From October 31, 2014

Today is one of my favorite days of the year! Yes, for the vast majority of the country it is simply Halloween, a night to dress up, go to parties, and get candy. I gave up the costumes some time ago, and I buy my own candy now. However, as a pastor I love the day for very different reasons than I did as an elementary school age boy.

Today is the day when Martin Luther decided he had had enough and wanted to talk to someone about what was going on within his church, the Roman Catholic Church. He loved it and wanted to preserve it. He wanted it to be true to its calling. He wanted it to be faithful to the Gospel.
Dr. Luther asked for a debate. He wrote out 95 points of concern he had with his church and where he thought it had departed from the Gospel. It was 492 years ago that he took his challenge and posted it on the door of the church in Wittenberg. It was a bold move because he was declaring that he was out of step with the entire church. He was not declaring his intention to break away from the church, but he was being very clear as to what he thought he needed to do and to teach as a pastor/priest in his community.

So, began one of the central acts of the Reformation. Dr. Luther was not the first. In fact, his inspiration came from the letters of John Huss who had been burned as a heretic 115 years before Luther became so bold to nail his own concerns to the church door. For his efforts, he was eventually branded as a heretic himself, and, probably, would have met the same fate as Huss if had not developed a very powerful ally in Frederick III, Elector of Saxony. Fredrick was both an avid collector of relics and a supporter of modern scholarship. He was educated at an Augustinian monastery and made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. He collected religious relics—19,013 of them, in fact, by the year 1520—with the wish that Wittenberg, as a depository of sacred items, would become the Rome of Germany. He had such rarities (it was claimed) as four hairs from the Virgin Mary, a strand of Jesus’ beard, and a piece of the bread eaten at the Last Supper.

The pious Frederick also founded the University of Wittenberg. After inviting Luther to teach there, he found himself having to protect the troublesome professor of Bible.

When in 1518 Luther was summoned to Rome for a hearing, Frederick intervened and arranged for the meeting to take place on safer German soil. And after the Diet of Worms placed the reformer under an imperial ban, Frederick found him a hiding place at his castle, the Wartburg.

Today we remember the Reformation and continue its tradition of the primacy of Scripture over tradition. We commend ourselves to the task of study, prayer, and obedience to the Holy Spirit over the traditions of councils and denominations. Do something radical today – read your Bible!

Pastor Craig