The End of Reformation

Propers: Reformation Sunday, AD 2023 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

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

Today I’d like to tell you three things about the Protestant Reformation that you may or may not know. Number one: It is far from the only reformation in the history of the Church. There were many before, and several since. Number two: The Protestant Reformers did not intend to do anything new. They believed they were resisting unwarranted change. And number three: When it comes to the primary reason for the Reformation, the impetus behind the whole kit and kaboodle, Lutherans and Catholics now agree. Go figure.

The Church is always reforming, and is always in need of reform; which is to say that we must ever return to Jesus, to the living Christ among us. This pattern is reflected within everything we do. When we are baptized, we are baptized into Jesus’ death already died for us, that we need never fear death again, and into Jesus’ own eternal life, already begun.

And so when we go to bed at night, we die to ourselves every day, die to our sins and our fears and our egos. And we rise every morning afresh, with our new life in Christ. That’s what Baptism is: it is death and resurrection every day. Moreover, we come each week to this altar, to the table of our Lord. We are gathered in, forgiven, taught, fed, and blessed, made one in Christ’s Body, one in His Blood. And then we are sent out, back into the world, to be together Jesus for our own generation.

It’s a pattern, you see, in and out, like the breath in our lungs, the blood in our veins. And the pattern repeats, daily, weekly, annually, as we prepare ourselves for the Christmas, the Nativity of Our Lord, then follow Him through life, death, Resurrection, and Ascension. Always returning to Jesus, always being renewed in Him. This is our mysticism, our Communion with God. Life, death, rebirth. The eternal breaking into time.

Some have noted an even greater cycle at work within the history of the Church, one spanning centuries. Every 500 years or so, it seems, the Church rises from her slumber, shakes off the encrustrations of the ages, and brings out from her storehouse treasures old and new. The Church of the first century, the sixth century, the eleventh century, the sixteenth century, and the twenty-first century are very different indeed, one from another. And yet, we are always the Church, for Christ is ever with us.

She is a living body, after all: Jesus’ Body and His Bride. And a living thing grows, changes, matures in ways befitting to its nature. The secret to keeping things the same is change. Long before Luther, the Cappadocians, the Desert Fathers, the friars, all reformed the Church by returning to her roots, returning to her life in Jesus Christ.

And a similar reform is going on today, starting at Vatican II, perhaps, but stretching now into astonishing theology from the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the rediscovery of liturgy in various Protestant sects. Wild things are going on, wondrous to behold. In a hundred years people will marvel that we got to be Christians in this age.

As for the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, the one that we commemorate today, it too had to deal with Jesus, with returning to our roots. Martin Luther was a pastor. He was a monk, a priest, a doctor, a father, a professor, but first he was a pastor. He lived a fearful life, in a fearful time, and wanted more than anything for his people to know the grace of Christ. Alas, instead of grace, the poor of Germany were being sold conditional salvation, in order to build lavish cathedrals for rich Italians.

We have never heard of such things, Luther protested. Salvation is not for sale. Indeed, it can’t be earned, only given by grace in Christ. The doctrines then being professed, those of indulgences writ to free the souls of family from Purgatory, were crass innovations. Luther held to the apostolic faith, as passed on from his fathers. He wanted to know why the Romans of his day were coming up with something new. How could they defend it?

Either Jesus saves us, or we have to save ourselves. That was the crux of the issue. It devolved into matters of authority, of who has the right to interpret the Scriptures, of who must obey whom, but ultimately it was a pastor’s concern for the faith of his flock. We don’t put our trust in ourselves. We don’t put our trust in our works. We put our trust in Jesus Christ. We must have faith in Him—that is, faith in Jesus’ faithfulness. Because if we can’t trust Jesus, then we can’t trust anybody, and certainly not ourselves.

And it turned into this whole big mess, with all these wars blamed on religion. And certainly religious folks were culpable. But it really had to do with power, authority, money, and the right to have one’s conscience clear, even if it meant defying the emperor. But the weirdest thing about the Protestant Reformation, the Lutheran part of it anyway, is that we appear to have won, and nobody noticed.

I don’t mean that in a “yay us, boo them” kind of way. There’s no triumphalism to be found after centuries of strife. But the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s was noted by both sides as having been remarkably Lutheran in character. Pope Benedict XVI, the German Shepherd, tried to get the Augsburg Confession, the founding document of the Lutheran churches, accepted as a Catholic confession of faith.

In 1999, the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation issued the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, settling the primary issue of the Reformation: the acknowledgement that faith in Christ is salvation, and that good works are its fruit. As recently as 2016, Pope Francis stated publicly, that when it comes to salvation by faith, Luther “did not err.” Now you tell me: Is the Pope Catholic?

We may disagree on a dozen other things, from the role of women priests to the authority of the bishop of Rome, but when it comes to Christ we are the same. The old Reformation is over. The new one has only begun. And Christians will return to Christ together.

I am very hopeful for the Church. I know that seems bizarre, given how congregations across the board are aging, shrinking, and our seminaries have collapsed. But we mustn’t be myopic. Globally, the Church of Christ is doing great. Within my lifetime, China will become the largest Christian nation on the earth, and I for one cannot wait to see what all they will bring to the table. Not to mention Africa, South America.

The struggle that we see is in the West, where there are no martyrs, where the challenges to the Church are consumerism, ignorance, and apathy. And in a weird way, that’s good. Because the West itself is struggling, shuddering, reforming. God willing, these are birth pangs rather than death throes, but for Christians those are really one and the same. The fact that the Church is struggling right along with the greater society proves that we are present. We suffer with our neighbor. We might even be the canary in the coalmine, perishing that others might survive, a Christian legacy indeed.

But we have faith in Jesus Christ, faith in His own faithfulness. The world I see outside my window is not irreligious. The world I see is desperate for meaning, for wonder, for forgiveness, for resurrection. They just think that they can buy it with a card. Salvation comes now in packages, descending from the ethereal Cloud along the holy river Amazon. Surely we can purchase our salvation, not seek it in some messy community.

Yet the cracks in that religion have already begun to show. Individual consumption cannot fill the hungry soul. And far from forgiving us our debts, our financial system ties us to decades of crippling interest. Our humanity is still the same. And Christ is still the same. He will reform us, as He always has. He will send us out, unworthy sinners, to be His holy saints, as His Body for this world. He will find the unlikeliest way to save and raise us all.

And it won’t matter to Him who might be Lutheran or Catholic, secular or religious. He will simply see His people, His children, in need of coming home. He will gather us to Him as He always has and always will. For even when we’re faithless, Christ is faithful unto us.

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

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