Reformation Day: Unity, Kindness, and the Christian Witness

Dr. Jeff Cary: Good morning,
everybody.
I'm sure you all know what's coming up this Saturday.
Yeah?
No,
hold on.
I'm going the other way.
This is not working.
What is that? Hey, it's Reformation Day on Saturday.
October the 31st, I'm sure some of you thought that what was going on on Saturday was something called Halloween.
We have one Halloween fan.
That's discouraging.
I'm going to come clean.
I don't like Halloween.
Not for reasons that you might imagine.
I'm not opposed to it
on any kind of religious grounds
I just think it's kind of a
trashy holiday
everybody thinks
do we have any Halloween
raise your hand if you're a Halloween supporter
you're into this
raise your hand if you're in agreement with me
that it's just a trashy holiday
all the trash on people's lawns
yeah okay
so we seem split
the whole candy thing
I don't know
my wife Amy who is otherwise one of the most magnificent people on the planet
brought home a bag of Halloween candy the other day that is quite possibly the worst collection of
candy in one bag did you know that there are lime tootsie rolls this is a weird thing
it had all the bad stuff the worst were dots anybody ever had dots
hey i'm the one with the microphone all right i didn't ask for feedback all right so uh what is
reformation day i just kind of want to give you a little history about something that i think
mattered historically and continues to impact us today and leave you with just a brief uh word of
encouragement for how this might matter for you today and for the rest of your life.
So,
yeah. Let's begin with this.
Some people don't understand this.
Where did Halloween come from?
Where did this word come from?
All Hallows Eve.
I went to a little school where I was told that
the devil invented Halloween and it's about demon worship and all of that.
that's not actually historically true from from early on in the Christian tradition Christians
developed these feast days for people they called saints and especially for martyrs people who had
died for the name of Jesus they kind of had elevated status among a lot of early Christians
they called them saints which means holy ones and so as the Christian calendar developed through the
centuries,
one of the days that got put on the Christian calendar in about the 7th century was
a day called All Saints Day,
whereas before you would have feast days or saints days dedicated to
one person,
like Saint Ignatius or someone.
Then they decided,
let's just gather a lot of them up
that we haven't mentioned all in one day.
We'll call it All Saints Day.
Then eventually,
the night
before All Saints Day kind of began to elevate in status,
kind of like Christmas Eve before Christmas.
So we had All Saints Eve or All Hallows Eve.
The word hallow means holy or saints.
And so All Hallows Eve then in Scotland got,
you know how the Scottish run all their words together,
it became Halloween,
All Hallows Evening, right,
or All Hallows Even.
And no offense to any of you who are from Scotland.
It just sounds that way to me.
Sometimes those words run together.
Okay.
Now,
that had become a big deal.
And so in 1517,
something happened that was tremendously significant.
A man by the name of Martin Luther,
not Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights leader.
Martin Luther,
who was a German theologian and monk,
a friar,
decided that he needed to register a complaint,
so to speak,
against his own church,
which was the Roman Catholic Church.
Now, you need to know, if you don't know this, hopefully our Christian heritage class is teaching you a lot of this stuff.
in 1517 the only church Christian expression of Christianity in the west was the Roman Catholic
Church and Martin Luther was definitely a part of that he was a scholar a teacher a preacher
within it and now I'm going to say something that I need you all to hear me very carefully here
at that time the Roman Catholic Church was not at its best historically speaking and I say that
knowing we've got a lot of Roman Catholic friends here I really need you to hear me on this
even Roman Catholic historians and scholars will tell you that was not our high point
and each one of us from various Christian traditions could point to times in our own
history where we would say the same thing.
I'm from the Church of Christ tradition.
I can point
to some times in our history that I'm not especially proud of.
Those of you who are
Baptists can do the same thing.
Non-denominational.
Who are we kidding? You're Baptists too. You can
say the same thing.
Every group can say here's a time when we weren't at our best.
Especially that
years leading up to 1517,
some things had been going on within the Catholic Church that had led
to some corruption,
some degradation in their formal teaching,
and there had been a lot of people
calling from within the Catholic Church calling for reform,
okay?
And one of them was this guy,
Martin Luther. Now take a look at his haircut on the right.
That little hair ring,
that's called a
tonsure.
When my three kids were little,
my kids loved Halloween,
much to my chagrin.
They loved
dressing up.
And my wife took our kids to some store like Goodwill or something,
and my son Tyler
found a little monk costume.
And he was going to dress up like a monk, and I thought, here's my
chance.
So I told my kids,
I mean, I teach Christian history,
so this is in my blood.
I said, hey,
what if instead of Halloween,
we celebrate Reformation Day?
They said, what's
Reformation Day? So I told them the story of the Reformation that launched in 1517.
I told them
about Martin Luther.
I said, Tyler,
what if you're Martin Luther?
And I showed him a picture like
this. I said, what if we shave a tonsure in your head and you wear your little monk suit?
And the girl said, well, what about us?
And I was kind of at a loss.
They had these dress-up dresses from like the late 1600s.
So we're not quite the same time period.
But I said, how about, Anna, you can be Katerina von Bora,
a nun that Martin Luther eventually married.
And then I made up a name for Olivia.
I was out of options at that point.
But I really convinced them, and they were all in.
Here's what it looked like.
that was the best reformation day in our family i'm sad to say it was the only reformation day
because by the next year they they were very angry at me they they had been so excited to
celebrate reformation day and then they talked to their friends and realized that was a bust so
we still have we still go to counseling as a family over that
So what Martin Luther did on October 31st,
All Hallows'
Eve,
he went to the church at Wittenberg,
the town of Wittenberg where he lived in Germany,
and he posted his famous 95 theses.
five points that he wanted to publicly debate about.
And at that time, if you wanted to call
for a public debate,
you would go to the central church in the town and you would post your
notification for public debate,
which he did.
Some scholars debate whether he did this at the church
or not, but we're going to go with that story.
He posted those 95 theses on the door.
Here's a
group of LCU students that Dr.
Sauerwein and I led a few years ago,
a Protestant Reformation's
that included a trip to Wittenberg,
and those doors behind us are replicas of the doors where Martin Luther posted his 95 theses.
One of the main things that Luther was challenging was a practice that had developed in the Catholic Church called selling indulgences.
And what this basically meant was the Catholic teaching at the time said that when a person dies,
most people who die go to a place called, if they're a believer,
if they're a Christian,
most people go to a place called purgatory,
which isn't quite heaven.
But it's a place where your soul is further refined.
And there's a certain amount of discomfort in purgatory depending on how bad you were in your life.
And so what happens is you have these leaders in the Catholic Church at a time when there was a high anxiety level over things like the Black Plague sweeping through Europe.
People were very superstitious.
You have these church leaders,
unfortunately,
preying on some of that fear.
And they start selling these indulgences, which meant if you buy an indulgence, your status in the afterlife will be increased.
Or everybody's got that weird Uncle Bob,
and you know how Uncle Bob was in his life.
He's probably struggling in purgatory.
If you give a certain amount of money,
then his status will be increased in the afterlife.
It was a money-making deal.
And again,
that wasn't the Catholic Church's high point.
It was a low point.
And Martin Luther,
as a Catholic,
is challenging this.
He's saying this isn't right.
And others were beginning to challenge it and call for reform within their own church that had been decaying for a while.
Now,
we could talk about the theology of all of that.
What was theologically at stake there?
But what I really want to focus on is what emerged after the debate.
At first, Martin Luther was polite.
He was clear, but he was polite.
He was just calling for debate.
The Catholic Church did not respond very well to Luther,
and they kicked Luther out of the Catholic Church as a heretic.
And so for the first time in a very long time in the Western world, there was another way to be Christian that wasn't Roman Catholic.
These groups that had been protesting became known as Protestants.
Luther's kind of trajectory of that eventually becomes the Lutherans that we have around us today.
There were other streams that began to develop.
And once there started becoming these divisions,
it just turned out to be endless division,
right?
And that's where we end up with a lot of our church denominational differences today was out of what happened out of 1517.
And if it hadn't been Martin Luther, it was going to be somebody else.
This call for reform was happening.
He just happened to be the guy.
Here's what happened, though.
once Martin Luther got kicked out
he let his rhetoric run away with him
he got really nasty with his tongue
and with his pen
and he gave himself over to calling
the Roman Catholic leaders including the Pope
pretty awful names and saying some really awful things about them
things I can't say at LCU Chapel
you can go look them up for yourself
It got so bad there's a thing online called the Luther Insult Generator.
Tells you something about what he was really good at it.
He was really good at it.
I made the mistake of reading some of these quotes one year in class to some of our Bible majors.
And I discovered them written on the bathroom walls later.
So I stopped doing that.
You know, Bible majors.
So what happened then was that the Catholic Church responded in kind.
And the insults that were flying, the things they were saying about each other's moms,
I mean, all kinds of stuff.
You can't imagine what they were saying to each other.
And that set a pattern,
that commitment to that kind of rhetoric,
set a pattern that lasted for over 400 years.
Now, there were serious theological differences among these groups,
but one of the things that exacerbated the division
was their use of rhetoric with each other.
Finally,
it wasn't until the mid-20th century, the mid-1900s,
that Protestant churches,
all the churches that weren't Roman Catholic, Christian churches other
than Roman Catholic in the Western world,
that all of them and the Roman Catholic church started
being more civil to each other.
And we're thankfully in a time where there's a lot
friendlier exchange among all of those churches.
But it hasn't always been so.
This is kind of how it looked for a long time between Catholics and Protestants and between different Protestants and each other.
The more splintering you had,
the more you wanted to defend your own position,
the nastier you got in taking down opponents.
You don't need me to tell you that we live in a culture that sometimes looks like this rhetorically.
Think about some of the sensitive things our culture is debating.
Think about the way those differences are often framed.
They're often framed as culture wars.
And there are a lot of people who are drawn to this idea of war.
And they like the metaphor of war.
We're in a battle against the vipers.
We got to fight.
The other side is attacking.
They think of life primarily as them versus me.
And I got to stand up and fight.
And the way that they're going to know,
that people are going to know whose side I'm on,
is that I am going to use all the familiar weapons,
I'm going to use all the familiar terms,
all the litmus test terms that tell everybody whose side I'm on,
because I am here to fight.
To be sure,
there's language in Scripture
that says that we are engaged in battle.
More explicitly, it says our battle isn't against flesh and blood,
It's against the powers,
the evil powers of our age.
There's battle language in Scripture.
But we also need to take account of the fact that this is not the way that Jesus taught us to live.
There are serious differences in our culture among people.
There are real differences.
We don't need to run from talking about those differences.
But it seems to me that a commitment to try to not demonize other people in that process
is an important part of what being a Christian should be about.
Unfortunately, long ago and even today,
there are people who bear the name Christian
who don't live out that reality.
and it compromises our witness in the world.
Think about this picture.
I didn't think about this one.
This one or this one.
It's like being at the eye doctor.
This one or this one.
There may be some of you who actually prefer this one.
You like the fight.
You've gotten used to the rhetoric.
You like the way it makes you feel amped.
There's some of you who may dream for something like this.
Now, I want to be careful that we're not overly sentimental here.
Oh, look at the cute kitten with the little birdie and the doggy.
These are creatures that shouldn't be hanging out, but here they are.
Some of you look at that and say, that's the kind of life I want.
Let's all just do a group hug and get along.
We don't want to mask over the fact that there may be real differences among us,
not only culturally,
but religiously.
And we don't want to minimize those differences,
especially when they're important.
I'm talking to you about how we engage those differences.
You don't have to fall into the trap that Luther fell into,
or that the leaders of his opposition fell into at the time.
Here are the words of Jesus,
and I'll note that this is on the last night of his life.
This is one of the last things he wants to say before he goes and dies voluntarily for you and for me.
What's one of the last things he does?
He prays.
He prays for his immediate disciples,
his apostles,
who are about to face some hard times because they're following him.
and then he prays for all who will bear his name in the future.
Hear the word of the Lord.
Jesus prays, I do not ask on behalf of these only,
but also for those who will believe in me through their word,
that they may all be one.
Just as you,
Father, are in me and I am in you,
that they may also be in us,
so that the world may believe that you sent me.
Our unity,
our kindness to each other,
is one of the most powerful ways we bear witness to Jesus.
Don't get comfortable with inflammatory rhetoric.
It is not of Jesus.
It is not of Jesus.
And you have no idea,
if you give yourself to that,
how long the consequences of that might last.
Those Reformation debates took us 400 years to try to make our way out of.
This is all a short way of saying be kind to each other and desire unity.
Deal with your differences.
Don't minimize them,
but carry yourself with kindness in this world.
That's what we're trying to help happen at Lubbock Christian University.
We want you to have a transformative experience like that,
so you go out and you are ambassadors for Jesus.
So think about that on October 31st.
Instead of that trashy thing,
happy Reformation Day.
See you guys.
Have a good weekend.
Thank you.