Reformation Sunday

             It’s 1:08 AM, I was in class for 9 hours and drove over 3 hours, therefore I’m going to keep this brief (I hope). Today being October 31, 2010, I decided to go to Christianity Today’s website and get an article on the Reformation. For those of you who are unaware, today is the day we celebrate/remember Martin Luther’s 95 Theses being posted in Wittenberg. Instead, I found one article on why the devil should get Halloween and several political issues.

            One of the troubling things for me is that we are completely unaware or do not care about our history. We care so much about our new fads and which pastors are popular but we are forgetting the roots of where we come from. What are we to pass on to our children and congregation members if we do not know who we are ourselves?

            This complete lack of respect for the saints who have gone before us is not only a stumbling block for me but it causes me to worry about the future of the Protestant Church. If we are not aware of our history, we are going to be so immersed in the idea that we belong to our denominations rather than the whole body of God. Our ecclesiology will begin to be weakened because we no longer remember that we were one catholic church before the split which Luther never intended. We will look at churches as Y’all vs. Us rather than getting together and loving one another, regardless of our differences.

            How big is your view of the body of God? Is it the 100 or 5000 people in your own church building? Or does it encompass ALL of brothers and sisters, including those who belong to the Roman Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodox Church? I just ask that when you read your Bibles, look for the emphasis of being a unified body of believers, even among Jews and Gentiles.

Ancient Future Worship

        What is worship? I think when most of us are asked this question, the first thing that comes to mind is music and dancing. However, I feel that this is a very shallow answer and lacks much theological depth. In Robert Webber’s book, Ancient-Future Worship, he goes into the idea that worship DOES God’s story. What he means by this concept is that we are to remember God’s redemptive actions in the past, anticipate the eschaton and have the connection of the two manifest in the present.

        Imagine yourself at the age of 80, sitting next to the fireplace with a cup of coffee with your husband/wife of 50 years. As you sit there, you begin to remind yourself of all the great experiences you two had together. You especially remember all the times when they came to your side when you were in need of company and help. Similarly, worship is to do the same thing. We are reminded of the many stories in the Bible of when God came to the rescue of His people (The Exodus, David vs. Goliath, Samson, Gideon, etc.). We ultimately see God’s greatest act in salvation through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

 Going a little further, we see that Jesus’ message and job in the Synoptic Gospels (Matt. Mk. Lk.) was to announce the breaking-in of the Kingdom of God. When we read the Bible, you can’t help but to notice that there is an understanding of God’s Kingdom already being here but it has yet to be fully realized. We are anticipating that day when Christ comes back and fully ushers in the Kingdom on Earth (“Your Kingdom come, Your will be done, on EARTH as it is in Heaven”). We are awaiting to be back in the Garden, where we are fully in the presence of God. It is like a long pregnancy, where you have gone through much of the work in keeping your baby healthy but you still are looking to the day when they are finally born and with you.

 So what does this look like in our context today? Webber states that proper worship connects the past with the future. In our own worship, we are to be reminded week in and week out that we have been saved out of sin’s grasp. However, we must be sober-minded and not forget that the work is not yet done. We live in anticipation for Christ’s return, when he will redeem all of creation.

 The fear is that when we over-realize the eschaton, we celebrate too much and forget the fact that sin and pain are in this world. We forget out responsibility of helping the poor and preaching the Gospel. If our realization of the Kingdom being here is too low, we get weary of the life we are to live and we become like the whiny Israel in the desert; we lose hope. We are in need of understanding what it means to live with both aspects in life.

 What we must do then in response to this understanding is to take seriously the preaching of the Word and be very mindful of the right administration of the sacraments (Baptism and Eucharist). As we “act out” our redemptive history and our fully realized future redemption, we remind ourselves that we are living for a good God who has all things under His control.