Sermon for October 26

Sermon for Reformation Day

We live in a world where grace is at a premium. That may, in fact, be a generous statement. Grace, ofttimes, seems completely absent. There is no mercy, no forgiveness, and no second chances. Once a person is painted with the brush of failure, they are forever known by what they did wrong, never about all the good they once did or could possibly do again. Grace and all its attributes are in short supply. I have witnessed people ostracized from community for mistakes and it seems that no matter how they try, they can never find a place in that community again.

And no matter how forgiving or charitable we may feel, there is always a line that once crossed, we are no longer willing to forgive and act mercifully. Sometimes those moments are serious and sometimes they are petty. I can remember sitting in a restaurant which was a family favorite of ours and they forgot our order. Actually, they didn’t just forget our order, they catered to a much larger group that came in after us. The group ordered and were eating before we decided to ask where our food was. Their response was “Oh, we thought the appetizers were all you wanted.” We paid and left, and I vowed never to go back. And we never did, even though my family wanted to.  Nothing was served by my anger and resentment, except that we never went back to a favorite restaurant. The place in question went out of business a year or so later.

I can think of other moments when I was angry at someone and chose to hurt them for the pain they caused me. The pain I dished back to them didn’t solve anything, except to inspire more pain and to damage that relationship forever. I am not one to argue very often. Instead of arguing, I internalize everything. I have a thousand arguments with the person in my head, but very rarely do I address those thoughts and concerns to the person in question. It has succeeded in doing nothing more than causing resentment towards the other person, a resentment they know nothing about, as well as an inordinate amount of stress for myself. Yet, in my mind, this is the better course of action. To harken back to a sermon I preached a few weeks ago, I too often seek to be nice than kind and everyone (myself most of all) pays the price.

Can you imagine if God held on to things the same way we do? Can you imagine if God gave us a three strikes rule or had a breaking point with all our silliness and stupidity? Would we even be standing here if God truly had enough of us? Likely, the human race would have been wiped out centuries earlier, with God throwing God’s hands in the air as God gave up on us completely. In our broken state, it’s not even hard to imagine. After all, we live in a world where parents are sundered from kids or kids break their relationship with their parents. We live in a world where no relationship is so strong and so powerful that it would endure, no more matter what it had to face. And because of this we feel that God acts in the exact same way.

Thanks be to God that God doesn’t act that way!! While we could imagine God finally getting sick of us and walking away, the very notion of this is anathema to everything that God is. We may not understand this, but in Paul’s words, there is nothing that could separate from God’s love. Nothing. Not even our own, stupid selves. If our sins doomed us, then we were cooked long before we entered adulthood. If our perfection was the only thing that assured our salvation, not one of us could stand. No one. Not Mother Theresa or Bonhoeffer, or Billy Graham, or any other person. Not one person could stand before God, confident in the perfection of their actions during their lifetime. We would be all doomed.

But God doesn’t act that way. Scripture talks of a God who gets angry, like any parent, but not a God who gives up on us. God didn’t give up on Israel, despite of all the ways that they struggled against God and God’s calling for their community. They worshipped other Gods and chased after power. They wanted to be like the nations around them, even when they were formed to be a community of the Ten Commandments, with their eyes fixed on God and God’s covenant. But God never gave up on them, not even through the very worst of the kings, or the prophets of Baal, or all the other ways they turned right when God wanted them to go left. God didn’t give up on them because God, as love, could not give up on them. To stop loving God’s people was against God’s very nature and so God never stopped. Even now, with the war in Gaza costing so many lives, God still hasn’t given up on God’s people and through voices of modern-day prophets, the people, we pray, will find their way back to what it means to be God’s people.

That same promise followed in Christ, but instead of being situated in a small nation, the promise of God’s eternal, unrelenting, and forever love became cosmic. It was meant for all people, everywhere, always. This didn’t abrogate God’s love for Israel but instead shared it to all of creation. In Christ, that amazing love of God was made universal. No one stood outside of that love. Christ had made sure that this love was meant for all, with faith acting as the way to see this amazing gift and to acknowledge it. In faith, that love came to bloom and lives were changed.

This was what Luther “rediscovered” in scripture over 500 years ago. The church had forgotten its core message, using scripture as a weapon against people and to advance its own agenda (sound familiar). Luther, tormented with the idea of a God who could ultimately damn him if he made a major misstep or forgot to confess a sin, was set free when he encountered this idea.  God never intended to damn anyone. God’s fervent desire was that all would come to God and know God’s love. God would never force that, because a forced love is a false love. God wanted the love to be real, just as God’s love was real. Luther was set free by this, and he challenged the church because of how much that truth meant to him. His reformation certainly put a magnifying glass to the corruption of the church and the destructive hierarchies of ecclesiastical power, but at its core, it was about God’s love. It was about reclaiming that love and making certain it was central to the faith of all people.

It is what we celebrate on Reformation Day. We celebrate that time in history where Luther and many others were able to give the church its soul back and remind all people of what it meant to be loved by God. It is also a time where Luther and the reformers challenge us to pick up the torch of the Reformation and continue its work. The reformation didn’t end with the death of the reformers. It continues, even now. And that reformation is so badly needed in the light of the hate that flourishes everywhere we look. We need to be a church that offers the love of God so that the hate of the world can be muted and perhaps, one day, defeated. Not much has changed since Luther’s time, including who we are as a church. We need to still promote the Gospel message in all that we do, for the sake of the world and for the sake of a truth that was known by ancient Israel thousands of years ago. God loves us all, completely, utterly, recklessly.  Nothing can take that away from us and when we come to accept that, we are forever changed.

Amen