Finding Treasure
A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY
by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor • Copyright 2017
Reformation Day • October 29, 2017
Click below to hear the sermon preached
What does it cost to get in? I guess we’ve all asked that somewhere, sometime. How much are the tickets? There’s some connection between cost and value we calculate. When one of the Planet of the Apes movies was $12 a few months ago, it wasn’t worth it to me; when it was $5 at the Madison Theater, it was. Jacquelyn and I spend lots of time about a 20 minute walk from one of the best aquariums in the country. We’ve never been; it’s $30 and neither of us wants to spend that much to look at fish that you can’t eat. There are less tangible tickets too. What does it cost to have a happy marriage? I talk about that with couples sometimes; I explain it’s not a 50-50 situation, it’s 100%/100%. What does it cost to develop a church? Change: and not the sort in the bottom of your purse. What does it cost to live with God? What’s the ticket to heaven and where do you buy it? People have asked that question for centuries and 500 years this month it remember the answer and it seemed new.
Right from the beginning, Jesus’ followers tried to set up boundaries. When a crowd gathers to hear Jesus, the disciples advise Jesus to leave them; he tells the disciples to feed them. Someone does healings in his name, the disciples object; Jesus tells them to accept that person. The earliest Christian churches were consumed by the question of what to do about Gentile members: should they be circumcised? should they be required to keep kosher? Throughout the letters of Paul, we find these boundary questions, questions designed to create walls and different levels of Christians. To all of these, the apostle Paul says, nothing counts except faith in Jesus, nothing matters except loving Jesus, nothing matters except following Jesus.
We hear it in the part of Paul’s Romans we read today. Some Christians have been boasting about their spiritual credentials. Paul’s response is absolute.
For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith.
No distinction: no difference, all equal before God, in the love of God. Jesus Christ lived and died for all. And finally, the thing that makes this effective in us is our faith. In fact, as Paul goes on to say, we are justified with God, restored to God, through our faith.
Of course, Paul’s word wasn’t enough. The part of us that wants distinction, wants walls, kept building. Over the next centuries, Christians built a series of intricate walls that made many distinctions. They believed in power instead of grace and made the church into a bank. It’s a great advantage to say to people, “Your eternal salvation depends on what you give, what you do.” And that’s what they did. By the 1400’s, the church was actually selling indulgences, a sort of ticket to heaven.
That’s when a passionate monk named Martin Luther objected. Five hundred years ago this month, Luther publicly preached against the walls the church had erected and reminded them that salvation was by grace and justification by faith.
Over the next century, others joined him, including some like John Calvin, a French Protestant, who designed a new kind of church with the Bible at its center. English Protestants took this lesson back to England and refined it. They imagined a church as a covenanted group of equal Christians. They were our fathers and mothers in the faith and eventually this way of doing church would be called Congregationalism.
Still, the impulse to build walls continued. Congregationalists, who had been on the outside of the walls at their start, built them as well, trying to keep out Quakers and Baptists and others.
But the power of Jesus was irresistible and gradually many of those walls have come down. One of the great joys of my life and perhaps yours has been watching this process. I entered seminary in 1972, when women were still discouraged from training to be pastors; by the time I left, half the seminarians were women and today it’s unusual to have a clergy meeting without several women pastors present. I came into the ministry when gay marriage was almost unthinkable; today we rejoice when any couple invite us as a church to participate in witnessing a loving covenant.
This is our job, this is our role: to tear down the walls. Not every Christian communion has come as far in understanding there is no distinction in the love of God, so it is vital that we are here. We have a purpose, we have a plan: to be one place where no matter who you are, what you are, who you love, what you believe, you are welcome to come into the embrace of a corrugation inspired by the embrace of God. We want everyone to discover they are God’s treasure. Often when someone finds us, they are amazed at the openness of the welcome.
There is a reason the pews of so many churches are empty. It is because we were so busy building walls, we forgot to build up people. The true treasure of the open welcome of Jesus Christ is made concrete in the welcome you offer every day.
Today is Reformation day. In many pulpits, there will be a sermon about the past, one far more detailed and descriptive than the little sketch I offered. I kept the history short because I believe the real Reformation is in the future. I honor Luther’s work tearing down the walls; I honor the Pilgrims tearing down the walls. But I am inspired even more by the great future we have in making the promise of the Reformation come true.
The truth is, God loves us all. When we act like that and believe it, the walls come down and we are free. For just as Jesus said, the truth does set us free.
So today, this Reformation Day, is a moment not just to look back at the mighty fortress of Luther and Calvin and the heroes and heroines of Congregational history but forward. What walls remain? What are we doing that prevents people from fully experiencing God’s welcome here? How can we tear down those walls? What changes challenge us as we take our place in the dance of Reformation?
Robert Frost has a wonderful poem that imagines two neighbors rebuilding a stone wall.
It begins,
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it And spills the upper boulders in the sun, And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
[Robert Frost, Mending Wall]
They are rebuilding the wall because, as the neighbor remarks, “good fences make good neighbors”. Today, all over the world, Protestant congregations will mark the 500th Anniversary of the Protestant Reformation by singing a hymn to walls, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, Martin Luther’s song of triumph, perhaps written while he himself hid behind the walls of a German castle.
So with all this talk of walls, it’s an important moment to say: the work of Jesus Christ is to tear down walls and open gates and invite all of us to fulfill our original purpose: living together as God’s children, praising God’s creative love.