What is Your Catechism?

Beloved of God, grace to you and peace from God our Creator and the Savior of the world Jesus the Christ. Amen.

A childhood ritual of mine, growing up in the Safe family, was developed around my mom’s love of garage sales. Every year annually, the City of Cannon Falls would host a city-wide garage sales, and for a whole weekend it seemed like the entire city population would bring their dusty wares and vintage clothing and old collectibles out for the world to see. I used to hate tagging along – as a child, why would I have a reason to want to look through old people’s stuff? My mom, on the other hand, just loved it – and continues to love antiquing and other sorts of activities like that where you can repurpose old things. It never ceased to amaze me – my mother would find old door frames, chests of drawers, or old signage – and transform them into something new and fresh that would later come to decorate our home. The idea behind garage sales – passing on the old to make way for what will come later, the new – is something that theologian Phyllis Tickle applies to the work of our Church. She is famous for having quipped, “Every 500 years, the Church has a rummage sale”, where we as the Church are examining what works and makes sense theologically and where we see God in the midst of our present.

Today is Reformation Sunday, where we are celebrating the 502nd year of the Reformation. In 1517, Martin Luther, the founder of the Church that bears our name, posted his ideas for Church reform to the door of the Wittenberg Church in Wittenberg, Germany. Martin Luther, professor and priest, was frustrated by the way that the Roman Catholic Church was handling matters of salvation. The Roman Catholic Church was encouraging its adherents to purchase indulgences. The more indulgences you bought, the less time you were supposedly going to spend in purgatory, or this weird limbo space between heaven and hell. Martin Luther wanted to both return the Church to sound scripture teaching and give the Church back to the people, rather than priests conducting the mass services in Latin. What followed Martin Luther’s ideas for church reform soon took on a life of its own – Bibles began to be printed in German, Church liturgies that involved the participation of the people were developed, and the Church began a new era of ministry distinct from its Roman Catholic beginnings. Martin Luther was very engaged, writing several Catechisms for teaching in the Church, which we still use today to guide our thinking. We, as a Lutheran Church, follow in Martin Luther’s teachings. Yet, in the last 500 years, the Lutheran Church has also had its own rummage sale. Each passing year, as we follow in the rhythms of worship, baptism, communion, confirmation, and fellowship, we as congregations are also aware that our own lives and communities are changing. The pressing issues faced by Martin Luther and the Church of his time are different from those that we face now, and generations descended from ours will be confronting different questions from our own.

Yet, that doesn’t change the reality that what was begun on the day Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses to the Wittenberg Church was a desire to return to essential, foundational truths about our Christian story and witness: that Jesus Christ, in dying upon a cross outside the city of Jerusalem, defeated death once and for all and assured humanity’s salvation from the worst versions of itself: harm, pain, and violence. That together, as the people of God, we witness to the goodness and wideness and fullness of God’s mercy and love, and practice robustly the habits of forgiveness and reconciliation. While our surroundings and our questions do change, our story that we tell has been foundationally the same.

My friends, this Reformation Sunday, I encourage us to remember our Gospel text for today from the Gospel of John. Jesus is teaching Jewish followers about what it takes to become a disciple – a learner of, or follower of, Jesus. He tells them, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (vs. 31-32). The key point here is that we continue – we keep on the practices that Jesus would encourage: bringing about healing, offering comfort, loving well, feeding the hungry, and sending away the rich and disdaining – because those are the things that will bring about the kingdom of God. Those are the things that will reveal to us more and more the nature of what it means to follow our God who promises to overturn the order of things as they stand now: where death will be no more, where crying and pain and loss will be done away with, where we will see all things made new. I encourage us to consider this week what our own “catechism” is. Catechism, at its root, means “questions”. Martin Luther loved to wrestle with theological questions, as we see in his work. What are your questions for the Church today? How might we faithfully begin to answer them? I invite you to journal this week – what are questions of faith that you are discerning or wrestling with? What do you want clarity on or a deeper understanding of? I invite you to ponder a few answers, and then when you’re ready to have a conversation with me – I’m excited to hear what you’re thinking about as we continue our ministry journey together.

To begin to prompt your thoughts, I am going to share from our confirmands. Today at Henrytown, we are celebrating alongside Reformation Sunday the Affirmation of Baptism for four of our members – Anna and Ella Bjertness, Grace Dowling, and Logan Stelpflug. Over the course of the last two years, we have engaged the Bible and Martin Luther’s teachings to talk about what it means to be a person of faith today. In anticipation of today, I had them each turn in a creative project or a faith statement, and I’m excited by their work and their answers. They are, in many ways, returning to the teachings of Jesus as they grow and as they discern their way in this complicated and multifaceted world. Grace Dowling wrote that the Bible offers her a sense of hope in the midst of sadness. Anna wrote of God’s provision during temptation. Ella reflected upon the truth of God’s love – that no matter what we do, God still promises to love us. Logan sees God in everything – “He created the world and looks down at everyone and tries to keep people safe” were his words. Together, Anna, Ella, Grace, and Logan are today saying “Yes” to God’s “Yes that was started in them at their baptisms. Today is not a graduation from church, but rather a beginning – a beginning filled with new wonder, new opportunities for relationship, and new opportunities for growth in our faith. Today marks a continuation of examining the stories of our faith and what they mean for this moment and for our lives. Grace, I charge you to explore more about where you find hope in the Bible. Anna, I want you to continue to think about God’s provision when the world gives us mixed messages about what is good and bad. Ella, you should keep learning about the wideness of God’s love – as you wrote from John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.” Logan, I encourage you to continue to seek God – in small moments and in big ones. Together, the four of you have begun a journey that will last a lifetime: seeking meaning in the midst of our world and in our lives. Don’t lose that sense of hope and wonder, because you as the next generation of the Church are leaders among and inspirations to us all. We rely on your voice and your guidance as we go into the future, following in God’s footsteps of justice and love.

So, my friends, today let us not hold on to too much too tightly. Let us wonder, just like at a garage sale, what in our Church might need to be let go of in order to make way for the things of new life. Let us wonder about the profound promise that in Christ we will be made free – free to serve, free to love, away from the things of our lives that cause fear or pain or oppression. Might we, on this Reformation Sunday, vow to live in the spirit that Jesus encourages for us – to go and heal, baptize, and teach, telling the whole world of this radical love we have been given. This love of Christ is a message that sustains, that deepens, and is profound from everlasting to everlasting – from Christ to Martin Luther to Henrytown and Union Prairie and into what will be beyond our own lives. Thanks be to God for your witness to this story, and thanks be to God who on this day reminds us that all will be made new. Let us journey into the future together, leading the way in truth and in love. Thanks be to God. Amen.