from Phillips:

From Romans 12: “Don’t let the world around squeeze you into its own mould, but remold the world from within.” Isn’t that great?

From 2 Corinthians 9: “Let everyone give as his heart tells him, neither grudgingly nor under compulsion, for God loves the man whose heart is in his gift.”

From Philippians: “Don’t worry over anything whatsoever; tell God every detail of your needs in earnest and thankful prayer, and the peace of God, which transcends human understanding, will keep constant guard over your hearts and minds as they rest in Christ Jesus.”

When J. B. Phillips was translating the New Testament he noticed that the book of Acts was really about faith. It is about, he said, what happened when men and women began to “believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.” The point of Acts, he noticed, is not on what’s wrong with humans, or on human depravity, but on faith – the grasping by the faith faculty of the new order. The Good News, Phillips said, was not primarily the announcement of the fact that people were sinners, but that the real world had broken through into this world in visible, tangible form – in fact, in Christ. God was now knowable, not distant, and God’s plan of a universal kingdom was manifest, and even death itself was of no account now that God had revealed himself in Jesus.

Down near Grammercy Park in Manhattan, at Park Avenue and 20th street, you’ll find Calvary Episcopal Church, where for many years a rector named Samuel Shoemaker preached. Sam Shoemaker was one of the founders of a movement called “Faith at Work”. I remember him coming to my college in the late 50s and talking about “Redcap 42”, an African American man who was a porter at Penn Station and always carried his faith in Christ in his heart as he worked, and it showed so much that people just knew he was a Christian, and how he influenced so many.

This is what Christianity basically is, putting our Christian faith to work in such a way that we are lights in the darkness and salt of the earth, leaving the earth better than we found it, telling others of the joy we have in being a Christian, being part of a community of faith in praising Christ, as the early church clearly was.

I can think of many people right here in this church who are to me what Redcap 42 was to Sam Shoemaker. They put their faith to work. People like Irene Balram, never missing a Sunday teaching Sunday School, and Pat Young, teaching Sunday School for more than 20 years, and Will Schmidt, whom everyone recognizes as a faithful servant of his Lord, and Richard Paz, whose prayers are so heartfelt, and Karen Wood, who is really there for the church in so many ways, and many, many others. And we remember how Ralph Boone always put his faith to work, though never, we must admit, at 9 in the morning.

Roland Bainton, the great historian of the Reformation who taught at Yale University, said, “We do well to recall that those Lutheran princes who gave rise to the name ‘Protestant’ at the Diet of Spires declared. “We protest and testify,” and they were more concerned to testify than to protest.”

What is your testimony of God’s Word at work in you?