Reformation Sunday

Grace's Luther window

At its most basic level, Christianity is not a system of belief but a life of trust. All those who trust in Jesus Christ alone for salvation are our brothers and sisters in Christ. All those who are baptized in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who live in God’s promise of mercy, are the Church. They are our family. They are our flesh and blood. We are not black or white, not American or Somali, not Democrat or Republican, not Protestant or Catholic. We are one Church, now and forever.

We do not pretend that there aren’t differences. We don’t claim a false unity that says those differences don’t matter. But when push comes to shove—we are all Christians, bound together by Jesus Christ and our shared suffering in this world. When whole Christian villages are slaughtered in Nigeria, as is happening right now, we suffer with them. When Coptic Christians are bombed in their churches in Egypt—this is our family. When Christians in the Middle East continue to suffer heavy persecution and the world doesn’t notice—we notice. Because those are our brothers and sisters.

          Gathered here in this place, we dare to call ourselves Lutherans. But that wasn't always our name. 500 years ago, we called ourselves Evangelical Catholics—the word "evangelical" meaning "of the evangel” which means “of the Gospel." We wanted to be known as Gospel Catholics, Good News Catholics. Our opponents called us Lutherans because it was Martin Luther, a priest and monk and professor of theology, who in 1517 kicked off a particularly divisive Reformation within the Church. Martin Luther himself hated that people hung on to this name. He didn't want any church named after him, because he understood that the focus needed to be on Christ, not on Luther.

          The events of the 16^th century were hardly Christianity’s first reformation—the Church cleans house at least every 500 years or so—and it was hardly Luther’s doing alone. His was just the final spark, atop a powder keg that had been building for centuries. But this Reformation would prove different from the others. This one would break us all apart.

          Back then, there was so much sin, so much blame, so much misunderstanding. And who could foresee the violence to come as Lutherans and Romans and Anabaptists killed each other from the 30 Years War all the way to the Troubles in Northern Ireland? But the Protestant Reformation is fundamentally misunderstood. These days we talk about it as something daring and new, but it wasn’t. The Reformation was at heart a very conservative movement. It started out as people of faith standing up against corruption in Church hierarchy, against distortion in Church teaching, and saying, “This far and no farther!”

          Our most basic claim as evangelical Catholics was that we were NOT introducing anything new into the Christian faith; our opponents were. They were coming up with new doctrines, new authorities. The evangelical catholics, the so-called Lutherans, sought to maintain the ancient faith handed down from the spotles, our shared heritage as small-o orthodox, catholic Christians. And for that commitment we found ourselves cut off from Rome.

Our forefathers claimed that they had to sacrifice Church unity for the Gospel truth. Their critics pointed out that the witness of Christian truth requires Christian unity. Sadly,  both unity and truth became muddled in the ensuing chaos. These days I am increasingly convinced that both sides were right, and both sides were wrong.

          But that was a long time ago. The break in our community—the splintering of the Body of Christ—has been recognized by most Christians as a tragic necessity. Some would talk about the tragedy before the necessity, others the necessity before the tragedy, but either way our division has caused Christ’s Body to suffer.

For good or for ill, the Reformation broke apart our visible unity. But it is hard not to see the hand of God at work in what has transpired over the last 500 years. Like ancient Israel, we have been divided by our sins, by our infidelity to our brothers and our sisters and to God. Like ancient Israel, we hope for reunification, for an end to our mutual Exile from one another.

          Yet even as our visible unity has been broken, God has maintained by his grace our invisible unity. He has given us the marks of the Church as sure signs of his continuing presence with us. He has given to all of us the holy Sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist. He has given the grace of Absolution through Confession. He has raised up clergy for us in the Apostolic faith. He has come down to meet us in the Liturgy and preaching based on the Holy Scriptures, and most intimately God has come to us through the Cross of Jesus Christ.

Wherever we see these signs—Baptism, Confession, Holy Communion, Ordination, Liturgy, Scripture, and Cross—there we see the unity of the Church, the wholeness of the Church, the God of the Church.

          We Lutherans are not a new church. We are a movement, an order, one tradition within the Great Tradition of God’s people. We don’t presume to have exclusive claim on the Church, as though we alone were the only true Christians. We are part of the whole, a limb of Christ’s Body, not its entirety in and of ourselves. Our witness is vital, yet the Lutheran Confession is but one voice amidst the chorus of the whole Church.

          Reformation doesn’t mean throwing out the old ways to try something new. It doesn’t mean burning bridges and casting off old alliances. Reformation calls us quite literally to re-form, to come back together, to be one again in heart and soul. Christians disagree on a thousand matters, great and small, but at the end of the day division is not the will of God.

We are in troubled times right now. You know it and I know it. Turbulence, upheaval, persecution, even—this is happening around us. So we must remember that the issues that divide us are real, but the Christ who unites us is infinitely more real. He is always working in and through us, for reconciliation, for re-formation, to bring us to the place where our only power is in Jesus, where the only strength we have comes from relying fully on God. That is true salvation, true peace. And that is the truth that sets us free. Amen.