Every in the Lutheran Church year we celebrate the Reformation. Many of us think of this sequence of events as the founding of the our Church by Martin Luther, a time when the firm foundation of our faith community as established and we broke away from the Roman Catholic Church. This kind of an account is more of the elements of a legend than it does real history. Luther’s intent when he posted the 95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral was to create an atmosphere where communication could begin regarding some issues he felt needed attention within his faith community. It was never his intent to start a new church; in fact he spent most of the nest decade answering questions and charges of other Roman Catholic clergy trying to prevent a break up. His intent was just exactly what the word used to describe these events implies. Luther wanted to reform the church, to help steer her back to the purpose God intended for the Body of Christ. He was concerned about people not reading the Bible, about a growing legalism and a hierarchy that seemed more concerned with money than with people or spirituality. If it sounds familiar that is because these are always the problems that occur in any faith community.
No one sets out to move away from the faith. We just drift over time; we create new traditions that become old traditions until their meaning is finally lost in the mists of the past. A study I read once said you only needed to do something a particular way for six months in a church before someone would tell you that we have always done it that way. Can you image how many traditions are accumulated over a hundred years in that way? We don’t repudiate the Gospel; we just cover it with tradition.
Another problem Luther faced was the changes that were occurring in his society. The printing press was becoming more common; people’s level of education was rising as the renaissance took hold. Things that were once answers to problems became problems in themselves. A good example of this is Church Latin. When the church started using it was a commonly spoken trade language. It allowed people from different cultures and languages to communicate with a common language that was widely used. By Luther’s time the force of tradition had taken hold and no one outside the church spoke Latin at all. It had become a barrier that kept the Gospel from people instead of a way to increase communication. As the culture changes, the way people communicate changes as well. One of Luther’s reforms was to speak the good news in the language of the people, and print the Bible in German. These were changes that did not happen in parts of the church until 50 year ago. People were beginning to communicate with the printed page, a change that would radically change the whole culture. Changes in the way people communicate make it critical for the church to change as well if we still want people to hear the Good News, the Gospel in Latin, God entrusted us with.

When you realize how much change the printing press and other inventions caused in Luther’s time, think of how many changes have occurred just in the last hundred years. Before the church’s way of communicating an unchanging message stayed the same for centuries, but that is because the culture remained largely the same. In Luther’s to communicate they sent letters or wrote books. It was the same at my grandparent’s birth. But by the time they had come of age there were telephones and radio. In my parents time there was television and people walked on the moon. In our time we have email and computers and routinely look at pictures taken on Mars of on flybys of the rings of Saturn. Our culture has changed more in the last 100 years than in thousands of years that went before it. We either have to change with the culture or fall silent, no longer able to communicate the Good News.
Luther understood what was happening to his world. Truly there have been a lot of reformations, not just the Lutheran reformation Christian History is full of People who changed so the good News would continue to be heard. This is not a comfortable truth but it is so important that the early Lutheran leaders choose not to call our church a denomination. Instead they described what we are doing as a “reforming movement in the church catholic.” Or to put it in language we would use today a change movement in the one universal church. Change is never comfortable but it is so important to keep up with the times that we choose to describe ourselves as a changing people of God in order that new hearts in changing cultures will always be able to hear the Good News in a way they can understand and relate to. That is true Reformation.

Pastor Jim Bliss
September 2007