The Reformation period is roughly the 200 year span from 1500 to 1700.  This was a period of a lot of turmoil, church conflict, religious persecution, political conflict, and bloodshed and wars — not a pretty picture.  If you think that religion is a completely benign, innocent, peaceful enterprise, you need to read the history of Europe during these two centuries.

Looking back on this period, we can see now that what was really going on was a redistribution or re-locating of authority.  Who has the right — you might say, the God-given right — to say what is true?  And who has the right to be in charge, both religiously and politically?  These questions are still relevant today.

This is a bit of a simplification, but in Europe before the Reformation, in the medieval period, religious authority and political authority were tied together in the Holy Roman Empire.  There was no separation of church and state.  In the early 1500s this centralized power structure began to unravel.  Local princes got tired of taking orders from Rome.  Nationalism was on the rise.  World trade was on the rise as Europeans started traveling to North America.  The church hierarchy was very corrupt at this time.  So a lot of changes were underway.

Martin Luther was one of the first “reformers” and his protest (from which we get the name Protestant) had to do with the sale of indulgences, which was a form of penance.  Giving money to the church was a “good work” which made up for sin, but this practice became rather corrupt and, not only that, but Luther saw it as superstitious and un-Biblical.  There was a satirical early Reformation saying, “When a penny in the coffer clings, a sinner out of hell springs.”  In other words, giving money would not only save a living individual from hell; it could also get a deceased family member out of purgatory.

In Luther’s time, the sale of indulgences was being pushed to pay for the construction of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, which some of you have probably visited.  It was a very ambitious, expensive building project and it was easy for people to resent the pushing of indulgence sales as corrupt money-grubbing. 

Indulgence sales were the lightning rod that the bigger question of authority was  drawn toward.  As centralized religious authority, located in the Vatican, began to splinter apart, more and more emphasis was placed on the human heart.  The new idea was: Religious truth has to be experienced at the conscious level.  It has to be felt.  It’s not enough to go through the motions.  The whole person — body, mind, and soul — needs to embrace the faith with devotion and commitment.  The point of this was to feel God’s presence, to feel different, to feel better, to feel at peace, to feel “redeemed” which means re-valued.

This movement left a deep imprint on western culture.  What we, today, believe and feel about God or anything else is very important to us. 

At the same time this emphasis on the heart, on feelings, on personal experience, has its own dangers.  Sometimes, our hearts get us in trouble.  Sometimes, our hearts aren’t entirely reliable — not that we should ignore our hearts, but sometimes the situation is more complicated than our hearts at first want to believe.

This is true in love and romance.  Heart-felt attractions can lead to disaster and painful endings.  This is also true in religion.  How do you tell the difference between a calling from God and a temptation?   

In the Reformation period, both Roman Catholics and Protestants thought they were doing God’s work when they burned each other at the stake.  Jim Jones, who led his followers to mass suicide back in the seventies, had deep religious feelings and convictions.  Suicide bombers have deep religious feelings.  There’s a lot of controversy about our President’s religious faith and sense of calling.  Is that a good thing or a dangerous thing?

Here at First Church, I think it’s safe to say that we value religious feelings, we pay attention to them, they are part of the raw material of our life as a community, but these feelings need to be examined under a bright light.  They need to be tested.  They need to be checked out with other people.  We believe in a balanced perspective — balanced between religious experience and feelings on the one hand, and our covenant with each other and how our beliefs hook up with a wider community and how these feelings and experiences hook up with the world as a whole.

There’s a joke about the UCC.   The letters really stand for “Utterly Confused Christians” or “Unitarians Considering Christ”.  We poke fun of ourselves with that, but the truth is that religious certainty is not our trademark.   We tend to put a lot of asterisks and footnotes in our mental creeds.

This tends to make us easy targets for those who profess more religious certainty — from both ends of the religious spectrum.  Those on the more fundamentalist side, whose who call themselves Bible-based or Bible literalists, say we don’t believe the Bible at all.

The other week, our Deacons got a letter from a woman in Meriden who felt called by God to write to us to tell us that Satan had taken over our church because we don’t condemn homosexuality and actually encourage same-sex couples to commit themselves to each other in lives of monogamy and fidelity.  It was a very sincere letter.  It was very heart-felt.

From the other end, the more “magisterial” side of the Church, the Roman Catholics, the Anglicans and Lutherans and Eastern Orthodox, we’re sort of like rebellious children or juvenile delinquents.  We aren’t connected to the apostolic succession of bishops that guards the true religion.  In their minds, we have too much individualism and too much democracy is the church.  We’re too defiant of orthodox tradition.  Our sacramental practices are sloppy.  We use grape juice instead of wine.  It’s not “the real thing.”  So we don’t make them happy either.

A few years ago, in a sermon I preached at South Church, I had some fun comparing various religious communities to breeds of dog.  I’ve updated my comparisons, so here is my revised church-dog metaphor.

The Roman Catholics are the St. Bernards.  They’re big.  They can save everyone.  You have to respect them just for their size.  Some of the earliest Protestants were the Presbyterians in Scotland, so they’re the Scottish Terriers — fierce and loyal.  The Episcopalians are the Corgies.  That’s the kind of dog the Queen has.  They’re sweet, and sort of upper class.   They drink sherry.  The Lutherans are the German shepherds.  They drink beer.  The Unitarians are the Golden Retrievers – sort of preppy dogs who try to please everyone.  The fundamentalists are the Pit-Bulls.  The Jehovah’s Witnesses go all around the neighborhood marking every tree. 

What are we — the United Church of Christ, UCC?  We’re the mutts.  We come from every different background.  We’re sort of mixed up.  We don’t like any religious category that is too confining. 

So “utterly confused Christians” is apt in a certain way, not that we’re “utterly” confused, but we’d probably be spiritually richer if we worked harder at being less confused about how we read the Bible and our practice of the sacraments.

There’s also a positive side to being confused.  We’re confused because the situation is confusing. Confusion is warranted.  If you’re not confused, then you’re not really paying attention to how complicated life is.

Some people claim too much on the basis of religious experience.  They over-simplify it.  Other people claim too little for religious experience or reject it completely, and that’s an over-simplification too.  How do we find the right balance between those positions?  This is the continuing reformation question that’s never been resolved.

On one hand, we’re alone in our spiritual life.  God, the mystery, the meaning of it all, is something we each have to contend with.  No one can do the work for us.  We each have to do it.  We each have to struggle.  We each have to figure out what to make of this life and what we’ll do with it.  We’re alone in this soul-work we have to do and in that sense we are radical Protestants, standing alone before God.

But we’re catholic, or connected, in this sense — that we can do this individual work together.  We can help each other do it.  We need each other to do it. 

So we’re alone, and we’re not alone.  We have our work to do, but we have each other to help us do it.  And we have generations and centuries of Christians before us who help us do it.  We stand on their shoulders, so to speak.

And we have generations and centuries of Christians who will follow us, and in a way they help us too.  If we don’t get it all figured out, others will have a chance to make more progress.  I do find that to be a helpful and comforting thought.