Always Being Reformed

Micah 6:6-8; Genesis 1 & 2, selected verses

Jan. 1, 2017

The secular calendar reads New Years Day, so Happy New Year to one and all. Let’s hope it’s a good one!

The liturgical calendar turned more than a month ago, and it begins anew in the weeks prior to Christmas with a season of waiting, of preparing, of longing, and of expectation.

So, this morning, as we walk through the gate of the secular calendar’s new year, I want to pause for a moment and cast a gaze back before looking ahead. I tend to do that every year as the calendar winds down – writing a Christmas letter to family and friends, pondering the perennial question of “resolutions,” and so on.

But this year I’m looking a bit further back. OK, way further back. Five hundred years back, in fact.

This year – 2017 – marks the 500^th anniversary of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. More accurately, come October 31, 2017, we will mark the 500^th anniversary of the 95 Theses that Martin Luther sent, on October 31, 1517, to the Bishop of Mainz. That thoroughly academic disputation about the selling of indulgences launched what we now call the Reformation. Though it’s worth noting that, as Oxford historian Diarmaid MacCulloch put it, “there were very many different Reformations.”

We Presbyterians stand in the line of one particular stream of that broad river of reform that swept across western Europe in the fifteen hundreds.

Why should any of this matter to us beyond idle historical curiosity?

Well, as Anglican Bishop Mark Dyer observed early in the present century, “about every 500 years the church feels compelled to hold a giant rummage sale.” The late Phyllis Tickle, in her landmark book, The Great Emergence, wrote, “Like every ‘new season,’ this one we recognize as the Great Emergence affects every part of our lives. In its totality, it interfaces with, and is the context for, everything we do socially, culturally, intellectually, politically, economically.”[1]

Looking back 500 years it’s easy to see that in Luther’s time political relationships across Europe were changing dramatically as early democratic impulses threated the stability of monarchies. Entire economies were transforming as mercantilism eclipsed feudalism. These changes were driven and enabled, in part, by radical advances in communication technology and the resulting freer exchange of information and ideas begun when Mainz native Johannes Gutenberg began fiddling around with moveable type in the mid-1400s.

In other words, everything was changing – and at an unprecedented pace.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see that we are living through a similar season.

Rather than moveable type, with the advent of the internet we have moveable digits, and ideas can travel around the globe almost as fast as light. You don’t have to look very hard to find economic theorist speculating about the collapse of capitalism in the face of globalism, and you really don’t have to look very far at all to find current events that call into question the political structures we have come to accept as fixed and permanent right here in the United States.

In other words, everything is changing – and at a pace that would have shocked Martin Luther.

So, what’s next? God only knows. And, hey, if the process theologians shape our thinking here, God doesn’t know either. I’m going to leave that thought aside – not because I dismiss process theology (which I don’t) but rather because whether you understand God as ruling is sovereign omniscience or not, we have no way of knowing. Thus our response to “what’s next” can either be to toss up our hands and await our unknowable fate, or to engage the present moment with the firm conviction that we can shape the moment yet to come.

I believe the roll of the church is to engage the present in faith, trusting that God is calling us to shape the moment yet to come, and to shape it in particular ways.

In fact, I believe that the church is already doing this in all kinds of ways that future historians will gather under some catch-all name like the Reformation, or, perhaps the Great Emergence.

The historian MacCulloch’s observation about “many Reformations” is profoundly helpful here. If we are, as I and many others believe, living through another Reformation time, it is helpful to understand that the first one wasn’t a single moment, a single event, a single congregation. The first Reformation was not accomplished on October 31, 1517, in Wittenberg, and the current Reformation will not happen in a single time and place either.

This brings me to an announcement of some news that a few of you have already heard. No, I’m not announcing 95 new theses!

The news is this: Martin and I have been awarded a grant from the Louisville Institute to conduct research for a proposed film documenting communities in the United States where the reformation is happening. During this 500^th-anniversary year, Martin and I will spend some time in a half-dozen or so worshipping communities talking with folks about what shapes their work and worship, and interviewing scholars, theologians, and activists who are exploring and articulating various visions of what’ next.

What’s in this for you? Well, in part, we’ve been working on the edges of this movement of the Holy Spirit for many years now, and we may be being called to engage it more directly. Whether or not we discern that intention, we are living through this sea-change together, and we have both the opportunity and the responsibility to engage it thoughtfully.

So I want to spend a few minutes this morning engaging an initial question about first principles. The guiding principles of the stream of the Reformation in which we stand are captured in a few simple statements: scripture alone, faith alone, grace alone. Or Sola Scriptura, Sola Fide, Sola Gratia, because everything sounds better in Latin. In other words, scripture and not the Roman Catholic church, is the highest authority; our faith and not our good works makes us right with God; and God’s grace not anything we do saves us.

Standing in the line of John Calvin, we add his great watchwords: we are the church Reformed and always being reformed.

I chose the readings this morning, from Genesis and Micah, because I believe they point to principles that ought to guide what’s next for the faith. The creation stories of Genesis tell us that human beings are made in the image and likeness of the Creator, and thus, for me, this principle emerges: if each human being bears within the image and likeness of God then our worshipping communities ought to center on practices of faith and life that honor that in every single human being.

Micah 6:8 articulates the general principles that ought to shape those practices of faith and life: do justice; love kindness; walk humbly with God.

Those are my starting points. What others would you suggest?

In looking at what other worshipping communities are doing, what questions would you ask of them?

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One of my convictions, as we engage this project during the coming year, is that the work of reformation begins at table and is, in a profound way, centered there. Thus it is good and right and appropriate that we begin the year together at table.

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[1] Phyllis Tickle, The Great Emergence (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2008) 14. Tickle cites Bishop Dyer and is the source for the paraphrase of his observation.