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Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
November has turned out to be “history month” for us. Next Sunday is
Middletown History Sunday, and in today’s 2nd hour, Karl Scheibe will be
telling us about the Anabaptist movement. The most famous Anabaptists
today are the Amish, and group is especially fascinating on the American
religious landscape.
With both of those events in mind, I thought this would be a good time
to describe what I see as being at the very heart of the Protestant
Reformation.
First, what is the “Reformation”? The term “Protestant Reformation” took
place in western Christianity beginning in the early 1500s and lasting
through the 1600s. It many ways, this was an unfortunate and even tragic
period because a lot of blood was shed and a lot of hysteria broke out
as the church went through a lot of change at this time. And there were
a lot of technological and political changes going on that fueled the
fire.
Before the Reformation, in the medieval period, there was one Catholic
Church in Europe. It was a stable situation. After the Reformation,
there was still the Roman Catholic Church, but there were also hundreds
of Protestant splinter groups, and those breakaway groups kept splitting
and splitting more, even down to the present.
The bloodshed resulted from many of these splinter groups believing that
they had found the one True Religion. Religious tolerance came later.
The Reformation period was a period of destruction and reorganization on
many levels. But these were changes that needed to take place
eventually.
The main thing that was destroyed was the structure of authority in
Europe —religious authority, government authority, and intellectual
authority. These would never be the same, at least in Europe.
The main insight, in terms of religion, was this: A religion overly
controlled by human authority, a religion of blind obedience, a religion
of going through the motions that a priest tells you to go through, is
not good enough. It’s not authentic. The Reformers said, in essence,
was: what’s important is what goes on inside the human heart. The
important thing is the experience of faith, the experience
of trust in God, and the experience of true desire for God’s
grace and God’s presence. This is the central trademark of all groups
that called themselves “Protestant” back in the 1500s and 1600s.
Middletown was settled in 1650 by a particular group of Protestants from
England, the Puritans. Puritans were the reformers in England, and when
things started going badly back in England — persecution, civil war, and
economic woes — many of them migrated to New England and some of them
ended up right here, at the great bend in the river.
The Puritans have a bad reputation these days. They are the butt of a
lot of jokes. The word “Puritan” has come to suggest a person who is
rigidly moralistic and prudish. I think this image is unfair. The
Puritans were obsessive in some ways, I suppose. But their religion was
very heart-felt. They were very much focused on the emotional experience
of God’s grace. And this emphasis on the heart, on the inner-self, left
an indelible mark upon the American psyche. I want to mention just two
ways that is so.
First, the Puritans brought with them a high sense of a call from God.
When the Puritans came across the ocean, they brought with them a fierce
conviction that they were God’s chosen people, the new Israel, crossing
the sea, to enter a new Promised Land and establish God’s Kingdom on
earth. This is why they latched onto the Biblical phrase “a city upon a
hill” whose light cannot be hidden. This is a dangerous idea, to be
sure.
But today, Americans — including recent immigrants — still feel that
what God is doing through the United States is something God is doing
for the world. This idea is called American exceptionalism. It’s an
emotion. There is still, in American culture and politics today, a sense
that the eyes of the world are on us. I’m sure you can all see that idea
operating in our political life today, for better or worse. It can
motivate the United States in positive ways, but it has a downside. It
can lead to the feeling that we are superior, spiritually privileged,
and favored by God.
The other major imprint of Puritan thought on our American psyche has to
do with that emphasis on the inner life. The Puritans and other
Protestants latched on to this idea that we are saved not by works, not
by obedience, but by faith, by something in the heart.
This Protestant emphasis on the heart, on the inner life, sounds very
appealing to most of us. We are very psychologically oriented ourselves.
But this emphasis has a downside too.
Before the Reformation got stirred up, the church offered a lot of
reassurance and comfort. If you just did certain things, if you were
baptized, if you went to church and said your prayers, if you
participated in the sacramental system, you could feel secure. You could
feel safe. You could feel that you were saved from judgment and torment
in the afterlife. It’s easy, and within your control.
But you can’t control what you feel. You can’t force yourself to trust,
or to have enthusiasm. According to the old way, if you just did your
religious duty, you didn’t need to worry. But with the Reformation, all
of that was shaken up, and suddenly you did need to worry. You had to
worry about what you felt. People’ hearts tend to be conflicted about
most things, including God and religion. How do I know my faith is true?
Have I had a true experience of God’s grace? Was I fooling myself? Was
it the devil trying to trick me?
So, the good news was: people were free from the burdensome authority of
the Church. The bad news was: the authority of the church lost a lot of
its power to comfort.
Going back to the Puritans in the early days of Middletown, your faith
had to be proved authentic in order to be a member of the church. You
had to be a church member in order to vote in civic matters. How do you
tell if a person’s faith is authentic? This became a very practical
problem.
The answer was, and is: you look at the fruits of that faith. You look
at what a person’s faith leads to, in terms of works. So, we’re soon
right back to works. But of course, the Faith vs. Works argument is a
false choice. Faith leads to works. But works can lead to faith too. I’d
like to explain that, because it really ties all of this together.
We feel God’s presence most powerfully 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, a
mountain . These are experiences. They bring us faith because they
remind us that we’re vulnerable, and they put us back in touch with a
power bigger than we are.. Vulnerability is what opens our faith. It
makes faith necessary and possible.
But you can also think of a work as a kind of experience. Works — things
we do, ways we venture out beyond our comfort zone — can also be ways of
making ourselves vulnerable and awaking our faith. Works are themselves
a kind of experience, a way of putting ourselves out there.
This is why we create opportunities for works in the church. These
aren’t just acts of charity. They’re part of our spiritual formation.
When you go to the CT Juvenile Training School, or CVH, or when you sit
at a table with the folks at St. Vincent DePaul Place, or when you
become a hospice volunteer, it may help someone else. That’s the charity
part.
It’s also a way of letting yourself be vulnerable and, therefore it’s a
way to find faith and find God’s love in your own life. Faith doesn’t
come to us out of thin air. It’s also cultivated and taught.
The mission of the church, the reason we come together, is to cultivate
faith by seeing other people’s faith and by doing things (works) that
help us find faith of our own that we didn’t know we had.
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