Sermon for February 20th 2011 - Flesherton Pastoral Charge

This past week, I had a chat with a long time friend about things church and more specifically, the impact of Luther on the Christian Church ... Rob and I have been friends for all of my life – he grew up across the street from us, and was like an older brother to BOTH Scott and I, so when we sat down to lunch earlier this week, we talked about family and common experiences in and around our neighbourhood, then the talk turned to a series of class I took with he and his then new bride back almost 25 years ago.

They were membership classes for the Lutheran Church, and the pastor was a personable and very knowlegable man, who endured a lot with the presence of a United Church heretic in his midst for the 16 weeks ... but we survived, and I could technically have joined the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church after having taken these classes ... but instead, I stayed here in the United Church, and used what I learned to deepen my understanding of things Church.

What Rob and I recalled this past week was the impact that Luther had on the church – an impact that continues to reverberate throughout the Church to this very day ... Luther began his journey because he found the Gospel and the requirements of faith to be onerous and untenable ... Luther acknowledged that he was spending hours on his knees in confession, and even during confession found his mind wandering and sinning ... it struck his legalistic mind as odd that we were expected to be so removed from sin, that even the act of confessing our sins lead one to sin ... something wasn’t working ...

So, Luther began to study the Scriptures, and to read what they REALLY said, not what his professors, and his colleagues and his fellow monks said – but what the Scriptures said ... and as he read the words of Jesus, Paul, Moses and the others recorded in the Bible, he began to have serious questions about the disconnect between what he was reading, and what he was hearing preached from the pulpits of the Church ... and yet, no one wanted to hear, much less answer his questions ... yet Luther was nothing, if not persistent ... until on day at the Cathedral at Wittenburg, he nailed his 95 Theses – or questions to the Door and set off the Protestant Reformation ...

What has always struck me most about Luther, was his no nonsense and very common sense approach to life and church. In Rome on pilgrimage once, he was horrified to hear a priest conducting the Mass in Latin, and as he broke the bread for sharing amongst those gathered didn’t say “the body of Christ broken for you,” but rather said cynically – “bread you are, and bread you shall remain” – Luther was deeply offended not only at the offense offered to the eucharist, but he was also offended at the cynical hypocrisy of the priest who clearly didn’t believe the theology he was representing, and through the use of Latin was misleading the congregation ...

Interestingly though, some of Luther’s most candid and succinct expressions of faith came not in grand theological treatises, nor in his lectures and sermons, but rather when his students and followers sat down in a local tavern and over beer and beverages, discussed things theological, and Luther spoke frankly and often bluntly about things ... offering reflections and musings about life, the universe and everything – statements that some six centuries later remain concise expressions of taking this book (...) and applying it to life in the real world.

Where Rob and I headed in our discussion this past week, was in the need to reclaim some of Luther’s no-nonsense approach to things Church. Rob and I discussed the experiences we’ve both had in the church when the ‘way things are’ took precedence over being open to the will and the way of the spirit. Too often in the Church the rules and regulations and the dogma become the very reason for being, and the sharing and living of the Gospel is put safely under lock and key. For a Good Lutheran like Rob, such legalism is a bitter pill to swallow, because it is the very thing that Luther raged against when he began the Protestant Reformation.

Luther remembered the gift and the power of God’s grace, and shared that remembrance with the rest of us. For Luther the very fact that God offers unconditional and limitless Grace to us, was enough ... it doesn’t mean we have a carte blanche to go and do whatever we want, but rather, in response to God’s grace we will TRY hard to live a spirit guided life, and live according to the precepts of our faith ... but when we fail, and we will, we simply claim anew that gift of Grace through confession.

Regretably, in the generations that succeeded Luther, this freedom was curtailed ... the very thought that you could make confession and continue on your way, only to make a confession sometime in the future was unbearable to some ... so they imposed rules ... they set up expectations and regulations ... they hemmed in the gift of Grace by establishing legal boundaries and perameters to protect this precious gift of Grace ... and ironically, in the process, they began to recreate the very thing that Luther had so eloquently rejected ... God’s gift of Grace is free for the taking – anything else becomes a human construct that Luther repeatedly rejected.

The bottom line in Luther’s teaching is the realization that a close reading of the teachings of Paul and Jesus and others, reveals a movement towards a faith NOT based on legalism and imposed rules.

Our Gospel readings this morning, are evidence of this ... Jesus knew the legal requirements laid out centuries earlier by Moses at Sinai ... and instead of further underscoring them, and demanding more strigent observation of the LAW, he instead pointed out the value and the necessity of living those principles fully, and in the process envoking an active resistance to the legalism and the polictical machinations of the day, by living according to the tenents of our faith.

If a man slaps you on the cheek, give him your other cheek ... this is not just passivity – but is an active resistance to the one who would slap you. By turning your face and offering the other cheek, the aggressor (the one slapping you) would have to go through incredible contortions to slap your cheek ...

The slap to the cheek would be delivered with the back of his hand ... so to turn your face means he has to step it up a notch by slapping you with the palm of his hand – a NO NO in the culture of the day, or he has to use the left hand – the unclean hand – an even bigger NO NO in the culture of the day ... or he has to go through incredible contortions to whack you ... by simply turning the cheek you are moving the burden to the aggressor and limiting his ability to strike out ...

Likewise, each of the teachings we encountered this morning have a strong element of active resistance to the dominant culture of the day ... by using the legal expectations the oneous is placed on the agressor to avoid shame and uncleanliness and THEY are placed in the position of being embarrassed by their own actions ... if they want your coat, give them your robe also so that THEY are shamed by your nakedness ... if they want you to carry their pack for a mile, carry it a second mile, so they are shamed by your action ... if they want something, give it to them and give them more so they stand in a place of embarrassment and shame ...

It is a brilliant use of the law, to turn the law on its ear ... in the midst of the civil rights battles in the US, Martin Luther King used this same principal by building on what Gandhi had taught a generation earlier ... King noted:

I'm happy that he didn't say, "Like your enemies," because there are some people that I find it pretty difficult to like. Liking is an affectionate emotion, and I can't like anybody who would bomb my home. I can't like anybody who would exploit me. I can't like anybody who would trample over me with injustices. I can't like them. I can't like anybody who threatens to kill me day in and day out. But Jesus reminds us that love is greater than liking. Love is understanding, creative, redemptive good will toward all men. And I think this is where we are, as a people, in our struggle for racial justice. We can't ever give up. We must work passionately and unrelentingly for first-class citizenship. We must never let up in our determination to remove every vestige of segregation and discrimination from our nation, but we shall not in the process relinquish our privilege to love.

I've seen too much hate to want to hate, myself, and I've seen hate on the faces of too many sheriffs, too many white citizens' councilors, and too many Klansmen of the South to want to hate, myself; and every time I see it, I say to myself, hate is too great a burden to bear. Somehow we must be able to stand up before our most bitter opponents and say: "We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws and abide by the unjust system, because non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good, and so throw us in jail and we will still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at the midnight hour and drag us out on some wayside road and leave us half-dead as you beat us, and we will still love you. Send your propaganda agents around the country, and make it appear that we are not fit, culturally and otherwise, for integration, and we'll still love you. But be assured that we'll wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves; we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory."

Such is the power of active resistance – BY USING THE LAW creatively, the burden is shifted to the aggressor, and we stand in a place where the weakness of the legalism and the rules and the regulations are revealed for all to see.

Grace is NOT about legalism – Grace is about freedom. And freedom is lived when you stand in a place where Grace is embodied in every thought and every action ... where my initial conversation with my friend Rob went, was to a place of realization that folks like Luther, and ultimately Jesus come along to free us from the legalism that places the word of the law foremost ... they see, speak and embody a spirit of the law approach that values the relationship between us and God – the Covenant to Abraham that says simply “I will be your God, and you shall be my people ...” – the Covenant to the Prophets that challenges us to live our faith humbly and with the certainty that we belong to God ... it’s not really that hard ... it’s about being free to live our faith and to share it with others in every action and every thought ...

May it be so, thanks be to God – let us pray ...