Reformation Day and the Spirit of Unity

Dr. Jeff Cary: It's good to be with you this morning, and I'm so thankful, as always, that we have this time in the middle of the day to get together, to get to acknowledge our Creator together, get to remember who we are, apart from our achievements and accomplishments, that our lives are given by God, for God, for the glory of God, and we are moving toward God.
So this is a really great thing we get to do on our campus.
I'm sure you all know what tomorrow is
Reformation Day, that's right
I know that you are all planning your Reformation Day parties
wondering which of your favorite Protestant reformers you're going to dress up as tomorrow
So up until the early 1500s
The only Christian expression in the Western world was the Roman Catholic Church.
And in the early 1500s, a guy emerges on the stage named Martin Luther.
This is Martin Luther, not Martin Luther King Jr., so keep those straight.
Martin Luther was a German and very Catholic monk.
He was an Augustinian monk who launches a major movement that started on October 31st, 1517.
Now, I've got to make a confession to you.
I don't like Halloween.
I can't see you all.
Raise your hand if you also don't like Halloween.
Where are my people?
Raise your hand if you love Halloween.
Oh, it's about evenly split.
Okay.
So it's not that I don't like it because of some evil reason having to do with demons or anything.
I just feel like it's a trashy holiday.
Thank you.
I need more amens on this.
You're driving down the road and people in your neighborhood with all this trashy stuff out on their lawn.
I just don't like it.
So I teach Christian history and theology.
And so when my kids were really young, one year, I convinced them that we were going to celebrate Reformation Day instead of Halloween.
And I said, what do y'all think about dressing up like Protestant reformers?
And I was able to talk them into it.
Now, I want to show you something.
This is Martin Luther.
The picture on the right is when he was an Augustinian monk.
And maybe you've seen pictures like this before where monks at that time would shave what's called a tonsure in their head.
So they just had a little ring of hair.
Well, my son Tyler, the reason I thought about having them celebrate Reformation Day is his mom had taken him to, my wife, had taken him to like a Goodwill store or something.
And they found this little monk suit.
And I said to him, how would you like to dress up like Martin Luther?
and he said, yeah, let's do it.
And I said, do you want to shave a tonsure in your head?
He said, yeah, let's do it.
So on the left,
some of you know my son Tyler.
He's a student here.
You see him there on the right.
That's him on the left with his tonsure
as Martin Luther before he breaks from the Catholic Church.
And the girls had these dress-up dresses.
These are really more Elizabethan style from, you know, a later era.
But I said, hey, you know, one of you can be.
And I just told them some, you know, women's names from the Protestant era, one of whom was Luther's wife.
That's kind of weird because they're brother and sister.
Anyway, they were all into this.
And something clicked.
And after it was over, they felt like they had been gypped so bad.
They said, we will never listen to you again.
They actually came up to my classes and handed out candy to my classes like this.
The students who were in my classes at that time still remember this.
So there's Tyler and Olivia now.
And Olivia insisted that her dog Beans be in the picture, so she Photoshopped Beans in.
Okay.
By the way, when I shaved that tonsure in his head, that was a Wednesday.
That night, we went to our church, the Ida Lou Church of Christ.
and he led songs like this in that thing.
And I'm certain that's the only time
that a monk with a tonsure shaved in his head
led songs at the Idlew Church of Christ.
Okay.
So Luther, what happens here?
1517, October the 31st.
Those of you who are Roman Catholic friends
in the room today,
I want you to listen to me really carefully.
What I'm about to say is not a diatribe against the Roman Catholic Church, okay?
I want you to hear me very carefully.
During this time, in the late 1400s, really all the 1400s and the early 1500s,
that was one of the darkest times for the Roman Catholic Church.
Even Roman Catholic scholars and theologians admit this.
So it's not like I'm trying to be unkind.
all of our Christian traditions have our dark spots, don't we?
This was a particularly dark time in the Roman Catholic Church.
There was a series of popes that were a lot more motivated by greed and pride
than they were the glory of Jesus Christ.
And again, we can say that for all of our, not only our Christian traditions,
if we're a part of one, but ourselves personally, right?
One of the things that was going on at this time was that there was a lot of plague and people were being very superstitious about how we could make it to the afterlife.
They were driven by fear a lot.
There was a lot of lack of education.
So you could really lead those people to believe whatever you wanted them to believe.
And one of the things that they were teaching, that the church was teaching at the time was, if you buy these things we call indulgences, we're going to sell them to you.
If you buy them, then you will get advanced status in the afterlife in a place called purgatory where you kind of work your way up to heaven.
You're going to get advanced status.
Or if you've got a loved one who's suffering in the lower rungs of purgatory right now, like we all have our Uncle Bob, right?
You know where Bob is.
You can buy some indulgences and increase his status.
And so the Catholic Church had these people going out all over the landscape selling these indulgences to fund some really opulent things in Rome.
Luther, as a monk, thinks that this practice is despicable.
And it's about this time that Luther's figuring out we don't earn our salvation to God by doing all of these works and buying indulgences.
This is a free gift of God's grace, and he wants to have a conversation about it.
And so he nails on the door of the Wittenberg Church, according to legend,
he nails his so-called 95 theses.
Hear me clearly.
I said 95 theses.
One of my very best friends, Rob Duncan, who was a youth minister for a long time,
tells a story about taking his youth group around to see various older people in the church.
And they went to this one older woman's house, and she's lecturing the teen, saying,
the problem with you kids today is you don't know your history.
You don't know about Martin Luther nailing his theses to the door.
And one of the girls said, ooh, gross.
Theses.
95 theses.
You'll get it an hour later.
All right. So these 95 theses were actually calling for reform, and Luther wasn't the first
one to be calling for reform of this broken Catholic church. He just happened to be the
one around which this whole thing ignited, all right? So by nailing these theses to the door
of the Wittenberg church, he is calling for a conversation of reform. This is a group that
Dr. Josh Sauerwein and I in accounting took, these are LCU students a couple of years ago,
we actually went to the Wittenberg Church. Those doors behind us are a replica. They are metal
doors now, and all 95 theses are etched in those doors. So that was kind of fun to be there in
person. What ends up happening as a result of this is that Martin Luther is kind of kicked out of the
church. He wasn't looking to separate from the church, but there was kind of a breaking point
at which it was clear Luther and the Roman Catholic Church were not going to be able to get along.
And only then was the possibility of another form of Christianity opened in the Western world.
These were people who were protesting, like Luther, and calling for reform.
That's why we call them Protestant reformers.
So many of you in this room today, if you're Christian and you're not Roman Catholic,
you're more than likely Protestant in the Western world.
many people see this as a celebration that all these protestant church or the protestant movement
you know broke away from the roman catholic church one of the unforeseen consequences of this that
luther could not have foreseen is that once you break off once what can you do again
you can keep breaking off and so all these little protestant groups started you know breaking off
and having babies and now we look out over the landscape and we see a host of different
splinter groups we see baptists we see methodists we see churches of christ we see non-denominational
which are really Baptists.
Joking.
We see Anglicans.
We see Episcopalians.
We see just an assembly of God.
And this fracturing of the body of Christ is a scandal.
It's a scandal to the witness of Jesus.
And so, as we think about Reformation Day, in my mind, it's not so much a celebration as it is a moment for us to remember the importance of the unity of the body of Christ, the church.
And that our divisions stand as a witness against the unified body of Christ.
These are some of Jesus' last words on the last night of his life as it's recorded in the Gospel of John.
He prays a prayer, and this is part of his prayer.
I do not ask on behalf of these only.
He's talking about his immediate apostles.
But also for those who will believe in me through their word.
That's any of us who follow Jesus today.
That they may all be one.
Just as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they may also be in us,
so that the world may believe that you have sent me.
This is an image that looks a lot like our world today.
Terror. Vicious attack.
And you might think I'm just talking about politics.
or our social landscape, but too often this is what it looks like
in and between our churches and our church traditions.
If you want a happy, feel-good image for Reformation Day, how about this?
How cute is that?
We've got these animals that shouldn't be living together,
shouldn't be lying down having a nap together, and there they are.
That's really what the body of Christ should be like.
People who shouldn't, according to sociological reasons,
shouldn't be able to get along,
shouldn't be able to be unified.
Here they are living a unified life
because of their common commitment to Jesus.
This prayer should guide us.
Now, hear me clearly.
That's not to say that we don't have significant differences among us or to deny that some of those differences are substantial.
I'm not suggesting we just do a big sentimental, everybody give each other a group hug.
You know, there we are.
We're one.
That's not really how unity works.
We do continue to discuss and discern and inch our way forward, confess our own lack of sight.
we do even debate and argue so we're not trying to achieve a cheap unity but if we are followers
of christ unity of the church should matter it's one of jesus last prayers and it's one of the ways
that we christians can bear witness to the goodness of jesus in a fractured world
so as we go out from this place if you are a follower of christ be an agent of unity pray
that god would allow you to be an agent of unity be a person who is infectious with unity be leaven
that fills the whole loaf so that other christians are inspired to be unified reformation day
I think stands before us as a challenge to realize what can happen when the church becomes fractured.
But I do not lose hope because Jesus is the Lord of his church.
And the gates of Hades will not stand against it.
May God bless us all with the spirit of unity.
Let me pray for us and then we'll go.
Lord, thank you very much for the heritage that you have given us.
I pray that those here today who are followers of Jesus will commit to Christian unity.
I pray you will soften our hearts where they need to be softened,
open our minds where they need to be opened,
so we can receive each other as gifts.
Enable our witness of unity before a watching world,
so that your name will be glorified.
We pray through Christ. Amen.
Go with God.