Reformation
Sunday Service of Emmanuel Lutheran and All Saints Episcopal Reflection October 29, 2017 Southern Shores, NC Thomas E. Wilson, Episcopal Rector
Jeremiah 31:31-34 Psalm 46 Romans
3:19-28 John 8:31-36
Re-Form-Ation
The question for today for meditation is “How are
you continuing your re-forming of your relationship with God and neighbor?
Years ago, before I had my mid-life crisis, a kind
of reformation, which led to my going to seminary, I was teaching Social Work
and Counseling in a College. It was about this time of year, mid-term, when I
would have a “Come–To–Jesus” session with my students on how to do essay
questions, especially in one class, “Social Welfare As A Social Institution”,
that I taught every fall semester. In it I had a section on 12 ways of dealing
with the poor that has been tried throughout history, from Number 1: “Let Them
Starve, by Happenstance or Design” to Number 12: “The British Health System”,
where societal equal vulnerability during the World War II Bombing Blitz led health
care to be seen as a right not a privilege. Every midterm I would have an essay
question asking students to compare and contrast three of the twelve ways; the
three changed every year.
This was a question that called for analytical
thinking about the purposes and consequences, advantages and disadvantages, of
each approach. However, many of the students had been taught in high school to
memorize things they heard any person in authority say and regurgitate them
back on tests. Or, they unthinkingly parroted their parents’ opinions that
people were poor or unable to afford food, shelter, or medical care or to have
good marriages because of their own laziness or sinful predilections or God’s
Social Darwinism of thinning out the species of the weak members. I was not
asking them to feed me back the company line of either me, their parents, or
anybody else, but to think, to have a coherent response to real life, to use
the brain that God had blessed them with. As the 6th century BC Poet
Theognis of Megara commented: "It is easier to
beget and rear a man than to put good sense in him.” Yet we try, against the backdrop of what
passes for education calling for the parroting back of the slogans of the conforming
order of the dominant culture instead of learning to ask of, struggle with, and
honestly answer questions of worth. My employer being a Baptist college, I
would quote Scripture, Paul from his Epistle to the Romans: “Be not conformed
to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
In Romans, Paul posits transformation sets us free
from the past, which the Gospel of John passage for today echoes. Martin Luther
was especially indebted to the Book of Romans. Martin had a Confessor, Johann von Staupitz, who saw Luther as imprisoned by the old
form of sinful shame. Luther was reported to say that if it had not been for
Johann, he would have “sunk into hell”. He was so conformed to the company line
of sin and hell that he spent hours trying to follow that company line to
perfection, dwelling in the hell of his own making. Von Stupitz saw an opening,
a release from the old form of damnation, by arranging for Luther to teach
students to re-vision Scripture from a book of law to a love song from God. With
his students' help, Luther, by the re-forming of his thinking and his faith,
transformed his life and the history of the world. This re-formation of
thinking led him to confront the conforming party line of the larger powerful
Church, He had not been the first reformer; there had been many over the
centuries, and some had been incorporated by tolerance into the larger church.
St. Francis, for instance, was a reformer several centuries before Luther, but he
did not mess with the church’s sources of money or power; he found a way into
the heart of God by reforming himself away from the love of money and power and
did not waste his time by picking a fight over who was right. Francis became,
as one writer affirmed, “… the most admired and least imitated saint in the
church.”
Most
of our heroes are those who get into fights about who is right, and Luther was
one of those. Insisting on dualistic thinking of “right and wrong” leads to
conflicts of intellects, of persons, of nations, religions, and civilizations
where one side wins a Pyrrhic victory and everybody loses. Erasmus, who was an
early admirer of Luther’s scholarship, wrote warning Phillip Melanchthon,
Luther’s Deputy, in 1524:
I know nothing of your
church; at the very least it contains people who will, I fear, overturn the
whole system and drive the princes into using force to restrain good men and
bad alike. The gospel, the word of God, faith, Christ, and Holy Spirit – these
words are always on their lips; look at their lives and they speak quite
another language.
Luther’s insights in theology, as well as the other
Reformers like Calvin, Zwingli, Knox, and the Counter Reformation on the other
side, were hijacked by political figures who had their own agendas for power
and money, where the world was treated to spectacles of brutality as different
followers of the Prince of Peace tortured and slaughtered each other to get
their version of God’s approval.
The problem with the Reformation is that it did not
go far enough. Jeremiah has a vision where God sings of the time of a new covenant
which God will “write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they
shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each
other, "Know the Lord," for they shall all know me, from the least of
them to the greatest,”
The Biblical word “know” does not mean an
intellectual understanding, like I know that the City of Omaha is in Nebraska,
not Kansas, but the kind of “knowing” of an intimate nature, the joining of
hearts and bodies into one where questions of intellect become irrelevant.
Knowing is about love, vulnerability, joy of discovery of differences, respect
of the other, working toward a common goal, the awareness of our own flaws,
forgiveness, and the grace that flows between, in, over, under, and through us.
Today we have an opportunity as Emmanuel Lutheran
and All Saints’ Episcopal come together for a Luther-palian service of
Communion and Baptism. The child that the Episcopal Priest and Lutheran Pastor
will baptize together has an Episcopal father and Lutheran mother, and they
have been going back and forth between the two congregations in two different
parts of the building complex on the same campus. Whose book in which this
child’s name is enrolled is irrelevant because both congregations, in the name
of the Savior who is greater than the both, is us combined, and we will give our
promises of support.
Reformation is not something that happened 500 years
ago. It is something that we are called to continue daily in our own lives and our
churches so that we and our places of worship might be transformed into being
the body of Christ in this world and the next.
Re-Form-Ation
The
old form for us was Jesus is dead,
killed
by the long ago far away others,
not
only the people that Jesus bothers
but
all the thoughts dwelling in my head
that
slithers out to become sins of mortal,
as
opposed to the ones of nature venial
only
calling for some actions remedial,
kills
grace, calls for soul’s death immortal.
New
form is re-visioned in images of dove
changing
the threat of shame and hellfire
to
living Christ burning within holy desire
entering
into union; omega point of love
as
undying spirit writes new manuscripts
on
hearts, setting us free from our crypts.
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