Back to the basics. That is one
way to view the Reformation movement that Martin Luther and his fellow reformers,
including his wife, Katie, began in the early 1500s. Martin Luther looked at
the church of his day—a church that seemed to be entrenched in all kinds of
rules about how God’s grace works, a church with a structure and format so convoluted
that the ordinary person had a difficult time relating to a loving God—and he decided
it was time to get back to the basics, because it was important that people
relate to God’s love.
Granted, the Reformation
turned out to be more than just an event for the church. There were a whole
bunch of social and political pressures in Rome's declining empire that played into the upheaval that the Reformation brought about. Nevertheless,
Luther saw his time as an opportunity for the church to look again at some of the
core principles of the faith and his position as a priest and professor and his
educated background gave him the opportunity to know what people were
struggling with. His own challenges as a person of faith trying to be assured of
God’s favor also helped give him a good bit of insight into what needed reforming.
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| 95 Theses is a lot of basics...but still |
Some of those basics that
Martin Luther used to reform the church are still well known today. The biggie,
of course, is that we are justified by grace through faith alone, apart from
works of the law. This was the main one Luther arrived at early on as he read
the New Testament and drove home over and over again in his teaching and writing.
Luther really felt this was the core of it all, the belief on which the church
stood or fell, the belief which should have completely invalidated many church
practices in his day: that is, God’s gracious love in Jesus Christ is nothing we
could ever deserve or earn on our own. It is not possible purchase or work for
real estate in the kingdom of heaven. Rather, it is a free gift to each and
every one of God’s children, granted once and forever in the life, death, and
resurrection of Jesus Christ. You can see how that’s a basic belief: if
Christ’s death on the cross is ultimately not really necessary because God
still expects us to do something on our own, then Christ’s sacrifice was in
vain.
Another one of the basics
that Luther brought up was the importance of Scripture’s authority. That may
seem rather obvious to you and me nowadays, but in Luther’s time the Bible was
rather removed from the practice of Christian faith most ordinary folks. For
one, it wasn’t printed their language. In Latin, it was something only the priests
and monks could read and understand. Luther changed that by translating the
Bible into German. With that, along with Gutenberg’s printing press, everyday
people soon had access to the Scriptures. Furthermore, it wasn’t always clear
that things the church taught and drew a hard line on had any basis in
Scripture. So, Luther did a lot of housecleaning, and the tool he used was the
Word of God. Seven sacraments, for example, got narrowed down to the basic two the
Protestant Church has today. Since Scripture was silent about papal
infallibility, Luther saw no more use for believing the Pope in Rome had the
final say on everything. There were a few other basics that Luther tried to
bring the church back to, some of which proved to be more controversial than
others. To some degree, these are still the main, basic issues that Lutherans
attempt to hold the church to today.
Interestingly enough, Jesus
had also sought to bring people back to the basics, too, in his time. We see a
prime example of that effort in the gospel lesson this morning. In the face of
the Pharisees questions of theology and belief, who are trying to find
something to fault him for, Jesus gives a simple but straightforward answer: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your
heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment.
And a second is like it: ‘You shall love
your neighbor as yourself.’ On these
two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
In other words, these two
commandments are the basics. Everything that was contained in the Jewish law
code and the words of the prophets through the ages were in some way dependent
on or in support of those two commands about a disposition toward and actions
of love toward God and neighbor. The Pharisees, you see, liked to use that law
and those prophets’ words as weapons as they hurled them at their opponents or
as walls against people who they viewed as unclean. Jesus very quickly reminds
them that the foundation of their entire religious system was really about
loving God with every fiber of your being and loving other people as you love
yourself. That is, everything the people of God are about should really come
down to these two related commandments about love. One of them involves a
vertical dimension—from God to us—and the other a horizontal one that unites us
with the people around us.
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| The Pharisees gather... |
Interestingly enough, this is
the final encounter Jesus has with the Pharisees and the scribes. The last
little argument that Jesus has here involves his identity as the son of David
and Messiah. The Pharisees had essentially denied that anyone could ever be
greater than King David, their ancestor. Jesus, however, uses Scripture to
prove that a Messiah would come that would be even more “anointed with the
Spirit” than David was. Again, those were the basics: that a Messiah would
arrive who was God’s own son and that that God was concerned about a
relationship based on love more than anything else.
As it happens, love really
becomes the centerpiece of Jesus’ life and witness, and not the kind of love
that is based on emotions or dispositions toward others. It is a love that
stoops to serve. It is a love that reaches out to the other. It is a love which
risks alienation and death, a love that Jesus eventually demonstrates in his
death on the cross, the perfect but painful intersection of a vertical
dimension and a horizontal one. The basic of all basics the cross of Jesus. That
is where we come to understand the depth of God’s great love for us and the
kind of relationship God calls us to extend to our neighbor. That is where
Pharisees and outcasts alike all come to terms with their sinfulness and their
shortcomings but also God’s gracious forgiveness and desire to include everyone
in his kingdom.
The church should really
always be about the basics, if you think about it. In fact, when we start going
too far past them and adding things on to the mission of Christ’s Church is when
we start to get in trouble. When the church, for example, gets aligned too
closely with certain political or social agendas as it did even in Luther’s
day, then the church can become just a tool for certain powers. When the church
becomes too mired in rules of religious purity, as if following Christ is only about
ticking off boxes and chiefly avoiding certain behaviors then we risk becoming
more like the self-righteous Pharisees.
When it comes right down to
it, the church should be a place where these two commandments are at the center
of everything we do and say, where an understanding of God’s love for us in
Jesus leads us to a love for our neighbors, especially those who are different
or distant from us. As I heard a pastor once say, the holiness of the church is
not its perfection. The holiness of the church is its capacity to love. That is
to say, what makes the church the church is not our ability to be morally
perfect people, but rather our embodiment of the love Jesus has for people. And
we can only learn how to love over and over again when we are constantly
reflecting on who Jesus is and what he does.
That, in fact, is the focus
of that second argument with the Pharisees in this morning’s text. The Pharisees
struggle to explain Jesus’ relationship to King David and to God. I think many
of us—church leaders, included—struggle to explain just who Jesus is to us and why
we feel he has rescued us, and just what we feel he rescues us from. It has
been said that Lutherans are great at demonstrating the gospel through their
actions. We could probably, however, bone up on articulating that gospel in our
words.
Some interesting research has
come out recently from the Barna Group about faith of Millennials, those who
were born between the years of 1984 and 2002. One extensive study discovered that
of those in the Millennial generation who are still active in the Church today,
a full 68% responded that “Jesus speaks to me in a personal and relevant way.” It
was the single-highest response across the board. Of those who have dropped out
of the church, only one-quarter claimed that. According to that study, then, developing
that basic relationship with Christ was more important than anything else—more
important than beliefs about the Bible, for example, or style of worship. Two
of the other most important factors in the faith of Millennials still active in
church? “Close relationships with an adult in the congregation or parish” and “an
experience serving the poor.” It strikes me that right there in those three
responses you see both dimensions of that love…vertical and horizontal.
A few months ago we were
sitting down to eat supper and our older daughter, who is seven, asked to say
the prayer. That is nothing out of the ordinary. They often take turns offering
one of our usual rote table prayers, “God is great, God is good…” But that
evening she folded her hands and offered up a completely original prayer, in
her own words. I was flabbergasted by the beautiful pattern of it, and her
boldness to say it. It was clear that she had learned to speak to God that way,
and I was pretty sure it wasn’t from me. Someone in this congregation—a Sunday
School teacher, a Cherub Choir director, someone—had
taught my own daughter to speak to God with her own voice. Someone here is modeling
how to love God with her heart, her soul, and her mind.
Now, I wouldn’t want to base
all ministry on studies and surveys, but it is striking to me that some
research points to what we, in some ways, already are doing and knowing. That
is, well…the basics. Here we are, almost 1500 years into this Reformation
movement, and you can still see the need for many of the Lutheran reformers’
main points. They are simply a re-telling of Jesus’ own lesson, that on these
two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
In the middle of it all, of
course, is that intersection of the two dimensions: developing that relationship
with God through Christ so we may love with all our heart, and soul and mind, and
strengthening our relationships of service and compassion with our neighbor. Therefore,
in the Spirit of Luther’s reforms, let gather at that cross in the middle and recommit
ourselves…to getting back to the basics.
Thanks be to God!
The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.
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