What does it mean to be Lutheran? (As written for someone in highschool):
Dear Lutheran,
I’ve been told you’ve been starting to wonder about what it means to be a Lutheran. Perhaps you have completed studying Luther’s catechism and have been “confirmed” (a strange word that we will have to skip discussing here). Perhaps you have had a conversation with friends who aren’t Lutheran but are Baptist, or Roman Catholic, or United Church of Christ, or Presbyterian, or non-denominational, or nothing really at all … and they asked you, “what’s a Lutheran?” and you felt a little tongue-tied. Or perhaps it is a passing thought on your way to not caring about what it means to be Lutheran, because, after all, does it really matter and aren’t all churches basically the same?
Of course, maybe the thought has occurred to you that being Lutheran is simply an accident of where you are born or who your family is. If you were born in a country that was 90% Muslim, would you have been a Lutheran? Probably not. But that doesn’t really say much about what it means to be Lutheran or whether it is true. If Sir Isaac Newton were not born in England but rather in China, and so instead of sitting under a ripe, apple tree in Cambridge, he sat under a Flying Spider Monkey tree fern … then the apple would not have fallen on to his head and he would have never scribbled down the theory of gravity. But so what? There would still be gravity. The truth of gravity is true whether one has a theory for it or not … whether one believes in it or not. So part of the question of what it means to be Lutheran is a question of truth. Are the things that Lutherans talk about, pray about, love and hope for … are they true? Are they real like gravity or are they just a product of culture, or perspective, or preference?
But first we should point out that “Lutheran” is actually an unfriendly nickname—a “sick burn” (as my kids say), given by the critics and opponents of those who thought Martin Luther was worth listening to when he talked about Jesus. Luther himself didn’t like it and preferred simply “Christian” (Luther: “why should the children of Christ call themselves by my wretched name?”). His friends often used the name “evangelical,” which just means “Gospel people,” and that gets quite a bit closer to it. Because, in the end, it’s not the name that matters but what we believe. And what we believe is the Gospel.
Lutherans are obsessed with the Gospel, laser-focused on it. Among all Christians, in all places, we find that it is our calling to confess it, to confess the Gospel. We know that the Gospel isn’t the whole song, (there is creation and the law, and beauty and good works, and the mystery of black holes and mathematics and video games, as well as cancer and jazz and social justice and peer pressure and politics and pandemics), but we believe it is the best part of the song, the song’s main theme and main chorus, and that without it, the song would not be very good at all.
But the Gospel is more than a theme or a chorus. It’s more than some lovely ideas about God or a story about Jesus. It’s more than even the fancy church-word, “doctrine.” The Gospel is something real … the really Real … the really Real Presence of God in this world, in His Son, in His Son’s words because His Son is the Word, the Word made flesh who dwells among us (John 1:14).
The Gospel is the good news that God has not abandoned the world—even though it seems like the world is spinning out of control. Though it may be hard to believe, what with hurricanes and climate change, and people without enough food or clean water, and senseless suffering and war; nevertheless, God is here. He has always been here even though we have thought to build towers to reach him or launch rockets into the heavens to make a name for ourselves. God is here and He is close, as St. Paul said to the Athenians, “he is actually not far from each one of us for ‘in him we live and move and have our being’” (Acts 17:27f). And not only is He present in this world, but the Gospel is the glad tidings that He loves this world, loves us in this world, even though we have made an enormous mess of this world and ourselves. And that love has been made known in Jesus Christ, God’s Son.
The Gospel is the declaration that God’s love for us is more profound and reckless than any love we can imagine. Not for good folks, got-their-lives together folks, or better-than-most folks, but for us sinners Christ died. For us sinners he suffers, he forgives, he delivers from death, promising us life by the strength of his resurrection from the dead.
And even more than this (can there really be more than this?) the Gospel is the promise that Christ has chosen to come and meet us today in his Word—those written words of poets and prophets and apostles that we call the Bible, those words proclaimed from the pulpit by the pastor, the words that accompany water and bread and wine. Christ is here. In our joy and our sorrow he has joined himself to us, like the vows of a wedding—”for better or worse, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish” yet without the “until death do we part”!
From this obsession with the Gospel, Lutherans conclude a variety of things about how to live in this world. We don’t have space in this letter to list and explain all of them but we can sum it up in its most important and overarching theme: FREEDOM. It’s actually kind of in our (nick)name. Martin Luther’s last name sounds a lot like the Greek word for “free” (eLeUTHERios), and so, when he discovered this Gospel he started signing his name like that: “Martin Eleutherius” – Martin the Free One.
Now in America there is a lot of talk about freedom—political freedom, religious freedom. But the freedom of the Gospel is really something quite different. “For freedom Christ has set us free!” said the apostle Paul (Galatians 5:1). But he does not mean freedom as independence, freedom to do or take whatever we want. Paul means freedom from prison, a prison that is in many ways a prison of our own making. Sin is this prison because it ties down our thoughts and actions only towards ourselves. We put ourselves in the center of the universe, thinking this will make us happy, but instead we are forever stuck – stuck trying to figure out how to make our lives better or at least appear better before others. Like constantly tweaking an a Instagram pic with filters and photoshop, we are continually worried about how we look (yes, physically, but also in every other way—successful, smart, interesting, etc.). Even if we don’t care about others, we are obsessed with wanting others to care about us. We judge others, but we don’t want others to judge us. And we certainly don’t want God to judge us.
But now, because of Christ, because of his forgiveness, we have freedom from all of these ways that our sin holds us captive. We have freedom from the law of God that judges and condemns us, free from the accusations it makes against us because of our sins. But we also have freedom for God’s law—to love and delight in the beautiful life it describes even though it is a life that the law cannot give. We now have freedom to receive, without embarrassment or hesitation, absolutely everything from the hand of God. Freedom to love without strings attached, without trying to get something out of it, without trying to earn God’s favor or the favor of others. Freedom from grief without hope, freedom from the petrifying fear of death, freedom to suffer for others without need of reward, recognition, or payback. Freedom to simply be a beloved child of God, knowing that whatever happens this will never change. “For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39).
So that’s it for now. I hope you noticed how I did not answer the question. Being Lutheran is not being German or Swedish or Norwegian, going to potlucks, eating brats or lutefisk or lefse. It’s not even singing your favorite hymns or carols. To be Lutheran is to be free … free in all the ways that really matter … free to be a child of God, free to love your neighbor, free to be Christ’s own, “to live under Him in His kingdom and serve Him in everlasting righteousness, innocence, and blessedness, just as He is risen from the dead, lives and reigns to all eternity. This is most certainly true.”