The First Penguin

 The scriptures referred to are Romans 3:19-28 and 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8.

We've all probably seen documentaries on penguins and how after the female lays her egg she at last makes the long trek to the sea to eat. And how this means the male sits on the egg for two months without eating. When the female returns, the male goes on the long journey to the sea. But even though they are all starving, the penguins do not just jump into the water. Their enemy the sea lion might be beneath the surface, waiting to gobble them up. So the penguins crowd along the edge of the ice floe until one falls in. If he isn't eaten, then the others jump into the water, in a wave of bodies that reminded me of an old Esther Williams water ballet number.

People aren't really that different. As a group we rarely do anything until one person does it first. You see it in videos on You Tube, showing psychological experiments, where an actor falls to the pavement and lies still. The crowd tends to walk around him, especially if he looks like a homeless person. Only when one person stops to help, do other people do likewise. Recognizing that as a problem to getting someone first aid, in Red Cross CPR training, they tell you it's vital to immediately go to the aid of someone you see in distress. Once others see you do it, they will jump in and help.

But it takes a lot of courage to be the first person to step out of the crowd and do something out of the ordinary, even if it is the right thing. We wouldn't be celebrating Reformation Sunday if it weren't for one man, Martin Luther, doing just that. And he was an unlikely person to do so.

He didn't seem very brave when, frightened by a nearby lightning strike, he made a hasty vow to become a monk. And his early years as a monastic were spent fearing and hating God because he felt there was no way to please him and save himself from going to hell. Fortunately, his mentor saw him to be an intelligent scholar and set him to teaching the books of Romans and Galatians at the University of Wittenberg. And as he immersed himself into these key writings of Paul, Luther discovered that his idea of our relationship with God was distorted, and that a lot of this was due to the way the church approached matters like sin and salvation.

What he found was that God loved us and rather than demanding we save ourselves through perfect observance of the law, God saves us by the free gift of his grace. What we must do is accept his grace through faith, trust in his loving, forgiving nature revealed in Christ, especially through what he did on the cross. Which in turn led Luther to question the whole system of penance and absolution the church of his day had set up.

And what brought things to a head was a money-making scheme dreamed up by his archbishop and the Pope. His archbishop had debts to pay for obtaining additional bishoprics and Pope Leo X wanted to rebuild St. Peter's Basilica. Their solution was to sell special indulgences that would let people off from the punishment of their sins in purgatory. They selected a Dominican friar, John Tetzel, to spearhead the effort. Tetzel was a great salesman but a poor theologian. His catchy slogan, “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, another soul from purgatory into heaven springs,” really grated on Luther's ears. So Luther wrote to his archbishop, protesting the whole enterprise and listing 95 objections and questions he had about it. He also supposedly posted the 95 theses on the church door which served as a university bulletin board. Luther sincerely wanted to debate them. But after the original Latin version was translated by his friends into German and copies spread throughout the country, Luther's private qualms became a very public matter. He got pushed off the ice floe and into the ocean tide of history.

Luther did more than not get eaten by Leo the sea lion; he proved to be a very pugnacious penguin indeed. He continued to study and teach and publish criticisms of the corruption of the church and its doctrines. Eventually he got called to a Diet before the Holy Roman Emperor. He was not given a chance to debate his assertions but simply to disavow the positions he took in his writings. Luther took a day to pray and talk to his friends about the matter. The next day he declared that he stood by what he had said unless someone could show him from scripture that he was wrong. He was declared a heretic, an outlaw and not only was it a crime to give him food and shelter, it would not be considered a crime if someone killed him. Now Luther was really in the deep end.

On the way home from the Diet of Worms he was kidnapped by masked horsemen. This had been arranged by Luther's prince, Frederick III. During his absence from public life, he grew a beard, as we guys do when isolated for long periods of time, and he translated the New Testament into German, so that everyone could read the gospel for themselves.

We know the rest but I want us to consider the courage it took Luther to stand up to those in power and to keep speaking up. It wasn't like he didn't know how much trouble he could be in. Just a century earlier a Czech theologian, Jan Hus, objected to many of the same things in the Catholic church, including the selling of indulgences. Not only was Hus excommunicated and told to recant, he was burned at the stake as a heretic. And at the Diet of Worms, Catholic theologian Johann Eck mentioned Hus. I think that was a not very subtle hint of where Luther's actions could lead him.

What enables a person to step out of the mainstream, single themselves out of the crowd, go against the flow of society and risk death? Two things: being convinced of the rightness of your cause and being convinced that it is vitally important. Galileo was sure he was right about his scientific discoveries about the earth revolving around the sun but he was willing to recant publicly to avoid severe penalties at the hand of the Inquisition. Luther was not. The way the solar system operates does not generally affect the average person but the good news that God's love and grace and forgiveness is available to all if they put their trust in Christ does. The fact that this was obscured by the church was something Luther could not keep silent about.

In this Luther was in the same company as the apostles and saints. They could not contain themselves when it came to the word of God despite the consequences. As it says in Hebrews, “There were others who were tortured, refusing to be released so that they might gain an even better resurrection. Some faced jeers and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were put to death by stoning; they were sawed in two; they were killed by the sword.” (Hebrews 11: 35b-37a) Luther did not suffer most of these things but the threat of imprisonment and death hung over him the rest of his life.

C.S. Lewis said, “Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, at the point of highest reality.” In other words, you may say you stand for the truth but if you let yourself be cowed into silence, then you don't really stand for it. You may say you stand for justice but if you don't go to bat for those suffering injustice, you don't really value justice. You may say you are compassionate but if you don't show compassion for despised people for fear of being attached to an unpopular cause, you aren't really that compassionate. A true virtue must be backed by courage when the virtue is threatened or it is false virtue. In John's gospel Jesus says, “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13) In 1 John it says, “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.” (1 John 3:16) We would not know God's love if Jesus did not have the courage to speak out, defy convention and be willing to go to the cross for us. We in turn must take up our cross for him if we are truly his followers.

Love is a strong motivation to act in the face of danger. I saw a mother hen launch herself 11 feet in the air to attack a hawk that had grabbed one of her chicks. I didn't know that chickens could fly that high. But she saved her chick from the talons of the predator. I just saw a video of another hen, who grabs a hawk trying the same thing and fights it on the ground and backs it into a corner before turning and walking back to her chicks triumphant. And we see mothers and fathers do incredibly brave things to save their children. And not just parents. I read several years ago of an elderly man on oxygen who went into his burning house and carried out his invalid wife to safety, before dying himself. Love fuels courage.

The same thing goes for faith. If we really trust God, we will heed the words we find in the Bible 365 times: “Do not be afraid.” Fear is the opposite of faith. If we truly believe that God almighty, the God who is love and life, is with us, we will not fear opposition. Jan Hus not only went to his death for his faith, he was heard singing psalms as they burned him at the stake. To try to end a crusade, St. Francis of Assisi went to see and try to convert the Sultan of Egypt, risking martyrdom. The sultan heard him and sent him back unharmed. That was practically a miracle. Luther risked the wrath of the church and the Holy Roman Empire. His namesake Martin Luther King Jr. did die in his efforts to free people. Dietrich Bonhoffer left the US where he was safe to go back to Germany and refute the marriage of Nazism and Christianity and was hanged in a death camp. They had the courage of their convictions and their convictions were that they were on the side of the God of truth and peace and grace and liberty and goodness.

21 years ago the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation signed the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, which essentially resolved the issue that caused the Reformation. They affirmed that we are justified by God's grace through faith in Christ, as it says in the Bible and as Luther asserted. The World Methodist Council and the World Communion of Reformed Churches both adopted the declaration at later dates. Since the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission had agreed on the matter in 1986, the Anglican Consultative Council welcomed and affirmed the declaration. The initial issue that could have gotten Luther killed has been settled.

But that doesn't mean there is no need to display courageous faith anymore. There are still evils and corruption and injustices that need reforming in our world. There are, sadly, people distorting the gospel and misusing the power of the church for personal ends. The powerful still don't like to hear the truth or want it published and there are still people who react to unpleasant truths with violence. And the majority of people, like penguins, are afraid to take the first step for fear of what might happen to them.

But as Paul reminds us, “For God did not give us a Spirit of fear but of power and love and self-control.” (2 Timothy 1:7) And unlike the early Christians, or our brothers and sisters in Christ living in some countries today, we do not generally have to worry about death. We are primarily in danger of being ridiculed as hypocrites or of being looked down upon as fools. Again a lot of this is due to self-proclaimed Christians who have visibly and loudly proved themselves to be either or both. But showing ourselves to be neither is simply a matter of being real followers of Jesus, who practice what we preach and who know what we are talking about.

And it takes courage. It means stepping out of the crowd and taking a stand, no matter how unpopular that makes you with society as a whole, or your family and friends. And we can't resort to violence, not even to defend ourselves, because Jesus told us to put up the sword, lest we die by the sword. (Matthew 26:52) In the armor of God, our only weapon is the “sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.” (Ephesians 6:17) In an age with much more efficient weapons than they had in Jesus' or Luther's day, that may not seem like much. But, as we've seen, armed with God's word alone, one person can change the world.