When I was visiting seminaries during my senior year of college, I took a train over Reformation Day weekend to visit the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, and heard this first reading from Jeremiah read during morning chapel, after having just heard it in daily prayer on my university campus. There was a difference, though - in college, the reading went: “a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord.” At the seminary chapel the reader said: “a covenant that they broke, though I was married to them, says the Lord.”
I was stunned. I understood what they were trying to do at the seminary, be all gender-inclusive and such, but the word ‘husband,’ it just has so much more to it. Especially in light of these vineyard stories we’ve heard of late, the word husband brings up images of husbandry, of the arts of raising up a garden or animal to their very best, for show and awards at the fair. Husbandry takes a particular attention to detail, a care for the best of the whole, a devotion.
But all through college, too, we switched up gendered language for God. It honestly drove me crazy for a very long time. I was introduced to this idea in high school, of picturing God as a Father sending his son to war, or as a mother sending her son to war. In college we did this thing where God occasionally had her gender erased so that there weren’t any pronouns at all. “In the beginning, when God was creating the heavens and the earth, God made humankind in God’s own image, male and female God created them…” Neither ‘he’ nor ‘she,’ and it drove me up a wall.
This isn’t a lecture on gender, though. No, the male or female debate is just one way of many that we put God in a box. That we think we know who we’re dealing with and how the great game works, and who wins, and how, and at what price. Today being Reformation Sunday, I’m going especially to use Martin Luther as an example of where that can get us: Luther in his youth and early career knew that God was vengeful and angry, full of wrath and demanding purity from any who would dare to ask admittance into heaven. Whether that meant God was like the old image of ‘a woman scorned’ or an angry Zeus-like character who threw thunderbolts, it was a vengeful God who frightened Luther into hours spent in confession and cycles of self-abasement and dreadful fear. Everywhere Luther turned he found a God who was angry, disappointed, condemning, and so holy that nowhere could Luther ever have hope to come near for grace and forgiveness.
But then, as the story goes, Luther was studying the Word of God while taking care of some very human needs, and he was grabbed by the sudden reality of Grace in a way that had not spoken to him before. Rather than finding himself never good enough, never righteous enough, never pure enough, which had driven him to such despair, he found in the Scriptures the free gift of Christ, the reality of forgiveness, and his freedom.
Suddenly Luther’s entire experience of God was turned on its head. Where before his religion had been running on fear, working himself raw to be good enough for God’s love and mercy, when in time of plague and poverty it seemed logical to think God was punishing the world for abject sinfulness, in meeting the living Christ, Luther found the heart and soul of his life-giving faith. No more fear of a vengeful God. No more ‘woman scorned’ or ‘firey thunderbolt’, God was suddenly gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love!
Not that God had actually been anything else before, but in Luther’s experience, in his anxious nights awake and the way he thought of humanity compared to God, this was a revelation.
It was a sort of ‘coming out,’ as someone who might fully expect to be shunned and shamed but instead found a welcome with open arms and an equal place at the Table. It was a liberal community actually fully welcoming a conservative. It was Jacob expecting to fight or flee from Esau when they reunited, but being embraced instead by this brother whom he had cheated so long ago.
See, Reformation Sunday is the celebration of the way the Holy Spirit continues to surprise us. It is a conversion story that keeps on happening to all of us, a welcome that startles and unsettles us, a truth about a God who sets us free. This is not a historic remembrance of a moment that was once long ago and is done and finished and only part of the history books. It is a celebration of the continuing work of God making God’s Self known to us in whatever way that brings us most alive.
“The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant… I will be their God and they will be my people… I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more.”
Two years after I visited LSTC as a college student, I entered school there, and on Reformation Day found myself visiting a local Catholic parish with an amazing liturgy, where we acknowledged our historical divide and shared worship together. After that service of worship I wrote an article for the seminary weekly, where I mentioned ‘those of us who follow in Luther’s footsteps.’ Oh, I was only a first-year student at the time, but was still soundly reminded by one of the wiser, more experienced senior “we don’t follow Luther, we follow Jesus!” Of course she was right. We may call ourselves Lutheran, but Luther didn’t save us. Luther wasn’t God in the flesh among us. He was a vessel, a servant, a saint among saints who struggled with daily life and faith and found a gracious God where for too long he had only experienced grief over his own failings. May we, also, find that gracious God among us, doing a new thing, writing love on our hearts, and freedom. Because God is among us, gracious and merciful, continuing to re-form, to re-shape our lives and the world around us by the powerful grace and truth of our reconciliation in Christ Jesus.
Thanks be to God.
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