October 25, 2026
By Kristin Berkey-Abbott
Reformation Sunday
Here we are at Reformation Sunday, a Sunday chosen because it is closest to the day when Luther nailed his 95 Theses on the door in Wittenberg, Germany. Having this day as one of our big Lutheran festivals might make us think that those 95 Theses are Luther’s biggest and best theological ideas. In the Spring, I took a Lutheran Confessions class at United Lutheran Seminary, one of our 6 Lutheran seminaries. It’s a class that looks at the foundational documents written by Luther.
On the first day of class, our professor made the startling claim that Luther’s 95 Theses, one of the founding documents we celebrate today, was not the most important work of theology that Luther wrote. By then, at the age of 33, some of his earlier theology is much more groundbreaking. You might say, “Who was this renegade professor that the seminary allowed to teach this class?” In fact, my professor was Guy Erwin, president of the seminary and former bishop of the Southwest California Synod. During the semester, Erwin proved his point. It is too easy to be raised Lutheran and have a distorted or shallow view of our theology as Lutherans.
In fact, if you read the 95 Theses, you’ll see that most of them are fairly straight forward and not radical at all. If you’re like me, you might have spent much of your life thinking the theses nailed to the door were all about indulgences, the medieval church practice of taking money with the promise of reduced time in purgatory and a faster route to Heaven for loved ones who have died.
His critique of indulgences is what got him into trouble with both the church and the emperor—and during his time the fortunes of both church and emperor were intertwined in a way that can be hard to remember today. In fact, today, about 60% of the Lutheran church budget in Germany still comes through the German government—but the fortunes of the government are independent from the church. Luther’s attack on indulgences is one of the events that eventually leads to the separation of church and state enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.
We might think of the medieval Church that shaped Luther and imagine it was the kind of church like the ones we miss, the ones we’ve heard about that existed in the 1950’s and 1960’s, churches that were full of activities not just on Sundays but throughout the week. We might think of a church like Faith Lutheran this week-end: a harvest festival on Saturday and worship on Sunday.
Medieval cathedrals may have been community centers, but they did little to enrich the spiritual lives of those who entered. People came to Church primarily for individual Confession, not worship. Medieval believers, before the reforms of Luther and others, were unlikely to have the Eucharist very often; most believers might have it once or twice a year. And most of those believers would not be able to explain why it was important.
We remember Luther’s critique of indulgences, but his vision of a church as a force for education is a far more important change. In Luther’s day, people knew that they had rules they had to follow, rules handed to them by the church and reinforced by the government, but they couldn’t explain why. Most believers couldn’t read, but they did memorize the rules—a condition which may remind us of the Pharisees of Jesus’ day, who wanted everyone to follow the rules given in the Law. Luther wanted believers to think about what they memorized and why it was important.
In order to accomplish this task of a deeper understanding, Luther engaged in a life-long re-forming of the local church. He saw the church of his day as a sacramental gate keeper, managing who got to go to Heaven and how long it would take to get there. In contrast, Luther built a church focused on teaching and educating, a church in service to worshippers instead of a church with church leaders in charge.
To become a church serving believers, Luther focused on changing the priesthood. Many priests in Luther’s day didn’t have much education. But Luther was much more concerned with corruption, particularly priests who had sexual relationships with women. It was not uncommon for priests to have marriage-like relationships, and Luther believed this hypocrisy undermined faith—faith in God and faith in the Church. Luther talked about the need to regulate clergy and to focus on the parish. He redefined power saying that priests should be in service to the parish, not the other way round. Luther spent his life formulating the best ways for clergy and lay people to build a life together in a parish.
Luther also focused on home life, seeing the home as a kind of parish, another place where faith should be fostered. Many of us are familiar with Luther’s Small Catechism or we’ve heard of it (it’s in the ELW, if you want a refresher, p. 1160). Luther wrote this work as a teaching tool to be used around a household table, a way for families to have conversations about what really matters.
We spend time praising Luther for his work to get rid of indulgences, but we really should also be praising him for his work on education and literacy. He believed we should all be able to read the Bible for ourselves and interpret it in community. During his time, if someone wanted information, he or she would need to go find the one or two people who knew how to read and trust their reading. During his time in hiding, Luther translated the Latin Bible into the everyday German used by ordinary people and new technology, the printing press, made it widely available. The world would never be the same.
I don’t want to ignore the problems that came with Luther’s reforming ways. You can go back through my Reformation Day sermons and note that I don’t spend much time talking about Luther’s antisemitism or about the Peasant’s Revolt which resulted in the slaughter of 100,000 poor farmers. Times of reformation can be a time of powerful change, but those changes aren’t all positive.
We live in a time more similar to Luther’s, and Christ’s, than we may realize. People in Luther’s time were worried about a variety of gathering storms, from peasant uprisings to conflicts further away. Constantinople to the east had fallen to the Muslims, in Christ’s time, Jerusalem had fallen to Rome, and it was clear that neither would stop at the capture of those ancient capital cities. We, too, feel malevolent forces gathering, a variety of forces set to wreak havoc upon our lives.
Then as now, people were increasingly oppressed: faith in the church was diminished, adherence to law, church and civil, was strict, individualism and individual rights were suppressed, and the cost to simply live was becoming more difficult to achieve.
Based on the last three decades, the balance of the twenty-first century will have as many challenges as the time period during which Luther and the reformers lived and worked. With the grounding provided by these confessional documents, with their emphasis on grace, mercy and learning, a willingness to lift a pint with our political adversaries and share a song, along with a bit of luck and Divine providence, perhaps we, too, as a committed people of God, can successfully navigate our current century and emerge with even richer traditions that will shape future generations for centuries to come.
