Reformation Slogans

I think it is inevitable. Any great movement eventually gets reduced to a slogan. And for a while the slogan works, and then the movement gets institutionalized. And institutions can’t work on slogans. And people forget what the slogan meant. And people try to add to the slogan. And it becomes trite.

The slogan of the Reformation is or was “The Solas”. As late as the 20^th Century people were still trying to add solas to the list. The Reformation really boiled down to two: Grace Alone and Faith Alone. Somewhere along the way Word Alone was added. Three points always rolls easier. Leave it to the Reformed to try and push 3 to 5. I think they wanted a Reformation parallel to TULIP, the Calvinist summary. But the two they added in the 20^th century just address later arguments that aren’t really the beating heart of the Reformation. So I stick with three: Grace Alone, Faith Alone, Word Alone.

Grace Alone. Nobody really disagrees with this. The problem that Christianity addresses is sin. You might ask what is sin? At least I think moderns do. And there are different answers. You can lean into the legalistic, breaking a commandment. You can be more general, missing the mark. That is the allusion buried in the Hebrew word translated sin. I appreciate the definition the Novelist Francis Spufford used in his work of apologetics and confession: The Human Propensity to *Mess* Things Up. Although he didn’t use *Mess*. We can’t seem to avoid it. We mess things up. Even when we don’t want to, we do. As Paul would cry from the heart, “who will save me from this body of death?” Other religions don’t all have sin as their fundamental problem, but they usually will offer some type of solution. And that solution always comes in some type of law like the Buddhist 8 fold path or the Islamic 5 Pillars or the Mormon Doctrine and Covenants. Christ says something completely different. It is by grace alone. You can’t fix it. God has. And everything worthy of the name of Christ agrees that it is by grace alone.

The first dividing point is the 2^nd Sola: Faith Alone. As Mumford and Sons once sang, “How does this grace thing work?” One answer is that it works like medicine. God grants grace. If we respond to the medicine with good works, He supplies more grace. And so there is a cycle of grace and works. And boy did Luther try the works. It was later reformation Roman polemic that would smear Luther, but all the early accounts of everyone who knew Luther would have described him as Super-Monk. He lived it. It didn’t work. How does this grace thing work? Absolute trust in God: Father, Son and Spirit. Faith Alone. The grace of God given to us freely creates faith. Non-Reformed Christianity will still talk about the process as medicinal, a steady infusion of grace to the extent that works are done. The Reformation proclaims faith alone that God’s grace is enough to cover even me.

Eventually everyone asks the question “How do you know?” One answer would be authority. The Pope or Prince says so. Another answer would be tradition. This is how it has always been, or this is how we do it. The Reformation added its third Sola for this question. How do you know? Word Alone. This often gets taken as Scripture Alone. Which is not terrible, because the Scriptures are the Word of God for Christians of all times and places. The Scriptures are the Norming Norm of our life together. But Word Alone was always bigger. The simplification to the Scriptures I think is what caused so much of the late 19^th and 20^th century angst. As critical movements and the enlightenment attacked the Scriptures themselves, for many it felt like everything was lost. But the Reformation slogan is deeper. Word Alone. The Word of the Lord Endures Forever is something of another Reformation slogan – VDMA. When you’ve heard the Word of God, you know. It is self-revealing. It does not return empty. It is not without power. How do you know? Word Alone.

Reformation Day is a banner waving day, but also a good day to understand what those banners are about beyond hooray for my side. They are about Grace. They are about how Faith holds onto that Grace. They are about How we know. The Word of God has come to us today.

The Eye of the Needle

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Biblical Text: Mark 10:23-31

These was our “stewardship Sunday.” If you are not familiar with those, they are the Sunday that we set aside to talk money. It is budget season. We ask our members to fill out pledge cards in this season. And typically the lectionary serves up a gospel lesson that is Jesus speaking about money or mammon or the like. This year the lesson in the aftermath of the “Rich Young Ruler” which was last Sunday’s lesson. Sometimes you might choose that week, but for me Jesus teaching his disciples after that encounter is more stewardship. And it opens with his blunt statement, “how difficult it will be for those who have wealth to enter the Kingdom of God.” And it mostly concerns the disciples reactions.

This sermon is built around those reactions, and how they are the ditches on either side of the narrow road concerning money. It imports what I think is the first strategy around Jesus’ clear saying which is just denial that we are wealthy. There are two ways we can understand our wealth. The first is simply we are Americans, which is a relative argument. But the deeper is an understanding of providence. And that understanding sets the table for the disciple’s more subtle ways of fogging up Jesus statement.

Those ways are our natural mistaken framing of what wealth is. We take it as reward, but it really is faith challenge. The second way accepts the framing of Jesus on wealth that we are entrusted with it for Kingdom purposes, but pridefully attempts to claim heavenly credit for doing what we are called to do. The sermon develops those ditches so that we might recognize them.

It then ends with the narrow road. How the cross of Jesus is the eye of the needle.

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A Note on Stewardship

And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, ¹² to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, ¹³ until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, ¹⁴ so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. ¹⁵ Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ – Ephesians 4:11-15

This week’s corner has a very practical purpose. We are passing out pledge cards for the coming year 2025. They should be stuffed in your worship folder this week. They will also be available the next couple of weeks. Due to a variety of reasons I am having to write this very early, but I also expect that in this package we will have a one page summary of the council approved budget for 2025. This all has a purpose and part of that purpose is “to equip the saints for the work of ministry to build up the body of Christ.”

It has long been a slogan of the Lutheran church that Article 4 of the Augsburg Confession on Justification is the article on which the church stands or falls. We cannot be justified before God by our own strength, merits or works. We are freely justified for Christ’s sake through faith in His work for us. Now I suppose if nobody else was found to proclaim that good news the rocks would cry out. But instead of the actual rocks, God in his wisdom has chosen the living stones, us. And from these living stones He has built his church. It is through the church, in the preached word and the sacraments, that the Holy Spirit works to call, gather, enlighten, sanctify and keep a people for God. The saving word always comes from outside of ourselves. Evangelism and the mission of the church is not some heroic one-time thing, but it is the ongoing work of every congregation. In the Spirit, we keep each other evangelized sharing the word of our salvation in Christ and witnessing to His work in our lives.

That is the fundamental purpose of every congregation. Our council and elders have put together a budget that they believe is necessary and appropriate for that work here at Mt. Zion. You the congregation will have the chance to vote on this budget on November 17^th. And this is why we are passing out the pledge cards at the same time. The support of this work comes from you. While justification is God’s free gift, the life of sanctification is always a partnership with God in faith. A partnership in walking the good works that God has laid out in advance for us to do (Ephesians 2:10). This is equipping you to build up the body of Christ and to mature in that faith instead of being tossed to and fro by every change of inflation.

We are asking you to take these pledge cards home and over the next couple of weeks “decide in your heart how much to give (2 Cor 9:7).” The card has two lines. The first line is for a flat number. This can be a yearly, monthly or weekly number. It is your pledge for the work of Mt. Zion. The second line asks you to state that number as a percentage of your expected income. Tithing, a tenth, was an old testament practice that has often been imported into the church. Old Testament practices are good examples, although in the gospel the tithe is no longer a legal demand. Instead the intention of this like is likewise the building up of the body of Christ. That tithe is one of the few Old Testament examples where God says “test me” in this (Malachi 3:10). The purpose of this line is to encourage such intentional planned stewardship. All that we have is but ours temporarily. It is all from God and we are merely stewards of it. Do we bury it in this earth, or do we put it to work for the kingdom?

Final practicalities. First, nobody besides you and the treasurer will see your pledge. Second, we will collect pledges in service on November 10^th. For a couple weeks after we will leave a collection box in the Narthex. We hope that running the budget at the same time as the pledge both demonstrates the need and offers you the solid opportunity to respond in faith.

Foxes and Hedgehogs

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Biblical Text: Mark 10:17-22

I think this text is a hard one for us to hear because we are so far at an extreme. The key verse that jumps out is that “Jesus loved the Rich Young Rule.” The key question to ask is how did Jesus love him? What I mean by that is how did the love of Jesus manifest itself. And the answers is rather straight forward. Jesus was a good teacher. And in this man’s case that meant holding up the mirror of the law. First he hold’s up the 2nd table, what we might call the basis of ethics. But the man’s problem, the man’s idol, is not ethics. The man’s problem is God. He does not love God above all things, and he is still looking for what he must do. Man has two typical solutions to this. We either create a false law that we can keep, or we excuse ourselves from the law because we are so special and God loves us. But the love of God, what Jesus shows this man, is to hold the clear mirror of the law up. And then we can learn that we cannot free ourselves from our sinful condition. That we cannot do anything. But that Christ has done it.

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Acute and Chronic

No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. – Luke 13:3

In my former congregation there was a nurse manager who also was a teacher/trainer at the local college. One of her observations was the difference in how people and institutions reacted to acute and chronic problems. Acute is happening right now. Getting shot is an acute condition. Chronic is ongoing. High blood pressure is chronic. Her observation and complaint was that all the money went to acute. All the trainees wanted to be in the ER. Those positions always had higher salary and status. But it was the chronic conditions that needed the most help. Uncontrolled chronic conditions rolled down the hill further and faster, and you tend not to climb back up slippery slopes. Yes, acute could kill you now, but chronic could steal all the life from your life. Yet the entire system is set up to treat the acute and rely on the individual to manage the chronic. The individual who has already proven not up to that task. I find the model of care at the place where my wife works to be a fascinating experiment. The practice gets paid on trying to keep people with chronic conditions healthier. On managing them well. I believe it is one of the experiments enabled by the Medicare tweaks in the Affordable Care Act, but google fails me in confirming my memory. The old MBA in me was always fascinated by business model experiments.

But back to the main thought, I was thinking about acute and chronic because of the Hurricanes. Hurricanes are at first very acute. They are happening now. But as we see in North Carolina, they become Chronic. Some of those hollows of Appalachia will just never be restored. Or maybe if you are a radical environmentalist you are saying “no, they are being restored, to nature.” By the time Milton sweeps across Florida, Helene will be a distant memory. Just another chronic condition.

When Hurricanes or natural disasters come around or the most recent acute trouble gets its 15 minutes, I often turn to Luke 13:1-5. Acute disasters terrify us. We think they are God’s judgement. You must have done something to deserve that. Karma’s a b. You saw that in online responses to Helene. “Stupid Trump voters deserve it.” In Luke Jesus gets asked about “some Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices (Luke 13:1).” Part of Jesus’ reply is to bring up a prior 15 mins, “what about those 18 on whom the tower in Siloam fell?” Acute disasters. Why did they happen? Maybe more pruriently, “what did they do to deserve that?” Jesus, who could read hearts, apparently thinks that is what they were thinking. “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans?…do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem (Luke 13:2,4)?”

Jesus takes the acute and the natural human fascination with the acute and turns it to the chronic. Blasphemous sacrifices and falling towers demand immediate attention. But Jesus says, “No, I tell you (they were not worse sinners for suffering in this way), but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish (Luke 13:3).” Sin, the cause of death and decay, is the ultimate chronic condition. And occasionally the fallen powers and principalities throw up a horror that makes us pay attention. But per Jesus there is nothing special about such horror or tragedy. We should not assume “they deserve it” and the corollary that we get to play little Jack Horner sitting in a corner thinking what good boys we are. The acute should force our gaze to the chronic. We are all sinners. And we cannot save ourselves from our sinful condition. Leaving the chronic to the individual just winds up with everyone dead.

But there is a balm in Gilead. Our Chronic condition has been treated by the great physician. Repent and believe. The blood of Christ, sacrificed under Pilate, is the cure for the sin sick soul. His resurrection shall be ours bringing to an end the reign of bodily death. And those powers and principalities that occasionally rear up? Their time is short.

Soften Your Heart

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Biblical Text: Mark 10:2-16 (Parallel Matthew 19:1-15)

Of all the ethical teaching of Jesus, this is probably the most consistently rejected throughout all time and space. And not because it is false, but exactly for the reason Moses felt moved to regulate it – “the hardness of our hearts.” The text in Mark and the Matthew parallel are first about divorce, but in Jesus’ teaching about divorce you have his entire sexual ethic. And he doesn’t ground it in any petty legalistic scheme or regulation. Jesus is not getting pulled into our Overton Window fights. His response is so far outside of acceptable opinion that even Jesus adds the note of despair, “Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.”

What this sermon attempts to do is build the case for receiving it, even if it convicts us. Grounded as it is in natural law it is part of the deep magic of this world. And the law is good and wise. If we conform ourselves to this, things go better. But that is still the law. Why we should receive it, even if we cannot keep it, is because the gospel itself is unthinkable without it. Marriage is the image, the icon, that is given of Christ and the Church, of God and his people. And Christ loves the church with his steadfast love, his covenant faithfulness. We don’t want a world where God can divorce his love. And we do not have one. Receiving this teaching is receiving the invitation to the eschatological wedding feast. We may never live up to it, we might be cracked icons, but the icon is always imperfect. The perfect itself will come.

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Lessor and Greater

The New Testament Book of Hebrews has an interesting argument. Coming off of St. Michael and All Angels it is fitting. In the intertestamental period, the time between the Old Testament and the appearance of Jesus, Jewish religion became infatuated with angels. If you wanted to see an example you could read an apocryphal work by the name of 1^st Enoch. (Just google it and you’ll find multiple copies on the internet. Our age is not so different. Both ages that felt something in the air that wasn’t quite there yet.) The Jews had named a bunch of angels. They had created entire celestial hierarchies. They had job descriptions for all of those hierarchies. The closest analogy for the role these angels played in that time frame might be the role of Saints in the medieval church. You sought them out and asked for their assistance. The first argument of the book of Hebrews is the many ways that Jesus, the Son of God, is higher or better than the angels. These angels you so admire and fixate upon? Turn your eyes and prayers and worship to the greater one – Jesus. That kind of argument – from the lessor to the greater – will continue throughout the entire book. The author of Hebrews, who we don’t really know, starts off with angels, but proceeds with Moses, the Priesthood, the offerings and many of the staples of Jewish religious life. All of these have been fulfilled in the person and work of Jesus.

The church and the world around is always drifting off into these esoteric and gnostic forms. Now I’d bet that you might not understand those terms – esoteric and gnostic – but if I described them the lightbulb would go on immediately. Esoteric means slightly hidden. Agent Mulder in the X-files had his poster “the truth is out there.” That is an esoteric belief. There is truth. You must find or uncover the way to have it. And that search usually leads to all kinds of practices we might call witchcraft or similar: tarot cards, amulets, psychics, horoscopes. These are all esoteric ways to knowledge. The gnostic usually pairs with the esoteric. The gnostic is someone who believes in a spiritual reality, but it requires knowledge to access it. The most modern Gnostics might be those who are using ayahuasca, ketamine or other psychedelics, like QB Aaron Rodgers or most of Silicon Valley. They take part in shamanic rituals. They hire spirit guides. All in the pursuit of some greater knowledge. Esoteric or hidden practices lead to gnosis or knowledge. And the church and the world are both always drifting off into things like this because who doesn’t want to know. And God can always seem so frustrating in not giving us knowledge. He doesn’t answer the why too often. The intertestamental Jew would summon the angels. The modern Christian goes on a vision quest retreat.

The author of Hebrews tells us, “we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it (Hebrews 2:1).” We might desire that esoteric knowledge, but the true stuff has already been given to us. God in his wisdom has chosen to reveal himself in His son Jesus. And Jesus has been proclaimed by the apostles, the church and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Proclaimed freely and openly. Why would we “neglect so great a salvation? (Hebrews 2:3)” Why would we turn away from this deep and true knowledge which God “bore witness by signs and wonders and miracles? (Hebrews 2:4)” Why would we neglect Christ proclaimed to play with trinkets? Why would we accept a lessor knowledge, when the greater has been given to us?

While right now we might feel lessor. And that lack makes us chase everything that promises knowledge now. Jesus himself was “for a little while made lower than the angels (Hebrews 2:9)” but through his suffering and death was crowned with glory. So also us. Our salvation is made perfect in Christ and the sharing of his sufferings (Philippians 3:10). “This is why he is not ashamed to call us brothers (Hebrews 2:11).” Now we might feel lessor because we walk by faith, not by knowledge. But salvation only comes by faith through the one who is not ashamed to call us brother.

Dispatches from the Battlefield

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Biblical Texts: Daniel 10:10-14, 12:1-3, Revelation 12:7-12, Luke 10:17-20, Colossians 1:16

The day on the church year was the feast of St. Michael and All Angels, so we get to talk about the church year a bit and angels a bunch. For me, St. Michael’s Day is a report from the battlefield so that you might understand the terrain as you traverse it. And this sermon has three broad points about that report.

We live in a Spiritual reality – an invisible creation – some of which has been corrupted and remains at war with the true authority.

That true authority – Christ – has triumphed. That true authority loves you and has tasked his faithful officers, great and small to guard you.

Know that the time is short. Understand the Word. This battlefield world is passing away. And the peace of the world to come is coming into being. Rejoice that your names are written there.

Important things to remember.

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Feasts and Festivals

One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. – Romans. 14:5

Of the Worship of Saints they teach that the memory of saints may be set before us, that we may follow their faith and good works, according to our calling – Augsburg Confession Article 21

Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. – Colossians. 2:16-17

Christians have been arguing about calendars since Apostolic times. And those arguments never really stopped. Hence the two opening quotes. And when you argue about calendars you are arguing about piety, practice and remembrance. You are arguing about what people think is important. Many such arguments can simply be settled “you respect yours, I respect mine.” You can hear that argument in the Apostle Paul. But calendar arguments, because it is hard to keep your own calendar, often become group defining. “We are going to remember this date.”

The very first of those definitional dates would be over the Sabbath. The Apostles, being Jews, kept the Sabbath, on Saturday. They then met together on “the Lord’s Day” or Sunday, the day of resurrection. For example Paul is searching for the local Jewish gathering “on the Sabbath day” (Acts 16:13), but at the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15 there is no mention of telling the gentiles to keep the Sabbath. And by the time of John’s visions in Revelation, they come to him as “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day (Revelation 1:10).” You can hear those arguments in that third quote at the start. Paul telling his gentile audiences that Sabbaths are a shadow of the substance of Christ. Meeting on Sunday is good and proper.

I’m talking about Calendars for two reasons. The first is that this Sunday gets a special name – St. Michael and All Angels. The church calendar that we follow has a general structure – the large seasons of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter and Pentecost. For half the year we follow the life of Christ, and for the other half we emphasize the life in the Spirit. We gather on the “the Lord’s Day”. We are the people of the resurrection. We remember that substance of Christ weekly. Within that general calendar there the “feasts and festivals.” The actual dates never change. All Saints is always November 1^st. But some of them, like All Saints, we move their observance to the nearest Sunday. We have deemed their witness and memory too important to skip, yet we do not feel compelled to gather on the odd Tuesday Nov 1^st. Most of those festivals we observe occasionally, which means when their day falls on a Sunday naturally, so due to leap years every 6-14 years. St. Michael and all Angels is one of those days. It is always September 29^th. When September 29^th is a Sunday, we remember the angels. There are also some feasts that honestly, we just don’t remember. When I served St. Mark’s in West Henrietta, I tried to observe April 25^th, the feast day of St. Mark. At Mt. Zion there is no such special connection.

And that gets into the second reason I’m talking about calendars. I tend to think that our everyday lives and most of what takes place in them is designed to flatten everything. The World does this in two ways. If anyone saw the original Pixar Incredibles movie, it has one of the most subversive lines I can remember. “And when everyone is super, no one is.” There is something about our age that reacts against “the memory of the saints being set before us.” Our world wants equality or even equity. The acknowledgement that someone – a saint – lived it better is subversive. So it levels all days, and days it can’t level it elevates everything to obscure the remembrance of the saint. But I just don’t think that is either reality or the needs of true humanity.

We need things to strive for. Every Olympic athlete ponders how can I break the world record. The memory of the saints is so that we may follow their faith and good works. We need feast days like we need fast days, and ordinary time (another name for the season of Pentecost). Because life is not flat. We need days to remember St. Michael and the angels, because we need to ponder that creation includes “things visible and invisible”. And that those invisible things do impact our existence. When the world wants to flatten everything, the Christian needs to hear the distant triumph song. There are things the world wants us to forget that we need to remember.

What Happened?

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Biblical Text: Mark 9:30-37

For me I feel like this sermon is slightly different. Sermons are this cycle of meditation from text to life to text to life. Most of mine start with the text. Back at the start of the week I translate everything. Try and discern what the text is talking about in some platonic way. This is always a little false because the bible, the sacred text, isn’t some hermetically sealed away thing. The text itself springs from some lived reality. But I try and answer the general drift. And then I start asking question of how does this intersect with life right now. It is in that intersection that dogmatic or theological questions can help shed light and be asked fruitfully. How is the law felt here? How does the gospel come to us? And eventually I have to move to preaching it. My general outline, which can be mixed around, but I tend to think the standard works best for preaching flow is the ancient four-fold meaning: Literal Text (which bounds things), Christological (what does the text say about Christ and how does it intersect with us), Moral (How then shall we live), and Eschatological (Where are we heading, or what is the promise we are living into). I usually craft an introduction last. Hopefully an artful open door into the meditation that follows.

But this sermon started with a conversation. The introduction is not a conclusion, but an honest inquiry. Hence it is a bit longer. And what follows is an attempt to give an honest answer. And that answer implies both moral and eschatological charges to those who would believe. The question was simply: What Happened? Longer: Why did the American church seem to break between the boomer and the X generations and continue to break continuity? That is tied into fears both in the current about viability and in the future about my kids and the faith. This sermon is an attempt to answer.

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