Reformation Sunday

This coming Sunday, October 30, is Reformation Sunday. I know. It is just another Sunday in the liturgical calendar that is met with a resounding yawn in our congregations. Who in the world cares about a Reformation that took place in 16th century Europe? What does it matter to us? How does it ease our suffering, calm our pain, or meet our needs?

Perhaps Reformation Sunday is about more than a memory of something that happened long ago, however. Maybe it is an ongoing process, an unfolding evolution, a forest instead of trees. Maybe we can expand our vision and understanding in order to breath new meaning into Reformation Sunday.

The Great Reformation began around 1450, with the invention of the movable type printing press. By the time Martin Luther nailed 95 statements of disagreement with Roman Catholic theology to the doors of a cathedral, in 1517, the die had been cast. People were, for the first time, reading the Bible in the vernacular and would no longer fall for being told that the Bible said things that it simply did not. They were learning to read and interpret it for themselves. Information brought about change. It was change that those who were invested in the Roman Catholic Church despised. Those who protested saw the Reformation as a way out of oppression and into religious liberty.

The time was chaotic. It was upsetting. It shook the foundations of everything about which many were solidly convinced and permanently persuaded. After about a century, the Great Reformation settled into the uncomfortable distinction between Catholic and Protestant. In the Protestant world, denominationalism divided Christian practitioners into schools of arcane orthodoxy and sectarian practice. Some believed some things, while others believed otherwise.

Phyllis Tickle, in her fabulous book, The Great Emergence, saw in the Great Reformation an ongoing cycle of 500 year cataclysmic change. That is, every 500 years, culture had evolved into something other than it had been in the previous 500 years. Her point is, of course, that we are living in the transition of another of those 500 year transitions. We are again evolving, reforming, changing and moving.

The change is uncomfortable for those who have a stake in the configurations of the past 500 years. The term "uncomfortable" is an understatement. The change is uncomfortable like puberty was uncomfortable. The change is akin to having one's chair pulled out from under her or him. It is like building atop a foundation that has shifted, or perhaps one that has disappeared altogether. This next 500 year configuration will undo much of what we had been so completely certain. It will shake our very understandings of the world in which we live.

There is a road map for the transition, however. If we allow ourselves to identify those things of the past 500 year configuration out of which we are transitioning, then we can consciously contemplate their loss. If we can anticipate the new configurations that will shape the coming 500 years, then we can move in those directions. This is Reformation. It is being open to changing the foundations upon which we have relied to ones about which we are uncertain, but hopeful. Reformation is always a move onward from what has been to what is coming.

One additional point. I firmly believe that the cultural evolution in which we have found ourselves since the late 1960's is a positive move toward fulfillment of human spiritual life. The evolutionary process is bringing us nearer blessed, abundant, whole, and healthy human life. It is a step onward in the process of becoming one people under God.

This is Reformation Sunday. Bring it on!