One Church

Scripture: Reformation, A.D. 2015 B

Sermon:

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

There is only one Church. There has only ever been one Church.

This Church was founded by Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, Who sent out His Holy Spirit upon the Apostles at Pentecost in order to gather peoples form every nation and tribe and tongue, that together we might all become a new and priestly people, a new Israel, the Kingdom of God on earth. We are that Church: a gathering of sinners sanctified by grace. Christ is our head, and we are His body. Christ is our Bridegroom, and we are His bride. And just as there is but one God, one Christ, one Baptism, so there is but One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.

Whenever we talk about Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox and Lutherans and Episcopalians and Methodists, we aren’t talking about different peoples, different faiths. We’re talking about the people of God, our brothers and our sisters. We have been divided by weakness and sin and the mysterious workings of God’s own Providence. We have called ourselves different churches, and some of us have claimed to be the true Church to the exclusion of all the rest, but that’s a lie. We are one people, made one by our shared history of faith, yes, but more importantly made one by the love that Christ has poured out for us upon the Cross.

At the most basic level, Christianity is not a system of belief but a life of trust. All those who trust not in themselves but in Jesus Christ are our brothers and sisters in Christ. All those who are baptized, who live in God’s promise of mercy, are the Church. They are our family. They are our flesh and blood. When Catholic Christians in Germany are wracked by the threat of schism, we suffer that schism. When the Orthodox Christians of Russia are tempted by the siren song of state power, we feel that same temptation. And when the Coptic Christians of the Middle East are beheaded because of their faith in Jesus Christ, we bleed too. We are not Jew or Gentile, not American or Syrian, not Protestant or Catholic. We are one Church, now and forever.

Gathered here in this place, we dare to call ourselves Lutherans. It wasn’t always so. 500 years back, we called ourselves Evangelical Catholics—Gospel Catholics, Good News Catholics. Opponents called us Lutherans because it was Martin Luther, a priest and monk and professor of theology, who kicked off a particularly divisive Reformation within the Church. This was hardly our first reformation—the Church cleans house at least every 500 years or so—and it was hardly Luther’s doing alone. His was just the final spark, atop a powder keg that had been building for centuries. But this Reformation would prove different from the others. This one would break us all apart.

Back then there was so much sin, so much blame, so much misunderstanding to go around. Wittenberg was as guilty—as right and as wrong—as Rome. And who could foresee the violence to come? But the Protestant Reformation, like the American Revolution, is fundamentally misunderstood. These days we talk about it as something daring and new, yet such was not the case. The Reformation, like the Revolution, was at heart a very conservative movement. It started out as people of faith standing up against corruption in Church hierarchy, against distortion in Church teaching, and saying, “Thus far and no farther!”

Our most basic claim was that we weren’t introducing anything new into the Christian faith; our opponents were. They were coming up with new doctrines, new authorities. The Evangelical Catholics, the so-called Lutherans, sought to maintain the ancient apostolic faith, our shared heritage as orthodox, catholic Christians. And for that commitment we found ourselves severed from Rome. Our forebears claimed that we had to sacrifice Church unity for the Gospel truth. Their critics pointed out that the witness of Christian truth requires Christian unity. Alas, both unity and truth became muddled in the ensuing chaos. These days I am increasingly convinced that both sides were right, and both sides were wrong.

That was a long time ago. The break in our community—the shattering of the Body of Christ—has been recognized by all people of goodwill as tragic necessity. Some would confess the tragedy before the necessity, others the necessity before the tragedy, but either way our division has caused Christ’s Body to suffer. For good or for ill, the Reformation broke apart our visible unity. And whether as blessing or as punishment, it is hard not to see the hand of God at work in what has transpired over the last 500 years. Like Israel, we have been divided by our sins, by our infidelity to our brothers and our sisters. Like Israel, we hope for reunification, for an end to our mutual Exile from one another.

Yet even as our visible unity has been sundered, God has maintained by His grace our invisible unity. He has given us the marks of the Church as sure signs of His continuing presence with us. He has given to all of us the holy sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist, of Absolution through Confession. He has raised up clergy for us in the Apostolic faith. He has come down to meet us in the Divine Liturgy, in the corpus of Holy Scripture, and most intimately He has come to us through the Cross of Jesus Christ. Wherever we see these signs—Baptism, Confession, the Eucharist, Ordination, Liturgy, Scripture, and Cross—there we see the unity of the Church, the wholeness of the Church, the God of the Church.

We Lutherans are but a movement, an order, one tradition within the Great Tradition of God’s people. Like the Dominicans, the Augustinians, the Franciscans, we do not presume to have exclusive claim on the Church, as though we alone were the only true Christians. We are part of the whole, a limb of Christ’s Body, not its entirety in and of ourselves. Our witness is important, indeed vital, yet the Lutheran Confession is but one voice amidst the heavenly chorus.

Reformation doesn’t mean throwing out the old ways to try something new. It doesn’t mean burning bridges and casting off old alliances. Reformation calls us quite literally to re-form, to come back together, to be one again in heart and soul. Christians disagree on a thousand matters great and small, but at the end of the day—at the end of the age—division is not the will of God. The issues that divide us are real, but the Christ Who unites us is infinitely more real. We must always work toward reconciliation, toward re-formation.

All Christians are one in the eyes of God. Let us also be one in the eyes of the world.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.