No matter how many times we hear this good news, it never stops being good news.
Each Sunday, faithful Christian preachers deliver Jesus into the ears of people who are desperate for a morsel of hope.
And every week people are going to be desperate to hear it all over again. No matter how many times we hear the good news, it never stops being good news. That’s how we know the Reformation is still going on.
One of the hallmarks of the Protestant Reformation––sparked so long ago in 1517––was the echo of Isaiah 40:8: “The Word of the Lord Endures Forever.” If Holy Scripture does not change but remains, then so, too, is our enduring need to hear it.
Yet after 500 years, it seems many churchgoers have become bored singing Martin Luther’s battle hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” and even Lutheran preachers and theologians feel like broken records delivering the same old message of justification by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. Some even argue that most of the reforms Protestants wanted Roman Catholics to make have now been made and that Protestantism has become an end in itself.
At the 500th anniversary of Luther’s 95 theses in 2017, Episcopalian ethicist Stanley Hauerwas posted an article to The Washington Post titled: “The Reformation is over. Protestants won. So why are we still here?”
Hauerwas contended:
That the Reformation has been a success, however, has put Protestantism in a crisis. Winning is dangerous — what do you do next? Do you return to Mother Church? It seems not: Instead, Protestantism has become an end in itself, even though it’s hard to explain from a Protestant point of view why it should exist. The result is denominationalism in which each Protestant church tries to be just different enough from other Protestant churches to attract an increasingly diminishing market share. It’s a dismaying circumstance.
What do we do when the task of reforming the church is finished?
What do we do when the steeples on our old churches are falling?
What we always have done: Continue looking to Jesus, the rock on which the church still stands.
It is still all about Jesus.
The Protestant Reformation may be over, but Jesus is not done reforming – or rather transforming – the hearts of all. What, then, does the task of reforming the Reformation look like?
It looks like pew cushions, benches, and chairs indented by the people – whether a few or many – sitting on them week after week.
It looks like the earwax of earthly errored thinking cleared by the Holy Spirit through the proclamation of God’s word.
It looks like baptisms and Holy Communion celebrated not once, but always, as a means of God’s forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation.
The reformation of human hearts is a lifelong venture until eternity. Every week, people are desperate to hear all over again that there is not anything we can do to make God love us any more – and there is not anything we can do to make God love us any less. No matter how many times we hear this good news, it never stops being good news.
One of the residual reforms of the Reformation has been the spirit of youthfulness. Not only has the Christian education of children been a product of reformers like Luther and his Small Catechism, but also the very existence of public and parochial schools. Those young minds may just be the key to reminding us how reforming the Reformation can still be done today.
In his book, Orthodoxy, Catholic author G.K. Chesterton wrote:
The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning, but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun, and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.
It is time for Christians to “do it again.” The process of reforming the Reformation starts and ends with the daily, weekly, and yearly practice of hearing God’s Word, applying God’s Word, and living God’s Word. And that Word of God is this:
Jesus has come to live his life for you. Jesus has come to give his life for you. Jesus will come again to give eternal life to you.
He has reformed us once. And he will do it again.
