A Church Reforming

Grace and Peace to you from God our Creator and our Lord Jesus Christ.

In 1910, the Danish Lutheran Church (one of the many denominations that has merged to become the ELCA) felt led to support a mission church in Nigeria.  A farmer from Kenmare, ND heard about this and felt called to be a part of this.  He went to his congregation of Trinity Lutheran in Kenmare and talked about this.  Trinity ended up raising $2000 of the $5000 needed total seed money needed to start the Lutheran Church of Nigeria.  A few years ago, the presiding Bishop of the Lutheran Church of Nigeria came to the US and visited the small town of Kenmare.  While he was being shown around, he walked into a field and filled a container with dirt.  When people asked him what he was doing he simply replied, “I want to show my people the soil from which we were raised”.

It is important to know where we come from, the stories that shape us, the soil from which we were raised.  And that is partly what Reformation Sunday is about. It is the day in our church year when we all wear red, sing some of our best Lutheran hymns, and celebrate the series of events that happened 500 years ago that shaped us into who we are as a denomination today.  It is a powerful day of celebrating and remembering where we came from and who we are.  And this knowing of the stories that shaped us and knowing of the beliefs that ground us in our identity as ELCA Christians is critical to who we are so we can embrace who God is calling us to be. 

What I think we forget however, is that our identity is not simply a Church born out of the Reformation, we are called to be a church that is reforming.  Luther challenged the church authorities because he believed that along the way, they started to get off track.  He believed that the message and love of God was getting twisted up in church law and indulgences.  His writings and actions didn’t create a denomination overnight; his writings and actions set into motion a series of events that eventually led to the formation of a new church.  Beliefs continued to be shaped and changed throughout the years as scholars and theologians took Luther’s writings and expanded on them or challenged them.  Although there are many jokes about Lutherans and hating change, we forget that we were born from change and we evolved through change.  Who we are today as Lutherans and Christians is not same as the Christians in Luther’s time and not the same as in Jesus’ time.  We are different because the world we live in is different.  And so we must not be simply the Church of the Reformation, we must be the Church that IS reforming. 

 I wonder if our fear and hesitation toward change is a fear of losing who we are, losing our identity.  In a culture of action and busyness, we are defined by what we do.  If we change what we do, we change who we are. And in a chaotic world, we long for stability, for rootedness.  And so we fear change. 

But lucky for us, we can tell a different story.  We don’t have to fear change.  Because change doesn’t impact the core of who we are, or more accurately, whose we are.  In Jeremiah we are reminded who we are:  you shall be my people, and I shall be your God.  This is big enough that it bears repeating: you shall be my people and I shall be your God.  We are a people of God- that is our identity.  And so we can change, question, wrestle, and reform what we believe and how we look and act as a church, because that does not change whose we are. Quite the contrary- knowing whose we are, empowers us to change what we do and how we act as a church for the sake of the world.  For the sake of a world that needs to hear this message of belonging and love, for the sake of people who need to hear Jesus’ message of acceptance and grace in ways they can understand.

And yet, there is lamenting, a looking back with longing of who we were.  All around the country, as a Church we look back fondly of when pews were fuller, we had more youth, budgets weren’t stretched quite so thin, etc.  Often people talk about partnering with another congregation or ministry with a tone of failure; failure because they no longer have the resources to do it on their own. 

 Much like the Jewish people Jesus was talking with, we cling to who we were, and forget who we are.  In the gospel the Jews Jesus is talking to respond to him with a bit of shock- we are descendants of Abraham! We have never been slaves!  They conveniently forgot the minor detail of being slaves in Egypt, and slaves to the Romans.  But their identity was rooted in their past, rooted so deeply that they couldn’t see who else they might become.

In his words today, Jesus echoes the words in Jeremiah- continue in my word and you will be my disciples.  “You will know the truth”- that’s the part I think that gets them stuck.  They fear having to change, having to be different.  Because I think they know that if they continue to follow Jesus, they will be different.  Their identity as children of Abraham will be changed if they take on the identity of Jesus’s disciples.

And that’s where we have an advantage over the disciples.  Because we know that this God that called Abraham and his descendants, the same God that wrote the law upon our hearts and has claimed us as God’s own, is the same God speaking to the disciples and speaking to us in the Gospel.  It is not an either/or choice.  Our identity is people of God and followers of Jesus, and we know they are intricately connected, not 2 different things. 

And so remember who you are!  People of God, followers of Jesus- the Son makes you free and you are free indeed. Free to be a people and a church who is always reforming.  Looking around, it is easy to see we are in the middle of a Reformation.  I thinking we are becoming the church, becoming the people, God is calling us to be in our world today.

I see it in congregations like First English in Columbus, Ohio.  First was a dying inner-city congregation, staying open just long enough for a members’ son to get married, and then they would close their doors forever.  But God had other plans…and the faithful members were listening.  They looked around and saw hungry people in their neighborhood.  Trusting in the Holy Spirit and with mission support from the ELCA, they threw open their doors and began a breakfast worship, where people could be fed both physically and spiritually.  And now First Lutheran is a congregation full of  new life and mission and continuing to do God’s work in their neighborhood. 

I see this reformation in the 12 Social Statements adopted by our Church.  Did you know we had that many?  Have you read them?  We continue to face new challenges in our world and as people of faith we continue to respond to them.  These statements are rooted in our understanding of the Gospel and are created as new questions arise in our culture and our world- we are a church reforming.

And I see reformation in Ridgeway, Colorado, in the congregation of the United Church of the San Juans.  This congregation is a joint congregation of the ELCA, Presbyterian, United Methodist, and United Church of Christ.  Rooted in their identity as followers of Jesus, they worship and serve their community together for the sake of God’s mission.

And so it’s time to change the story we tell.  In Albuquerque, NM we have the congregation of Camino de Vida, a joint Lutheran/Episcopalian congregation.  Recently, they partnered with St. Paul Lutheran to jointly call a 2^nd pastor, who serves each congregation half-time.  They do this together knowing they can serve their community and do God’s mission better if they do it together.  There is no sense of failure that they don’t have the resources to do it on their own, quite the opposite.  They rejoice that together they are growing.  They are rooted in the belief that we are in this together, that we are the church and we are better together. 

It’s time to change the story we tell.
If we look around and see our pews less full than before, let’s not continue to struggle to answer the question of how we get more people in the door- let’s take the message of love and grace out of the door and to where people are at.  Let us invite them to the table by taking the table mobile.  In St. Paul, Minnesota there is a new ministry operating out of a food truck.  A free lunch is given no questions, and a Bible study is offered for those interested. 

But this changing of the story, the changing of how we do church today comes with risk.  There is risk because changing how we live out Jesus’ message in our world requires us to let go of some things.  In our gospel today, Jesus tells us that we must stop being slaves and then we will know freedom.  If we truly want to be a church that is reforming, committed to living out our faith in the 21^st century, what do we need to let go of?  What is holding us back from truly being free to boldly do the work that God is calling us to do?  Like the disciples, I think what holds us back is knowing that if we take this call seriously, we will be changed.  And so maybe I need to adjust what I said earlier- being a people of reformation won’t change whose we are, but it will probably change who we are.  We know that we can’t keep doing the same things over and over again and expect different results.  But we also can’t do new things and expect things to stay the same.  Because that’s not how Jesus works.  When Jesus entered the world, he did things differently and changed the world that he was a part of.  And he keeps doing that today, he comes to us in the Word and in the bread and the wine, inviting us to be different, inviting us to share his message anew, in however we need to so that people hear it, so that people experience love, grace, and freedom- so that people experience God- through us. 
That is what it means to be this Church of the Reformation in our world today.  We are not simply the Church born from the Reformation, we are the Church reforming, changing and reforming for the sake of sharing God’s story and doing God’s work in the world.
Amen.