Based on a sermon preached by Jack Cabaness at the Katonah Presbyterian Church on June 18, 2017. This sermon is the first in a series on the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation.
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| Martin Luther nailing the 95 Theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenburg, Germany on October 31, 2017. The church door was actually the equivalent of a university bulletin board. |
Today we begin our summer sermon series on the 500th
anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. I’m interested in this series not
only because I’m captivated by church history but also because I know that many
of us in this congregation have Roman Catholic backgrounds; more than a few of
us are still technically Roman Catholic even after worshipping at KPC for
years. More than once someone at KPC has come up to me and said, “I’m sorry,
Father, I won’t be able to make it to mass this Sunday!” I mention this not to
put anyone on the spot, but simply to note in a light-hearted way how deeply
ingrained our religious habits can be.
When I’m a guest in a Roman Catholic service, and
it’s time to say the Lord’s Prayer, I do remember to say “trespasses” instead
of “debts.” But the thing that I always forget is that the Roman Catholic
version of the Lord’s Prayer is shorter than the Protestant versions, and when
the entire congregation has finished saying “deliver us from evil,” mine is the
only voice adding: “For thine is …”
Over the course of this summer, we will have fun
observing the light-hearted differences and commonalities between us, and we’ll
examine deeper issues as well. As we mark the anniversary, do we celebrate it
or do we commemorate it? On the one hand, there are many things to celebrate.
The Presbyterian Church (USA) wouldn’t exist without the Protestant
Reformation, at least not as we know it. There are many things in our heritage
about which we should be grateful. Yet we are also acutely aware that the reformations
of the sixteenth century led to persecution, executions, long-lasting wars, and
continual divisions in the body of Christ, and for this reason many voices
suggest that commemoration is the better approach.
For many of us these divisions are not just sad
but interesting chapters in a history text book, they are sad and tragic
chapters that have played themselves out in our own families. Perhaps your
parents or grandparents were ostracized because they married “outside the
faith.” Perhaps you’ve been ostracized because you no longer worship in the
church of your childhood. I have childhood memories of fundamentalist
Protestant preachers and my own grandmother telling me that my Roman Catholic
friends, with whom I grew up in El Paso, Texas, would be going to hell; and
many of you who grew up Roman Catholic in the years before Vatican II likewise
have memories of priests and nuns telling you that your Protestant friends
would be going to hell. Sadly, we got to be very good at condemning each other.
This is why I’m grateful for the voice of Martin
Luther reverberating across history calling the entire church to repent--not
just Catholics, not just Protestants, but all of us. The church in 1517 needed
to repent. And the church in 2017 needs to repent. In the first of his 95
theses, or propositions for debate, that Martin Luther nailed to the church
door in Wittenburg, Germany, he wrote, “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ
said, ‘Repent,’ he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.”
At the time he had no idea that he would one day be regarded as the founder of
a separate church or movement; in his mind he was simply calling the entire
church as he knew it to repentance.
Some scholars wonder whether Martin Luther
literally nailed the theses to the church door. They wonder whether that is more
legend that fact. At any rate, the act of nailing a list of theses to the
church door may or may not have been as radical as it sounds because the church
door really functioned as a kind of university bulletin board, much like the
Katonah Village Improvement Society bulletin board near the train station. It
wasn’t the act of nailing the theses to the church door that was so radical; it
was what Luther was saying in those theses! Originally, Luther only intended to
debate his university colleagues in Wittenburg, but thanks to the relatively
recent invention of the printing press, Luther’s ideas spread like wildfire and
the German Reformation was under way.
There were three specific issues facing the
church in Luther’s time that prompted his call for repentance. The first issue
was the lack of education among the parish priests. Many of them did not
understand the Latin of the Mass that they recited every day. Many of the
parishioners tended to view what the priest said in largely magical terms
anyway—for instance, the phrase “hocus pocus” comes from that point in the Mass
when the priest would say hoc est corpus meum (“this is my body.”)
But the lack of education among the clergy also
meant that basic Christian doctrine was not being communicated either. After
the invention of the printing press, many of the laity began reading for
themselves. For example, in Geneva in 1536, just prior to the city turning
Protestant, members of the congregation were known to interrupt preachers,
challenging what was said on the basis the of the parishioner’s own readings in
the Bible and shouting the preachers down when they could not respond to the
parishioner’s satisfaction.
A second issue facing the church at this time was
widespread concubinage. The local priests were required to be celibate, but
many of them lived openly with women and simply paid an annual fine to the
bishop, which the bishop was only too happy to receive. Rodrigo Borgia, after
he had become Pope Alexander VI, made his illegitimate son a cardinal and put
him in charge of the papal armies. How many things are wrong in that one
sentence?! If you watched the Borgias miniseries on Showtime, you might be
familiar with much of that story. Reform-minded people across the church grew
increasingly dismayed at a church that taught one set of practices as official
doctrine but lived out a very different set of practices in reality.
A third issue, and one that particularly incensed
Martin Luther, was the selling of indulgences. An indulgence was a way of
reducing the amount of time that a deceased person had to spend in Purgatory in
exchange for a fee. The selling of indulgences had helped to fund some of the
Crusades a few centuries earlier, and they helped to fund the building of St.
Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Indulgence preachers like Johan Tetzel would go around
and try to convince people to buy indulgences. Tetzel is said to have come up
with the jingle,
as soon
as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from Purgatory springs
It rhymes in German, too. And Tetzel was not
above using emotional manipulation. He would lay on the guilt, saying such
things as “for only a few coins, you can alleviate the suffering of your loved
one in Purgatory. Are you really going to pass up such an opportunity?”
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| The Selling of Indulgences |
In addition to the growing, widespread
church-wide concern about all three of these issues, the Humanist movement was
growing and helping to sow the seeds of reform. A humanist was a student of the
humanities, a group of subjects that included rhetoric, moral philosophy or
ethics, history, and poetry. They looked to the past for sources of truth and
goodness. They read the classics in Greek and Latin, and they wanted to read
the Scriptures in the original Hebrew and Greek. One of their rallying cries was
“ad fontes”--back to the sources. One of the humanists was Desiderius Erasmus.
Some of said that Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched. Erasmus and others
began to question many of the traditional teachings of the church based upon
their new reading of the Scriptures in Hebrew and Greek.
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| Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) Erasmus was a leading Humanist reformer who remained within the Roman Catholic Church, and who would later debate Martin Luther on such topics as the Freedom of the Will. |
For example, in today’s gospel passage from
Matthew, where Jesus says, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near,”
Jerome’s Latin Vulgate had said “Do Penance.” Erasmus and others realized that
a better translation of the Greek word metanoite
was repent. Instead of undergirding an elaborate church system of penance and
indulgences, Jesus in the Gospels was simply calling us to repent, to stop
taking our lives down one direction, to turn around, and begin taking our lives
in a new direction. That was why Martin Luther began his 95 Theses with a call
for repentance. Repentance is something that a believer is always called to do
during his or her lifetime. It is not dependent upon whether or not your
survivors buy an indulgence after you die. In the rest of the 95 Theses, Luther
goes on to question the power of the pope to extend indulgences to souls in
purgatory, especially when salvation is really a gift given by a righteous God.
In a nutshell, these were many of the factors
leading up to the Reformation.
What are
the roots of reformation in our own time? Just as the printing
press helped Reformation ideals spread like wildfire 500 years ago, the
internet has utterly transformed our communications and the ways that we
connect or fail to connect with one another.
In our gospel reading this morning Jesus said,
“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is drawing near.” Repent, and change the
direction of your life, Jesus said, because God is doing a new thing.
I believe, and so many others believe, that God
is doing a new thing in our lifetimes. It’s difficult to describe with
precision because we are alive while it’s happening. We don’t have the benefit
of the hindsight of history yet.
The late religion journalist and author Phyllis
Tickle once said that every 500 years or so the church conducts a giant rummage
sale. Of course, this congregation puts on a giant rummage sale every year! But
in Tickle’s analogy every 500 years or so the worldwide church decides which of
its essential beliefs and practices it will hold onto and which ones it will
discard and put up for sale. If the last great Rummage Sale was the Protestant
Reformation, then we are due for another one.
Tickle says we are entering a new era of "The Emergent Church," a religious movement that crosses denominational boundaries and traditions, seeks common ground, engages diverse cultures, embraces social causes, seeks to live out Christ's call to serve others, and takes place mostly outside church buildings. Is this an apt description of the church of the future?
We will ponder that and many other questions throughout the summer. Behind me are some of the church's most treasured possessions that I believe we will always cling to. The Bible on the lectern reminds the church that God is still speaking. The baptismal font reminds us that even in the midst of dizzying changes that God claims us in the waters of baptism and reminds us that we belong to God. The communion table reminds us that God feeds us and gives us the spiritual nourishment we require. These are some of the many things we will hold onto.
We might accidentally sale a communion tablecloth during Rummage, but we're not getting rid of the table! There will always be a reminder of how God cares for and nourishes each one of us.
As we decide what we keep or what we discard during this giant church-wide Rummage sale, the most important question for us is to keep asking ourselves what our mission is. Many bloggers and preachers have said that the church is currently facing its "Kodak Moment." The Kodak company ran into trouble because they believed that their mission was to make film. And nowadays few people buy film. But making film wasn't really their true mission. Their true mission was to preserve images and make memories, whether that was through film or the digital camera technology (that they actually invented!) but were too slow to embrace.
The most essential message of Christianity will always be resurrection and renewal. Jesus said, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is drawing near." Let's go, boldly and faithfully, where God leads us.
All glory and praise be to our God. Amen.
Bibliography:
Bass, Diana Butler. A People’s History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story. New
York: HarperCollins, 2009.
Hillerbrand, Hans J., editor. The Protestant Reformation. Revised Edition. New York: Harper
Perennial, 1968, 2009.
Sunshine, Glenn S. The
Reformation for Armchair Theologians. Louisville, Kentucky:
Westminster/John Knox Press, 2005.
Tickle, Phyllis. The
Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why. Grand Rapids,
Michigan: Baker Books, 2008, 2012.
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