Reformation Sunday By Rev. Sharon MacArthur For Berkeley Chinese Community Church Sunday October 29, 2017 Jeremiah 31:31-34 31 The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 32 It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, * says the Lord. 33 But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34 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, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more. Romans 3:19-28; 19 Now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. 20 For no human being will be justified in his sight by deeds prescribed by the law, for through the law comes the knowledge of sin. 21 But now, irrespective of law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, 22 the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ * for all who believe. For there is no distinction, 23 since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; 24 they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 25 whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement * by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; 26 it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus. * 27 Then what becomes of boasting? It is excluded. By what law? By that of works? No, but by the law of faith. 28 For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law. ***************** A Bible and Halloween We don t usually think of these two as having anything in common but they do! Think about it - Tuesday is October 31! It s Halloween when many people dress up in costume and kids go trick or treating. It is All Hallow s Eve the day before All Sants Day or All Hallow s Day. It is also Reformation Day actually this coming Tuesday is the 500 th anniversary of Reformation Day. It was on October 31, 1517, when Martin Luther nailed his 95 revolutionary opinions on the Castle Church door in Wittenberg Germany! He picked that day knowing that the church would be full in the morning of All Hallow s Day he knew many, many people would see his notice. His 95 Theses attacked the Catholic Church s corrupt practice of selling indulgences to absolve sin. His 95 Theses, boiled down to two central beliefs - 1 - that the Bible is the central religious authority and - 2 - that humans may reach salvation only by faith and not by their deeds Page 1 of 8
His 95 Theses was to spark the Protestant Reformation. The ideas were not new but Martin Luther codified them at a time that was ripe for religious reformation. His writings changed the course of religious and cultural history in the West. The Catholic Church was ever after divided, and the Protestantism that soon emerged was shaped by Luther s ideas. So, aren t you curious about Martin Luther? What made him who he was? that he would dare to buck THE church the entire world of Christianity as he knew it? Young Martin grew up in a world where rules played an important role in life. - - There were God s rules like the 10 commandments; - The church had rules; - His school had rules. Martin was afraid of breaking any of them take his school for instance. Throughout the week, one of the boys in his class would be chosen to observe all the other boys in secret. You never knew who it was or when they were near you. If someone broke a rule, and the boy who was the observer saw it, he would write it down. At the end of the week, the observer would turn in his list of rule breakers to the headmaster. The headmaster, armed with this information, would beat each boy for the rules he had broken. I can t even imagine what it would be like being a boy in that class! What state of mind must young Martin have as he approached Fridays not sure what the teacher did or did not know? Wondering if he would be beaten that day and how bad the beating would be? Over 400 years later the field of psychology would tell us that we form our earliest images of God based on the adults who are in authority around us when we are children. Our parents, our teachers, our grandparents and other relatives. Erik Erikson, the famed psychologist, would go on to write a book called Young Man Luther all about Martin as a boy and a young man. He wanted to figure out what had made Martin into a man willing to face down the powers of the church. Page 2 of 8
He observed that the same Martin who as a boy had been so scared and anxious about rule breaking and punishment at school grew up to be a young man who was scared and anxious about rule breaking and punishment when it came to his relationship with God. Martin became consumed with fear that he was going to be punished by an angry God who had been marking down his every mistake. And his church didn t help. The church of his day emphasized God s wrath and punishment, and capitalized on it. The fear of hell drove people to desperate measures. And the church obliged. Churches even sold indulgences, payments you could make to the church in order to be forgiven for your sin. The church knew that they could market to the fear of good people in order to fund their own treasuries. And back then, there was no other church. If you were a German in the 1500 s, you were a Catholic because that s all there was. You couldn t go down the street to the church on the next block. The Catholic church was your one connection to God, and to heaven. It s important to note too that this was a very different world from ours, and a very different Catholic Church than the one that we know today. Corruption has existed in every denomination at one time or another. One of the outcomes of the Protestant reformation was that the Catholic Church had its own reformation where many of these practices were changed. It s important that when we talk about what happened 500 years ago we make every attempt not to malign our Catholic brothers and sisters, or their faith, nor that we believe we who are Protestants are above corruption. So back then, this was the church that Martin Luther knew. And it was the church that was there for him when another fearful event happened in his life. Martin had grown up into a bright young man, and he had begun to study the law. He was well on his way to being a lawyer when one day in 1505, when he was about 22 years old, he was caught walking in a terrible thunderstorm. Page 3 of 8
The storm was so bad, with lightning crashing all around him, that he thought for sure that he was going to die. In his terror, Martin calls out to God, and he makes a promise: God, if you save me, I will become a monk. He survives. And Martin keeps his word. He leaves school and he joins the monastery, and he begins to study to be a monk and a priest. It was fear that got Martin into the monastery, but it is the monastery that teaches Martin that maybe he didn t quite understand God. One thing that you have to realize about Martin s time is that everything you knew about God and Scripture and the church was taught to you by the clergy by the priests. The printing press had just come into being about 75 years prior, and its spread was slow. Not many had access to the Bible or other books. AND, even if you could read, most books weren t in German. The Bible in particular was written in Latin. Only the most scholarly of Germans, like the monks, could even read it. AND here was Martin, a monk, FINALLY getting to read the Bible. And, as he read the Gospels, as he read Paul s letters, as he read of a God who loved God s people, it didn t quite square with what he had always been told about God. Here in the Bible was a story about a God who is not waiting to punish us at the end of our lives like a school master at the of the week. Here is a God who loves us, and who loves us so much that God gives us the grace of forgiveness. Sort of like what we talked about last week, right? Rethinking the God of Joshua who sounded like the God who preceded Joshua and the nation of Israel across the Jordan river and did away with many tribes of people before the Israelites arrived. Sounded like they were slaughtered! Only to find out that archaelogy didn t support any battles or massacres. What WAS supported was peaceful living maybe tribes merging together and farming and peaceful coming together and maybe that s how the tribes ceased to exist they became integrated into one! It took some re-formation of our thinking to get there and Martin s worldview was getting re-formed with his new knowledge! Martin s whole life he had been taught that the only way he could be saved from eternal punishment was by his works. - If only he was good enough, - if only he worked hard enough, - if only he bought enough indulgences, - then maybe maybe God would save him from punishment. But now he saw that this wasn t who God really was. It was the thought about the indulgences that really sent him over the top. Page 4 of 8
You see back then, If you were afraid of going to hell, the church could SELL you forgiveness; if your mother died and you were worried she was stuck in purgatory, the priests could say, you know, if you really loved your mother, you d pay a little more to be sure she went to even. The church was already wealthy but back in Rome, they were breaking ground on a brand new cathedral the one we know today as St. Peter s. The sale of indulgences funded that new cathedral s construction. Martin Luther didn t think this was right. He didn t think it was faithful to scripture and to who Jesus really was. SO he wrote the 95 Theses his 95 statements about faith and the abuses he saw. THAT s what he posted to the church door! It was twelve years after that day in the thunderstorm, it had been twelve years of learning and unlearning when Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses. Let s look at that slide again - Legend says he nailed them to the door, but that makes it sound a little more dramatic than it probably actually was. Actually the church door was a lot like a well-read bulletin board of a few decades ago. Maybe even like a Facebook page today. If someone had something they wanted to share, something they wanted others to discuss, they often tacked it to the door of the church for others to see. This is not to diminish Martin s courage. The 95 Theses are really just 95 statements about who God was, and what that meant for the church. Martin knew what he was doing he knew that in the eyes of the church these statements would make him a heretic, and maybe even cost him his life. But Martin had come to understand God s love and God s grace, and he felt compelled to share it with others, and to reform his church, even if it meant his whole life was about to change. And once it was done, there was no going back. Sure enough, after they were posted, more people kept reading them. They started to get Page 5 of 8
around. And then the local bishop saw them, and he passed them on to the Pope. Sure enough, the Pope was not happy, especially because they needed those indulgences Luther was upset about to build St. Peters. The next year, in 1518, Luther was charged with heresy. He found protection, for a few years, with the help of a prince called Fredrick the Wise who was sympathetic to his ideas. In 1521, though, the Emperor called Luther to appear before him, and Luther had no choice. And so four years after he had posted those ideas to the church door, Luther was finally called to answer for them. Luther is called before the Emperor and asked to recant, and say he was wrong. Luther refuses to do so, and shouts out Here I stand! I can do none other! Luther s words only convince the council that he is a threat. He is declared an outlaw and a heretic, which means that anyone was allowed to kill him. And as he leaves the council he is immediately kidnapped. Fortunately, his kidnappers were sent by the friendly Frederick the Wise. They keep him safe, and they bring him to a castle in Wartburg. He grew a beard and assumes the identity of a man named Squire George, and goes into hiding. It s in Wartburg that Luther does what might be the most radical thing of all. He takes the New Testament, a book that your average German has never heard in the German language, and he translates it from Greek. He translates it not into the scholarly Latin which can only be read by clergy and academics, but into German. And for the first time, your average person in the pews could hear the stories of God s love and grace for themselves, and not just as the church wants for them to hear them. Over time Luther started to find more public support. His ideas were spreading, and he kept writing and encouraging reformation. At one point Luther encouraged all the priests, monks, and nuns to leave their cloisters. Page 6 of 8
One of those nuns who leaves, Katharina, became his wife. He even becomes a father of six children. Eventually the Emperor got distracted by other pressing issues, and Luther was left alone. He kept writing and ministering until his death in 1546. And 500 years later, we still remember his life, and his legacy. Because of Martin Luther, you and I are here today, doing church together in a very different way from Martin Luther s. - - We are a member of a Protestant denomination United church of Christ among others - that seeks to understand the Scriptures in light of God s grace and love. - We explore the big questions of faith together, with the church and pastor as teacher, and not tyrant. - We do not believe that we are saved by our good works, but that we do good works because God s grace has already saved us. We look to the scriptures of today Jeremiah 31 which reminds us that God is the God of God s people and that God s law will be written in hearts and that s how the people will know God as one who forgives! Martin Luther did come to know God as the one whose laws were not to be feared! And we look to the Romans passage that has become the banner text of the Reformation. It testifies to God s grace through faith and not laws about what we must do to earn salvation.it s through through faith in Jesus Christ this has been the theme of the entire Reformation. Page 7 of 8
And, like Luther, we take up the call to be courageous in our faith. We live out our faith in this world, gratefully serving others with love, because we know already that we are loved by God. We are living the reformation that s what Martin Luther started and that s what we continue that s what Martin Luther hoped for. Today we re going to be cleaning the church how symbolic is that for Reformation Sunday? 500 years ago that s essentially what Martin Luther was doing cleaning up the church.cleaning up the corruptions, the indulgences, the abusive behaviors of the those in power in the church. Our cleaning today will be more mundane we ll be dusting shelves and cleaning windows and vacuuming dust and cobwebs. But imagine that along with the dust and cobwebs we are also clearing away those attitudes and ideas that keep us from moving forward to a new beginning as Berkeley Chinese Community Church a RE-formed BCCC as it were. Those refreshed and re-formed attitudes will be helpful next week when we will be meeting as one congregation to consider adopting a mission statement. - a mission statement that reflects the thoughts, feelings and passions gleaned from the 6 new beginnings conversations over the past year. - A mission statement that will anchor our programs - a mission statement that will become the foundation for the work of the search committee to call the next settled pastor. - A mission statement that can be a re-formation of Berkeley Chinese Community Church and new beginnings let s take that next, bold, courageous step together as we follow Jesus! Amen. Page 8 of 8