Well here it is again, that strange contradiction that is the last week of October. While all around us people are buying candy and putting the finishing touches on their Halloween costumes, we Lutherans are dusting off our red sweaters and singing A Mighty Fortress. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Reformation Day. It tops my list of favorite church holidays. Also, this is my favorite stole, and I think I look especially good in my red sweater. Though, I’m preaching to the choir tonight, you are a fine-looking red clad bunch. But even though we are that special breed of folk who come out on a Wednesday night to celebrate the Reformation, we may still be asking the question, why? What does it matter? We are insiders gathered here tonight, listening to an insider message. And while this is fun, I think it is safe to say that for most of us, we wonder what the future will be for our churches. Most, if not all of us, wish for the church we remember, the time when our numbers were booming, when Sunday Schools were packed and worship was standing room only. But we don’t live in that world anymore. Mainline churches are struggling, our economy is increasingly global, and even though technology has increased to the point where we can connect to each other in an instant over the internet, we seem to be more disconnected than ever before. So what’s the point, other than nostalgia, for celebrating the Reformation? Are the actions of a sixteenth century German monk at all relevant in our twenty-first century global world?
Now, bear with me, because I think the answer to that question is yes, yes the Reformation is still relevant. And not only relevant, I actually believe that our Reformation heritage gives us who call ourselves Lutheran Christians a unique and important perspective that can be a gift to our global and fast-paced world. I believe that the lessons of Luther and the Reformation can help us lead others into this new era. And I’ll get to why I believe this. But first, I want to talk about the real thing that draws us together. I want to talk about Jesus.
Our Gospel reading for Reformation starts with Jesus talking to a group of “Jews who had believed in him.” It’s always important to remember, especially when reading John’s Gospel, that Jesus himself and all his disciples were Jewish. Christianity didn’t become a separate religion until much later. Jesus was not out to create a new religion and break from the Jews, Jesus was a Jew. So these “Jews who had believed in him,” is really better translated as “Judeans” or probably “Jewish religious leaders.” They are the people who have the most to lose if the upheaval of the social order that Jesus was preaching came to fruition. These are people who followed Jesus as long as it was politically expedient for them to do so, and then turned as soon as his message started to threaten their power. The conflict in John’s Gospel is not Jesus over and against the Jews, it is Jesus over and against the people who have worldly power, power that they are using to oppress others.
And if we needed more proof that these “Jews who had believed in him” were not really religious Jews, we need only to keep reading. Because when Jesus said to them, “‘the truth will make you free.’ They answered, ‘We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone.’” Wait a second; you’ve “never been slaves to anyone.” That’s just not true. A case could be made that they were in some ways slaves in that moment to the occupying Roman Empire. But more than that, what is, to this day, one of the central holidays in the Jewish religious tradition? Passover. Two-thousand years later, our Jewish sisters and brothers still gather in the spring to “remember that they were slaves in Egypt” and God led them to freedom. To be a descendant of Abraham is to be an heir to this promise that God sets God’s people free, that God does not allow God’s people to dwell in slavery, be it slavery in Egypt, slavery under the Babylonian exile, slavery under the Roman occupation of Jesus’ time, or even slavery to their own greed and self-absorption. What God does in Jesus Christ is really a new riff on the same old salvation story sung since the dawn of creation, that God brings freedom to God’s people.
The guys in our Gospel reading today had been slaves but now they were free. Only they forgot their history, and so they forgot what a gift that freedom was. The story had become so familiar to them, they were so caught up in the role they thought they were playing in earning their own salvation, that they did not even recognize their freedom anymore. They needed Jesus to tell them the truth anew, to remind them of their need and God’s faithfulness, so they could recognize the new promise God was unfolding in front of them in the person of Jesus Christ.
And I can’t be too hard on these guys, because I think sometimes we do this too. Or at least, I do this, I can’t speak for you. But I forget. I get so caught up in the story in front of me, in the immediate moment, that I forget that God is a God of freedom, that God is a God of resurrection, that God is a God of life and hope and promise. I know those things, I’ve seen them in the stories of scripture, I know them in my soul, but like the guys in our Gospel reading, I forget them sometimes. I get too caught up in the task ahead of me, too obsessed with my own abilities, or lack thereof and it blocks me from recognizing the thing that God is doing. And here, I think, is where our Reformation heritage can help us.
Let’s start with Luther. Now, I love Luther. I love his theology, his writings are central to how I’ve made sense of my faith. I would say that Jesus is why I am a Christian, but Luther is why my particular brand of Christianity is Lutheran. But as a student of Luther, I also have to be critical and admit that, if God had given me the job of choosing reformers, I might have picked someone a little more tactful. His theology was grace-filled and inclusive, but his way of delivering it was often less so. When you get a chance, Google “Luther Insulter,” the guy had some zingers. He was plagued his whole life with both crippling self-doubt and a chronic stomach disorder that often left him short-tempered and even mean. He could be stubborn and harsh, and he wrote things about Jews and peasants that are simply indefensible. And yet, despite all of that, Luther’s theology articulates this promise that God is a loving God, that God wants nothing but to be in relationship with us, and that God’s grace is a gift that God gives to everyone regardless of whether or not we deserve it, but simply because it is God’s nature to love us. Luther was by no means a saint, and I think we can take hope in that, and confidence that no matter what doubts or failures we might have, God still uses us to share the promise of grace. That the worst things we’ve done or said do not define us, what defines us is the love God has for us. And so, following in the example of Luther, we can try our best, and when we fail, when we are grumpy or irritable or lose our temper, we can rest in the promise of God’s forgiveness and try again. Luther was not some paradigm of virtue; he was a flawed human being just like the rest of us. And that makes him a hero in the faith we can relate to. If Luther, grumpy, irritable, Luther, could change the world by proclaiming the love of God, then we can too.
Another thing our Reformation heritage teaches us is the importance of leveraging technology. Now, how am I comparing smartphones to a period when people thought the devil could enter your mouth when you sneezed, but bear with me. Luther lived in a time that was actually not that much different than our own in terms of the pace of change. Luther was not the first person to have these ideas, but he was the first person to have them take off, and the reason for that was a new technology called the printing press. Prior to the fifteen hundreds, news spread slowly because the only way to copy written documents was by hand. But with the invention of the printing press, suddenly multiple copies could be run off in comparatively rapid speed. When Luther nailed the ninety-five theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, he wasn’t thinking they would have a wide readership; he simply wanted to start a conversation about some excesses he saw in the local church. But somebody got a hold of them, translated them, and ran off a ton of copies, spreading Luther’s writing all over the known world. The analogy I make is its like if you think an interesting thing and you post it on your Facebook page, because you want to talk about it with your friends, and then suddenly Reddit picks it up, and it goes viral, and everyone around the world is arguing about your cat’s opinion on the election. Friends, Luther literally stumbled into the concept of having something “go viral.”
And here’s maybe my favorite thing Luther did. He translated the entire Bible, both Greek and Hebrew, into German. And, in the process, he really created the modern German language, because Germany wasn’t a united nation at the time but a series of loosely connected nation-states. But, more important than the coolness factor of creating a language, why Luther’s translation is important is it opened the scripture up so that people could hear the good news of God’s love for them in their own language. For the first time in people’s lives, the scripture they heard in church was in a language they spoke, the hymns they sung told the story of God’s love, the sermon was an exposition on God’s good news for God’s people. All of the reforms Luther did in translating scripture and opening up the worship service was about finding new ways to tell the same old truth; that since the Son has made us free, we are free indeed. Luther didn’t change the story of Jesus; he just found ways to tell it so that everyone could understand.
Friends, the world is changing. We stand at this pivotal moment in history and the way church was in the past will not be the way it is in the future. And that, especially as someone who has staked my livelihood on ordained ministry, is terrifying. But here’s the good news. We too are descendants of Abraham, grafted into the family tree through the waters of baptism. That means that slavery, struggle, and hardship is a part of our story, but so too is the overwhelming creative and redeeming grace of God who throughout history has led God’s people into their next tomorrow. The God who led the Israelites through the wilderness, who delivered them from captivity in Babylon, and who sent Jesus to defeat death and bring all of creation into newness, that God is our God. Yes, the church and the world is changing, but on Reformation we celebrate that the church that buried Luther was not the church he was born into. And so, we who claim the name of Lutheran Christians can be bold to lead the church into the new thing that God has in store for us. We can listen for the winds of the Spirit’s creative presence; we can follow in Luther’s model and translate the scripture into our own context. We can find new ways to tell the same old glorious truth, that the Son has made us free, and we are free indeed. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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