Loss and Reformation

It will be interesting to see how various churches approach Reformation Sunday on this Sunday that caps a week of loss and fear.  One approach could be to continue with one's sermon regardless.  It's timeless, after all, right?  We've been hearing sermons about Martin Luther and those 95 theses for 500 years, right?  Why change?

And yet, if one was going to change a Reformation sermon, a shooting in a synagogue yesterday would justify the change.  It would be an easy change to visualize--a 96th thesis, calling for the end to this violence or perhaps a larger vision, calling for a transformation of our culture while steeps people in fear and hatred and gives them easy access to weapons of mass killing.  The fact that this shooting came at the end of a week of pipe bombs being mailed to prominent Democrats could reinforce the Reformation message of a need for deep societal change to heal the brokenness that has become impossible to ignore.

It's been a week of other types of losses too:  some of the great theological thinkers of our time have left us this week.  I began the week hearing about the loss of Eugene Peterson, most famous for The Message, his translation of the Bible into very modern language.  I wrote about him earlier this week in this blog post.  I see his writing as part of the very heart of reformation--give the people scriptures, in the language that they understand, so that they have the most amazing good news directly available to them.

I ended the week reading this article about the Thomas Keating, the monastic who taught so many the art of centering prayer.  I confess that I haven't done as much with centering prayer as I wish; I've studied the practice, but not practiced the practice--at least not for any amount of time.  Here, too, Keating seems very suitable for Reformation Sunday--give the people a spiritual practice that they can do, whether or not there's a church official anywhere nearby.

Last night I read about the death of Ntozake Shange, most famous for her play, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf.  I remember the line of the play which seemed so revolutionary when I heard it at a performance I saw in grad school (early 90's): “i found god in myself / and i loved her / i loved her fiercely.”  My grad school feminist mind glommed onto the idea of a god as female.  Only later did I think about the other idea in this quote, the idea that we find God already inside us.  It reminds me of much spiritual teaching, that we already have everything we need.  Some traditions take an opposite approach, that we're born broken and only when we heal our brokenness will be be redeemed/find what we're looking for.

It's been a week of tremendous loss.  But in the heart of these losses, it is good to remember the breath of Reformation that blows through all of history and how often that breath is rooted in loss.