He Never Meant to Start a Church
Matthew 23: 1-12 (NIV)
Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples: “The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. So you must be careful to do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them. “Everything they do is done for people to see: They make their phylacteries wide and the tassels on their garments long; they love the place of honor at banquets and the most important seats in the synagogues; they love to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and to be called ‘Rabbi’ by others. “But you are not to be called ‘Rabbi,’ for you have one Teacher, and you are all brothers. And do not call anyone on earth ‘father,’ for you have one Father, and he is in heaven. Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one Instructor, the Messiah. The greatest among you will be your servant. For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.
Over the last two years a lot of you have heard me talk about a gentleman by the name of Martin Luther. You've even heard me preach about him on occasion. You'll hear me talking about him today, since this is a Sunday when we remember what he did for our Church.
Martin Luther never meant to put to motion what he did. He never meant to ignite the Protestant Reformation, and he definitely never meant to start a whole church tradition of his own. He was just fed up.
Luther was a very devoted, pious, studious German Roman Catholic monk, and he loved his Church. He loved his Church so much that it hurt him to see what was happening to it. He loved his Church so much that he couldn't just sit around and see what was happening to it and do nothing.
Luther was starting to take issue with a lot of the Church's practices. He was afraid the Church was alienating its own believers. He thought the Bible should be available in languages that people actually speak, and not just Greek and Latin. He thought that the Bible was all anyone needed to get to know and love God. He thought that having faith in Jesus was so powerful that that faith alone was all a person needed to be saved--he thought your works weren't anywhere near as important as your faith. He thought people should pray directly to God, and that people didn't need help praying from their priest, or from the Pope, or from Mary, or from a saint.
His ideas were revolutionary, and he was in an institution that did not approach change well. Still, his ideas weren't enough for him to break from the Church he loved. That moment didn't come until the Church decided to do something so corrupt that Luther knew he needed to take a stand, even if it costed him everything.
And that happened when the Church sent a papal commissioner to Germany to start selling something called indulgences. Indulgences worked like this: Let's say you did something you weren't too proud of. You made a mistake, one that will look sinful in the eyes of the Church. You're really worried that your mistake is going to hurt your relationship with God. So you go to church and confess that mistake to your priest. And your priest tells you, It'll be okay. You know what, if you give me $20, I can talk to God and clear this whole thing up for you.
The Church was advertising that you could buy forgiveness for your sins, and that money was going toward building cathedrals and generally bolstering the wealth of the Vatican. For Brother Martin, this was the last straw.
He never meant to start a new Church. He never even meant to protest against the Roman Catholic Church. He was a scholarly sort, and he was hoping that if he drafted a critique of the sale of indulgences, and if he brought his concerns to the attention of the public, and especially if he got the attention of those in a greater position of power than him, then maybe some things could change. He never wanted to leave the Church, he just wanted to change it.
So on Halloween of 1517, he posted what we now call his 95 Theses on the front door of the Schlosskirche in Wittenburg. He never meant to start a whole new Church, he just wanted to reform the problems in the Church he was in. But it didn't work out that way. Brother Martin was ousted from the Church, excommunicated, and started a wave that eventually and inevitably led to a whole new way to worship God: Protestantism.
The Church sets aside this day to remember Brother Martin, and what he sacrificed so that we could worship with integrity. And even though the date of Reformation Sunday is set because of this pivotal moment in Martin Luther's life, today we should remember all the people who never meant to start a Church--but did.
Because Luther was in very good company. Luther stands in the company of Paul, who never meant to plant Christian churches, just home-based congregations of Jewish people like him who worshipped Christ. Luther stands in the company of John Wesley. Wesley was an Anglican priest all his life, and never meant to leave the Church of England. He just wanted to reform it--he wished that people would spend more time practicing personal spiritual disciplines like prayer, reading the Bible, and fasting. He was insulted as a Methodist, but a combination of those convictions and a desire to go out to the streets of England and evangelize set a huge spiritual revival in motion, and the more he did in the interest of improving the Church of England, the further away he drifted from it. Eventually, his congregants broke off from the Church of England entirely, and today here we are, in the United Methodist Church.
In the history of the Church there's been a lot of people just like Martin Luther. People too numerous to name who never meant to start a whole new Church. They desperately loved the one they belonged to, and they just wanted to reform and revive it.
Jesus was one of those people. Jesus never meant to start a whole new Church. It sounds kind of funny, but it's true: Jesus Christ wasn't a Christian, and he never meant for there to be Christians. He was Jewish. All of his disciples were Jewish. All of his friends and family were Jewish. Judaism was his world, and he never meant for it to be any other way. He told his disciples, I came not to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it. God his Father was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That was his tradition. He never left Judaism, and he never meant for us to. He just wanted to see God's love lived out to its fullest among God's people.
But here we are. And that's because the other really important thing Jesus and Luther had in common was that the institutions they hoped to change didn't tolerate change well, and were run by people who had no reason to want change.
Just like how Luther had to deal with the Roman Catholic authority in Rome, and how their decisions were alienating ordinary people from the Church, Jesus had to deal with the Pharisees, and their practices that we're alienating the rest of the synagogue community--Jesus' followers.
And just like how Luther was getting fed up with Church leaders who were abusing their authority to get money out of people, Jesus' was getting fed up with the Pharisees, who used their authority in the Temple not to help anyone, or to improve the spiritual life of the congregation, but to stroke their own egos. Neither man ever meant to start a whole new Church. But just like Luther's protests got him excommunicated, Jesus' subversive teachings eventually got him killed.
That's the depressing side of this, but lucky for us there's more going on here. All of these people I've talked to you about--Luther, Paul, Wesley, Jesus--sacrificed and lost a tremendous amount for us to be able to worship as we do now. But that's not why we celebrate these people. We celebrate them because they had a faith that was on fire. We celebrate these people because, even though they never meant to start a Church of their own, they stirred up a love for God within the people who followed them that was so great that the traditions they came from could no longer contain them.
That love for God brought us here. So let's have this day be a day when we remember that in everything that we do here as a faith community, in all the ways we connect with God and all the ways we worship, let's kindle the flame of a love for God so great that no one church can contain it all, and let's never let that fire burn out.
Amen.
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