REFORMATION DAY!

I cannot post this picture enough. I wonder if it looks anything like him. So lets take a little break from politics today and enjoy the day.







Soooo...Reformation Day. Reformation for Lutherans is kind of like Mardi Gras is for drunks and losers. We can get lost in it. Even without beads and floats and lots of booze. My wife loves Reformation. I have a complicated relationship with it but we come from a shared heritage of Lutheran grade schools where our tutelage was under a bunch of semi-psychotic, German Lutheran women and a couple of men and a few Pastors. All of these people were products of the various "Concordia" Universities, normally from River Forest in Chicago or from some back water place in Nebraska. They were devout people. Christian people...deeply troubled people.

Each year when the rest of the world and all of our friends were getting psyched up for Halloween we would be in dark classrooms watching film strips (does anyone remember film strips?) or black and white movies on a projector (these projectors were about he same size as a 350 V-8 engine and were rolled around on audio visual carts and had a light bulb in them that you could easily heat a room with). The film strips all showed Luther with his Monks haircut. His hard child hood (abuse implied but never confirmed) his father pressuring him to go into the law but being caught under a large tree in a Lightning storm where Luther cries out "St. Anne save me! I will become a monk." And so the die was cast.

Luther is obviously very full of himself and a good talker and makes some friends in high places. In the mean time the Pope and his people are busy building St. peters cathedral and it is badly over budget and they are taxing the hell out of everyone, including some German nobles. Now the way we learned it they befriended Luther and he began to question the papacy, the Priesthood being intercessors and of course the selling of indulgences to gain favor with God and get yourself or a loved one out of purgatory and into heaven. I know enough now to understand that is our version of history. Now my best guess is that those germans were sick to death of their Italian brethren calling shots and invoking the Holy See whenever they complained. This Luther fellow was their ticket out...oh and his theology was good to.

So Luthger nails his 95 Theses to the door of the Cathedral in Wittenberg. The Church comes after him. He is hidden and protected and ultimately the catholic church loses a lot of folks. Calvin and Henry the 8th got busy and the printing press helped spread the word. The Catholic Church which had guarded the Bible as something to only be understood by the learned stood by helplessly like the record companies did when music started being free on the internet. the Protestant church in all of it's balkanized glory, moved off on 100 new paths. He posted his Theses on October 31, All Saints Day.

Anyway, we love reformation. being a Lutheran has given me a special understanding of God's Grace as it relates to all of us but especially to me. The message of the Lutherans through reformation can be summed up as, we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, because Christ died for us on the cross, which is declared through the Scriptures alone. I have always shortened it to the fact that someone like me can be saved through God's Grace and God's Grace alone. I can do nothing towards my own salvation. It has all been done for me.

So we love Reformation. We sing "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" in all of it's teutonic stomp. We sing it poorly. We sing it with Spirit. Maybe somewhere Luther smiles.