Like most moments in history, the Protestant Reformation was not the singular act of nailing the Ninety Five Theses to the church doors of Wittenberg on October 31st of 1517, though we tend to pick that date, and that singular man, Martin Luther, for the sake of simplicity.
In truth, the seeds of the Reformation were being planted for at least two centuries before the German monk declared “Here I stand,†seeds planted by prophets like John Wycliffe and Jan Hus, tended by many great thinkers of the Northern Renaissance like Erasmus, the Dutch priest and older contemporary to Luther, a groundbreaking translator of scripture, and a leading humanist.
Erasmus, probably best known for his devastating work “In Praise of Folly,†would be associated with many of the important figures of his age, including the English Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, later canonized, and Henry the Eighth, the ruler whose break with the Roman church led to More’s execution. In his recent dual biography of Erasmus and Luther, Michael Massing describes the dutchman’s visit to Rome in 1509, painting a picture of a church and a city in advanced decay. The Roman forum was a cow pasture, the great Capitoline a hill of goats not of emperors.
Erasmus had as his patron in Rome Cardinal Raffaele Riario, the Vatican’s chief financial officer, who lived in the Cancelleria, an immense palace made with stone taken from the Coliseum. The palace was built using Riario’s winnings from a night of gambling with none other than the illegitimate son of the previous pope, Innocent the Eighth. That son would marry Maddalena de’ Medici, of the famous Florentine family, a marriage that would pave the way for her brother, Giovanni, to become Pope Leo the Tenth. And so it went, adultery, simony, nepotism.
The Cancelleria still stands, and has in recent years been back in the news, connected with scandal of a more recent vintage, for it served as residence-in-exile for the disgraced American Cardinal Bernard Law, who fled to Rome, until his death last December.
The church that Erasmus experienced, against which Luther eventually and reluctantly rebelled, was little more than a secular earthly kingdom with a thin veneer of religion, the Papal States, with a new Pope, in Julius, committed to conquest and construction, a latter day Caesar literally riding in military triumph and expanding the monstrous St. Peter’s Basilica into its present form.
A shallow version of history focuses on this construction and the sale of indulgences to fund it as the cause of religious revolution, the revolution that would lead to this very church in Blue Hill. Those histories miss the point, but so does pretty much every interpretation grounded in the secular.
As Protestant Christians, we are inclined to move beyond the sale of indulgences to two very different explanations for the religious revolution that was Reformation, both the movement in Germany that we now call Lutheran and the movement in Switzerland that we now call the Reformed tradition, two streams of Protestantism that would come together to form the United Church of Christ and similar denominations in several other countries.
Many Protestants focus on the theological differences between our tradition and Roman Catholicism, things like the number of sacraments, the need for confession to a priest, Marian devotion, and the nature of the bread and the wine during communion, but those differences were not the driving force behind the schism. The cause of the Reformation was not differing belief. There had always been diversity of belief. There is diversity of belief in scripture. There were diverse understandings of who Jesus was and what he meant on the day he was publicly executed. There was diversity within the Roman church, despite the narrative that it was top-down and unified. There was no more absolute unity of belief than there was absolute power in the papacy, both a convenient fiction.
Others, in examining the Reformation, choose to focus just on the corruption in the Medieval church, one that was ill-equipped for the transformation of society that would see nation-states replace the system of suzerains and vassals, that would see the rise of the merchant class and eventually industrialization. These polemicists focus on incidents like that night of gambling with the son of a pope and the millions in today’s dollars that changed hands.
There was certainly corruption and the Reformation and Counter-Reformation would lift up theological differences. But the real problem with the Roman church was that those in charge had a belief, but what they believed in was church as an institution. The offices of the church were being bought and sold by men that didn’t believe in the religion itself. All of the metaphysical stuff, all that demanded we change our lives and reach for the transcendent, God and Christ and gospel, all were gone in a church that was secular and civic. Those earthly pretenders to the apostolic tradition used heaven and hell and purgatory and judgment to terrorize others, but they did not believe any of it. If they did, they would have lived very different lives. They would have sought God’s will, not earthly wealth and glory. The leaders of the faith had no faith.
We have contemporaneous accounts of sacrilegious conduct even during the mass itself, when, according to Catholic theology, Christ is physically present, never mind the debauchery we find in one account after another of the lives of popes and bishops… lovers, concubines, and catamites. The Medieval church Erasmus experienced in Rome and against which Luther would rebel was an institution emptied of belief, and lacking clarity and passion. It was, as our UCC Statement of Faith describes, a place of “aimlessness and sin.â€
The blind do not see where there is no belief. Belief is what heals in the gospels. The Spirit does not blow where there is no belief. The sails droop, and if the ship of church is becalmed long enough, there will certainly be death on the rocks or at the hands of mutineers.
Of course, there is also such a thing as too much wind, and there is such a thing as a faith that is too certain, too strident, that is marked by hubris, not humility.
Luther would find his own sins. He would embrace the antisemitism that poisoned Medieval Europe, an age of expulsions and ethnic cleansing. His antisemitic writing was so vitriolic, his influence so great on German identity, that one can easily wonder if the Holocaust could have happened without him. Add to that his theology of the two kingdoms which justified acquiescence to an unjust prince, an unjust nation-state, allowing people to claim that they were “just following orders,†a defense that would not unravel until Nuremberg.
History makes clear here and in many other cases the easy step from something noble, like the abolition of feudalism in France in August 1789, to something horrible, like the Reign of Terror just four years later, when angry mobs turned the beautiful ideals of liberté, égalité, and fraternité on their heads, resulting in the loss of heads to the gruesome guillotine at Place de la Révolution.
Like the French Revolution, the Protestant Reformation was a human thing, imperfect. And Luther was imperfect.
It isn’t far from Luther’s emphasis on scripture to Calvin’s sola scriptura, and from there to the selective literalism of the purveyors of religious hatred, to Pat Robertson, Franklin Graham, and Jerry Falwell Jr., the American jihadis who claim to speak for Christ, but froth at the mouth spewing hatred and judgment.
Too narrow a faith and our souls become shriveled. Too rigid a faith and we become irrelevant to a world that changes whether we give it permission to do so or not. Spiritual rigor mortis sets in, for the faith is dead, and the institution will surely follow.
Gospel is not something that happened two thousand years ago. Gospel is today. Reformation is not something that happened five hundred years ago. Reformation is today. Both involve saying yes to something that is more than human, more than our petty preferences and selfish demands. It is saying yes to something greater than ourselves, something we call by many names: God, Father, Spirit, Christ, Divine Mystery, Love. Anything less than this assent to something greater than yourself is narcissism and idolatry. Reformation is an act of love.
It is not enough to offer the world some watered-down faith, what scholars have labeled a moralistic therapeutic deism. It is not enough to be a secular church that worships nothing so much as church itself. Follow that path and we will find ourselves like the protagonists in that dark comedy from almost three decades ago, “Weekend at Bernie’s,†dragging around a corpse and pretending it is still alive.
Nostalgia is a mind-altering hallucinogenic as addictive as any opioid and just as deadly. Once hooked, it is hard to escape. It sucks the life out of you. It kills churches. It can kill a nation.
Scripture is the story of a people always changing and evolving, embracing new ways.
The prophet Jeremiah promises on the Lord’s behalf “With weeping they shall come, and with consolations I will lead them back, I will let them walk by brooks of water, in a straight path in which they shall not stumble.†What the reading, excerpted from the bigger story, does not tell you is that what they would come back to was not the same thing that they had left behind. Those who returned from Exile needed to learn a new way of being God’s people in a world where they no longer had control. They understood themselves as being at the center of all creation, of having a place of special privilege, and that was no longer true for them. And it is no longer true for us.
We need to learn a new way of being God’s people in a world where we no longer have control. We need faith, and we need reformation.
Though we have many more ways of being Christian than they had in 1517, though the word Christian itself has become shameful for its association with hatred and injustice, though even the best of us are often divided, in truth, we are not so far from that 16th century church.
Today’s princes of the mega-churches live in mansions and fly private jets. They conflate faith and nation in a way that would have made no sense to Jesus, who was murdered by the state. And so many who bear the title pastor and teacher have lost all faith, have lost all hope, their spirits in ruins like the Rome Erasmus experienced, a parody of what was once alive, great, and glorious. Leaders, ordained and lay, are burned out and suffering, anxious and unsure what comes next.
Our Congregational and United Church of Christ way is not the way of hellfire and brimstone, of certainty and damnation. We’ve always embraced reason and learning, welcomed new ideas, been at the forefront when it came to realizing that the children of God come in many colors, genders, and ways of loving. But we all too often become so intellectual and scholar that we are as dry as a valley of bones. Can we have a little passion? Can we unite around anything bigger than the institution? We make room at the table for atheists and humanists. Can we make room for those who believe as well?
Can most of us still proclaim that there is something instead of nothing because of some mystery we name as God?
Can we proclaim that people experienced something holy and more than human in the person of Jesus during his lifetime?
Can we proclaim that we experience something holy and more than human in that story today?
Can we claim his demanding teaching about radical hospitality and sacrificial love? Are we willing to sacrifice anything to follow on his Way? Are we willing to sacrifice everything to follow on his way?
Will we worship God or will we worship church?
Can we be reformed in holy love? Do we have enough love for Reformation?
May the power of Jesus, a power that can raise the dead, fill our hearts and fill our lives. Amen.