Reformation Day - What does it mean for us?

Last Sunday, 23 rd Sunday after Pentecost, I preached on the some aspects of the significance of both All Saints Day and Reformation Sunday. This is a short excerpt:

So what does the observance of the Reformation say to us? Well, it calls us to constantly assess our beliefs, our doctrine, against the Word of God. It calls us to do the same with our traditions and our devotional practices. We need to ask the question – have we drifted from the Gospel in what we believe, in what we do, in the values that inform our lives? It’s about learning the lessons of history; and not just the example of the Medieval Church and its errors and corruptions. We need to look first at our own Church, especially so as we Anglicans affirm the Reformation as part of our heritage. In the wider contemporary Church, there are plentiful examples of dubious beliefs and practices, beliefs and practices which can infiltrate our Church and our personal piety. They can rob us of our assurance in Christ, distort our discipleship, and waste our spiritual energy, and our time and talents on things that are not of God. I’m thinking of things like the prosperity gospel, the popular teaching of some Pentecostal luminaries that God wants us all to be rich and successful; or the faith healing peddlers who claim that God wants to heal all our diseases and that we are only sick or suffering because we lack faith, a most insidious teaching; the ultra-liberal denial of any form of judgement, the view that God is only loving and is too nice to hold anybody accountable for their sins – a teaching which amounts to a denial of God’s holiness and which reduces his infinite love to insipid tolerance, a dark deception indeed. There are of course many others.

Important as all that is, there is a very positive lesson to learn from the Reformation. And that is that the Gospel is central, that we focus on the good news that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself; that God so loved the world that he sent his only Son that those who believe in him will not perish but have eternal life; that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. This is good news indeed, this is the heart of our faith, this is what the Reformation recovered from the crusty overlay of dubious tradition and piety which had unfortunately muted the gospel message; this is the touchstone against which we measure our Christian life, personally and collectively, in all its aspects. This is the heart of our message, this is what must always be front and centre.