Always Reforming

Always Reforming

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

October 29, 2017

Scripture: Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17; 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

The day after tomorrow is Halloween. Many people will get dressed up in weird costumes. Children wearing costumes will come to our doors to get candy. Halloween has become a big deal in American culture. We spend more money on it than we do on any other holiday save for Christmas. Halloween is a big deal commercially, but it actually has some Christian roots in addition to the pagan ones it also clearly has. The word Halloween comes from the phrase All Hallow’s Eve. It is the eve of the day in the Christian calendar for remembering the saints, the “Hallows” or hallowed ones, who have died before us, with hallows here understood as all Christians. So even before it became an occasion for kids to get a sugar high, Halloween had at least some Christian significance.

Maybe that’s why, at least according to popular legend Martin Luther chose Halloween as the day on which to post his famous 95 Theses on that church door in Wittenberg, Germany. Whether that’s why he chose October 31 or not, or even if he ever actually posted those theses or not, what he actually did then or some other time sparked what came to be known as the Reformation, a movement that transformed the religious landscape of the world. At the most basic level Luther discerned that the Christian church of his time and place had gone badly astray. It had fallen into significant error. It was leading people astray. It was teaching them falsehoods. Yes, it still taught foundational truths—that Jesus is the Christ for example. But it also taught and practiced falsehoods.

The practice that set Luther off was the practice of selling indulgences. An indulgence was a promise purchased for money that the purchase would reduce the amount of time the soul of a deceased loved one would have to spend in Purgatory before being released to heaven. It wasn’t that Luther denied the reality of Purgatory. He didn’t. He denied that the Pope had any authority over the souls of the deceased. He thought, correctly, that the sale of indulgences wasn’t done for any legitimate spiritual reason but only to raise money for the Archbishop of Mainz so he could pay off his debts and for Pope Leo X so he could keep building the new St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Luther saw that the sale of indulgences was grounded in false theology about the power of the Pope and that it distracted ordinary people from worthwhile religious thoughts and actions. Luther’s objection to the sale of indulgences led to a broad movement of church reform that swept across northern Europe and eventually spread to North America, brought to this continent most significantly perhaps by our Congregationalist forbears, though they were Calvinists not Lutherans.

Luther saw that the Christian church of his day needed reforming. It needed renewing. It needed correction from bad beliefs and practices. It needed reformation because it had deviated from a true Christian way. It had come to be all about secular power, especially the power of the Pope. It cared more about itself than it did for the Christian people it was supposed to be serving. Beyond that, it was stuck in a medieval way of thinking and acting that was becoming obsolete in the world that began to emerge in Italy in the fourteenth century and was beginning to emerge in Germany in the early sixteenth. Luther saw that the Roman Catholic Church of his day was out of touch with its true mission and out of step with the world as it existed. That’s why it needed reformation, and Luther started that reformation though he probably had no idea at the beginning that that was what he was doing.

Now, Luther addressed the church’s need for reformation and renewal in his time, but let me ask you something: When was the last time someone tried to sell you an indulgence? When was the last time you thought that Pope was teaching you anything at all, much less things about the Christian faith that are just wrong? Yeah, like never. No one has believed in indulgences for a long time. We Protestants don’t generally think that the Pope teaches us anything, for we owe no allegiance to any Pope. The issues that drove the Reformation in its early years just aren’t issues today, at least not for us Protestants.

So is the Reformation that Luther started five hundred years ago next Tuesday irrelevant to us? A lot of Protestant Christians may think that it is, that when we mark the five hundredth anniversary of Luther’s provocative act with his 95 Theses that we are only remembering an important but quite distant historical event. Well, let me suggest otherwise. Let me suggest thinking of Luther and the Protestant Reformation this way. Luther understood that the church was failing in its mission. It was failing its people. So he set out to correct it. He established the principle that we humans are capable of seeing when a human institution like the church is going wrong and that we have both the right and the responsibility to do something about it. When he tried to do something about it he met massive resistance from the church and from many secular authorities who were beholden to the church. Nonetheless, he persisted. The basic notion that institutions go wrong and we have the ability and the duty to correct them led to another of the Protestantism’s great aphorisms, one that I think has profound meaning for us today. Two weeks ago we talked about the Reformation’s aphorism “by faith alone.” Last week we talked about the notion that we know our faith by scripture alone. The third great Protestant aphorism I want to talk to you about is “always reforming.” Semper reformanda, in Latin. It is the notion that the church is always in need of reformation.

That’s a notion that few Protestants pay much attention to I suppose, but some do. Many very good theologians today are saying that we are in the midst of a new Reformation. Even if that is a bit of an overstatement, it is nonetheless true that the Christian church (or at least the Protestant part of it and to a lesser degree the Catholic part of it) is constantly changing to adapt its message and the way in which it delivers that message to the people of its time and place. Of course a great many Christians don’t realize that such reformation is a continuous process for the church. Perhaps because they believe, rightly I think, that since the foundational truths of the Christian faith don’t change, therefore the church doesn’t have to change either. It is so easy for us all to universalize what we believe to be the truth and seek to freeze it in time. And perhaps the undeniable truth that Americans generally don’t learn or appreciate much history plays a role too. After all, the changes that are continually taking place in the church aren’t necessarily obvious in the course of one brief lifetime, although sometimes they are if people just know to look for them. Whatever the cause of the phenomenon, most American Christians aren’t really aware of how the church is constantly changing.

Let me give you one example. At least some of you believe that Fundamentalism is “old time religion,” that the Christian faith has always understood its foundational truths in literalistic terms, that the Bible is the literal word of God and that Christians have always understood it literally, that is, factually. Well, will it surprise you to learn that Fundamentalism is a very recent phenomenon in the Christian tradition? Well, it is. The term Fundamentalism comes from some pamphlets that were published in this country just over 100 years ago. Before about the eighteenth century Christians generally understood the Bible to be relating facts, but they also understood that the important truths of the Bible weren’t in the supposed facts it recounts but in the deeper, metaphorical or symbolic truth that it conveys. Western Christianity came to understand the Bible only as fact as a consequence of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Emphasizing the Bible as fact was a change brought about as the tradition sought to speak to people who had come to understand truth only as fact. Now, our culture, or at least the leading edges of it, has gotten over its obsession with mere fact and is rediscovering other, deeper kinds of truth. So the Christian tradition, or at least some parts of it, is reforming its understanding of the Bible from limiting it to fact to understanding it as containing truth much deeper than fact that doesn’t really depend on what the facts behind a story actually were. If you want to know more about how Christianity is changing in that way, read either my Liberating Christianity or Part One of my Liberating the Bible. They’re both on the shelves downstairs.

Folks, it is so easy for us humans to get stuck in our understandings of things. We are taught something or other as the “truth.” We accept it as the truth. We make that truth part of how we see the world and even part of who we understand ourselves to be. For most of us moving from that truth to a newer, perhaps deeper or more productive truth is really hard. I’ve found it hard myself. I remember a conversation I had with my father years ago in which he said that Jesus probably didn’t understand himself as God Incarnate. I said: “How can someone be God Incarnate and not know it?” I didn’t understand then, but do understand now, that my question was grounded in the understanding of truth as fact. Through lots of study I came to realize that truth is a whole lot more than fact. The Christian confession of Jesus as God the Son Incarnate can be, and is, true regardless of the factual details behind that confession.

That is the kind of movement that the Christian faith needs today. The world in which we live and work isn’t so much changing as it has changed. The world of one hundred years ago that gave us Fundamentalism isn’t there any more. At at the higher levels of the culture it isn’t. The world that gave us biblical factualism isn’t there any more either. A faith that clings to a cultural norm that has passed into history will itself pass into history. Luther saw that the church of his day wasn’t speaking truth to the people of his day. The Protestant Reformation was the result of that insight. The Christian norms of a century ago no longer speak to a great many people today like they did in times past. That is the insight some have had today and that a great many more need to have today if Christianity is to survive. Luther introduced the principle of reformation into the Christian tradition, but reformation isn’t a once for all thing. It must be ongoing for any faith to survive. That’s why some of the Reformers said “semper reformanda,” always reforming. Our faith needs reformation today as much as it ever has. Sure, we can just be comfortable in truths we’ve held for our whole lives. But if that’s all we do our faith will not outlive us, or at least not outlive us by much.

So let’s recover that old Protestant concept of always reforming. Let’s understand how the world in which we live has changed and how the great, eternally true Christian faith must speak to that world today. Always reforming. It isn’t easy, but it is necessary. May we all truly understand that reality. Amen.