October 26, 2021
Reformation
The righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, 23since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; 24they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. (Romans 3: 22-24)
This weekend we will celebrate more than Halloween. We also get to celebrate the Reformation. It can be hard to talk about the Reformation and its implications succinctly. Luckily, in my former congregation we had an expert in Reformation studies, the Rev. Dr. Mark Ellingsen. He wrote this four years ago when we were celebrating Luther 500, and I asked his permission to share it with you. If you enjoy this work he has many books and articles for you to dig into further, one article is wrote is 50 things Luther taught that you may not know.
God’s Peace,
Pastor Tim
REFORMATION 500: SO WHAT?
By: Rev. Dr. Mark Ellingsen
October 31, 1517, 500 years ago this Halloween, a young German Catholic monk Martin Luther started the Reformation, composing 95 Theses for Christians to debate. Luther had finally come to the conclusion after careful study of the Bible that its main message is that God loves us with no strings attached (justification by grace through faith). Most Catholics were teaching you had to do something to earn God’s love first in order to get it. (Many Americans still believe that polls tell us.) And in 1517 the Church was undergirding that idea by selling Indulgences (encouraging the faithful to purchase certificates of forgiveness which get dead loved ones out of purgatory and into heaven quicker -- to buy God's love with money and works). Luther and some allies at the university where he taught took a stand against this practice in order to get the Church to take God’s unconditional love more seriously. Unfortunately, what the young monk did got him in trouble. Instead of following Luther's suggestions about reforming the Church, the Pope kicked him out (and so all the rest of us who agree with him have been kicked out too). Always remember the Lutheran Church is an accident, not what Luther wanted, and he and his followers wanted to be called Evangelical Catholics. (Lutheranism is just a name that was made up by critics of Luther to make fun of him.) While by contrast the other Protestant churches all walked out of Catholicism.
Has the Reformation been worth it? Was it a good thing? How much is believing and teaching that God loves you with no strings attached worth to you? If you want more stress on works, then wouldn’t it be better if the Reformation hadn’t happened, because then we’d all be one? Luther himself would like us all to be one, as long as the Pope and his Bishops preached justification by grace too. And if you study cutting-edge Catholic theology and ecumenism, that’s starting to happen. Oh, but Luther didn’t want all that other Catholic stuff. Wrong! He loved Catholic worship, Catholic ways of doing Church, and even called Mary the Mother of God. How about the Bible? Sure Luther stressed Bible study, pretty much like we are now. For him the Bible was a story in which you find yourself in the characters of the Bible stories, see yourself as part of the church to which the Epistles were written. Guess what. Some Catholic Biblical scholars including Pope Benedict XVI read the Bible that way too today. If you like God’s no-strings-attached love and think of the Bible as a Story, then don’t forget to thank God for the Reformation amidst all the trick-and-treating this month.