Being Re-Formed
October 26, 2014 Matthew 22:34-46
Rev. Lesley Weir
A lot is going on here today. We have witnessed our third graders being gifted with bibles. A gift we hope becomes a guide book, a source of comfort, an amazing collection of stories about God’s deep and abiding love for all of us. Later this morning, we will present our gifts to God for the coming year. Gifts of our treasures from God that we will share back in some portion that we hope will help this place continue to be a guide, a source of comfort, and amazing collection of stories about God’s deep and abiding love lived out through St. Luke. On top of that, as Presbyterians, we recognize today as Reformation Sunday,a day to mark the beginning of fresh air and new thinking in the church that began almost 500 years ago in Germany. A movement that sought to be a guide and comfort to the people of God. A movement certainly filled with stories about God’s deep and abiding love.
All of these elements of today’s worship mark changes and growth. Third graders are now old enough for their very own bibles. They have learned to read well enough that they can pour through its pages on their own. Our gifts to God that will be offered before we leave,contain our hopes and dreams for new or expanding ministries here at St. Luke. Our financial gifts keep us growing in faith and service. And Reformation Sunday, well that was certainly about change and growth.
Matthew’s gospel today fits into the same categories.It signals change and growth, not just for Jesus and his disciples, but for the world. This story comes on the Monday of Holy Week in Matthew’s tale. Jesus has ridden into town on the donkey, proclaimed and hailed triumphant. Immediately he starts getting into it with temple leaders. The last few weeks of worship we have looked at some of his encounters with the powers that be. Today is no different. The tension between Jesus and the Pharisees can be cut with a knife. And so they call him on the carpet. “Which commandment is the greatest?”they ask.
Now, this is nothing more than a good Sunday School question. Every practicing Jew could answer this question. The answer comes straight out of the opening of worship for the Jews, what is known as The Shema. Shema means hear, or listen, in Hebrew. And the Jews always began worship with “hear O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.”Temple 101 for Jesus. It is straight out of the book of Deuteronomy, the oldest recited Jewish passage. It is our Lord’s Prayer.
Jesus then goes beyond the initial question of the greatest commandment, and for free, throws in the second greatest. As Christians, we can have the tendency to hear this second part as something new, something Jesus has begun on his own. But alas, this is also a fairly simple question for a practicing Jew 2000 years ago. The next greatest commandment would be to love your neighbor. Love your neighbor as yourself. Love your neighbor as it tells you to in Leviticus chapter 19 verse 18. Yes indeed, there we find in the Old Testament; Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.
So, in essence, there is nothing new here at all.Jesus is merely quoting back the answers,the correct answers if you will, to the questions from the temple crowd. But it is new, isn’t it? In some way, there is something new about this, about Jesus, the man who answers, about the conflicts he is having with the authorities. Jesus is asking them to reconsider how they hold these old commandments in their hearts. He is asking them to rethink what these answers really mean. He is trying to re-form the culture.
It is not a whole lot different in some ways,than what Luther was trying to do 500 years ago. Luther had no intention of splitting the church, of having two very different branches of Christianity emerge.Luther’s aim was to get the church to think differently about the ways it interpreted itself. And one of the ways to do this, is to ask questions. Questions that require us to look deeply into our answers. Questions that require more than the simple Sunday School answer. Questions that on the surface might be answered by reciting the Lord’s Prayer, but then ask for reflection and authentic consideration of what that answer means.
It is tricky business,this answering of God questions, faith questions. When John Calvin and his brand of reformers came along, one of their key contributions to the entire movement, was the belief that the questions never have one and only one answer. What do I mean by that? Well, Calvin and his group taught that the church indeed needed reform at the time. But they ventured that this would always be the case. You couldn’t ask the big questions in one time, get your answers, and then be satisfied for all time.“Times they are a changin’“might be how they would state it today. (Sorry for the continued 1964’s music analogies!) But the Reformed branch of the reformation, which is what we belong to as Presbyterians, that branch believed that while this was a momentous event in the life of the church, there would probably be other times in the future that would ask us to consider the big God questions again.
And so the Calvin team coined the phrase “ecclesia reformata, semper reformandasecundumverbidei” which is Latin for ‘the church reformed, always being reformed, according to the word of God”. For this group of theologians, changing times and a living God meant that how we interpret that word of God might change in response to what was happening in this world. Please note, we are not allowed to just decide on our own whim what that interpretation should be, but according to the word of God or with the power of the Holy Spirit.
The most concrete way of seeing this principle in action,is our Book of Confessions. And no, this isn’t some Hollywood or Washington DC tell-all! Confession in this sense means a stated belief. What we confess, affirm and declare to hold true about God and the church. Now, I have to admit, coming from the Roman tradition, this was a jarring revelation, that there was a book of CONFESSIONS, plural. In your oldest traditions, the Nicene Creed and the Apostle’s Creed say it all. And they are pretty similar to each other. They are both pretty short, concise statements of belief. But here I was checking out of the library this tome of creeds and confessions that all belonged to our one Presbyterian tradition.
But you see, this is the result of the Calvin way of understanding statements of belief or of interpreting the answers to the big God questions. So we have in here the Nicene and Apostle’s Creeds, along with statements from the Scott’s and the beautiful Second Helvetic from Switzerland. If you grew up Presbyterian in the mid twentieth century, you most likely are very familiar with the Westminster Confession. The Declaration of Barmen was written in response to the German church’s failure in the 1930’s, and the Confession of 1967 looked to the vast and seismic culture changes that swept the globe after World War II. All totaled, there are 11 confessional documents in this Book of Confessions.
Today, we used the Belhar Confession to form our Call to Worship as well as our Affirmation of Faith. This confession came out of the apartheid conflict in South Africa in the 1980’s.It is not in this book. But our General Assembly this summer voted overwhelmingly to consider adding this to our Book of Confessions. What that means is that all Presbyteries of the United States will be voting on inclusion. If 2/3 approve, The Belhar Confession will be added and will become one of our official confessional documents. Basically, we come from a tradition that sees that God is always up to a new thing and it is our responsibility to respond to that new thing. We do this cautiously.We do this only with the guidance of the Holy Spirit.But we do it.
Matthew’s gospel is a lot about God being up to a new thing in Jesus.But it is important to note that Jesus never throws out the old thing. The old thing is re-formed in light of the times, in light of the new thing God is up to.In fact, Jesus is quite consistent in Matthew’s gospel in the ways he quotes and holds up the old Scriptures, but asks for the people to understand them, to live them, in a new way. We are asked to live in this same sort of newness in our faith lives at St. Luke.
The times they are indeed a changin’. The world outside our walls is vastly different today than it was when most of these walls were constructed in the 1960s and 1970s. The lives of people outside our walls have been shaped and altered beyond recognition in response to technological and scientific advances.
I invite you all to think about the telephone you had in your homes in 1970. I bet it had a cord, was attached to a wall, and there might very well have only been one in your entire home. Heavens, multiple people had to share the same phone and the same phone number.And that phone didn’t work too well from your car! Today, we all have a personal phone,our own personal phone number that follows us wherever we live in the world. As well, that little phone is very likely a highly sophisticated mini computer.
Families have taken on all kinds of new dimensions.We no longer think of the father at work,the mother at home and the children in the public school system.Families may have multiple sets of parents, or those parents may be same gendered. All the parents often work outside the home. In other homes, the home is the school, as families opt out of public education. Jobs and travel have splintered families so that members live across the globe, or travel weekly to employment far away and come home for the weekend. The point is, life has changed drastically outside our walls here. The changes in the fabric of life and society have never undergone such rapid alterations before.
And so how we minister to the world needs to match that world outside our walls.Just as it will no longer due to use that 1970s telephone, we can no longer try to serve the world with 1970s sorts of ways. Over the late spring and summer there was information in the Lukan Letter and posted to our Did You Know? board about the work of the Delta committee. This fall, you have hopefully read in the Session Summary or seen on the board, that Session has approved funds to hire architects and engineers who will help us look at our old building in a new way. Today, the two architects are here to observe how our building functions on a typical Sunday morning. Later this fall, you will all have the opportunity to meet with them as a congregationas they garner your input and ideas.
The point of this project is to allow us to see our old building with new eyes. How are the ministries that we serve in the 21st century served by our building? How are those ministries hindered by our building? Are there new needs outside our walls that call to us? What do we need to meet those needs? We have a wonderful asset in our building, but God is asking us to look at that gift with eyes of re-forming how we utilize our space for the work God is asking us to do here at St. Luke.
There are no decisions made yet,no plans have been put on paper. But we are prayerfully and reflectively entering this process with the confidence that God will reveal the paths. Like the Book of Confessions, like our Reformed Tradition,we see that reform is needed. We see that the world around us has changed and that we need to respond to those changes. We hear Jesus’words to love God first and foremost, then to love our neighbor as ourselves. These will be the guiding principles of the work we do this fall.
How do our facilities help us love God better? How can they help us love our neighbors as we love ourselves? So watch for information on when we will meet with the architects as a congregation. Mark those days on your calendars. Help us re-form, help us to do a new thing with our old building. Help us love God with all our heart, mind and soul. Help us love our neighbors as we love ourselves. Amen.