2008_1026 Reformation Sunday sermon
Each of us builds upon the foundations laid for us by generations past. Not many of us can be Solomon, building the first temple upon the mount, laying the first stones upon the very bones of the earth. But even Solomon built upon the scriptures, the stories of the faith of the children of Israel. Even Solomon had something under his feet that he couldn’t lay claim to, and then build upon.
The old joke goes that when mankind had finally reached the point of intellectual development that he was capable of creating life itself, God appeared to make his own case that their claim that they were equal, Gods themselves, was not quite true.
The representatives of Mankind drew near to God and said that they had surpassed God and could create for themselves life. God asked them to demonstrate and they said that they would.
They spoke to the crowd saying, “First you take some water . . .” but they got no farther before God interrupted them saying, “Oh no, that’s water’s my creation, you make your own.” With the words “in the beginning, God” the bible tells of the very first creation, the one without precedence but since then, people have relied upon the work done before them.
I was having a discussion about this with some people downtown at a coffee shop, one of them telling me that in no uncertain terms that religion is bad and spirituality is the essential thing in a person’s life. Now I’m about as Lutheran a guy as you’ll find anywhere, I first felt the Spirit move in me in a Lutheran Church, I went to a, some might say the Lutheran seminary, I read Luther because he speaks to me in a manner that lifts my spirits and satisfies some part of me that is hard to define or locate.
In all that I am and all that I do I find a foundation of grace and love and hope in the tradition of the Lutheran church and the expressions of faith that centuries of scholarship and loving pastoral thinkers have left behind. I am a Lutheran to the very core of me and yet there are those out there that wish I were a little more Lutheran, that I held a little closer to the Lutheran ideal as expressed in Luther’s writings.
Almost as if they’d prefer that I shaved my head in the tonsure of the Augustinian Monk and live as Luther lived, scratching my sermons out by the light of a candelabra. Gnesio-Lutherans they’re called and they see themselves as the ultra-orthodox, the ones whose spine is the straightest with the benefit of the most tradition.
The problem, for me at least, is that I don’t think that Martin Luther was right about everything (pause to check if the ceiling falls in). In almost all ways Luther was a product of his times and his culture. His was the time when the Blood Libel was used to demonize the Jews most actively, when the tools of the dentist were made by the blacksmith, when curing a headache might have meant drilling a hole in your skull. I’m not certain, but I’ll bet that none of these things would be approved of by those Gnesio Lutherans who would put so high a value on Luther’s other beliefs.
The thing is, Luther didn’t happen in a vacuum either. Before Luther there was only the church in Rome and fourteen more centuries of elegant and beautiful thought about the nature and love of God. Upon that did Luther build, not laying the first stone like Solomon, but rather building on what he himself had been given, testing it to see what was true and what was false before determining, correctly if you ask me, that God’s will might not best be described as a ladder that we have to climb ourselves, but rather as a cross where God chose to share our fate so that we might share God’s eternity.
It seems to me that the absolutely, positively most radically Lutheran we could ever be is when we choose not to slavishly adhere to tradition, but rather test and weigh everything that we have received to see if it is true, if it holds water, so to speak.
And this isn’t just true in terms of faith, in all things it is important to remember that Luther only came upon his revelations about the nature and power of faith after thinking about it a lot, after pondering and weighing it, after using the oversized brain that God had given him and he didn’t stop there but also wrote about matters of state and the conduct of politics and the institutions that make up a society.
In America we have what are called “strict constructionists” who believe that the constitution should be viewed as written and as intended and you will hear them invoke the founding fathers an awful lot. I think that it bears remembering that the founding fathers, for the most part, were slave owners and when they wrote one of the most amazing and enduring codifications of the freedoms that a government can ever bestow upon mankind they thought that a black person was worth three fifths of a white person and that Indians were not worth anything at all. Article one, section two, look it up.
The following is every word ever written about stem-cell research by Martin Luther:
<pause> The following is every word written about terrorism by Martin Luther: <pause>The following is every word written about abortion in the U.S. Constitution. <pause>
The point is not that these are not valuable resources, that traditions and the history of what we do and have done throughout time are not important, vital even to who we are and what we are and what we do, but rather that they are not the only place we have to look, not the only resource we possess. The thing that we must remember is that the people who crafted our traditions, the ones who wrote the words after thinking the thoughts and pondering the meanings were radicals and revolutionaries of their times.
Luther was hunted throughout Europe, hiding out with his patron for years. So radical were his ideas that he was excommunicated from the church, in their eyes removed from the sight and love of God because he took the traditions that they all held in common, and then he kept going, he kept thinking because he realized that God had not given him his enormous brain for no good purpose, but rather so that he might be capable of thinking great thoughts and making the world new with them.
The same can be said for the founding fathers. Out of their knowledge of philosophy and of the history of the world they took what they had inherited and then they kept going. They kept thinking until they had crafted a new nation the likes of which the world had never seen.
Luther and the framers had something in common. They both thought that the traditions that they received were a toolbox, a common place from which to start their lives and their careers. Just as none of us live in the house of our parents, wears their clothes or follows their philosophy, they took what they had been given, their traditions, and they built something truly spectacular.
Why should we stop there? Why should what they have given us be enough? I’m not going to rush out and get bled by leeches every time I get a toothache, a headache or a cold, why should I just accept that all decent theological thinking stopped at Luther’s deathbed simply because I describe myself as a Lutheran? Equally, what better homage could we give the founders of this great nation than to try and to make it better, better even than they could have dreamed.
The other thing that Luther and the founders had in common was that they both loved to dispute, to argue and to disagree. Maybe that’s my favorite part of all because I too love to wrangle and argue, not for its own sake but because there has got to be a light, a new thought, a new answer just beyond today’s thinking. Maybe it will never be me who comes up with it, but it is always just there, on the other end of the discussion so long as the discussion takes place. No discussion, no examination, no progress, no change.
Jesus says, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” I’m of the opinion that Jesus is really the only person for whom that is true and I like to think that Martin Luther would agree with me. Continuing in Christ’s word is far more important to our lives and to our eternal futures than how well we continue in Luther’s words, or even Hamilton’s or Franklin’s.
From those men we have inherited great wisdom and we should learn all that we can from it. They and many more like them have given us a toolbox, worn and scuffed like the world itself but filled with tools of most excellent quality. They are what we must use to build a better future, but it is we who must build it because they are no longer with us and their world is not our world.
Traditions can guide our decisions but they cannot make our decisions. They are meant to give us a perch to come home to and wings to go and explore.
The altar guild at the church we served in Minneapolis was aghast that the new pastor didn’t know what candle went where, which side of the Altar the Christ candle was supposed to be, what the four colored candles for Advent meant. They thought of these traditions as being part of the very foundation of the church itself and without them they were just at sea, beside themselves at his ignorance. As it turns out, none of them could produce a single page of information concerning where they thought things should go, it was merely handed down from Altar Guild to Altar Guild and it certainly wasn’t in any of the liturgical manuals at the seminary They had merely invented it for themselves, but then they adamantly refuse to worship without it. It held to forgiveness no grace, and yet they thought of their traditions as essential.
Continue in Christ’s word and you are truly His disciples. Follow Luther’s example and question and test at every turn and you are truly his inheritors. And there is no prouder inheritance at all.