Vicar Karla Leitzman
Today is a really big day for our church. It’s Reformation Sunday- the day where we commemorate the start of the protestant reformation and the church that we are now, as we have been becoming for the past five centuries and as we continue in all of our becoming and reforming. Back in the fall of 2017, I remember thinking about all of the pomp and circumstance of the 500th anniversary of the reformation and it was truthfully the first time I had given it much thought. Through attending some of the big services and events surrounding that anniversary, I realized that we were not there to celebrate one big event that happened five hundred years ago; we were gathered to acknowledge that the reformation is continual.
As a recap for some of you or to share with others of you for the first time, the reason we note October 31st as Reformation Day is because it is the day where in 1517, German monk, Martin Luther nailed up his 95 Thesis to the door of the church in Wittenburg, Germany. Luther observed the growing corruption of the church, and these 95 ideas were things that he was advocating the church should change in order to be more rightly aligned with God’s directives. The church as a system had eclipsed God in many ways.
It is impossible to overstate just how much authority the church had during the Middle Ages. Since the fourth century, pretty much all Christians in Europe were Roman Catholic, and the Roman Catholic church owned one third of all of the land on the continent. Martin Luther was a monk who was really captivated by the idea of sin and namely his own nature of sinfulness. So, the church sent him to Wittenburg to teach because they figured he would be good at teaching the New Testament. So because of this, he spent a massive amount of time studying the life, death, resurrection of Jesus and the redemption that is offered through Christ. And it is this extensive study which led him to his charge for reform.
The church had a pretty well established system for dealing with sin. If you committed a sin, you could pay what was called an indulgence which was basically a donation to the church which came with the guarantee that your sin was forgiven. The price of one of these indulgences was roughly half of the annual income for the average German person at the time. In short, the church was making bank while the poor and the marginalized remained poor and marginalized and Luther thought this was wrong.
Through his extensive study of the bible and through his own faith and introspection, Luther discerned that no human, no clergy person, no priest, had the authority to forgive someone’s sin much less guarantee that forgiveness through the exchange of money. Only God can forgive sins. And the redemption comes from Jesus as the manifestation of God’s promise, as the indwelling of God’s word and of God’s love.
It is not the doing of good works that “buys” our forgiveness. It is not by completing a set of subscribed good deeds that we can celebrate salvation. It is through faith and through God’s boundless grace that we are forgiven. Because Luther started preaching this and teaching this, because Luther wrote down his 95 ideas which were criticisms of the way the church was arbitrarily handing out supposed salvation, the match that would become the Protestant reformation was lit, beginning on October 31st, 1517 in Wittenberg Germany with Luther nailing these theses to the door.
It is incredibly important to note that we say this is the start of the protestant reformation. It wasn’t a one time act where Luther nailed these thoughts and boom, we now have Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, etc. It was just that. A Start. A start of something that in all honesty has never had a defined ending. The reformation has been constant. This start and its subsequent continued reforming has been anything but simple or straightforward.
Like many millennial women, I too, had a fascination with Tudor England and subsequently with the six wives of Henry XIII of England. England became protestant because King Henry wanted to divorce his wife but because of its Catholicism, he couldn’t. So, he broke away from the church, sparking the spread of Protestantism throughout Europe. And the Church of England and the state churches of many European countries remain protestant today in spite of many bloody and brutal attempts throughout the last five centuries to reinstate a catholic monarchies to various thrones.
I promise I have a point in this mini history lesson. See, the protestant reformation is actually a pretty perfect metaphor for all that we experience and navigate in our modern church. It can be temping for us to long for a time when we perceived things to be simpler, easier. To long for a time when the church felt less precarious amidst an incredibly shaky and unstable world. To return to a time of less change. But the truth is, there has always been change and tension. That is constant. We have been trying to figure this all out for the last five hundred and eight years, and guess what, we’re still figuring it out. The constant is God’s love and that God is present in all of the change and tumultuousness.
You have heard me preach from this pulpit that when we really boil being Lutheran down to a central idea, it is this: that Christ has completed the good works. We do not have to check the boxes of good deeds because God took care of that for is through Christ’s death, resurrection and our subsequent redemption. Therefore, we do not need to spend our lives trying to earn or achieve salvation. We are given that through grace and through faith. And because we have been freed from that endless rat race of chasing salvation, that we are thus freed to love and to serve our neighbor. Basically, that’s it, folks. That’s what it means to be Lutheran.
As Americans in particular, we are fed a lot of ideas as to what freedom is or isn’t. And we find that it is largely a focus on freedom from and in a very individualistic sense. The freedom is mine and mine alone and no one can tell me what to do because that infringes on my freedom. But what if we approached it from the vantage point of it being a freedom to and not from? In Christ we are given the freedom to live abundantly, to love and serve our neighbors, freedom to explore new ideas, to create community together even when it feels shaky or confusing. Freedom to celebrate God’s presence in our lives and in our communities.
It is not an accident that our stewardship season coincides with this season of Reformation. It is profound that we celebrate that we are part of a church community which has freedom to. Freedom to care for one another, to truly engage with one another and be there for each other. Freedom to have fellowship together and share together in both life’s joys and grief. Freedom to be responsive to the needs of our community, both the community that is immediately geographically close to us and to our national and global community. We give and share because we get to, not because we have to. We are not asked to pay a punitive amount of money in order to guarantee our salvation like so many earlier Christians were. We are invited to share what is significant to us not because we have to check boxes of good deeds to earn salvation but because we celebrate that we can do so much together.
Our changing, our reforming continues. It wasn’t a one and done event with Martin Luther’s nail and hammer. That was merely the beginning. And we are the ones charged with continuing that reforming, not knowing precisely where we will end up, but celebrating that God is with us all the same.