Sermon for Proper 25, Year A, October 29, 2017 REFORMATION SUNDAY: 500 th Anniversary of Luther s 95 Theses, Hallowe en, 1517 Church of the Nativity-Episcopal, Indianapolis The Rev. Susan Marie Smith, Ph.D. Track 2: Leviticus 19:1-2,15-18 Psalm 1 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8 Matthew 22:34-46 O God, our refuge and our strength, who raised up your servant Martin Luther to reform and renew your Church in the light of your word: Defend and purify the Church in our own day and grant that, through faith, we may boldly proclaim the riches of your grace, which you have made known in Jesus Christ our Savior, who, with you and the Holy Spirit, lives and reigns, one God, now and for ever. Amen. Almighty and everlasting God, increase in us the gifts of faith, hope, and charity; and, that we may obtain what you promise, make us love what you command; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. I. It was the year 1054. Christianity had spread throughout Europe, and each culture that accepted it, also modified it. In the East, there were 5 popes, or patriarchs, in Antioch, Constantinople, etc. In the West, there was one pope, in Rome. It the East, the bread used for Eucharist was leavened; in the West, it was unleavened, like our wafers because the bread at Passover was unleavened ( but, said the East, Holy Communion is not the same as Passover ). In the East, clergy could be married. In the West, clergy had to be celibate. There were different fast days, different feast days, different saints venerated. So there were tussles all along. But the temperature started to rise with a little not-so-friendly competition, and in 1054, they excommunicated each other. So we had a big split. We are descended from the Western Church. Since the split, we had the Crusades, not our best years (and part of our current problems today are long memories from the Crusades). And since the split, we had the Inquisition torturing folks until they recanted and affirmed the belief acceptable to the hierarchy--really not our best years. Yet we can see that when the one church with one head in collusion with much of the political leadership, there was a lot of power. Priests can bless, and forgive sins. And the Roman pope understood himself to be the descendent of Peter, of whom Jesus said, Simon, I name you Peter (= Rocky ), and on this rock I build my church. I give you the keys of the Kingdom: what you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and what you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. And what we know about power and money is that when people have it, they have a very hard time letting it go. As Lord Acton said of the papacy, Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. The keys to the Kingdom! 1
So as a sign of this great power and wealth, the Vatican wanted to build a basilica that would be at least as big and beautiful as the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. It would be called St. Peter s, and it would be 2 football fields long. But to complete this project, money was needed. II. Which brings us to the early 1500 s in Europe. One of the Inquisitors, a Dominican priest named Johannes Tetzel, came up with a very clever scheme. He knew how many people prayed fervently for the remission of suffering of their loved ones who had died and were being purified before they could enter the heavenly precincts, in what was called Purgatory. So Tetzel worked it out with the pope to allow souls suffering in the Pre-Heaven purification process to have their years in Purgatory remitted for money. With his large ego, Tetzel went around Germany shaking his coin box and calling out a little German jingle: When the coin in the coffer klings, The soul from Purgatory springs. Desperate to be assured that their deceased loved ones would rest in peace, people paid money, and Tetzel arranged for a writ of papal indulgence freeing their souls. Everyone knew this was wrong. But the Powers needed money and turned their backs. Enter a monk of the Order of St. Augustine, a brilliant New Testament scholar and teacher, named MARTIN LUTHER. Luther knew that there was nothing in the Bible about Purgatory, and nothing about indulgences. And there was certainly nothing about paying money for spiritual benefits in fact, Jesus had become sorely angry in all four Gospel accounts only once, and that was when he found the religious leaders making a profit at the money exchange in the Temple precincts as people were trying to seek forgiveness for their sins. So what do you do when you disagree with a policy of a governmental authority? You write a letter of protest, outlining your reasoning, arguing for a different point of view, and try to persuade others. You do it respectfully, but clearly. This is exactly what Martin Luther did. He wrote out his arguments against the sale of indulgences very clearly, in logical order, point by point by point. To be precise, there were 95 points. He hand-wrote these 95 theses, and he posted them on the community bulletin board, which happened to be on the church door of the church in Wittenberg, Germany, on the eve of All saints day: on October 31, 1517, 500 years ago this week. The discussion ensued. A firestorm was ignited. Huge numbers of powerful church leaders refused to admit they were wrong and refused to give up the power that had been legitimated around them. However, other great numbers of persons, Christians, clergy, nuns, and political leaders, realized that the Church must reform itself. How can the Church of Jesus Christ lead God s people to live a moral life of faithful commitment and devotion if the Church itself is in sin? REFORM was needed. And in fact, by Luther s courage, The Reformation, protesting the corruption, immorality, and ineptness in the Western church, was begun. With the Reformation, the Western Church split into what was then called the Roman Catholic church 2
and the Protesting or Protestant church. To this day, the LAST SUNDAY of OCTOBER is celebrated in all Lutheran and some other Christian churches as REFORMATION Sunday. As the arguments continued from 1517, Frederick III, Elector of Saxony, took Luther under his protection and got him a hearing at the Diet of Worms in 1521. Yet the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, ruled against Luther (May 26), and promulgated an edict against him, stating, For this reason we forbid anyone from this time forward to dare, either by words or by deeds, to receive, defend, sustain, or favour the said Martin Luther. Luther s response is powerful and famous: I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God. Amen. Luther was declared a heretic and had to escape for his life. He spent some years in Wartburg castle. From 1521 on, his name was read on the list of heretics from the Vatican steps every Maundy Thursday, until the 1960 s. III. But the 95 theses arguing against the sale of indulgences were not at all the greatest part of Luther s work, nor the most dangerous. Luther studied and wrote prolifically, theology and Scripture translation. He spent those years in exile in Wartburg continuing his work translating the Bible. One scholar asserted that translating the Bible into vibrant German was Luther s most dangerous work. For Luther set off the first Wikipedia 500 years ago: he translated the Bible into the German spoken by the people, and he did it without authorization from the Church or any kingdom or civil authority. Luther translated the Bible not just from the standard Latin vulgate that had been in use for 1100 years but he went back and checked the Greek. And with the help of Gutenberg and the printing press, people started reading the Bible for themselves, without benefit of official interpretations in their own dialect. In England, Wycliffe and Tyndale did the same. It was weird to have scholars just on their own start translating something as elite and important as the Bible in fact, William Tyndale was burned at the stake for this work. And this is why King James authorized a royal translation to be done, which came out some decades later in 1611. Since then we ve had translations all over the place! People offering their own input, like Wikipedia. And instead of one Bible in a church, chained to the pulpit, pretty soon people started to own their own Bibles, and then people learned to read, and then even more people had Bibles. And they started to think for themselves about what it might mean. Thanks to Luther, they and we are not dependent upon the few wise and powerful leaders to tell us what God did or what God wants of us. We can read it for ourselves. The laity grew in discipleship and responsibility. And the Bible became a source of God s revelation in addition to the tradition of scholars. The foundation of Anglican theology arose: Richard Hooker s 3-legged 3
stool of Scripture, and Tradition, and Reason our own thinking and experience as sources of authority and revelation. --You just never know what igniting a firestorm might lead to. IV. What were the most important Bible passages to Luther? 1. The most famous important passage is that we are saved by Grace through Faith. WE DO NOT HAVE TO EARN OUR SALVATION THROUGH GOOD WORKS. PERIOD. Our good works are done as thanks-gifts for God s free gift of salvation. This is not strange to us, since we ve lived with this understanding for 500 years. Romans 3:24-26, 6:23, 5:1-2, 11:6 Ephesians 2:8-9: For it is by God s grace that you have been saved through faith. 2. Another one of the most important passages to Luther happens to be the ones we hear about today: The Holiness Code in the book of Leviticus begins in chapter 19. When we studied this in Bible Study here, I shared what a rabbi taught my elementary school children in the Episcopal school in California (where I was chaplain). She said that if you opened the Scroll of the Torah (that is the 5 books of Moses) to its very center place, right in the middle so that the scroll is the same size on each side, you find the heart of the Torah: which is Leviticus 19, what we hear today: You shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord. Later in Leviticus 19, still at the heart of the Torah in v. 34, it says, 34 You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God. If you wonder why the immigration issue is so huge? It s because it s right here in the Bible, in the heart of the Torah, in the middle of everything Jesus said and did and stood for. You shall love the stranger as yourself. Jesus lived this commandment, treating tax collectors and sinners as if they were his neighbors, loving them. His parable of the Good Samaritan showed how we are called to love folks we perceive as enemies, caring for their needs. We must love our neighbors as ourselves, and everyone is our neighbor. The LORD spoke to Moses, saying:... You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy. You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor. You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbor: I am the LORD. You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD. Leviticus 19:1-2,15-18, NRSV It s in Deuteronomy 6:4-5 that it says, 4 Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone. [a] 5 You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. 4
Jesus, in Matthew s Gospel today, takes these commandments: Love God, and Love your neighbor, and makes them two sides of one commandment: To Love God IS to love your neighbor. For (elsewhere, Jesus says) if you cannot love your neighbor whom you can see, how can you love God whom you cannot see? Over and over, Luther teaches and writes about this passage. When you love your neighbor, you are loving God. To love God is to love your neighbor. Your neighbor includes the stranger, whom you are to love as you love yourself. In the Middle Ages, the Church did not even love some of its own members as it loved itself, including folks who were deeply grieving and had been taught that their loved ones would spend eons in Purgatory before being welcomed to God s nearer presence. Luther was angered by this, and argued the discrepancy, seeking to reform the church s behavior. And the work of Reformation is not over. In recent decades, clergy have taken advantage of vulnerable members of their own church, and then, just like the indulgence issue, the clergy and the churches defended, denied, and covered up. It s why we have a program in every Episcopal Church called by various names, but here, SAFEGUARDING GOD S CHILDREN and GOD S PEOPLE. (And, of course, all people are God s people. God made us all.) My friends, it s not easy to love all creatures. It s not easy to love those we don t understand. Heck, it s not easy to understand all the thoughts and feelings and tendencies inside our own selves and consequently, it s not easy to love ourselves. We each have parts of ourselves that we don t like Carl Jung called those parts The Shadow --and we defend, deny, and cover up those attitudes and aspects of our own selves, as well. But actually, when those nether part of ourselves, or nether neighbors we don t think we like, if we allow the truth of them to come to the light of day, we find more to love. And the more we love even those strange parts and people, the less strange they turn out to be. Today we give thanks for Martin Luther who called the church to continuously engage in reform: semper reformanda, always reforming. We give thanks for the privilege of standing in the tradition of the Anglican Communion, for we consider ourselves to be fully catholic and fully reformed. We give thanks for Martin Luther s namesakes, especially our own Martin Luther King, Jr, who worked tirelessly, peacefully, to reform some ways our nation was failing to love our neighbors as ourselves. Today we pray that God will help us remember and act upon the call to continue to reform ourselves, our church, not just for the next 60 years, but always, and to reform our world. We are called upon to continue his and other reformations in our country, in our culture, in our church, in our community, and in our own souls and psyches. For we are finite. We are not yet holy. We seek purification, not later, in a purgatory, but here, now, on earth, with each other for help and guidance and support and celebration. Holy God, help us to live in faith, hope, and charity, to love your command to love our neighbors as ourselves, and to boldly proclaim the riches of your grace, which you have made known in Jesus Christ our Savior, by the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen. 5