Something old, something new: Five hundred years of being Lutheran

Romans 1:16-17 

Five hundred years ago this Tuesday, Martin Luther nailed his “95 Theses” to the door of the castle church at Wittenberg. Five hundred years ago. America had just been “discovered” by Columbus. Minnesota was home to the Chippewa and the Lakota and its population of Caucasian Europeans was exactly zero, which means there was, believe or not, no lutefisk or lefse or disappointing sports teams here. Five hundred years ago it would still be another hundred years before the first pilgrim colony in America. Five hundred years ago is a LONG time ago.

            But five hundred years is nothing compared to the time between Martin Luther and Jesus. Fifteen hundred years. It’s nothing compared to the time between Jesus and Moses, between Moses and Adam and Eve, between Adam and Eve and the creation of the world. It’s nothing.

            Five hundred years is impossibly long and incredibly short all at the same time. So we need a little perspective here: The Lutheran church has been around a long time… and also not very long at all.

            This comes out in funny ways in our traditions. Some traditions, like the liturgy, like Holy Communion and Baptism, date from the time of Jesus. Some things we do are truly ancient. Other things, like our music we play, or our church architecture, or our governance structures, what is called our “polity,” have constantly evolved over the years. Just ask a Lutheran to tell you about the “good old hymns” and you’ll find out exactly how vague that concept is. Many of the good old hymns that people love were written in the 20^th century—Just a Closer Walk With Thee, How Great Thou Art, The Old Rugged Cross, In the Garden to name a few—all written since 1900. Meanwhile, many of the songs that are called “contemporary,” which by definition suggests they are up-to-date, songs like “Here I am, Lord” and “Shout to the Lord” for example, are thirty to forty years old. Kumbaya is nearly one hundred years old. Even Beautiful Savior, written in the 19^th century, and Amazing Grace, in the last part of the 18^th century, came into existence since the founding of America, which is itself a very young country.

All of this is to say that we are a hodgepodge of the ancient and the modern. The heart of our church is not those trappings—not the songs we sing, which will be different in fifty years; not the church architecture which goes through phases—but rather the power of the Gospel. As Paul says in our Romans reading, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” In Paul’s day the big new movement was a church not only for Jews but also for Greeks. Paul helped take the church from Judaism and bring it to the Gentile world. Fifteen hundred years later, Luther would take the church out of the halls of the Catholic priesthood and make it accessible to the common people.

Lord knows we’re not done reforming. This is the church into which our young people are being confirmed. It’s not a church standing still, and it’s not a church surfing the cultural waves; it’s a church that is moved by the Spirit, and the Spirit so often moves against the tides. This is a church that is always reforming. Always. You could say this church looks ancient—that it’s been this way for a long time and some things at this congregation have changed very little since its founding—but what is 125 years, really? Think of the new thing those who founded Grace/Red River were doing. They created a “traditional” Lutheran church in this new land of the free, but their tradition was itself a thing that was newly conceived. It wasn’t long before their Swedish-language services fell by the wayside. Their worship spaces too had their nuances. No longer using the high pulpit of their Scandinavian forebears, which often reached to the ceiling of the church, these immigrants lowered the pastor closer to the level of the congregation. This was intentional; they were making a statement about the priesthood of all believers. They were picking up threads from Luther to make the church new.

The question, especially for those of you now joining the church, is what next? What threads from the past is the Holy Spirit going to tug at to help you weave the church of the future? What people, like the Greeks in Paul’s day or the peasants in Luther’s, needs the doors to the church flung open to them? How will the ancient change the modern, and how will modernity change our view of what is ancient?

It’s the same Gospel, but it plays differently in every age. In today’s reading today from Jeremiah God promises a new covenant. The old covenant had depended on a specific location—this Promised Land that meant a lot to the Israelites—too much maybe—because when the Israelites lost the land they risked losing their identity and their faith. So God made a new covenant to be with them wherever they went—a covenant much preferable to the old one but also harder; it meant Israel had to lose its need to control the narrative. They weren’t assured of a Promised Land any longer. Later, God gave us a new covenant through Jesus, put into practice by Paul and the early church, and that covenant was available to all people; not just Jews, not just the chosen few, but all people. In Martin Luther, that promise was finally approachable for everybody in our own language. God’s movement from the time of Abraham forward has been a movement toward inclusion. Every covenant has opened a new door to a new people in a new way. What human beings declare as new is not always better, but when God declares something new it is better because it is a taste of eternity.

So this is a funny church our confirmands are joining today. It is a church that looks back to look forward. It’s a place that commemorates the past in order to be reminded that God does new things in the present. It’s a church that won’t look the same tomorrow, and that’s for the best. It’s a church that struggles with change even as it is founded on it. It’s a place filled with broken people, trusting in wholeness beyond their gaze. It’s ours but not ours. We are bound; we are free. We are sinners; we are saints. It’s always both-and, rarely either-or. It’s just the Lutheran church.

Too often this church that was founded under the banner of a radical monk has concerned itself with playing it safe; it’s mission has turned toward self-preservation, with trying to do the same thing as long as possible, but that has never been our calling and it is never our mission. Our mission is not to last; it’s not to do the same thing as yesterday or to re-create something from the past. Our mission, because of our history and not apart from it, is to be vessels through which God can make all things new. We honor our forebears and our namesake not by re-creating what was but by doing what they so often did, and following the Spirit to a place that is uncomfortable and new.

As we commemorate this time—five hundred years in the life of the church—the question isn’t whether this church will it be around in another five hundred or fifty or five, because the church is that rare institution that is not overly concerned with itself. Our concern is how God will lead us to reform all over again. The question is: How will the future build on the past? Who needs the Gospel and how will we be vessels to share it with them?

For, like Paul, we are not ashamed by the gospel. It is the only thing that matters. And we will be a people who follow it, who preach it, who live it. Today, tomorrow, and wherever it leads. That’s the church you’re joining. Some days we even do it well.