a sermon preached by A.H.Harry Oussoren

Prayer:

Let only truth be spoken, and only truth be heard – your truth O God, our Rock and our Redeemer. AMEN

Today is Reformation Sunday. The chapel door in front of the pulpit is a reminder. As is the theme melody of the Reformation that has been highlighted in this service. "A mighty fortress is our God" is not just a variation on Psalm 46, but for churches in the Reformation tradition, it serves as a kind of church anthem.

What was the Reformation?

Simply put: a movement of the 16^th century to reform and renew the western church – not western Canada – but western Europe. The consequences of that reform are still felt around the world.

To be sure, if we really delved into the history of the Reformation, we would find that there were lots of other factors bringing about this reform.

There were political, economic, cultural, social and psychological reasons that made Martin Luther’s initial 95 Theses suddenly cause a fire of change to sweep across Europe.

We can’t go into those reasons right now, but they are significant.

Right now I’d like to try to identify a few of the main issues at stake in the Reformation. I do this not because I need to unload a history lecture, but because we are better served to have some sense of what it means to be Protestants.

Glenys and I went to St. George’s Greek Orthodox Church for their Hellenic food festival last weekend and while there went into the sanctuary. We picked up this little brochure which in a nutshell describes what it means to be a Christian of the eastern orthodox persuasion. To have a dialogue with Orthodox Christians or people of any other faith, requires us to be informed about what makes us Protestant Christians.

The Protestant Reformation launched in 1517 in Wittenberg gave a big push to the ongoing process of renewing the church. Leaders like Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Knox, and some of the princes of various states "protested" – made witness

What were these new ways? Let me briefly touch on four key issues raised by the Reformers:

First, the protesters challenged the notion that we could buy or work our way into the forgiveness and love of God.

Pauli hadn’t learned the key Reformation principle. In the early 16^th century people bought indulgences. An indulgence was a certificate from church authorities wiping out penalty time for sinful behaviour.

In the popular mind, indulgences were a way of acquiring God’s favour and grace.

Luther insisted we don’t buy God’s love. We don’t work our way into God’s good graces. Not even our many prayers or fasts or pilgrimages or other pious activities result in God loving us more.

Not even being a moral, upstanding, righteous citizen guarantees for us God’s acceptance.

Throughout the ages people of faith have wrestled over this.

If I am good, will God love me more?

If I am bad, will God punish me?

Luther himself deprived himself, flagellated himself, hated himself, demeaned himself – in order to gain God’s favour.

But in the end it was those words from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans which reminded him that we live by grace – God’s incredible, amazing grace revealed in Christ assuring us that we have been accepted, forgiven, and loved to new life.

God is love reaching out to me. Nothing can separate me from that love.

By faith - by being in relationship with God, immersed in Christ’s Way - we receive this grace as true for our lives. And by faith we live thankfully reflecting this gift, pointing to God’s goodness.

Secondly, the protesters understood that all human beings stand before God equally. There are no first and second class people in God’s eyes – as in clergy and lay.

The phrase "the priesthood of all believers" proclaimed that clergy are not the mediators people have to go through to encounter God.

Clergy are not more spiritual than lay people. They do not have a more direct line to God. Rather everyone of us has priestly roles to play to each other.

Sometimes here we will joke that because I am ordained, I have a higher priority in getting God’s attention than the non-ordained.

Whether it is praying for good weather for the Open House, or getting God to pay more attention to some aspect of congregational life –

we can joke about this notion that an ordained or a diaconal minister is somehow closer to God than others.

It is appropriate to laugh about it, because it is nonsense, of course.

Protestants understand that ordained and diaconal minister are not magical manipulators of the sacred.

We are simply people God calls to be faithful and we are authorized by the church community to give leadership – alongside and in partnership with all the other people of God.

All God’s people are entrusted with the sacred and the holy. That’s what prophecy from Joel said to us: the Spirit of God is poured on all flesh – whether basic workers or rich or powerful or weak and poor, sons and daughters can prophesy, and young and old will have visions and dreams.

The truth is that all believers have this priestly, pastoral, prophetic role.

In our congregation we see that as church school teachers become pastors and teachers to the children in their learning circle; as youth leaders care for the well-being of young people; as the pastoral care team takes communion to frail and elderly members; as all of us speak the Gospel word and pray for each other and call for justice in God’s world.

The challenge still in our time is for all church people to really claim this priestly-prophetic role in the home and in the workplace, in the community and in the nation.

Thirdly, for this "priesthood of all believers" to have any reality, church people needed access to the Bible. Prior to the Gutenberg press and before the Reformation, the Bible was hardly available to the average church person. Manuscripts were in Latin and the vast majority of the population could not read it.

To remedy this Luther himself translated the Bible into German and others quickly produced other European language translations.

As a result, anyone who could read had access to the scriptures.

It meant that clergy no longer controlled mysterious secret knowledge. Lay people could even challenge princes of the church, so that one powerful 16^th century ecclesiastic (Eck) complained chauvinistically:

Nothing sorry about it, at all! The Bible gave women and men of all classes power to interpret the Word.

In our time we hardly comprehend the significance of this revolutionary opening.

We’ve had access to the Bible all our lives. Unfortunately in most Christian homes it’s the book least likely to come off the shelf. We take it as read but don’t actually read it. We don’t know our way around it. Let alone how to interpret it.

Northrop Frye has taught us that you can’t really understand English literature without knowing the Bible. But that hasn’t stopped us from neglecting the book.

Fundamentalist churches have told us we have to suspend our intellect and read the Bible by believing it word for word as fact.

Churches like ours understand that the Bible is foundational, but that it has to be read not as scientific fact, but as story with meaning.

When we read the Bible we insist on keeping our brain alive and alert.

We read prayerfully, trusting the Spirit of God to transform the written words into the Word of God for us today.

That’s what nurtures us, inspires us, strengthens us, gives us hope.

So the Reformation put the Bible into the hands of the people and God’s Word into their hearts.

Finally, there is something called the Protestant Principle. It insists that only God is absolute and ultimate. It rejects the notion than anyone or anything other than God is infallible.

Human ideas, authority figures, particular institutions – even the church itself, are vessels in which the truth is to be found, but never controlled.

Only God is God. Everything else falls short of ultimate truth.

It is because of that conviction, the Reformation teaches us that every generation must go through the demanding process of rediscovering truth, of seeing the vision anew, of renewing the personal relationship with God, and of reforming the Church.

We reform in the knowledge that we can’t create a perfect church, but that God blesses and uses imperfect people and communities to make Christ’s Gospel real for the world.

So everyone of us is called to contribute to that process of reformation.

And today in your order of service you will find a sticky and here is a chapel door.

We haven’t asked Martin Luther from the grave to give us 95 Theses pointing to God’s truth,

rather in good Protestant fashion, everyone of us is invited to offer ways to reform the Church and renew the faith.

Take a minute now to think and pray about your Thesis, your thought. Write it down which the organ is played and before you leave today, tack your Thesis to the chapel door as your contribution to the ongoing renewal of Christ’s church – whether here at Shaughnessy Heights, for the whole UCC, or the entire Christian church. We will gather these up and print them in the next full Grapevine.

May we be worthy of the trust our forebears handed on to us,

and may we grow in our grateful response to the amazing grace of God,

who in Christ and by the Spirit never fails to reach out to us.

AMEN