Neverending

I hate to burst everyone's bubble but this is not the 500^th anniversary of the Reformation. This is the anniversary of a university professor doing the equivalent of posting a list of debate topics on the community bulletin board. Martin Luther and his colleagues probably put theses on the door of the Castle Church all the time. It was part of their job. The significance was that Luther was not merely being pedantic this time.

Luther was also a priest and pastor and he saw the effect that the sale of indulgences had on his flock. Those rich enough to afford a plenary indulgence were probably feeling pretty cocky because they had a document from the church and backed by the pope that said no matter what they did, they had no punishment awaiting them in the afterlife. They felt they would go directly to heaven, do not stop at purgatory, even if they, in the words of salesman Johann Tetzel, had raped the Virgin Mary!

Mind you at this time (1517) Luther does believe that purgatory exists. He accepted that Christian souls with unconfessed sins had to go through a process of having those sins purged from their souls before going to heaven. What Luther disputes is the idea that the living can get those souls out of purgatory by giving money to the church. It isn't till 1528, 11 years later, that Luther will explicitly reject the very idea of purgatory.

Luther is more motivated by his biblical research into the nature of salvation. Luther had been an orthodox Roman Catholic on the whole concept of how penance worked to the point that he would drive his confessor crazy by spending hours in the confessional dredging up every tiny sin he could think of. But in his studies of the books of Romans and Galatians, he realized that humans cannot earn salvation by trying to be good. Rather our loving God accepts us through his grace. We simply have to trust him on that. It is not that God doesn't want us to do good; it is that we can't be good enough to save ourselves, that is, we cannot be perfect. And in fact, we cannot be truly good without the help of the Holy Spirit working in us. And again that can only happen if we trust God to work in us. We are saved by grace alone through faith alone.

But at this time Luther doesn't want to start a new church. He wants to make some corrections to it in this one area. He does, however, want his ideas discussed outside the university of Wittenberg. He sends a copy of his theses to his archbishop. And there were all in Latin, which only scholars and church officials could read. Which means someone must have translated them into German and gotten them printed and distributed. Had this not happened, Luther's ideas would have stayed a matter of academic debate and church politics would have quashed them.

We are not sure who made copies of the original Latin theses. We know someone named Kasper Nutzel of Nuremberg translated them into German and sent copies to “interested parties” but as far as we know, he did not have them printed. Someone did and that person was key in making sure this was an issue that did not get buried by the church bureaucracy but became a topic discussed throughout Germany and ultimately throughout Europe.

By August 1518 the pope summoned Luther to Rome. In his Explanations of the Disputation Concerning the Value of Indulgences Luther defended himself of the charge of attacking the pope. But the more he explained, the more he followed the implications of his initial objections and the more he departed from traditional teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. Eventually he did reject the authority of the pope. But he didn't break with the church. It broke with him. Those in power never intended to debate his theses. They simply demanded that he recant. When he didn't, he was excommunicated.

So perhaps we should say the Reformation really began in 1521 when Luther burned the papal bull that offered him a choice of recanting or being excommunicated. Specifically we should look at April 18, 1521 when at the Diet of Worms, before the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, Luther refused to take back what he had written. Or possibly May 26 when he was officially declared a heretic and an outlaw. Also in December of 1521 Jacob Probst became the first cleric who supported Luther to be arrested under the Edict of Worms. He was forced to recant but two monks, Johann Esch and Heinrich Voes, who were arrested in 1522, refused to recant. They were burned as heretics in 1523.

Luther's efforts to reform the church were not the first. Luther was called the German Hus, because 100 years earlier Bohemian cleric Jan Hus had preached against the practice of indulgences as well as other Roman Catholic doctrines. Hus was burned as a heretic in 1415. He in turn was inspired by the writing of John Wycliffe, an Oxford theologian who called for reform. He translated the New Testament into English, while friends did the same for the Old Testament. He also challenged the pope's authority and condemned many of the same doctrines Luther did as unbiblical. Wycliffe died in 1384 but was declared a heretic 31 years later. The very same year Hus was burned Wycliffe's remains were dug up, removed from consecrated ground, burned and the ashes thrown into the River Swift.

The history of Christianity is one of folks detecting that the church has strayed from the teachings of Jesus and the Bible and working to bring it back. Their success depended on whether those in power listened to them. In Luther's case, it was the people who heard and responded. And I personally think that had that not happened there would have been no Reformation. At least not then and not in the same form it took.

The universal church is different for what Luther did. Not only the Protestant part of the church but the Roman Catholic church as well. In 1545 the Council of Trent started was has been called the Counter-Reformation. In part it was a pushback against Lutheranism by the Roman Catholic Church but it did fix some problems, like creating seminaries to properly train priests and bringing religious orders back to their spiritual foundations. It did encourage people to seek a personal relationship with Christ. Some see the effects of the Reformation in the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, which supported ecumenical dialogue. And that led in 1999 to the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification between the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church, in which they say “as sinners our new life is solely due to the forgiving and renewing mercy that God imparts as a gift and we receive in faith, and never can merit in any way.” The World Methodist Council formally endorsed that declaration in 2006. The World Council of Reformed Churches, those who follow the theology of reformer John Calvin, just signed on to it this year and the Anglican Communion is expected to follow suit.

Does that mean the Reformation is over? No. We can never stop paying attention to the state of the church, nor can we ignore flaws we see, whether in faith or in practice. It's when we get complacent that laxity, mission creep and corruption take hold. Like denying ourselves and taking up our cross daily, we must always be ready to reform not only ourselves but the church as a whole when it strays from the gospel.

So if the Reformation didn't take place 500 years ago today, what did? What happened was the planting of the seed of the Reformation. It kicked off a movement whose effects are felt and seen today.

Jesus used often compared the kingdom of God to seeds: the mustard seed, the wheat among the weeds, the seed the sower scatters. The point is that plants grow and change. The sowing the seed is vital. But so is the soil. Without the right kind of soil, the seed never reaches maturity. And of course you have to water it and weed the garden.

So we must also remember the importance of the unsung and unknown heroes who translated and spread the seeds of Luther's ideas as well as the role that the common people played in being receptive to them. If the German people had been apathetic to Luther's rediscovery of the gospel, the Reformation would have been stillborn. The world we live in would be a different place, spiritually, religiously, and politically.

The seed of our faith is the good news of God's gracious forgiveness of our sins, made available to us through Jesus Christ. All we have to do is trust him and accept this truth. And if we do so, if we let that seed take root in us, we will be changed. And if we change, so will the world. We've seen it happen. And it's happening still.