Reformation or transformation?

Words are powerful.  They are small, seemingly insignificant, a pattering of sound throughout our days.  But sometimes, words are so profound they change the course of history.

Martin Luther has been a polarizing figure in the history of the church for 500 years.  As we celebrate this milestone of the schism he fueled in The Church, The Reformation, I have been thinking about his life and his goals.

Martin Luther was a simple man, and lived life on a small scale, at least until his rebellion brought him into the spotlight.  He had great joys and deep sorrows.  He was a thinker and a doer, and it is clear he respected and valued the words he used, and understood all too well how much impact they had on the people who surrounded him.

Martin Luther was a writer and a ponderer, and among the illiterate masses of that time, a highly educated man.  I think he chose each and every word with care, even without fully understanding the powerful impact he would have, not just on himself or his community, but on our lives 500 years later.

Of course, although he is the most well known of the radical reformers, his words and actions were but one step in a process which was already well underway in Europe.  The Catholic church at that time was extremely corrupt and all powerful.  Even the common peasants had begun to quietly question and doubt the authority of the church hierarchy.

Wealthy beyond imagination, the church owned vast amounts of property, and commissioned endless quantities of art and music, along with sacred and temporal goods.  Even local priests lived in splendor, while the upper echelon lived in mansions as they lined their own pockets with the hard earned coins of the poor they were supposed to serve.

The Pope was de facto leader of the Western world, a man who demanded special treatment as a right, despite his failure to live the ascetic life he required of others.  The Pope was considered the infallible representative of God on earth, unquestioned, untouchable, unassailable.  The power of the church was equal only to the power of temptation, and, in that time, temptation was having a field day.

Into that unholy world came a man who saw the church differently.  An Augustinian friar, he studied The Word, and recognized how far his beloved church had strayed from what he saw as the mission of those who represented God on earth.  He started small, complaining to those he interacted with on a common, day to day basis, but was rebuffed and rejected.  Soon he was perceived as an oddball, someone to be avoided in a day and time when thinking outside the box was dangerous, even deadly.  Eventually, he saw no other course but to bring his concerns to a head, even if it cost him his life, because it was eternity that mattered to him, not this temporary, mortal existence.

His bravery was rooted in his faith and his belief that The Church was leading people astray, at the cost of their salvation.  It was simply too important to continue down the wrong road, because the consequences were for all eternity.

But for all his radical actions, at least for that time, Martin Luther was not looking not for a whole new body or a completely different theology.   On the contrary, he wanted to bring the church back to earlier times, when they were following The Word of God instead of the word of fallible popes and cardinals.  He was not looking to change thought so much as deeds.

To reform, you take what is already there and change it such that it is improved.  But to transform, we change what is there to make it entirely new.  Martin Luther wanted reformation, not transformation.  But God had different plans.

From our perspective today, it is obvious that the transformation of religious thought in Europe was already well under way.  Martin Luther wanted to change attitudes and expectations through his powerful, condemning words, but instead he became the impetus which sparked a change in the entire way of understanding God's place in our lives.  Into the maelstrom, he preached the gospel of grace.  Tranformative words, indeed.

I was once asked by a person of another faith to briefly sum up my theology.  The answer was easy.  Grace.  That is what I believe, based not on the words of a human man, but the words in the Bible given to us by our God.  It is the radical idea for which Martin Luther risked his life, the theology of the cross.

In Ephesians 2:8 we are told:

"For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith - and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God...."

Reformation happens throughout life.  We are constantly changing, rethinking our words and deeds, refocusing, renewing, reworking.  It is part of the human journey, something we all have in common.

But transformation?  That is something altogether different.  We cannot make ourselves new.  We cannot change our body.  We cannot save our own soul.  That is done through the power of the Spirit alone, an unearned gift from God.

Today we celebrated the life of a man who reformed himself many times throughout his life.  His path was not easy, and he overcame many struggles along the way.  But of one thing he was certain.  At the end, he would be ushered into a transformed life with the God he loved for all eternity.  The gift of grace.  It was all he required.  It is all any of us require.

Words are powerful.  Grace.  The power to transform a broken world.  Nothing more needs to be said.