[Sermon prepared for St Paul's Lutheran Church, Rye Brook, N.Y., October 27, 2024.]
When Reformation Sunday comes around every year, I think of an old friend I knew through the National and World Councils of Churches.
I met Father Leonid Kishkovsky in the 1970s when we were both young ecumenists representing our churches in these councils.
Back then, Leonid, a Russian-born priest in the Orthodox Church in America, wore a black cassock and parted his long hair in the middle. His beard and dour expression made me think of Rasputin.
Leonid was a quintessential Orthodox priest. I told him that when I was a young Air Force chaplain’s assistant in October 1967 I visited Rome.
“That was the time Patriarch Athenagoras I was there to confer with Pope Paul,” I said. Leonid raised his eyebrows.
“The Pope and the Patriarch concelebrated a mass at the high altar,” I added.
Leonid shook his head.
“No they didn’t,” he said.
“Yes,” I persisted. “That’s what the church media called it.”
“Impossible,” Leonid said. “They may have stood together at the altar but it could not have been concelebrated.”
I replied that as a Baptist layman I could not have made the word up but he was unmoved.
Later, during one of the National Council of Churches’ worship celebrations of Reformation, I sat next to Leonid. He leaned over and whispered, “We don’t observe Reformation Sunday,” he said, referring to Orthodox churches. “We did not have a reformation. Didn’t need one.”
Whether they need reforming or not, in most Orthodox churches, the liturgy, ministry, and requirements for ordination have not changed in twelve hundred years.
Leonid became an archpriest in the Orthodox Church in America and retired to serve as pastor of a church on Long Island. He became ill and, toward the end, preached in a wheel chair. He died in August 2021, May his memory be eternal!
For Christians who are not Orthodox, Reformation Sunday, if not a high holy day, is a time to reflect on how the church has evolved over the centuries.
When the reformers risked their lives to translate scripture into the vernacular, it was a revelation. Nowhere in the bible were references to popes, bishops, priestly celibacy, or Purgatory. Soon, thanks to the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, these truths were spread far and wide. The established church was threatened and the Reformation was on.
Imagine the amazement of people who were told that good works was the only way to get into heaven when they read this passage in their own language:
“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus, for good works…” (Ephesians 2:8-9)
We have so much to thank these early reformers for, particularly the realization that we are saved by faith, and that no one – no pope, no bishop, no priest – stands between the individual sinner and God.
Thus Reformation Sunday is a day for rejoicing and gratitude for those who came before us, including Martin Luther, who never intended to found a church named for him. As Luther famously said, “While I was drinking beer, God reformed the church.”
But we would be doing these early reformers a disservice if our rejoicing did not include a sobering awareness of what they faced. The penalty for reform was invariably torture and fiery death at the stake.
It’s difficult for us to fully appreciate what they went through.
C.J. Sansom, the British writer who died earlier this year, wrote seven novels that paint a vivid and horrifying picture of the state of the church under the erratic and unpredictable reforms of Henry VIII. The novels offer detailed descriptions of life in medieval England, the smells, the sewage troughs in the middle streets, the multi-tiered caste system from King to peasant. The novels are written in the voice of Matthew Shardlake, a hunchback lawyer who struggles against his disability to solve crimes and brush against such personages as Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Cranmer, Queen Catherine Howard, and Henry VIII himself.
In his book Lamentation, Sansom draws us into the dark side of the Reformation when King Henry vacillates on what his people should believe, what they should read, and how they must worship. People who guessed wrong what the King wants them to do at any given time face painful deaths.
One of the most disturbing scenes in the book involves Anne Askew, a 25-year-old anabaptist reformer who claimed the authority of the Holy Spirit over the king. She was arrested by devious officials who plotted to depose Henry’s sixth and final wife, Queen Catherine, because they suspected she was a closet reformer. They tortured Anne Askew on the rack to force her to reveal that Catherine was one of her supporters.
But Anne never talked.
Sansom’s description of the rack is not for the squeamish. We hear the groaning of the ropes and the cracking of Anne’s joints and her screams, we struggle to breathe in the hot humidity of the torture room, we smell the foul sweat of the men pulling at the rack.
Anne Askew was the only woman to be tortured on the rack prior to being burned at the stake because King Henry, in his tender wisdom, forbad women to suffer this fate. For that reason, the torturers were careful to hide their identities.
Anne’s body was so broken by the rack that she could not stand. She was tied to a chair and taken to the place of execution where she was chained to the stake in an upright position.
It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to smell the acrid smoke and feel the flames as they climbed her body. According to some reports – accepted by Sansom in his fictional account – Anne’s suffering did not last long. In a spirit of Christian compassion her executioners tied a bag of gun powder around her neck. It exploded almost immediately, ending her agony and blowing her head off.
It all began five hundred and seven years ago this Halloween when Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg. We celebrate this relatively benign but courageous fact today.
But it’s not as simple as that. The truth is, if he had his way, Luther would have nailed a few Anabaptists to the door, too. And Jews. And the Pope. The defacing of the Wittenberg door was the ominous prelude to decades of burnings, beheadings, torture, and other primitive forms of hermeneutical discussion.
Luther, who spent much of his life hiding from Catholic assassins, would have readily immolated the odd Mennonite or Jew whose theology he found abhorrent.
Luther was complicated. Among other things, he was a bona fide prophet. God spoke through him with blinding clarity.
But Luther also spoke for himself, and on those occasions he was often wrong. He was a typical sixteenth century European Christian who bristled with anti-Semitism and xenophobia and he bristled brisker than most. Had his glowering imperfections been less obvious, his followers might have elevated him to the demigod status of Joseph Smith or Mary Baker Eddy.
Whether Luther actually defaced the Wittenberg door with nails is a matter of dispute, but historians are clear that he sent the theses to his bishop, Albert of Mainz, on October 31, 1517. They were not a demand for comprehensive church reform but a complaint about the sale of indulgences, a papal racket for selling tickets to heaven.
The Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences was the opening salvo of the Protestant Reformation. Pope Leo X, who depended on indulgences to continue living in the manner to which he was accustomed, was alarmed by Luther’s disputation and eventually excommunicated him. His Holiness also dispatched goon squads in search of Luther’s hoary head.
Ironically, the sale of indulgences has never gone away completely. There are still church fundraisers that suggest a donation of $5 will assure the attentiveness of the Blessed Mother to prayers. And scores of television evangelists, most of whom scorn both Lutherans and Catholics, raise millions by promising that contributions to their ministries will bring “special blessings” that undoubtedly include heaven.
Luther’s point was that with God’s grace, salvation is achieved by faith alone. That was a revolutionary revelation that relieved a heavy burden from sinners who saw themselves struggling futilely to please a vengeful God. We Lutherans are beneficiaries of Martin Luther’s teaching that only the Holy Spirit can give us faith and we cannot do it ourselves. We are not among those who go around asking each other, “Have you found Jesus?” Through grace Jesus has found us.
Salvation by faith remains a wonderful idea, and it’s too bad Pope Leo couldn’t see it. It’s also too bad that the reformers themselves sometimes lost sight of it.
But times change and we Christians are no longer immolating each other. Today Pope Francis warmly embraces Lutherans and Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York (who knew he was a Luther scholar?) acknowledges “the church needed reforming” in 1517. One can even see the day in the not-too.distant future when Lutherans and Catholics will share the same communion elements of bread and wine at a common table.
The ideal result of the Reformation will be when Lutherans and Catholics share a common priesthood, but that day seems far off. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America ordains women as priests and consecrates women as bishops. But the otherwise progressive Pope Francis has declared that will not happen in his reign. So for those who believe it is essential for the church to embrace the gifts of all who are called to ministry, regardless of gender, there is still reforming to be done.
As we look forward to the perfect unity of a reformed church, it may be good to keep in mind that Reformation has always been imperfect, often brutal, and slow to embrace the insight that Luther saw in his more gracious moments: that persons are redeemed by faith, not dogma, and by God’s grace, not priestly intercession.
True reformation may be a long ways off, but by God’s grace it will come.
Like the long, slow moral arc of the universe, the arc of reformation bends inexorably toward unity.
