Preview(S): The Five Solas....all you need is _________

  The Lutheran tradition turns five hundred years old this October. If you ask me we don't look a day over four hundred and fifty but... my...but how time flies. So, for the big five-o-o I am doing a five week sermon series on the five solas of the reformation. No, not solos...no one is singing here, least of all me. Solas. Sola means "alone" in Latin and these five solas (the original three: sola gratia, fide, and scriptura plus the later additions of solus Christus, and soli Deo gloria) make up the core foundation of what it means to be the protestant reformation. But, first a few notes:

•      One, these don't supplant the traditional creeds of the church (Apostles, Nicene, and Athanasian) but they do supplement our understanding of them.  
•     Two, they are not all inclusive as there are certainly other things that matter and are important. 
• Three, they were not all written by Luther, in fact none of the original reformers actually created a master list. These merely came up time and time again in their writing. For instance, Luther's great partner in the Lutheran reformation, Phillip Melanchthon, once wrote in 1554: "sola gratia justificamus et sola fide justificamur" ("only by grace do we justify and only by faith are we justified"). 

     OK, so we have that all out of the way.  Now: Cool "Solas graphic"... check.   Rational for the series...check. Explanation of Latin terminology....check. Basics of what they are not....check. Now, on to the fun stuff: Heresy!  Yep, it's time to dive right into why this stuff matters at all and the answer begins with the big no-no of Christianity.  

Sola Gratia:  By Grace Alone

    Rev up the Wayback machine Mr. Peabody, it's time to go

back in time and check out the church of the 1500's. Some things are similar: the pews are still uncomfortable, the jello salads are still awesome (I imagine), and the choir still shows up late for practice....but a lot of things are very, very different.  For instance:  
    In Luther's day the Roman Catholic church was a little hard-put for cash.  Like so many of us they took on a building project that taxed their income beyond their ability to pay.  In the case of the Catholic church it wasn't a plumber who quoted you one price but then charged you thirty percent more after the job.  Nope, they started

some buildings in Rome that cost the modern day equivalent of millions and millions of dollars.  Since this cost was way beyond having a church bazaar and selling raffle tickets the leadership of the day pondered what sort of major-ticket item they had that could be converted to hard cold cash.  The answer was a real game changer:  salvation.
   The Roman Catholic church began selling pieces of paper with the Pope's express promise that either they could get out of a certain period of time in purgatory (the cheap option), or out of hell entirely (the expensive option), or get a dead relative already in hell out (the reallllllly expensive option). The church called them "plenary indulgences" or just, "indulgences".  
     Although this may all sound ludicrous to us today, at the time the Roman Catholic church had a strict doctrine of works-based salvation.  If you did such-and-so-forth thing you go so much time off of purgatory, if you failed to do such-and-such-thing you got more time in purgatory.

Purgatory: (in Roman Catholic doctrine) a place or state of suffering inhabited by the souls of sinners who are expiating their sins before going to heaven.  A concept neither found in scriptures nor in the writings of the early church, purgatory did not enter into religious thought until nearly a thousand years after the formation of the church. 

    To Martin Luther and the other German reformers the concept of purgatory was already in question, but adding to that the garish sales-circus that surrounded the sale of indulgences seemed to Luther to be the worst sort of profiteering.  Even worse yet, it was just bad theology.  Luther noted that in the book of Ephesians the apostle Paul seemed to have an entirely different take on the nature of salvation. Paul wrote:  

Ephesians 2:8 -9 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith-and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God- not by works, so that no one can boast. 

    Luther read this and had one of those moments when you

realize something that should have been obvious all along. The Bible has been saying clearly, all along, that salvation is not an act of will, not a product of a financial transaction, it is not a product of good works. Salvation is a gift freely given. It is grace and grace alone.  Jesus died for our sins so that any who believe in him might be saved.  Not by any good deed, not by the magic words of any particular prayer, not by some piece of paper signed by a pope...it is grace...alone.  Embracing the notion that salvation could be bought, earned, or sold was...heresy.  Salvation is free. 

    We might want to make it more complex, more detailed, even more profitable but the simple fact is that salvation was, is, and always will be a free gift we receive through faith. As such, it is available to anyone: the good, the bad, the ugly, the pretty, the rich, the poor... you get the idea.  If we make salvation about us then we take the reigns of grace from the very hands of God.  As Paul says to the Romans in the eleventh chapter that we have received salvation by grace and by grace it must remain:

Romans 11:6 And if by grace, then it cannot be based on works; if it were, grace would no longer be grace.

  In case that is even the slightest bit confusing let me clarify one important thing that this means:  you don't deserve to receive salvation.  Nor do I.  Likewise, no-one can be said to deserve having it withheld from them.  A gift that is given as grace is not an entitlement, a prize, nor a "just-desert".  It is free.  And free means free.  To the lifelong Sunday school teacher and the heroin addict in the gutter a free gift is offered.  It is a gift given freely and equally.  This is "grace".  It exists because God chooses for it to exist and that is all.  
    I do want to pause for a moment and backtrack on what I just said a wee bit.  Salvation is free...salvation is that our sins are forgiven, and we are welcomed into the Kingdom of God, imbued with the Holy Spirit, reunited with God the Father, and granted new...and eternal...and abundant life...but only because it has been paid for, at enormous cost, by someone else.  Jesus paid it all on the cross for you and me.  There is no cost to us, no action required on our behalf, no deed we need to perform.... because Jesus took the action to go to the cross and die for us paying the ultimate price.  Our grace is free because it was paid for by someone else: Jesus the Christ. 

    The notion that I am saved by this "grace" and "grace alone" and not my good works, money, magic prayer words, family, heritage, little pieces of paper, or pious morality is a uniquely Lutheran gift to the world of the reformation and very important the development of the entirety of Protestant and even eventually Catholic theology.  
    As we go along this next few weeks we will be seeing quite a few "Solas".  They all work together and form a coherent basis for the Lutheran Reformation but it all begins at the cross with grace freely given to a fallen humanity.