Over the last week or so you may have seen events and
articles commemorating the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. In
a way, it’s a bit of an arbitrary date. What this anniversary has actually
marked is the moment when, on Oct 31st 1517, Martin Luther, a German
Augustinian monk, nailed 95 theses – 95 statements – to the door of a church in
Wittenberg. They were statements expressing his disagreement with the Catholic
belief in indulgences. An indulgence was a formal declaration granting “time
off” for people in purgatory, an intermediate state between heaven and hell
where the soul was thought to be cleansed. Prayers, pilgrimages and good works
could all reduce the time you’d have to spend there after death, according to
Catholic doctrine. It was always a bit of a dodgy proposition – there’s no
Biblical basis for it – but it was when indulgences started to be sold on an
industrial scale for cold, hard cash that opposition to the whole system
started to build. Luther wasn’t the first to challenge the sale of indulgences
– that’s why I said that this is a rather arbitrary date to fix the start of
what we call the Reformation. Over a century earlier, the English priest, JohnWycliffe, had criticised them, and his followers, radical Christians who were
scathingly called Lollards – babblers – had kept up the criticism since then,
and been persecuted savagely for doing so. Luther’s 95 theses, nailed to the
Wittenberg church door, were just another step in a long, slow process of
reform, which would eventually lead to the foundation of Protestant Churches
across Europe.
The thing that fuelled this reforming urge, both for Luther
and the earlier Reformers, was the Bible. It was Paul’s letter the Romans which
did it for Luther. As a conscientious monk – perhaps too conscientious – he’d
tried so hard to live the perfect spiritual life that it had nearly broken him.
“How can I be saved?” was his anxious question. As he read Romans, he was
reminded powerfully that salvation was a gift from God. We’re saved by grace,
by God’s loving decision and God’s loving action, not because of what we've
done or ever could do. That wasn't a new idea, but things like the sale of
indulgences had obscured it, because they gave the impression that God’s love
could be bought or earned.
Reading the letter to the Romans opened Luther’s eyes afresh
to this central message of the Gospel. And
if it had opened his eyes, he knew that it could open the eyes of others too. But
how would ordinary people ever discover this liberating message for themselves?
Luther could read Latin, Greek and Hebrew. But most ordinary people never heard
the Bible in a language they could understand. If you’d come here to Seal church at
any time before the Reformation, the service would have been in Latin,
including all the Bible readings. I don’t know how good your Latin is, but my
guess is that most people here would have found it pretty hard to follow. It
might seem crazy to us now to make it so hard for ordinary people to understand
the Bible, but in a sense, that was the whole point.
You see, the Bible is a dangerous book. It’s full of
dangerous ideas. It tells us that we are all equal in the sight of
God, that God “casts down the mighty from
their seats and exalts the humble and meek.” That’s good news for the
humble and meek, but you can see why the mighty might not be so keen on it. As
well as that, people were genuinely afraid that if untrained people read the Bible
they might get it wrong, and imperil their immortal souls as a result. Better
to leave the Bible in the hands of those who knew what they were doing with it,
or thought they did!
No wonder the powers that be were worried when people like
Wycliffe and Luther translated the Bible to make it accessible to all. Luther
reputedly went down into the marketplaces of the town where he was staying and
spent time listening to the way people actually spoke to each other, catching
their idioms and rhythms of speech so that his translation would communicate
with them, and it soon caught on. Back here in England Wycliffe had made a translation
into English a century earlier. It had been banned – the penalty for owning one
was death – but it had circulated widely and now William Tyndale began to make
a new translation which, like Luther’s, captured the speech patterns of
ordinary people. Tyndale paid for his presumption with his life, since Henry
VIII was still staunchly Catholic at this stage. But ironically, less than two
years later, after Henry’s break with Rome, he ordered that every church in the
land should have its own English Bible, in a translation which was mostly
Tyndale’s. Tyndale is said to have prayed as he died, “Open the King of England’s
eyes”, and it seemed as if God had done just that.
Those who’d feared that giving people access to the Bible in
their own language would spark revolution were right to be afraid, because it
did. It changed the world.
I’m glad that today we have a Bible we can all read, but for
all that, though, I’m not sure that Protestants have really been any better at
truly “hearing the word of the Lord” than their Medieval Catholic brothers and
sisters were. Anyone who knows me will know that I am pretty passionate about
the Bible, and pretty passionate about finding ways of helping people read it.
There’s the “Story of the Week” each week on the pew leaflet, the Good Book
Club each month which discusses those stories. There are Home Groups, Lent and
Advent material for reflection, and all sorts of other things. I care about
this book immensely, but I’m also clear that the squiggles on these pages are
not, in and of themselves, the word of God. God may speak to us through them, through
the stories of those who have struggled with faith before us and left us this
record, but he can’t be confined by this book, any more than he could be boxed up in
the rituals of the Catholic Church, and when we forget that we soon get into
trouble.
At the Reformation, Protestants knocked the statues of the
saints off their pedestals, but often they then put the Bible on those
pedestals instead. They insisted that every stroke of it had come straight from
the mouth of God and should be obeyed as unquestioningly as Catholics had been
expected to obey the Pope. Read it correctly – that is, the way those in charge
told you to read it – and all would be well. They accused Catholics of
idolatry, but then set about making an idol of the Bible instead. That’s a very dangerous thing to do. You can
construct a justification for almost anything from the Bible if you pick the
right verses; slavery, the oppression of women and LGBT people, imperialism and
racism, even child abuse. The Bible gives very clear instruction that rebellious
sons should be put to death (Deuteronomy 21.18-21), but I think you’d rightly get
into quite a lot of trouble now if you obeyed that particular injunction. That’s why I think it is really important that
we grasp that that this book, this physical object, these squiggles on these
pages are not in themselves the Word of God. We can be enlivened, enlightened,
challenged, comforted, blessed and transformed through them. We can feel God’s
breath coming from the pages, but we mustn't mistake the creation for the
Creator. The Bible is a precious treasury of wisdom, story, worship, warning
and inspiration, but if we truly want to hear the word of God through it, we’ll
need to work a bit harder than just lifting proof texts from here and there and
assuming we've found simple answers to life’s complicated problems.
“Let the word of
Christ dwell in you richly”, said Paul to the Colossians in the reading we
heard today. I love that verse, because it’s a reminder that God wants his word
to dwell in us, to make its home in us, to intermingle with all that makes us
who we are and enrich us in the process. The “word of Christ” that Paul refers
to here wasn't a book. It can’t have been, because this book didn't exist when
he wrote to the Colossians. The Gospels hadn't been written yet. Paul’s letters
were just scraps of paper circulating around the churches he’d founded. It
would be centuries before the list of books we now find in our Bibles were
finally agreed on, let alone bound in one volume like they are today.
So, when Paul talks about the word of Christ, he isn't talking
about words on a page, but something far more diverse than that. The people he
was writing to expected God to speak to them in all sorts of ways; through the
Hebrew Scriptures, but also through each other as they gathered together and shared
in the fellowship of their churches, through prayer and prophetic utterance as
well as through the stories they were told of the life of Jesus. It may all
sound frustratingly vague. They, like we, would probably have like to have a
neat list of rules, all bound up in one slim volume, to which they could
effortlessly refer – that’s how the Bible ended up on that pedestal at the
Reformation. But the truth is that if we try to treat the Bible that way we
have to ignore its complexities, read only those verses that suit us, and when
we do that, we lose its richness too. The only measuring stick the early church
had to determine whether they were hearing God’s word, God’s guidance for their
lives, was the measuring stick of love. Did what they were hearing build love and
draw them together, or did it bring hatred and stir up division?
I’m glad that here at Seal there are so many ways in which
we can encounter this precious book, brought to us at so great a cost by those
Reformation translators. But I hope that we’ll always have the courage to bring
our own brains and hearts to it as we read it and hear it. It’s only when we do
that the Word incarnate can speak through the words on these pages. It’s only
when we do that that God can come to dwell richly in us and in our community
bringing us his life, his love and his peace.
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment