"No water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale" -- Sermon for Sunday 27 October 2019 (Reformation Sunday)

                         Lutheran Church of the Redeemer, Jerusalem

The Rev. Carrie Ballenger

Baptismal font in St Paul's Church, London, England
October 2019
Photo by Carrie Ballenger

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

One October Saturday in Chicago, I was at the wedding of a dear friend, an Episcopal priest. At the reception, I mentioned I would be going home soon to finish my sermon for Reformation Day. There were a few blank stares from the non-clergy in the room. “You know, Reformation Day,” I said, “It’s kind of a big deal.”

One friend-- another Episcopal priest—responded: “Preaching on Reformation Day shouldn’t be too hard! I mean, isn’t it just “Grace, Luther, Bible, Beer, and repeat?”

And then another clergy friend (there are always lots of clergy present at the wedding of a priest) helpfully offered, “Anyway, the best sermon ever is just ‘God loves you—pay attention—Amen.’”

I still had to go home and finish a sermon, but I’ve never forgotten that advice! God loves you. Pay attention. Amen. Can I go home now?

Technically, we’re not honoring today as Reformation Sunday, as here in Jerusalem we have a special service on Reformation day (otherwise known as Halloween in the States). I hope to see you all this Thursday at 4:30 pm in the main sanctuary next door!

But I couldn't resist the opportunity, because my Episcopal priest friend was right, of course, and not only about what constitutes the best sermon ever. Reformation is kind of a big deal for those of us who identify as Christians in the Lutheran tradition. 

On Reformation Day we remember how, on October 31, 1517, a priest named Martin Luther nailed 95 talking points (we call them the 95 Theses) on the church door in Wittenberg, Germany. He posted these 95 points to start a conversation, but instead he unwittingly started a movement within the church. Luther’s ideas, combined with the invention of the printing press and the advent of general unease with the excesses of the church across Europe, resulted in what is now known as the Reformation. Christians who call themselves Lutherans (or Protestants of many other church bodies) are Christians whose ways of worshiping, reading the Bible, and structuring ourselves as a church, spring directly from this period in history. Church of the Redeemer in Jerusalem is a Reformation church, still proclaiming 500 years later “ecclesia semper reformanda est”—the church is always reforming”, or at least, is always in need of reforming.

I have to say that I once hated Reformation Day, because it felt like “Lutheran pride day” or the “I’m so glad I’m not Catholic day”, which felt wrong to me (in part because in my college years, I went through RCIA classes and was confirmed as a Catholic!) 

Now, however, I love Reformation Day, and not because of some sense of Lutheran pride. I love Reformation Day because it’s an opportunity to preach, loud and proud, about God’s gift of grace. 

I suppose any Sunday is a day to preach about God’s grace...

But just as Christmas is not the only day to rejoice in the Incarnation, or Easter the only day to preach Resurrection, and yet we have set them aside to focus on those central ideas of our faith, so also Reformation Day is set aside in the year to proclaim, alongside the author of Romans:

“There is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift”; and again, “We hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law”; and, with the author of the Gospel according to John, to remember ““If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free!”Amen!

Grace alone, Faith alone, Word alone. 

This was the motto of the Reformation. And this is the saving truth that changed Martin Luther’s life and began a reforming movement within the Christian church: that no human being is made right with God by being good or following the rules, but that we are good and acceptable and worthy of being loved because God said so. God’s opinion on the subject of you and your worthiness has been made crystal clear on the cross, once and for all, where our brother Jesus, Son of God, suffered with us and for us, and through this great love we have been clothed in Christ’s own righteousness and have been reconciled with God. Amen! Thanks be to God.

This amazing grace is the foundation of our faith. But it’s so amazing we have a hard time believing it. The gift of God’s grace is so beautiful, so bountiful, and so boundless that humans spend our lives making up rules, laws, excuses and exceptions to explain it away.

I don’t actually have television here in Jerusalem, and I know we come from many different backgrounds here at Redeemer, but I wonder if you know that annoying credit card commercial that used to come on every year at Christmastime, in which a husband goes out to get the morning paper and finds a luxury car sitting in the driveway with a giant bow on top? Or maybe you know the one where the wife goes to get an ornament off the Christmas tree and finds a diamond ring hanging there instead? Or, most annoying of all, the one where the kids come downstairs on Christmas morning to find a perfectly adorable puppy under the Christmas tree with a set of tickets to Disneyland in its mouth?

Even if you haven’t seen one of these monstrosities, I hope you can understand my hatred of them. I despise what they do to our brains and hearts, how they change our expectations of Christmas and gift-giving. Because of these messages, on Christmas or a birthday, when we present our friends and family a lovingly knitted scarf or a carefully chosen sweater or whatever other gift we can truly afford to give, somewhere in the back of our minds we are worrying “It should have been a puppy. Or a car. Or a car with a puppy in it.”

But here’s the thing: what we do with the gift of God’s grace is the exact opposite. God has already given us the gift to beat all gifts. God has given us the luxury car with the bow, complete with the puppy in the front seat and carrying the tickets to Disneyland, and what we say is “Dear God, thank you SO much for the new car floor mats. They’re just what I wanted.”

Can’t you just hear God saying, “Wait, what? Didn’t you see the car? And the puppy? And the Disney tickets?”

And we just respond, “Well, I saw all that, but I didn’t think that was for ME. Surely I don’t deserve so much.”

God has given the whole world the amazing gift of grace and love through the cross of Jesus Christ, and we often look right at it and say, “Thanks for loving all the good people, God.”

Instead of receiving this free gift, we make up our own rules for God’s love. We say to ourselves:

“God loves everyone! 

But I can’t stop smoking, and I swear a little, so I’m surely the exception. 

Jesus is present in the bread and wine! 

But I’m not really sure how that works, so he must not be there for me. 

Jesus died to save the world! 

Well except for my neighbor, because he’s a real jerk. 

Grace and love and forgiveness are free! 

But I’m gonna earn them anyway.

Dear siblings in Christ, one reason I’m happy to call myself a Lutheran is that I know our brother Martin Luther had already been down this road. He also struggled to accept his belovedness. He tried to follow all the rules, and even made up a few of his own, hoping to earn God’s love. But it was through diligent prayer and study of Scripture that Luther was finally convinced of the magnitude of God’s gift of grace. He was so convinced that he stood in front of princes and church authorities, accusing him of heresy, to say, “Here I stand!” I cannot and will not take it back! For this Good News is just too good to ignore. It’s too good to hide. It’s too good not to share.

Theologian and food writer Robert Farrar Capon once said this about the Reformation of the church:

“The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellar full of fifteen-hundred-year-old, two-hundred proof Grace–bottle after bottle of pure distillate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly. The word of the Gospel–after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection of your bootstraps–suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home before they started…Grace has to be drunk straight: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale; neither goodness, nor badness, not the flowers that bloom in the spring of super spirituality could be allowed to enter into the case.”

 (― Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace)

Dear friends,

It is an odd thing to preach on Reformation Sunday in Jerusalem, to a community who mostly does not identify as Lutheran! Redeemer Church is Lutheran...and we are also Presbyterian, Mennonite, Catholic, non-denominational, Nazarene, evangelical, and maybe mostly confused. 

We are American, Israeli, German, Canadian, Swedish, and lots of things in between. 

I often say that if you simply love Jesus and speak English, you belong here at Redeemer!

We are all very different. But what each of us shares is that we are loved equally by God. 

May this love of God in Christ Jesus continue to free us, and to reform our lives and our churches for the sake of our neighbors. 

And may the peace of God which passes all understanding keep our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.