Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire and lighten us with thy celestial fire. Amen.
Today is a once in every half a millennium occurrence. As you’ve likely heard, October 31 will be the 500th anniversary of Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther published, though most scholars agree that he did not nail to the door, his 95 Theses against abuses of the Roman Catholic Church. And thus began a period of reformation in the Church. Ten years later, when Henry VIII requested that Pope Clement VII grant him an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon the seeds were sown for the English Reformation, which was a distinct and separate reformation than the one initiated by Luther. So Anglicans have always had a complicated relationship with the Reformation.
We see ourselves as being a via media, a middle way, between Roman Catholics and Protestants and sometimes it is said that we are “Catholic, yet Reformed.” And locating our particular denomination on the spectrum between the Pope and Luther can be a bit of a challenge, so we’re left not knowing what to do with this day. October 31 is not a part of our liturgical calendar of observances in The Episcopal Church, yet on February 18 we do commemorate Martin Luther; so you see, it’s complicated.
It has become fashionable for Episcopalians to discount the influence of the Protestant Reformation on our own English Reformation. But to ignore the link between Luther and Thomas Cranmer, the author of the first Book of Common Prayer is not only historically flawed, but it closes us off to the work of the Holy Spirit’s own movement within our church. There is no such thing as the “pure” church, and thinking that we aren’t caught up in the tide of the Reformation if foolhardy.
Though Henry and Cranmer both sided with the Pope against Luther, when it came time for Henry to stand up against Rome, there’s no telling what success he would have had if Luther had not blazed the trail. Once the church in England began its process of breaking from Rome, it became clear that a theological reformation would need to accompany the political revolution that Henry began. So when Cranmer and others sought to rejuvenate the Church of England, they looked to Luther. His translation of the Bible served as the foundation and encouragement for William Tyndale’s and Myles Coverdale’s translations of the Bible into English. You may have noticed that sometimes in our liturgy, particularly in Rite I, that sometimes we refer to the Holy Ghost instead of the Holy Spirit. That’s a clear signal that a debt is owed to Martin Luther’s geist in German instead of the Latin spiritus. Our own 39 Articles which served as the theological foundation for the Church of England were heavily influenced by Luther’s own statements. As Anglicans, like it or not, we owe a tremendous amount to Martin Luther and the Reformation which he began.
The reason why I think it’s important for all Christians, regardless of denomination, to remember the Reformation today is because it has been the single most important event in Christendom in the last thousand years. The tremors of the Reformation are still felt today and forever changed the landscape of the Church. I want to consider the two major ways of viewing the events that started on October 31, 1517 and then look forward.
One way to view the Reformation is as a victory for justice and a cleansing of the corruptions of the Church. As we heard the prophet Isaiah say in the first reading, God says “I am about to do a new thing.” The Reformation, indeed, was God doing a new thing. The Church had become complicit in its power and was engaging in theological abuses. Things needed to change, and through the Reformation, they did.
And so many good things came out of the Reformation. If you enjoy singing hymns, you can thank Luther for that, as he instituted the practices of both congregational singing and singing hymns, as opposed to only Biblical texts. If you enjoy preaching, you can also thank Luther; and if you don’t, then blame him. Parish clergy in the 1500s were not generally well-educated, and so many bishops did not allow preaching for fear of heresy. In fact, many churches didn’t even have indoor pulpits. But they did have one outside because when a traveling preacher would come through town, the crowd wouldn’t fit inside the church. But Luther insisted that the clergy be educated properly so that they could convey the message of God’s grace to the people. Worshiping in a language that could be understood by the people, instead of Latin, was also championed by Luther, and I’m quite thankful that through prayers and liturgy, I can come to know God more fully. And personally, I’m quite thankful that one of Luther’s reforms was doing away with clerical celibacy and allowing clergy to be married.
Perhaps Luther’s greatest contribution though was his central emphasis on the grace of God, which was at the heart of his opposition to the sale of indulgences. God’s love and mercy are not things that can be bought, earned, sold, or traded. God’s grace is not for those who deserve it, but rather for those who need it – which is all of us. And because God’s grace is unearned, it cannot be taken away. Grace is not something that we receive because we read the Bible, or because we receive the Eucharist, or because we are charitable. Rather, God’s grace undergirds all of those things. Luther’s insistence on grace reminds us that God is the primary actor in Creation and that grace is behind us, ahead of us, and within us. Luther’s Reformation was about restoring the central message of the Gospel as the Church’s central teaching: the unbounded power of God’s grace. And when viewed in this light, the Reformation was and continues to be a good thing.
But there’s another side to the coin. As you all know the Reformation wasn’t simply a process of cleaning up some corruption and going on our merry way. The Reformation was a brutal, bloody, and violent divorce that continues today. It’s nearly impossible to count, but there are thousands of Christian denominations today, most of which can trace their roots to that fateful October 31. The Reformation wasn’t a crack in the Christian unity, it was its shattering. In this view, this is not a day to celebrate, but rather it is a day of penitence to approach with broken hearts. Some would say that the Reformation is not an example of listening to the Spirit, but rather was a failure to do so.
Pope John Paul II confessed the sins of the Roman Catholic Church that led to the Reformation, but this day is often celebrated by many Protestants as the vanquishing of the corruptions of the Vatican. I’m not aware of any Protestant leaders confessing the sin of disunity caused by the Reformation. And that is a travesty. The disunity caused by the Reformation has broken nearly every bone and ligament in the Body of Christ. If you disagree with me on anything, you can go and start your own church, and that is not a good thing. Because of the Reformation, we no longer need to be able to stay together when we disagree. Because of the Reformation, we are no longer bound to each other in the same community. And that is not only a loss to us as Christians, but to the entire world which needs the witness of Christians’ love and peace. Think of how many people look down upon Roman Catholics for no reason other than they are Roman Catholic; that, plain and simple, is a sin. And by the same token, the Roman Catholic Church does not recognize the validity of my ordination or the Eucharist that we will soon celebrate, and that, too, is a sin which grieves the heart of God.
That being said, it’s not fair to blame Luther for this disunity. It was his love of the Church that gave him the courage to stand up to the injustices and abuses that he saw. Blaming Luther for the effects of the Reformation would be like blaming Darwin for debates about teaching creationism vs evolution in schools – it just doesn’t make sense to do so. But it does remind us of the importance of reforming from within instead of from the outside. But that takes time. We’re often impatient and we want to see results in our day. What happens though when we try to rush results is that the shortcuts that we take in the process are damaging.
That’s one of the things that I so admire about someone named after Martin Luther, Martin Luther King. The night before Martin Luther King was killed, he preached “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.” Reformation takes time. Whether it’s changing who you are, or changing the culture of a church, or reforming the nature of our political system, these things take time. Sometimes they take more time than we will be given. We must remind ourselves that it is God who does the work of transformation, not us. God may well use us in the process, but we might not get to see the final results. It was Reinhold Niebuhr who said “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.” Reformation takes a lot of patience, forbearance, and trust in God. And so the other way of remembering the Reformation is as an event that short-circuited that process.
So how do we remember the Reformation 500 years later? Is it something to celebrate or repent of? Yes. History is not so neat and clean as to fit completely into one category or another. It has been noted by many historians and scholars that history tends to move in 500 years cycles, which means that we’re entering into a new one. Just look at our world – because of technology, globalization, and secularization, today’s world is radically different than it was just 50 years ago. And given the likely technological breakthroughs in medicine, automation, and artificial intelligence that will come in the next 50 years, we are in for changes of exponential proportions. The question for us, as people of faith, is what will be the Church’s role in this new society?
From the Reformation, we learn of the importance of listening for the movement of the Spirit. We learn of the importance of being willing to be self-critical and making needed adjustments. We learn of the importance of unity and of the need to pursue Christian unity more vigorously in the future. But these are all methods. What is the actual core of the Christian message which the Church must proclaim today?
When Jesus was asked what is the greatest and most important things to know and practice, he responds by saying “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” This must be what Christians adopt as their core principle going forward. In our on-going reformation, we must ground ourselves in the work of loving God with everything we have – our hearts, our time, our souls, our minds, our wallets, our lives, our deaths. And likewise, showing the love of Christ to our neighbors is key – the neighbors we like and those we don’t, the neighbors we want to have and those who are given to us. And as Jesus notes, we must love our neighbors as ourselves – so we cannot neglect the importance of loving ourselves, of knowing that God’s grace saturates our being.
I don’t think I need to convince you that we need a reformation in our society, world, and church. Today, we remember the complexities of the Reformation. We give thanks for the addressing of abuses, for reformations that have led to us knowing more fully the grace of God, for the Holy Spirit which continues to guide the Church, and for the role that the Reformation had for us as Anglicans. We also repent of the division which exists in Christ’s Body and our complicity in it. And we pray that God will sow in our hearts, souls, and minds a transforming love for God and our neighbor, that we will continually be re-formed in God’s love. Amen.
