The Big Two: Loving God and Loving Neighbor

by Dan McCoig

The Big Two:  Loving God and Loving Neighbor

Reformation Sunday 2017 | Dan McCoig

1.

It’s not often we get to observe the 500th anniversary of something.  500 years is rather a long time.  Given that a generation is 25 years, we’re talking 20 generations.

So, what happened in 1517 that we are making such a fuss over.  Martin Luther, a devout 33 year old Augustinian monk, who loved his God and his church deeply and dearly wanted his church’s leadership to take a long, hard look at the church and its work to insure that it still aligned with who Jesus Christ was and why he had come into the world.

Luther believed that the medieval Roman Catholic Church had veered from Christianity’s main path.  He wanted to explore ways to reform the church so that it could find its way again.

It’s helpful to remember that all institutions at some point began as a movement with all the energy and enthusiasm a movement entails.  For its initial centuries Christianity was a movement.  It lived by the story of what God had done in Jesus Christ and was continuing to do through the Holy Spirit in the life of believers and the church.  There were no church buildings.  There was no Bible. 

This movement, in time, took on more organization and structure and eventually became quite an institution. Institutions are good and have their place.  They are one very important way movements get perpetuated.

The entire Holy Roman Empire — the Mediterranean world and most of Western Europe and some of Eastern Europe — became Christian upon emperor’s Constantine’s decree in the 4th century.  Depending on your perspective, this was either a good thing or a bad thing.  Either way, Christianity became less of a movement and more of an institution.  But Christianity never forgot its movement roots.

Back to Luther.

A tipping point for Luther came in 1511 when he first visited Rome on official business for his religious order.  What Luther saw scandalized him.  The Christianity of Rome was too much institution, and to Luther’s mind a corrupt one at that, and too little movement.  To grossly oversimplify matters, the Christ in Christianity was missing.  Something had to be done.

In 1517, on the day before All Saints — October 31 — Luther enumerated 95 issues he wanted to address, known as the 95 theses.  Tradition has it that he nailed these to the castle cathedral door in Wittenberg.  Most of us first learned about the 95 theses either in Sunday school or in a high school world history class.

Some of the 95 theses were what I would call major issues.  Some of them were relatively minor issues.  The biggest issues for Luther were:

Papal supremacy and infallibility.  Can one person really reign supreme over others and in doing so be infallible in matters of faith?  Humans by our nature are fallible.

Indulgences, that is money for sins.  Can persons really buy their way to God’s forgiveness?  Can living persons buy dead persons out of purgatory and into heaven?  It was a great way to raise money for church construction but lousy theology.

Papal forgiveness of sins upon the purchase of indulgences.  Isn’t forgiveness God’s domain and didn’t God show his hand on the forgiveness front in Jesus Christ?

Ecclesial secrecy and bureaucracy.  How the church works and goes about its work should not be a secret nor should it be so bureaucratic that it moves at a snail’s pace.

The language of the mass.  Why Latin?  Nobody but the priests understood what was being said.  What about using a language people actually spoke and understood?  Worship should be intelligible as should the Bible.

Transubstantiation, the belief that the bread and wine of communion become the actual body and blood of Christ when the priest intoned the words of institution.  Luther didn’t think so and said as much.

2.

Christianity has always been an introspective and restless religion.  It has always been a religion of pilgrims rather than settlers.  We are a people on the move, always in the direction of the kingdom of God.

In our history there have been periods when some of our leaders have become painfully aware when the gap between what the faith is really all about as articulated in the New Testament and testified to internally by the Holy Spirit and what the faith sadly has become has grown too great.  These leaders then articulate their vision for renewal and reform so that the faith can find its way once again.

My guess is that we know what this is like on a personal level.  We all have a narrative in our heads as to who we are and what we value.  For example, we tell ourselves, “I’m a good person.  I value kindness”.  And then there’s that moment when we betray the narrative.  We say or do something that isn’t good and perhaps even cruel.  Maybe we mistreat someone.  Once or twice is an aberration.  But beyond that we will have a crisis.  We will either adjust our narrative and own up to the fact that we are not good and we don’t really value kindness or we will change because living with the disconnect of saying one thing and acting contrary to it is unsustainable.  We want our real self to align with our aspirational self.

As I read the gospels, it’s apparent to me that Jesus himself was a reformer.  The official Temple Judaism of his day, at least at the leadership level, had grown transactional.  One line of thinking was “If I make certain sacrifices to God in the Temple then I obligate God to perform certain duties on my behalf”.  That’s not religion.  That’s commerce.  Religion, for some anyway, had become more about appearances and less about a profound change of mind, heart, and life.

The New Testament writers tell us that Jesus came in order to show humanity the mind and heart of God.  Jesus came to show humanity what it meant to be authentically human.  He revealed God and authentic humanity in what he said and did, especially on the cross and in his resurrection.  The church is to embody Jesus and carry his word and work into the world.

Jesus came to leave no question as to what being in a right relationship with God was all about.  It involved what I will call the big two:  Loving God with all that we’ve got and loving our neighbor as ourselves.

My personal test as to whether something honors God and neighbor or not is this:  Can I hear Jesus saying it?  Can I see Jesus doing it?  If not, I’m on the wrong path.

This is a good test for the church.  Can we hear Jesus saying it?  Can we see Jesus doing it?  If not, we’re on the wrong path and it’s time for renewal, reformation.

3.

Being Christian in a Presbyterian way originates with one of the Reformation’s second generation reformers [second generation simply means the folks who came after Martin Luther], John Calvin.  You can see his not quite smiling face on the cover of the bulletin. Calvin’s ideas about being Christian make their way to North America’s shores in the 17th century by way of the British Isles.

John Calvin was a French reformer.  He was trained as a lawyer at the University of Paris.  He was captivated by the reforming ideas that were sweeping across Europe and became a theologian.  He is perhaps best known for his Institutes of the Christian Religion, which he wrote as a guide for reading scripture, and his reforms in Geneva, Switzerland.

Today’s order of service was written by Calvin and first used in Strasbourg, France in 1542.  It is pure Calvin.  The service is designed to be simple and intelligible.  Its focus is the saving truth of the gospel.  Calvin sought to strip worship of any elements that might come between the worshipper and God, the human heart and the message of the gospel.

If Martin Luther was the initial spark and flame of the Reformation, Calvin captured the flame and codified and systematized it in order to better perpetuate it.

4.

About ten years ago author Phyllis Tickle published The Great Emergence:  How Christianity Is Changing and Why?  In the book she calls attention to an observation first made by Anglican Bishop Mark Dyer.  Dyer pointed out that about every 500 years Christianity has felt compelled to hold a rummage sale.  We know what rummage sales are.  We clear out the stuff we no longer need in order make room for the stuff that will be more useful.

Christianity’s first rummage sale was 451 at the Council of Chalcedon.  The council set aside a lot of peculiar ideas as to who Jesus was and codified correct doctrine regarding Jesus — one person, two natures, human and divine.  The fifth century also saw the Fall of Rome followed by the rise of monasticism in the sixth century under Gregory the Great.

Christianity’s second rummage sale was the Great Schism of 1054.  The church divided into the Catholic West and the Orthodox East over theological differences and ecclesiastical disputes.

The third rummage sale was the Reformation.

And, according to Tickle, the fourth rummage sale is right now.  The one thing about each rummage sale is that none of them were the result of “one semi-millennial eruption”.  Rather the standing form or organized Christian faith “lost [its] hegemony or pride of place to the new and not-yet-organized form that was birthing”.

What Christianity was waned and what Christianity was becoming waxed.  As it waned and waxed no one knew for sure what it would become.  Now that we are 500 years on from the Reformation, once again what Christianity was is waning and what it is becoming is waxing.  What is Christianity and the church becoming?  Who is our Luther?  Our Calvin?

It’s hard to say.  But we can say this:  God, of course, is always doing a new thing even if we preferred God didn’t because we like the old things.  This is an exciting moment as well as an anxious moment to be Christian.  I sense a strong movement to rediscover and follow Jesus and to unite with him and unite with others who follow him across all traditions. 

I’m still very Presbyterian.  I’m not sure I can help it or want to.  But, my Presbyterian Christianity is informed first and foremost by Jesus rather than Jesus being informed by my Presbyterian Christianity.  There’s a difference and it’s a crucial one.  This is the way Reformed Christianity works, we are not settlers; we are pligrims.  We’re always reforming.

Amen.