Thursday, October 26, 2017

Reflection and Poem for Reformation Sunday



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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