Meditation on This Sunday's Gospel

Here we are, approaching another Reformation Sunday. For those of us who spent our formative years yearning for change--for ourselves, for our societies, for our churches--was this change that has come over the last years and decades what we had in mind?

In our younger years, we might have argued that there are newer and better ways of "doing church." We might have had a vision for a more just society, a completion of the picture offered by Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, and other 20th century activists. In pre-pandemic times, we might have imagined how we would behave in times of adversity.

It is interesting to wonder how future historians will see our current age. Are we in the middle of a great transition to something else? Are we at a hinge point of history? Will we have the courage to keep creating something new and useful out of great chaos? Times of Reformation can enrich us all. Even those of us who reject reform can find our spiritual lives enriched as we take stock and measure what's important to us, what compromises we can make and what we can't. It's good to have these times where we return to the Scriptures as we try to hear what God calls us to do. It may be painful, but any of these processes may lead us to soil where we can bloom more fruitfully.

We may think of that metaphor and feel despair, as if we will never be truly rooted, flowering plants. But rootlessness can be its own spiritual gift. The spiritual wanderers have often been those who most revitalized the Church, or on a smaller level, their spiritual communities. The spiritual wanderers are often the ones who keep all of us true to God's purpose.

If you have been feeling despair, take heart. Jesus promises that we will know the truth, and the truth will set us free. You might not be feeling like you know what the truth is at this current point; you may feel tossed around by the tempests of our current times. But Jesus promises that we will know the truth. We will be set free. We don't have a specific date at which we'll know the truth. But we will.

Rest in God's promise that we are all redeemable; indeed, we are redeemed. Rest in the historic knowledge that the Church has survived times of greater turbulence than our own. Rest in Luther's idea that we are saved by grace alone. Rest.