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Editor’s Introduction

On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther nailed his ‘95 Theses Against Indulgences’ to the door of the University Church in Wittenberg. The Augustinian monk wasn’t trying to incite a revolution so much as he was calling for a theological debate on the controversial practice of the selling of Indulgences. Luther’s arguments, however, were run off on the newly invented printing press. Suddenly people all over Europe were talking about the brash young priest in Germany who had dared to challenge the authority of the Pope himself.

David Read’s Reformation sermon largely bypasses the 500 year-old debate that Luther’s protest sparked. Instead it seizes the occasion to champion what Luther himself was essentially championing: God’s free, undeserved grace. Read sees grace escaping from the pages of the Bible and lighting up the beauty of the whole natural world. He sees grace in a child’s anger-diffusing remark, in the courage of a stricken family at a memorial service, in the splendour of his city on a fresh fall morning. Above all, he sees God’s grace breaking upon us in Jesus’ revolutionary life and teachings, and especially in that awe-filled moment when “the embodiment of grace let himself be crushed by the very forces of which we are so afraid today.”

“This World, With Devils Filled”: Luther’s Answer And Ours

A Sermon preached by David H. C. Read at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church on Reformation Sunday, October 27, 1974

Text: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God . . . ” Ephesians 2:8

Readings: Joshua 1:1–9; Ephesians 2:1–10; John 16:26–33

Seen from forty thousand feet this is a fair and beautiful world. The other day I flew in from the west coast over a pure and sparkling desert, then the folding, blue ranges of the Rockies with their misty turrets, then the quilted plains soaking up the riches of the autumn sun, till leveling down slowly over the flaming tints of New England. Even at five thousand feet New York itself is a dream city on such a day, and rises to meet you as a tapestry of streets and parks and bridges, as a glittering jewel in its silver setting of rivers and ocean. This is when you really want to shout: “The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork.” “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof.”

Halfway across the continent the air traveler who can’t spend all his time looking out of the window consumes the last unnecessary calories on his tray (I never knew what calories tasted like until I met airline food) folds up his table, and picks up the morning paper. In a few minutes it’s a very different world he is seeing. Somewhere up in the Maritimes a storm has struck and pictures show families hopelessly digging out their belongings from the wreckage. In the Bronx a young woman has been found murdered in her apartment. School children in Boston and Brooklyn are scratching and stoning each other because some have black skins and others white. A picture of a mother and daughter from West Africa in the last stages of starvation cries out against the food that has already been wasted on this plane and calls out to the great breadbasket that stretches endlessly below us. He turns the pages. Human beings have been torn to pieces in Ireland in the name of religion. The Holy Land is the target of warring powers. Somewhere diplomats are conferring so that there may be some pause in the race for weapons that can destroy every living creature on this planet. Then page after page reports the suspicion and the cynicism with which we have come to regard the political scene. It’s a different world the traveller sees when he looks again through that little window.

“And though this world, with devils filled,

Should threaten to undo us”

wrote Martin Luther, and we now know what he means. Fifty years ago these words would have had a curiously antique flavor. “With devils filled?” That’s the way they used to talk, poor dears; we know better now: devils went out with Santa Claus: there’s nothing wrong with the world that better education and a little Christian optimism won’t be able to cure. Now we feel closer to Luther than to the blinkered idealists of the recent past. And to be closer to Luther is to be closer to the Bible. For the Bible tells us that this world, created to declare the glory of God, is a fallen world, and that humankind, made in the image of the Creator, has been enslaved by demonic powers. This doesn’t mean that the world is bound for hell and that every human being is some kind of monster in disguise. But it does mean that there is a mystery of iniquity abroad that defies the simple solutions of human ingenuity. There is such a thing as sin which, as Karl Menninger has recently pointed out, has been strangely neglected by the modern Church.

Has there ever been a time since perhaps when Luther lived when ordinary men and women have been more baffled and dismayed by the virulence of human passions, the sheer irrationality of the evil things human beings can do to one another? Particularly in this country where ideals have glowed so brightly and hopes have been highest we are going through a period of shock, anxiety, and near-despair. We know exactly what Luther meant when we sang of “this world with devils filled” that “threaten to undo us.” The trouble in the Church has been that we have wanted to hear the Good News without first taking a hard look at the bad. We have sometimes spoken as if our redemption was little more than a helping hand to humanity in its rise to perfection, and that the Son of God didn’t really need to die to save us from our sins. It’s time to see again in all its grim, demonic depths, the predicament of the human race, the fearful question to which the Gospel gives its answer. Luther, Calvin, Augustine, Paul, and Jesus himself would echo in this spiritual struggle the old military maxim: “Never underestimate the power of the enemy.”

We need to be saved. Let’s hear that word again with its full Biblical weight, without any undertones of sticky pietism. We need to be saved from evil in all its forms—individual, social, and cosmic. That’s why Jesus taught us to pray: “Deliver us from evil.” He believed the evil to be in us, in the world, and in an invisible sphere of the demonic. (The correct reading of the prayer is probably: “Deliver us from the Evil One.”) The salvation the Bible speaks of is not some kind of religious emotion. It is health, total health of body, mind, and spirit, for the individual and for the whole human family. The New Testament declares again and again that it is for this that we are being saved as members of Christ’s Church. Being saved is being rescued, not only from the hell we make for ourselves, as for the colony of heaven God is establishing on earth.

It was because Luther found the answer to this question of salvation, first for himself and then for the Church and the world of his day, that he was able to sing: “Though this world with devils filled should threaten to undo us, We will not fear for God hath willed his truth to triumph through us.” He found the answer in the Bible, where it lies still today. Nowhere is it more clearly expressed than in the seven monosyllables of our text: “By grace are you saved through faith.” They summarize the whole content of the Bible. They express the dynamic of the Gospel which keeps springing to life again whenever the Church gets drowsy and over-organized. They offer to you and me today the only real antidote to anxiety and confusion. In them we hear the truth of the Gospel through which we can face the world, the flesh, and the devil unafraid. “We will not fear for God hath willed his truth to triumph through us.”

“By grace. . . . ” The view from forty thousand feet was not all an illusion. There is a glory in the natural world and in the works of man that reflects the joy of the Creator who still sees the universe he has made “and behold, it is very good,” and also the dignity and aspiration of human beings created in his image. Neither Luther nor Calvin was blind to the beauty of the natural world, and each of them knew how to enjoy human company over, respectively, a stein of beer and a glass of wine. They were not the grim, sour-faced ecclesiastics of popular imagination. If they knew what it was to see a world filled with devils, they also knew how to see it filled with angels. The point is that, like the Bible, they took both the angel and devil seriously. That is: they saw the terrible force of sin in human nature but believed in the grace that can lift us up to our angelic destiny. In a demonic world they chose to live by grace.

Does that mean simply that the Gospel invites us to look on the bright side and throw our weight on the side of goodness in the human struggle? Can this Christian answer to our fears be adequately described in the words of Studdert Kennedy as “backing the scent of life against its stink”? There’s truth enough in that to hold on to, but the word “grace” in Scripture and the life of the Church carries a profounder meaning. Sure, it’s grace when we see this city sparkling in beauty on a fresh Fall morning; it’s grace when a little boy disarms your anger with an absurd remark; it’s grace when a stricken family gives thanks and takes courage in a memorial service here; it’s grace when we hear the happy stories that never appear in the morning paper. But the Bible tells us that these signs of grace flow from the great rescuing love of God, a love that shines through even the bloodiest pages of the Bible story, a love that comes to a climax with the coming of Jesus Christ. “We beheld his glory,” says the apostle, “full of grace and truth.”

When we use the words “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ” we are not only thinking of the perfection of his life, the blazing signal that God has not given up on the Adam of his design. We are not only thinking of the way in which the love of God reached out through him to the lonely, the crippled in mind and body, the outcast, and the broken-hearted. We are thinking of his battle against the forces of the devil, his encounter with the evil in our world. This battle, this encounter, reveals what is most amazing about this grace. For it took the form of letting the powers of hell do their worst. The one who was the embodiment of grace let himself be crushed by the very forces of which we are so afraid today. He took the entire weight of human sorrow, anguish, and sin upon himself, and was crucified, dead, and buried. This is what Luther called “the right man on our side,” the One who goes this length for our rescue. And ever since he came back triumphant from this mission against the enemy the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ has dawned upon the world as our hope and our salvation. “By grace are you saved . . . ”, by this gift of God, by this liberating love, by this victory over all the powers of darkness.

In his day Luther found a Church in which this grace was being obscured, even as it is often today in churches that celebrate his Reformation. It was, and is, obscured in two ways. First, there is the notion that grace is some kind of religious medicine dispensed by the Church. The impression is given that there is a kind of reservoir in the institution that is drawn on by its members, and that through the pipelines of its ordinances and activities we can get enough “religion” to keep us going. Luther, in his search for “a merciful God” made the great discovery that grace is supremely personal, the gift of a God who cares for each one of us. The grace that saves us is as personal—and as powerful—as the love of a mother for her child, as the communion of two close friends. The love that moves among a group of caring people is not something to be measured or rationed out; it is a free, spontaneous, accepting, forgiving, and delivering power that comes from the heart. So, I would say, grace comes not from the plans and programs of a religious organization, but from the heart of God. The services, the sacraments, the activities of a church are properly described as “the means of grace.” They are not grace itself.

The second way in which grace is obscured is the persistent notion that somehow it has to be earned or deserved. The music exploded in the heart of Luther when he finally knew that nothing whatever was required of him to merit the grace of God: no penances, no mortifications—yes, and no smug sense that he had made the grade as a moral and respectable citizen. If there ever was a character who seemed able to rely on his own interior strength it was Luther who, when warned of the danger that awaited him at Worms, remarked: “If I had heard that as many devils would set on me in Worms as there are tiles on the roofs, I should none the less have ridden there.” Yet this was the man who sang: “Did we in our own strength confide, our striving would be losing, Were not the right Man on our side, the Man of God’s own choosing.” It was this “right Man” whose grace alone forgave his sins, set him right with God, and nerved him for every struggle.

It is still a surprise for many people, even within the Church, when they really hear that the grace of God means that his love accepts them just as they are, that there is no scale of religious virtue to be climbed before they can know the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit. So long as we retain one trace of self-justification, one little desire to earn our own salvation, we are at the mercy of these fears and victims of our pride. Grace is the great leveller—never more needed than in times when we tend to range ourselves with the good guys and blame all our troubles on the bad. “All have sinned,” said Paul, “and come short of the glory of God.” But all can be “justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” “By grace are you saved . . . ”

How then if there is nothing we can do, can we be really linked to this amazing grace? That’s the big question today as at the time of the Reformation. There can be no quarrel among Christians any more about the answer. “By grace you are saved through faith.” Catholic and Protestant may still have different ways of expressing what this means, but increasingly we converge on the ultimate truth. Faith is our total trust in this grace that meets us in the person of Jesus Christ. Every one of us knows that it takes two to be friends. I can offer you my friendship, my understanding, my sympathy, my love, but if this evokes no flicker of a response then nothing happens. Grace is the hand of God stretched out—and it waits to be grasped by our hand in faith. This faith can be expressed in a silent prayer of commitment and trust, in a common affirmation in creed or hymn, in an inward yielding to the Spirit of God. But it is also expressed by the direction of our lives, our concern for other people, our reflection of the love of Christ, our readiness to follow where he leads.

Here we come to the question that always arises when the Gospel of salvation by grace through faith is preached. Do you mean, it has been asked since the days of the apostles, that since there is nothing I can do to earn my salvation, I can just trust in this grace—and carry on in my own sweet way, caring nothing about the commandments of the Lord? Dietrich Bonhoeffer used to call this misunderstanding of the Gospel “cheap grace.” The answer of the Bible is that the test of our faith is whether it issues in a real discipleship. If it doesn’t it is not faith, and grace is not there. Listen again to the words of the epistle. “By grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God; not of works lest any man should boast.” Our Christian activities in this devil-filled world are not the cause, or the price, of our salvation. They must follow genuine faith as the thankful answer of the forgiven sinner. “For we are his workmanship,” the passage goes on, “created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.” In a new translation: “We are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to devote ourselves to the good deeds for which God has designed us.”

So we come down from forty thousand to six feet above the ground. We go out again to face a world with devils filled. There is work to do. And we are called to do it with the joy of those who are being saved by grace through faith. In our anthem this morning you will hear the sounds of the devils: but through it you will hear the clear notes of the grace and the love that casts out fear. “Be of good cheer,” said Jesus, “I have overcome the world.”