It’s not as if, before the time of Martin Luther, there had been no inkling that something had gone wrong, that the church needed to get back to the basics, clear out the clutter of the teachings and rituals of men.  The motto that emerged, beside the solas—the “onlys”: the Word of God only, Christ only, grace only, faith only—besides those, the motto that emerged from the Reformation was “the Church reformed, always being reformed, according to the Word of God.”  Kind of a mouthful.  Reformed according to the Word of God, only according to the Word of God.  Any other standard was the ways and wishes of men, bringing God’s Word in line with the wishes, will, and way of men.  That’s old, very old.  Beloved, God’s Word comes to us to bring our wishes, wills, and way in line with God’s.  That reformation is ongoing, continual, because the need is always there.

We all have some sense of what a Fundamentalist is, but we may not know about the controversy that gave rise to the term.  The 1600s in Europe was marked by lengthy, savage, bloody religious conflict.  The Enlightenment of the 1700s was at least in part a strong reaction against that violence: reason, and a religion of reason, would triumph over our benighted condition.  It wasn’t as if warfare ceased, though: the excuses changed; the fighting continued.  By the early 1800s, the independent spirit of the 1700s had caused a revolution in the study of the Bible.  The result was that highly intelligent, eminently reasonable people began to question the reliability and authority of God’s Word: progress!

At the same time, the plight of urban, industrial workers and their families began to grab the urgent attention of people who were deeply troubled by the conditions under which such people lived and worked.  How’d you like to be a coal miner in 1885?  A seamstress in a New York sweat shop, circa 1895?  Or a child laborer?  In those decades, a movement arose called the Social Gospel.  Its aim was to transform society according to what its proponents regarded as Christian concern and compassion for the poor.  Scripture is plain: God wants all His people to have special compassion for the poor.  There are differences of opinion about how best to do that.  One way that has remained popular among some pastors is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.  Some find it rather more congenial to afflict the comfortable than to comfort the afflicted.

As the supposed foundations of biblical authority shook and the misery of the masses swelled, there emerged a sort of Jesus-inspired crusade in certain segments of the church to transform the world according to a higher, enlightened thinking: the higher, enlightened thinking of men who now understood that things were in their hands.  Particularly over the past sixty years, mainline thinking has been that the church focusing upon the plight of the exploited, the marginalized, the oppressed, is most truly being the Church, living out its call in Christ.  The kingdom of justice, in our time.

Over the last century and more, what we may or may not think about miracles, the Virgin Birth, the full deity of Jesus, the Second Coming, and the trustworthiness and reliability of Scripture has taken a decided back seat to what was lifted up as the real call, the real work of the people of God: remaking the world for justice and equality—for Jesus, that is.  The so-called Modernists gravitated toward that aim, which was not exclusive to them.  The so-called Fundamentalists were not so ready to boldy go from the received foundations for the authority and reliability of Scripture.  The so-called Fundamentalists also acknowledged social ills, but they were not so ready to heed the Modernist imperative to remake society, nor Modernist prescriptions for doing so.  While fundamentalist and modernist began as terms describing a relationship to God’s Word, they have since morphed, along with everything else, it seems, into political categories.  The world will not allow us to transcend politics: the world demands we declare our loyalty to one party or another, you know: the Smart Ones of the Idiots.  God’s Word asks us to declare our loyalty to God.

It seems especially fitting that, on this Reformation Sunday, when we commemorate the Spirit of the Reformation—which I put to you is the Holy Spirit working His work of ongoing purification in the Church—I say it’s most fitting to recall what Jesus says about the priorities of the people of God.  Jesus is asked about the greatest commandment.  He gives his memorable answer.  The one who asked, an expert in the law, responds, “Well said, teacher” (12:32).  Indeed, to love God and neighbor “is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices” (12:33).  That was no small thing to say in the Temple in Jerusalem, high headquarters for the entire worship apparatus of the people of God: priests, sacrifices, and the experts in the law, with their venerable tradition of reasonings elaborating the law, interpreting and understanding the law: the human expertise that made the religion work.  It was as if God’s given way was never sufficient: it always required, and still requires, the addition of human rules, limits, exceptions, and re-imaginings.  God, plus.  God’s Word, plus.  God’s Word alone couldn’t possibly be enough, so it simply must be God’s Word plus our enlightened, expert words.

As we spend time in Scripture, we may be left with the impression that the Temple was like a great, holy slaughterhouse.  People brought animals, bought animals there, to be offered as sacrifices.  There was an awful lot of blood in the Temple, splashed, smeared, sprinkled.  I’m woozy when it comes to blood, so I don’t know that I could have been in the Temple very long without passing out.  All that slaughter and all that blood had one major significance: it was a very visual, palpable, visceral sign of the cost of sin and of God’s forgiveness of the sins of His people, the sins of anyone who would come to Him, confess, and make the sacrifice God appointed for reconciliation.  Forgiveness and blood were inseparable, beloved; let us always remember this, giving thanks to God in Jesus Christ.  But there was always a matter more fundamental than the blood: encountering God—encountering God in His holiness, in His justice, in His mercy, in His grace.  People came to get right with God; even more, they came to encounter God.  Over time, what they encountered was what men had built up between people and God: the teaching of men, the religion of human expertise, the dense strata of the administrative church.

To become clean before God, you must come clean with God—admit, confess your need, entire, complete and unavoidable.  Your need and your guilt: your guilt, yes, but also your pre-existing need, even apart from your guilt.  We were made for God, beloved, yet so many, all too many, do not live for Him, even today, and not just outside the church.  Still and always, by grace through the ongoing ministry of the Holy Spirit, in church, as the Church, we’re doing something about living for God, because God is doing something about it in us.

That expert in the law knew the Word of God.  He knew the words of Samuel: “To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams” (1 Sam 15:22).  He knew what the psalms sang: “My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; / a broken and contrite heart / you, God, will not despise” (Ps 51:16-17).  “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire— / but my ears you have opened— / burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not require [. . . .] I desire to do your will, my God; / your law is within my heart’” (Ps 40:6-8).  That expert in the Law remembered the wisdom of the proverb, “To do what is right and just / is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice” (Pr 21:3).  He remembered what God said through His prophets; through Isaiah: “These are the ones I look on with favor: / those who are humble and contrite in spirit, / and who tremble at my word” (Is 66:2); through Jeremiah, “when I brought your ancestors out of Egypt and spoke to them, I did not just give them commands about burnt offerings and sacrifices, but I gave them this command: Obey me, and I will be your God and you will be my people.  Walk in obedience to all I command you, that it may go well with you” (Jer 7:22-23).  That expert in the law remembered the Word of God through His prophet Hosea, “I desire mercy, not [animal] sacrifice, / and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings” (Hos 6:6).

Not rituals knocking on the door of holiness, but inward transformation, the disposition of the heart: God knocking on the door of our hearts—a changed heart; a God-ward heart, to use John Piper’s term.  Good deeds do not make a person good; kind words do not make a person kind.  God makes a person good, kind—holy—through making a change in the heart, by putting His law within our hearts, giving us a heart of flesh in place of that hardened heart of stone: willful, a heart self-satisfied in the conviction that to do something good means you are good and good with God.  The aim of the Reformation—the Word of God and only the Word of God—means to clear the way for the transformation of our world-directed, flesh-oriented hearts.  The Reformation is the ongoing work of the Spirit, weeding the garden of our souls.  Oh the tangles of venomous vines!

Jesus did not say that the greatest commandment was to love your neighbor as yourself.  That was second, like the first.  Like, not the same.  Love of neighbor is the fruit of the first love: to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.  Love for neighbor is not the same as love for God; it is not equivalent; it is no substitute.  The greatest love for our neighbor does not show itself in feeding our neighbor, in clothing him, or visiting her when she is sick or in prison; the greatest love for our neighbor is not in embracing one set of political predilections or another.  Politics will always try to harness religion—especially in our time, yet we of all people should know the source of our security and the guarantor of our prosperity.

To have compassion and concern and to put these into action is good, is blessed.  If a fellow brother or sister in Christ or any fellow human being lacks food, give; if he or she lacks shelter or clothing, give, even if at great personal cost—let us be resolved together to live into this blessed way!  Let’s start today!

The greatest love we can show our neighbor is to guide them to an encounter with God.  Declutter the way.  This is the heart of reformation.  Declutter the way.  We are each temples of the Holy Spirit dwelling within us.  This is comfort and refuge not only for us but also for our neighbor, believer and nonbeliever.  Bring the Word of God to your neighbor; be the Word in action for your neighbor.  The Reformation was and continues to be about getting the Word in us, the Word of God in and the words of men out, the ways of God in and the ways of men out, the kingdom of God in, and out with the kingdom of those repugnant Republicans, those laughable Libertarians, those idiotic Independents, those deplorable Democrats.  The Reformation is about blessed assurance, born not of the conviction of right actions but of the pursuit of right belief.  The hands do as heart and mind tell them.  From where, from what, from whom shall the heart learn?

The church is not immune to politics: the church is situated in the world.  The call of the Reformation is to have politics serve faith.  The bent of the world has always been to make faith serve politics—such happy accommodations and adjustments, so reasonable, so intelligent, so . . . enlightened. Nationally, our denomination has been quite the poster child for that.

Let love for neighbor flow from love for God.  Love for God is to love the Word of God by which God makes Himself known to us.  God’s Word is neither red nor blue, neither left nor right.  What some seem to find most palatable about Christian faith and living is the loving and helping others part, the social justice part, the afflicting the comfortable part.  There’s much encouragement for that out there, these days!  We can so focus on others that we overlook our personal walk with God, thinking we are being faithful, according to our own light, our own standard.  The aim of God’s Word, though, is to lead us to servant focus through concern for our personal walk with God.  The Reformation continually directs us to this walk because the Reformation continually puts the Word of God before us, as it continually works to clear away the clutter in our world-directed hearts.  Reformation continually knocks on the door, pleading with us to let the Word in.  God, give us Word-directed hearts!  Such the prayer of Reformation.

And to Jesus Christ, who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests of his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever.