(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Reforming the
Reformed”, originally shared on November 11, 2025. It was the 381st video for our YouTube Channel, Streams
of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my
wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
One day bothered me, and it bothered me for
a few days. Another day made all of us new, and it made us new forever. Today
we’re going to find out what they both have to do with the Reformation,
Halloween and the current administration.
It’s been said that every generation gets the government it deserves. I
hope that’s not true but, as many have pointed out, our country has been
getting exactly what was promised and what the majority of voters, through our
electoral college system, voted for in the last election.
However, I
think that there is a growing number of those voters who are not opposed to the
goals of this administration, but who are shocked by the inept, bullying
methods, the lies, the arrogance, and the blatant empire building, who hope
that a reformation will come to this administration of reformers.
We are only
nine months into it, and time already does not seem to be on the current
administration’s side. We all experience the passage of time, and I wonder if
that passage of time bothers anyone in power today.
I’ve had many
birthdays. Only one bothered me, and it wasn’t even actually a birthday. It was
the day I realized that I was 33 and 1/3 years old. That’s one third of a
century!
That bothered
me. Not when I was 25, or 50, or even 75 years old, just being one third of
a century bothered me. It seemed to me that a lot of time had passed.
Today is
Reformation Sunday in Lutheran Churches all over the world. It’s the 508th
anniversary of the beginning of the Reformation. That’s over half of a
millennium! More than 77 million Lutherans will celebrate it, but I don’t
think that it will bother any of us.
Reformation Sunday
is celebrated the Sunday before Reformation Day.
Reformation Day is
always October 31st, the day in 1517 when Martin Luther began the
movement to reform the Roman Catholic Church of his time by nailing 95 theses,
or statements for academic debate, regarding the corruption of the Church to
the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, Germany.
Luther expresses his fundamental beliefs in
the Lutheran seal. Luther argued for the restoration of the Good news that is
it the gift of Christ on the cross that has given me life transformation in my
heart, giving me the joy, comfort and peace that the world cannot give through
the gift of faith, the beginning of the joy that has begun in me, leading to
eternal life in heaven.
This was not an act of
vandalism. The church door was a public bulletin board, and public notices were
routinely nailed on it.
Was there anything significant about October 31st that Luther chose that day to nail the 95 Theses to the church door? Why yes, there was. And it’s
related to Halloween.
All Saints Day is on November 1st.
It’s a day to celebrate all the Saints. All Saints Sunday is the first
Sunday after All Saints Day, so we’ll be celebrating it next Sunday and, as a
bonus, we’ll get more morning light for our worship service if you
remember to set your clocks back one hour. 😊
A worship service was scheduled for the
night before All Saints Day, and Luther knew that the Castle church in Wittenburg, Germany, would be packed.
His challenge to the Catholic Church for an open debate would be seen by a lot
of people!
But when Luther posted his 95 theses, the
reaction was way beyond what he expected. It set into motion events that
changed the world.
Reformation Sunday, today, is a celebration
of our freedom. Luther recovered the Gospel, the promise that we are set free from sin,
death and the power of the devil by God.
There won’t be any costumes or lawn decorations today, no specially themed movies or TV
shows or parties. Just a celebration of the recovery of the good news. It is a
celebration of our born-again day.
I don’t think I’m exaggerating or even engaging in a bit of Lutheran
chauvinism when I say that we are
celebrating events that changed all our lives, everyone in the world who has
lived since October 31st, 1517.
A few years ago, the History
Channel asked its viewers for their opinions of who were the most influential persons of the past 1,000 years. Martin Luther was
second. Guttenberg and the invention of the printing press was first, and it’s interesting that they both
happened at about the same time.
Martin Luther protested the abuses of the
Roman Catholic church of his day, and he was called a “protestant” for
doing it. It wasn’t a very nice thing to call somebody then. He was the first
protestant. All other protestant churches followed Martin Luther’s witness.
Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr. was born
Michael King, and named his son Michael King, Jr. But when the Senior Rev. King
traveled to Germany for a Baptist church conference in 1934, he was so
impressed with the legacy of Martin Luther that he changed his name to Rev.
Martin Luther King, Sr. and his five-year-old son’s to Martin Luther King, Jr.
Today, if you say that you are a Lutheran,
many people will respond, “Oh yeah, Martin Luther King, Jr. I’ve heard of him”.
So, this is a good time to refresh peoples’ awareness of who is who. 😊 Who was Martin Luther?
Martin Luther had been a young man on the move in the 16th century. His father wanted him to
be a lawyer and to be rich, and that’s where young Martin was heading.
Then, Luther was walking across a field one day when he got caught in a lightening
storm. He prayed to his saint, Saint Anne, as a good Catholic young man would,
and said that if she saved him from the storm that he would show his gratitude
by becoming a monk.
He was not hurt and, much to
his father’s chagrin, he became an Augustinian monk.
The more he studied the
scriptures, however, the more Luther became absolutely convinced that he was a sinner and that he was going
to hell. Even when he spent an entire day praying, going to Mass and reading
the Bible and came to the end of the day feeling good that at least he could
say that he had spent one day without sinning, he realized that he had committed the sin of Pride.
His superiors sent him to teach
the Bible at the University of Wittenberg, because teaching something is a very
good way to understand it. 😊
And in his preparation, Martin Luther discovered a verse where the Roman Catholic Church’s Latin vulgate version had translated from the original Greek the word “metanoia” (“to turn around” or “to repent”) into the Latin word “poenitentia” (“to do penance”). That is, the Roman Catholic
Church, the Church in the West, was teaching that you could get into heaven by
doing good works, and not by repentance and faith that then produces
good works.
Doing penance meant you could
do good stuff in this life to make up for the bad stuff.
The Church at this time was
raising money to build St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, and financial
contributions to it would be considered a good work that would buy you an
indulgence.
Indulgences were a written promise that you could buy from the Church,
for a contribution, to get time off from purgatory for yourself or even
for a loved one (‘cause you wouldn’t want Grandma to be in purgatory, would
you?) that the Church had figured was a
place for those who weren’t bad enough for hell, but weren’t good enough to be in heaven. Purgatory was a place where you could
serve time to work off the penalty for your sins. The Church said that the
pope could decide who could get out of purgatory.
Luther argued that the sale of indulgences
was in conflict with the fundamental teaching of scripture that we are put
right with God through faith, through a gift of God’s grace. Furthermore,
Luther taught that purgatory wasn’t in the Bible and didn’t exist. Every
penalty for sin has been fully paid by Jesus on the cross. But if purgatory did
exist, Luther asked, why didn’t the pope let everybody out from pure Christian
compassion and not for money.
Luther drew his beliefs from texts like in
Paul’s letter to the church at Rome, in Romans 1:16-17,
16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it
is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first
and also to the Greek. 17 For in it the
righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written,
“The one who is righteous will live by faith.”
And Paul’s letter to the church at Ephesus,
in Ephesians 2:8-9,
8 For by grace you have been saved
through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— 9 not
the result of works, so that no one may boast.
And all of this is related to Halloween, a
holiday that’s coming up on Friday, 5 days from today, a holiday that has
nothing at all to do with how it is celebrated today.
The gospel reading that is being shared in
the vast majority of churches throughout the world today is John 8:31-36,
and it tells a lot about what Halloween is really about.
In John chapter
8, starting with the 31st verse, we read
31 Then Jesus said to the Jews who had
believed in him, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; 32 and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you
free.”
Did Jesus say, “the
truth will make you free”? It’s a phrase often thrown up in Christian’s faces
to support some non-Christian’s personal cause. It’s a way to say that what
they believe is the truth and Christians better get with the program because
Jesus said, “the truth will make you free”. Right? But did Jesus say
that?
Jesus did say it,
but not in the way most people think it means.
Jesus says, “the truth will make you free”
at the beginning of this week’s Gospel text. But those words are the end of
what begins with a great big “If”: “If you continue in my word.”
What will happen then? “you are truly my
disciples; 32 and
you will know the truth, and the truth will
make you free.”
Luther sought
to tell the truth and it was dangerous. As George Orwell said, “In times of
universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.’
What is the
truth? Jesus. We see, in John 14:6,
6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and
the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
The customs of
our celebration of Halloween are rooted in the beliefs of a time in Europe when
people who had been saved by Jesus on the cross were moving out of paganism and
were seeing the world with a Christian worldview instead.
Pagans had
been holding rites at the end of summer to appease the lord of death and evil
spirits. Christians were redefining those rites in a festival of life. Pagans
dressing up as evil spirits to disguise themselves and hide from them was then
becoming Christians dressing up as evil spirits to mock them.
You know those
round glowing things above the heads of certain people in Christian art? That’s
right, “halo’s”. They are there to show that the person under them is a saint,
or holy, or hallowed, as in “hallowed be thy name”.
All Saints Day
was called All Hallows Day in those times. The night before that day was All
Hallows Eve. It was shortened over time to Halloween.
People during
this time in the Middle Ages believed that the forces that defy God were
allowed to come out on the night before All Saints Day to scare Christians.
Christians
would dress up to mock them, to show that they had nothing to fear from them,
and to pretend-scare each other.
Those forces
were then required to return to whatever hole they came from at midnight,
because that was the beginning of All Saints Day.
They were
mocked in those days. Today, in our secular society, people seem to celebrate
them, pretending that scary things are fun. Yet some of those same people are
frightened, especially when left alone.
People in our
times decorate their lawns, they invest in elaborate costumes, they go to
horror movies and torture houses. Terror has become entertainment. They spend
an enormous amount of money on the decorations, the parties, the costumes,
candy, greeting cards, and so on. In fact, Americans will spend a record 13.1 billion
dollars this year, a 12.93% increase from last year’s 11.6 billion dollars on
Halloween.
Christmas
season spending is over 18 times more than that, at 242 billion dollars, but
very little of Christmas spending is done for a specifically Christian purpose
anymore.
Why do we
spend many billions of dollars celebrating Halloween? Ironically, I think that
many adults in our times are comforted by this devilish terror. They think that
if they invented it, it must not be real. If everyone around them seems to be
enjoying torture and death, superstition and decay, evil forces and crushing
despair, it must be OK to not mock them but to celebrate them as harmless
entertainment.
This is a form
of delusion in which our current culture finds itself. Author C.S. Lewis once
said, “There are two equal and opposite errors into
which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their
existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy
interest in them.” Our current culture is saying that they don’t believe any of
it, good and bad.
Our
response is that the forces that defy God have no power over us.
Our Gospel reading for today from John 8
concludes, starting with the 33rd verse,
33 They answered him, “We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves
to anyone. What do you mean by saying, ‘You will be made free’?”
34 Jesus answered them, “Very truly, I tell you, everyone who commits sin
is a slave to sin. 35 The slave does not have a
permanent place in the household; the son has a place there forever. 36 So
if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.
On October 31, 1517, Martin
Luther nailed 95 theses (plural of thesis, as when a Ph.D. Student proposes an
original idea, or thesis, that he/she must successfully defend in order to qualify for his/her degree) to the doors of the church to argue against
indulgences.
He didn’t want to leave the
Catholic church and he didn’t.
He wanted to reform it. He wanted to debate the idea of indulgences. The
Church, particularly the pope, who Luther saw as unnecessary, did not want to
hear it.
Under trial for heresy, the
punishment could have included excommunication, imprisonment, torture, and
death, but Luther didn’t flinch.
At the end of one of his
trials, in Worms, Germany, Luther was being tried before the head of the government, the
Holy Roman emperor, and was accused of being vague in his defense of his written
works. Luther replied,
“Since then your serene Majesty and your Lordships seek a simple answer, I will give it in this
manner, neither horned nor toothed. Unless I am convinced by the testimony of
the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in
councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and
contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot
and I will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go
against conscience. May God help me. Amen."
“My conscience is captive to the Word of
God.” “It is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.” That was
Luther’s defense, and ours.
The Bible is our only source and norm for
human life. It forms us and it speaks to us through the Holy Spirit, and
everything in the Bible points to Jesus.
Luther’s argument may seem mild
today, but to those hearing it, or hearing of it, it was mind-blowing.
Luther lived when the Church
and its teaching were everything. One of its teachings, in a time when the
Church and the State were almost indistinguishable, was that both the pope and
the emperor were put in their positions by God.
To go against either one was
not to enter into a dialogue over a reasonable disagreement, but, in the minds
of many people, to go against God.
It was seen as a revolutionary act.
I think that we can draw a straight line from Luther’s idea that the individual is
responsible for acting on his or her own conscience, not the from the dictates
of those in authority, to the idea of democracy in the West.
Luther was convicted by the Church and declared a
heretic, and by the Holy Roman Empire and declared an outlaw. At one time, the pope declared that anyone who murdered Luther would not
be committing a sin.
Luther came along at the right
time, though. The German princes were promoting nationalism, a breaking-away
from the Holy Roman Empire, so they protected Luther. They figured that
anything that weakened the Roman church would weaken the Roman empire.
And, the printing press had
just been invented. Luther’s 95 theses were printed in bulk and in two weeks
were being read in Spain! That was viral media in those days. Luther later published such
a mountain of work that there are now 61 volumes of “Luther’s Works” published
in English, with more releases planned through at least 2026
And, in the course of the
Reformation, Luther brought in revolutions.
Does your congregation sing
during worship? Yes. Thank Martin Luther. He brought in congregational singing,
which had previously been done by monks.
He declared the freedom of priests to marry, something for which Sally
and I are grateful.
Can you read the Bible? Luther translated the Bible into German, the language of the people, and for
the first time in 1,000 years, people could read the Bible in their own
language, not Latin, the language of the educated which were at the time pretty
much only priests. Principles of translation he invented are still in use
today.
Luther recovered the Biblical good news of
salvation by faith alone, through grace alone (not by our efforts), revealed by
the Bible alone and not by any human authority.
Luther taught that God ruled the world
through two kingdoms, the kingdom of this world so that governments are to be
measured by what God is calling them to do, and through the Kingdom of God at
work in the Church, to be measured by what God is calling it to do.
Luther taught that every form of legitimate
work had value and dignity, that every person has a vocation, a calling, and
that none is holier or more valued than another.
Luther even reformed beer. The Roman
Catholic Church taxed the herbs and botanicals that were being used to brew
beer, and some people in Germany had already been using hops in protest. Luther
promoted the use of hops as a superior alternative and so contributed to the
way beer tastes and is preserved today.
Today we say that the Church is always reforming. It is in no less need of reformation today than
it was in 1517. It constantly needs to be called to scripture alone as the only
source of our belief and conduct, to teach salvation through faith alone
through God’s grace alone.
So this week, I recommend that we spend some
time in “Reform School”. This is a good week to read a book or do an online
search for something about the Reformation and what it has given to us and to
the world. Even better, in the spirit of the Reformation, spend some time
reading the Bible. And consider what in the Church needs reforming today.
Consider what
it means for us to say, “my conscience is captive to the Word of God” and resolve to live by it.
Many of us will consider the need of our own
denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, to be reformed, based
on these same God-given principles.
The Holy
Spirit continues to open our hearts to the Word of God. It was poured out on
the Day of Pentecost, over 2025 years ago, and none of us was bothered by that.
We celebrate it! It was the birthday of the Christian Church.
It reminds us that we were set free from
sin, death, and from all the forces that defy God and restored to a living
relationship with the one true living God for which we were created, and then
re-created by Jesus, on the cross, through faith.
Jesus has set us free, so we are free
indeed! Celebrate it and, most
importantly, live it.
Reform the reformed.
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