Always Reforming

(Scriptures: Joshua 3:7-17, I Thessalonians 2:9-13, Matthew 23:1-12)

Today is Reformation Sunday, when we remember that time in our heritage when differences with the Roman Catholic church to the formation of the churches of the Reformation – among them the Lutheran, Reformed, and Presbyterian denominations, along with the Church of England and its descendents. The birth of these churches was traumatic, a split in the body of Christ. While much of the immediate emotion – the mutual recriminations and, indeed, mutual excommunications, political wrangling, even armed conflict – has dissipated over the centuries, the effects of this split persist to this day. While today we celebrate the insights of the Reformers – that we are saved by God’s grace, not our own merit; that the Scriptures are available to all believers in their own language, not only to the clergy in Latin – we may feel some ambivalence about the divisions and misunderstandings that came out of that period of history.

Our Gospel reading this morning reminds us that religious conflicts were no easier in Jesus’ time than at the time of the Reformation, or in our own time; that conflicts within a faith community can grow heated indeed. Our Gospel gives us one side, Jesus’ side, of a disagreement between Jesus and the Pharisees. When we read Jesus’ contentious words, it’s easy to forget that Jesus was born a Jew, lived as a Jew, and died a Jew – and that his disagreement with the Pharisees was, in a sense, an argument within the Jewish faith community, a family argument. Jesus’ earliest followers were Jews, and in the years immediately after Jesus’ ascension, many of them continued to practice their faith within the context of the synagogue. Over the course of several decades, the synagogue leadership increasingly excluded the followers of Jesus from their assemblies. And the early Christians responded in kind, condemning the synagogue communities from which they had been expelled. The Apostle Paul spent time on both sides of this divide, first as a Jew persecuting the upstart Christian movement, and then as a Jewish follower of Jesus wrestling in conflict with his former supporters in the synagogue. The influx of Gentile converts, who had no memory of the synagogue, only served to reinforce the parting of ways between church and synagogue. And that division continues to this day; just as we in the church are the spiritual descendents of the early Christian movement, the Jewish communities of our day are the spiritual descendents of the Pharisee movement of Jesus’ day.

In the midst of these divisions, it’s easy to forget that the Pharisees and Jesus agreed on a great deal; indeed, they agreed more than they disagreed. Both passionately worshipped God, and both passionately sought to live in accordance with God’s law as revealed to Moses and the prophets. In contrast with the Sadducees, whose obedience to God was almost entirely limited to carrying out the Temple’s rituals of sacrifice and worship, Jesus agreed with the Pharisees on one key point: that obedience to God is not simply a matter of maintaining correct Temple ritual, but that God’s will is to be carried out in all areas of life. The Pharisees tried to accomplish this with their ever-expanding oral tradition of interpretation. And in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gave his views on how God’s will is to be lived out daily. Where they differed was in discerning their basis for interpretation. For the Pharisees, purity – maintaining ritual cleanliness, remaining separate from anything or anyone unclean – was the key to understanding God’s law. The Pharisees showed their love for God by upholding the rules of purity. Love of neighbor was important, but mostly limited to those within the community. For Jesus, love – love of God and love of neighbor, with the term “neighbor” broadly defined as “anyone in need” – was the key to understanding Scripture, and trumped purity.

The disagreements that led to the Reformation are not all that different from those between Jesus and the Pharisees, that led to the break of the church from the synagogue. All of those we know as Reformers – Martin Luther, whose thought informs the Lutheran Church, John Calvin, whose ideas live on in the Presbyterian church, Ulrich Zwingli, whose thought informed the German, Dutch, and Swiss Reformed Churches and their descendents, including the United Church of Christ - and others – began within the context of the Roman Catholic church. Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk. He was overwhelmed by a burden of guilt and unworthiness before God, that all the rituals of the church could not overcome. His reading of Romans – that the righteous shall live by faith – led him to disagree with the penitential system of confessing one’s sins to a priest and doing deeds of penance, and most especially the buying and selling of indulgences, essentially ecclesiastical “get out of purgatory free” cards. He experienced the Roman church’s system of penance – confession of sin to a priest, prescribed acts of penance, and, for him, ongoing guilt no matter how much penance he did, as a burden, and so his reliance on God’s grace, by contrast, Luther considered gospel freedom. Luther did not seek to leave the church – when he nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenburg church, he was only seeking to start discussion, much like posting a document on Facebook or a blog today. But what started as a post evolved into a medieval version of a email or Facebook flame war, with accusations flying back and forth. Ultimately the church excommunicated Luther, and the ministry of Luther and his followers continued outside the Roman church.

While the Reformers differed among themselves on specifics, they held much in common. They uplifted Scripture as the primary authority in the believer’s life, indeed, the only authority – “sola scriptura” was one of the rallying cries of the Reformation. There were others. The purpose of Scripture is to point to the faith – “sola fide” that unassisted by our own works brings us to salvation. And we come to an understanding of saving faith entirely by God’s grace, and not by virtue of our own merits, so “sola gratia” was yet another mantra of the Reformation. In all, there were five “solas”, five essentials involved in the Protestant doctrine of salvation: By grace alone (sola gratia), through faith alone (sola fide), in Christ alone (solus Christus), known through Scripture alone (sola scriptura), and to God alone be the glory (sola deo gloria).

Despite sharing these foundational beliefs, the various Reformed churches organized themselves in different ways and evolved in different directions. From the same Bible, various reformers found support for very hierarchical churches such as the Lutheran churches, which have bishops, while others found support for congregationalism, where the local church sets its own course – that was the path of the Puritans who settled in New England, while still others adopted a structure in which authority rested, not with the local congregation or a bishop, but with local or regional synods – that was the course charted by the Presbyterian church as well as the Evangelical and Reformed Church prior to the merger that formed the UCC. From the same Bible, Christians found support for the continuation of slavery and for the abolition of slavery. From the same Bible, some Christians found precedent and support for the authorization of women for ordained ministry, while others to this day still don’t.

Indeed, in the centuries since the time of the Reformation, while denominations have stayed separate, there has been much cross-pollination of practices. Roman Catholic churches have embraced at least some of Luther’s insights; indeed, our first hymn, A Mighty Fortress is our God, is sung in Roman Catholic churches. Roman Catholic worshippers hear at least as much Scripture read in church as Protestants do, and probably more than in most Protestant churches. (Years ago when I invited a Roman Catholic friend to join me worshipping at a Protestant church, he was amazed that there was only one Scripture reading; in Catholic churches, there are four readings – Old Testament, Psalm, Epistle, Gospel.) By the same token, Protestants are increasingly embracing traditionally Roman Catholic prayer and devotional exercises, such as the daily prayer of self-examination and lectio divina, divine reading of Scripture or devotional literature. Catholic and many Protestant churches alike use the Revised Common Lectionary, reading at least some of the same Biblical texts every Sunday, so that, literally as well as figuratively, we are at least in some ways on the same page.

A motto of the Reformation is “Reformed and Always Reforming.” This means that we do not content ourselves to hold the insights of the Reformers of 500 and 600 years ago, but rather we are always open to new light and truth breaking forth from God’s holy word. God is not done with us yet, as individuals or as a church. God is constantly calling us forward on a pilgrimage of faith, constantly sending us out to be salt and light in the world.

The world in which many of us grew up, in which the church was the center of family and community life, is gone. As our third hymn states, “new occasions teach new duties; time makes ancient good uncouth.” Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever – but our society is constantly changing, and even though the message of salvation is the same, the church cannot proclaim this eternal message to this changed society by doing the same things we’ve always done. In some ways, our society is similar to the society encountered by the early church, in which many people have never been inside a church, have only second-hand knowledge or maybe no knowledge at all of the Gospel. Churches are rediscovering the need for evangelism – we can no longer rely on family and societal expectations to bring people into the church, and so church members are finding it necessary once again to go out into the community and witness to their faith. More and more churches – including Emanuel – cannot afford full-time professional clergy. New models of ministry involving teleconferencing and social media are emerging – I know one church who, when it snows, holds worship via videoconference. Old patterns of ministry such as tentmaker ministries, where the pastor earns his living elsewhere in order to reduce the financial burden on the church – that model goes back to St. Paul - and shared ministries in which nearby churches are yoked together into two and three point charges served by one pastor, are being rediscovered and repurposed.

Society has changed, but society’s need for salvation has not changed. We live in a neighborhood, in a city, in a society that needs good news. Perhaps the church is on the cusp of a new reformation, not based so much on fine points of theology, but on discerning God’s will for us in a transformed society, on loving God and neighbor in a way that speaks God’s good news to this generation. May we always keep our eyes and ears open for the light and truth which God reveals to us. Amen.