“Always Reforming”
October 28, 2017
Habakkuk 2:1-4
John 14:8-17
“The church of Christ, in every age”—we sing—“The church of Christ in every age...must claim and test its heritage.”
This is a time of claiming and testing.
Protestants mark this last Sunday in October as “Reformation Sunday.” This is the Sunday closest to October 31, the day on which Martin Luther went to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg and nailed to it a document titled: “Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences,” which came to be known as the “Ninety-five Theses.”
Now, some suspect that the account of Luther dramatically hammering away at that door is an exaggeration. We do know that Luther wrote a letter to his bishop protesting the sale of indulgences by the Church. With the letter he included a copy of those Ninety-five propositions.
It was the beginning of the age of the printing press and the document quickly went viral. The Latin version was printed in several German cities before the end of the year and was translated into German by January of 1518. By March it had spread throughout Europe.
This year we celebrate the 500th anniversary of that event of October 31, 1517. There have been conferences and gatherings worldwide. There have been numerous books and articles published. Our Lutheran sisters and brothers around here have been somewhat restrained in their celebrations and commemorations—but I read recently that up in Minneapolis, where the Lutherans are much more, well, robust than those here in Iowa, these days are featuring worship and workshops, the debut of a Reformation-inspired symphony, and even a play in which the Devil prosecutes Martin Luther, calling Sigmund Freud and Pope Francis as witnesses. (We should have planned a road trip.)
While we mark this year as the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, protests and calls for reform had been going on for centuries before 1517.
One hundred years earlier, in 1415, the Czech priest and professor, Jan Huss, was burned at the stake for his challenges to the church, including his own questioning of the power of indulgences to help those poor souls thought to be in purgatory.
That same year, the English theologian who translated the Bible into English, John Wycliffe, was declared a heretic—even though he had died in 1384.
In France, Pierre Valdo contested the institutional church and translated biblical texts into French, dying in 1217, some 300 years before Luther’s protest.
These and others have been called “Forerunners of the Reformation,” their causes taken up and expanded by Luther and Calvin and Katherine Zell and Marguerite de Navarre and others.
So what we claim this year, this day, is not just an event 500 years ago, but a heritage much older than that. It is also a living movement that continues to call and challenge us.
Mainline denominations such as the United Church of Christ are descendants of the great Protestant reformers who challenged empires and reordered societies. To this day we continue to imagine new and more faithful ways of being the church that God is always reforming. We don’t stop where we are.
“God doesn’t need our good works,” Luther said, “but our neighbor does.” So our Protestant tradition has continually fostered important innovation in meeting social needs. This tradition has produced powerful voices of prophetic judgment and has frequently given birth to great movements of moral protest—saying “no” to what is and also saying “yes” to what, by the grace of God, might be.
Five hundred or eight hundred years on, Reformation Sunday is not a time for looking backwards and worshipping our history or enshrining the very human men and women who were our ancestors in faith. It is a time to open ourselves to the ways in which the Spirit of God continues to renew and reform the church in our own time. This day is as much about our present and our future as it is about our past, as we consider what we are and who we are and why we continue to claim our Reformation heritage with pride and purpose.
One of the great leaders of the Reformation, John Calvin, reminded us that the human mind is a factory of idols. There is a human tendency to make just about anything sacred—even though it is not God. Recognizing this, Protestants have always been willing to question authority—including the authority of the church and of tradition. The “No” of Protestantism is important because it contains the divine and human protest against any absolute claim made for a relative reality—even if that claim is made by a Protestant church.[i] Protestantism places healthy restraints on the human tendency to deify any system or people. When the state, the church, the economy, or anything else seeks to be absolute, we say: “No!”
The “No” of Protestantism is important and sometimes we must speak it loudly.
But Protestantism also has a “Yes.” By the grace of God—and by God’s grace alone—the unrighteous are made righteous, the sinner is justified (and, yes, I’m talking about you and me here). Even the word “protest” suggests this, as its first meaning is “to state positively, to affirm solemnly.” As a result, at our best, we are always looking for new ways of being faithful people in changing times. Out of the Protestant Reformation came key Western values—social reform, individual religious conviction, hard work, and the rejection of corruption, hypocrisy, and empty ritual.[ii]
I think that most of us recognize, however, just how difficult it is to live out this tradition of protest and affirmation. It’s easy to get stuck, to stay comfortably where we are instead of faithfully following where God might continue to lead us.
So we constantly need reminders.
Barely 100 years after Luther’s challenge, Pastor John Robinson addressed the Pilgrims leaving for the New World. One of those who heard Robinson that day said that “[Robinson] took occasion also miserably to bewail the state and condition of the Reformed Churches, who were come to a period in religion, and would go on no further than the instruments of their Reformation. As, for example, the Lutherans, they could not be drawn to go beyond what Luther saw; for whatever part of God’s will he had further imparted and revealed to Calvin, they will rather die than embrace it. And so also, [Robinson said], you see the Calvinists, they stick where he left them; a misery much to be lamented; for though they were precious shining lights in their times, yet God had not revealed his whole will to them...”
Within one hundred years of Luther’s actions that caused a smoldering reformation to burst into flames, the light was already threatened by a calcifying captivity to the past. Robinson reminded the people of their greater calling and encouraged them to move beyond the accepted dogmas of the past, whether of the Roman Catholic Church or John Calvin, and to move toward more truth and light.
Within another century or so, the New England Congregational heirs of the Pilgrims began to reject much that was called “Calvinism” and lay the groundwork for a liberal Christian alternative. Claiming and testing their heritage, they were also willing to move beyond it.
As Protestants living out a continuing reformation, we are not embracing change for the sake of change, or simply jettisoning our past for something more convenient and less demanding.
We are following in the way of Jesus Christ that he put before us when he told his disciples: “Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact will do greater works than these.” Throughout his ministry Jesus was clear that the work he did was God’s work. Now he includes those who follow him as co-workers with him. We who follow are included in showing the power of character of God—love, peace, and mercy—in what we do. Indeed, our work is in a sense greater, Jesus says, because we announce the whole Gospel story of the Word made flesh, who is both crucified and resurrected.
From the start, the Christian faith, following the resurrected Christ, has been about looking forward, discovering the new truth that God is revealing for our time. In spite of our tendency to make an idol of the past and the ways things were in any imagined golden age, Reformed Protestant faithfulness to the living Christ turns our ears toward the new truth that God is speaking and turns our eyes toward the light that shines from the future. We are constantly invited by God to go further.
As we become a more diverse society, and as people are drawn into different special interest groups, the need to care for the public life and a common sense of ourselves is only becoming more important. Our task as Protestants is to help our nation and our world see larger realities and value the long-term health and well-being of the whole creation more than the issues that dominate the latest news cycle.
Our world and our time require a humble faith, one that is at home among other faiths, comfortable in asserting our own beliefs and comfortable in living along side those with different affirmations. The gift of the United Church of Christ is a form of Christianity uniquely suited to help us negotiate our way in a world where faith matters and in which religions are many. We begin and we end our spiritual journey in the majesty and mystery and wonder that is God.
In all of this, we recognize that, as Luther’s hymn put it, “Did we in our own strength confide, our striving would be loosing.” All our struggles—to love our neighbors, those for peace and justice, our efforts to reduce and eliminate hunger—all our struggles are not losing battles because of God’s grace working in us and through us.
“The righteous shall live by faith,” the ancient prophet tells us. We come into relationship with God not through our own strength, not by our fine moral character, neither through our wisdom nor our financial well-being. It is by God’s grace that a relationship is offered to us and by God’s grace that we are able to respond to that offer.
When we realize this—and that’s not always easy to do—we begin to relax. Sometimes we try so hard, as if everything depended on us and us alone.
It doesn’t.
While it is true that God depends on us and uses us for working in the world, it is God who is at work. Today, Mainline Protestants are experiencing a renewed sense of mission and strength in many places, including, I think, in this congregation. Claiming and testing our heritage, we are finding new ways of addressing current challenges as we live by faith.
We live by faith—faith in the God who is our refuge and our strength, a very help in times of trouble.
We are Protestants.
We live by faith.
Let us claim and test our heritage. And keep on rising from the dead.
[i] Page: 2
Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era
[ii] Page: 3
Back cover of Protestants, by Steven Ozment