History lesson time, because relevance.
John 8:31-36; Romans 3:19-28; Psalm 46; Jeremiah 31:31-34
Reformation Sunday! The Lutheran Church’s birthday (kind of, sort of, though not really at all, and never mind that Luther never actually wanted to start any sort of new thing). Today is kind of a rather big deal. The Protestant Reformation did quite a bit to change the religious and political landscape of Europe, leading to a series of rather unpleasant wars that, while not primarily motivated by religion, came to be about whose faith was right and who was a heretic.
The Reformation itself was built on the shoulders of others who we don’t often talk about: John Wycliffe, an Englishman, who started a return to the thought of justification by faith and sought to translate the Bible into English; and Jan Hus, a Czech, who preached against corruption in the church, as well as setting up many of the theological ideas which came up during the Reformation.
Then, on October 31, 1517, a certain monk sought to open discussion on indulgences, a way of spending money to buy in advance forgiveness of sins. As it turned out, and apparently unknown to Luther, the sale of indulgences was primarily motivated by a desire to raise money for the renovation of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The idea that someone had to pay the church for something God did for free didn’t sit well with this certain monk, and so he wrote Ninety-Five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, and published them for discussion at the All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg. Written in Latin, the discussion primarily occurred in scholarly circles, until several of Luther’s friends translated it into German, and printed the 95 Theses into pamphlets for widespread distribution.
To make an incredibly long and complex story short and simple, Luther became the centerpiece for people frustrated with the religious and political failings of the day. For a little while, everyone played nice, but very quickly the different groups started to factionalize. You had Calvinists in Switzerland that weren’t too happy with the Lutherans in Germany, neither of whom were particularly pleased with the Catholics, and all of whom couldn’t stand the Anabaptists. What started out as a wonderful return to Scripture — a recognition that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came through Christ Jesus,” as our reading from Romans reminds us — turned into a free-for-all where everyone who wasn’t in your group was a heretic and deserved to die.
It really got quite ugly. Within 7 years, people were already killing each other because of the Reformation: 1524-25 had the German Peasants’ War, in 1531 the Battle of Kappel, from 1546-47 the Schmalkaldic war, the Eighty Years’ War of 1568-1648, the French Wars of Religion from 1562-1598, the devestating Thirty Years War of 1618-1648, and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms from 1639-1651.
Even after these specifically religiously motivated wars, difference in religion became a motivating factor in many wars in Europe, for example in the Second Northern War, Poland was being soundly defeated by the Swedish, until the Swedes tried to take a rather wealthy monastery in Czestochowa which happened to be dedicated to the Virgin Mary. This siege became a turning point in the war, because the Catholics in Poland didn’t want the “heretic” Lutherans to defile their sacred space.
I know this is a lot of history and background, but it shows an interesting point. One of the primary things to come out of the reformation are that very line in Romans 3 — that everyone is a sinner, though forgiven through Jesus Christ. No one is better than anyone else; no one is a “worse sinner” or “lesser sinner”, everyone has sinned. Jesus says something similar in John 8. But very quickly after the reformation, people started to draw lines depending on who the Bible was interpreted. Calvinists, Lutherans, Catholics, Zwinglians, Anglicans — all of them declared those who didn’t agree with them to be heretics based on their own religious “scorecard”.
To an extent we still do this today; we forget that we are all forgiven sinners and spend a lot of time working out who is “right”. We take the good news of Jesus, that we are set free from bondage to sin by the Son of God, and corrupt it. We forget that, as Jeremiah wrote about and we’ll be reminded of at Communion, we are now in a new covenant established in Jesus’ blood — one in which God “forgives [our] wickedness, and remembers [our] sin no more.” Let’s keep the “good news” good news, and not get bogged down in religious scorecards: for we are all sinners, forgiven by God’s grace through Jesus Christ, and set apart to do the good works God created us to do.