With the death of Pope Francis, my thoughts went in many different directions, but one of them was the memory of my humiliation at the front door of his house.
Invited by the Pope to speak at the Vatican on an evangelical view of marriage and fidelity, I arrived in Rome jetlagged and exhausted, having just finished teaching at a Southern Baptist seminary on Martin Luther’s view of conscience.
Going through security at the Vatican, I handed the Swiss Guard what I thought was my passport, pulling it absentmindedly out of my pocket, from the same suit I had worn back home. After a moment or two of his puzzled expression, I realized that I had given him a pocket-sized copy of Luther’s 95 Theses.
