Some Important Messages

Monday, October 30, 2017

Reforma Et Semper Reformanda

Tomorrow, aside from being Halloween, is the 500th Anniversary of the Reformation. Protestants all over the world are celebrating, commemorating, and otherwise memorializing the historic split from the Roman Catholic Church. Most homes right now are focused on Halloween costumes and decorating pumpkins; in my house, we've spent countless hours debating the significance of this anniversary (that's what happens when seminary grads marry each other). Jeannie wove some of the significance seamlessly into her sermon yesterday (which in case you missed it can be viewed here). So I thought I would piggyback today to say why this date is important and how it affects our current church.


A semi-boring history lesson



Let me give you a 60 second summary of what you learned back in 10th grade World History about the Reformation.

First, there's the Roman Catholic Church. At the time, most people were uneducated and poor, and they relied on the Catholic Church as a place of comfort and help. As family members died of disease or war, or when the land refused to yield crops, the people of Europe came to Catholic Priests for assurance that their loved ones would be at peace. Most of the Catholic Priests followed traditions, telling them to pray to saints and pray for their family members now residing in purgatory and to resist the power of sin. Some Catholic Priests saw an opportunity to advance the wealth of the church (or of themselves) and manipulated people by saying that in order for their family member to be saved or for them to be saved themselves, they needed to give a certain amount of money or large donation to the Catholic Church. This practice was called indulgences. Because the Roman Catholic Church is a church that is made up of a lot of humans, who are both capable of great good and great evil, the church was not perfect, and had lots of ways it could improve. But the "management" so-to-speak either didn't hear it or didn't care because the majority of people didn't realize what was going on.

So on October 31, 1517, a Roman Catholic monk named Martin Luther wrote down 95 ways he felt the church could improve and fix some of its corruption. These were called the 95 Theses. And he nailed these Theses to the church door.



Of course, Martin Luther didn't really want to ditch the church; he loved Roman Catholicism and just wanted it to be the best version of itself it could be. But last time I checked, just writing down a list of complaints and nailing them to the church door isn't maybe the cleanest and least offensive way of making change.

One of Luther's main objectives was to make sure that all people could read and hear the Bible in their own language, something that had never been done before (all worship services were done in Latin, and a lot of people couldn't read). It so happens that the planets aligned and through the recent invention of the printing press, a German version of the Bible wasn't a far-off dream, something Luther worked for in his lifetime. With this new information and this first step, other men and women began writing and speaking and thinking about ways to make the church different and better, and many of these folks weren't so keen to stick with the Roman Catholic Church (OR the RCC wasn't too keen on keeping them around either).

One of these folks was John Calvin, who was the father of the Reformed tradition, which eventually through John Knox in Scotland, produces the Presbyterian Church. John Knox borrowed a lot of theology about the sovereignty of God, about our understanding of sin, and about our understanding of salvation from the theology of John Calvin (who was practicing it in Switzerland). Knox combined this theology with a form of governing by the people to develop Presbyterianism as it is today. The Presbyterian Church form of government was adopted in part by the founding fathers of the United States to serve as a model for our country's government. 

Semper Reformanda

The Reformation was famous for its witty slogans which included: sola scriptura (scripture alone!) and sola gratia ([we are saved] by grace alone) and soli deo gloria (glory to God alone). I like to imagine the reformer men wildly shouting them as though they were at a football game.



The one, however, that in my estimation is most important for this anniversary is this:

reforma et semper reformanda

Reformed and always being reformed

You see, when Luther nailed those theses and Calvin wrote the Institutes, they opened up this big can of worms. Suddenly, it wasn't just 95 issues that Luther had with the church, it was 95 issues per congregation member in every church. It was not as though we could get through this list of issues and then go back to being perfect again; it was an acknowledgement that the church has never been perfect.

If we believe that human beings can never obtain perfection, that we are both sinners and saints, and we acknowledge that we bring both the sin and the saintliness into our congregations, we must then also recognize that the Reformation can never end. There will always be weeds to be weeded out.

That said, not every weed is really a weed. If I got to list my complaints, chief among them would be the uncomfortable pews. But just because I don't like it doesn't mean it's the way the church should reform itself. The second part of the phrase, and always being reformed, is often misquoted as "always reforming." While this is true, I prefer the grammatically correct, "always being reformed" because it reminds us that our reforming should always be inspired by the Holy Spirit. We are always being reformed by God.


Fractures and Healing


This idea that God is constantly reforming us is important for the church, as in all the churches of Jesus Christ around the world.

We don't get to own perfection as Protestants.

Because it's God doing the reforming and not us, it doesn't make Protestants more right than Catholics. In recent history, God has made reforms within the Roman Catholic Church with regard to speaking in the same language of the people and ethical codes for priests. In fact, almost everything Luther took issue with 500 years ago has been remedied.

And while there are many reforms that I think have been definitively the right moves for our church (like women's ordination and the adoption of the Belhar Confession), there are a lot of moves I think we are still trying to figure out if they're the most faithful. Like how do we deal with food allergies in communion, or should we have wine?

The truth of the phrase the church is "reformed and always being reformed" is important because we believe God is reforming all of the churches by the power of the Holy Spirit. This keeps the church relevant today rather than a time capsule of memories. It shows that God's promises are true for all of humankind in every generation and location, though they might look different according to culture. Nobody is forgotten; nobody is left behind. Perhaps the 500th anniversary of the Reformation is a chance for us to reclaim and rekindle our relationships with and respect for our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters. 


Long Distance Family

My brother is four years younger than me. He is one of my best and closest friends; in fact, in high school we were so close, our youth group called us The McCarty Twins. While we have bickered as any siblings do, we have never been mean or stayed mad at each other for long periods of time. We've always been on the same team and we enjoy spending time together.




I love my brother. But I hope I never have to live with him again. At our age, we are better friends and better siblings because we do not live in the same house. This is not a dig at my brother or myself; simply put, we have different housekeeping standards and expectations, we have different social needs, and we are in different places in our lives. This isn't a negative thing in our relationship; on the contrary, it just shows where we are in life. The distance often enriches rather than harms our relationship.

This is true in the church as well. Sometimes I think we can love our brothers and sisters in Christ better when we don't live in the same house. I have dear friends who are pastors in the Methodist, Baptist, and Episcopalian traditions, and we could argue all day long about our theological differences. But I love and respect each of them for the role they play in the larger Kingdom of God. Because we live in different houses, we can serve God better and love one another more. I know it's weird and foreign in our culture to think something "different" isn't necessarily better or worse than what we know, but if we as Christians could learn to see our denominational differences as ways God is continuing to reform our communities, perhaps we could learn to respect and love the way God is using each of us to do God's work.

We still have work to do...

But the most important thing I think the 500th anniversary of the Reformation calls us to is the continued faithful discernment of reformation in our own congregations. Unity is preparing to wish a happy retirement to Pastor Dan and to welcome Pastor Mark to our church as the Interim. We are preparing for a journey of discernment, change, and thoughtfulness, as we begin the process of finding a new permanent pastor to step in after Dan's long tenure. The theme of our lives right now is reformation.

We are a church with 1300 members that sees about 50-75 visitors on average each Sunday. We see over 100 youth and over 100 children each Sunday through our various programs; we have members from infancy through 102 years old. We have missions and youth groups and dinners and women's circles and choirs and banners and...and...and... the list could go on and on. As we grow, it's time to think about what weeding and reforming God is going to be doing with our congregation. There may be friends who choose to live in a different house for a while, or permanently, but that is OK. There may be ministries that lose energy or become something different, but that is OK. There may be some things that feel uncomfortable or awkward, there may be mornings we just weep as we grieve this changing experience, and there may be days when we worry, but that too is OK. God has a plan for Unity Presbyterian Church, and all of it is a part of this reforming and refining process that Luther started 500 years ago. Unity, in fact, has been around almost half as long as the Reformation, and we wouldn't be where we are if we hadn't prayerfully discerned God's constant reformation in our community over the past 230 years. As we ring into November first, I will be actively holding our community in prayer for this reformation process, and I hope you will be too.

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