June 15, 2025

“Sin Boldly!”

If you found this morning’s sermon title a little shocking, don’t worry, you’re not alone.  People have been scandalized by the phrase “sin boldly” for the better part of five hundred years.  It was advice first contained in a letter, written by none other than the father of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther.  The letter was written to fellow reformer, Philip Melanchthon, on August 1, 1521.  In it, Luther writes:

“If you are a preacher of grace, then preach a true and 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.”¹

For generations, people have been trying to come to terms with this language.  Luther has been cursed by many for seeming to give free license to “evil-doers” and “fornicators.”  But he’s been largely misunderstood.  The words in his famous letter are really only a restatement (albeit in rather extreme language) of the words of the Apostle Paul in letters he wrote to the churches in Rome, Galatia, and Ephesus – words like those we encountered this morning in the fifth chapter of Romans.  Paul writes, “since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand.”

Luther was struck by this notion of “justification by faith.”  It wasn’t what he was being told by the preachers and theologians and church potentates around him.  And it’s not what many of us hear from some of our brothers and sisters in the faith today.  What Luther heard the church saying, and what you and I glean from those well-intentioned Sunday School teachers of our youth, is: “if you’re good, and behave yourself, God will love you; and if you’re truly sorry for the bad things you’ve done, God will forgive you, but only if you stop doing bad things and be good from then on.”  When Luther read Paul’s letters, he was struck by this notion: being set right with the Lord has nothing to do with being good; it was a free gift of Divine grace, dependent on nothing but the faith to receive it.  Martin Luther was scandalized himself.  The implications of what he encountered are staggering.  Going to confession and being told to fast for a year, or to say three Hail Mary’s, or to make an offering of indulgence were no longer, in Luther’s mind, a requirement for getting back on good terms with the Lord.

Even more than that, Luther caught the scandalous flavor of Paul’s words later in verse six, “Christ died for the ungodly.”  It occurred to Luther that Jesus didn’t die on the cross, as I once heard it said, “so that nice people could be nicer.”  Christ died for sinners, not for righteous people.  In fact, there isn’t any such thing as a righteous person.  That was Luther’s point.  He writes to Melanchthon:

“As long as we are here [in this world] we have to sin. This life is not the dwelling place of righteousness . . .”  Luther saw that those who convince themselves that they are righteous, those who look down on others because they don’t measure up to their high standards, those who always point the finger at others instead of themselves, are the truly dangerous ones.  It is they who are living in a delusional state, and wrecking their own lives by trying to be something they cannot truly be.

So, he wrote to Melanchthon, “Sin boldly!”  He wasn’t advising riotous and licentious behavior; he was using a rather extreme and attention-getting phrase to make a point.  The point is that because you are human, you are flawed, inclined to error and capable of all manner of evil.  You will do the greatest harm by trying to claim your goodness and rightness; so be bold enough to embrace the truth about yourself; any other starting point is living a lie.

This I love about Luther.  He gives the lie to the Puritan myth – the notion that people can live by such a strict moral code that it will make their lives or their society nearly perfect.  That myth inevitably leads to the demonization of others.  It was just such a mythology that ended in the burning and hanging of many young women in our land who were branded as “witches.”  That danger is not only a memory, it is ever present for those who see themselves as righteous enough to be divinely charged to bring God’s truth to the unenlightened world.  We’ve seen the results of such a passion in virtually countless acts of terror in past years.  God save us from such a zeal to set the world straight.

The psalm we read this morning presents a different view.  The Psalmist is in awe of creation, and especially of the crowning achievement, humanity.  He writes, “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?  Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor.  You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet.”  “A little lower than God?”  Is that how we see ourselves?

What is a self, anyway?  Perhaps what distinguishes us from other animals is the ability of our minds to transform images and represent them symbolically.  This gives us the capacity for storytelling.  Accordingly, a self is simply a story.  It is the story we tell ourselves, and it defines us.

Maybe it’s the capacity to create images and tell stories that makes us “a little lower than God.”  We can create amazing things in our minds.  I personally have traveled to Jupiter and Neptune, and on to strange planets in the solar systems of unimaginably distant galaxies.  I have defied the laws of physics and sat on the edge of a black hole, poked my head inside and seen the remarkable results of a quantum singularity.  And now, because I have shared these things with you in words, you too have visited those places.  Every one of us is capable of creating things that simply don’t exist in nature, like a three-headed, purple toad with wings.  All it takes is a moment of idle reflection.

We also have the capacity to see into the future, and to envision things that might be.  It was Leucippus, and then his student Democratus who came up with the fantastical idea that all of nature, all material existence is made up of tiny particles separated by empty space.  These were called atoms.  What a strange flight of fancy to engage in four hundred years before the birth of Christ.

This capacity for imagination is an amazingly powerful ability, and it allows us to craft a story that defines the self in pretty much any way we wish.  And that power can transform lives for the good.  That happens when a person sees (more or less) the truth about himself and envisions a path to betterment.  It’s also a power that is frequently abused for evil, when the story that one tells creates a corrupted self-image that confers the power to discount or abuse others.  Those I’ve been most disappointed in over the years are those who stand in judgment of others based on a sense of their own righteous superiority.  So, we are “a little less than God,” and we are most certainly flawed, capable of evil, and in need of grace.

Every one of us is tied to every other human being by an unbreakable bond.  We all fail, we all do wrong, and we are all embraced by unflinching grace and incomprehensible Divine love.  That was Luther’s point, and it was Paul’s point.  Luther wrote to Melanchthon, “No sin will separate us from the Lamb, even though we commit fornication and murder a thousand times a day. Do you think that the purchase price that was paid for the redemption of our sins by so great a Lamb is too small?”   Paul put it this way, “For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life.  But more than that, we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.”

I’ve often said there should be a sign over the front door of a church building; “Sinners only.  The righteous need not apply.”  We are not set right by our goodness, or our rightness, or our purity.  We are redeemed and transformed by the pure grace of the Lord of Life who loves us even though we fail each other, and fail the world, and fail that Lord.  That’s the only message we’ve got to deliver.  And if someone is looking instead to be justified in their holiness and superiority, they might as well go somewhere else.  The church is for sinners.  “Christ died for the ungodly.”

“Sin boldly,” Luther said, “and yet more boldly, still believe.”  Luther was not giving us license to live in debauchery, nor was Paul.  They were grabbing us by the shirt collar and saying, “See yourself as you are.  Know that you are flawed and weak and insufficient.  And know that you are joined to every other person by Divine love and mercy.”  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it this way: “If only there were evil people somewhere, insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.  But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.  And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”²

I’m reminded of all this at this time of huge demonstrations, national guard troops putting them down, and great divisions over immigration and government policies. But the story that America, at its best, tells itself is one of a flawed nation, and of sometimes mistaken policies and decisions, but a nation that is, nonetheless, always trying to grow and live up to its ideals.  A clear and honest sense of who we are dissuades us from high-fives and fingers poked in the air proclaiming, “USA, number one!”  We have too much respect for those who have paid the ultimate price to turn their sacrifice into a jingoistic distortion.

What we are left with is a great joy.  It is the knowledge that the capacity to be honest about ourselves is perhaps our mostly Godly trait, and that our shortcomings and failures cannot, in the end, succeed in cutting us off either from that Lord of Life or from one another, because those very weaknesses reveal to us the boundless love, grace and forgiveness of the Lord – something we all share.  Luther summed up his advice to Melanchthon in these words: “Pray boldly – you too are a mighty sinner.”

In the year 1529 Luther wrote a hymn that has become one of the most cherished in all Christendom: “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”  Let’s sing it together.

¹ Luther’s Works, Letters I, Volume 48, Fortress Press, 1963, pp. 281-282.

² Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in Fred E. Katz’s Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil: A Report on the Beginnings of Evil, New York State University Press, 1993, p.vii.