Greetings from Pastor Khader:
On Sunday, October 29th, Lutheran congregations across the globe will gather to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. Our own congregation, Grace Lutheran Church, will commemorate this heritage as rebels and reformers—to honor our faith roots in a movement sparked by a man named Martin Luther, who loved his faith too much to see it perverted by the corrosive influence of human ego.
Our Reformation history honors even deeper roots… roots in a movement that empowered every person to take the search for truth into his or her own hands and to take comfort in the knowledge that each of us can be in relationship with God… without membership fees… without having to go through a middleman… without separation… without distinction.
Reformation calls us to remember how the freedom of the Spirit was reclaimed then… in the days of Martin Luther and his 95 Theses and his big box of nails… But focusing on Martin Luther’s nailing protest of old… this is good, but it’s not really enough.
Luther famously compared his time period in Rome to Babylon in the time of the Hebrew Scriptures… Babylon where the Israelites had been dragged off into bondage… Today, as our loved ones, our friends, our neighbors, distant others, or we ourselves remain unemployed, underprivileged, or unrecognized… can we really doubt that today we are still in bondage? And if we are in fact in bondage, then what does that say about our truth?
One of Luther’s great insights into the nature of Christian faith and life… and into the life and future of the church… was this:
Sometimes we feel that we are close to God and we believe we understand God’s truth. And then at other times, we feel the opposite… that God is either immeasurably far away… and at still other times, God seems to be somewhere in between, or just beyond our reach.
Life as a Christian is recognizing that God is both near and distant… In Christ, we come to know God in the deepest understanding of what it means to have knowledge or to know… but at the same time, God is hidden.
And this is the life of the church… lived out in this tension between being already saved, claimed as God’s own… and still falling short of the fullness of what God intends for us. The life of the church is lived out in being Lutheran and therefore the children of the Reformation, and in realizing that at the exact same time we too must be reformers.
Reformation is not just history. Reformation is every day. Where in our baptism we die with Christ, and then we live again, so too reformation is a process of continuation… Reformation is continuing in pursuit of Christ’s freeing promise of continual transformation.
The late theologian and food writer Robert Capon said this about the Reformation:
The Reformation was a time when men went blind staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellar full of fifteen-hundred-year-old, two-hundred-proof Grace… one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly. And after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection of your bootstraps—the Gospel suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home before they even started the journey.