Video for this will be up tomorrow, complete with my own minor-ish departures from the printed text, but for now...the manuscript.
498 years is a remarkably long time. 498 years ago, the land on which Grace stands was a swampy woodland. It was a place known only to the indigenous people of the region, whose name for it reflected the stink of swamp mud and wild onions – Shikaakwa, meaning “smelly onion” or “skunk” depending on who you ask. The ancestors of nearly everyone in this room were, more likely than not, living an ocean away in Europe. Those European ancestors, 498 years ago, were probably all Catholic regardless of where they came from.
498 years ago, the printing press was the forefront of modern technology in a world in which most people were illiterate. The vast majority of the human population was rural, and most were subsistence farmers, producing enough to support themselves. Those who lived in the urban landscapes of 16th century Europe were typically day laborers and domestic servants; only a privileged few were members of the emerging middle class, and even fewer ranked among the wealthy nobility. Perhaps elements of this landscape sound more familiar than might have been the case fifty or sixty years ago.
498 years ago, it was a dangerous thing to put forward new ideas that challenged the status quo. Copernicus’ radical notion that – just maybe – the earth orbited the sun, and not vice versa, was deemed unsafe enough that Copernicus published anonymously out of fear of what fate might befall him for challenging the official teaching of the Church that the sun orbited the earth. Even a century later, Galileo’s confirmation of Copernicus’ hypothesis landed him in house arrest and he was forced to recant his teaching…or else be put to death.
498 years ago, a German monk and professor of Old Testament named Martin Luther posted a document we know as the 95 Theses – they constitute an argument against the then-common practice of selling forgiveness of sin (a practice known as selling indulgences), while arguing for an understanding of God’s forgiveness as a treasure opened to us through faith. Luther set out to work against the worst of what institutional religion practiced in his time; he wound up being the catalyst for a wave of religious turmoil, debate, and reformation whose effects we still feel today.
498 years was a long time ago, but it still matters to us today. I don’t say that to suggest that its importance is solely, or even mainly, because we belong to a faith traditions whose roots are in that same Martin Luther’s bold stand against what he saw as a corrupt, broken church…though this is hugely important, and as Lutheran Christians we stand as direct heirs to the legacy of Luther’s zeal for a church which stands on grace alone, faith alone, and scripture alone.
Today, I suggest that 498 years matters to us because it reminds us of how much the world changes, and of how Christ works in his Church and in that changing world. The simple fact is that over the last 2,000 years, let alone the last 498, Christ’s Church has been in a near constant state of change. The congregations which Paul planted centuries and centuries ago do not exist; they are gone. New congregations have taken their place, lived, and died, with others coming after them. While many of the great churches of the Reformation era still stand physically, plenty of them are more-or-less just museums. Even more of them – these grand edifices which were once filled to the brim on Sunday morning – are lucky to see more than a few dozen people.
Even here, this is something we see. I’ve heard lots of stories about how, back in the 1950s, this church saw several hundred people gather at several services…and now we have one worship time with 40 people on a good day, usually fewer. Congregations never live forever; just like people, they are born, they live, and they die. This isn’t a reflection of some congregations being bad; it’s just the nature of things.
It isn’t an easy word; it is not a truth we want to hear, any more than we want to hear the truth of a bad diagnosis from a doctor, or the truth of a loved one’s illness, or the truth of the loss of a job. It hurts – truth does that, sometimes. But the pain doesn’t make it not true. I didn’t want to believe, two years and some change ago, that my dad was dead…but it didn’t make him any less dead. We don’t want to believe it when we’re told that we’ve got cancer, and it’s bad…but that doesn’t make us any less sick. We don’t want to hear that the congregations and institutions we love will die…but that doesn’t make them any less likely to close their doors.
Truth can hurt, but Christ promises us that Truth also sets us free. We discover, in our encounters with Truth that, no matter how painful they might be, they liberate us from the prisons of impossible expectations and root us firmly in the grace-filled realm of what is possible, where God is at work in surprising ways. Truth might confront us with the realities we would rather not face, but it also assures us that our human limitations and finite nature are not the end of God’s story. Truth forces us to face the fact that every single person in this room will die, and that this congregation will die…but that Christ’s promise to us is resurrection.
You will die. Someday. It’s scientific fact; it is Truth. The even greater Truth is that, in Christ, death becomes for us nothing more than the entry point into the fullness of the eternal life we have in Christ. Grace Church will die. Someday. Perhaps in a year or two, perhaps in a decade or two, perhaps in a century or two. It’s Truth. The even greater Truth is that Christ will use the people and resources of this place, even in its death, to do the resurrection-work of bringing new life into this community and world.
498 years after Luther’s actions launched the Reformation, we are questioning what that means for the world, what relevance those of us who follow in his steps might have in our own day and age. The Truth is that we are struggling to figure that out in an era in which people seem to be less than interested in what we have to say, and where the human institutions we have built no longer seem sustainable. The even greater Truth is that Christ cares for and upholds his Church, and that 498 years from now, others after us will be continuing to wrestle with the Truth of their reality, and the same will be true 498 years after they gather in worship, and 498 years after that. Christ’s Church endures because Christ is our one foundation, in life and in death, and Christ brings us through death into eternal life. It’s resurrection. It’s the core of what fired up Luther to write his 95 Theses, and before him it was the promise that led Paul to travel the Roman Empire, inviting people to believe in Christ and experience transformation through him. The form of the Church will change, as we’ve seen over time, but our substance – the Good News that we are saved by grace through faith for Christ’s sake apart from works – endures forever, and whether we live or we die, as people or as institutions, we live, die, and rise again in Christ. This is most certainly true.
