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Today is Reformation Sunday. Today is the Sunday before the 488th anniversary of the day a young priest named Martin Luther nailed a bullet-pointed argument to the door of a church in Wittenberg, Germany.

It would have been a Catholic church, because that’s the only Christian church there was at the time in Western Europe. But that wouldn’t be so for long. For over a century before, reformers and critics had dogged the church at Rome about one thing and another. The time was right for a radical, crazy, courageous, and stubborn person to ignite the ready-to-romp reform movement. Martin Luther was all that. Within ten years of his action in Wittenberg, the Reformation—by then an historical event, not just a movement—changed the church, the culture, and the politics of Europe and England. The Reformation surely would have happened without Luther, but it would have had a very different flavor.

Luther was an amazing guy. He would have been very unhappy to see a denomination named after him. He wanted reform, not a new church. Probably he was a little naïve about that. But Luther’s wishes notwithstanding, modern Lutheran churches can by and large be proud of their connection with the man Luther.

But Reformation Sunday is not mostly a celebration of Luther, and not mostly a celebration of the political upheaval that started Protestantism going. It is mostly an appreciation of a theology. A theology that Luther found in the writings of Paul and which became so much a part of him and his arguments that it became a motto. We heard it today in the second lesson from Paul’s letter to the Romans: Justification by faith apart from works prescribed by the law.

Luther’s effect was so powerful because it changed the way people thought about their relationship with God: It’s all about you. And it’s not about you at all. The Reformation emphasized a personal interaction with God—that’s the all about you part—characterized by God’s grace—that’s the not about you at all part—as revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

For the Reformers salvation is individual, about you—not so much about the health of the world or, as in Palestine during the time of Jesus, about the health of a people such as Israel. Luther’s struggles with God (and his theology emerged from those struggles) were personal. God and Luther had issues. The good news that Luther saw and preached was that it is God, and God alone—not you—who makes our relationship with God work out.

It is both arrogance and a burden to think we can handle it—whatever “it” is. How God feels about us, world peace, significant relationships, making an omelet. Things for the most part are too large, too complicated, or too enduring for us to control them. We are bound to end up defeated. What Luther discovered—not discovered, really, but proclaimed—is that God does not expect that we will through our own efforts become perfect, or even good enough. In the relationship between God and us, it is God who does the heavy lifting. “The nations made much ado,” says the psalm, but it is God “who makes war to cease.”

We can not rely on our own efforts, but more than that: we need not. It is, as a colleague of mine once said, as if you’ve got an A on your paper before you even turn it in. This—God’s grace being freely and hugely given—is pretty radical and not in accord with the things of the world. It goes against the grain. The grain being: you get what you deserve. It certainly went against the grain during Luther’s time. And during Jesus’ time. It is God’s love that keeps us whole, not our goodness. It is God’s acceptance of us, not our perfection. The flip side is a good tune, too: even when we are bad, God loves us. Even when we screw up, God accepts us. We can’t take the blame. And we can’t take the credit, either. “What becomes of boasting?” Paul asks. “It is excluded.”

But then what can we take? Are we mindless, careless, and amoral blobs? People asked this of Luther. People asked this of early Christians, too. What Luther said was that assured of God’s love, we are freed from the burden of having to prove ourselves. That freedom opens us up to do what we most want to do and to be: to receive and give joy, to help others, to know contentment, and to be human beings made in the image of God.

What can we take? We can take risks. Being secure in our selves (as a result of God’s guaranteed love for us), and being freed from the power of the fear of death (and its cousin Failure), we can do what is good and right. We can weather and even welcome surprises. We can try things that might not work out. We can be courageous. We can stand up for things that are hard to stand up for. We can afford to be embarrassed, or to be thought foolish. We can be affectionate.

We can take pleasure in the world and things of the world. Luther was an earthy and physical person. He was not an ascetic or a hermit. He loved it that God, in the person of Jesus, did all the things people did, was connected to life lived in an organic body. Jesus ate food and drank wine (people accused him, remember, of being a glutton and a drunkard). Luther argued that priests should marry, and he married Katherine von Bora, and they had six children.

We can take care of others. We can even if we don’t have to. We can help others out of gratitude for gifts God has given us, out of our own built-in desire (often suppressed by fear) to relieve the suffering of others, and out of our hope that the world might be better.

And finally, we can take a break. Freed from depending on our own accomplishments to yield a high-scoring life, we can put aside our desperate busy-ness. We can sit still. We can listen to God and to our brothers and sisters. We can admire beauty. We can stop to listen to the voice of the Spirit guiding us. We can be satisfied with less. We can be at peace.

Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans that between people, “there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” We are not so great, and we are not so bad. But we are all God’s. The Lord of all the cosmos, says the psalm, is with us, the God of Jacob is our stronghold.

The power of the Reformation was not Luther’s constant attack on the corruption of the Roman church, and not the prospect of a new and better church. We are all sinners, and the church—Roman or Protestant—being human, remains a corrupt institution. Luther didn’t become the namesake of the Lutheran church because he fixed things. Luther spoke with power because he was free. And therefore courageous and compassionate and passionate. And because he saw freedom in life as an inevitable result of God’s love for us revealed in Jesus.

A love undeserved, unearned, unqualified, and wonderful.