Cattle call

Eyes in front, like to hunt.  Eyes on side, like to hide. 

This is the nice mnemonic to help you to remember the predator / prey relationship, the relationship between what like to eat, and what likes to get eaten. Now, obviously nobody and nothing wants to get eaten, but some things are predators, and some other things are prey.  And prey has been equipped with various survival strategies to help them to avoid, evade, or fight their way out of capture and inevitable death.  Whether it be horns, claws or deadly poison, whether it be speed or shells, prey would like to have a way to stop being killed for food. 

That's good for them, but bad for us.

Before we as humans domesticated animals, we hunted them.  Before we put fences around animals so they couldn't get far, we had to hunt them, chasing them down, and attacking them with spears or driving them off of cliffs.  This was a good way to get meat, but it wasn't perfect.  If we wanted to keep our meat fresh, then we were going to want to do something a little outlandish, which was to instead of hunting the animals, we would keep them close to us.

This is going to involve something specific though.  If you're going to domesticate an animal, you're going to want to do something important, which is to take away its survival instinct. For if an animal is going to want to survive, it's going to want to evade capture and death from all its predators, including but not limited to the farmer.  The animal has to be taught not to fight the farmer that is raising it, and that's what domestication is all about.  In order to keep the animals close to you, to make it so they don't run away, you have to kill the survival instinct that they have.  You have to give them nothing to strive for, nothing to work for.  If you pen them in, if you fence the cattle in, and give them food and water, safety and shelter, gradually cattle will stop running into you with horns outstretched, and will inevitably focus on just wandering about from place to place, eating, sleeping, and mating.  And that's all.

So, ask yourself what it is that you're here for.  You are the same as likely all people, which is that you have a life, you have decisions that you can make, and likely you have been listening to the same instructions as the rest of us.  And I do mean instructions.  There is a good chance that you've been hearing the same instructions that I have.  We've been hearing the same things, that tell us that the things we ought to do is to eat, sleep, mate, and that's it.  There are great forces out there that are happy, very happy, for you to be essentially gelded.  There are forces out there that are quite pleased for you to move around in a circle, eating and sleeping, mating and dying, without ever lifting your head up to realize the talents, skills and abilities that you've been given. 

The first epistle of Peter says to us, Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.  Can you imagine if a lion could be assured of getting a kill? Can you imagine a situation in which the gazelles, or the wildebeest were just milling around, captive, and never looking up to see the lions awaiting them?  It seems  unlikely, but that's the best situation for the lion to be in.  A position in which the prey doesn't even bother to look up, because they're amused to death.

And this is the situation that we are in today. We are being amused to death.  We are being quite happily amused down to nothing.  We are quite happy being led around by our instincts, and being defined by our consumption, and not by our production.  We are quite happy to be moved about, directed by our passions, with our gods in our bellies, face down in the grass, quietly munching away while we are awaiting butchery.  But we aren't meant to be killed and eaten you know. We were made and placed by God on earth to use our skills, talents and abilities to do the extraordinary. We were placed by God to do something fantastic.  We were baptized with the holy spirit and with fire, to lift up our eyes to the hills, and to be focused on things far far more significant than just our bodily passions, and to be focused on things far more relevant than just surviving the day.

In the parable of the talents, we heard about how there was a master, an overseer, who gave his servants some talents, and then left on a journey.  And the big question for each of those servants was what they were going to do with those talents.  How were they going to employ these things in service to their master? Two of the servants, those that had the lion's share of the money, invested said money until it doubled in size, and well and good.  But the third servant, the one who had received only one talent took it and buried it.  Better to leave it buried, hidden away, than to let it be seen, let it be used, to risk using it or tarnishing it. Burying things, leaving them in the dirt, staying face down, that's sort of the way we do, isn't it? We are keen to just keep our heads down, bury our talents, and just live day to day.  That's what the world wants, that's what our flesh wants, that's what the devil wants.  And that's why we are called to do more.

You may ask what happened to things like devil possession, to things like ghosts and goblins, the things that go bump in the night, the long-leggedy beasties, and the thing is, that the devil worked out some time ago that it was far far more profitable for him to just perpetually drown you in your desires, and then you'll never really have a chance to focus too much on what you really should be accomplishing.  And as long as you're facedown in fleshly concerns, as long as you're thinking all day every day about eating and sleeping and mating, as long as you're thinking only about buying and selling, about profit and purchase, about sweet treats and pornography, as long as you're thinking about those things, then you have been made fully complacent.  And the devil, who prowleth around, has got you exactly where he wants you, just thinking about yourself, and thinking with your belly.

But you weren't made to be a prey animal.  You weren't here to eat and sleep and mate.  You weren't put here on God's earth, as the crowning achievement of creation and the apple of his eye, just to binge watch Stranger Things and to take a woman you don't like and don't want to have children with home from the bar.  Instead, you were entrusted with the tools, talents and abilities that God wants you to use in his service, and you were given the command, the order, to get those things working for Him, and by extension for you.  And these days, complacency is your biggest enemy, the biggest threat, and the number one thing that the devil will attack you with.  Instead of starving you, scaring you, or threatening you, he'll just give you whatever you want, and kill you with absolute complete complacency.

So the work of the Christian begins by recognizing that the horns and fangs and claws and hooves and teeth aren't just for show, they're not ornamental.  The things that you were given by God aren't decoration, they're there to be used, to be activated in his kingdom pursuit.  People often ask questions where they say 'why doesn't God just save everyone from hell?'  Good question, and the answer to that question typically is 'why are you standing in his way? '  Why are you burying your talent, why are you roaming around in complacency, why are you walking from place to place in a big circle with your eyes focused on the ground, thinking only of eating, and sleeping, and mating? Why is this sufficient for your life? And the answer is that it isn't.  This is not any kind of good use of your talents.

We'll get more into this next week, of course, but what you need to know for this week is that the person you are, the skills you have, the talents you enjoy are things that you are given not only to make you extraordinary, but also to do the work that has been set aside for you specifically to do.  As the scriptures say, you are God's workmanship, created by him to do good works, which he has prepared in advance for you to do.  This is true, and even if you're not a believing Christian (which you ought to be), you must realize that there are a great many tasks and responsibilities that you have before you that are straight up given to you and to you alone.  There are many deeds that could be done by you, that don't really seem like they'd be suitable for anyone else.  In other words, the abilities, skills, talents and resources that you have at your disposal seem to be awfully convenient for making inroads on some things you desperately need to do, and that God wants you to do.  How do you get to it? Glad you asked.

If you know anything about the scriptures, about Jesus and his crucifixion, you'll know that he was taken to the place of the skull, Golgotha, Calvary, and was crucified there.  And the Romans tended to crucify people in public, very much on display, so that the people of the surrounding region would look upon the condemned, and perhaps change their ways.  They were placed way up high on crosses, way up high on a hill, and were put on humiliating public display.  The words that Jesus spoke to Nicodemus about this are words that display that he understood the significance of this act, saying to Nicodemus 'As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the son of man be lifted up; that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.'  Lift up your heads.  Look to the cross, and let the work that Christ has done shock you out of your complacency.  Look upon the cross, and realize the price paid for you, the blood shed for you ,the wounds opened for you.  Look upon the cross, and think of the crucified savior, who burst through the bounds of complacency to bring you life everlasting.  And in doing so, you will find yourself less and less able to be complacent, to be servile, to be passive. You will find yourself thinking more of Christ, and less of yourself. 

The theme at this time of year is very much about lifting up your head.  About moving through the complacency, shattering through it, realizing that the devil is quite happy indeed to suffocate you with what you think you want, and to look up Jesus, the author and perfecter of your faith.  He who did not scorn the cross, but instead bore it, and carried it up to Calvary. That man is the focus of what we do . If the focus is on us, and what we want, it will all be food and drink and sex.  Always. But if the focus is on Christ, his work and his commands, then instead of being buried the talents that we have been given may very well be put to work.  And we may very well be convinced that putting them to work isn't just the best thing for God in his majesty.  It's the best thing for us too, moving us away from being complacent cattle, and into being women and men.

The best of times, the worst of times

The end times.

And, as it says in the scriptures, that the end times are the great and terrible day of the Lord.  How can something be both great and terrible? Simple, really, that great meaning large or immense, we mean it in the pejorative sense.

Simple enough, and everything we read about judgment day seems to suggest that it is darkness and not light, that it is bad news and will plague us with horrendous sights never before contemplated. The Bible tells us that judgment day is a time in which everyone is resurrected, and each one must give an account of his deeds.  The righteous will move towards heaven, and the unrighteous into eternal damnation and fire.

Working that part out helps the Old Testament reading to make sense, really.  For in the Old Testament reading, it tells us that the day of the Lord is as though a man was escaping from a Lion, and a bear met him.  Or if he entered into a house, and a snake bit him.  The colloquial expression for this is 'out of the frying pan, and into the fire,' and that's sort of what is promised on the last day. The last day, judgment day, in which everyone will escape the first death, where we will all be raised up on the last day, but then what happens to us? Some will avoid the first death, only to meet up with the second.  Some will be alive until the coming of our Lord, and will escape temporal death, but not the judgment that comes along with that return.

Our view of judgment day is skewed, as these things often are.  That is, we tend to think about judgment day as a time in which God will be there, and he will be accountable to us.  We will get to ask him why it is that he felt it was appropriate for our dog to die when we were seven, which made us real sad.  We feel as though it will be the right time for us to say to the Lord our God, the king of the universe 'how come I got split ends right before the big dance?'  In many ways, we think about judgment day in the same fashion as that footprints poem, you know the one.  And when I read that poem, I'm always struck by the audacity of the man in question to say to the living God, the fire and the whirlwind 'I'm gonna let you finish, but How come there was only one set of footprints when things got tough?'

That's not the judgment day that the scriptures describe.  They describe a day in which God himself will judge us, not the other way around.  And it's described not only as a great and terrible day, but as a sudden, immediate, terrifying time, in which you won't have time to repent, to get your life in order, to live properly.  The day of the Lord, just like our own individual deaths, will just happen.  Not necessarily any warning, so you have to be ready all the time.

And that brings us to the parable of the wise and foolish virgins.  The sophomoric virgins, if you follow me.  The ones who were wise prepared, they brought with them extra oil for their lamps, as they planned on joining the wedding procession to the feast site.  The foolish ones did not.  The foolish ones likely didn't know how long it was going to take for the wedding procession to get going, nor for the party to start, and besides, why should you bother getting your extra oil ready when you have other people, in the same boat, and they can prepare for you?  What's the point, after all?  So, the foolish virgins, when they heard that the bridegroom was coming, they got up, trimmed their lamps, and prepared to join in the procession.  And they said to the wise virgins 'we have no oil for our lamps.  Give us some of yours.'  The reply from the wise virgins makes perfect sense, too 'if we give you our oil, there won't be enough for anyone.  You should go to the dealers and buy some.'  Yes, yes they should.  But they should have done so much earlier.  By the time they go and get oil, and then come back, the door to the festival is shut, and as they knock, a voice can be heard from the inside 'I do not know you.'

Does that end bother you? It should, and it tends to bother most people.  Most folks don't look at what happened to the foolish virgins and say 'good end.  Git rekt.'  Most folks, when the foolish virgins get shut out, when they are not welcome, when they are barred entry into the feast, they say that this is a horribly unfair scenario.  That the groom should just open the door, and let them in as they pound desperately to be admitted.

Okay, but if you think that's a good idea, then I would ask you a simple question, which is to ask you who would you invite to your wedding? Would you invite friends, family, that sort of thing? Would you invite people who had a large part in making you into who you were, and who your intended spouse had become? Or would you just invite total strangers, start up the open bar, and let them have at it?  Almost nobody I have ever met has ever welcomed gatecrashers into their wedding reception.  Almost nobody I have ever met has been at their own wedding reception, have seen uninvited strangers show up, and have said 'gosh, the more the merrier.'  An invitation to a wedding doesn't tend to go to the best and brightest, it doesn't ususally go to the captains of industry and socialites.  Wedding invites tend to go to the people known and loved by the bride and groom, and their families.

If you find that moment where the virgins are pounding on the door, begging to be let in to be offensive, it it bothers you that the voice from the inside comes out and says 'I do not know you,' then I welcome you to think about the work of Christ to get to know people before the wedding feast begins.  For the book of Revelation, mandatory reading as we consider the end times, there's a passage that we shouldn't skip, especially if we're not overly in love with the idea that there might be unanswered knocking at doors.  There is a passage where Jesus talks of us, and says to us 'Behold, I stand at the door and knock.  If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in, and we will eat together as friends.  Those who are victorious will sit with me on my throne, just as I was victorious and sat with my father on his throne.'  That all seems fine, to be sure. It seems fine, because this is the work of the bridegroom to meet the guests before the wedding.  You and I both know that admission to a wedding isn't based on being the best and the brightest, but based on being the people with whom you break bread, and eat with.  It's based on who you know, who you love, and being invited to share with the bride and groom in their happy occasion.  And this, well, it's a matter of some interest for us, because Jesus is standing at the door of each and every human heart, and knocking.  And the response that he tends to get seems to be the same as the response that he gives in the Gospel reading.

I do not know you.

That's how people respond when Christ seeks to come and visit with them, to eat with them and drink with them, to grow in love and service and knowledge with them.  They respond by saying to him that they do not know him, that they refuse to open the door to him, refuse to let him in and grant him entrance.  At the point where we are discussing life and salvation, where we are talking about grace and sin, life and death, salvation and damnation, we look at the words of the groom, and are upset by them.  As the hands of the foolish virgins pound ever more insistently on the door, we feel as though the groom should just let them in, whether he knows them or not.  But if that is the case, then surely each and every single one of us ought to be unlocking the door to Christ as he knocks on the doors to our hearts.

The number one thing to know, to remember about how this whole salvation and damnation thing works is that the door, though locked between us and him, is only locked on our side.  Complaining about how Christ refuses to come to us, about how he refuses to allow us into paradise, is a lot like saying that you have been locked inside your house, or inside your car.  Surely, you can  understand that here, as Christ desperately wants to know you and wants you to know him, the door is locked, it is barred, but from your side.  If you want to know Christ, to be forgiven, to be given new life and invited into the wedding feast, then it would be best for you to unlock the door, and to not shut out the bridegroom, who wants to know you, that you may be welcome at his wedding feast as an honored guest, and not pounding at the door as a gatecrashing stranger, just there to enrich yourself.

But that could happen at any time, you know.  And as the church year draws to a close, our focus stays sharply on the idea that none of us know the day nor the hour. So best to welcome him past your threshold now, that you may know him before the procession starts.  You had better be prepared at all times, for you won't get a warning when he returns in glory.  Instead, you will have to see and encounter the living God face to face.  So be sober, be alert, and be ready for his coming.

Fidelis

Have you ever found a time when you've been in a rather disreputable bathroom, seen graffiti, and noticed that sometimes people write back and forth to one another?  This is the nuttiest thing I've seen in a long time, especially in an age of social media, where everyone has his or her own wall, can be poked at any opportunity, and where you can write on other people's walls all day.  This is the new age of things, but as long as there have been walls, real walls, people have been writing on them.

You may not know how true that is, but it is seriously, abundantly true.  For the history of humanity largely deals with what we have left on the walls of things.  Think, for a moment, of some of the most famous walls of all time, and I'm thinking in this moment of Lascaux.  The cave paintings in there are some of the oldest things that we have as far as human artistic endeavors.  People making things, people making art, people composing and constructing things that look like other things.  And that's almost as old as people themselves.

It should come as no surprise, then, that in thinking about All Saints' day, we think about what it is that those saints left behind.  And in thinking about All Saints' day, it's nice that we have the beatitudes to give us some comfort and direction.  The Beatitudes tell us that we are blessed, blessed by God, when we are in a variety of bad, dangerous, and unpleasant situations.  It's easy to be and feel blessed by God when everything is going well, when there are essentially no problems, but boy oh boy, it is much harder to be on point, to continue with things as though there were no problems, to feel the blessing of the almighty Lord on you when things aren't going all that well.  The Beatitudes serve to remind you of something crucial, which is that God is still there, he is loves and comforts you, even and especially when things aren't going your way, exactly.  I can't tell you how many times I've had the conversation with people where they will say after a catastrophe, after an event that has plagued them, after a death or a breakup 'where is God in all of this?  Where's your God now?'  Good question, I suppose, and it really has two answers - one, that he has been with you this entire time, and you really didn't stop to acknowledge him in the slightest, and two, the beatitudes are there to show you how God blesses you even in the midst of suffering.  I don't want to get all 'footprints in the sand' with you, but I do want you to know that the beatitudes are there for you to see and find comfort in the real suffering that exists in the real world.  There are blessings there for the Christian even in dark times.

And these days, in Canada, in the 21st century, how much are you really expecting to give up for your Christian faith? If you're like most of the rest of us, the answer is 'not much, really.'  For the cost of being a Christian is not that high.  You're not going to be put in stocks, nor burned at the stake.  You're not going to lose your job (probably), nor are you going to be crucified, beheaded, sawn asunder, sewn into wild animal skins, or anything of the kind.  Someone may call you a dummy, though, and that's pretty much it.  And what do we fear as current humans? We are so far removed from any possible threat of hunger or thirst, so far removed from any threat of cold or scorching heat, that we move through our lives with so little discomfort that our priorities have changed.  You don't fear violence or famine, because those things don't really exist for you, not in a real, tangible way, anyway.  But what you do fear is a loss of social standing.  You fear a drop in your likes, a social shunning that might happen.  And if you hold to Biblical views on things a social shunning will happen. This is inevitable, given that you are dealing with a fallen world with its own priorities.  And the fallen world that we live in is one in which we are constantly and perpetually dealing with the idea that our sins should be served and serviced.  And if you take a stand on anything, from a Christ-centered view of creation to an ethic that puts God and family first, then you will find yourself running afoul of the world that we are living in, and that will place you squarely in the camp of the last two verses of the beatitudes, that is where it says quite clearly 'Blessed are you when people reviles you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.  Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.'

For the average comfy Christian, that's going to be the only cost you're going to have to pay.  People are going to make fun of you. They're going to give you a hard time, they're going to give you the business.  They're going to think you're silly or outdated, and there is immense pressure to cave on that, just to fit in, to go along to get along, and to do the worst thing as an observant Christian, which is to conform Christ to men, and not men to Christ.  Being a Christian is going to cost you something, it is going to pinch, it is going to hurt, there's really no way around it.  The only way to avoid even this tiny cost would be to quit, or to make the Gospel say nothing.  Because the Gospel is always going to be counter-cultural, its message will always be counter-cultural, and the world will always try to shut it down. And this isn't new, in fact it is as old as the Christian faith itself.

As we celebrate All Saints' day, I would like to introduce you to a saint you may never have heard of.  Alexamenos. Have you heard of him? Perhaps, but perhaps not.  In either case, Alexamenos is an important guy, given that he is at the centre of the first, earliest depiction of Jesus of Nazareth.  Now, Alexamenos didn't draw this depiction, he didn't illustrate it, didn't call attention to it.  Instead, it's mocking him.  It's a drawing making fun of Alexamenos worshiping his god, that of Jesus Christ.

In case you can't read the writing, it says 'Alexamenos worships his God.'  What do we know about Alexamenos? Not much, save that he was obviously a Christian, and a Christian in a time where there was going to be large scale mockery for believing in a crucified and risen savior, here depicted as a donkey.  And this is probably the earliest depiction of Jesus in existence.  This is probably the earliest depiction of Jesus around, you know, and it's a crude, insulting one.  It's not nice, or fun, it doesn't praise or worship Jesus, heck, it isn't even neutral.  It's insulting and offensive, and what it shows you is that mockery of Christians has been around from the word go.  In fact, Jesus himself was mocked while he was on the cross, so I don't know why we think that would have changed ever. 

Now, we know that Alexamenos was insulted for his faith, we know that he was mocked and derided.  We know from the evidence left behind that someone, at some point, thought it would be fun to make sport of Alexamenos' faith, and to give him a hard time for what he believed.  And this person who etched this into a wall was likely hoping that Alexamenos would give up his faith, would surrender what he believed, and cave into pressure.  And if Alexamenos had done so, along with all his Christian contemporaries in the second century, then there is a great chance that there would be no Christian church at all in the 21st century.  For people living in the time of Alexamenos, shortly after the time of Jesus, they were functionally living in the last Christian generation, as we are today. Every single generation of Christians in the world has been living in the last Christian generation.  We have all be existing in the twilight of the faith, unless we should choose to pass it along, no matter what the cost might be.  There will be a cost, obviously, and for us, it is likely the cost of mocking, of derision, of a ribbing from friends, family, acquaintances, people who will give us a hard time for deigning to believe in something so hopelessly outdated as the Christian faith.  The world will stand against us in what we believe, for they wish not to believe it, and that's why we need the last little bit of the beatitudes, that promise us that we are blessed when people mock us, utter all kinds of falsehoods against us on account of our Christian faith.  Great is our reward in heaven, which makes sense.  The world will mock us and deride us, the world will oppose us.  In this life we will have trouble, as Jesus said, but take heart, for he has overcome the world.

The Christian faith is built, then, on the legacy of the saints, those who have come before us, lived and died, who have folded our hands in prayer and placed into those hands the holy scriptures.  The Christian faith is built up off of people who have passed the faith down to us, both in commands and in whispers, people who have prayed with us and for us, who have encouraged us and built us up.  People from the time of Alexamenos onward, who kept the faith in a crucified and risen Lord, slain for our sins, and refused to give it up.  For if you have ever wondered what Alexamenos might have answered to the person who mocked him and laughed at him, well we actually know.  For Alexamenos wrote something back.  Etched crudely into the wall in the same location is Alexamenos' response.  Two words only.

ALEXAMENOS FIDELIS.

Alexamenos is faithful.

People held fast to that faith in Christ, for thousands of years they did so because they knew that the treasure waiting for them was bigger than the world.  The world never had any time for the Gospel, not truly.  The world has always resisted the Gospel, which is why faithful men and women have always had to pay a price for following it.  It may have been manning the walls in Constantinople, or hiding in the catacombs of Paris.  It may have been walking along the sand bridge of Lindisfarne, or sapping mines at Vienna.  All these people, for all these hundreds of years have all lived and died in the faith, and have all breathed that same word 'fidelis.'  Faithful.  Faithful to their faithful God, who holds fast to his promises made, and is ever faithful to us.  Be faithful to the crucified and risen Lord.  Celebrate all the saints who led you to this state, known and unknown.  And breathe that faith to the next generation, fold their hands in prayer, read the scriptures to them, and encourage them in their faith, that they may say with Peter, Andrew, James and John, Mary and Martha, Lois and Eunice, Alexamenos and everyone from that point onward who has carried the faith of Jesus Christ.

Fidelis.

To read, to know

500 years ago, something happened, and the most important things always happen with someone nailing something to something. 

Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of a church ,and the reformation began.  And curiously enough, of course, Luther's nailing of the 95 theses to the door of the church were there to remind people of the fact that Jesus was nailed to the cross for their sins. And I say remind, but that's sort of inaccurate.  It was there to tell them.

For the people of the time of Luther, they had the Bible, the language of the church, the means through which Christ had promised to be seen and known, just out of reach.  They went to church, they heard the hymns, the readings, the liturgy, and the preaching, but it was just out of reach for them, for it was all in another language.  They couldn't quite get to it.  And so they would go week in and week out, and in doing so, would find that they didn't know any more about the church, about Jesus, than before they went it.  But this was the way of things, and if you wanted to know more about the faith, well you'd just have to go ahead and ask your local priest, and he'd tell you all about it.

But people are people, and they do what they do, which is that they won't leave well enough alone.  They will add to things nonstop until the thing that they are adding to is sort of beyond ruined.  We don’t tend to leave well enough alone, and usually, even our best of intentions end up being somewhat disastrous, which is funny given how well intentioned we are.  And all we want things to do is to make sense, right? We just want things to make sense, to be current, to be, as it is called ‘good news for modern man.’  But there’s a wonderfully inherent problem with that, which is that modern man, he doesn’t stay modern.  He moves on.  And what seemed cutting edge five hundred years ago seems hopelessly quaint now.

The point I was trying to make on Reformation Sunday was that in older houses, where the toilet is blue, where the sink is pink, where the oven is harvest gold and the fridge is avocado, all those things that seem awfully old and dated, those were the neatest thing in the world when they came out.  Back then, you couldn’t get more modern, more up to date than these pastel fixtures, which, when the trend has passed, look very dated, because they look very much of their time.  They don’t look neat, they don’t look cool, they look locked in time.  And the church in Luther’s time had ended up in that very same sort of fix. They had updated things to keep pace with a certain type of world, then had stopped there.  Forever.

Latin used to make sense for the church.  Latin used to be the language of the world, the language that you could be sure that almost everyone had at least a passing familiarity with.  Most people could at minimum struggle by with it, getting enough out of it to attend worship, to read the scriptures in what is known as the vulgar tongue.  The vulgar tongue, which gives us the vulgate.  Biblia Sacra Vulgata, or the common Holy Bible.  It was the common nature of it that should have made it more useful, but if you imprison it in time, if you lock it down, then all of a sudden, when times change, when people no longer speak, read or write in Latin, the entire thing gets a little dulled down.

But wedded to the concept as they were, this decision to keep the scriptures locked into Latin then had another side effect, which meant that only the clergy really got to read the scriptures, and only the clergy got to interpret doctrine.  And all their doctrines that were counter-scriptural, well, the common people, the vulgar people, they would never know.  And all the decisions that seemed good on paper, yet were miles and miles away form the content of the actual paper, all those things were made to overshadow the truth of what the scriptures actually contained.

That’s why the words that we read on reformation Sunday are so important. When Jesus speaks to the Jews who had believed in him, he tells them ‘if you continue (abide) in my word, you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.’  To continue, to abide in the word of Christ means that you are going to have to live in it, and it is going to be just like living in the house you’re living in right now. For what do you do in your house? You are on a constant diet of repair, of replacement, of effort with your home in order that you might make it into what you want it to be.  For you know, and I know, that if you are going to live in that home, if it is going to be a house that you are going to want to call a home, you are never done with it.  Far far from it. If you’re going to live in a space, you’re going to have to work on it basically forever, to keep it moving and to keep it going.  And usually, what you are going to end up doing is everything you can to make it more like it was intended to be.  And that usually means peeling things away.

Think of it this way. You know what it is like to move into a home and pull back the linoleum to find hardwood, right? Or to remove the shag to find tile? You know what it is like to remove wallpaper, sheets and sheets of it, to uncover the plaster and paint underneath it? This is what we are talking about here, and it is constant work.  For the reformation didn’t end 500 years ago you know.  The reformation didn’t wrap up back then, and then we’ve been living in the afterglow ever since.  No no, the reformation started then, and it continues to this day.  For this world that we are in still needs to live in that word, still needs to abide in that word, still needs to know the truth, and to be set free from our sins that we commit all the time.  The truth is the number one thing that we forget, of course, and it’s what we need to be reminded of all the time, constantly.  We need to be informed, instructed, and told what we need to keep on going back to. We need to live in that word, and we need to be reminded of it all the time.

In the time of Luther, they couldn’t read the Bible, because they didn’t speak that language.  But in our day, we don’t read it because we don’t feel like it.  We have lots to do, you know, even though we’ve never head more free time in human history than we do right now.  Of all the things we need to take seriously about the reformation, this is a big one. The word of God, the work of Christ, it only really works if we are immersed in it, if we know the truth, and the in knowing the truth, are set free.  The truth about what? About our sin, about the ways in which we have fallen short and continue to fall short.  About how we aren’t anywhere near as good as we want and expect other people to be.  About how we are people who are a long way away from getting things right.  And also the truth about Jesus Christ, the one who took on flesh, and because we refused to dwell in the word of God, he dwelt with us.  He dwelt with us in this world of sin, lived amongst us, and was nailed to the cross, and died to take sins away.  This is not news to you but you absolutely need to be reminded of it. In the same way as Luther didn’t come to make a new church, but to reform the one that was, so too does your faith need to be reformed, daily and weekly. 

How does that happen? You live in God’s word, you abide in it, you continue in it. Then you will know the truth.  About the world, about sin, about life and death. About Christ and his work.

And the truth will set you free.