At the end of October every year we celebrate the Reformation, the beginning of our church. It began with a revelation Martin Luther had while studying the New Testament. Immersed in a faith that was bound by tradition and rules Luther’s understanding of God reflected that rigidity. Things were simple. There was a heaven and a hell. If you did what you were told, followed all the laws and went to church on Sundays and all the Holy days of obligation you went to heaven. If not you went to hell. It was a religion that had no flexibility, no grace and law was more important than love.

What Luther discovered was not new; it was the good news itself. Paul probably stated this rediscovery most clearly in the book of Ephesians; for by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God-- not the result of works, so that no one may boast. (Ephesians 2:8) From this beginning Luther began to understand more and more that God was not distant and angry but very present, and in fact, was a loving tolerant God that wished joy and life for all people everywhere. A Revelation like this cannot be kept silent. Luther began to teach this good news in his classes and it spread like wildfire across Germany. From that beginning the majority of the protestant church was born. It was not that Luther was alone in this revelation; he just had the advantage of local rulers and university officials that were encouraging and willing to protect him from the persecution that had ended all the previous attempts to reform the church.

The essence of reformation is change. But it is change that makes the central message of God’s love in Jesus Christ clearer to the people that need to hear it. It does not change the message itself. Luther in his time did this by translating the Bible into the language that people spoke instead of insisting that it be read in Latin simply because that was the language the church had decided upon over a thousand years before. This change or reformation has to keep up with each passing generation.

The Lutheran Church believes this so strongly that it is written into our core doctrines. We understand ourselves not as a church or denomination but as a reforming movement within the one true church. In other words we are a reformation people, a people committed to making the changes to our worship and practice that are needed to make sure that the Good News is understood by every generation. @TEOTD TATI.

Did you understand the last sentence of the previous paragraph? I had to get it off the internet. @TEOTD TATI is an acronym that young people today use to text message. It is something that most of us over thirty can’t make sense of. This particular acronym means “at the end of the day, that’s all there is.” I used it to make a point about church and change, it is easy for us to sit in our pew and think that nothing has changed and that the way we proclaim the Good News should be good enough for our children and their children after them. After all, the Gospel is unchanging and we speak the same language. But if you did not recognize the text message acronyms then you don’t speak the same language that the youth of America do today and the reformation needs to continue.

Luther’s reformation was not a comfortable thing. There was not just vocal argument, there was bloodshed and war. Yet through the difficulties the change made the Gospel available to millions of people who were caught in a web of law and tradition and did not know the love of God. If we are going to be true to the spirit of the reformation we need to continue to seek new ways to speak the Good News. We need to look around us and make sure that we are not so comfortable that we exclude others that desperately need the love of God in their lives but cannot hear the Good News in the language that we speak in our community of faith.

Reformation is change. Not change for the sake of change itself, but change that breaks away covering of tradition and legalism that always seems to gather around the Gospel as we seek to pass it from one generation to the next. As we celebrate the Reformation this October let us examine our faith and traditions and see if we can separate the things that are true and essential to God’s love and grace from the things that we have added just because they make us comfortable. As we discover these things perhaps we can loosen our grasp on some of them and allow the Spirit to continue to move and change us just as it moved and changed Luther and his companions in Germany 500 years ago.

Pastor Jim Bliss
October 2006