Sermon - 10-30-22

<p>Grace to you and peace from God our creator, Jesus our Savior, and the Holy Spirit our guide. Amen.</p> <p>Happy Reformation! The day we celebrate the start of the Lutheran Church. The day we celebrate change. The day we look at what makes us Lutheran. As I was thinking about how Reformation can be considered the start of the Lutheran church, I was thinking that we celebrate a lot of “starts” in our church. We celebrate Advent - the start of the church year; we celebrate Christmas - the start or birthday of Jesus; we celebrate Easter - the start of a new way of thinking about salvation; and we celebrate Pentecost, the start of the Holy Spirit among us and what some would consider the start of the Christian church. So, if nothing, we are certainly flexible, or we just love to celebrate the church.</p> <p>When thinking about Martin Luther and the Reformation, I came up with 3 C’s that I will reflect on in today’s sermon. The first is “change” - reformation - re-forming - changing the church. Luther didn’t want to start a brand new branch of the church and he certainly didn’t want his followers to call themselves Lutherans, he simply wanted to change some of the practices of the church at the time that didn’t fit with what the word of God, the bible, said. He felt the church structure had become something that was getting in the way of people’s connections to God. One of the main issues was that the church 500 years ago was very focused on “doing the right thing” or doing “works as prescribed by law” in order to obtain favor with God and get into heaven. Then, in case you were concerned you didn’t have enough good works, you could simply buy indulgences as a way to guarantee your sins would be forgiven. Luther wanted to change the church and get rid of these practices since they were not what the bible was saying was the way to be right with God.</p> <p>Yes, Luther changed the church, or ended up creating a division since the church didn’t want to change (not that a church today would ever be reluctant to change!