The Sermon for Reformation Sunday
October 25, 1998

Christ the King Lutheran Church

The Rev. Edwin D. Peterman, Senior Pastor

The Lessons for the Day

• Jeremiah 31:31–34
• Romans 3:19–28
• John 8:31–36

All of you have had the experience of not being able to remember something you thought you would never forget. Memory is a tricky thing. Sometimes just when you count on it, it lets you down. One evening I was writing something at home, and I asked Jane, "How to you spell maybe?" "What?" she asked. "Maybe," I said. "How do you spell it? Is it M-A-Y-B-E or M-A-Y-B-Y?" "Are you serious?" she asked. "Yes," I said. "Is it with an E or a Y?" She said it was with an E and walked off shaking her head. It's embarrassing to forget something like that. But they say when you get older, the memory is the first thing to go. Or is it the second?

When you can't remember something, it stops you cold in your tracks. It paralyzes you. You go to the garage to get something but then you can't remember what you went there to get, and you just stand there, motionless and frustrated. Or someone walks up to you in a shopping mall and says brightly, "Remember me?" You recall the face and you know that this is someone you once knew well, but for the life of you, you can't remember the person's name. For a moment there you are trapped. You don't remember, but you know you should. Your own limited memory binds you, and you long to be free.

The loss of memory always curbs freedom to some extent. It may be momentary embarrassment, or it may be more or less permanent confinement as in the case of a victim of amnesia or Alzheimer's. A major component of human freedom is the ability to remember.

In today's Gospel Jesus was talking with some Jews. He told them, "You will know the truth and the truth will make you free." The Greek word for truth is ale´theia. Aletheia is really two words: letheia and the prefix a. Letheia means forget. The prefix a means not. Therefore the Greek word for truth means not-forgetting. To know the truth means to remember. Remembering will make you free.

Now the irony of the story in today's Gospel is that just as soon as Jesus tells these Jews that the truth—that is, remembering—will make them free, they immediately protest and say, "We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone." That is ironic, because in their effort to claim the freedom that comes from remembering, they show clearly that they have forgotten their own history as Israelites. They have forgotten their ancestral captivity as slaves in Egypt. They have forgotten their Exile into Babylonia in the Sixth Century B.C. By forgetting their past slavery, they have become slaves to their own ignorance. The truth about them is not only the history of their great triumphs, but also the history of their great defeats and God's gracious deliverance of them through no merit of their own.

People who remember only their triumphs are slaves to triumphalism. And people who remember only their defeats are slaves to defeatism. Neither way of remembering acknowledges the truth. The truth is the total remembering of both triumphs and defeats, a remembering that ultimately gives God the credit for your deliverance.

The struggle of faith is to remember the past, to remember where you have been, including both the mountain tops and the deep valleys and the deserts. The struggle of faith is to stand present to your own individual and corporate past and not flee from it by rushing off into the future. Now faith does not require that you dwell in the past. Romanticizing the past is characteristic of reactionaries, be they political or religious. The past, after all, is the past. And by the grace of God the past is received and accepted by God exactly the way it was. And God gives us permission to receive and accept it as well. But that is not the same thing as permission to forget. We are not to hold grudges, for that is to dwell in the past. Rather, we remember. And remembering is the means whereby the Spirit of God prepares us for the future. When Jesus promised his disciples that the Holy Spirit would come soon, he said the Spirit would lead them into all truth by bringing to mind and heart all that Jesus had told them in the past. The past is not a millstone but a stepping stone. And forgetting the past is forgetting where you stand and where you're going.

Today is Reformation Sunday. It commemorates the time 481 years ago this coming Saturday when Martin Luther posted 95 Theses for debate within the theological community of Wittenberg, Germany. Luther was alarmed over the failure of the church to remember its own scripture and tradition. There were fund-raisers from Rome telling North German peasants that they could buy their way out of purgatory. That was contrary to the Gospel, Luther said, because the Gospel says that we are justified by the grace of God through faith, not by good works such as contributing to the building fund for St. Peter's in Rome. That was the beginning of the Lutheran Reformation, and when each position radicalized its stand, the outcome was the excommunication of Luther and his followers.

The church historian Jaraslav Pelikan calls the Reformation a tragic necessity. He says that the trouble is that the Roman Catholics saw it only as tragic and did not see it as necessary. The trouble, further, is that the Lutherans saw it as necessary but not particularly tragic.

Luther's efforts were focussed on reclaiming the ancient Gospel in the midst of a church that had become forgetful. In many respects the challenges he faced nearly five hundred years ago are not much different from the challenges we face today, even within our own Lutheran denomination.

For several decades after the Second Vatican Council, Lutherans and Roman Catholics achieved considerable consensus through careful and honest dialog. As a result, some suggested that we might well do away with Reformation Sunday entirely, because it is now obsolete. I disagree. I do think it is time for us to do away with the practice of congratulating God on liking Lutherans better than Roman Catholics. In particular, I am strongly opposed to that kind of pharisaism among Lutherans which proudly states, "I thank thee, O Lord, that I am not like those disgusting Roman Catholics who make the sign of the cross and have communion every Sunday and whose priests wear fancy chasubles." That sort of triumphalism is simply foolish and sinful.

On the other hand, we cannot rewrite history. We do well to remember the Reformation with great solemnity and awe. We do well to remember how easily a big church that has everything going for it can forget the gospel and reach instead for power and success. We do well to remember how yesterday's heretics like Luther can become tomorrow's heroes in the faith. We do well to remember how God is continually at work reforming his church, reminding it of its past and calling it into the future.

"You will know the truth," Jesus said, "and the truth will make you free." Or, literally, "You will not forget, and not forgetting will make you free."

There are many ways in which we are called to remember, both individually and corporately. But for the Christian church the supreme remembrance is in its weekly liturgy. In Confession we remember our cold-hearted sinfulness toward God and neighbor, the wrongs we have done, and the wrongs we have permitted to stand uncorrected. And in Absolution we are declared free from all those sins.

In the Liturgy of the Word we hear the old, old stories. The faithfulness of God in the past is set forth in the present, for the sake of the future.

In the Liturgy of the Eucharistic Meal the Words of Institution force us to remember the night on which our Lord Jesus Christ was betrayed and how in the presence of his enemies he prepared a table for us. A table on which the bread of life is broken and the wine of gladness is poured out. A table at which the Eternal Word of God becomes the flesh and blood of our existence. "Do this," he said, "in remembrance of me." Communion makes us remember the past, and paradoxically it also makes us remember the future. Past and Future become the Now. And once again the primal covenant of which Jeremiah spoke is written upon our hearts.