The Reformation We Need

Proper 25A-26 – Reformation

Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago

It’s Jesus’ last week before the cross.  Now it’s the Pharisees turn to play gotcha with Jesus.  The Sadducees, Scribes and Herodians all struck out last week.  This is the fourth and fifth of five confrontations with religious leaders in the Temple.  After this none of them will dare to ask any more questions.

Teacher, ‘Which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ (Matthew 22:36). Jewish scholar’s painstaking careful reading of the Hebrew bible had resulted in a list of 613 commandments.  Citing any one of them as the greatest could be cause for controversy. They hope to entrap him.

Jesus’ answer: love God and love people. Jesus combined the famous Shema and the Golden Rule.  You may have Jewish friends who have nailed a mezuzah to the doorjamb of their home which contains the words of the Shema from Deuteronomy 6:4—‘Hear O Israel the Lord is our God…You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”  The golden rule, ‘love your neighbor as yourself’ (Leviticus 19:18) is more familiar to Christians, although we’re often surprised to find it in Leviticus!

Love God, love people and love yourself—because you can’t really love God or your neighbor without first loving yourself.  Sounds simple, but then Jesus didn’t give us much instruction. Instead, Jesus showed us. He talked to the Samaritan woman beside the well; dismissed the angry mob and pronounced forgiveness upon a women caught in adultery. He fed the five thousand. He ate with no-good disreputable people, touched lepers, cared for widows, and, of course, he showed us how love overcomes our enemies by going to the cross.

All the trappings of our religion have a purpose. Our church, our traditions, our worship, and our Sacraments are intended to align our heart and our behavior more closely with the loving character of God. When religion falls short at doing that—well, that’s what the Reformation was all about. Institutions truly dedicated to Jesus are known by their fruits. They produce people who love God, love people and love themselves.

Love, after all, is what the first Christians were known for. Faith active in love is what drew early observers of Christianity into the new religion.  Neighbor love without regard for tribe, race, gender, clan, or class was shocking and amazing. The ancient Christian theologian Tertullian (155–220 CE), wrote, “Our care for the derelict and our active love have become our distinctive sign before the enemy [those who oppose us]. They say, “See, they say, how they love one another and how ready they are to die for each other.” (Clendenin) It was just the kind of reformation people needed.

Fast forward to today. Love has fallen on hard times among some Christians. An influential book among the evangelical Christians who now are running the United States government argues that empathy is bad. Cruelty to women, to the foreigner, to the queer, and transgender is celebrated. Love extends only as far as the borders of our nation. God’s love is for white men the rest of the world be damned, bombed, shot, or starved to hell. Judging by the standards Jesus lays out for us in today’s gospel, we clearly need a new reformation today.

The reformation we need will be defined by love. Love points toward an alternative disruption — one that never destroys and only builds. Back in 2009, Jeremy Rifkin, the noted economist and social theorist, wrote a book called, The Empathetic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis.“Published in the optimistic early years of the Obama presidency, Rifkin proposed that ‘a radical new view of human nature’ was emerging ‘that we are a fundamentally empathic species.’ He believed that new social and political arrangements would follow, that which he called ‘The Empathetic Civilization,’ and suggested that humankind was entering an ‘Age of Empathy.’ (Diana Butler Bass, “The Reformation We Need,” Sunday Musings, The Cottage, 10/24/26)

Rifkin, who is Jewish, and not a theologian, argued that empathy has shown itself repeatedly within the human story.  The Golden Rule and the biblical command to love one’s neighbors have always created counter-movements to empire in every age of human economic transformation, empathy, compassion, and neighborly concern arose as social and political correctives to that which was destructive — always broadening the sense of human connection and moral conscience.” The oldest and most successful way for human beings to survive and thrive is through widening cooperation, community, and compassion. (Butler-Bass).

Empathy is not new. Love of neighbor is not new. The reformation we need and have always needed is rooted in the love God pours out on all of us in each new moment that was revealed to us by Jesus. “If it seems like the world has gone mad. If you feel angry, if the news makes you depressed, you aren’t the crazy ones. You are the sane ones. You are responding in the most human way possible — seeing human beings as human beings, not some “other” to be manipulated, used, or demeaned.” (Butler-Bass). Your anger is evidence. Your bewilderment is the seed of the new reformation trying to be born in us.

500 years ago, the Protestant Reformation brought an explosion in literacy and learning. It activated each man, woman, and child to become involved in cultivating faith. Yet it also cast long shadows in Western history which we are only now beginning to name.  The legacy of colonialism, white supremacy, manifest destiny, antisemitism, Christian nationalism, and ecological destruction are the sins of our ancestors which we must now face squarely. A Reforming church is, by definition, also a self-critical church. It is a self-correcting church, a repenting church that can learn and respond to the promptings of a Loving God.

Love God. Love neighbor. Love yourself.  We do these things not merely because Jesus and the Torah commands it but because Jesus revealed that love is who God is. This is among the most precious gifts Christianity has to add to the wisdom faith traditions of throughout the world. God took on flesh and lived among us. God is with us. God is in us. God moves among us now.  God operates from the furthest corners of the cosmos in the most intimate moments of our lives. God moves within the course of human history pulling, cajoling, luring but never coercing all that is toward greater complexity, harmony, beauty, and love. God dwells within the ongoing emergence of the world itself. This is the reformation we have always needed. It is the reformation we need now. It is the reformation that awaits us now from just over the horizon fighting to be born again. It is widening, contracting, dilating, and expanding the circles of empathy and love to include all people, all religions, all creatures, and every nation in the warmth of God’s embrace. In the name of Christ Jesus, the midwife of incarnation, may it be so.