Why of all things, Lutheran?

a post for the "Lutheran curious"

Why Lutheran

To be absolutely clear: I am not Lutheran because I am ethnically Northern European (I’m not), or culturally mid-western (I’m definitely not), or even because I am devoted to the institution of the ELCA (that comes and goes).

I am Lutheran because it is my theological identity.

Why? Because grace is the center of gravity in Lutheran theology. Not personal righteousness. Not discipleship. Not morality. Not piety. Not progressive sanctification. Not activism. GRACE. And the thing that separates grace from all of the other things I just listed is that with grace, God is the determining factor, not us and our efforts. When anything other than grace is the starting point in my relationship to God or in my identity, I am screwed because it means that my goodness or righteousness is the determining factor.

1. That photo of me is nearly 15 years old and 2. This meme has nothing to do with being Lutheran.

In my final sermon at HFASS, I offered 8 things I wanted to say about grace. Here they are:

1.    Grace is our origin and our source-code 

In the beginning, all there was was God, so in order to bring the world into being, God had to kind of scoot over. So God chose to take up less space—you know, God make room.

So before God spoke the world into being, God scooted over. God wanted to share. Like the kind-faced woman on the subway who takes her hand-bag onto her lap so that there’s room for you to sit next to her. She didn’t have to do it, but that’s just who she is . . .; the kind-faced subway lady’s nature is that she makes room for others.

Then God had an absolute explosion of creativity and made animals. Amoebas. Chickens. Crickets. Bees. Orangutans. 

Then God said,“Let us create humans in our own image and likeness.”

Let us. God the community, God the family, God the friend group, God the opposite of isolation, said, “Let us create humanity in our image and likeness. Let there be us and them in one being.”

So God created every one of us in the male and female image of God. Then God gave us God’s own image -something so holy that it could never be harmed, and never be taken away. A never-aloneness. An origin and destination. A source code of grace.

2. I’ve got good news and bad news

The thing is, in order to really speak of grace, we must speak of why grace is needed. Which means we simply must speak of sin - even if liberals tend to think that speaking of sin is the same as celebrating low self-esteem. But friends, how can we ever understand why grace is amazing if we think we don't need it?  

I mean, a free lifetime supply of injectable insulin is only good news if you happen to be someone who has diabetes.

The problem, of course, is that the word sin is too often used as a synonym for being immoral. But you could live an entirely moral life, never cheat on your spouse or on your taxes…you could never break a law and be a so-called good person and still be a total sinner. 

In fact, the word sin has been so misused and misunderstood (not to mention weaponized), that I’m grateful that writer Francis Spufford substitutes the word sin for the HPFTU - the Human Propensity to Fuck Things Up.  

The human propensity to fuck things up cannot be avoided.  Do not be fooled into thinking that with enough therapy or meditation retreats, or with enough wokeness or with the right elimination diet or with good enough intentions that you will not still F things up. You will. I will.

But also, friends, do not despair because

3. You are indeed a mighty sinner, but Shame is optional

Martin Luther in a letter he wrote to Philip Melanchthon told his friend,

    "If you are a preacher of grace, then preach a true not a fictitious grace; if grace is true, you must bear a true and not a fictitious sin. God does not save people who are only fictitious sinners. Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly, for he is victorious over sin, death, and the world. As long as we are here we have to sin. So pray boldly – you too are a mighty sinner."

While it can be healthy and useful to have regret about the ways you fuck things up, and to even make amends, you need not have shame about it because on a really basic level, if we did not fuck things up, we would not need God. There wouldn't be any space for her. Which brings me to…

4. Feel free to name your sins – after all, it’s how WE scoot over and make room for God.

I like to think of Grace not as when God is a good enough guy to forgive me for my failings, but as when God is a source of wholeness, redemption and healing which makes up for my failings, which is more powerful than my failings. 

Grace, to me, is God’s source code. It is the Spirit’s renewable resource and confession of sins, or completing a moral inventory and speaking it to another person isn’t the way we earn forgiveness – it’s just the way to force our egos into a posture where we can receive forgiveness. 

5. Grace and gratitude. 

When I forget about the grace all around me I start to feel entitled to all the good things in my life.

To be a living being on this glorious earth is, itself grace. But what did I do that God would knit me together in my mother’s womb? How could I earn the right to eat a perfect peach – that the creator even thought to make the peach is grace to us. My friend Jeff Chu was working with wild bees recently and said that honey is grace in a jar, a sweetness entirely given that we did absolutely nothing to deserve.

7. When we experience grace we become more compassionate.

As Richard Rohr says, “once you have received real grace…real mercy… you are no longer in the position of deciding who the so called “deserving poor” are”.  When we see how God’s source code of grace has redeemed our HPFTU we give other people a break. We stop holding others to a ridiculous standard. We believe God can make beautiful things out of even other people’s HPFTU.

But to be clear,

8. Faith isn’t about self-improvement. 

Because God isn’t interested in making you a better person.  God is interested in making you a new person. Because if this whole thing was only a matter of self-improvement then trying harder should do the trick in which case we basically we don’t need Jesus anymore. 

Being better people – being good-er Samaritans is something we can do on our own.  But to become new people we need God. To become new people we need a God who offers us a way where there is no way.  Becoming new people is what this whole Jesus-following thing is about and it doesn’t happen though trying harder to be good.  It comes by being robbed.  Robbed of our old ideas about ourselves.  Robbed of our self-sufficiency.  Robbed of our piety. Robbed of our selfishness.

It is grace that the sweet Holy Spirit intercedes for us. It is grace that our prayers are welcomed by the creator. It is grace to hear each other’s prayers and to make them our own.  Every day that myself or any other alcoholic or addict is clean and sober - that is grace. The sun rising in the East every day is grace. My virtue could not pull that ball of fire up over the horizon. 

It is grace that God would make her home in the womb of a peasant girl. That God would hang out, see what it’s like to have a body that aches and a mother that loves, and bread that nourishes, and sunrises that stun, and friends that console and friends that betray – and be under an empire that persecutes. God saw what all of that was like and said now is the time of salvation and opened their arms wide on the cross and welcomed every horrible thing that our human propensity to f things up could do and responded with only forgiveness.

It is grace that God would again scoot over and make room for our hearts and hurts and prayers and say to us you are mine. 

I know only one thing – that there is only grace, my sweet friends. Everything else is a measure of worthiness. Everything else leads to insiders and outsiders. Everything else can fail us. But - O to grace how great a debtor daily we’re constrained to be. Forever and ever. Amen.

Carry on, you beautiful saints and sinners,

N

p.s. there are so many other aspects to Lutheran theology: how we view scripture, our “theology of the cross”, “law and gospel” preaching etc. Other subjects for other days.

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