Reformation Day Assembly, 2014

What follows is the text of an address I was privileged to give at school for Reformation Day. I love Reformation Day, and all that we celebrate, and so I love giving addresses on the topic! Last time I did this, I spoke about Martin Luther and the gift of personal Bible reading. This time I chose to speak about Zwingli and the importance of searching the Bible to see if what he hear and believe is true.

Here is the speech:

What do you think of when you are asked about the Reformation of the Church in Europe in the 1500s? What image, what picture do you think would best represent the spirit of the Reformation? Martin Luther courageously standing before the Roman Church council demanding to be shown in Scripture where he is wrong? John Calvin preaching courageously in Geneva, not that far from Roman Catholic France, which he fled for his life? Ulrich Zwingli courageously eating sausage with some friends during Lent?

You heard me correctly. One of the important leaders of the Reformation started changing the church by eating sausages. Sausages. No joke.

The year is 1522. Zwingli is a priest in a Roman Catholic Church in the city of Zurich, Switzerland. He is 38 years old, and is not a person to back down from a challenge. In 1522, that challenge came during the season of Lent. Lent is the period of 40 days before Easter. During these 40 days, Roman Catholics are supposed to give up something. At the time of Zwingli, that thing was meat. In the 1500s, Roman Catholics gave up meat for Lent. This was supposed to create in them a reminder of Christ's sacrifice. The problem with Lent is that it is nowhere found in the Bible. And this was Zwingli's challenge to the Roman Church.

One night, after a long day’s work, a friend of Zwingli’s, a man who owned a printing press, shared some smoked sausage with his workers, because they were tired and hungry. When the bishop and other priests heard of this, they arrested the man. Zwingli took the matter to the pulpit and preached an important sermon that following Sunday. He preached a sermon in which he showed that it doesn’t matter what we eat, don’t eat, or even celebrate or don’t celebrate. What matters is our hearts before God. The Church should not demand things from people that God does not demand of them. If it does not say in the Bible that people should fast at Lent, why does the Roman Catholic Church demand that people should fast?

We do not simply remember Zwingli for eating sausage (even though he didn't eat any, he defended those who did), we remember Zwingli for his insistence on sticking to Scripture. He always asked what the Bible says. Tradition, church teaching, nothing is as important as Scripture for guiding and directing our lives.

Zwingli follows in the wonderful tradition of the Bereans whom Paul meets in Acts 17. Not impressed simply with Paul's words or his credentials as an apostle, the Bereans constantly searched the Scriptures to see whether Paul's teachings were true.

Acts 17:10-13
As soon as it was night, the brothers sent Paul and Silas away to Berea. On arriving there, they went to the Jewish synagogue. Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true. Many of the Jews believed, as did also a number of prominent Greek women and many Greek men.

The basis for truth is not the one who brings the message, whether apostle or Pope. Nor is it whether we like the message or it makes life easier for us. The basis of truth for anything we do in Church or in our Christian life is Scripture alone.

Zwingli pushed the Roman Catholic Church in Europe to find this foundation again. The Roman Church had put heavy burdens on the people, adding lots of extra teachings and practices. There were feast days for saints, fasts for repentance, actions to do for earning forgiveness. Priests could not marry, people could not read the Bible themselves, and many other things. Zwingli went back to the Bible, and started freeing believers from these heavy burdens.

The last time I had the privilege of speaking at our Reformation Day assembly, I spoke about Martin Luther and perhaps the greatest gift he gave the churches--the importance of reading the Bible for yourself. Here Zwingli adds to this gift by showing us why we read the Bible for ourselves. If we don’t know Scripture, we can be taken captive by the teachings of men, and be drawn away from the revelation of God.

Did you know that when Zwingli first received a copy of the Greek New Testament from his friend Disiderus Erasmus, he took a whole year and read through it, cover to cover? Do you know why Zwingli was such a force in the Reformation? Because he saturated himself with God’s Word, and read it as often and as fully as he could!

God has given us his Word so that we can know him. Why would we let anyone get in between us and God? Search the Scriptures like the Bereans, to see if what you are told is true. Search the Scriptures like Zwingli, to see how best to live your life before God. And search the Scriptures above all, because it is there, and nowhere else, that we know the One, True, Living God.

A Reformation Day Assembly.

I delivered my first school assembly address on Monday.  The topic, of course, was Halloween.  Okay, no it wasn't.  It was the reformation, as October 31st commemorates the day on which Martin Luther, in 1517, nailed his 95 Theses to the Wittenberg church door.  But, as I argue, this was not the glorious beginning to the Reformation, this was a scholar's invitation to debate about the practices of indulgence-sellers.  If you read the 95 theses, as I made my grade 9s do, you will see that he does not disagree with indulgences as such, nor the power of the pope, but with the practices that have surrounded these things.  The real Reformation began, I would argue, during the Diet of Worms where Luther demanded to be proven wrong on the basis of scripture alone.  

What follows is my assembly speech, which I did not deliver verbatim.

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When Martin Luther strode up to the church door in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517, he did not intend to start a revolution.  What he intended was to reform certain practices in the church of his time.  In fact, the church door was the bulletin board of the city: if you had something you wanted people to know or to read, you didn’t e-mail them, you didn’t send it to the newspaper, you took a hammer and some nails, and you posted it on the church door.  Martin Luther was simply inviting people to come and have a debate with him about these things called indulgences.

Here’s the deal.  The Pope, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, had this great big church to build in Rome: St. Peter’s Basilica.  But the problem was that he was broke—he had no money left.  How was he to build a beautiful new church without a penny left in his bank account?  He would raise the money by selling indulgences.  These were pretty pieces of paper that let a person out of purgatory early.  Purgatory is that place between earth and heaven where our souls go after we die to become clean.  We are purged of our sins before we can enter heaven.  Depending on how often you had sinned in your life, you might have to spend many years in purgatory before you could enter heaven.  An indulgence releases the soul from purgatory, and sends them merrily on their way to heaven.

Of course, we don’t believe in purgatory.  But in 1517, Martin Luther did.  And so did most of the people around him.  They believed in it so strongly that they would pay whatever they could to buy an indulgence.  Luther, however, was not convinced.  Purgatory, he might believe in;  Indulgences, sure;  But the fact that the people had to pay for them?  That was a stretch.  And the fact that the people selling indulgences, people like John Tetzel, took money from people too poor to even buy bread to eat?  That was too far.

On October 31^st, 1517, Luther wanted to put a stop not to indulgences, but to the corrupt practices of those selling indulgences.  He did not want to start a revolution.  The revolution came later, when the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church decided that Luther was a nuisance.

What happened on October 31^st was Luther saying “Something has to change!”  What happened two years later, in 1520, was Luther saying, “Everything has to change!”  Nailing the 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg was simply the act of a scholar wanting to argue and discuss with other scholars.  But when the Roman Catholic Church decided it didn’t want to play nice, Luther set the world on fire with a speech, a speech with ended this way:

Since then Your Majesty and your lordships desire a simple reply, I will answer without horns and without teeth.  Unless I am convicted by Scripture and plain reason—I do not accept the authority of popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other—my conscience is captive to the Word of God.  I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe.  [Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise.]  God help me.  Amen.

Here is where Luther set the wheels of the Reformation in motion: don’t quote pope or council to me—they are human and can be wrong, in fact, they have been wrong!—instead show me from the true, infallible, trustworthy Word of God where I am wrong.  Luther denied the authority of the Pope to determine the meaning of the bible.  Luther denied the authority of the Roman Catholic Church officials to tell ordinary people—people like you and me—what the Bible says.  In fact, Luther felt so strongly that every person should have the responsibility to read the Bible for themselves, that he spent the next year translating the New Testament from the Greek into his own language: German.  And since Luther, every Reformation that happened did the same thing: translated the Bible and put it into the hands of ordinary believers.

This is the lasting and greatest legacy of the Reformation.  When we celebrate Reformation day, we do not simply remember a monk who invited other scholars to debate about the way indulgences were being sold.  No, we celebrate the fact that through this very humble beginning, the Lord raised up for his church a man who would eventually say ‘No!’ to manmade rules and regulations, say ‘No!’ to hiding the Bible behind human tradition, and said ‘Yes!’ to putting the gospel of Jesus Christ in the hands of every believer.  And once that happened, everything did change.  Men like Zwingli, Calvin, Melanchthon, Bucer took this bible and continued Luther’s Reformation in their own countries to the end that all men, women, and children may glorify God—a God they have access to through his Word, a God they know from the Bible.

Here is the lasting legacy, the great treasure of the Reformation.  Here is Christianity’s dangerous idea: we are all able and responsible to read God’s Word; to understand it; to submit to it; and to let it change our hearts and our lives.

Go home.  Pick up your bible.  Continue the work of the Reformation started almost 500 years ago.  And do not take this simple act for granted—being free and able to read the Bible for ourselves was a hard-won victory, begun in a humble way, on October 31, 1517.  Remember Luther.  But remember even more to read your Bible, for there we stand.  We can do no other.  God help us.  Amen.