Rhythm of Reform

Propers: Reformation, A.D. 2017 A

Homily:

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

Every year we commemorate the Reformation as a historic event. But that’s not really what it is. Reformation is part of the very life of the Church—always has been, always will be.

There is a rhythm to Christian life, a rhythm reflected in the seasons and the hours of the day. We are gathered in, to be sent out, to be gathered in again. In and out, gathered and sent, like the ebb and flow of the tide, like the rhythm of breath or the beating of a heart. It is the very pattern of life.

Every night when we lie down, we die to ourselves, die to sin. And every morning when we rise, we are given a bright new birth, a new beginning, a new day. This is how we live out our baptism, forever daily drowning and rising again from the water—right up to that day when we lie down never to rise again, until the Resurrection at the End of the Age.

Likewise every Sunday we are gathered, forgiven, taught, fed, blessed, and then sent out to be the Body of Christ for a needy world. And at the end of the week we return, stained by sin and wearied by the world, to be cleansed and rejuvenated once more. We are gathered in, to be sent out, to be gathered in again. And we do this for the sake of the world! For the lonely and the suffering and the sinful, for the needy and the lost and the least—which is to say, for all of humanity: ourselves, our neighbors, our communities and our country. The world needs Christ, and so we are sent to be Christ for the world! Ours is a holy calling. Not easy! But holy.

Martin Luther, in the first of his 95 Theses, wrote: “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent,’ He intended that the entire life of believers should be repentance.” Repentance, after all, is a return to God, a turning to Christ. And that’s what our life as Christians is. We are forever turning back to God in Christ Jesus, forever being gathered and sent, sainted sinners sent out for the world.

We must always repent, because we are always in sin, forever drifting away from God, forever falling short of the mark. But God never tires of forgiving—ever! He never tires of absolving us, of gathering us in, of welcoming us home. We turn and are forgiven, period. And when we will not be turned, God comes out looking for us. He is tenacious, this God. His grace will not cease to flow.

Now, what we call repentance in individuals we call reformation in the Church. The Church is Christ’s Body at work in the world, and in this work we tend to get our hands dirty, not to mention our souls. We tend to drift away from the pureness and shocking intensity of the Gospel. It is too scandalous, too generous for us long to bear. The Church becomes crystalized, fossilized in human institutions, overgrown with accretions, and so we must be called back, gathered in, back to the Gospel, back to Jesus.

This was not invented by Luther or by Calvin. The entire life of the Church has been one of reformation, from the very day that she was first founded in that outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles. The Church is always being sent out and gathered in, always sinning and being forgiven. Every 500 years or so, we seem to have a particularly firm shake-up, resulting in both great disturbances and also great flowerings of faith. This appears as a historical pattern of reformations within our greater life of reformation.

The legalization of Christianity and its adoption by the Roman Empire was one such great shake-up. The establishment of the mendicant friars was another. The Gregorian Reforms, the Great Schism, and, yes, the Protestant Reformation all resulted from such seismic shifts, these radical and regular re-centerings of the Church’s mission in the life of Jesus Christ. Radical, remember, means a return to the root—and the root of our faith is always our Risen Lord and Savior.

In and out, gathered and sent, dying and rising, confessing, forgiving. The whole life of the Christian is one of repentance. The whole life of the Church is one of reform.

We find ourselves as Christians reforming again today. It is a time of great disturbance in the Church, great shake-ups, great re-centerings. Never have there been so many members of Christ’s Body as there are today. One-third the population of earth, more than two billion souls alive, have been baptized into Christ Jesus. And as the Church spreads through Africa, Asia, and South America, baptizing new cultures, taking on new forms, she finds herself reforming, returning to the root of the Risen Christ, for this strange yet familiar age.

In the face of violent persecutions in the South and East, and secular apathy in the West, the old divisions of the past 500 or even a thousand years seem to mean little. We are united in an ecumenism of blood. Killers don’t care what sort of Christian they kill, and converts don’t care what sort of Christian baptizes them. Our enemies and our allies alike all know that we are baptized as one in Christ.

The Pope is commemorating the Lutheran Reformation this year, if you can believe that. Though honestly, ever since Vatican II, I’m of the opinion that our Roman brothers and sisters are often more Lutheran than most Lutherans. But that’s just me.

I met an elderly woman in the nursing home the other day, who is clearly approaching the terminus of her life. And she doesn’t care if the pastor visiting her is Apostolic or Assemblies or even UCC. She just wants Jesus and Him Crucified. Bring her the Word of God, bring her the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, and she will gladly gather at that Table. This, I suspect, is where ecumenism really occurs: not in history books or ivory towers, but in faith and love shared in the unlikeliest of places. For indeed, wherever two or three are gathered in His Name, there is Christ among us.

Brothers and sisters, I don’t know what the next 500 years will look like for the Church. I do know that her obituary has been written many times over, by the high and lofty of every age, only to have her outlive them all. And I know that as surely as Christ is Risen—and He is—He will continue to gather us in and to send us out, to saint we sinners, that we might then go and proclaim through word and deed the life and love and truth of God to a world still very much in need of resurrection.

We will always repent, we will always reform, until at last the mission of Christ’s Church on earth is complete, and God will be all in all.

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