Re-Formation
You shall know the
Truth, and the Truth shall set you free.
Reformation Sunday falls on our calendar when it does because
on All Hallows’ Eve in the Year of Our Lord 1517, a monk and professor named
Martin Luther nailed 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg,
Germany—all in order to hold an academic debate over a particular Church
practice, the exercise of which had become misunderstood, mishandled, and
misused. This unremarkable act proved the spark that lit the long-simmering
fuse of political, ethnic, and economic tensions that rumbled beneath the surface
of the Christian world. Thus did one disgruntled monk, trying desperately to do
the right thing, kick off the various Reformations and Counter-Reformations
that rocked Europe and that still send historical shockwaves down through the
Church Catholic to this day.
That’s why Reformation Sunday falls on the date that it
does. But that’s not what Reformation Sunday is all about. Reformation Sunday
is about a simple, honest truth recognized throughout Christianity in every
age, culture and denomination. Historically,
it has been summed up in the Latin phrase ecclesia
semper reformanda: “The Church is always
reforming.”
You see, I have a problem. Maybe you can relate. I get
bogged down in things that just don’t matter.
I get bogged down in bills, in debt, in books, in movies, in chores and
stress and unhealthy habits. Sometimes I
feel as though my entire life consists of child care and working nights and a
house left woefully untidy. Like most Americans, I become a slave to my
possessions. But worse than this, I
become a slave to my ego. My plans get
thrown out of whack, my expectations thwarted, my desires delayed, until I get
so fed up, so frustrated, that I finally blurt out, “What about me, hunh? What about what I want?” And that’s when I realize I’ve gone too far. That’s when I realize, once again, that I’ve put
myself ahead of my family, or my community, or even the Church of God. That’s when I realize that I’ve been feeding
off my own pride and arrogance—which is not only idolatry, but idolatry of the
worst sort: the worship of self.
When these moments of tantrum come—and they come far too often,
with little space between—that’s when I have to return to the center, to the truth
that sets us free. St. Paul put it best when he wrote: “For there is no
distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. They are
now justified by His grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Jesus
Christ… for we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed
by the Law.” That, my friends, is the Word of God in a nutshell. It is both the Law and the Gospel.
As human beings, we are
in bondage to sin and cannot free
ourselves. We like to think that we
can—that we can just pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and make ourselves perfect, make ourselves worthy of God, never to sin again. But
we can’t. And we don’t like to hear that
we can’t. We much prefer self-improvement, self-salvation. We’re Americans,
after all, and have never been slaves to anyone. What does Jesus mean by saying, “You will be
made free?” If I need any freeing at all—which I don’t, mind you—I’ll be
getting it myself, thank you very much! …
Ah, what a tangled web we weave.
Sometimes the most difficult people to free are the ones who
don’t realize that they’re enslaved. We
Americans have our material wealth and our Constitutional rights and the
American Dream that any one of us can do anything that he or she likes! We
don’t see that the very things we think make us free—our possessions, our power,
and our deeply-rooted pride—become the greatest tyrants of all. In truth, we
are all just human: not gods, not supermen, not Homo americanus, but just human.
As humans, we sin; and as sinners, we are slaves to sin. Even in the enlightened, wealthy Western
world, we are indeed at the mercy of forces far beyond our control—we just have
more trouble admitting it than most people.
Which brings us to the Church. The Church, you see, is the living Body of
Christ still at work in the world—and we mean this rather literally. Perhaps the greatest single belief of the
Christian Church is the concept of God’s Incarnation.
The Incarnation, quite simply, is Jesus Christ, God in the flesh. We believe that when humanity fell from
grace—due to sin, due to pride—we fell into bondage, and cannot free ourselves.
Despite all our delusions of grandeur (for indeed, Adam and Eve’s sin was to
try to become their own gods) we cannot claw our own way back up into Heaven. We
cannot be perfect, and thus, can never earn
the love of God.
But, thanks be to Christ, we don’t have to! In Jesus, God became one of us, became incarnate, so that when we could not
climb back up to God, God instead plunged down here with us—down into the mud
and the blood! Thus did God heal the
rift that we in sin had made, and continue to make to this day. In the
Incarnation, we learned that even though we cannot earn God’s love and forgiveness, nevertheless it is freely given to us in Christ Jesus by
the grace and mercy of God! Alleluia!
Yet let us not think that because Jesus now sits at the Father’s
right hand, and no longer walks with us as a man, that the Incarnation has
drawn to a close. Quite the opposite! You see, in Baptism, we are given the gift of
Jesus’ own Holy Spirit. And in Communion we are given the gifts of Christ’s own
Body and Blood, which make us One in Him.
Thus, through the holy Sacraments, we the Church can truly claim to be
the real Body of Christ, alive with
His Spirit, continuing His work in the world today. Thanks be to Christ, we are the Incarnation now! We, the Church, are how God chooses to come down and
reconcile with Man! By God, what a
scandal, what a miracle, what a promise this is!
But now here’s the kicker: see, the Church, like the Christ
Whose Body She is, exists as both human and divine. Insofar as we graciously have been forgiven
and made One in Jesus, the Church is nothing less than the Incarnation of God
on Earth. But insofar as we are still sinners, still prideful and imperfect,
and no better than anyone else in our fallen race, the Church is indeed a very human institution.
It should come as no surprise, then, that Christians sin and
fall short of our own ideals, let alone the Law of God. After all, Jesus came specifically to call
sinners, and when you gather together a bunch of sinners together, that’s exactly
what we do: we sin. And so just as we
are in need of Confession and Absolution—confessing that we are still very much
in bondage to very real sins, and being forgiven solely by the grace of a
loving God—so also must the Church as a whole regularly seek re-formation.
Re-formation is when we as the people of God periodically stop,
take notice of the destructive patterns and sinful habits into which we as the
Church have fallen, and shake off all the accumulated layers of the ridiculous
nonsense that doesn’t matter anymore, so that we may return the central truth
of Jesus Christ: the truth that our salvation is not about us—does not rely on us, does not depend on us—but rests solely
on the Name and love and grace of Jesus Christ, the God Who put aside every
crown to descend with us into brokenness, pain, and death. It may be hard to
confess our need for a Savior—for indeed, confessing Christ as God also means
confessing that we aren’t gods—but it
is precisely because salvation rests on His promise, and not on our own efforts,
that our salvation is assured.
Thus we are freed
from fear and doubt and ego—freed from uncertainty and pettiness and all the
stupid fluff that keeps us entrapped—freed to live unbridled lives of faith, hope,
and love, assured of our future and overflowing with good works for all. The
Church is ancient, vast, and living, full of rituals and traditions and customs
from thousands of lands and billions of souls, many of them good and true and beautiful,
but many others a result of sin. We pray
that the riches of the Church turn us to the central Truth of our faith rather
than distract us from Him. The Truth, dear Christians, is Jesus Christ. And whenever we turn back to Him—whenever we
seek His Resurrection to re-form us—the
Truth shall set us free.
500 years ago, an attempt at re-formation in a turbulent time
led to the breaking of One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church into various and
sundry churches. It has taken us centuries to recall that we share one Lord, one
Baptism, one Body. Let us pray that this healing continues for all the
baptized, so that we are freed from centuries of accrued division and hostility,
freed in Christ to share not just invisible union, but also unity visible for
all the world to see. One Lord, one Body, one Church—as it was in the
beginning, is now, and ever shall be.
Thanks be to Christ, Who re-forms the Church He loves. In Jesus’ Name. AMEN.
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