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.