Useful lives

With conscience cocked to listen for the thunder,
He saw the Devil busy in the wind,
Over the chiming steeples and then under
The doors of nuns and doctors who sinned.

What apparatus could stave off disaster
Or cut the brambles of man's error down?
Flesh was a silent dog that bites its master,
World a still pond in which its children drown.

The fuse of Judgement spluttered in his head:
"Lord, smoke these honeyed insects from their hives.
All Works, Great Men, Societies are bad.
The Just shall live by Faith..." he cried in dread.

And men and women of the world were glad,
Who'd never cared or trembled in their lives.

--"Luther"
W.H. Auden
When I was in seminary, I did a little digging for my advisor, Dr. Ralph Quere, and found the poem above in the library. I noted at the time that there is an alternate reading of those last two lines.

Dr. Quere, who preached at my ordination, recalled the incident, and mentioned that he had the impression that I liked the alternate ending better. He did too, he said.

The alternate ending goes like this:

...And men and women of the world were glad
Who never trembled in their useful lives.

Today is Reformation Day, the 489th anniversary of Martin Luther's posting of the 95 Theses on the door of the Castle Church at Wittenburg, the event usually seen as the beginning of the Reformation.

Many Protestants (including nominal Lutherans) still don't get it. They still don't understand what it was about Luther's rediscovery of the Gospel that enabled those men and women to cease their trembling- and enabled them to live lives that were useful.

It was this: justified by grace alone, by faith alone, for Christ's sake alone, we are freed from the necessity of saving our eternal skins.

The version of the poem above to the contrary, for Luther- as for Paul and Jesus- the Gospel doesn't benefit anybody who "never cared." The precondition for justification by grace through faith in Christ is despair of self. In the ELCA, justification is often presented as a kind of "get out of jail free" card, a licence precisely not to care. Luther- like Scripture and the Confessions- regarded a "faith" that doesn't care as merely another word for damnation.

We have to care in order for the Good News Luther rediscovered to be good news. But if we do, it is good news indeed.

Then our eyes- and our lives- can tbe turned outward, to God and our neighbor, whom we can serve out of love instead of fear.

Then we can be useful, as well as blessed.