"Have we failed the Reformation? Thoughts on Bread and Forgiveness" -- A Sermon for Reformation Sunday 2007

“Have we failed the Reformation? Thoughts on Bread and Forgiveness”
A Sermon for Reformation Sunday 2007
Romans 3:19-28; John 8:31-36

By The Rev. Matthew Emery
Preached at Second Congregational United Church of Christ, Rockford, Illinois
October 28, 2007

Reformation Sunday is probably one of my favorite days on the church calendar each year. Now, this may seem like a strange thing—Reformation Day doesn’t have the pizzazz of Easter Sunday or any special sentimental feelings like Christmas can have. It’s not even a day that everyone in our own denomination, the United Church of Christ, would be very familiar with—even though it is listed on the official UCC calendar book every year. I suspect that many of you probably don’t know much about Reformation Sunday, either, this day that commemorates the very beginnings of the Protestant Reformation, when people like Martin Luther and John Calvin back in the 1500s started trying to reform the church, but instead created one of the biggest divides among Christians ever, the divide between Protestants and Roman Catholics.

So why is this somewhat obscure day one of my favorites? Well, let me first say that it is not because I think it should be an easy opportunity to bash the Roman Catholic Church. Now, while there is much that I do not agree with, there are certainly things about the Roman Catholic tradition that are good. I know this might be scandalous to say here, but there are even things that they do better than us Protestants, and we might just have something to learn from them. So anyway, for me, Reformation Sunday is not about anti-Catholic feelings.

Some of my friends from seminary and others who know me well might say that my fondness for Reformation Sunday is about my fondness for things Lutheran. Indeed, this day is one that is most commonly associated with Lutherans and, even though I have never been a Lutheran, it is true that I do like many things from the Lutheran tradition—their more liturgical worship and greater focus on the sacraments, and their rich heritage of music and hymns, including our closing hymn today. Of course there’s also that great Lutheran tradition of beer-drinking, but that’s another matter.

But anyway, all of that said, the real reason I like Reformation Sunday so much is because the Reformation was all about reclaiming the central things—identifying again the real, core, central good news of Christianity and focusing in on the practices that proclaim and make real that good news—and then making sure that those central matters are actually what’s at the center of our life together as a church. This is a question that I try to keep in front of me all the time. It’s very easy for us to let matters that are really secondary overshadow what should be at the core of our mission and purpose—and certainly I can be as guilty of that as anyone else. But that’s the gift of Reformation Sunday, to let the question of the central things to challenge us once again into faithfulness.

So, what are the central things? How do we discern what should be at the core of our life together? We could try to talk about the central concerns of the Bible, which in fact we do do fairly often. We could try to look at the creeds and confessions of faith. But I want to propose another way, something perhaps more accessible, certainly something closer to our hearts. In fact, something most of us know by heart, and something we find on our lips every Sunday: the Lord’s Prayer. What can the Lord’s Prayer show us about the central things? **

First, I want to be clear that I’m not simply being arbitrary by focusing in on the Lord’s Prayer. It has been so central to Christian practice throughout history that it’s connected to all our praying, all of the church’s worship and liturgy. It’s connected to baptism, as a “gift” people are taught as they are preparing for baptism or as they affirm their baptisms though confirmation. It’s also connected to Holy Communion, as the final table prayer we pray at the end of all our great thanksgiving-and-praying in preparation for the feast. And it’s something we find amongst our prayers in the morning, in the evening, in Sunday services even when we’re not celebrating a Baptism or Communion. If there is one thing that Christians do together, one thing the Church does, it is pray and worship, and the Lord’s Prayer has such a common and important place that it could in a sense be a symbol to stand for all of our worship and prayer.

The Lord’s Prayer is first and foremost a communal prayer. “Our Father”, “give us”, “deliver us”. And, not only is it the prayer of a community and not just an individual, it is a prayer that expresses the deep longings and hopes of all humanity. It speaks with honesty of the human condition we all face: “longing for God, in need of mercy, justice, and life, hopeful, fearful, likely to fail.” O God, your reign come. Your will of justice and mercy and peace be done. Do not bring us to the test, for we fear we will fail. We pray these things looking to the future, waiting for the day of the Lord that we both hope for and fear. And we pray it along with all humanity—us as priests, praying on behalf of all the people. So this is one thing central to the Prayer, our calling to pray and cry out for others and all people.

But along side everything in the Prayer that pleads the hopes and fears of all humanity, there are two things that stand out as different, that set us apart as Christians from others. Two signs that the “expected, longed-for Day [of the Lord] has already dawned in the life of the [Christian] community itself.” Standing right at the center of the Prayer are two central things that mark us as Christians, as the Church: bread and forgiveness.

“Give us today our daily bread.” Or, maybe it should be “Give us daily the bread for the journey, the bread that sustains”. In visions of the end-of-times, of the coming reign of God, whether in our the book of Revelation or even in the Jewish writings that were around in Jesus’ time, one of the images of God’s reign is a rich banquet table where the great multitudes freely eat of the feast of new, rich, everlasting, abundant life—the bread that sustains. This vision is transformed, though, when we as Christians dare to pray to God to give us that bread, that feast, today, now. We dare to believe that the great, life-giving feast is already breaking forth here, in this place. We are the people who hold a meal together that we believe is already God’s meal—that’s what Christianity has been from the earliest times, a meal fellowship. We receive what God is giving us in the resurrection feast, and then we are sent out to share food with the hungry, to fill the actual needy with actual good things.

The other thing that stands at the center of the prayer—forgiveness—is also about God already doing what we expect in the end-times. ‘Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.’ Or perhaps better, “Forgive us now with your final forgiveness, just as we are turning to each other, ministering forgiveness to those who sin against us.” This is the place where Sunday after Sunday we hear the presence now of God’s promised forgiveness. “Friends, believe the good news of the Gospel: In Jesus Christ we are forgiven.” Not, ‘we will be forgiven’, but ‘we are forgiven’. That’s who we are as Christians, the people who believe that God already started God’s reign in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. But more, we’re the ones who turn to each other, full of that already breaking-forth power, and minister forgiveness to each other. “The peace of Christ be with you all.” And, of course, we are called to carry that forgiveness out into the world, that others may experience what we know of God already at work.

Of course, forgiveness was one of the central themes for the Reformers, folk like Martin Luther and John Calvin. “Salvation by God’s grace” is the big deal that most people associate with the Reformation, and especially with Luther. Convinced of his own unworthiness, Luther finally came to understand God’s love for him and all people in reading the writings of the apostle Paul. The message we heard this morning in Paul’s letter to the Christians in Rome, that all of us have fallen short, and yet we are justified by God’s grace as a gift—this was the key to all that Luther and his fellow Reformers stood for, all that the good news of the gospel still means for us today. And, I think it is no small matter that we as Christians are the people who pray and speak and act out of the conviction that God is already working such grace and forgiveness among us.

Bread and forgiveness, that’s what stands at the center of who we are, if the Lord’s Prayer is any clue. If the concern of the Reformation was about renewing our focus on the central things, then to ask if we are living into the spirit of the Reformers is to ask ourselves about our bread and our forgiveness. Does “bread and forgiveness” really describe who we are at the core?

Sometimes I worry that it doesn’t. Or at least that it doesn’t seem clear to the rest of the world that bread and forgiveness is what we’re all about. In a new book titled unChristian, David Kinnaman shares the results of some recent studies of young adult non-Christians, 16 to 29 year olds who do not consider themselves Christian. The results are rather sobering: 87% of young adult non-Christians believe that Christianity is “judgmental” and 85% say it’s “hypocritical”. Somehow these aren’t words I’d use to describe something that’s supposed to be about forgiveness. And even more, 91% of them, along with 80% of church-going young adults think that Christianity today is “anti-gay”. Clearly they don’t see the rich, open, hospitable banquet table spread with a life-sustaining feast given for all, the bread that the Lord’s Prayer points us to. Instead, we’re apparently a closed-off, rule-oriented, un-reconciling, judgmental, hypocritical group that “no longer looks like Jesus.”

Are they right? Have we become like the religious leaders that Jesus is talking to in this morning’s reading from John? They had forgotten where they had come from. “We are descendents of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone.” You almost want to say “Hellllloooooo, remember that whole Exodus thing? Pharaoh, Moses, the plagues, the Passover? Was that just some nice vacation in Egypt?” And more than that, Jesus seems to be saying, we all become slaves to our brokenness, our sin, to the facades we try to put up and the appearances we try to keep up. But there is hope, because in the Son, “we will be free indeed”, as John’s Jesus says. In fact, free we are, already, in the Son, Jesus Christ, the one who taught us the prayer with bread and forgiveness at the center, the one who is the bread of life we receive at the table, the one whose peace we pass on to others in forgiveness.

Inspired by our Reformation heritage, that is the freedom we are called to live in to, the freedom we have in Christ. It is the freedom to lay aside in God’s grace all that enslaves us, all the secondary things that keep us from the central things. The freedom to pray for God’s forgiveness already at work and for the bread of life to be broken in our midst. Indeed, here in this place a word and a feast are set out for us, and here in this place are empowered to be bread and forgiveness for the world—light to the whole human race.

BLESSING AND HONOR, GLORY AND POWER BE UNTO GOD, NOW AND FOREVER. AMEN.

** This exploration of central things is deeply indebted to “The Pastor in Preparing to Preside: The Lord’s Prayer” in Gordon Lathrop, The Pastor: A Spirituality (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006).