October 28, 2001
Twenty-first Sunday After Pentecost
CHRISTIAN GOSPEL: Standing in Need of Compassion ~ Luke 18:9-14
Do you remember studying the Protestant Reformation? Did you end up like me - aware that the Reformation was a significant turning event in Western Civilization, but not quite sure what it was all about? This scripture passage gives a very succinct synopsis of the controversy. For the firstt 1,500 years the Christian church was primarily one church, the Roman Catholic Church. Guided by the Pope in Rome and interpreting Christian faith to all the believers. At some point after that first thousand years there was a break-off and the Eastern Orthodox Church carried on its ministry without the guidance of the Pope. Though separate, the Orthodox church still functioned much like the Roman Catholic. Human institutions have a tendency to build up more and more layers. These institutional layers in the Catholic Church pushed the believers farther and farther away from what the early Christians experienced. There were always those, though, who were aware of the loss. Aware of what it really meant to be in a relationship with God. They set out, not to destroy the Catholic Church, not to start a brand-new church, but to bring about some badly needed reformation. Some change. A new beginning. A freshness of spirit. Clear out the corruption and worship as the early Christians did.
You know that those who are in power often are not happy when people say, “You’re doing it wrong.” So, what happened was, a new church began. Those who were calling for a renewal of the church, for a re-forming, became the leaders of the Reformation. Because they were ‘protesting’ against excesses in the church, they were known as ‘Protestants’. That is important history to know. We come from that branch of Protestants. Today we have so much knowledge to try to assimilate into our beings that it is easy to forget about American history and what happened to bring us to this point, in 2001. It’s easy to forget about our faith history. At the same time, it’s important to understand the changes that brought us to this point when we worship here this morning.
I know many of you have been shocked when you have read newspaper articles about the lack of geographical literacy among our young people. They are frequently unable to identify countries around the world, or even states in our own country. History is another problem area. Often students have not knowledge fo important historical characters.
Exactly the same thing happens in the church. There is rampant faith illiteracy. People will ask, “Are Catholics Christians?” “What are Protestants?” “What are Methodists?” People are not aware of the differences between different Christian groups, and why those differences exist. When you are not aware of any of the history, you come into the church at a certain point and you assume that is all there is. This was brought home to me during at a hospital visit that I made. I didn’t intend on a theological discussion, at least not that kind of theological discussion. In addition to the patient and spouse, there was another family member present. I ended up in a conversation about the church and Christian faith. It was disturbing to me. It wasn’t the purpose of my visit. Afterward one of the parents said, “This individual came from no church background at all. They came to the church through an evangelical experience. And that’s all that they understand of the church.” When you don’t understand the differences, then you tend to think that whatever you believe about Christianity is all that there is to know. That makes it difficult to work with people. It makes it difficult to talk about listening for God’s call. It leaves us unwilling to make changes in our lives.
The history of our denomination has been a history of changes. That is true, not only for the United Church of Christ, but it is true for all of the different groups that trace their heritage back to the European Reformation. Martin Luther is the first name that comes to mind, because he is the most famous of the reformers. The picture of him nailing his ninety-five statements on the door of the cathedral is one that is easy to hold onto. There were others that were looking for changes in the church that believed that God was speaking to us in different ways.
Luther called the church into question with exactly the topic that comes up in today’s scripture. That is, how do we relate to God? How is it that we receive God’s love? The church had reached a point where it said you receive God’s love by following all the rules that we have established. Luther said if you read the Bible, you will realize that God’s love comes to us free. It is grace. It is a gift. There is no way that anyone can earn it. We don’t need a priest to tell us that. All we need to do is read the Bible.
Well, there was a problem. There weren’t very many Bibles. The Bibles that were in existence were in Latin and in Greek. Only people who had been trained in those languages were able to read those Bibles. But, about the time that Luther was making his challenges, Guttenberg was developing the printing press. Within a short period of time the Bible was translated into the common languages that people were using and speaking in their daily lives. They were able to begin reading the Bible for themselves, and soon realized that many of the things that the church had been teaching them were not at the core of what it meant to be a Christian.
Luther wasn’t the only reformer. The conformation book from the United Church of Christ presents a couple of other characters important to our faith history. Ulrich Zwingli was in Switzerland. He argued for even more radical changes than Luther did. He wanted people to elect representatives to govern the church. He wanted worship to be very simple. He argued that church should have no crosses, no images, and no organs! Following the New Testament, Zwingli said that Christian worship should contain Bible readings, a sermon (I think that is where that four-hour sermon works in) and the sharing of a symbolic memorial meal around the Lord’s Table. Anything else was superstitious, he believed. War broke out in Switzerland over these ideas. They went to war because of these theological controversies. Zwingli was killed in his zeal to defend his ideas.
Anabaptists were another group that you may have heard about. People who agreed with Luther and Zwingli, but did not think that these reformers went far enough. These radicals believed that Christians should follow only the Bible, and they should have nothing to do with any government, secular or religious. Bible only. They withdrew completely from society into small sect groups, refusing to support the state or to bear arms as they tried to live by the scripture. They rejected the practice of infant baptism, because the Bible says nothing about it. They insisted that persons should be baptized only when they were old enough to understand what it meant. Because they re-baptized persons who had been baptized as infants, they were called Anabaptists, which means “Baptized again.”
John Calvin was another of the reformers in Geneva, Switzerland. Calvin was extremely influential in addressing this question about whether or not Christians can earn their salvation, or only receive it as grace. Even though he believed, along with Luther, that you did not earn your salvation, he believed an exemplary life was still critical. So, the way that you showed that you were loved by God was to live out that love. To live faithfully. When Protestant groups were persecuted in that area, they fled Geneva and many of these ideas ended up in England, and became the foundation of the Presbyterian Church. These ideas were also passed on to some of our ancestors. Remember, the church in England broke from Rome. Henry VIII wanted to have a son and was not able to with his first wife, or second, or third. He wasn’t getting cooperation from the Pope in his requests for divorces, so he asked Parliament to give him the authority to be the head of the church in England. He appointed the Archbishop of Canterbury to take on the role of representing the King. The Church of England, the Anglican Church, or, as we know it here, the Episcopalian Church, was born.
This group, the Anglicans, were not protesting abuses of scripture. They were protesting the authority of the Pope. But, there were still people who were unhappy. They were unhappy about the Anglican prayer book. They wanted prayers from the heart not prayers form the page. And they were unhappy about having to follow all the newrules. So, there were two groups that take their names from their responses. One of the groups wanted to ‘purify’ the church. They were called Puritans. Another group wanted nothing to do with the Church of England, and they were known as the Separatists. The Puritans are those who later landed in Boston. The other part, the Separatists, went to Holland for a while, then sailed on the Mayflower to land at Plymouth Colony. The Pilgrims and the Puritans became the foundation of our Congregational heritage. I want to read from an article written in 1981 by Jim Gilliom, who is the founding pastor of the Mercer Island Church. He writes:
It was in 1620 that those nonconformists called Pilgrims first landed on the American shores. Forced out of England because of their desire to be separated from the established church, they became parents of Congregationalism. Passionate for freedom, they were soon to prove that no human endeavor is pure, by developing themselves into a sometimes rigid New England religious establishment. Nevertheless, they contributed two great principles to American Protestantism.
The first was that the local congregation, was the basic unit of the Christian Church, which we follow to this day. No one outside of this church can tell us how we have to worship, or what we have to do. We make our decisions here, with freedom of conscience, guided by the Holy Spirit.
The second was in viewing the Christian life as a continual transformation. This became known as the Pilgrim Way. To represent God’s kindness: a people covenanted together in congregations, to always be growing in their understanding of God’s love, and growing in their response to God’s will for the whole world. Gilliom quoted John Robinson, who was the pastor to the Pilgrims. He told them shortly before they left Holland in 1620: “the Lord has more truth and light yet to break forth out of his Holy Word.”
Now, this tradition of transformation is what we are referring to when we say that we are a reformed church and a reforming church. This is not a static Christianity that we can pour into our hearts and be done. Instead it is a way of being a Christian in the world that says we have to continually read scripture and receive the Spirit to understand how we are to act in the world today.
Another author in that 1981 issue of The United Church of Christ magazine was the conference minister in Hawaii at the time he wrote this article. He’s currently serving as the interim minister at Plymouth Congregational while the senior minister is on sabbatical. He writes, “Christ the transformer of culture,” is how the late Professor H. Richard Niebuhr, one of the great UCC theologians, has identified the relation of Christ and the world.
It is this kind of belief that has moved the United Church of Christ to be deeply involved in the world, in all its struggles and pain. We have believed that obedience and faithfulness to the Christ who has loved us means that we must love the world in his name. In Jesus we are given not simply an example, but a demonstration of that quality of love that indeed does transform the world.
So in the midst of a distorted, corrupted and bruised world, we are a people who have been captured by a vision of what God intends for the world and humankind. It is a Kingdom where the heart and mind of God reigns – there is harmony and balance, there is love and justice, there is peace and wholeness.
It is the vision of the Kingdom of God that leaves our spirits restless with the way things are, and calls on us to be instruments of that vision. It calls us first of all to identify and celebrate those places in the world where that vision is being lived out - where the naked are clothed and the hungry are fed and the oppressed are liberated.
The church can never confuse or equate even the best human endeavor with the Kingdom of God. The American Way and the Kingdom of God are not the same. Even as we celebrate that which participates in the Kingdom we also know that the American Way must come under the judgment of the vision of God’s Kingdom. For all the denials of justice and human dignity are real and the violation and exploitation of people are oppressively real. Ask any Indian or Black person and listen to the pain and the rage that churn in their bellies.
So, we live in the world. We live as Christians who believe that God loves us just as we are, but who also believe that because of God’s love for us we should live faithfully and do all we can to help bring God’s reign in its fullness. That means, through the years, that we have learned how to listen to the voice God. We have learned to move out of our own comfort zones. To listen to the cries of people that are oppressed. To people who live in poverty. To people who have deep needs. Then we have done what we could as individuals and as a church to try to address those needs. Many times, that has put us at odds with the rest of the country. It has put us at odds with other Christians who have either not listened for God’s call, or have believed that they have heard God saying other things. Our task as a congregation in the reformed tradition, in the congregational tradition, is to listen to hear what God says to us now, about people who are in need. Then to reach out and to love. We are a reformed church and a reforming church.
We pray that God’s Spirit will always be with us. Amen.