One of the retired pastors who served on my care committee during internship always liked to both seriously and jokingly (I think) say that I was more Lutheran than Martin Luther! This was always great fun for me when we consider that Martin Luther really didn’t want a denomination named after himself, after all, he saw himself as a worm undeserving of such thing because it took the emphasis away from Christ, and that he really didn’t want the church to become divided in the first place either, he just wanted a church that more faithfully served the Gospel. That is why, on this Reformation Sunday, we commemorate, not celebrate the Reformation. After all, without it, we would not have our denomination as we know it, nor would we get to experience even more unique and diverse ways through which God is working in the world, but we also get to mourn the divisions that have occurred between Christians over the last centuries because of denominational divides.
It’s funny to think about how when I began my Seminary journey, the biggest note they made after my first interview in the Candidacy process was that I struggled to articulate why I was a Lutheran. It wasn’t like I was new to Lutheranism; I had been attending a Lutheran church my whole life. But, I couldn’t articulate why I was a Lutheran. I got the Christian part down, but not Lutheran apparently. Which was also ironic since part of my call to Seminary involved three Union Seminary graduates nudging me towards Seminary after they heard me give a presentation about what being Lutheran meant to me. Then, I got to my Seminary classes and I couldn’t get enough of Lutheran theology. It became my favorite subject to study, both the history of how it came to be, but also the nuances of what we believe, why, and how we talk about it. During my second interview, I’m proud to say that they had no questions about my theology… it was clear why I was a Lutheran.
“There are no exceptions: everyone has sinned; everyone falls short of the glory of God. Yet, everyone has also been undeservedly justified by the gift of God, through the redemption wrought in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3: 22b-24). If we want a core to what we believe as Lutherans, our reading from Romans today is a great place to look. In his writing, Paul notes that all humans are sinners; no one is perfect because if we were we would be God, not God’s created. Yet, God doesn’t leave us in our sin, but instead we are all given the gift of grace that we are wholly undeserving of, through faith alone. Not by the works that we do, but through faith. We always got a good chuckle/groan when our Lutheran History professor would stand up before the class and remind us that the Reformation wasn’t about grace, but it was about faith. After all, the Roman Catholics believed that there was so much grace, they were able to sell it. It is not what we do, or buy in the case of indulgences, that determines our worth and salvation before God.
Yet, Luther doesn’t say that good works aren’t necessary, in fact, he says the opposite. Good works aren’t necessary for our salvation, but are a result of our justification in God. We are freed from sin and thus freed to serve the neighbor, for the sake of the neighbor alone, not because we feel that our salvation depends upon it. It would be quite un-Lutheran to simply thrown away good works because it removes, for Luther, one of the main reasons why we are freed from sin in the first place then.
So, just as we don’t throw away good works, we do not “celebrate the Reformation,” but instead commemorate the event AND celebrate that God is continually reforming our world. The good ole Lutheran paradox, the both/and. So we celebrate that God did not end at creation, but is continually creating and re-creating; God is constantly doing something new in our midst. Because God so loved and so loves the world that we have received Christ so that we can do new things too, so that we can be heirs to Christ’s promises, instead of slaves to the sins that divide us (John 8: 34-36). We are freed from sin so that we may be freed for, for life, for caring for one another, for tending to the Earth; if that is not one of the ways that God continues to reform us and our world, then I don’t know what is!
So, on this Reformation Sunday, may you be more Lutheran than Luther, while also remembering that we do not celebrate the divisions that divide Christ’s church. But, we can rejoice that we are able to hear the Good News of what God has done in Christ Jesus for us, and what God continues to do for us, as we remain a community and a church at large that is always reforming. Always reforming because we have the Spirit of God dwelling among us, continually nudging us along our journey of growth, to more fully love God and keep Christ at the center of all that we do. After all, the Reformation wasn’t just an event in 1517, but its effects continue to ripple out today, as we live in a world that is always in need of reformation and is also always reforming.