The Heart at the Heart of God
Proper 25A; Reformation Sunday
Parish Church of Trinity Ashland
8:00 AM Said, 1:00 AM Sung Mass 29 October 2017
Deuteronomy 34:1-12; Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17; 1
Thessalonians 2:1-8; Matthew 22:34-46
God, take away our hearts of stone and give us
hearts of flesh. Amen
Five hundred years ago this
week, Augustinian monk, Martin of Erfurt, a professor of Biblical studies at
a university seminary, took the bold step of challenging an errant and
hopelessly corrupt Church hierarchy. He
was disgusted by Ponzi-scheme-like efforts to raise funds to build a new and
improved St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican by selling promises of forgiveness
of sins, past, present, and future.
The
Vatican’s point man in the district selling such indulgences, Dominican monk Johann
Tetzel, had infamously coined a memorable little ad jingle for the campaign,
speaking of the souls of the beloved departed: “As soon as the gold in the
coffer rings, the rescued soul to heaven springs.”
At least as legend tells it, Brother
Martin, whose surname was Luther, chose an appropriate day to post his
challenge on the main Church’s door: October
31, the eve of All Saints’ Day, just before the Feast of the Souls of All the
Faithful departed, when most of community would come into Church and be
thinking of the dead.
“Debate me fair and square on
this,” he demanded, putting his argument into 95 succinct propositions or
theses: sin was forgiven by God’s grace
when a sinner repented, not when someone paid money to the Church. Faith in Christ was the main instrument of
this, not the intercession of the Church and its hierarchy. Christ himself was displeased when people
tried to sell promises of salvation or the priesthood, etc.
Thus did a troublesome monk
in an obscure part of northern Europe unintentionally trigger the split of
Western Christianity into two warring factions: Rome and the Reformation. Local leaders, feeling the new nationalism of
the age and cynical of a hierarchy that had lost all moral credibility because
of the papal schism and the Borgia popes, saved Luther from the fate of those
who had challenged Rome even only 20 years before: burning at the stake as a heretic. Both Romans and Reformed claimed to preserve
the ancient faith given by Christ: the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic
Church.
The Protestants rejected the
obvious enormities of Rome: a legalism harsh
on the common people but lax on the rich and the clergy, superstitious
practices that obscured the truth of the Gospel found in scriptures, requiring
celibacy of ministers not graced with that particular charism, contempt for the
laity and the priesthood of the baptized clearly taught in scripture, etc. But in the process, they, particularly those
following ideas put forward in Geneva, themselves fell into enormity: a fragmented church of atomistic
congregations and no great shared common doctrine or standard of worship, a
doctrine of a double predestination (some to heaven and some to hell) at the
expense of the scriptural teaching that God desires to save all people and that
our choices in accepting or rejecting God’s grace actually make a difference, a
loss of respect and devotion to her whom the main body of the united Church of
the first nine centuries called the Blessed Mother of God, a belittling and
mocking of honors paid to the consecrated bread and wine of Holy Communion, what
Christ himself said was his body and blood, forbidding images of Christ and the
saints as though the incarnation meant nothing, and even a denigration of the
cross itself as a symbol of our faith.
The biggest enormity of Geneva and Luther stemmed from the idea that the
Bible was the sole source of establishing faith, doctrine, and practice in the
Church. The result was hundreds of
little denominations all claiming the follow the Bible, all in disagreement
over key things because their interpretations differed from each other.
This so-called Protestant
illness, fragmentation and disorder in the common life of the Church, came from
its use of the authority of the Bible to counter the overwhelming power of the
Roman hierarchy. “Sola scriptura”
(“Scripture Alone!”) cried Luther. But
the Bible itself is a complex mix of teachings and practices gathered from over a
thousand year period by the church itself. Without some basic
principle of interpretation, without what Luther called a “canon within the
canon,” it was hopeless as a guide. But
Protestants differed on where that canon lie, or even if it existed.
In England, the turmoil on
the continent led a very catholic King to break from Rome to escape the
political control of a foreign power and allow him to secure the peace of his
realm by arranging a marriage that might produce an eligible heir to the
throne. But Henry kept the doctrine and
practices of the old religion. In time, the
ideas of Geneva and the practices of Luther helped even this limping
independent Catholicism to reform. In England, the authority of the Pope was
replaced by the authority of the state. But despite Elizabeth’s gentle efforts to
settle a peace between Catholics and Protestants in her realm, the violence of
the Reformation on the Continent came to England: Mary made protestant martyrs,
Elizabeth made catholic ones once the Pope declared open season on her throne,
and later a very protestant parliament levied war against and eventually
beheaded a catholic leaning Charles I.
Many see this 500th
anniversary as a cause of celebration, but many of us also see it as a cause
for mourning the sad divisions that have split the body of Christ and made
enemies of those who share a common confession that Jesus Christ is Lord.
At the end of Johann Tetzel’s
life, as he lay alone dying of degenerative illness, rejected by the hierarchs
he had served and the public he had milked, Luther wrote him, offering his
prayers and sympathy, and reassuring him that the great schism they had started
was not the fault of either of them:
“there were forces at work much larger and stronger than either of
us.”
How can we make sense of such
discord, and disagreement about what God’s word teaches? Everyone points to one passage, while
opponents point to another. But where is
the center of scripture? Where is the canon
within a canon? Where is the heart at
the heart of God? Today’s Gospel gives
us a glimpse.
A lawyer asks Jesus, “Of
all the 613 commandments in the Torah, (365 “Thou
shalt nots” and 248 “Thou shalts”), which is the most important?
What is the heart of the Law?”
Jesus starts his answer with the
Shema‘, the credo of Judaism recited every morning and evening: “ Hear,
O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone. And you shall love the Lord your
God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.” Most rabbis had also pointed to this passage
from Deuteronomy as the heart of the Law.
But then Jesus adds, “and another
commandment is on par with this first one,” citing an obscure portion of the
Leviticus Holiness Code: “‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On
these two commandments depend the entire body of scripture.”
This juxtaposition is something completely new, first made by Jesus.
He puts these two
commandments using the verb “love” on par with each other. In so doing he bridges a great divide in the
Hebrew tradition: the contrast between
holiness and purity on the one side and social justice and fairness on the
other, between Priests and prophets, or ritual and ethics.
Why love? Why not fear, or obedience, or respect? Why not honor, or duty? Jesus is saying the openness and
vulnerability of our hearts is where we find the ability to find the right path
to faithfulness to a holy God and taking care of one’s fellow human
beings. This is what it means when he says the link between the two
is love.
Love here is not
just a feeling, but a disposition of the will, a lifetime of benevolent acts.
Maybe it’s the
loss of self-regard we experience in love.
Most of our other emotions and habits can be pursued while manipulating
and being manipulated by others. But if
love starts doing that, we no longer consider it love.
Think about
it: your best loves—whether a partner,
or friend, parent, or child—what is their essence? Loss of concern about yourself and focus on
the beloved. That’s one of the reasons
that finding right ways to set boundaries in love relationships is so tricky,
and so necessary.
The two are on
par with each other. Holiness must be
bound by justice. And Justice must be
driven by holiness.
Mindfulness and
being present must find expression in compassion. Our concern for decency and fairness must
never descend into mere self or group interest.
Love is the heart
of Christian community, of our common life.
Differences about things that matter deeply to us should never touch our
mutual affection.
Love is the
ultimate reformation, and the ultimate expression of catholic faith. Let us love, beloved, as Christ loved
us. Amen.
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