Reformation Sunday

I have taught before about how to read Scripture: 

being attentive to the literary form, the author, their purpose and what else was happening in the world around them. 

And being willing to engage the text with curiosity and wonder and ask questions about what it tells us about God. 

Understanding the context helps us more fully understand. 

 

On this Reformation Sunday, I think it’s helpful to remember that lesson.

 

The Reformation is not defined exclusively by one particular day or event, or even one person. We tell the stories about Martin Luther’s life and accomplishments – his revolt against the sale of indulgences, his writing and posting the 95 Theses, his persecution and defiance of the Church, and even the story of his marriage to Katie. 

 

But alongside these stories, we must remember the reformers who came before Luther, just as we remember those who followed him. 

 

We must recognize how the Church was reformed but it was not made uniform. Today we have both Eastern and Western traditions in Christianity, and even just within the Americas, the breadth of Protestant traditions testifies to the diversity of the Church.

 

And most importantly, we must understand that reformation is never complete and finished, over and done. 

 

The call is to be semper reformandus 

or "always reforming".

This is the ongoing work of God in, and through us.

One part of the work to which we are called is what Luther explains in his Small Catechism where he lays out the foundations of faith. 

 

With each of the Ten Commandments, Luther urges us to fear – or hold in awe – and love God because of who God is and what God does. The commandments teach us how to live in loving relationship with God, and with each other. In each article of the Apostles’ Creed and again with each petition of the Lord’s Prayer, Luther teaches us what God accomplishes for us, again because of who God is, and not from our own merit or works. 

 

But we can study and learn, 

filling our heads with history and theology, 

and still not be reformed or transformed.

 

Unless God’s work in Christ penetrates deep inside our hearts, we are left unchanged.^[i]

 

And that is work that begins in baptism and continues all through our lives because often we are the hard-hearted and stiff-necked people who we read about in Scripture. 

 

We do not believe God’s grace is for us, and we struggle mightily, like Jonah, to see it given so freely to others, too. 

 

And yet, God engages “in a holy forgetting”, “[forgiving] us our wickedness and [remembering] it no more.” (Jeremiah 31:34)

 

Writing to the Romans, the apostle Paul tells us that through the sacrifice of Jesus, God sets the world right and makes it possible for us to live in that rightness. And again, we hear that God doesn’t respond to what we do; we respond to what God does! (Romans 3:19-28, The Message)

 

Baptism is not the end - goal, but the beginning of a life of faith where we are nourished along the way by God’s love and God’s word.

 

In the same way, the rite of confirmation or affirmation of baptism we are celebrating today with Jackson, Blake, Madeleine, Caroline and Philp is not a graduation, or an ending. 

 

It is a milestone – a marker along the way – during which all of us will promise to support and pray for them in their lives in Christ. Over the last three years, these five youth have learned about Scripture, Martin Luther and the Small Catechism and they have had faith conversations with caring mentors - adults outside their families – where they could wrestle with questions, explore how to deepen their relationships with God, and decide what it looks like to live faithfully in their daily lives.

 

On your bulletin insert, you can read their confirmation verses, and why they chose them, as they name some of the promises that we have from God, and express the confidence we have in faith that God will do what God promises for us. 

 

Today we celebrate with these five youth, their families and their mentors as they take responsibility for the promises that were made on their behalf at baptism, 

and then together, 

we will continue the work that began in the Church centuries ago,

as God continues to move each one of us to live faithfully 

and we are created anew, 

reformed and transformed by God’s love. 

 

Amen.

^[i] By Heart: Conversations with Martin Luther’s Small Catechism, 7.