Lectionary blog for Oct. 30
Reformation Sunday
Jeremiah 31:31-34; Psalm 46;
Romans 3:19-28; John 8:31-36
A story is told about a young priest who was assigned to a cathedral in which there was a beautiful statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The young priest was assigned to preside at early Mass every day. There was an elderly woman who came every day. She ignored most of the service, spending her time staring at the statue of the virgin with a look of rapture and longing on her face.
The young priest mentioned this woman to an old priest who had served in the cathedral for more than 50 years. He went on and on about her piety and her devotion and her regularity at worship. The wise, old priest looked at the enthusiastic young cleric with a twinkle in his eye and said, “Do not be deceived. Things are not always what they seem. Once upon a time there was an artist who hired a beautiful young woman to pose for that statute of the virgin. The old woman you see now is that same beautiful, young woman. She comes here each day, not to worship God, but to worship who she used to be.”
Worshiping who she used to be. Wow, there’s a lot of that going around—from politicians who want to return us to some fabled time when we were supposedly better than we are now, to aging ministers who talk about the decline of the church with both dismay and despair, longing for a time when everything was better (presumably when they, and not someone else, were in charge), to football fans whose teams have fallen on hard times and who look back with fondness to when their team was great.
Worshiping who we used to be. We Lutherans are occasionally guilty of this when we celebrate Reformation Sunday. This is the 499th anniversary. We are beginning the 500th year of Lutheranism. We have a lot of “used to be” to worship. I do not pretend to think that Lutherans are the only ones guilty of this, nor do I think it a particularly heinous or disgusting sin. For the most part, a little appreciation of the past is a good thing. The problem comes when the worshiping who we used to be gets in the way of worshiping God. The danger arises when an honest appreciation of the past turns into false pride in our faith tradition, when history turns into idolatry and respect for our forebears turns into ancestor worship, when it becomes more important to us to be Lutheran than it is to be Christian.
We must be careful that we do not replace faith in Christ with faith in “churchiness” for this, I think, is the danger Martin Luther confronted almost 500 years ago. People had pushed into the background what Christ had done for them in his life, death and resurrection. Taking up a cross had become more about attending Mass, doing penance, buying indulgences, going on pilgrimages, seeing the relics, and obeying the priest than it was about following Christ on the way of the cross in loving God and serving our neighbor. It was in the midst of this churchiness that an obscure Bible teacher at an insignificant little college in a tiny town in Podunk, Germany, stood up and shouted, “No!”
Luther’s protest was not only about the sale of indulgences; it was about an entire system of belief and action that attempted to define what someone had to do, think and say in order to be acceptable to the church, and, by the way, to God.
Luther’s 95 theses were both a cry of pain and a cry for freedom. Luther looked at the entire system of indulgences, penance, acts of contrition, venial sins and mortal sins, going to see relics and making pilgrimages and saw that this system was blinding people to the simple gospel of our need and God’s love. People had begun to believe that following the church’s rules made them right with God. And in response Luther shouted from the rooftops the simple truth that it doesn’t work that way, that, actually, it works the other way around. As Paul said: “For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law” (Romans 3:28).
Our hearts and our souls are changed and transformed by the overwhelming power of the love of God in Christ Jesus. As a result of that change, that transformation, we go forth in love and service to our neighbor. We don’t do good things so that God will forgive and love us. Because God loves and forgives us, we do good things. How does this happen? What moves our hearts and souls and makes of us new creatures in Christ? It is the Christ event; it is the cross; it is the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. That is what does it and that alone.
But yet today many of us don’t trust God. We still try to find out the right thing to do to prove that we are good people, worthy of God’s love. We still want to say the right thing, to feel the right thing, to discover the right truth. We still seek a new prayer technique, or a special mission from God, or a sign from God—something, anything, that we can do or hold on to that will assure us that we are worthy of God’s love. And the gospel is, there is nothing—nothing we can do, nothing we can say, nothing we can be that will make God love us because God already loves us more than we can begin to imagine. All we can do is cling to Christ, in the words of Luther’s wife, Katie, “Like a burr to the hem of a dress.”
Reformation Sunday is not just about looking back on our history and congratulating ourselves for being Lutherans. It’s not a time to rehearse how the good-old, heroic Luther challenged the evil Roman Catholic Church. It’s not a time to get misty over the many Lutherans through the years who took many risks to keep the faith alive. It’s not a time to worship who we used to be.
It is rather a time to remember the gospel in its purity and its simplicity. It is a time to put away all attempts to impress God or each other with our goodness, or our intelligence, or our learning, or our piety, or our enthusiasm, or our liturgy, or whatever else we may hold up to prove to ourselves or others or God that we deserve to be loved. Reformation Sunday is a day to remember that we are loved for Christ’s sake and for Christ’s sake alone. And that is enough, praise be to God; that is enough.
Amen and amen.
