From Cradle to Grave: How Grace Sustains us from Beginning to End

Well, good morning everyone. It’s good to be with you. I’m going to run through some comprehensive phrases: from A to Z, from beginning to end, from alpha to omega. You can see up here: from baptism to last rites. From baptism to last rites. The title of my talk echoes these sort of comprehensive, beginning-to-end type statements. From Cradle to Grave: How Grace Sustains Us from Beginning to End. We eventually want to get to how the Reformers answered that question, a sort of “from cradle to grave grace,” if we can call it that. But in order to understand precisely how the Reformers, how the Protestants, really how we at Christ Covenant would answer that question, we need to look at the world that the Reformers of the 16^th century inherited. See if my clicker here works. There we go.

So, in the early 16th century, the church stood really at the center of life for those that were in Western Europe. And this picture is just trying to impress this upon you where you often had these beautiful cathedrals that would dominate the landscape so that if you were anywhere in a town, you could look around and find that highest, most grand, most dominating visual point. It would be, by and large, the church. Over the previous, say, 250ish years, from 16th century backwards, there really was a shift in how the church operated within the life of Christians. My old professor Harold O.J. Brown put it this way: “The church went from being the company of the saved to the salvation company.” That’s always stuck out to me since I heard that as a seminary student as a really good, precise way of summarizing some of these crucial changes that took place in late medieval Christianity. From the company of the saved to the salvation company. That shift is key. Instead of seeing the church as the fellowship of those who belong to Christ, the church was increasingly viewed as an institution that managed and owned and dispensed salvation, a salvation company.

So, what do we mean a little bit more by this phrase salvation company? As Chad mentioned last night, Luther really saw this clearly. By his day, the faithful had become enslaved to a sacramental system. Instead of looking to Christ for assurance before God, they by and large looked to the church. It was believed that Christ, Mary, the saints, they all together had accumulated through their life and through their good works a storehouse, a storehouse of grace. And that storehouse of grace was deposited somewhere. It was deposited in the church. Who could dispense the goods, the merits, the wealth of the storehouse? Well, that would have been the representatives of the church. The priests alone could dispense it. And over time this whole system, in many ways, has become mechanical. It’s something that flows through rites and ceremonies and clerical control. Interesting enough, in 1520 – you can see up there on the slide – Luther published one of his key works. He published three real important works in 1520. One of them was called The Babylonian Captivity of the Church. Of course, here he’s recalling how the Israelites were captive for a period of time in Babylon, and he’s saying the church has captivated the Christians of the day through a system. And he attacked this system as a cradle-to-grave bondage that kept Christians captive to Rome and the church rather than free in Christ. So, the Babylonian captivity of the church.

So, how did this sacramental system actually function? How did it keep people captive as Luther charged? Well, here’s one summary. I’ll read it. You can read along up on the slide. One was baptized as an infant, confirmed as a youth, married as a married person, and received extreme unction at one’s deathbed. Each of these ceremonies, along with ordination, were seen as sacraments. These conveyed grace when administered by a priest. (Remember the church and her representatives, the priests, were the sole administrators of grace.) The grace conferred through these sacraments was supplemented throughout one’s life by regular confession of sin to a priest. We’re up to six sacraments now, if you’re counting, and the reception of the eucharist in the mass, that being the seventh sacrament. In short, every movement of grace from cradle to grave came through the church, came through her clergy. Now, if you’re accounting all the way through that description, indeed, you would come up with the seven sacraments of the church: baptism, confirmation, the mass, penance, marriage, ordination, last rites. And it’s always a fun sort of trivial pursuit question, “Who can receive all seven sacraments?” Now, if you think about it for a little bit and put it all together, especially ordination with marriage, it would be a widower. A widower who became a widower and then became ordained, that’s really the only person who can receive all seven sacraments.

But these seven sacraments have been described as the seven arteries – the seven arteries of the body of Christ, through which the lifeblood of God’s grace was pumped. So, if you wanted grace, you had to access these seven sacraments, and the church alone controlled the circulation of this blood or of the grace that was dispensed through these sacraments. And who could turn on the taps of grace? If we want to envision sort of these seven sacraments as seven taps through which the blood of Christ flowed, who could actually have the authority to pull the tap to turn them on? Well, that again is connected to the church, but it’s specifically connected to the hierarchy of the church, at the top of which, as we heard last night, is the pope. And then under the pope, you have cardinals. And then under the cardinals, you have the archbishops and then bishops. And from pope down to bishop you have a hierarchy, but then under those bishops you have the priests. Now above the priests – they were all priestly in a way too, by and large, so they could all administer the sacraments, but the priests were, by and large, those that were closest to the people – and then at the bottom you have represented in that picture up there all the people of the church. So, who could turn on the taps of grace? The priests, the hierarchy of the church. Grace, you could say, flowed downward through the hierarchy of the church, and the people of God were dependent on that hierarchy, or in Luther’s terms, they were captive to it. And all this reinforced Luther’s central concern in the Reformation, that the church had replaced Christ as the source of assurance that we are indeed saved, and we are held in the company of the saints.

In this system, there was a shift in orientation from Scripture in the early church, where Christ was central to now the church is central. There was a shift in orientation from God’s promise to the priest’s performance. From grace as gift to grace as something earned, maintained, topped off through the taps of grace in the sacraments. Now to understand why this created a deep spiritual anxiety in the faithful, we have to step back and examine sort of the theological framework which supported this whole system. It is a system which in many ways bred anxiety. So, let’s step into that system. Something happened with the slides there. We’ll see if we can get them back up. Technology. Does it help? Does it interrupt? I guess both.

If we want to grasp the medieval and Roman Catholic view of grace, we must first understand two pillars of that system. First pillar would be their view of human nature, and then second, the church’s role in mediating grace. Human nature. The church’s role in mediating grace. Rome taught that human nature had been damaged indeed by sin. There we go. We’re back live up there. So, human nature had been damaged by sin, still retained the capacity – human nature did – to receive and to cooperate with grace, and then grace came through the sacraments, perfecting what remained in human nature, elevating it so that it could be in the company of God. But grace, which elevates human nature, can only be accessed through the sacraments administered by the church. So, Christians were completely dependent on this whole clerical system for any movement and growth toward God. Of course, the Reformers sharply disagreed with this, and they would say the dead cannot ask for grace. They need a sovereign grace by the Holy Spirit to enter in and to give us new life through regeneration, a very different view fundamentally of a starting point of human nature.

But recall the transition I mentioned earlier from the company of the saved to the salvation company. This shift in the medieval church, it developed gradually, and so, by the late Middle Ages, there were this distinction between two kinds of grace that became very central to how one related to God and to the church. And it’s a distinction between what’s called operating grace and cooperating grace. Operating and cooperating. What is operating grace? It’s that grace that is infused at the beginning of the journey through baptism. This begins salvation. So, especially in baptism we see this grace get infused into a person. But then you have the cooperating grace. This is the grace by which the believer, using his or her will, continues towards salvation by performing meritorious works, cooperating with God. And so devotional acts, pilgrimage, veneration of the saints, honoring Mary – these were all understood as accumulating merit. Indeed, saints could accumulate extra merit that would be stored in the storehouses of the church and could maybe be applied on your behalf as well, but the goal was, by cooperating, to accumulate more and more merit through the church and through devotional acts.

Let’s go a little bit deeper into how this system worked. Operating grace, I just mentioned, began at baptism. What would follow baptism would be confirmation, and from then on, the Christian was expected to cooperate with grace, accumulate merit. When one committed sins in your life, that required penance. And in penance, you could confess your sins and receive absolution from a priest. And that cycle of receiving absolution would, of course, clean one’s conscience, which was needed before you could take the eucharist, go to mass. And because a full confession at death might be impossible, last rites were offered as sort of a last infusion of grace. So, the goal was to cooperate with this grace, to get steady infusions of it throughout one’s life, but there was always an uncertainty of whether one’s sins were completely confessed and whether there was any remaining issues there. And so, you had last rites offered as a final infusion of grace. Now outside the sacraments, additional merit could be obtained if you were in the late medieval church through pilgrimages, relics, the veneration of the saints. And one way of viewing this is sort of accumulating a spiritual retirement account, if you want to think of it that way. You’re storing up through good devotional acts, through accessing the various sacraments of the church. You’re storing up merit, which will be in your favor as you move into the next life. But as much as you might be accumulating credits that are being stored up in this storehouse of grace, you also have your sins and your debits, the remaining guilt for your sins in this life. Now, the remaining guilt of those sins did not necessarily mean you were going to hell, right? There are certain sins beyond the pale that might send one to hell, but by and large, for the faithful, remaining guilt of sin, what stood before them was not the bliss of heaven per se, nor the ultimate unending horrors of hell, but purgatory, which was this uncertain place where one’s sins would be purged over a period of time so that one was fit to be in the presence of God. And most Christians, if you’re not a saint, fall short of immediate heaven, and so they enter into purgatory where those remaining impurities, those debits, those sins that were not confessed, were not dealt with, were purged. Now, the prayers of the living could help lighten the sentence for you in purgatory, but one always worried about exactly how long your time there would be and what would be the exact nature of that purging of sin.

So, this was a system that created anxiety. Had you accumulated enough merit? Had you confessed everything? This was Luther’s state. It was described to us by Chad last night, as he was in this system, was just filled with existential angst. There’s a German word for it. It’s really fun. You know, he says, “What do I do with myself? I’m not sure I’ve confessed enough.” And he couldn’t rest. He couldn’t rest in Christ in this system. Would others pray for you when you died? Would your burden be ever lightened in this period of purjugation in purgatory? Well, there was a certain solution that developed within the Roman Catholic Church of the late Middle Ages, and that solution to this problem – at least one solution – were indulgences. Now, indulgences were declarations by the church that those penalties that you were going to undergo in purgatory would be reduced. They would be reduced. Now, they could initially be reduced through sort of pious practices. You would go on a pilgrimage. Or acts of charity that you did, these would help reduce your time in purgatory. But the indulgences quickly got associated with almsgiving to the church and eventually with the idea that you could purchase them outright. And that’s what Chad described last night. Johann Tetzel was sort of the used car salesman of selling indulgences in Germany in the 16th century, and he’s the one that really ruffled the feathers of many, including Luther – you know, going around with a slogan, “Every time a coin in the church’s coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs.” It became this very transactional idea, one that you could do for yourself or maybe on behalf of a loved one. It’s a system ripe for abuse, but you could, in a sense, purchase cooperating grace, purchase credits that could fight against your debits and lessen your time in purgatory. This was a system Luther and many other Reformers confronted, and we heard about that last night.

Now, as we look at this whole picture, one of the questions that might be in our minds is where in all of this is something like what we call justification? How are we made right before God? How can we be confident we have right standing before God? How does the Roman Catholic understanding of grace and of the sacraments, how does it put that together? Now, we should know that Rome does affirm all grace comes to us on the basis of Christ and his merits. The Council of Trent, which was a council in the 16th century that was put together to respond to the Reformation – the Council of Trent said these words, up on the slide, “Although no one can be made righteous unless the merits of the suffering Christ are communicated to him, still this takes place so that by the merits of the most holy suffering of the same, the love of God is poured out by the Holy Spirit in the hearts of those who are justified.” And again, it also says, “The meritorious cause of justification is our Lord Jesus Christ, who earned justification for us by his most holy suffering on the wood of the cross.” But these statements about justification, about Christ’s work, about his merit, we must understand that these are preparatory. They describe a grace earned by Christ, but then that grace that’s been earned by Christ is vested in the church. What happens to the individual, then, the individual Christian, as he or she seeks to receive that grace, to be themselves justified? Well, a person becomes subjectively righteous through the sacraments. No surprise, given all that’s been said thus far. It begins with that operating grace in baptism, and in that operating grace in baptism, original sin, which everyone is born with, is suppressed and expelled. And this might be described, we could say, as the first justification of being made right before God at one’s baptism, because sin is dealt with there. But in that, grace is infused, new qualities are given, and by exercising these qualities through the will, one can earn merit and gain eternal life.

And that leads to second justification, a growth in righteousness throughout the course of one’s life by cooperating with grace one’s good works. Now the Reformers said plainly the basis of justification is not infused grace which we cooperate with, it is the free imputation of Christ’s righteousness. We’ll get back to that here in just a minute. Rome, though, teaches that grace is not imputed like a lump sum given. Rather, it’s infused, and then we cooperate with that infusion through our will, through this human nature that is being elevated. So, grace continues to be infused. How does it be become infused? Well, you have that first infusion, right, through baptism, but then through the sacraments. And we respond by building up faith, hope, love. And so, therefore, justification throughout one’s life can increase, but it can also be lost at the same time. And so, to get restored to one’s justification, one must again go through the sacramental system of the church, things such as penance. But in this whole thing, you can see how grace is infused, but human work is woven together with that grace.

And so, we might ask, what’s the ground? What’s the ground for that justification? What’s the ground for that justification? For the Reformers, justification entirely on Christ’s righteousness. His righteousness, which is imputed to us as a result of his life, death, and resurrection. For Rome, justification includes a mixture of grace and the cooperation of human works. In other words, justification and sanctification – these two things that we want to see as part of God’s gift to us, but clearly distinct – they get collapsed into one another. They get collapsed in this process of the process of justification, as Rome sees it. So, the ground of justification: it’s a key question.

Now for the Reformers for us who are in their heritage, justification is the gracious verdict of God on elect sinners. He pardons our sins. He accepts us as righteous. Why? For the sake of Christ’s saving righteousness, which has been given – imputed – to us fully. It’s a lump sum given to us, not infused over time. And this is offered to us through Word, through sacrament, which is received by faith alone, and faith itself, of course, which is the means by which we receive the righteousness of Christ. Faith itself is a gift to us through the Holy Spirit. I think one of the finest statements of justification is in our Presbyterian tradition and heritage, in our confessional document of the Westminster Confession of Faith. If you read chapter 11, it’s a statement of justification. And as you read it – it’s up on the screen; I’ll read it here in a minute – you can see how they (so the original Reformation was in the 16th century; by the time we get to the Westminster Confession, we’re in the 17th century), but some of these same issues are live, and there’s tension and debates around them. So, when you read this statement, you can see they are answering the very questions that we have been engaging in this lesson. I know that is kind of small font, so for the young, they can see it. For those that have weakening eyes, such as myself, maybe listen carefully. “Those whom God effectually calleth, he also freely justifies. Now, how does he do this? Not by infusing righteousness into them (that’s saying no to the Roman Catholic system), but by pardoning or forgiving their sins and by accounting – that is, considering them as such – as righteous and accepting their persons as righteous. Why? Not for anything wrought in them (there’s nothing worked in them by a cooperating grace, not for anything done by them), but for Christ’s sake alone, nor by imputing faith itself (the act of believing or any other evangelical obedience) to them as their righteousness (Not even faith is righteousness, right?), but by imputing (that is, again, registering to their account, considering them) the obedience and satisfaction of Christ unto them.” And how do we receive this? Receiving and resting on Christ and his righteousness by faith, which faith they have not of themselves, it is a gift of God. Faith, then – faith thus receiving and resting on Christ and his righteousness is alone the instrument of justification. What does instrument mean here? It’s the means by which we receive it. It’s the means by which we receive our justification. Yet, and this is where the Reformed Confession of Westminster is trying to acknowledge this is foundational, and this must be kept at the very beginning of salvation, but it’s not the end. There is something that follows from justification, because it says, “Yet it is not alone in the person justified, but is ever accompanied with all other graces and is no dead faith but worketh by love.” So, as I said, the Roman Catholic system in many ways collapses justification and sanctification. Here you can see the relationship defined between justification that then leads to these things working out in love and in good works.

Well, the Reformers beginning with Luther recognize that Scripture presents a far simpler, a far more Christ-centered, account of how grace comes to us. That stands in contrast to that which I’ve described. Luther, subsequent Protestants, they look to Scripture, and they see the centrality of the Word as that which delivers to us the gospel of Jesus Christ. They look and see there are sacraments in Scripture, yes, but there are only two. And why are there only two? Because the church does not get to accumulate more and more sacraments. No, Christ defined what a sacrament was, and we find baptism and the Lord’s supper as instituted by Christ himself.

Well, the effect of this teaching was revolutionary. In the Reformation – and we’re still living in the wake of the Reformation – it shifted the focus away from the church in its hierarchy, and it placed the focus firmly on Christ. Christ alone. No longer was salvation something that was dispensed by a company of priests turning on and off the taps of grace. Salvation is located in a singular person, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who alone mediates grace to sinners. Once this whole ornate sacramental system was stripped away – once the whole edifice of priests and altars, penance and mass was challenged – a natural question arose. Where might Christians go for grace if they’re not going to be going to the seven sacraments of the church in its hierarchy? Where would Luther point them? Well, up on the screen is another picture for us. And this is a famous painting. This painting stands, if any of you have gone to Lutherstadt, Wittenberg in Germany, there’s two main churches there. You have the Schlosskirche, which is the castle church. It’s the bigger one on the edge of town. And then in the middle of town, right off town square, you have the Stadtkirche, or the city church. And in the city church in Wittenberg you have this painting. On the one hand you have Luther in the pulpit, and then on the other hand you have the faithful, and then in the middle you have a cross of Christ. And Luther here stands in the pulpit, his hand raised, his index finger extended, pointing to Christ on the cross, and then on the other side you have the people looking to Christ. And this was Luther’s answer. Believers must look to Christ alone. When Luther said, “the cross alone is our theology,” he was striking at the very heart of this system which I sought to describe to you this morning. He was declaring Christ alone and his grace is what drives the entire Christian throughout his life. The Reformers sought to scrub away many man-made traditions that had entered into the church like barnacles on a ship and were obscuring Christ. And so, according to Scripture (the standard), priests were redefined as pastors, altars gave way to tables, the ministry of the gracious Word, a centrality of a pulpit such as this one replaced sacramentalism. And so, they dismantled centuries of confusion about how sinners were made right with God, and they sought to center everything, as Luther points here, on the person and work of Christ. That is the foundation. That is the focus of the Christian faith.

And so, in many ways what we see happening – you remember that early slide I showed you of the dominating church in the landscape of the imagination of the Christian. We want to suppress a dominant church that displaced Christ, and we want to exalt a strong savior. We want to, as Hebrews put it, look to Jesus. Look to Jesus, who’s the founder and perfector of our faith. The founder and perfector of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. The Reformers would have us cast our eyes not on the church but on Christ, to see that he alone is the source and sum of our salvation. He alone is the one that is able to hold us from beginning to end, from alpha to omega, from cradle to grave. The Reformers – they, in a sense, if you can imagine a picture, a canvas – they wanted to present to the Christians not a picture, a painting, dominated by the church, but they wanted the landscape of redemption to feature Christ and Christ alone. Not the smallest brush stroke could be reserved for the church and her priests. To add to the picture was to pollute the grace that is given to us through Christ. In Christ alone, as we sung earlier, my hope is found. Christ from beginning to end, from cradle to grave.

So, from cradle to grave, the medieval Christian was dependent, bound to the church’s sacrament, striving for merit, anxious about salvation. The Reformers did not simply oppose the abuses that were associated with this. They actually opposed and took on the entire system that obscured the finished work of Christ. Their answer and our comfort is that grace does not trickle down through a hierarchy. It comes to us in Christ, and he sustains us from beginning to end.

Well, let me give some final words of application. The temptation to obscure Christ and his grace is not just a temptation in the late medieval church. It’s not just a temptation that was fought out in the 16th and 17th centuries. This temptation is always present within us because of fallen human nature, but it often takes new forms. Luther identified something contrasted with the theology of the cross, and he called it the theology of glory. Theology of glory. And a theology of glory can rear its head in many different forms, in many different places, and at many different times. What does he mean by a theology of glory? It’s adding human devices, adding human elements to God’s work and thereby bypassing Christ and his cross. Christ alone, grace alone, faith alone – these continually call us back that Christ, and he alone, mediates our salvation, founded in his works. But we are so often prone to seek after user-friendly mediators. These user-friendly mediators, they throw promises to bring God near to us through programs, maybe personalities, new technologies. But in the end, do they draw us to Christ, or do they draw attention to themselves? Like the sacramental system so often drew people away from Christ into the dominant church. Even in evangelical circles, we sometimes think, well, we preach the gospel. Yet, are we often guilty of making the church more central than it could be at the heart of the gospel? Christ himself, his cross, the second person of the Trinity, the transcendent yet imminent Lord – is that central to our gospel message? It should be. And yes, people come to the church to hear that message. Or can the church get caught up in her identity, her programs, replacing Christ with a synthetic, man-made glory? We want to make sure, as we seek to be faithful in the church, which Christ established, that we are not presenting Christ alongside worldly wisdom that produces this theology of glory, a church which is seeking to draw attention to itself rather than to present Christ to a needy world. Because when the church seeks to present itself or draw attention to itself, the fruit is pride. This is the very danger Paul confronted in Corinth, where worldly wisdom threatened to shape the church’s life and message. Today that threat can appear in politics, flashy programs, big personalities, slick technologies. But Paul would remind us, the foolishness of God is wiser than men. The weakness of God is stronger than men (1 Corinthians 1).

What do we do to add Christ, to add to Christ in our relationship with God? Whatever it might be, it mirrors the late medieval sacramental system that the Reformers so opposed. And so, we must repent to the accretions, to the additions, that we individually, or maybe at times attempt to do corporately, to add to the person of Christ. Christ, what did he invite? He said, “Come to me. Come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” This is the Christ we seek to offer in the church. Yes, Christ established the church. The church is the one that shepherds the means of grace. But what are those means of grace? We preach the Word. We administer the sacraments. We come together to pray.

Well, let me leave you with this final quote from John Calvin. He said, “The only remedy against the snares of false apostles is to understand accurately who Christ is. Christ alone makes all other things vanish.” Satan seeks to obscure Christ – and that Satan is still active today, seeking to obscure Christ in our churches and in our individual walks. And the only way to retain and restore pure doctrine is to place Christ before our eyes so his excellence is truly perceived. I’m going to pray in Christ’s name here in just a minute, but before I do so, I want to remind you that after I pray, there are donuts. Seemed like an awkward transition, but God did create us with bellies and taste buds, and these donuts will satisfy both. But in the midst of that, we will enjoy fellowship with one another, I trust. Those are available outside in the narthex, the main lobby out here, as well as all those goodie books. So, you have goodie books, and you have goodie food, and you also have fellowship that we get to share in the bonds of Christ. So, when I’m done, you can exit out those central doors there. But let’s first pray together.

Our heavenly Father, we thank you. We thank you for your Word, which so clearly communicates to us the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. We thank you for this church, Christ Covenant Church, founded upon Christ and his Word. We come into a room such as this – we even approach this building from afar – and our eyes cannot miss the cross everywhere. Christ and who he is and what he has done must stay central to our lives with you, must stay central to the message of this pulpit, must bind together who we are as a church. No program, nothing else added on to that. May that be our heart. May that be that which by your grace continues to be here at Christ Covenant Church. We thank you for all those that came here this morning, maybe not a part of this church. We pray the messages that will be heard, whether here in Sunday school or in the subsequent sermons, will be that of Christ and a burning desire to make him central – him and his grace central – to our concerns and that we receive this by faith, a gift of God by the Spirit. And so, we pray your blessing upon now this period of fellowship. May that which we are hearing and learning about be on our tongues and in our hearts, that we might encourage one another in these truths. We do pray, as we regather here at 10:45, that we would worship you in Spirit and in truth and in the name of Christ, in whose name we now pray. Amen.