Auden understands Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith not as a mere theological platitude, a trick of biblical grammar, or a catchphrase for men to rally around.
Our Lord Jesus builds, forms, and fashions his church as an artist forms a mosaic.
Luther felt the reform of the church could not simply remain a matter of aesthetics and practice. Something much deeper needed to be rooted out.

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Hear that confession of saving faith? Rahab may have been a prostitute in Jericho, but she was secretly a virgin daughter of Yahweh.
The church is God’s flock. Jesus is both a lion and a lamb. The zoo turns out to be as packed with theology as a seminary, if not more.
You matter so much to God that he would rather die than lose you. You matter so much to Jesus that no suffering was too much, no deprivation too burdensome, no punishment too severe for him to endure to have you as his own.
Christians are Christians not because of anything that they have done but because of everything Christ has done for them.
Read your life like a Hebrew, from the end to the beginning, and you will see that the last is first. The dead are alive, the cursed are blessed, the humble are exalted.
We who fall within the Protestant camp of Christianity have longstanding issues with ritual. I get that. Ritual is often abused. Idolatrized. It can easily devolve into a hollow act of religious farce.
The side of God he has made known to us is Jesus. He is the one and only revelation of the Father, the one and only revelation we need.
He holds you tight and loves you even as you weep and fight in his arms. His Son suffers alongside you as your brother in the flesh.
We need pastors who carry that same concealed weapon in their mouths, who are outfitted with the same word the angels have: the word steeped in divine blood, shed for you. That is all we need, for the word does it all.
You became, for a time, ritually unclean. Not sinful. Not immoral. To be unclean meant you bore in your own body the effects of a creation in bondage to decay.
All our little laws reveal that we are, by nature, trying to justify ourselves before others, and before God, based on what we do and who we are.
Imagine if Zacchaeus posted on Jerusalem's Facebook a selfie with Jesus. The top dog among the tax-gougers with Christ at his dinner table. Oh, the outrage! The puritanical zealots would have been tweeting and blogging about it for months.