a promise. “I’ll call you tomorrow.” That is another promise. “Open the envelope, there is a letter inside.” Yet another promise. Just think how many times each day you hear a promise and believe it. We are believers by nature.


And here is the big promise, the God-sized prom- ise: “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). You can believe that promise too.


Putting it together, part 1 So now we are at the place to pause and put the first three words together. And we will do so in two ways. We’ll put the three Lutheran words together to make a Lutheran phrase and also put together a picture of what this “good theory” looks like in “practical daily life.” First, the Lutheran phrase: We are justified by


grace, through faith, apart from works. As it is written in Ephesians, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one can boast” (2:8-9).


Second, a picture of what this theory looks like in the practical ebb and flow of daily life: Imagine that you are walking down the street, minding your own business. As you walk, something you smell reminds you of something you did wrong (or failed to do right) 10 years ago. You stop short. A sense of guilt or shame overwhelms you. You look around and notice that someone is looking at you. You wonder if they know—even though you know intellec- tually that they can’t know. What do you do? You stop right in that moment and claim Christ’s promise of free, unconditional


grace and love. You remind yourself that we are justified by grace through faith and things that we either do, or do not do, do not change that fact.


But there is another aspect of the picture of what this Lutheran phrase looks like in daily life. The last few words from the Ephe- sians passage are important. Justification is by grace, therefore “no one can boast.” No one can boast. A Lutheran Christian isn’t someone who has the corner on the truth but instead is one who has been cornered by the truth. We have not found God, but have been found by God. And this leads to a very practical orientation toward daily life: humility with regard to the Christian faith.


This is not to say, of course, that


individual Lutheran people are not quite often uniquely guilty of pride. But humility with regard to the spiri- tual life is something (quite ironi- cally) to strive after.


Freedom (from and for) Freedom, n. The condition of being without—without bondage, without obligation, without chains, without confinement, without guilt, without shame ... even of being without choice.


Now here is a Lutheran word that is truly worth wrapping our minds around: freedom.


Precisely because God’s grace


can’t be earned and therefore is a free gift from God, a Christian is someone who knows that the self-giving love of God in Christ Jesus has set us all free.


Paul put it best in his letter to the church in Galatia: “For freedom Christ has set us free” (Galatians 5:1). And Lutherans, especially, have rel- ished the idea of Christian freedom. But the weird thing about Chris- tian freedom—what sets it apart from “American freedom”—is that it is for something, rather than only being a freedom from something. Yes, the Christian is freed from.


We are freed from thinking we have to earn God’s love. We are freed from the guilt and shame of our past sins. We are freed from the sort of religious obligations that many of our Christian sisters and brothers are burdened by.


But even more deeply, Christ has


freed us for. We are freed to love our neighbors and to live lives of service, care and justice. We are freed to be in relationship with both God and the neighbor. And here is the paradox of the Christian life. We are freed in order to become slaves. Again, Paul said it best: “For you were called to freedom,


22 The Lutheran • www.thelutheran.org


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