The Sweet Spot.

Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18; 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8; Matthew 22:34-46

October 29, 2017 + The 500th Anniversary of the Reformation

I.

The Reformation had a motto about how the church is “always being  reformed.”  In Latin it was semper reformanda.  It has been used ad nauseam by people ever since to rationalize and justify all kinds of changes in ecclesiastical life.  It is right up there with the horribly misused and abused quote from the prophet Isaiah, “behold I am doing a new thing!”  As if Isaiah is endorsing every new thing just because it is new, regardless of whether it is good or not.  This became one of the unintended consequences of the Reformation: the bias in favor of whatever is new and against whatever is old.

We get this same sensibility today all the time.  We are in an age of change today at least as comprehensive and traumatic as the changes happening in the 16th century, and many church leaders are latching onto the “always reforming!” cry to advocate for the so-called “adaptive” changes necessary for the church to survive through it all.

Our time is different from 500 years ago in many respects.  One of the most important is that we tend to have a higher degree of self-awareness.  I mean, in the Reformation they were trying consciously to model the reformed church on the church of Jesus and the apostles.  But they couldn’t see how much they were really merely adapting to their own context.  What they ended up with was less a restoration of the church of the first century, and more a church supremely refitted to thrive in the Modern Age, which was the 16th through the 20th centuries.  They weren’t adapting to the original church so much as to their new historical and cultural situation.

So all the characteristics of what we came to call Modernity — individualism, technology, democracy, human rights, science, rationalism, progress, and so forth — were all woven into the very DNA of the Reformation churches.  At the height of the mature Reformation, the church of our Puritan forebears was probably nothing like the church of the Apostles in the Mediterranean basin 1500 years earlier.  It reflected and expressed the values and outlooks of the Europe of their own time. 

This is exactly what most of the people mean when they enthusiastically gush about a church that is “always being reformed.”  No one is pretending to recover the early church these days.  Now we are quite honest and enthusiastic about wanting to adapt the church to our situation in the 21st century.

Last week at the presbytery meeting we heard a sermon that made the case for contemporary worship.  It was very convincing.  The preacher used the example of how the way we get our music has shifted in format over the years, from 45s to LPs to cassettes and 8-track tapes, to CDs, to MP3s, and now to streaming services.  (What he didn’t mention is how LPs are making a comeback, which kind of undercuts his case….)  His point was that the church needs to adapt its format to what makes sense to contemporary people.  We don’t change the basic message, of course.  But the medium, the language, the format has to keep changing with the times.  And as a kind of proof, he didn’t have to remind us how successful, if success is measured by people showing up, contemporary worship often is, when it is done well.

II.

That sermon expressed the spirit of the Reformation with a self-awareness that the Reformers didn’t have in their own time.  Just as you can take the same music and present it in different formats, the idea is to take the same gospel of Jesus Christ and simply present it in a format that makes sense and is appealing to people now.

Everyone will agree that it has always to be both.  Faith has to be  embodied in and intelligible to each generation; at the same time it must be true to the original, basic, essential truth of the gospel.  And everyone, and every church, falls somewhere on this continuum between traditional and contemporary.  A church that is too traditional is in danger of becoming a museum of mildly interesting but irrelevant practices.  A church that is too contemporary is in danger of losing touch with the gospel altogether, becoming The Church of What’s Happenin’ Now and not the Church of Jesus Christ.

Somewhere in the middle is that sweet spot in which we are both faithful to the gospel and communicating it effectively and meaningfully to people today.  The danger is that the technology and the music, the style and the language in which the message is communicated will drown out and even change the actual message.  We need to find that sweet spot.

It turns out that there was actually more to the motto that I began with.  The whole sentence is, “The church is always being reformed according to the Word of God.”  The point of the Reformation was to recover the spirit of the Word of God, Jesus Christ.  And that has always to be the first thing we are about today.

Which brings us to today’s Scripture readings, which are centered on the gospel where Jesus lays out the Two Great Commandments: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind,” and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  That second one was our reading from the Hebrew Scriptures.  I repeat these commandments for you on many Sundays as the Charge before the Benediction.  Our obedience to these commandments is how Jesus Christ shapes our life together.  

The gospel, Jesus says, is about love.  “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God and God abides in them,” says the apostle John.  To say that “the church is always being reformed according to the Word of God,” means according to Jesus Christ, which means according to the outpouring of God’s love we know and receive in him by the Spirit.  Love is not a theory or an idea: is it a quality of relationship.

III.

And the reading from Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians is instructive in this.  With directness, beauty, and simplicity, the apostle talks about the love he shares with God’s people in the church he founded in Thessalonica.  Here we get a little picture, not of the grand theological themes upon which Christianity is based, not of “salvation by grace through faith,” as important as that is, but of the intimacy and affection the apostle has for this fragile, small group of Jesus-followers in one particular Greek town.  For in the end, the gospel is communicated and sustained face-to-face, relationship by relationship, hand to hand, and heart to heart.

Paul knows that it is in the quality of the interactions happening in community life, between and among individuals in a local congregation, that the gospel happens.  What is most important in every reformation is what is important each day and each moment, right here, in the way we touch each other as individuals.  Paul knows that this Jesus-movement depends entirely on the health of congregations and the people in them.  He knows that because that is the example of the Lord himself, whose main MO is the healing, welcome, acceptance, forgiveness, liberation, and gathering together of broken people.  

The church of Jesus Christ always rejects self-righteous grabbing for power, fame, and wealth, and expresses the kind of heartfelt affection for siblings in Christ that Paul mentions here.  It always avoids deceit, impure motives, and trickery, like bait-and-switch evangelism.  It always has to stand fast amid suffering, and face the opposition of a world with different values.  In the church we learn to treat each other with gentleness, like a woman nursing young children.  It is about sharing with each other our very selves, even as Jesus emptied himself to share God’s very nature with us.

This means listening to ourselves and each other, and becoming more aware of how we are relating.  It means confessing our faults, admitting our weakness and pain, building forgiveness and forbearance.  It means listening to each other with empathy, identifying with the needs and feelings we all share, and which we share with Jesus.  It means “discerning the body” in which we all participate, especially in the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper which is constitutive of this community.   

Every reform movement in the church primarily if not exclusively concerns congregational life.  Christianity is about healthy gatherings of disciples.  It is about relationships.  It is about people.  It is about love, because it is about Jesus Christ.

This is something so basic and fundamental that it doesn’t matter what century we find ourselves in.  The church is always being reformed, that is, we are continually reshaping the life of the gospel community according to the love of God expressed in love of neighbor, which is to say, all.

IV.

We are in another era of transition and transformation in the church… and in the world.  We are being called again to bring the church back into alignment with Jesus Christ, the Word of God, in our time.  We are once again to ensure that people “know we are Christians by our love,” and, experiencing that love ourselves, spread it to others.  

So yes, the church needs to adapt.  But I suggest that we adapt only to the Word of God, Jesus Christ, and his commandments of love.  Everything we do is about listening to, following, and even becoming, the Word.  

So we continue the work of reformation, seeing how the life of God in Jesus Christ, the life of love, emerges with, within, and among us, in life-giving gospel communities in which healed people heal the world. 

+++++++