Nine Theses
Matthew 5:1-12
October 30, 2011
When Martin Luther posted his famous 95 theses on the door of the Wittenberg church, on October 31, 1517, he could not have imagined that his act of ecclesiastical disobedience was part of a larger movement that would give birth not only to a new church but also to an entirely new social order. If he had known that where once there was one Christian church in time there would literally thousands of denominations, perhaps he would not have been so bold. Perhaps he would have said, “let somebody else take the heat.” Perhaps he would have been frightened by the very forces of faith and liberty he helped unleash.
But his time demanded a response of conscience and so Luther said, “here I stand, I can do no other.”
Jesus, 1,500 years before Luther, walked up the mountainside, sat down to teach, and said, in effect, the same thing. “This is what I believe, I can say nothing else.” Rather than 95 theses concerning the life of the church, Jesus offered up a simple list of blessings that framed his vision of the kingdom of God, the commonwealth of the beloved.
We, the heirs of Jesus’ vision and of Luther’s original impulse for reform, live with a church and a social order in similar need of new vision and reformation. Where, then, shall we stand?
Considering the magnitude of the Reformation – whose founding gesture we celebrate today – it may strike you as overstating the case to suggest that the present moment calls for change of similar scale.
On the other hand, look around. If ever a time cried out for being reformed on a massive scale, it is our time.
Thomas Merton, writing 40 years ago, named our times this way:
… we are confused, empty and discontented. We have no spiritual and ethical center. We do not have the motives which would enable us to build a peaceful world, because we do not have a sufficient reason to restrain our violence.[1]
I reach for Merton’s voice to underscore that the present crisis reaches far beyond the Tea Party movement or Occupy Wall Street. It encompasses but is not reducible to the Arab Spring or the movements of radical Islam or fundamentalist Christianity. It includes the collapse of Christendom in Europe and the end of the Protestant Establishment in America. It is marked by and recorded through world-changing advances in communication technologies on the one hand, and world-threatening advances and uses of industrial technologies on the other.
They are all symptoms of a far deeper and considerably older crisis that accompanies the twilight of modernity.
We are living in a period of multiple crises, but each is first and foremost spiritual in nature. The present moment inescapably calls forth a new way of living together.
There is a sense, of course, in which every age, every epoch, calls forth a new way of being that breaks with the orthodoxy of any given moment. Indeed, as Brian McClaren points out in A Generous Orthodoxy,
In the Middle Ages, “straight thinking” was a kind of government function – like right business practices, similarly enforceable by censorship, imprisonment, torture, inquisition, and massacre. In the Modern Era, protest and conquest were the spirit of the age, so “right opinions” were one’s ticket to power and dominance. But in the world that is emerging out of roots in the modern and medieval worlds, perhaps we will believe again that the meek will inherit the earth and that truth is a treasure not best found or held through coercion and threat or competition and dominance, but by humble seeking, sincere faith, resilient hope, patient love.[2]
You can hear in McClaren’s description echoes of the Beatitudes: “perhaps we will believe again that the meek will inherit the earth.” As that suggests, Jesus faced his own time in the spirit of reformation. The meek were certainly not inheriting the earth in first-century Palestine; the poor in spirit dwelled far from the kingdom of heaven; peacemakers were called many things – but children of God was no more likely then than it is today.
Yet from under the thumb of an oppressive empire, Jesus cast a vision of a future otherwise that still animates dreams and visions 2,000 years later. Likewise, from under the thumb of an oppressive church, Martin Luther cast a vision of a future otherwise that still empowers the church 500 years later. Just as Jesus proclaimed in his time and Luther in his, so I say to you today: another world is possible. Another world is possible.
But it is not inevitable. It will not simply come with the rising of the sun and the breaking of a new dawn.
God calls it forth in sovereign love. But, in freedom we have the capacity to remain enslaved to the present time. In brokenness we can choose to remain broken. In sin we can continue to turn away from God and from the future that God is calling forth.
What does that future look like? The future of God’s imagining?
Jesus captured its spirit and cast a vision from the mountaintop when he cried out for a community of passion and compassion – a community in which the mourners would be comforted and in which lights of faith, hope and love would be lifted high against the darkness; a community in which the poor are blessed and peacemakers are called the children of God; a community of compassion structured by a politics of love and justice.
Where, today, can we find our own Martin Luther? Where, today, can we find people willing to forego security for the sake of conscience? Where, today, can we find a community of reformation unafraid to declare boldly to the world that there are at least 95 more things that need to change?
Well, as I have said to you before, we are the ones who we’ve been waiting for. The task of our time is to name the present age accurately and to cast a vision of a future otherwise.
The present way of ordering and arranging our economic life is inadequate and incomplete, the present way of ordering and arranging our political life is inadequate and incomplete, the present way of ordering and arranging international affairs is inadequate and incomplete. These may sound like political or social concerns, but they are first and foremost theological concerns and our response to them must be grounded in the vision that Jesus casts in the Sermon on the Mount.
The vast economic inequality and growing gap between the haves and the have nots is an affront to the gospel. The consolidation of political power in the hands of the wealthy at the expense of the poor is an affront to the gospel. War is an affront to the gospel.
And yet the church, too timid and tepid to lift again the banner of reformation, acquiesces quietly to a status quo that relegates spiritual questions to the confines of private life all but oblivious to the deep and public spiritual crisis of our age.
Where is the church? Where is the community of compassion that can respond to this crisis of spirit? Where is the vision of a future otherwise?
Unfortunately, the present way of ordering and arranging our spiritual life is also inadequate and incomplete.
Nevertheless, here we stand. We can do no other. Therefore, let us offer, as mere bullet points, and by way of invitation, a glimpse at the church of the second reformation.
This is the age of Facebook posts, so there’s no way the world will sit still long enough for 95 theses. So, let’s start with a tenth of that: nine theses for the community of compassion and transformation.
Remember that Luther’s theses did not set in motion a singular new institution, but instead began a long journey into new ways of being together.
Perhaps we may use this shorter list as bread for our journey together here, as we try in our own time and place to be faithful to Jesus’ founding vision of a community that lived in recognition that the kingdom of God was near at hand.
As we welcome new members into this community today, and, in a few minutes, as we begin thinking anew and afresh about some basic structures of support and staffing for this community, may we be guided by commitments such as these, watered by the wellspring of our own tradition, and rooted and grounded deeply in our trust in the love of God, the grace of Christ and the communion of the Spirit. Amen.
________________________________________
[1] Thomas Merton, Peace in the Post-Christian Era (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2004) 19. This volume of Merton’s work went unpublished for more than 40 years. For a description of the controversy surrounding the work, see the introduction by Patricia A. Burton.
[2] Brian D. McClaren, A Generous Orthodoxy (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervans, 2004) 294.
Rev. Dr. David Ensign
October 30, 2011
When Martin Luther posted his famous 95 theses on the door of the Wittenberg church, on October 31, 1517, he could not have imagined that his act of ecclesiastical disobedience was part of a larger movement that would give birth not only to a new church but also to an entirely new social order. If he had known that where once there was one Christian church in time there would literally thousands of denominations, perhaps he would not have been so bold. Perhaps he would have said, “let somebody else take the heat.” Perhaps he would have been frightened by the very forces of faith and liberty he helped unleash.
But his time demanded a response of conscience and so Luther said, “here I stand, I can do no other.”
Jesus, 1,500 years before Luther, walked up the mountainside, sat down to teach, and said, in effect, the same thing. “This is what I believe, I can say nothing else.” Rather than 95 theses concerning the life of the church, Jesus offered up a simple list of blessings that framed his vision of the kingdom of God, the commonwealth of the beloved.
We, the heirs of Jesus’ vision and of Luther’s original impulse for reform, live with a church and a social order in similar need of new vision and reformation. Where, then, shall we stand?
Considering the magnitude of the Reformation – whose founding gesture we celebrate today – it may strike you as overstating the case to suggest that the present moment calls for change of similar scale.
On the other hand, look around. If ever a time cried out for being reformed on a massive scale, it is our time.
Thomas Merton, writing 40 years ago, named our times this way:
… we are confused, empty and discontented. We have no spiritual and ethical center. We do not have the motives which would enable us to build a peaceful world, because we do not have a sufficient reason to restrain our violence.[1]
I reach for Merton’s voice to underscore that the present crisis reaches far beyond the Tea Party movement or Occupy Wall Street. It encompasses but is not reducible to the Arab Spring or the movements of radical Islam or fundamentalist Christianity. It includes the collapse of Christendom in Europe and the end of the Protestant Establishment in America. It is marked by and recorded through world-changing advances in communication technologies on the one hand, and world-threatening advances and uses of industrial technologies on the other.
They are all symptoms of a far deeper and considerably older crisis that accompanies the twilight of modernity.
We are living in a period of multiple crises, but each is first and foremost spiritual in nature. The present moment inescapably calls forth a new way of living together.
There is a sense, of course, in which every age, every epoch, calls forth a new way of being that breaks with the orthodoxy of any given moment. Indeed, as Brian McClaren points out in A Generous Orthodoxy,
In the Middle Ages, “straight thinking” was a kind of government function – like right business practices, similarly enforceable by censorship, imprisonment, torture, inquisition, and massacre. In the Modern Era, protest and conquest were the spirit of the age, so “right opinions” were one’s ticket to power and dominance. But in the world that is emerging out of roots in the modern and medieval worlds, perhaps we will believe again that the meek will inherit the earth and that truth is a treasure not best found or held through coercion and threat or competition and dominance, but by humble seeking, sincere faith, resilient hope, patient love.[2]
You can hear in McClaren’s description echoes of the Beatitudes: “perhaps we will believe again that the meek will inherit the earth.” As that suggests, Jesus faced his own time in the spirit of reformation. The meek were certainly not inheriting the earth in first-century Palestine; the poor in spirit dwelled far from the kingdom of heaven; peacemakers were called many things – but children of God was no more likely then than it is today.
Yet from under the thumb of an oppressive empire, Jesus cast a vision of a future otherwise that still animates dreams and visions 2,000 years later. Likewise, from under the thumb of an oppressive church, Martin Luther cast a vision of a future otherwise that still empowers the church 500 years later. Just as Jesus proclaimed in his time and Luther in his, so I say to you today: another world is possible. Another world is possible.
But it is not inevitable. It will not simply come with the rising of the sun and the breaking of a new dawn.
God calls it forth in sovereign love. But, in freedom we have the capacity to remain enslaved to the present time. In brokenness we can choose to remain broken. In sin we can continue to turn away from God and from the future that God is calling forth.
What does that future look like? The future of God’s imagining?
Jesus captured its spirit and cast a vision from the mountaintop when he cried out for a community of passion and compassion – a community in which the mourners would be comforted and in which lights of faith, hope and love would be lifted high against the darkness; a community in which the poor are blessed and peacemakers are called the children of God; a community of compassion structured by a politics of love and justice.
Where, today, can we find our own Martin Luther? Where, today, can we find people willing to forego security for the sake of conscience? Where, today, can we find a community of reformation unafraid to declare boldly to the world that there are at least 95 more things that need to change?
Well, as I have said to you before, we are the ones who we’ve been waiting for. The task of our time is to name the present age accurately and to cast a vision of a future otherwise.
The present way of ordering and arranging our economic life is inadequate and incomplete, the present way of ordering and arranging our political life is inadequate and incomplete, the present way of ordering and arranging international affairs is inadequate and incomplete. These may sound like political or social concerns, but they are first and foremost theological concerns and our response to them must be grounded in the vision that Jesus casts in the Sermon on the Mount.
The vast economic inequality and growing gap between the haves and the have nots is an affront to the gospel. The consolidation of political power in the hands of the wealthy at the expense of the poor is an affront to the gospel. War is an affront to the gospel.
And yet the church, too timid and tepid to lift again the banner of reformation, acquiesces quietly to a status quo that relegates spiritual questions to the confines of private life all but oblivious to the deep and public spiritual crisis of our age.
Where is the church? Where is the community of compassion that can respond to this crisis of spirit? Where is the vision of a future otherwise?
Unfortunately, the present way of ordering and arranging our spiritual life is also inadequate and incomplete.
Nevertheless, here we stand. We can do no other. Therefore, let us offer, as mere bullet points, and by way of invitation, a glimpse at the church of the second reformation.
This is the age of Facebook posts, so there’s no way the world will sit still long enough for 95 theses. So, let’s start with a tenth of that: nine theses for the community of compassion and transformation.
Remember that Luther’s theses did not set in motion a singular new institution, but instead began a long journey into new ways of being together.
Perhaps we may use this shorter list as bread for our journey together here, as we try in our own time and place to be faithful to Jesus’ founding vision of a community that lived in recognition that the kingdom of God was near at hand.
As we welcome new members into this community today, and, in a few minutes, as we begin thinking anew and afresh about some basic structures of support and staffing for this community, may we be guided by commitments such as these, watered by the wellspring of our own tradition, and rooted and grounded deeply in our trust in the love of God, the grace of Christ and the communion of the Spirit. Amen.
________________________________________
[1] Thomas Merton, Peace in the Post-Christian Era (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2004) 19. This volume of Merton’s work went unpublished for more than 40 years. For a description of the controversy surrounding the work, see the introduction by Patricia A. Burton.
[2] Brian D. McClaren, A Generous Orthodoxy (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervans, 2004) 294.
Rev. Dr. David Ensign
posted by David Ensign at
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