31 To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. 32 Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”What in the world does this have to do with the Reformation, let alone our celebration of it in the modern church?
33 They answered him, “We are Abraham’s descendants and have never been slaves of anyone. How can you say that we shall be set free?”
34 Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, everyone who sins is a slave to sin. 35 Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever. 36 So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.
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During the sermon I mentioned that the Jewish people in this text proudly drew upon their ancestry as a source of identity. "We are Abraham's descendants and have never been slaves of anyone." They used their cultural identity to rebuff Jesus' offer of truth and freedom. Why would they need his truth when they already had theirs? Why did they need to be free when they had never been enslaved?
Of course anyone with a cursory knowledge of Israel would understand that slavery was deeply entwined with their history and heritage. The greatest unifying moment--to this day the source of their greatest religious/cultural festival--was the Passover...the night they were freed from slavery in Egypt and made into a new people. Exile and diaspora would provide echoes of that experience in later years. The protest in this text appears almost tone deaf. They, above all people, should have understood that the need for true freedom stemmed from that same heritage they touted with such satisfaction.
Fast forward to today, to modern Lutheranism. It's a little less so in 2011 because the church has (in some ways thankfully) been rocked by the question of homosexuality, forced into exacting self-examination. But as recently as just a few years ago the refrain of, "We are Lutherans! We got it right! We (exclusively) are God's people, heirs of Martin Luther's teachings, children of the Reformation!" This strain of "rah-rah church" was certainly prevalent in the Midwest when I went to seminary and served my first call in the region. Healthy doses of it were dumped all over every Reformation service like too much sticky syrup on a dry pancake. You could almost hear the chorus of Lutherans cry, "We are descendants of the Reformation and have never been slaves of anyone! How can you say we need to be set free?"
Ummm...if you were never slaves of anyone or anything, why did you need the Reformation in the first place?
Here's a fun fact: The Reformation happened because the church wasn't perfect, because its mere existence, and by extension the traditions that had informed that existence, weren't enough to guarantee alignment with God. The church had become self-referential, self-absorbed, self-serving. Its predicament can be summarized with the alternate text for this Sunday from Matthew 23:
4 They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.The Pharisees worshiped their own precedence. The Catholic church in Martin Luther's time had done the same. They got it "right". They were (exclusively) God's people, heirs of the correct teaching, children of the chosen tradition. Sound familiar?
5 “Everything they do is done for people to see: They make their phylacteries wide and the tassels on their garments long; 6 they love the place of honor at banquets and the most important seats in the synagogues; 7 they love to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and to be called ‘Rabbi’ by others.
This wasn't just an issue of incorrect doctrine. The self-absorbed mindset--interpreting everything through the lens of one's own needs, rights, and glory--twisted any doctrine they tried to employ no matter how sound it might have been.
The Reformation, then, wasn't just trading one set of rigid doctrines for another, as if moving cells within a prison. The Reformation was about motion, leaving behind the prison and finding freedom in Christ's truth.
Christ's truth says this: We are imperfect. Our churches are imperfect. No tradition will be free of that imperfection. No doctrine is enough to overcome it. That imperfection forbids us to stop in one place as a church and say we have "made it", that we have finally found the perfect expression of God's will. We move through tradition and doctrine, but the verb there is still move. As soon as we stop moving, relying on heritage and tradition to save us, we have re-entered the prison.
When we make a stationary idol of our church, of Martin Luther, of the Reformation itself we lose the meaning and purpose inherent in them. The fact that we use the title "Children of the Reformation" to cement the bars on our cell does not solve the problem. It makes it worse, I think. We should be the last people saying, "Rah-rah! We are greater than you and have never been slaves to anybody and do not need to be freed from anything!" That's the same as saying, "Get out of here, you annoying Christ with your annoying reminders of our imperfection! We've got it right already. Who needs you?" Luther would be aghast if anybody said that in his name, based on his teachings.
The proper celebration of Reformation Sunday, to my mind, follows the form of the exodus that began on Passover...the real heritage Jesus' Jewish friends should have remembered. Long ago we began a journey out of slavery. We wander in the wilderness yet. We've come such a long way and discovered so much about our relationship with God but we're not to the Promised Land yet. Until that day we will not stop. We won't stop walking, changing, growing, reforming ourselves in readiness to be part of the land we're going to. We don't celebrate ourselves. After all, who are we but freed slaves still stuck in the wilderness? Instead we celebrate the journey and the God who is leading us through it...the God who freed us, who sustains us, and whose greatest command in this time is that we just keep walking no matter what. We don't look back. We don't get distracted. We don't get too satisfied with anything on the way. We journey together, keeping our eyes on the ultimate destination.
What are we really celebrating here? If we view the Reformation as simply a historical event shaping our tradition and giving us our cultural heritage it becomes plastic and unresponsive. We're just part of the Lutheran club that nobody but us and maybe a few of our children want to belong to. When we instead understand the Reformation as a living, breathing reality calling us to amend our lives and churches, prodding us onward when we want to stop and get comfortable with ourselves, we breathe in its true spirit. Being Lutheran shouldn't be like belonging to the Daughters of the Revolution or a Civil War re-enactment group. Being Lutheran should mean being revolutionary every day!
Carry the Reformation and Christ's freedom with you this week by keeping in mind a healthy sense of your own imperfection and the need to keep moving in faith. Beware the temptation to get comfortable or seek your own glory. Instead stay alert and in motion, looking always to serve those whom God places in your path.
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
