Reformation On-going

Text: John 8:31-35
October 29, 2006

This is a big day for Martin Luther. We sing hymns that he wrote, and we hear his words quoted. The Lutheran church worldwide is especially proud of Martin Luther on this day, and will celebrate the day more energetically than most other Protestant denominations. You would be forgiven if you thought that the name of this day was Martin Luther Sunday.

But it is not. This is Reformation Sunday. What we celebrate today is The Reformation. That period about 500 years ago when the unity of the formal Christian church was shattered. Though there had been major splits in the church before, in the Reformation the very idea of what the Christian church was made of changed. It wasn’t Luther who made this happen. Forces were already weakening the Roman church. Luther was just the right man in the right place.

Lutherans and other Protestant churches celebrate the Reformation because that was the time of their incubation. Without the Reformation there would be no Lutherans or Methodists or UCC or Disciples of Christ or Baptists or any of the hundreds and maybe thousands of Christian denominations.

Not everybody sees this as good news, all these little grouping of Christians, and during the Reformation most people thought the upheaval in the church was bad news. Luther himself was unhappy about how things went. He was not interested in breaking the church apart. He would have not been pleased to see a denomination named after him, as we Lutherans have done. “What is Luther,” he said, “After all, the teaching is not mine. Neither was I crucified for anyone.”

Luther sought reform, not replacement. He was a “work in the system” kind of guy. The system was broken, he thought, and he had a few ideas about what was wrong and how to fix it. But he was surprised at what he helped cause. For a long time he thought that if the Pope were only made aware of the problems in the church, he would move to fix them and everything would be ok again. Luther’s early letters to the Pope are heartbreaking and naïve, saying essentially, “I think you are a great guy; why are you letting these bad things happen?”

When we see how the Christian churches are going at each other, we might join Luther in having mixed feelings. So what we celebrate today is not so much the period of the Reformation (capital R) but the idea of reformation (lower case r).

All organizations need reforming from time to time. Good starts and good intentions break down either because an organization forgets its mission or allows it to be corrupted, or because the mission is good but the implementation is not. So a hospital may begin to think that its mission is to make money for its shareholders instead of caring for people. Or a government may begin to think that its mission is to protect the holdings of the rich few instead of the well-being of the many. Or a church may begin to think that its mission is to keep things orderly, privileged, and successful instead of to bring about God’s realm of peace, healing, and justice.

Or the mission may be on track and the execution not. So the hospital may harm people through poor controls and standards, or the government through corruption and cowardice, or the church through greediness for power, success, and admiration.

The church exists so that people may know God. Worship and teaching and service and music and all the other things we do provide ways for people to know God, each person in his or her own way. There is no single path to knowing God, so the church’s most important task is to say what it knows and share what it experiences and teach what it has figured out so far and to nourish people in their faith, and then to get out of the way. The church’s most constant job is to remove barriers between people and God.

We are slaves, as Jesus says, to many things in this world. His audience takes him literally and protests. We are not and have never been slaves to anybody, they say. But Jesus knows that our masters are many. What are the things that boss you around? What are the things that keep you from doing what you know is right? What are the things that make you do what you know is wrong? Those are our masters. When fear is strong in us, we are not ourselves. We are someone else’s. We belong to someone, something else. “A slave to sin” is another way to say this. It feels sometimes is as if we were trying to get through a door, except there is this big guy in our way, blocking the passage. Or as if people have put up Jersey barriers, like they do in construction projects, and our way which seems like it should be short, direct, and pleasant winds all around in annoying detours.

The job of the church is to make those barriers ineffective. Either by removing them, or by showing us that they are not really substantial and permanent, just flimsy and fake. Margaret Payne, the bishop of the New England Synod, wrote about the job of the church this way: “By means of worship, courage, compassion, and teaching, to remove all barriers that resist God’s transforming power.”

All too often, though, the church does the opposite. It puts up barriers. You can’t come in, it says, because of the rules, because of the way you are, because of the way we are. So Paul writes in Romans about how the rules of the church in his should not be used to keep out the pagans who wish to follow Jesus. So Luther speaks out against a church that insisted on mediating between God and people. So Paul extends access to the church to gentiles so that all might follow Jesus. And Luther translates the Bible into the everyday language of the people so all might hear the word of God.

A theologian writes about the ongoing nature of faith. “Now, faith, is a living thing … It is not a once-for-all accomplishment. It is not a possession, like a Visa card, that some have and others don’t. It is an ongoing response to God, to the world, to life. It is therefore a matter of decision—taken not once, but over and over again.” So the church, grounded in faith, and renewed through trust in the ongoing and often surprising guidance of God, is formed over and over again.

In a moment [ ... ] will be installed as the vicar here at Faith. She will take on a role as a leader in the Lutheran church. And she will take another step on her path that, God willing, will lead her to ordained ministry.

[ ... ], there is no perfect church that calls you. There is no church known by human beings that is right now complete and true. There is only—as Luther and his friends wrote— there is only an assembly of those who gather to hear the gospel of Jesus and to share in his supper. There is only a church that works daily, over and over again, to free people from the barriers that keep us from God. There is only a church in constant reformation.