Ecclesia Reformata

He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

We will be increasingly bombarded during this election year with all kinds of rhetoric and appeals aimed at persuading us or manipulating us to vote one way or the other. No matter the party you prefer, no matter the candidate you like, no matter the issue you support, everyone says, “I’m right and the other person is wrong.” A long time ago, Jesus talked about a Pharisee and a tax collector who both went to the Temple to pray. The Pharisee thanked God that he was right and not wrong like the tax collector over there.

Now we’ll miss Jesus’ point here if we think the Pharisees were the bad guys. They were not. They lived good lives. They obeyed the law and paid their taxes. They kept their yards nice and did good things in the community. It is no accident that many have said Pharisees and Presbyterians look a lot alike. The tax collector, on the other hand, was someone whom only a mother could love and maybe not even Mom. Israel was occupied by the pagan Romans and the tax collectors took in the Roman taxes and usually made themselves rich on the side. They were scum and everyone knew it.

But Jesus said the man who was completely right was completely wrong before God and the man who was completely wrong, the man who had sold his soul to the Roman devils, was right before God. Jesus smacks the way we normally think right in the face. But let’s see if we can make some sense of it by talking about one of the basic principles of the Reformation.

Let’s begin by remembering or learning a little Latin today —even though I’m hardly a suitable Latin teacher because I never studied it in school, a lack I have always regretted. But there are some Latin phrases which remain fairly important in theology and one of those, my sermon’s title today, describes a basic principle of the Reformation this way: ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda. That could be translated: “the church reformed, always to be reformed.” Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda is one of the abiding principles of the Protestant Reformation.[1] Both Martin Luther and John Calvin insisted that reformation was never complete. The church could be reformed only by always reforming.

Why is that? There is a strong human tendency to identify what is with what is right. It comes out in phrases like “My country right or wrong.” “My political party right or wrong?” “My corporation right or wrong.” “My labor union right or wrong.”[2] “My school right or wrong.” “My race right or wrong.” “My church right or wrong.” Human beings tend to identify their own way as the only way and the only right way.

Some time back a radio preacher I heard condemned the Democrat Party as godless and immoral. It doesn’t matter whether you are a Democrat, Republican, Independent, or something else. It’s just spiritually arrogant if not intellectually stupid to make condemnations like that. And there are equally arrogant and stupid accusations going the other direction.

The Reformers recognized the dangers of this and that’s why they insisted the church must be always reforming. One person puts the principle this way: “we must fight others’ falsehood with our truth and we must also fight the falsehood in our truth.”[3]

It isn’t easy. The Reformers had the principle but even they didn’t always act on it. Twelve years after the Reformation began, Martin Luther, who headed the German reform movement, and Huldrych Zwingli, who headed the Swiss reform movement, met inside an inner room of a castle in Marburg, Germany.[4] They talked about many things, but mostly Zwingli and Luther argued about the Lord’s Supper.

Luther kept quoting the New Testament in Latin: hoc est corpus meum, hoc est corpus meum, which means “this is my body.” He bitterly insisted the phrase meant that Christ was literally present in the sacrament of communion.

Zwingli was just as adamant that the words could not be taken literally because that’s how Catholics understood the mass and both he and Luther were trying to separate reformation teaching from Catholic teaching. Zwingli also pointed out that Jesus spoke, not in Latin when he instituted the sacrament, but in Aramaic which has no verb “to be.” Thus, Jesus could not have said “this is my body” but only “this—my body, broken for you.”

Zwingli wouldn’t budge. Neither would Luther. He kept pounding the table, where with a piece of chalk he had written the words hoc est corpus meum, and saying, “Est, est, est: ‘this is my body.’ One cannot squeeze out of that little phrase or give it another meaning. The Word, the Word, do you hear, is the decisive factor.”[5] What became Presbyterian and what became Lutheran never got together because Zwingli and Luther wouldn’t agree that the other had any truth.

The Reformers had the principle, ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda, even when they didn’t act on it. The church is reformed and must always be reformed. Without that principle, faith leads to the Pharisee: “I thank you, God, that I am not like that person over there: that Presbyterian, that Lutheran, that Democrat, that Republican, that Jew, that Muslim, that poor person, that Asian person, that African-American person, that illegal immigrant, that person who never comes to church, that …”

Having learned about the Reformation principle, I want to conclude today by briefly reflecting not just on how it judges our intolerance but on what it affirms. We can see this if we go back to the Pharisee and the tax collector.

The Pharisee lived the right life and the tax collector lived the wrong life. There is no question about that. Jesus didn’t hold up the righteousness of the tax collector because he was a moral person. He was not. Tax collectors were scum and Jesus wasn’t minimizing that. He was just looking at things more deeply. The problem was the Pharisee presumed on his goodness and thanked God for it. The tax collector knew he didn’t have a leg to stand on before God and depended solely on God’s mercy. And that’s the point. God’s mercy is all the Pharisee could depend on, too. The Pharisee was wrong not because he was immoral but because he didn’t know his true condition. Our true condition is that we are all dependent on mercy — always.

God does not love you or me because we are good. God loves us because God is good. God does not love us more than all the folks who will slept in today and didn’t come to church. God loves us only and always because God is merciful. The tax collector, who was bad, knew that. The Pharisee, who was good, did not.

This can easily be misunderstood. So let me clarify. Most of you know that a few weeks ago I flew to Seattle to take part in a memorial service for a very dear friend of mine. I met Joe in 1972 when serving my first congregation in Bellevue, Washington. Not long after I began at that church, Joe, an accomplished physician and medical researcher, said to me, “Bill, I want to learn about theology. Not the simplistic, layperson stuff, but the real stuff you learn in seminary. Can you help me?”

What came out of that was a covenant group that we called Theology Study. Four couples including Joe and his wife Mary Ann, and Merrie and me, met together for almost seven years, every Tuesday morning at seven o’clock. Those were marvelous mornings of good coffee and rich conversation. We assigned ourselves books from the heavyweights: Barth, Tillich, the Niebuhrs, Bultmann, Calvin, Luther, Brunner, and many others. We talked and learned, we laughed and sometimes argued. Most of all we became close and abiding friends.

Even after Merrie and I left that church, first to Birmingham, Michigan and then to Spokane, Washington, our Theology Study group got together somehow at least once a year. In fact, one time when I was working on my doctorate at San Francisco Seminary, the three couples flew there from Seattle to spend a weekend with Merrie and me. I was deeply moved that they loved Merrie and me enough to take time from very active lives and a good chunk of money just to fly down and spend a few days with us.

So in a sermon one time I mentioned all this and said, “I don’t deserve that kind of love from them and there is nothing I can do to earn it. But they give it freely simply because they choose to love me. And the truly amazing thing is that their love frees me. And it empowers me and it inspires in me not only a greater love for them but for everyone else I encounter in my journey of faith.”

After that sermon a woman was quite upset that I said I didn’t deserve love. She thought I was putting myself down and she was adamant about the importance of self-affirmation. But she missed what I was saying. Self-affirmation is great if we understand that it begins in the love of God. The Pharisee was self-affirming but that didn’t make him right before God. The tax collector knew that he depended completely on God. He knew he needed mercy and that did make him right before God. We can really affirm ourselves only when we begin by affirming the mercy of God which we so desperately need.

I don’t deserve the love from my friends in Bellevue, or from my wife or children, or from you or anyone. Least of all do I deserve God’s love. But I am loved and when I know I don’t deserve it, then I can affirm not only who I am but who I am becoming. Just like the church, I can be reformed only by always reforming. As soon as I become contented in who I am, like the Pharisee, I forget what God’s love would have me become. I can affirm who I am by affirming who God is helping me to be. The same is true of the church. The church reforms by always reforming.

There is only one hymn by John Calvin in our hymnals and the last verse of that hymn, which we’ll sing a little later, says it well.

[1] This formulation is from Robert McAfee Brown, The Spirit of Protestantism (London: Oxford, 1961) 44. He suggests ecclesia reformata sed semper reformanda is a more historically accurate formulation.

[2] Brown, 44.

[3] Attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr by Brown, 44.

[4] 6:00am on October 1, 1529.

[5] D. William McIvor, “The Colloquy of Marburg and ‘cuius regio, eius religio’” in Studia Biblica et Theologica, V, 1975.