Anita, Clarence, And Me: A Reformation Day Meditation Text: Ephesians 6:10-19 -- By: Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen

Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 06:1 (Winter 1992)
Article: Anita, Clarence, And Me: A Reformation Day Meditation Text: Ephesians 6:10-19
Author: Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen


Anita, Clarence, And Me:
A Reformation Day Meditation
Text: Ephesians 6:10-19

Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen

Dr. Van Leeuwen is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies of the Philosophy Department of Calvin College, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This article was adapted from a lecture presented by Dr. Van Leeuwen for the Christ and Culture Lecture Series, Waynesburg College, October 1991

Among Reformed Christians (a term which includes Presbyterians, Calvinists, Lutherans, and many others who do not formally use those labels) this is the week in which Reformation Day is celebrated. For it was on October 31,1517—theeve of All Saints’ Day-that Martin Luther nailed his Ninety Five Theses, “for the purpose of eliciting the truth,” to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg.

It was no coincidence that Luther chose the eve of All Saints’ Day to post his theses on the church door, for this was the evening the Wittenberg church reserved for the display of its collection of saints’ holy relics. Veneration of these relics was supposed to add to one’s accumulated merit in heaven and decrease one’s projected time in purgatory.

As you no doubt know, the heart of the Reformation was there-discovery, by Luther and others, of the meaning of the grace of God: justification by faith alone. Burdened by constant doubt about the adequacy of his own legalistic religious observances for salvation, Luther began to look more closely at the Scriptures. It was finally through his reading of Galatians that he experienced liberation from his agonizing fear of his own imperfections before God. And why? Because he realized, as Paul wrote to the Romans, that “apart from the law the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus…For we hold that a person is justified by faith [alone] apart from the works prescribed by the law” (Romans 3:21-24,29).

Now this is a message so amazingly wonderful that we could well focus on it every Sunday and every weekday of the year, and not just on or near Reformation Day at the end of October! As the eminent preacher Robert Capon once put it, we have been “raised up” by God like paralyzed persons who have been placed on an upward-bound escalator. What he meant by this metaphor (as Luther had earlier discovered) is that our transport from death to life is God’s doing, not ours; and once we reach the top, all that God requires of us i...

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