Remembering the Reformation

But whether he nailed them or mailed them, he set in motion the events, which we now call the Protestant Reformation. And today you and I are different persons, different personalities from what we would have been because the Reformation happened. And we live in a nation whose ethos, culture, institutions are different from what they would have been if the Reformation had not happened. Reformation, therefore, has to do with our identity as persons, as citizens, and above all as believers. An incident is worthwhile to remember, to recall our identity as a way of affirming our deepest convictions. Yet a sermon on the Reformation is something of a contradiction in terms, for all the reformers, with that exception, insisted that sermons should be the simple, plain, unadorned exposition and application of Scripture.

Indeed, it was this emphasis upon the sermon as the center of worship and the sermon as the intelligible exposition of Scripture that shaped our communities and that shaped our lives. Yet, a sermon on remembering the Reformation is not altogether out of place against the background of the Reformation and also in the context of two factors, two movements or events in our time which force us to take the Reformation more seriously and therefore to take Scripture more seriously. There is justification, it seems to me, in using the Reformation, the secular humanist pluralistic context of the Christian community’s life today, and the emergence of Islam rather than communism as a primary alternative to Christian faith in our world, as the context in which we can understand more clearly the significance of the words of our text from Paul’s letter to the Romans.

If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek. The same Lord is Lord of all and bestows his riches upon all who call upon him. For everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved. And how are men to call upon Him in whom they have not believed, and how are they to believe in Him of whom they have never heard? So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes from the preaching of Christ. What do these words mean for us as individuals, as witnesses to the Christian faith, and as a congregation which lives by hearing the Word of God in our particular time. Well, let us begin with the Reformation background, and let us note, first of all, that the Reformation had its origin in the bruised spirits and the aggrieved consciences of human beings.

Historians have sought for a long time to find the origins of the Reformation in large major economic forces and nationalist forces and political forces are the social movements of the time. Some have even found it in the difference between the temperament of people in Northern Europe, from the temperament of people in Southern Europe. And one of the more popular explanations of the Reformation, even among Protestants themselves, is that it was a reaction against the breakdown of morals in society, but in particular the breakdown of morals and the corruption of the church. But it is becoming increasingly clear that the Reformation cannot be explained in terms of economic and political and social factors, And nor can it be explained in terms of a reaction to corruptions in the church.

The decisive origin of the Reformation was in the bruised spirits and the aggrieved consciences of human beings in the presence of God amid the chaotic events of history. For Martin Luther, the fundamental human problem is not political, and neither was it economic, and neither was it social. The primary human problem was in the anguish and the guilt of a sinful person in the presence of a righteous God. For Zwingli in Zurich and Calvin in Geneva, there was a slightly different emphasis upon the desperate need of lonely individuals in a hostile world adrift to hear word of God and to find in that word the purpose and the meaning of their lives. What does it mean to be a human being? And how does a human being stand in the presence of God, the ground and source of one’s existence, in the presence of God to whom one is unconditionally obligated and responsible?

How does one meet the crises and challenges of life with the serenity and the dignity and poise of those who trust in the living God. Medieval Catholicism had lost its ability to answer these basic questions. It suggested that these questions could be answered by pilgrimages, by buying indulgences, by various human works, and if medieval Catholicism had existed today, it would have added by joining a cause whereby we certify and prove ourselves righteous before God and guarantee the completion of our lives. Increasingly, the Church was preoccupied with the concerns of its own existence. The revenues of the church were used in an alarming degree to construct baroque buildings away from the congregation, to enhance a curia, which we today would call a bureaucracy, a church structure that did not mediate the grace of God to wounded human hearts.

Now, today, we no longer experience guilt in the same way that Luther did, nor meaninglessness. But if modern people do not experience guilt, as Luther did, they surely experience it in that strange and pervasive awareness of the disparity between what we know God intended us to be and what we know we actually are. The guilt we feel about the unfulfilled possibilities of our lives, the possibilities that lie beyond our highest efforts. We may not feel guilty before God, but we feel guilty that we have been poor parents, or not successful in our careers, or that we do not love. There can be no question, I think, that people in our time experience the same anguish in the presence of historical forces which overwhelm us and threaten our future.

We become frantic before the threat of a nuclear holocaust. We become angry or pathologically guilty in the midst of racial conflicts. Even with the marvels of modern science, we no less than medieval people know that the world is not responsive to our wishes. The Reformation began in the awareness that the basic human problem is not economic, political, or social, but theological. And it moved from that to give a theological answer to that problem. It is true enough that political, economic and social forces influence the Reformation, yet with an amazing unanimity, the reformers all refused to identify the gospel with any ambiguous human cause. The Marxists have never forgiven Luther. His refusal to allow the gospel to be identified with the cause of the peasants. slogans in our time is the priority of our causes, in particular the priority of ministering to human need, to feed the hungry, to visit the sick, and especially to visit those poor lost souls in our jails.

All of us ought to do more than that, and one ought not to be put in the situation of having to choose between feeding the hungry and preaching the gospel. And yet, it’s critically important for us to keep our priorities in proper order. If one did have to choose, it is more important to preach the gospel. When we have fed a hungry person and the hungry person is satisfied, all the problems of human existence still remain. Human beings do not live by bread alone, nor do we live by political planning or social engineering. The simple fact is we all die by these things unless there is a word of grace, the gospel, the fundamental need of every human being to be told about the grace that lies behind every human life, the purpose that called every human life into existence, the power God to enter into our human affairs in Jesus Christ and on the cross bear our sins and to forgive sin without destroying the moral structure of the universe and our hope of eternal life.

This is what we need above all else and And without this, nothing else really matters very much. Martin Luther put it with a great deal of flair as he did most things. He one time said, Life among us is as bad as it is among the Papist. We are no better than the Papist. We do not fight and damn them because they live evil lives. I do not consider myself to be pious. But when it comes to whether one teaches correctly about the Word of God, there I take my stand and fight. That is my calling. To contest doctrine has never happened until now. Others have fought over life, but to take doctrine, that is to grab the goose by the net. When the word of God remains pure, even if quality of life fails us, we still have hope. The fundamental issue is Luther knew was not whether we are more moral, not whether we are better fed than other people, or whether we have better social ministries, or whether we have the right understanding of what it is to be a human being.

This is the basic fact, especially what it means to be a human being in the presence of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. The Reformation understood the fundamental human problem as theological, and it sought to give a theological answer to that problem, which it believed was the Church’s greatest service and great mission in the world. And now let us come a step further and note that having seen the human problem as theological, and having given a theological answer to it, the Protestant Reformation mightily shaped human life on this planet. Herbert Butterfield, one of the most distinguished historians of this century, once said that the Church has influenced society most, not when it has tried to take society by the neck as it were and order it around, but it has influenced society most when it has been most responsible in doing what that by which the church lives, namely preaching, teaching the Word of God, and ministering the sacraments, and exercising pastoral care.

As has already been intimated, I was for a number of years, 11 years, pastor of the Presbyterian Church in northern Alabama, and one of the great theological problems I had to face with how to say that whether or not Auburn, Alabama won a football game was a relatively unimportant event in the ongoing of human history without antagonizing people. Then it suddenly discovered me, just occurred to me, that 70 or 80,000 people as then would gather to see Auburn, Alabama play the last Saturday in November. That’s a very impressive spectacle without the rituals and our religious dimensions that have been incorporated in the football games. Very impressive. But on calculation it became clear that within 25 miles of the stadium, a radius of 25 miles, more people gathered to hear the word of God preached on Sunday morning.

This is a fact that is designed mightily to shape human history. And to quote Butterfield again, historians have wrongfully minimized the impact of the preaching of the Word of God upon congregations which gather Sunday after Sunday. It is through the hearing of the Word of God that But life in our society is shaped. Mr. Jefferson talked to establish University of Virginia as a very secular institution, and it maintains its secular identity. But at times it has had devoted Presbyterian elders as president, who on Sunday morning heard the word of God and confessed the apostle’s creed, and the church was on the campus of the University of Virginia. We have many task forces on disarmament. But how does the church influence disarmament? Well, it influences it through a Presbyterian elder named James Woolsey, a former Rhodes Scholar, who reads Reinhold Niebuhr who was in church on Sunday, and who has participated in almost every one of the negotiations with the Russians.

That is the way the church transforms society. When the church does its task of preaching the gospel, the gospel which if the church does not declare, no one else will declare, it mightily shapes human history. It has done so in the past. It does so today in numerous communities across this land. Now, let me come a step further and note that we not only hear this word from Romans, that if we confess with our lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in our hearts that God raised him from the dead, we shall be saved. We hear this word not only against the backdrop of the Reformation, which understood the fundamental human problem to be theological. We hear it also in the context of a secular, pluralistic society which erodes basic fundamental Christian commitments.

One of the unquestioned dogmas of a secular society is simply that there is no such thing his revelation, and that there are many roads to God, all of them equally benign or equally harmless however the case may be. In a secular society, people who are not tolerant politically, socially, and economically regard it beyond the boundaries of politeness and niceness to refer to religious differences. Indus secularism in our society is increasingly taking its toll, and I have watched it in the civic club to which I belong in Richmond, Virginia. A few years ago, I was always impressed with the fervency of the prayers in that civic club and the clarity with which some identified their Christian commitments. Today we no longer have prayers, we have short lectures to the Kiwanis Club, not addresses to deity, really, or at least the person to give them have not reflected on what it would be to address something to deity if there is a deity, and there is no mention of Jesus Christ.

And even in our church school literature and elsewhere, we substitute CE and BCE for BC and AD. The erosion of a secular society has penetrated to the very life, heart of the church’s life, and many of the fundamental doctrines on which the Church exists are now at risk. Doctrines which are at issue in the secular culture are those upon which the Church is based. Does the triune God act personally in the created order? Or to put it practically, when we pray, does anyone hear the conviction that the God who created the world. The word, the mind of God in God’s self-expression became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth, fully God and fully man. That God in Christ bore our sins and that when evil men thought to do away with him, God raised Jesus Christ from the dead, vindicating his life and his words, and and that when we die, there is hope of life with God.

Ambassador Kennan, who I understand once worshipped in this congregation, once said in the Princeton Chapel that the most dreary thing in all the world was the Communist funeral, where the meaninglessness of life is expounded by the meaninglessness of death. And he quoted Ambassador Bohlen as saying that communism would never really grasp the hearts of people because it did not have an answer to the problem of death. Well, a secular society forces or invades the church and beguiles us into minimizing the clarity with which we affirm our Christian faith, not simply as something that is meaningful to us, but it’s true. When we say that God raised Jesus Christ from the dead, we do not mean this as a beautiful symbol. We do not mean this is a beautiful assertion.

We mean that God actually raised Jesus Christ from the dead. This is a faith that constitutes the church, and this is a faith that is at risk in a secular and pluralistic society. Very interesting to read a comment written a while back which I would like to quote, as a consequence of the modern theory of religious freedom, the churches find themselves in an anomalous position. Inwardly to their communicants, they continue to assert they possess the only complete version of truth, but outwardly in their civic relation with other churches and with civil power, they preach and practice tolerance. The separation of church and state involves more than a mythological difficulty for churchmen, it involves a deep psychological difficulty for members of the congregation.

Then he goes on to say, The human soul is not so divided in compartments that man can be indifferent in one part of his soul, firmly believing in another. And he continues. That statement was written by Walter Lippmann in 1929. And what he wrote in 1929 is increasingly clear with clinical accuracy in our society. There are theological bases in which people can respect the rights of other people in the same society without compromising the uniqueness, the identity, the Christian Protestant and Reformed identity of the Christian community. And then moving one step further. This whole issue is sharply focused for us now by the emergence of Islam as a primary alternative to Christian faith in the world. For the past 100 years, communism has been the primary option other than Christian faith in the world.

And many Christians even found communism very beguiling. The communists were very happy to have Christian allies. They used words which had symbolic meaning and which Christians filled with their own meaning. Justice, equality, community, peace. Of course, the fundamental fact is I do not know of anybody who is not for peace. And I do not know of anybody who’s not for justice. The real question is, what is justice? And the real question is, how do you get peace? But the use of these words was very beguiling. And many Christians went off to Prague to the Communist Peace Conference because they thought this was for peace. Today, the Communist claims to be a faith that satisfies basic human needs. The human needs of what it is to be a person, the human needs of what it is to be physically alive in this world have been exposed to be flawed, inadequate, and ineffective.

And in this place there is emerging Islam, which is an entirely different problem, as was illustrated recently in the Rushdie affair, when Khomeini decreed the execution of the author of the Satanic verses. The real problem for us is what this crisis revealed about liberal society in Britain, and one would have to say also in America when the issue is fully raised here. British society was very willing to accept the Islamic community into the liberal society on the same basis it accepted all other people. And it expected the Islamic group to accommodate themselves to the general consensus of this British society. Great Britain, as our society, gave almost sacred status to the right of racial minorities, ethnic minorities, nationalistic minorities, cultural minorities, and they were very happy to accept the Islamic people on this basis.

But the Islamic community said very clearly, we do not want to be accepted in British society on the basis of race or ethnic origin or nationality or culture. We want to be accepted here as a people of faith who believe and who not only believe but who believe that what we say is fact, and who intend to establish in Britain an Islamic society with Islamic values. There was no adequate answer that a liberal, pluralistic, and secular society could give to the rusty affair. For one thing, two, basic rights guaranteed in so many contemporary documents, It’s the right to free speech, the right to freedom of religion, cancel each other out. And we’re in a situation where you could not have both at the same time. The Islamic emergence confronts us with difficult problems, but it forces us to face issues that otherwise we did not have the courage to face and to address in our own particular society.

One can think of communism as God’s judgment on the Christian community for its moral lethargy. By the same token, it seems to me, one can think of the rise of Islam as an alternative to Christian faith, as God’s judgment upon the spiritual anemia and the vacillating faith commitments and the uncertain identity of Protestant churches. And if history tells us anything, Christian communities, without clarity concerning the identity, cannot survive in an Islamic society. Well, this is the context in which we hear these words. If one confesses with one’s lips that Jesus is Lord, if one believes in one’s heart, that God raised him from the dead, there is salvation. We hear that now in the context of the Reformation which we remember and the social pluralistic society in which we live and which continually erodes the distinctiveness of our faith and And over against the challenge of the Islamic community, you and I are, as today, of a great heritage.

We are first of all Christians, Christians of the Nicene Creed and the Apostles Creed. And we are Protestant and we are reformed. And this is a great heritage. You and I are different people, and the United States of America is certainly a different nation from what it would have been without the Protestant Reformation. Many of those aspects of our common life today, which we regard as most precious, are derived from the Protestant Reformation, from Puritanism, and from the evangelical awakening. And for that, we must be deeply grateful. Those who have gone before have sacrificed and have lived and bequeathed to us a goodly heritage. In the words of Luther’s hymn, that they knew what it was to let goods and kindred go this mortal life also, the body they may kill. God’s truth abided still. His kingdom is forever. And in response, we can but pray, exclaim, and sing, they climb the steep ascent of heaven through peril, toil, and pain, O God to us, may grace be given to follow in their train. Amen.