The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

Transcription

1 The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all. LUTHERANS AND CATHOLICS: TRANSFORMED AND RE-FORMED BY THE SPIRIT BY BISHOP DR. MUNIB YOUNAN JULY 2017 *** It is an honor for me to be here in Japan, and to be invited to speak to this audience of Catholic and Lutheran sisters and brothers, in conjunction with the Niwano Peace Foundation. I bring you greetings from Jerusalem, the Holy City, the home to two peoples and three faiths. I bring you greetings from my church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land, and from the Lutheran World Federation. The year 2017 is a special one for Lutheran Christians, as we commemorate the 500 th anniversary of the events which began the Reformation movement within the church. Our Catholic sisters and brothers present today may be wondering: Is this really a year of celebration, or of commemoration? I want to say to you, my sisters and brothers in Christ, that we do not rejoice in the division of our churches. For both of our churches, this is a moment of both joy and repentance. We celebrate the reformers who gave us great works of systematic theology on justification by faith. We celebrate that the Bible has been translated into the vernacular. We celebrate the music and art that has come from the Reformation movement. But we do not celebrate the division of the church. Our Lord has not called us to congratulate ourselves on 500 years of living, praying, and serving separately from our sisters and brothers. Both Lutherans and Catholics have heard the call of Christ to seek reconciliation. For this reason, fifty years ago, the Lutheran and Catholic churches began a dialogue. Together in faith, we embarked on a journey of understanding. It has been a long, sometimes painful, and often frustrating process. Fifty years is a very long time to wait a fact we know very well in Palestine! For fifty years, the 1

2 Lutheran and Catholic churches have prayed that the scales would fall from our eyes, and that our divisions would be healed. This fifty years of prayer and dialogue has resulted in some recent and remarkable steps forward in our ecumenical relationship. FROM CONFLICT TO COMMUNION In 1999, Catholics and Lutherans signed the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (JDDJ). This statement was a landmark in our ongoing ecumenical dialogue, in that it was a differentiated consensus. In particular, the JDDJ outlines how our churches understand justification. For Lutherans, this was critical, our brother Martin Luther has called justification by faith the doctrine by which the church stands and falls. For both of our churches and our members, this document has been a word of grace, for it has removed all historic condemnations of the other which had been in place for hundreds of years. In 2010, shortly after I was elected as President of the Lutheran World Federation, I had the opportunity (along with the General Secretary and other representatives of the LWF) to visit Pope Benedict XVI. At that time, I raised with His Holiness the issue of our ongoing dialogue, and offered that we could join together in prayer in Pope Benedict at that time said to me, I will be there! In the following years, the international Catholic and Lutheran commission developed the document entitled From Conflict to Communion, which in 2013 was published jointly by the Lutheran World Federation and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. This new document, From Conflict to Communion, is grounded in a shared retelling of the history of relations between Lutherans and Catholics. We hear in this document the voices of both Lutherans and Catholics, analyzing the events of the Reformation and the way in which our respective theologies converge. In it, baptism is confirmed to be the basis for unity and common commemoration. Holy Baptism is the foundation of our shared witness. Our human tendency in the church as well as in political relations is to emphasize what divides us rather than what brings us together. My sense is that we have often put too much emphasis on who is at the table or who is in the pulpit, and we ignore the basic unity we find in Holy Baptism. While differences in ordination and communion 2

3 practices cannot be ignored, baptism is what unites us. Through Water and the Word, we are engrafted into the church, the Body of Christ. In baptism, we are sent out into the world together for the sake of God s holistic mission, in diaconal purpose. This shared emphasis on baptism is the foundation for our continued ecumenical dialogue. From Conflict to Communion makes important contributions to the ongoing dialogue between Lutherans and Catholics. Along with reaffirming our unity through baptism, it also encourages Lutherans and Catholics to look to what unites before looking at what divides us. It asks churches to be open to transformation as a result of knowing one another. It encourages us to be in mission together, achieving visible unity for the sake of our neighbors. And it sends us out to rediscover and proclaim the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ for our time. The document From Conflict to Communion also insists that the fights of the Sixteenth Century have ended. For this we praise God! Now, as we engage across lines of faith, it is time for all violence perpetrated in the name of God to cease once and for all. Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Christians each have their extremists and leaders willing to exploit religious identity for their own purposes. From Conflict to Communion offers another step in this interfaith awareness. Already in 1984 the LWF has repudiated all anti-judaic diatribes from Martin Luther. And today, even as we continue to work against anti-semitism, it is also important to recognize our mistreatment of Muslims and Islam, and to counteract the Islamophobia present in many of our communities. A key motto of the Reformation movement is ecclesia semper reformanda est: the church is always being reformed. The discipline of being ecclesia semper reformanda is a call to humility. During this 2017 anniversary year, we have an opportunity to revisit our foundational commitments, including the sacraments of Baptism and Communion. As Lutherans, we must ask how we can best honor the spirit of the reformation, to celebrate the anniversary as disciples. In our commemoration of the Reformation, we reject triumphalism even as we strive to be clear about who we are and what values we claim. The Lutheran recognition that we are ecclesia semper reformanda, a church to be always reformed, is a sign of our humility calling us to discipleship. It is in this spirit that I am pleased that 3

4 From Conflict to Communion is an important step toward strengthening our common witness as Lutherans and Catholics in the world today. THE ONGOING RECONCILIATION OF LUND AND MALMÖ Another outcome of this fifty-year journey of dialogue was last year s worship service of Common Prayer in Sweden, co-hosted by Pope Francis, by Rev. Martin Junge, the General Secretary of the Lutheran World Federation, and by myself as the President of the LWF. This Common Prayer, which took place on Reformation Day at the beginning of this 500 th anniversary year, was an historic reconciliation. It was a moment that no one could have envisioned fifty years ago. I was deeply honored to have co-hosted and co-led, with the Pope, such a visible sign of Christian unity, and to sign a joint statement of ongoing reconciliation. The historic reconciliation between the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran Communion has had profound significance for global ecumenism. In 2010, Anglican theologian Andrew McGowan relayed the sense that we are now in the midst of an ecumenical winter, where the movement toward visible Christian unity had reached a low point. McGowan suggests that Many Christians find their most powerful and transformative experiences of ecumenism in experience, in shared prayer and mission. This sharing of prayer and mission is what we experienced in Lund and Malmö; perhaps, alongside many other movements, what we have achieved in the last decades of Lutheran-Catholic dialogue will lead to further breakthroughs of an ecumenical spring. The joint common prayer in Lund had three important elements. First, it was a service of Thanksgiving: giving thanks for faithfulness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ in both churches, Catholic and Lutheran, and for the unity freshness of unity we are experiencing today. Second, it was a service of Repentance: repenting for the mistakes of the past which both church have committed against each other and asking for God s mercy on us. And third, it was a service of Commitment: committing that the Lutheran and Catholic churches will work together through the five imperatives which are outlined in the document From Conflict to Communion. Thanks be to God, as we left this common prayer in Sweden, we 4

5 felt confident that our churches were committed to a future of inclusive mission, including prophetic diakonia. Historic reconciliation, as important and monumental as it is, cannot be allowed to remain only an end unto itself. This is the lesson of linking Malmö with Lund. Ecumenical dialogue, even on the academic level, can help us discern convergences and diversity, leading us toward common mission. These dialogues must address our common search for responding to the needs of the world. In the arena, we discussed challenges facing human communities in Syria, India, Burundi, South Sudan and Colombia. This event showed how ecumenical engagement can propel the Church into the world. The agreement between Caritas and LWF World Service demonstrated ecumenism based on mutual friendship and trust. Through this agreement and our shared work, we show that we are working together, following Christ s command, for the sake of the world. During the service in Lund, Pope Francis and I signed a joint declaration saying that through dialogue and shared witness we are no longer strangers. Rather, we have learned that what unites us is greater than what divides us. The declaration lamented that our division had wounded the visible unity of the church and rejected all hatred and violence, past and present, especially that expressed in the name of religion. I continue looking for the Holy Spirit to guide us through issues on which we still disagree: ecclesiology, ministry, and Eucharist. Honest disagreement is the foundation of dialogue; I am confident that we will be able to find convergence on many issues. No matter how difficult and long it is, I encourage Lutherans to continue this process because it is Christ s call: to have one Baptism and one Table for the Eucharist. It continues to be my conviction that the Eucharist is the Table of Christ, not a Lutheran, Catholic, Reform, Anglican, or Orthodox table. It is Christ s table of generosity. God s Word and Promise makes a thing holy, not any human effort or label. In other words, the event in Lund is not yet finished. Its positive energy continues to expand, even into interreligious relations. But I want to share with you something that caught my attention in Lund even before we had the opportunity to meet with Pope Francis. One day earlier, during regular Reformation Day worship at Lund Cathedral, following the liturgy of Holy Communion, something very special happened. Just before the closing hymn, we 5

6 suddenly saw the Dean of St. Thomas Aquinas Parish in Lund entering the Lutheran cathedral with the Vatican flag, an icon of the Virgin Mary, and the entire Catholic congregation. Together, they processed to the front of this Lutheran cathedral and joined the Lutheran congregation in shared song and prayers. As we gathered together around the altar, I have never seen faces so elevated and happy. It was as if we were dreaming. Many in the church were amazed; it reminded me of the Day of Pentecost when the disciples and the people were amazed with what was happening in front of their eyes. Many people were in tears. Later, some observed that our ecumenical celebration the next day would have meant very little if the local people had not embraced it so fully. This, my friends, is the positive energy emanating out of Lund. Like the work of the Holy Spirit, it has not remained in that place alone. I am confident that this energy will spread throughout our churches. Each diocese and congregation has an opportunity to reach out to Catholic and Lutheran neighbors and other Christians, urging them to build on this ecumenical energy. Just a few months ago, I was invited to Florence, Italy, for a three-day symposium on the Reformation. In addition to 23 Catholic universities and organizations, I was happy to be there with the Lutheran Church in Italy. In this very Catholic environment, I thought I was sitting in a Lutheran gathering speaking about music, marriage, and that the Church should be always reformed. The spirit was deeply and openly ecumenical. In cooperation with the Catholic Church, this same spirit has also been replicated in part in France, Chile, Jordan, and Bethlehem, as communities have sought to honor the historic prayer in Lund. The energy of Lund is not only limited to Christian ecumenical relations. Al- Mayadeen television station in Lebanon interviewed me about our historic reconciliation; I was told that the interview was watched by 30 million people throughout the Arab and Muslim world. Dr. Muhammad Al-Sammak, Secretary General of the Christian-Muslim Committee for Dialogue in Lebanon and Co- President of Religions for Peace, has offered several comments on Catholic- Lutheran reconciliation. Sammak, who has said that the task of the Muslims today is to defend and purify our faith from the criminal exploitation of the jihadists, has also suggested that Sunni and Shi a Muslims must learn from the 6

7 energy of Lund to explore reconciliation between their communities as well. The energy of Lund will create more energy and trust, and not just among Lutherans and Catholics. Surely, this is the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit! If Lund only remains in Lund and does not infiltrate into the Catholic and Lutheran churches, its meaning will diminish day by day. The more we receive and implement it into our churches, the more energy will be created, just as we experienced today in Tokyo. While the energy continues, we must invest in it. We must build relationships with Catholics, Orthodox, Evangelical, Anglican and Reformed churches, along with others. The more we can build this energy, the more we will be reminded that we share one mission in the world. The event is not finished; it continues, just like the ongoing Reformation of the Church. The energy going out from our celebration in Lund is a sign that the Holy Spirit is at work in the world, liberating us by creating trust and reconciliation in a time of fragmenting relationships. It is my sincere hope that the ecumenical winter we have been experiencing will indeed give way to an ecumenical spring. CONCLUSION Of course, the Catholic-Lutheran prayer service in Lund did not signal that we are reuniting with Rome. But this was a powerful witness to the world of what it means to be Liberated by God s Grace. Through this common prayer, our hope is that the world has seen that when you are liberated by God s grace you are not hostage to the past. Neither are you afraid of the present nor the future! Today, we proclaim with Martin Luther not only, Here I stand but also here we journey together as churches so that we may fulfill Christ s prayer that they may all be One...that the world may believe. (John 17:21) When you are truly free, you cannot help but respond in thankfulness and humility. Such freedom can never be kept to one s self this is the reason we speak of Liberated by God s Grace as being connected with the liberation of human beings, the liberation of creation, and indeed the liberation of religion itself. This is a clear sign that religion is not the problem, but religion is the solution, as long as our liberation by grace drives us to serve the cause of the church and to serve humanity in love. For this reason, the year 2017 is an anniversary of our freedom. By God s grace, neither sin, nor oppression, nor division, nor injustice has any power over us. By 7

8 Gods grace, we are freed to liberate others from the chains that bind them. By God s grace, we are brokers of justice, instruments of peace, defenders of human rights, and apostles of love in the world today. Dear sisters and brothers in Christ, the Reformation did not stop when the reformers passed away. The reforming work of the Holy Spirit continues in the global church today, including here in Japan. We must allow the Holy Spirit to mold us, change us, transform us, and guide us. The next 500 years of the Reformation are upon us. Are you ready? Are you ready in the spirit of togetherness and communion to be missionaries of love and grace to the world? Are you ready to be prophetic voices, standing firm on the foundation of human dignity and respect given by God our creator? Are you ready to welcome the stranger, feed the poor, pray for your enemies, and in all things glorify God who has liberated you from sin and death? The call of ongoing Reformation is not an easy one. And yet, liberated by God s grace, and filled with the Holy Spirit, together we will be the new reformers of the church, and of the world. This is the call of the Reformation to you and to us. May the peace of God which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen. 8