October 30, 2011 – Joshua 3:7-17; Matthew 23:1-12
Joshua 3:7-17; Matthew 23:1-12
Perpetual Reform [Sermon for Reformation Sunday]
20th Sunday after Pentecost [Lectionary 31] – October 30, 2011
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
When Joshua led the Israelites across the Jordan river, 40 years of wandering were ended.
40 years of what we call in confirmation class “wilderness school,”
where the Israelites were instructed by God to live differently.
Differently, that is, from the way of Egypt, which was the way of exploitation,
and abuse, and slavery, and hierarchy.
In the wilderness, for an entire generation, the Israelites were schooled by God in the ways of
manna-sharing and mercy-giving.
They were schooled in the way of what it is to genuinely live by grace.
And this is what they attempt to do in the Promised Land.
But they never do it perfectly. Years go by: sometimes they do it well, and sometimes they don’t.
Sometimes they forget the whole reason God gave them freedom and a new land:
to be God’s people of blessing in the world.
When they forget, the prophets remind them.
When John the Baptist comes, he really, graphically reminds them:
he takes the people out to the wilderness, dips them in the Jordan river,
and brings them out again so that they can begin to live again the way of manna and mercy.
He does the same for Jesus at the beginning of his ministry,
whose ministry in these last few chapters in Matthew consists of calling
the religious leaders of his day to change, to reformation, so that they, too,
can live God’s dream again and become the leaders that God has called them to be.
Jesus calls them this morning to not just speak the words of Moses, but
to actually do as Moses instructs them to do:
to live the way of manna-sharing and mercy-giving.
For they are like people who want to be Texans but aren’t: they’re all hat and no cattle.
Jesus is inviting them to examine their hypocrisy.
Jesus is inviting them to reformation, to be re-formed more into the image of
the one, gracious and merciful God.
Well: some of those who took Jesus’s concerns seriously, among other things,
became the Christian church.
The church self-consciously became God’s people of manna-sharing and mercy-giving.
All those who symbolically entered the waters of the Jordan in baptism
dedicated themselves to God’s mission to love, bless, and heal this broken world.
As Jesus reminds us this morning, the church has but one instructor who schools us in
what it means to live by grace, and that instructor is Jesus.
But the church never does it perfectly: sometimes it does it well, and sometimes it doesn’t.
Sometimes, maybe often, Christians forget the whole reason for their baptisms:
that they have been blessed in order to be God’s people of blessing in the world.
And when they forget, by God’s grace prophets rise up to remind them.
One of those prophets went by the name of Martin Luther.
When Luther nailed those 95 theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenburg 494 years ago,
he was calling for a reform of the church and particularly of its leaders,
because the church was not fulfilling its calling to love, bless, and heal this world very well.
The abiding thing we remember on Reformation Day is not the work of Martin Luther,
as important as that is; we can remember him on his commemoration of February 18.
And the abiding thing to remember on Reformation Day is not the birth of
Lutheran Churches, which we can remember on the anniversary of the Presentation of
the Augsburg Confession on June 25.
The abiding thing we remember on Reformation Day is the work of the Holy Spirit in the church,
work which makes possible the fundamental reformation notion:
The notion that the church perpetually needs to undergo reform.
One of the many, many things I love about being a member of this congregation is that
as a member here I am also a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada,
our national church, as well as a member of the Lutheran World Federation,
the global communion of Lutheran churches with about 70 million members.
And one of the things I most love about being a member of these churches is that at their best
they take seriously the perpetual need of the church to undergo reform.
Last year the Lutheran World Federation offered an historic apology to the
Mennonite Church for the awful way in which Lutherans – yes, Lutherans! – persecuted
the Anabaptists they disagreed with during the course of the reformation.
I know most of you don’t know that history. We don’t get taught that in confirmation class.
But we need to know it.
Reformation Day is about recognizing the perpetual need of the church to be reformed.
Reformation Day is about repentance.
Lutheran World Federation General Secretary Martin Junge writes:
In coming with repentance even to our own special festival [of Reformation Day], we are acting from the heart of our faith. We are recognizing that the Spirit of God who called the reformers is still active among us now. (at http://www.lutheranworld.org/lwf/index.php/churches-focus-meaning-reformation.html)
We recognize that the Spirit of God who called the reformers is still active among us now.
If I gave you a sheet of paper for you to write down the things about our congregation that
need reforming in order to be more clearly and more nearly the people of blessing that
God calls us to be,
and if I then invited you to nail this sheet of paper on our church door so we could all
sit together and talk about them next Sunday after worship,
what would you write down?
Are we, like the religious leaders Jesus speaks of today, are we walking what we talk?
Or are we all hat and no cattle?
It’s probably not really black and white, yes or no, but more like: where can we do better?
What can we reform?
When we were talking about reforming our worship space several years ago,
I had this very intense vision for the space.
I said, Wouldn’t it be great if we completely surrounded the worship space with water,
like with a moat, that we could cross each Sunday when coming to worship?
It would be like crossing the River Jordan every Sunday just like the Israelites did under Joshua.
And every time we did it, it would be clear that every Sunday we remember our own baptisms
and we would intentionally remember that we are constantly called like the Israelites to
live what we have been taught, that we practice manna-sharing and mercy-giving
here in worship and then cross back over the Jordan on the way out to
live it in the world, just like the Israelites in the Promised Land,
just like the people John the Baptist baptised. Wouldn’t that be friggin’ amazing?
In the silence that followed you could have heard the proverbial pin drop.
And then, “Uh, thanks, Pastor. Anyone else have any suggestions?”
But what would you say?
How do you think the Spirit can reform us so that we better reflect the grace of God
freely given to us over and over and over again, in the forgiveness of sins,
in the person of Jesus, in his feeding us with his love in this meal?
What can we reform as a congregation?
Of course, I think, too, that today is also a day to think about reforming our own individual lives.
Jesus’ words in the Gospel, you’ll note, are not really addressed to the religious leaders anymore.
He’s said to them what he has to say. He is now talking to his own followers and disciples.
He’s talking to us, as if warning us not to fall into the trap of
self-serving and hypocrisy that they have.
It is difficult to speak of the hypocrisy of others, right?
It makes me uneasy, as a Christian to do so, because I always hear my Instructor
inviting me to think about the log in my own eye rather than the speck in my neighbour’s.
I am painfully aware of those things that need to be reformed in myself.
Painfully aware of those things that keep me from being the person
God formed me in my mother’s womb to be.
Painfully aware of what slow progress I make in being Christian.
Painfully aware that how I spend my money and how I spend my time and how I choose to use –
or choose not to use – my body do not always reflect who my God truly is:
the God of all grace, and the God of all mercy.
If I gave you another piece of paper to nail to the door of your house or your bedroom,
and invited you to write on it the things about yourself that need reforming so that
you can more clearly be the image of Jesus – who is the image of God – that
you were intended to be: what would you write down?
The religious leaders of Jesus’ day had what they thought was
an effective way of dealing with Jesus: they nailed him to a cross.
That nailing up was God’s way of showing us just how deeply we need to be reformed: of
our hypocrisy, of our blindness to the truth of love when it confronts us,
of our own need to be God rather than the God of all grace and all mercy.
But it was also God’s way of showing us of how God deals with our un-reformed selves:
by forgiving us, by suffering with us, by granting us grace.
Beloved: The Spirit of him who died and was raised is present with us now.
Let us not nail him away, but invite him into our assembly, into our ears, into our mouths,
That we may be re-formed according to his image and according to his likeness.
That his spirit of manna-sharing and mercy-giving may live in us, and in this congregation.
So let us say together, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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