Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Today we celebrate the 503rd anniversary of the Reformation, recognized on October 31st each year. While the Reformation is rooted in history, it is a movement toward the future.
As we celebrate the bold actions that Martin Luther took to hold the Church accountable, and recognize his place in the collection of reformers who challenged wrong when they saw it, we celebrate a Church where the Holy Spirit gathers us around word and sacrament; where God hears our cries for mercy and pours out abundant grace; and where the Spirit leads us into Christ’s future with glad and generous hearts.[i]
This year we have had to learn how to be the gathered church without being in the same building, or sometimes, even the same state, as is the case when members who have moved away or others who are on vacation worship online. And while we lament and grieve the losses and some of the ways that we are different now, we also have confidence that God is at work, that it is the Holy Spirit who gathers us together in Christ, and the Holy Spirit is not constrained or confined to one location.
We have also had to learn what it means to gather around word and sacrament, when physical touch is discouraged. We’ve turned new attention to the significance of our rituals and been curious about the longings people have for them and we have had to re-form what they look like. This re-forming and re-shaping has always been the legacy of the sixteenth-century Reformation.
In the midst of the pandemic and changes to how we gather and worship, the truth that we know, the truth that frees us in Christ, is that, through it all, God remains steadfast and in our midst. As the psalmist declares in Psalm 46,
God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change.[ii]
This is the psalm that was the basis for Martin Luther’s Reformation hymn “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” where he wrote,
though hordes of devils fill the land, all threatening to devour us, we tremble not, unmoved we stand; they cannot overpower us.[iii]
Against the evil in the world, God is our refuge and fortress, a hiding place where we can rest safe and secure. And God hears our cries for mercy , and pours out abundant grace.
Describing this wellspring of saving grace, German Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote:
The past and future of our whole lives are merged in one in the presence of God.
The whole of the past is comprised in the word forgiveness.
The whole of the future is in safe keeping in the faithfulness of God.[iv]
Forgiveness and faithfulness.
And thankfully, neither one depend on my effort or ability. These are God’s actions toward us. It is God who forgives us when we sin; in the borrowed words prayed by the Jewish people at Yom Kippur, when,:[v]
We abuse, we betray, we are cruel.
We destroy, we embitter, we falsify.
We gossip, we hate, we insult.
We jeer, we kill, we lie.
We mock, we neglect, we oppress.
We pervert, we quarrel, we rebel.
We steal, we transgress, we are unkind.
We are violent, we are wicked, we are xenophobic.
We yield to evil, we are zealots for bad causes.
It is God who forgives us –
God who created the whole world and loves us too much to let judgment and death have the final word against us when we are convicted by our sin.
Recalling Bonhoeffer again, he wrote:
We who once were lost, now are found in Christ and made members of his Body. In the rescuing light of God’s word, we become aware of the God who loves us; we see our neighbors and their need…[vi]
Forgiven by God, we are sent into the world,
where the Spirit is leading us into Christ’s future –
into a future freed from contention and divisiveness,
a future freed from strife or envy, ill will or spite.[vii]
And so, we go, with glad and generous hearts,
trusting God to guide our thinking and speaking, and to strengthen us by grace.
Let us pray…[viii]
O God,
you have called your servants to ventures of which we cannot see the ending,
by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown.
Give us faith to go out with good courage,
not knowing where we go,
but only that your hand is leading us and your love supporting us; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
[i] from Reformation 500 Sourcebook, copyright © 2016 Augsburg Fortress.
[ii] Psalm 46:1-2
[iii] “A Mighty Fortress is our God”, excerpt from v. 3.
[iv] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1962), 79–80.
[v] The confession from Yom Kippur evening service, Mahzor for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, ed. Rabbi Jules Harlow (New York: Rabbinical Assembly, 1972), 403, 405.
[vi] Bonhoeffer.
[vii] “Where True Charity and Love Abide.” Text: Latin hymn, 9th cent. Translation © 1995, 2001 Augsburg Fortress.
[viii] Eric Milner-White and George Wallace Briggs, Daily Prayer (London: Oxford, 1941), 14; reprinted in Evangelical Lutheran Worship (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2006), 317.
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