When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, 35 and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” 37 He said to him, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Today is Reformation Sunday. What is the Reformation, and why is it such a big deal? What does it have to do with us here at First Church?

The Reformation is a change that took place in western Christianity beginning in the early 1500s and lasting through the 1600s. It many ways, the Reformation was a sad, even tragic event because the church broke apart. In the medieval period, there was one Catholic church in Europe. After the Reformation, there was the Roman Catholic Church, and hundreds of Protestant fragments that kept splitting and splitting more. But we celebrate the Reformation because we believe that in spite of the fact that it left the church divided, many good things came out of it, both on the Protestant side and on the Roman Catholic side too.

I want to talk about a couple of aspects of the Reformation as it was brought to the shores of North America by the Puritans. Puritans were the reformers in England, and when things started going badly there, many of them migrated to New England. This congregation was started by Puritans who came to the great bend in the river because of the grazing land they found, and they started this church in the 1650s.

The Puritans have a bad reputation these days. They are the butt of a lot of jokes. One definition of a Puritan is someone who lies awake all night, worrying that someone, somewhere, might be having fun - committing a pleasure. Christopher Morley, a 20th century writer, said, “Imagine how much happier we would all be if, instead of the Puritans landing on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock had landed on the Puritans.”

There may be some basis for these jokes. The Puritans were rigid in a lot of ways. But their religion was one of the mind and heart. It was logical, but it was also very passionate, and full of feeling. And it left an indelible mark upon the American psyche. We Americans today are all spiritual descendants of the Puritans, even if our biological family came to United States only recently, and even if we are American Catholics.

I want to mention just two of the ways that is so. First, the Puritans brought with them a high sense of a call from God. What God was doing through them was really what God was doing for the whole world. When the Puritans came across the ocean to New England, they saw themselves as God’s chosen people, the new children of Abraham, the Israelites, crossing the sea, to enter a new Promised Land and to establish God’s Kingdom on earth. They would be a city upon a hill, that everyone in the world would see. They were to be the example of how God wanted all people to live.

Today, Americans still feel that what God is doing through us, is what God is doing for the world. There is still, in American politics, a sense that the eyes of the world are on us, and we need to be leaders, we need to set an example for others to follow. And to fail in that respect, to miss that calling, or refuse it, by lake of vision, or lack of courage, puts us under God’s judgment.

The other major aspect of Puritan thought has to do with religious experience. The Puritans placed a lot of emphasis on the inner life, on how this faith operates in our daily lives at the most personal level, how we tie into God’s power.

That emphasis was very appealing, but it was also troubling. Before the Reformation, in the Medieval period, the church offered a lot of reassurance and comfort. If you showed up in church, if you were baptized, if you participated in the sacramental system, you were saved. You didn’t need to worry. But after the Reformation, there really was something to worry about. That reassuring authority of the church had been undermined. Now these Protestants had to ponder the question: How do I know I’m saved? Am I sure? Have I had a true experience of grace? Have I received a true call? Or am I fooling myself?

Today, some people still worry about whether they are saved, whether they’ll make to heaven. Other people think of heaven or eternal life not so much in terms of life after death but in terms of life here and now. How can I experience God’s power now? How can I live deeply now? How can I live with hope and trust and joy now?

Religious experience is itself a huge subject. I can’t even begin to say everything there is to say about it. One thing I will say about it, based on my own experience, is this. We experience God’s power usually when we run into something in life that is bigger than we are. An obstacle. An illness. Trouble in a relationship. An addiction. The loss of a job. A fear. A challenge that we don’t feel up to.

We’re better than the Puritans at insulating ourselves from these things, but we’re not completely insulated. We’re still vulnerable. We still get in over our heads. We still run into things that we can’t manage on our own. We still get driven to our knees, literally, or at least figuratively.

What happens then, sometimes, is we pray. We say, straight out, God, this is too much for me alone. I’m not up to it. I’m lost. I feel like a complete failure. I’ve made a mess of things. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how I’m going to make it. Help. I’m ready to be helped.

What happens after we pray like that can’t be predicted. It can’t be analyzed looking back. In my experience, God doesn’t swoop down and simply take our problems away. My experience is that God’s spirit holds me up, and keeps me going, and then doors open, and possibilities emerge, that weren’t there before, or that I couldn’t see before. Being down, on our knees, and looking to God for help, does change the situation.

Religious experience, the experience of God’s power on a personal level, is what drove the Reformation. That’s the kind of experience that drove the Puritans to undertake an absolutely terrifying adventure of crossing an ocean to set up a new society in a howling wilderness. What a preposterous vision that must have looked like at certain times, like when they were starving and freezing to death.

Look what came of it. Not exactly what they had in mind, but an amazing nation that bears the mark of their experience in a deep way.

The reason we come to church, the reason I come to church, is to be a part of a community, a group of fellow travelers groping our way through a wilderness, that will help me believe and accept that being on my knees literally or figuratively, is not a bad place to be. Many times it’s exactly the right place to be. Because it’s when we’re in that posture, when we’re open, and available, that God’s power can do something with us and make a difference in our lives.