Celebrating Nothing

Celebrating Nothing: Reflections on a Reformation Sunday Morning

The benefit, if not the glory, of Luther’s Reformation revolution, theologically, is usually told as a “works” versus “faith” competition for the prize of salvation, where “faith” wins out. Like most stories told, this is a simplification that is not entirely innocent in its protection of the Tellers. Certainly when all this all came down, there were Ecclesial Authority abuses, most notably the Indulgences, that preyed on the poor and illiterate and used as its foundational reasoning that people needed to sit up and fly right (“works”) in order to win, to earn, that place with God (salvation). So, to fight and defeat that notion that a person’s spiritual practices and/or ethical behaviors had any salvation truck with God, yes, the beast of “works” must be slain.

 To be fair though, the Roman Curia of the time (1500’s) was not doing anything different than all humanity has done from the beginning of time, and, I would argue, the Reforming Movement did subsequent to Luther in the “Synergistic Controversy” and other debates that produced the Formula of Concord in 1577. The Reforming Movement ended up practicing, if not also saying, in effect, “faith” is the new “work” that beats back and defeats and replaces “works” in the quest for salvation.

 The atrocity of the medieval Papacy was taking this human penchant for personal agency in relation(s) with divinity and wielding it with surgical precision in establishing rules and regulations and fees and services required in order to feed its enormous appetite for wealth, position and power. “Church Abuses” were certainly an issue and Luther and his fellow Reformers early on set out to disabuse Rome (see the 1530 Augsburg Confession’s Articles dedicated to such). But the explosion of grace that Luther brought to bear in such writings as his 1518 Heidelberg Disputation and 1525 Bondage of the Will was muffled if not extinguished when the 1580 Book of Concord paved the way for Orthodoxy in the Lutheran corner of the Reformation Churches that developed (see Calvin, Zwingli and others) to take hold.

 Radical grace, where all the legs for human contribution to a place at the divine table are uniformly and unequivocally and permanently cut off is simply too hard to take. “Faith” that wins out over “works” cannot mean that all of our activity, including our correctly held and honed beliefs, count for nothing. What happened in the 16th century Reformation circles continues to this day: “faith” becomes codified as propositional statements to be personally acquired or proactive caretaking of others to be personally displayed rather than the truth that blows the whole personal agency with God infrastructure to smithereens. The cry goes out, “but I have to at least believe don’t I ?!” And with any answer other than “no,” the battle is lost.

 And so, what about that “battle?” The so-called “Reformation Hymn” of “A Mighty Fortress” that we Lutherans so proudly sing on these Reformation Sundays speaks in warrior-like terms. Luther, its author, liked to speak of the battle of souls as one between the Devil and God. Regardless of whether one personified evil as Satan, certainly a battle does rage on in the human psyche and soul (and thus too spills out into our streets in injustices a million) but it is not a battle between Good and Bad. There is that battle, to be sure, but it’s not the battle of which Luther writes and we sing. It is rather the battle of God versus Good. If there is any devil prowling it’s the one who taps us on the shoulder and tempts us to be God. It is that devil that gets defeated by God. That is the victory won.

 But then, realize please, what when the smoke clears, what exactly we have left.  Nothing, save God.

 Nothing.

Nothing?

Nothing.

 And this is to be celebrated? Yes, but not by the faint of heart! Which is why we run away rather to our Conservative and Progressive corners of social policy and action and call those who disagree not simply wrong (which they in fact can be and often are when it comes to social and economic justice) but heretical.

 The heresy, we see, is not to decide wrongly, but to decide that our decisions about God matter for anything. There is only God delivering life. 

 Much to our surprise and delight, then, to have nothing then means to have, well, everything.