A Broken Name

Scripture: Reformation, A.D. 2014 A

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  AMEN.

In the Beginning—God said, “Let there be light!” and there was light. And God separated the light from the darkness, and saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. The next day God said, “Let there be a dome in the heavens to separate the waters below from the waters above.” And God made the dome, and it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day. Then God said, “Let the waters be gathered together into seas, so that the dry land may put forth vegetation,” and it was so. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.

Thus does God continue, in the first chapter of Genesis, to create, to shape, and to populate our world. Every day God looks at what He has made, and He sees that it is good. Yet by the next day, God has found more work to do. Everything is good—but apparently God wants even better for His world. Those successive days of Creation each die and rise again, with evening and with morning, to find a succession of brighter dawns leading onward to perfection. Only then, at the end, is God satisfied that the world is ready for those He loves, for human beings. And on the seventh day, God rests.

This is a pattern by which we can read the Bible. The Judeo-Christian God is unquestionably the God of history, the God Whose plans unfold slowly but surely as the centuries and millennia roll on by. He is the God Who keeps His promises. Every one of His acts, every blessing He pours out upon us, is good. But by the next new dawn, God wants better. He wants to give us more.

The same thing can be seen in the Old Testament in the life of God’s people Israel. Later on in Genesis, God reveals His secret weapon to save humankind: a 75-year-old homeless man with no kids. We will come to know him as Father Abraham. And God gives to Abraham great prosperity! And this is good. But then God wants more for Abraham, so He gives to Abraham a family. And this is very good. But God wants yet more for Abraham, so He makes of Abraham’s family a great people, and of this people a great nation, and from this nation many others, entire kingdoms granted to younger brothers and distant cousins.

The family of Abraham swells into 12 Tribes, and this is good. But God wants better for His people. So He gives to them one Law sent down from Heaven itself. And it is good. And He gives to them great warriors and judges and protectors. And it is good. And He gives to them one land and one king and one Temple, they become the great nation of Israel, and it is good!

But the people screw up. I mean, don’t we always? The people quarrel; they fight. God’s chosen king sins first against his God, then against his subjects, and finally against entire Tribes of his own people. That part’s not good, obviously. But then again, that part isn’t God’s doing.

The king is from Judah, the strongest tribe of the south, and he abuses his subjects in the north. That’s bad. The northern tribes of Israel rebel, and break away to form their own kingdom, with their own pretender king. That’s even worse. And so both north and south, a nation divided, now fall into wickedness, idolatry and sin.

God wants better for His people. They used to have one name, Israel. Now they have a new name, a broken name: they are Israel-and-Judah. Everything falls apart, and the divided people of Israel-and-Judah are scattered to the winds, into Exile. And God saw it was bad. But there was evening and there was morning, a new day.

God sent out new prophets, and it was good. God proclaimed astonishing new promises, impossible promises—promises about the resurrection of the dead and the coming of the Messiah and the rebirth of God’s people—and it was better. Then came great upheavals: old empires fell, and the people could come home again! Their land and Temple and God would be theirs again! And no longer would they be a divided people, a broken people, with a divided and broken name; no longer would they be Israel-and-Judah. But now they were one people again. Now they had one name again: Judah. Now, regardless of their pedigree, all God’s people were adopted into the royal tribe, into the tribe of Judah. Now they were all Jews.

And there was evening and there was morning, a new day. A better day. The day of the Lord. And it was good.

500 years ago, the Church was in crisis. Just like Israel in the Bible, the people of God were wracked by sin and abuse and hypocrisy. Christians in the north were exploited by Christians in the south, and that was bad. So Christians in the north rebelled and broke away to form their own churches, which ended up squabbling and fighting and finally warring against one another. That was even worse. And the people of God no longer had one name. We weren’t simply Christians anymore. We weren’t simply the Church anymore. Now we had a new name, a broken name: Catholic-and-Protestant. And for a while there, everything fell apart.

500 years ago, brothers and sisters, the unity of Christ’s Church was sundered, and the Christian world was split apart in ways never seen before, not even in the Great Schism a thousand years back. This was not the fault of one person, Reformer or Pope. This was not the sin of one group, Catholic or Protestant. We all contributed to the sins of the Church; we all suffered the consequences of our actions; and we all did what we thought necessary to preserve the truth of the Gospel and the salvation of God’s people. We did this together, Catholic-and-Protestant. And so we entered into Exile, together.

But God works in mysterious ways. And whenever His people fall to sin, He uses our own failings to bring to us unexpected and wondrous blessings. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation, in time, brought about great renewal in the Church. Theology flourished. Missionary outreach exploded. Religion became more than a caste into which we were born.

The breaking of God’s Church was in no way a good thing; it stands as one of the greatest tragedies in our entire history, with terrible suffering on all sides. But God used our divisions to remind us who we really are—Whose we really are. Protestants allowed Catholics to rediscover the glories of Catholicism, and Catholics allowed Protestants to explore the blessings of Reformation. Where we caused rupture, God has brought renewal. And in recent generations, we have found that the things which set us apart only make sense in light of the far greater faith that unites us as one in Christ Jesus.

We are a broken people with a broken name: Catholic-and-Protestant. We are a people in Exile, a people scattered by our shared sins. Yet just as He did with Israel before us, God has followed us into our Exile. He has claimed us in Baptism. He has upheld us through Word and through Sacrament. He has planted in our hearts the longing that our Communion, our Eucharist, must become one Communion again.

We will not always be divided. We will not always have a broken name. The time shall come when all will be one Communion, one confession, One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church again. I know these seem like impossible promises—as impossible as the Messiah, as the Resurrection, as the end of the Exile. But God will fulfill them, somehow, someday. And there will not be Catholic-and-Protestant anymore, for we shall all be adopted into one tribe, the royal tribe. It will be evening and morning, a new day. And we shall all be Christians again.

Christ forgive us; Christ lead us; Christ unite us. The time has come for re-formation.

In Jesus’ Name. AMEN.