SEMPER REFORMANDA-ALWAYS BEING REFORMED

October 30, 19388

8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan

Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Mark 2:18-22
Ii Corinthians 5:16-21

"No one puts new wine into old wineskins;...new wine is for fresh skins."
~Mark 2:22 (RSV)

"...my conscience has been taken captive by these words of God. I cannot
revoke anything, nor do I wish to; since to go against one's conscience is
neither safe nor right; here I stand, I cannot do otherwise. God help me.
Amen.“ [Luther's Reply at the Diet of Worms, April 18, 1521]

There are moments in time which change everything. There was a
moment when you said something or did something foolish, brave, honest...
"Yes," or "I do," or "I will," or "no," or "maybe," or "let's try it," or
"I'll take it,” and your history has been profoundly different ever since.

One of those moments in history happened on the afternoon of April
18, 1521, in the city of Worms, Germany. The words spoken on that occasion
are on the front of the bulletin. It was one of my own children who told
me recently that for years she thought the "Diet of Worms" was what the Pope
made Martin Luther eat for causing so much trouble.

The Diet of Worms was a meeting of the Imperial Court of the Holy
Roman Empire. Charles V had brought the court to Worms to shore up his
weak political authority in Germany. There was lots of business to attend
to and the Diet began to meet in November of 1520. But nothing turned out
to be as important as a hearing for a trouble-making Augustinian monk and
teacher of theology, by the name of Martin Luther. The Pope had
excommunicated Luther. His books had been burned. Now the Pope wanted the
Emperor to declare Luther an outlaw and imprison him, perhaps execute hin.
Luther's German supporters wanted him to have a day in court. For his part
Luther still thought he was a loyal son of the church, only desiring its
reformation. It was October 31, 1517 - four years earlier - that he had
publicly expressed his convictions. He still hoped for reconciliation.

So he appeared at the Diet of Worms and was shown a row of his books
and writings — all condemned by the Vatican. He was asked to recant then.

fe requested a day to think about it. The next afternoon he admitted that
he may have been a little too vehement in his personal attacks, but that he

conld not retract the essence of what he had written. The Emperor could
nol believe his ears and cut Luther off... And it was then that Luther
cried out ~ "My conscience has been taken captive... it is not safe or

right to go against one's conscience. I cannot do otherwise. Here I
stand, God heip me. Amen."

A month later the Diet placed its ban on him. By that time he was in
hiding, translating the New Testament into German and writing the
magnificent hymn, “A Mighty Fortress is our God." It was now clear that
whatever else was happening in the incredibly complex historical mix of
economics, politics, emerging nationalism, one thing was certain. God was
reforming the church and new forms were now necessary; old traditions had
to change or be broken; new structures were pressing to be born. It was
becoming clear that it had a great deal to do with something Jesus had said
1,500 years earlier about not putting a new patch on an old garment, or new
wine into old skins.

The Protestant Reformation literally exploded in Germany. Whole
countrysides became Lutheran because the Prince sided with Luther instead
of Rome. Wars were fought (what a fascinating experience to travel through
Southern Germany and Austria and see monuments to the heroes wha fought off
the Protestants from the North). New traditions were begun.

In France and Switzerland Protestant ideas took a new shape under the
influence of a brilliant, feisty Frenchman, John Calvin. The Reformed
branch of the Reformation created a new church with a whole new way of
looking at itself and a new name - based on the ancient office of the
Presbyter. This branch of the Reformation created a slogan which its heirs
still like to use.

."Ecclesia Reformata, Semper Reformanda"
“The Church Reformed, Always Being Reformed.”

They understood, as they looked back from their perspective, that
reformation must be a permanent characteristic of the church. If we simply
celebrate a 16th century event every year, we will have fallen back into
the very pattern which made Reformation necessary, and altogether have
missed the point.

The Protestant principle is that reformation is a process necessary
to the church, not an event that happened 471 years ago.

To be a Reformed Christian is to know and understand that encrusted,
petrified tradition is a major barrier to lively, honest, faithful
religion. It is to know and believe and trust that God's spirit is what
agitates for reform and renewal and change. And it is te humbly confess
that we have not always learned, understood or believed; and that our
clinging to tradition has caused, us on occasion, to be irrelevant,
unfaithful and and sometimes even a party to tragedy.

The day I prepared this sermon two Protestants were killed in
Northern Ireland. Within a week the Protestant para-military will

10/30/88

retaliate and people wil] die whose only offense was being born Catholic.
As I enjoyed myself, in the safety of my study, browsing through my beloved
history books reading again about 1521, and as J worked with the text for
Mark 2 about new wine and old wineskins, I recalled that I was brought up
in a time and place when a widely-held religious tradition was that
Catholics and Protestants did not regard one another as Christian. That
tradition was expressed when a Catholic friend would go a block out of his
way to avoid walking in front of a Methodist Church, when my standing in
line at the confessional in the Cathedral, waiting for my friend, caused a
major family crisis, and when the mest creative advice the Presbyterian
Church offered young people about inter-faith relations was "don't date a
Catholic." I am grateful that in my lifetime at least, most of these
traditions - several hundred years old - have disappeared. We now
acknowledge that Protestants and Catholics agree on most of the issues that
matter: that we are, in God's economy, one people of God, one Holy Church
and that slowly, but surely, we must listen to the Spirit that calls us
into the future, as one body of Christ.

I also recalted one of the most unforgettable and disturbing
experiences I ever had. We were at Corrymeela, an Ecumenical Peace
Community near Ballycastle, Northern Ireland, dedicated to working for
reconciliation between Catholics and Protestants. There were four of us -
two of us ministers. We were invited to be part, anonymously, of an
evening with a group called simply "Belfast Mums." There were a dozen of
them - all Roman Catholic - all poor — all with husbands either in jail or
in serious trouble - all on welfare. Corrymeela simply invites them up for
a weekend, takes care of the children, and lets them do what they want to
do, go for walks, read, or spend two days in bed. It is a lovely gift and
a desperately needed break from the daily grimness in which they lived.
They warmed up to us after a while. We talked some but mostly listened...
and then one of them said, “Let's sing one for Bobby," Bobby Sands, IRA
hero who had recently starved himself to death in a British prison. It was
' a poignant, sad and powerful moment as they sang about Ireland and Irish
heroes, hatred for the British, and they all wept.:. and the evening ended.
The next morning at breakfast I saw a few of them at the table, preeted
them warmly and they turned away... I tried again with another group. They
nodded, without smiling. I asked one of the staff members what was going
on. She said, “they found out you're a Presbyterian minister." To them,
“Protestant Presbyterians" are the enemy. To belligerent "Prods,"
“Papists" are enemy. Robert Coles calls it, the rebirth of "Tribalism" and
it shows no sign of abating. °

This process of reformation is bigger than any one of us. If it has
any comforting possibility it is only insofar as we understand that it is
Jesus Christ who is the reformer and that the best any of can and must do
is lay our prejudices, our bigotry, and our desperate hold on our
traditions - lay all of it at the foot of the cross on which he died;

We must then muster the courage and grace to respond to the leading of his
spirit. Reformation Sunday is not a day toe fly the banners of muscular
Protestantism. That's what it used to be: a time to beat the drums of
Protestant triumphatism. But there has been enough of that. It is, I
propose, a day to stand at the foot of the cross and to know again that he
died to make us - all of us - part of new creation and that means "semper
reformanda - always reforming.”

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At the very beginning of the story, according to Mark, Jesus the
Christ runs into religious tradition. In a brilliant sequence Mark shows
us Jesus in trouble with the religious authorities for disregarding
religious tradition. He is in trouble for healing, for associating with
unclean people, for not fasting and for deliberately breaking the Sabbath
law. In each instance the respectable religionists, the keepers of the
traditions, challenge him. It is in the middle of that situation that he
declares himself...

"No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment: if he does
the patch tears away from it, the new from the old and a worse tear is
made. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; if he does, the wine
will burst the skins; and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but new
wine is for fresh skins." Jesus' first antagonists were sincere religious
people who were so preoccupied with their religious traditions that they
had quite forgotten the substance the traditions were designed to preserve.

That's the point. Religious traditions, when they become
institutionalized, become petrified. Jesus erupted into the midst of rigid ore
religious traditionalism, with a new message of God's love and God's
kinedom which exists across the religious tradition and includes all manner
of people.

There are no Catholics or Presbyterians or Lutherans or Baptists in
God's kingdon.

The late Alan Paton, writing in and perhaps about his beloved South
Africa, said:

“Christians often imagine that the danger to Christianity and true
religion is communism. The greatest danger to Christianity in Africa is
pseudo-Christianity. And the marks of pseudo-Christianity are easy to
recognize; it always prefers stability to- change; it always prefers order
to freedom; it always prefers laws to justice; and it always prefers what
it calls realism to love."

We need a “sunset law" on all religious traditions, someone said.
That's an overstatement, obviously. Jesus didn't say, “throw out the old
garment —- or discard the old wineskins." What we really need is a healthy
skepticism about our own traditions: which is simply to say that we need
to be reforming Christians.

It will be a challenging time to be the church in the future. It
will be challenging for those of us who are the church here ~— to be honest
and relevant on North Michigan Avenue in the 2ist century. It's going to
be challenging to be Christ's church in a new world of incredible
possibility and incredible tragedy: a world with the knowledge and ability
to remedy many of the scourges of the human race - hunger, epidemic,
disease, war; but a world quite willing, eager indeed to deplete its
resources, in fact to poison its own people in order to manufacture weapons
of death... a world in which some of us enjoy incredible wealth, comfort,
leisure, health care. (Yesterday, coming out of Bloomingdale's, we
overheard one exhausted shopper say, “It's hard to have to buy so

10/30/88

much.) But Gt is alse a world, severa] blacks from here, in which drup
addjctiun, poverty, children havinp children, street violence and the
demise of family, school and church are dramatically increasing.

We will need aij] the resources of our past, our traditions and one
thing furlher, namely the grace and courage to listen to the Spirit and to
follow when Jesus Christ leads.

"No one puts new wine into oJd wineskins.” It is much easier to
preach that and to hear it - as a word about an institution and
institutional forms. It's easy to sit in a pew and agree: "Yes, the
church should be reformed." But, my deep conviction is that here, as is
always the case, God's word addresses us corporately — as a church — but
also individually. The two cannot be separated.

So, if this word is to be heard and acted upon other than a nod of
intellectual assent, it has to penetrate, get inside your life and mine
and stir things up there. .

The personal word here is that there are traditions in your life that
require re-examining and reforming. Perhaps a dependence on alcohol, or
drugs, or on success or hard work or status. Perhaps there is a jong
standing way of relating to a loved one - a spouse, a child, or parent, a
friend - that has become petrified and needs new life. Perhaps there is a
vocational direction, a world view, a political stance, which has given you
comfort and security for years, but now needs to be changed.

The personal word here is that the agitator of change, the advocate
of growth and reformation in your life - is not your impatience or your ego
~ but God's spirit. God is ready to do new things with your life: when
you decide to allow Jesus to be your Lord and to follow him, you must be
prepared to change.

What Luther recovered was the Gospel of grace. God is willing to
forgive what is past, to free us from the past, to liberate us for a new
and different life.

In Christ we are new creatures ~ part of God's new creation: the old
has passed away, behold the new has come.

Do you hear it? Beneath all the traditional reasons, isn't it really
why you and I are here this morning - on the outside chance that in Jesus
Christ God just might take these lives of ours, our old habits, traditions,
and make something new out of them? It requires faith and trust and not a
little courage - this “always reforming" business: to see it in the world,
to participate in it in your church, and to allow it in your life... I
very simply invite you ta it this morning. "Behold, I make al} things
new,” he said.

Amen.

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