A Sermon on Preparing to Die

A Sermon on Preparing to Die is a short German tract Luther wrote in 1519 at the request of Mark Schart, a member of the court of Frederick the Wise, who had asked through Georg Spalatin for something to read in the face of his own mortality. Luther put off the task through the spring and summer, which were consumed by the Leipzig debate with Johann Eck, and the finished piece appeared from Wittenberg in the autumn. It was not a sermon preached from a pulpit but a devotional work in sermon form, arranged in twenty brief articles, and it sits squarely within the late medieval ars moriendi tradition of handbooks that coached the dying through the devil's last assaults. Luther kept the genre's shape and purpose while quietly changing what stood at its center.

He opens with death as a narrow passage, likening it to birth: the infant is forced through a tight channel into a vast world it could not imagine, and so is the dying Christian. The real danger lies in three images that crowd the mind at the end, the image of death, the image of sin, and the image of hell. The devil's whole strategy is to make the dying stare at these three until terror and despair take hold. Luther's counsel runs against the grain of much earlier piety: meditate on death, sin, and hell during life, while there is leisure to do so, but in the hour of death refuse to look at them except as they appear in Christ. Death must be seen in Christ's death, sin in Christ's grace, hell in Christ's forsakenness and victory, since the three have already been met and overcome there. He treats confession, the sacrament of the altar, and the last anointing as signs to which God has bound a spoken promise, and insists that faith must cling to the promise rather than to the sign, nor should the dying torment themselves about election, which belongs to God's hidden counsel; Christ is the mirror in which one reads what God has decided. The angels and the whole church surround the deathbed with their prayers, and the dying person is to rest in that company rather than in a tally of works.

The tract was reprinted many times within months and remained among Luther's most widely circulated early writings. It shows the Reformation's pastoral instinct before its polemical shape hardened, retaining medieval practices while already relocating assurance from the believer's effort to Christ's promise, and it set the pattern for a long line of Protestant consolation literature.

Who should read this: pastors, chaplains, and anyone sitting with the dying or facing death themselves who want a brief, concrete guide to where the mind should rest at the end. It is not for readers seeking Luther's mature sacramental theology or the controversial Luther; this is the counselor, not the combatant, and it still speaks the devotional idiom of 1519.