Sermon for Reformation Sunday     10/30/05                                  Preached at ULC

Text:  Romans 3, John 8             Title:  Ch…Ch…Ch…Changes?

Main Message:  The church constantly changes around an unchanging center

Brothers and sisters…

As of September, I started my 4th year as a servant of Christ in Red Wing.  I have yet to go a full year without at least once being introduced at United’s new pastor. 

Well, that’s not so strange when you think that I am new next to a lot of things at United.  We have a directing pastor who has been around for 16 years.  We have a hymnbook that has been in print for nearly 30 years.  We have members who have been on the rolls for 60 years and more.  We have a building that goes back several decades; we have parts of our worship that go back several centuries.  We still pray to God every Sunday with thee’s and thy’s and thou art hallowed in heaven.  We use the same Bible, the same Benediction and Apostle’s Creed that have been with us since near the time of Christ.

So I hope you brought your sense of irony today, because I’m going to talk about one of the four values that, according to our Vision Statement, isat the core of who we are as a congregation.  HOLD UP SIGN.  Change.

It’s Reformation Sunday today.  The word reform denotes change, and the Reformation is one of the most significant changes in world history, some say the most significant in the last 1000 years.  United Lutheran would not exist as a congregation if it weren’t for that change.

And yet when I first saw the word “change” as one of our core values, part of me was skeptical.  Not because this church is so badly hidebound and stubborn, but because organizations in general don’t value change just for the sake of change.  Think about the hundreds of books in print about organizational change; most of them are about surviving and managing change and handling the stress of change in a positive way. 

Change is hard work for organizations because change is hard work for people.  It takes effort.  It means being unsettled.  It means a lot of things that can and often do go wrong that wouldn’t happen if you’d just leave well enough alone.  Even when you KNOW it will be a change for the better, the change is just a messy step to get there; the part you actually value is the result, the “for the better”, not the process of change itself.

We do value variety, but variety only works in the limits of a consistent theme.  The music can vary, but if it changes too much it’s no longer the same song, or it becomes not even music at all, but just noise.  

A constant state of change, by definition, is chaos.  Rational churches, rational organizations, and rational people don’t want a state of chaos.  Even God, in the very first act of creation that defined him as God, spoke into the chaos of the universe and created order.  We are created in God’s image.  Chaos isn’t good for us.

But we at United Lutheran believe that one of our 4 core values, one the beliefs we hold most deeply in our heart, is the value of change.

My best conclusion, and if you’re looking for a main point to the sermon, I guess this is it, is that the church is always being changed around an unchanging center.  The church is always being reformed around a form that stays the same.  We at United have chosen to honor both the unchanging and the changes, the form and the re-form.

Embracing Christianity is like standing in the current of the Mississippi River.  The water flows past you and every second it is changing; the water that touches you now is gone in a heartbeat, never to return.  But it’s still the Mississippi river, flowing off to the south in the same way it always has, and unless Christ comes back tonight, it will be the same river tomorrow and for every tomorrow that you and I are around.

The story of Christianity is a story of change, but that change is held in the banks of an unchanging bedrock.  There are times, in fact, when God himself ordains a change, not in order to move us in a new direction, but to get us back on course when we have drifted off, like a driver moving the steering wheel not to exit the highway but to keep the car centered in the right lane and on the same road.

We need to remember these things when we talk about change and reformation.  There’s a great Catholic writer by the name of Chesterton who said that it is impossible to discuss re-form without reference to form.  Martin Luther would have agreed 100%.  His goal was never, ever to start a new church just to rattle the cages down in Rome so he could stick it to the man.

He wanted to re-form the church to follow the road God revealed in the Bible that he wanted the church to follow.  The problem wasn’t a church that needed change.  The problem was a church that had changed away from what God wanted.  It had drifted onto the shoulder, and Martin Luther was one of God’s agents for steering it back. 

So we celebrate the Reformation. To some people, this day is a pep rally, where we say, “U- Rah, Rah, Lutherans!” To others it is a day where we once again tediously reflect on the history of the Lutheran Church and its founder. Neither of those two are our objective.

We celebrate Reformation Sunday because of the teaching from Scripture that God has declared sinners not guilty because Jesus has paid for all their sins.  This is the truth which God revealed in the Bible would set us free and which Martin Luther risked everything to restore.  We are justified by faith alone, in Christ alone, as testified to us by the Scripture alone.  All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

This was the truth at the heart of the Reformation.  That truth has been the same since the time of the Bible and it will be the same until this world comes to an end.  Luther didn’t want to change that.  He never tried to turn the church upside down, but he risked his life to re-form the church right-side up.  The truth had become unclear, fuzzy, hidden or even lost.  The church as an agent of truth had drifted off the road, and the Reformation had to change some things to get it back. 

So when you hear that we at United Lutheran place a high value on change, don’t believe for a second that we’re out to upset the apple cart.  Our value is on creatively ministering to the needs of an ever-changing society.

The truth of our ministry isn’t about to change; it will never change as long as we are led by the Spirit of God.  We still know that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, but while we were yet sinners, Christ died and rose from the dead for our salvation.  If that truth ever changes among us, it means we have fallen away from that which sets us free.

But the way we communicate that truth, the words and the music, not only can change, they have to change.  No matter how much we might like things the way they are now, we can’t keep them this way unless we can wade into the water and stop the river of time itself.  Someday we’re not going to have the green book.  Someday we’re not going to sing the triple Amen.  Someday we won’t have an organ. 

You and I may never see that day, but I pray it will please God to preach the truth at United long after you and I have gone to glory.  I know the way he’s going to do it will be different than the way he does now, and what we are saying with this core value is that we accept that fact.  We value it.  We don’t want a constant state of change, but we value the people that Jesus died to save, even if they receive that salvation in a totally different style than we receive it.  And we’re willing to do what it takes to reach those people. 

At least, we say we are.  Most Sunday mornings, only 1 in every 5 people in Goodhue County will worship in a church.  4 of 5 will not.  Can we set those people free with the truth by doing exactly the same thing we’re doing right now?  If the answer is yes, then we should do it.  If not, what will it take to share the Gospel with them?  What needs to change to meet their needs?  Can we make those changes and still meet our needs?

Your pastors and council and staff have been thinking about these questions, and we’ve had some great discussions.  We’re not going to The only thing we know for sure is that even if we don’t change a thing ourselves, ULC will be different 10 years down the road than it is right now.  We pray God will continue to guide us down this road, through these changes, as he always has in the past.  And we pray he will keep us faithful to the unchanging truth of His Law and His Gospel in everything we do.  Amen