Bethlehem Lutheran Church

Romans 3:19-28
John 8:31-36

Reformation (7 pm) Andy Behrendt, Bethlehem intern 

I want to perform a little experiment here tonight. I'm going to begin a sentence, and if it doesn't ring any bells for you, that's fine, but if it's at all familiar, I want you to complete the sentence for me: "Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest ..."

"... And let these gifts to us be blessed." That's the way most families across the decades have concluded that little table prayer. But not my family, the Behrendt family. When I was growing up, and when my dad before me was growing up, the prayer ended, "and let this food to us be blessed." That was the way we were used to praying, and we never thought much of it ... until my wife, Tracy, joined us at the dinner table ... and a small reformation took place.

We changed our prayer to "let these gifts." Initially it was just as a courtesy to Tracy, whose family had always prayed that way. But as the Behrendt Family Table Prayer Reformation spread to my grandparents, my dad eventually asked my Grandma Gladys why she had raised her boys to say "let this food." And Grandma Gladys replied that she had thought "let these gifts" would confuse her boys. Maybe they wouldn't make the connection between "gifts" and "food" and they'd instead start looking under their chairs and placemats for Christmas gifts in shiny wrapping paper. And so we realized that in the decades of simply doing what we were used to doing, we were not only furthering a family tradition of low cognitive expectations but also ignoring the important understanding that our food each night was a gift from God.

On this Sunday of every year, we celebrate the contributions of a religious reformer even more significant than my wife, Tracy. It was on October 31, 1517, that a Catholic monk and professor named Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg, Germany, and touched off a huge reformation that would change the face of the Christian church forever. Just as Tracy helped my family to return its table prayer to a deeper level of truth, Luther helped Christians to return to truths of the faith that had gotten lost.

For one thing, Luther placed in the hands of common people a remarkable translation of the Bible from its original languages into a lively form of German that people could understand and even enjoy. This gave the people a new power to read the Bible for themselves-something the church's power-hungry hierarchy thought the people weren't smart enough to do. Further, Luther insisted that ministry wasn't something that was limited to the officials of the church-rather, all people as baptized children of God were called to be ministers of God's good news through Jesus Christ.

Most importantly, Luther helped us recover an understanding of salvation that had been buried beneath understandings of a God defined by demands. The church in Luther's day taught that getting to heaven was very much in our hands. People were expected to do good works that would bring them closer and closer to righteousness. But even as a monk in a monastery, Luther found that he could never meet those expectations-he could never become right with God by his own power. And he realized that, while trying to earn his own salvation, he was acting selfishly and not out of love for God, which only made it clearer how sinful he was. And how sinful we all are.

But as he went closer to the source of the Christian faith and examined the writings of the Apostle Paul-the oldest of the writings in our New Testament-Luther rediscovered a picture of God and Christ and salvation that was completely different. Luther recovered from Paul an understanding of a God who is not about anger and punishment but rather a God who forgives us out of grace and who, through Jesus, saves us from our sin as a gift. As Paul writes in tonight's first reading, from Romans 3, "We hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works ... ." And Paul writes, "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. They are now justified by his grace as a gift." Since we cannot free ourselves from sin, Christ through his death on a cross set us free ... as a gift.

Just as my family lost the idea of gift in our table prayer, the Christian church of Martin Luther's day had lost the understanding of our salvation as a gift. Luther helped us all to realize that it's not by our own works that we're saved but by God's grace, through faith-through trust in the promises of what God, through Christ, has done for us. What a gift! And in case it sounds like that gift is not completely free-that God's grace requires our faith-Luther also taught us that faith is not something that we must accumulate. No. Faith, too, is a gift that God gives to us through the Holy Spirit, who allows us to believe in Christ. And we first receive the Holy Spirit in the gift of baptism. It's all gift.

Good stuff, huh? Hooray for Martin Luther, and hooray for the Reformation. But you may have noticed that all this happened just shy of 500 years ago. And you may be asking, as Luther so often asked, "What does this mean?" What does reformation mean today? This month at Bethlehem, we've been asking, "What does this mean?" about various pieces of the Lutheran heritage. Two weeks ago Pastor Beth explained the significance of baptism in our lives. And last week Pastor Chris did the same for communion. Tonight, the focus, as you may have guessed, is on reformation. Now, baptism and communion are fairly approachable because they're tangible things we still experience on a weekly basis. But what about reformation? Why is a word that smells so much like the 1500s important for us in 2008?

Well, besides being a celebration of the hallmarks of the faith that Martin Luther dug out of the dust 500 years ago, today-Reformation Sunday-is a day when we can remember that reformation doesn't stop. That's important to remember because, like my family with its prayer, we all have a tendency to keep doing what we're used to doing, without questioning it. And the church is no exception.

Rob Bell, a pastor and author who's been called a Billy Graham for a new generation, finds new significance in the story of the Lutheran Reformation in his book, Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith. In the book, which we're inviting Bethlehem young adults to read and then discuss after the Sunday night service on November 30, Rob Bell writes about how the world changes, even as God doesn't. And with that in mind, Bell challenges us to continue Luther's tradition-indeed, Jesus' tradition-of reforming. To keep reconnecting the earliest understandings of Christ with our ever-changing world. To continually repaint the Christian faith so that it doesn't end up like a Velvet Elvis painting, buried in the basement. "The world around us shifts," Bell writes, "and the Christian faith is alive only when it is listening, morphing, innovating, letting go of whatever has gotten in the way of Jesus and embracing whatever will help us be more and more the people God wants us to be." [1]

In tonight's second reading, from John's Gospel, Jesus invites people to continue in his word and to know a truth that will set them free from sin. And that truth, that word-the centerpiece of our faith and of our reforming-is Jesus himself. The gift of freedom we receive from Christ is not a freedom to be taken for granted. It's a freedom that transforms us and invites us each day to consider anew Christ's word and Christ's truth with questions and wide eyes, just as the 27 students who were confirmed here today have done. And as we're transformed, we're called to continually transform God's church and God's world into the places that Jesus called for them to be-places where forgiveness and unconditional love are made known to all people. As Paul taught us and as Luther reminded us, it's not for ourselves and our own salvation that we do good works. It's out of glad response to God's gifts and for the sake of others.

At a Reformation Sunday worship service three years ago in Wisconsin, I had a surprising and downright overwhelming experience of these gifts and this call. And I suddenly and gladly realized how I needed to respond. I needed to stop doing what I was used to doing. With tears in my eyes, I turned to Tracy at the end of that service and told her that I was pretty sure I wanted to become a pastor-that I needed to become a pastor. I needed to try to share the gifts I had received with others and do what I could to change the church and the world for the better.

But as I realized months later when I arrived at Luther Seminary and studied Martin Luther's teachings in more detail, I didn't need to pursue the life of a pastor to make those changes. Although I believe more strongly now than ever before that I am called to be a pastor, transformational ministry to the world is not only the calling of a pastor. It's the calling of all ministers-the ministers that we are all transformed into through our baptism.

Luther taught that in "the priesthood of all believers" all of us are called to serve our neighbors. And he taught that each of us has a vocation, a way to do God's work, whatever our role or occupation might be-mother, father, child, student, teacher, dentist, waitress, attorney, plumber, accountant, carpenter. Freed from sin and made right with God by Christ on the cross, we can stop worrying about getting ourselves into heaven and instead focus on reforming this world into a better place for one another, out of gratitude to God.

With that in mind, after tonight's service, you'll each receive a pocket cross ... to remind you of the gifts of hope, peace, and strength that are yours through faith in Christ; to invite you to engage that faith in ways you're not used to; and to help you consider what it means to live out that faith in today's world.

So let the reformation continue. And come, Lord Jesus, be our guest ... and use our gifts that your world might be blessed.

[1] Rob Bell, Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith (Zondervan, 2005), 11.