Sermon for October 26, 2025
Reformation Sunday
Romans 3:19-28
Rev. Karl-John N. Stone
Martin Luther (the namesake of our tradition within the Christian faith) described the anxiety he felt during his early years as an Augustinian friar [see Luther’s Works 34:336-37]. Despite his intense devotion, he felt unable to fully love God or be fully loved by God. It was one bible verse in particular that stood in his way, from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans 1:17 and this verse is echoed as well in Romans 3: “in [the gospel of Jesus Christ] the righteousness of God is revealed”. Luther explained his despair saying, “I hated that word ‘the righteousness of God’” because Luther’s teachers had always taught him that this means “God is righteous and punishes sinners.” He didn’t think he could ever escape God’s punishment. Luther wrote “though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt I was a sinner before God with a most disturbed conscience… indeed, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners… I was angry with God. Yet I…had a great yearning to know what St. Paul meant.”
After meditating and wrestling constantly with that phrase “the righteousness of God”, at long last Luther felt the mercy of God coming to help him. He finally realized that in the very next part of the verse that troubled him, St. Paul wrote “the one who is righteous will live by faith”. This prompted Luther to begin asking a different question. Instead of “What can I do to make myself righteous before a righteous God?” – an impossible task – his question became “What does the righteous God do to give me God’s own righteousness?” And the answer? God gives me the gift of faith. Therefore, I can trust that God is full of grace and mercy.
This changed Luther’s life. He wrote the scripture verse that had previously “filled me with hate, now became inexpressibly sweet in greater love. This passage became to me a gateway to heaven!” Luther switched from asking “What can I do?” to “What is God doing?” And the ripple effects of this switch have changed the way millions of Christians—including us here today—experience God’s grace and mercy in our own lives.
Like Luther, we can keep the spirit of the Reformation alive by switching up the questions we ask ourselves. This is a key point that our HOP Outside the Box team has learned through the Faithful Innovation process over the past three years. Their teachers have observed that in many different congregations, large and small, it can be exhausting to focus constantly on the question of “how to fix the church”. But, like Luther switching from “What can I do?” to “What is God doing?”, these same teachers have also observed that new energy and excitement comes when we change the questions we’re asking. Instead of struggling to overcome the exhaustion of “how do we fix the church?” we can ask “How do we follow the Holy Spirit’s lead?” Then as we listen for God to answer, get ready to buckle up for the ride. The Holy Spirit’s going to take us somewhere exciting!
Asking “how do we follow the Holy Spirit’s leading?” creates an environment where people are trying to live into the kingdom! And ironically enough, when we switch from focusing on ourselves, to talking about God, and what God is doing, and what God might be nudging us to try, and where the Holy Spirit might be leading us—over time the church actually gets healthier and more people want to be part of it. That’s because then we are living by faith in the living Christ, who is with us and helps us take one step at a time towards the plans he has in mind for the church.
It’s that faith in Christ, that movement of the Holy Spirit, that changes us as individuals and as a congregation. And so the Faithful Innovation process teaches a simple set of tools with a proven track record, and our HOP Outside the Box team has been teaching these tools to our congregation little by little. You can see the tools outlined in this “four-leaf-clover” graphic:
Listen to God, each other, and our neighbors in the community.
Try experiments to help us learn—and remember, nothing is a failure as long as you learn from it.
Reflect on what we’ve tried.
Share stories of what God has been up to and how we’ve participated in it.
Now I’m going to turn my sermon over to the members of the HOP Outside the Box team who will briefly share some examples about some of our experiments and what we learned: Dwelling in the Word, the 4th of July Parade, the Nature Spirituality Retreat, Sunday School at Kayla’s Playground, and Trunk or Treat.
If you’d like to hear what our team has to say about these things in their own words, you can watch them by clicking on the links below, and looking at the sermon videos from October 26, 2025. About 7 minutes after the sermon begins, the HOP Outside the Box team starts sharing their experiences. In them we see the words of Fr. Richard Rohr coming to life, when he observed: “We don’t think our way into new behaviors. We behave our way into new thinking.” Amen.
https://www.facebook.com/houseofprayerfranklinwi/ or Oct. 26 sermon on Facebook
www.youtube.com/@houseofprayer6401 or Oct. 26 sermon on YouTube