Reformation Sunday

Rom 3:19-28; Psa 46; John 8:31-36; Jeremiah 31:31-34

This is Reformation Sunday, always the last Sunday in October, and which commemorates an event that is said to have begun the Protestant Reformation – one of the most significant changes in world history. This is a festival commemorating Martin Luther’s posting of the Ninety-five Theses on the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, a summary of the abuses of the church of his time. At the heart of the reform movement was the good news that through faith God graciously sets us free from the ultimate power of sin and death. It is God’s doing, because we are incapable of doing it ourselves.

One of the texts we read to help celebrate and reveal this movement of freedom in God’s grace is from Jeremiah 31, the only Old Testament text of its kind. Before we read it, let’s set the stage:

Israel, the nation God had created centuries before to reveal God to the nations of the world, had time and time again broken its legal covenant – its contract – with God. This time they had become so corrupt, so godless, that when their nation was overrun by Babylon and the citizens (including Jeremiah) were taken into captivity, they felt it was a result of their turning away from God. They were a people with no hope. They were captives in a foreign land, lost, alone, forsaken, abandoned. Their nation, their temple, no longer existed. Time and time again, God had renewed them, restored them, started over with them, and every time, they wound up unable to keep their part of the agreement. They were incapable of keeping the law – of living in a full relationship with God.

God went above and beyond the agreement in giving Israel new chances – over and over again. But Israel simply couldn’t keep up their end of the deal. The world looked at them and didn’t see a gracious God, instead they saw a nation living like the pagans in the rest of the world.

So now they’re taken prisoner. Living in captivity in a foreign land where God isn’t known at all – and where they are not allowed to worship, or even speak of God.

It’s in this situation of utter hopelessness and failure that God gives a special word to Jeremiah, “The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. {32} It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt--a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the LORD. {33} But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. {34} No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

This is totally new! The covenant will no longer be dependent on the people’s ability to keep the law. It will no longer be a matter of people’s behavior – how good they are or how obedient they are or how much they love God or serve others. Righteousness of God won’t be something outside of them, which they have to strive to reach, written down somewhere. Instead, God will put God’s own righteousness inside of them. It will be their new identity. “’The days are surely coming’, says the Lord.”

And the days have begun. 2000 years ago this new covenant entered the world as God the Son became human, one named Jesus. This agreement is not based on our ability to be righteous, but on God’s ability to enter into our unrighteousness and overpower it.

As terrific as this news is, humans have continued to try to achieve their own righteousness outside of this relationship with God – to make and keep laws that define who’s in with God and who’s out. We still live as if a relationship with God were dependent on our behavior and attitudes.

Five hundred years ago, this corruption of the new covenant in Christ had reached a peak. Christians of the day not only taught that forgiveness and holiness had to be earned by us, but that they could be bought with money. And a young monk, Martin Luther, rediscovered the scriptural witness beginning in Jeremiah 31 that God was going to take care of our relationship with him. In Jesus, our ability to live according to certain external standards aren’t the issue, but God’s entering our brokenness and lifting us up into a relationship with him – a relationship that makes us whole, new, complete. And this by grace through faith.

This is what God is continuing to do: restore the whole undeserving, broken, incapable world. Bring it to its intended righteousness. The days are here, but the days are still coming. It’s begun, but it isn’t completed.

We celebrate the Protestant Reformation, but we have to remember that God continues to reform. God’s work isn’t done. In Christ God offers a new identity to anyone, to everyone. God keeps the covenant, God makes us righteous, God makes us complete, whole, reforms us to be the way we were created to be. Our righteousness is no longer dependent on how well we keep the rules, or how firmly we believe, or religious our practices are.

“The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. . . I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. . . they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.”

The good news of Reformation Sunday is that the new covenant of whole life, of new life, of real life has been made available to us in Christ. Know that today you are forgiven everything. Because it’s not about what we do, but who God is. Not what we’re doing, but what God is doing. Let God be God, live a new life.