Reformation Sunday (Proper 26 C) – Isaiah 1:10-18
Sometimes you can do everything right and still get it wrong, you know? I remember when we first had the idea of doing a worship service for young children over at Christ Lutheran. I mentioned it to Bishop Hazelwood, who said, “Well, maybe you’d ought to find out what families’ needs are and address them first, and later you can do worship.” I should have listened. But that sounded like a lot of work, work I wasn’t really sure how to do, and I thought it made sense to do something I knew was possible rather than doing nothing because I wasn’t sure how to go about it. So I began to study. I read a whole bunch of books about Montessori and community-based Christian education. I went for training and certification in early childhood music education. I interviewed pastors of churches that were doing similar things, and wrapped some of their wild stabs in real theology to understand why we were doing what we were doing. I took a class in the early childhood education department at Quinsigamond Community College. I worked to come up with a brilliant worship plan, and hired the best musician in the county. I even figured out how to advertise on Facebook. And we had two. On our best days, we had two children, both from the same household. We never met our goals of reaching our nursery school families, of growing our congregations, of helping to make the congregation viable. We did everything right, and we still got it wrong.
When Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses onto the Castle Church door in Wittenburg, he was really just trying to start a conversation. He was simply doing the medieval equivalent of emailing it to a few professor friends and saying, “Hey, I had some thoughts, and wondered what you think.” Literally nobody else in Wittenburg could have read it except the faculty at the university, and that church door was where all things for the academic community got posted. Just a note for a few friends, and suddenly he was being put on trial for heresy and being instructed to recant! By then, of course, it was too late to say he was “just thinking out loud here,” as he watched the church in Germany fracture into camps and start fighting against each other. For the medieval church’s part, it was really just doing things the best it could. People kept giving land and property to the church, and someone had to oversee it. It was a church, not a political power! But it had to become a political power, whether it liked it or not—and that was especially true for the pope, when vandals kept attacking his home in Rome. And now with the threat of the Ottoman empire just around the corner, he was far too busy to deal with some upstart monk in an obscure German town who wanted to have a “conversation” about why “everything” was “wrong.” If the guy wouldn’t recant, then he needed to be excommunicated. That’s what the church did with heretics. It really was a never-ending series of miscommunications, but the result was—well, how many broken family relationships, how many broken hearts, destroyed faiths, abuses of church authority, mutual condemnations, and even in certain times and places, war and death in the name of Jesus? Luther, his supporters, and his opponents all did everything right, but they all still got it very, very wrong.
It’s funny, this passage from Isaiah. God complains about a “multitude of sacrifices” from the Israelite people, wanting no more offerings, no more incense, no more festivals. When God commanded those offerings and sacrifices in the first place. It’s all detailed there in Exodus and Leviticus and Numbers, all the things God wants the Israelites to do in their worship. Which they’ve been struggling to do as perfectly as possible all these years. There are ranks and ranks of priests and Levites, various people whose holy work it is to know just the right way to slaughter an animal so that its life can be dedicated to the Lord. Choirs of singers and instrumentalists lifting up dozens of psalms in the temple, day after day. Artisans who produce the incense cones from a mixture of spices passed down from time immemorial who delight in knowing that God will be delighted too. And suddenly, here is God saying he wants none of it. “They have become a burden to me,” He says. “I am weary of bearing them.” Which sounds suspiciously like God is saying, “That thing that I told you to do in the first place? You shouldn’t be doing it.” It seems that the Israelites are doing everything right, and they still get it wrong.
And the results are tangible. The Assyrians have come from the north and destroyed the land. The little city of Jerusalem sitting on the top of mount Zion has somehow managed to hold its walls and keep the enemy out, but from every vantage point there is nothing to see but desolation all around. Its people attribute their salvation to God, saying if it weren’t for him, they’d be desolate like Sodom or Gomorrah. And God’s response to that is to call them, “You rulers of Sodom; you people of Gomorrah!” They think God has saved them, but destruction sits just at hand.
There’s a wonderful scholar whose work I quite like. Her name is Mary Douglas. And her expertise is that annoying book of Leviticus, with all its rules and regulations, some understandable, but some strange, and some downright ridiculous. To worship God, to do what is right, you must not eat shellfish. Shellfish? I live in New England! It’s almost a requirement to eat lobster! What are all these crazy worshipful, ritual rules all about? Douglas argues that the book of Leviticus is written in a circle, and the clue is at its center. There, in chapter 19, are a whole bunch of laws about justice. Don’t steal. Don’t lie to each other. Don’t harvest all your grain, so people who are poor can come by and take the leftovers. Don’t oppress foreigners. Don’t cheat in weights and measures. And right at the center, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” All these instructions exist to protect the weak and oppressed from the strong and the rich. And with justice at the center of these laws, justice is really what all the laws are about. Don’t eat shellfish—they’re on the bottom of the ocean, and hide under rocks and sand. They’re so weak God gave them shells to protect them from all of their predators. Don’t destroy the weak little lobsters!
Doing everything right isn’t enough, if you’re doing it for the wrong reasons. For the ancient Israelites, worship was going about its business in the temple, but the love of others had been taken out of it. Isaiah finally gets to his point: “Cease to do evil, learn to do good, seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.” Without these things, the sacrifices and offerings and incense and prayers are mostly pointless—something we should pay very close attention to as we perform our liturgy here on Sunday mornings. The same was true for the medieval church, going about business as usual, making sure everyone believed the right things and did the right things and listened to the right authorities without stopping to consider what this faith is really all about. To hail Luther in contrast as a perfect saint would be absurd; by the time he was done, Luther was being as vindictive toward his opponents as possible, just for the sake of being vindictive. And looking at my own example, with the children’s worship service, if I’m honest, “reaching our nursery school families, growing our congregations, and helping to make the congregation viable” is not exactly the most faithful list of goals.
Our national Lutheran church describes the Reformation as “Always being made new.” There’s great truth in that, but it doesn’t exactly mean the constant reinvention of oneself. For me, the Spirit of the Reformation is all about being drawn back to that central holy purpose. We proclaim the Good News that we are freed from sin simply because God wants to free us from sin. That we are justified by grace, through faith, apart from good works, for the sake of Jesus Christ. That nothing we can do or say can either increase or decrease that gift from God. That simply because God says we are righteous people, we are righteous people. That God gets to decide. Reformation means returning over and over again to that central truth, understanding what it means for each new generation, proclaiming that God’s love beats everything that can possibly get in its way. Every time we discover this grace anew, it feels new, because it IS new, refreshed, creative, generative, being reborn in us again and again. We use this grace to live in new and exciting ways, to carry out God’s work of loving the world with new means, to work with Jesus to transform humanity again and again. But it is God’s grace, and God’s love, and God’s reformation that takes place in us all.
Isaiah isn’t content to leave his message at “Cease doing evil.” He says, “Come now, let us argue it out. Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow. Though they are red as crimson, they will be white as wool.” Even before the people decide to return to the justice orientation God once had for them, God cleanses them of their sin. God renews them first. God always renews us first.
We don’t celebrate the reformation because of what Luther did; we celebrate it because of what God is doing. That reformation worked its way in the ancient Israelites by moving them to—yes, destroyed, taken into exile—to write down their stories so they could be passed down through the ages and form us into one people of God today. That reformation worked its way through Luther and his supporters in the formation of Protestantism, and through his detractors by renewing Catholicism and breathing into it new life and new faith.
Sometimes I wish God would hurry up and reform his church today. We have drooping attendance numbers and congregations closing here and there, and I wonder why the Spirit isn’t reforming us today. And then I remember.
I remember sitting on the floor with A— in our children’s worship service, telling him about Abraham and Sarah and their journey to a new land. I remember this particularly because I made the mistake of telling him the name of the city Abraham and Sarah came from, “Ur.” I suspect that A— will remember it for the rest of his life. We laughed over ancient city names, and wondered at the courage it must have taken to move to a new place. I watched as he sidled up next to his father, peering over his shoulder as he read aloud from the scriptures, the line of faith connecting generations visibly right in front of me. And then we gathered at the altar table and told another story, the one about Jesus’ last meal with his disciples. And A— tore off a piece of bread, and put it in his father’s hand, and proclaimed that the Body of Christ was present there, in this food and among us. Just as He is with us, reforming us, even now.