The Reformation’s 500th anniversary is next year. Preparations have already begun to celebrate this milestone of five centuries. Every week I seem to get one or two companies with Reformation travel packages for trips throughout Germany. Our church body has frequent publications, Concordia Publishing House has Reformation 500 products, gear, and even home furnishings. Our seminaries and universities, districts, and churches are planning what they too will do. It’s a big deal, and it needs to stop. Retire it!
Should we bother celebrating the Reformation if no one cares? Maybe the historical sights are nice and the history lesson could be worth while, but really does anyone care about the Reformation? Does the theology matter, does truth matter? It’s 2016, what’s the big deal about 1517? So history happened, it does everyday. Martin Luther stood up to the Roman Church, it would have happened eventually. Justification? Solas? Book of Concord? Book of what? Latin? Justification, what kind of jargon is this? Retire it!
Who cares about being declared righteous for Christ’s sake? My good works show God that I love Him, though I admit I often feel empty, wondering if they are enough to please Him. Then again, the things I really care about and believe in is how I’m moved by God. After all, when you can feel the Spirit move you what more do you need? Some weeks are better than others but I know God’s still there. He speaks to me through friendships, and moments of personal inspiration. As to my relationships, my most personal ones, maybe people in the 1500s thought God cared about marriage and identity in Christ, but that’s outdated religious babble. Maybe Luther cared about faithfulness to the Bible and the common person knowing God’s Word, but today’s different. Today I still care about the Bible, but it’s not like I need to read it everyday. It’s all Greek to me! I think what God wants is for me to find in the Bible my own spirituality, my own sense of identity. He doesn’t want me to be tied down by the details, I’m my own individual, I mean didn’t he create perfectly or evolve humanity into what it is today—something like that.
God wants me to be happy. Maybe that’s the real reason for the Reformation, my personal freedom from the Catholic church. But even today they try to promote Christian families, Christian values, Christian sacraments—hello, not everyone is a Christian! Lutherans can’t seem to reform themselves apart from those things, so did it really succeed? I think Christianity should be more open to new ideas, new beliefs, and a new identity. The old, stingy, Reformation theology needs to go, retire it. I want a Christianity more like me and less like Christ…oh wait a second.
Keep Christ in Christianity, Happy Reformation! (And a blessed All Saints Day–Nov.1)