Festival of the Reformation — Jeremiah 31:31–34. This was also my final Sunday with Faith and Bethany Lutheran Churches in Reading, PA.
Our Lutheran Church’s official representative for South America, Gustavo Driau, suggested I pick up a copy of a book called “Open Veins of Latin America.” The veins that the title refers to are the veins of useful and precious metals running through the southern part of this hemisphere, the mines and other industries of the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking colonial Americas.
But it’s also a title with a double meaning. When the Europeans arrived in this new world on the eve of the Protestant Reformation, when the Eastern hemisphere was discovering again the radical grace of God that sets us free from the powers of sin and death, they enslaved the people they found already living here in the Western hemisphere, and through their own grave sin, tore open the blood vessels of these beautiful people made by God, condemning them to death.
The city of Potosí, in what is now southern Bolivia, was only a tiny village overlooked by a great mountain. The Inca people who lived there were aware of the metals under the earth, and they found them both useful and beautiful. But they also had a great love for the earth, and took its gifts sparingly. Twenty-eight years after Europeans learned of the mountain’s existence, a city had sprung up with the same population as London. Thirty-five billion pounds of silver were loaded onto ships over the next hundred and fifty years. Native South Americans were forced to work in the mines for the privilege of using farmlands barely large enough to feed their families, on land that once been their own. Conditions in the mines themselves killed many; the mercury and other poisons used to extract and refine the precious metals killed the rest. Some families who saw what was coming decided to kill their children and then themselves. Better, it is said, to die and go to Hell, than to live and meet the Christian oppressors.
Things were so bad that in 1537, Pope Paul III issued a bull declaring that the natives in America were, in fact, real human beings, and had to be treated as such. The idea that a man living ten thousand miles away should have the power to decide whether you are human or not is terrible, but at least he made the right decision. The wealthy Europeans weren’t convinced. The King of Spain granted his subjects the gift of land in South America; the people who happened to be living there became their property as well. But at least the Roman Catholic leaders paid lip service to the natives’ humanity. When we Protestants arrived on North America’s shores, we had no such pretenses. (A strange thing to notice, perhaps, on Reformation Sunday.)
All this and more is found in chapter ONE of the book I’m reading. Three quarters of the book remains, and I fear what I might read. And as I do, the awareness that soon, I will begin work with a church made up almost entirely of people whose ancestors were devalued and, frankly, murdered by people who look like me. And I’m supposed to be teaching them. Teaching them! About God’s love! I’m feeling a lot like exactly the wrong person for the job.
I have always found great hope in the words of Jeremiah, the words we read today and every Reformation celebration. Part of the reason, I think, is that Jeremiah doesn’t shy away from the reality. Not even a little. The first thirty chapters of his book are a solid, resounding indictment of the evils of humanity. The refusal to hold God’s values as their own, to worship the real God not just in words but in actions as well. To treat the poor and needy and marginalized with dignity. To see the people who are truly dependent on others, and to provide for them enough not just to survive but to thrive. To love those who seem unlovable and who have been forgotten. To place the needs of human beings over the desires of those in power. There is nothing new under the sun.
Those were the terms of the old covenant, Jeremiah reminds us. The Law was given to Moses, given as a wondrous gift to help people love each other the way God loves them. It was a covenant that people celebrated, for which God was worth worshiping, a relationship that should have been as loving as the best, healthiest marriage. “A covenant that they broke,” in Jeremiah’s words, “though I was their husband, says the Lord.”
Jeremiah holds that up to the light. You have to look at it, its ugliness, the sin and evil we perpetrate. Lesson one of the Reformation is that: The reformers of Lutheranism and Protestantism didn’t close their eyes to the reality of sin. At the heart of the reformation is an idea called the “doctrine of total depravity.” We are sinful, through and through. Even the best of us. We hurt the world. We hurt each other. We hurt ourselves. We hurt God. If it were up to us, there would be no hope whatsoever.
But what’s amazing about Jeremiah’s prophecy is that after thirty chapters of bad news, he turns everything upside-down. It’s totally unexpected. God promises he will make a new covenant with us. It won’t be like the old one; as good as the old one was, it relied too much on us, and we failed. But instead of writing us off, God decided to take care of the whole relationship for us. The gift of love isn’t outside of us anymore, something we have to look at and try (and fail) to follow. It also isn’t written off, gotten rid of, replaced with something else entirely. It’s that same old law, that same old love, now written not on stone tablets but carved into the tablet of our hearts. We can’t undo it. It’s as much a part of us—perhaps even more—as our sinfulness ever was.
This is what Lutheranism really is about. It’s what makes us unique, different from not just our Catholic and Orthodox sisters and brothers, but other Protestants as well. The gift God has given us, the gift we have to share with the world, is that it’s all about God—what God has done, what God is doing, what God will always do. Any preacher, any person, who tells you how to live is not a Lutheran. We trust that if people know that God truly loves them, everything else will follow.
On Thursday, I met with Pastor President Germán Lozaya of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bolivia. A nice man, a strong thinker, who I can already tell has real faith and passion. He is one of the Aymara people, a descendant of the Incas who suffered for generation after generation under the hands of the Europeans and North Americans who came to plunder and to conquer. Why, I wonder, would he want someone like me to come to his country, his people, his church?
But I listened, as difficult as it was in this language with which I am still struggling. In describing his church, he picked up a piece of cloth, woven with many colors, in the fashion of his culture. “Our church is not just one culture,” he said, with pride and excitement. “We are like this cloth, made beautiful with its many colors. We are Aymara, and Quechua; we are Uro, and Guaraní; and Spanish, and when you come here, we will be North American as well, all one Body of Christ.” And just like that, he closed the gap between us that I have been feeling. It had nothing to do with what I’ve done, or who I am, but only with his decision to reach out to me, his action. Or better, God’s action, working in and through him.
Just like here in this congregation. I’ve heard a number of times how wonderful it was when I came here, how I just joined in and became part of the family. That wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for the kind of community you are. It is your grace offered freely to me that has provided that kind of welcome. A reflection of the grace given to us by God, the freedom of relationship and community we have not because of who we are, but because of who God is.
And now, we leave this place and go in separate directions. But it is not a leaving forever. We remain together, in relationship, in the same Body of Christ. We are bound together in the same Baptism, we are captivated by the same Word, we dine together at this same Banquet of Life, the same Table even though we are on different continents. Our church, always reforming, always changing and growing, is always bound together by the same Lord Jesus Christ. And not because of our efforts to be the Church, but because of God’s gift to make us the church. May we go out and help to bind the whole world together in God’s gracious love. Amen.