Annabelle was a contagious Christians, one of those Presbyterians who believe that everything that happens to a person is either directly or sometimes indirectly directed by God, that whatever highs and lows we have, that God has a way of leveling them out. She had this way of finding His hand in everything.
One day Annabelle is getting a pie ready to put into the oven when the phone rings. On the other end is the school nurse informing her that her son had some down with a high fever and needed to go home.
Annabelle calculates how long it will take to drive to school and back, and how long the pie should bake, and concludes there is enough time. So she pops the pie in the oven and leaves for school. When she gets there, her son's fever is worse and the nurse advises her to take him to the emergency room.
Seeing her son with his face flushed, body trembling and dripping with perspiration frazzles Annabelle, and she drives to the emergency room as fast as she can. She gets even more spastic as the doctor to comes out from the examining room with a slip of paper in his hand.
"Get him to bed and start him on this prescription right away."
Annabelle gets her son home and in bed. Now, she must be a blood relative of mine, because even though Annabelle was just in her house and the fumes from pie filling spilling over inside the oven has produced a plume of smoke thicker than the bomb that fell on Hiroshima, she forgets about the pie in the oven and heads out for the drugstore. She has to wait a half-hour for the prescription to be filled, rushes back to the car, and discovers that it's locked, and there, jangling in the ignition, are her keys, which is FURTHER proof that she's a blood relative.
Also locked in the car, in plain view, is her cell phone. So she runs back into the drugstore, finds a payphone, and calls home. Even though her son is only seven, is running a fever higher than the national debt and barely able to speak, he manages to say, "Get a wire coat hanger, Mom. You can get in with that."
So she goes to the shopping mall where the drugstore is and starts searching the mall for a wire coat hanger - which turned out not to be easy. She can have all the plastic hangers she wants, but shops don't use wire hangers anymore. After combing through a dozen stores, she finds one that is behind the times just enough to have a few wire hangers hanging around.
So Annabelle rushes out of the mall, finds her car, and stares at the wire coat hanger.
"I don't know what to do with this!"
Then, all of the sudden, she remembers the pie in the oven. All the frustrations of the past hour collapse on her and she begins crying. Then she remembers that all things work together for good for those who love God and care called according to His purpose. So she prays, "Dear Lord, my boy is sick and he needs this medicine and my pie is in the oven and the keys are locked in the car and, Lord, I don't know what to do with this coat hanger. Dear Lord, send somebody who does know what do with it, and I really need that person NOW, Lord. Amen."
She is wiping her eyes when a beat-up older car pulls up to the curb and stops in front of her. A young man, twenty-ish-looking, in a t-shirt and ragged jeans gets out. The first thing she noticed about him is the long, stringy hair, and then the beard that hides everything south of his nose. He is coming her way. When he gets close enough, Annabelle stops out in front of him and holds out the wire coat hanger. "Sir," she says, "do you know how to get into a locked car with one of these?" He takes the hanger from her hand and says, "Where's the car?"
Annabelle is amazed. The guy takes a quick look at the door and window, and with a couple of twists of the coat hanger and bam! Just like that, the door is open.
When she sees the door open she throws her arms around him. "Oh," she said, "the Lord sent you! You're such a good person. You must be a Christian."
He steps back and says, "No ma'am, I'm not a Christian, and I'm not a good person. I just got out of prison yesterday."
Annabelle jumps at him and gives him a great big bear hug and says, "Bless God! He sent me a professional!"
Sometimes, when we need it the most, God sends us a professional. It doesn't mean that it's a trained professional, an educated professional, a polished professional or even a professional professional. It means that often there is a person that God picks up like a puppy from the litter, a person whom you would think would be the very last person to lead others out of a crisis. Other times, however, there are people who look like they were groomed from their birth to be thrust into a situation. And all of their talent, grooming and training seem to be coming together in some kind of harmonic convergence for a particular task.
Sometimes there are people who sit on mountaintops and lord it over those in the valley; God will send someone to scale that mountain and topple those tyrants. Sometimes there are people who live extended periods in low valleys; God will send someone to lift them up to peaks and pinnacles the likes they had never seen. In the late 15th century, God's people found themselves in a situation like that. It was a world of tremendous peaks and valleys, a world with a tremendous gap between the two. On the mountaintops resided the clergy; the professionals; the leaders of the flock. In the valleys resided the laity, the common folk. Those on the mountain were educated, articulate and wealthy. Those in the valley were illiterate, incapable of expression, and poverty-stricken.
It was a time when those on the mountain had absolute control over those in the valley. That was bad in and of itself. But what made it worse was the corruption eating away like maggots inside the powers that be.
Everything was topsy-turvy. Nothing was like it was supposed to be. You see, in the beginning, back there in the first century, God created clergy to be servants. He created and gifted and enabled individuals to go out preach the good news. He sent people out to plant churches. He sent people to bring healing and justice. He sent people to watch over the flock and to tend the flock and to love the flock and to serve the flock. "Take nothing but the clothes on your backs," Jesus had told the original bunch that He had sent out.
But over time things had turned inside out. There was no preaching any more. The worship service had turned into little more than a hocus-pocus, repetitive ceremony where the same words were said over and over and over again and minds wandered and it didn't make a difference in peoples' lives. There was no planting of churches because the church had control of the state and the church was the state. There was no healing. As a matter of fact, the corruption within the church was making it sicker, not healthier. There was no justice. There was no love. And for certain, the clergy weren't there being servants to their flocks. No, they servants were now the ones being served. Those who had vowed to become poor to make many rich had stolen the riches from the people, had become rich themselves, and had inflicted base poverty on the people whom they had vowed to serve.
What made it all the more tragic is that the focus of the church, the focus that Christ had given it, was to give it away. Salvation is a free gift. It can't be earned, it can't be bartered, and it certainly can't be purchased. It's free, free, free, free and free. It's there for the taking. It doesn't mean that it's cheap. On the contrary, it is provided at a very high cost: the sacrifice of God's Son, His shed blood, His forfeiture of life, all to make this tremendous gift free of charge.
But things had changed dramatically. For now, instead of proclaiming the free gift of salvation through Jesus Christ, the clergy were now keeping their mouths shut and focusing instead on the acquisition of wealth. Christ, born into poverty in a manger surrounded by animals, was not being proclaimed. Following the example of Christ, who said, "Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head," was thrust aside so that clergy could now build themselves palaces and castles.
One thing, however, stood head and shoulders above all the greed and graft and corruption. It had to do with the gift of salvation itself. Christ and the apostles had taught that it was free, free, free, free, free. It was gratis. It was pro bono. But the clergy had stolen grace and had begun to market it; they had begun to charge for it. They, the clergy, now claimed power for themselves to say who went to heaven and who didn't go to heaven. They, the clergy, now dispensed and withheld salvation. And the straw that broke the clergy's back was how that grace was dispensed. It was being bought and sold with money. That's right. If you wanted to go to heaven, you had to write a personal check for it. If you had a loved one in purgatory, they could get out of there for a fee. If you had a friend in hell, a get out of jail card could be purchased with cash, Visa, MasterCard or moneyorder.
So it was into this world of the few on the mountaintops lording it over the many in the valleys that God sent the great leveler. It was into this world of extremes that God sent an extreme individual. His name was Martinus Luther, born November 10, 1483 in Eisleben, Germany.
Nothing about this guy was normal or ordinary. He was head and shoulders more intelligent than anyone in his family. His father saw the brains in his kid and demanded that he go to law school, become a lawyer and make the rest of the family rich. Most other kids would have leaped at the chance to please their father, but nothing about Luther was normal or ordinary. On July 2, 1505, after he had received his bachelors and his masters and was on his way to becoming the next Johnny Cochrane, Luther was caught in a thunderstorm, almost struck by lightning, and right then and there made a vow to enter the priesthood.
Now, when the clergy learned that Luther was joining their midst, they licked their chops, because here was a guy who was powerful and persuasive and could win just about any battle he fought. But they didn't realize what they had on their hands. Because after he went through seminary and earned his doctorate, Luther became a professor of New Testament, a position where the instructor was supposed to drill the church's official biblical position into the seminarians. But Luther turned out to be dangerous.
Luther was insidious because he had the ability to study for himself and to think for himself. And when he began teaching, he began doing something that no professor had done for hundreds of years: he let the scriptures speak for themselves, instead of trying to mold the scriptures into something the church wanted them to be. Instead of using the scripture to bash people over the head, Luther began listening to the scriptures. And what the scriptures told him were what the clergy had spent the last several hundred years muffling: that salvation was a gift, that it was free, free, free. That salvation comes from hearing and hearing by the Word of God.
And Luther began seeing that there was a world of difference between what God was telling people through the scriptures and what the clergy were doing but shutting out the scriptures in peoples' lives. One day Luther was walking in the town of Wittenberg when a parade came by and the main float was one of a statue of a saint that said, "Whenever a coin into the coffer sings, another soul from purgatory springs." Luther flew into a rage. And it all came to a head on October 31, 1517, Halloween, when Luther marched to the castle door and pounded his 95 theses on the door. And from that point on, history was changed. The world was changed. Luther never wanted to leave the established church. All he wanted to do was to reform the church. This is why this day is known as Reformation Day. He wanted the church to take a close look at itself and to examine itself in the light of the scriptures. He wanted the church to return to its priorities of preaching the gospel and feeding the poor and clothing the naked and sheltering the homeless and making peace and promoting justice and practicing healing.
It goes without saying that the clergy were too hardheaded, selfish and corrupt to listen to Luther. Instead of talking about it, they did what people usually do when threatened: they sought to shut him up. And when Luther kept on yelling louder and louder, and the clergy kept on growing colder and colder, Luther had no choice but to break away.
The Reformation wasn't contained to Germany, though. It spread like wildfire. It went into France and into Switzerland. It made its way to Hungary and Czechoslovakia and Central Europe and Eastern Europe. It made its way to Scandinavia. It even crossed the English Channel and made its way into England, Ireland, and my ancestral home of Scotland.
The Reformation turned things upside down. It bought down the haughty from the mountaintops and brought them back to earth. It elevated the laity from positions of subservience into a place of dignity. It put into motion ideas and practices some of which had immediate impact and others that are only recently beginning to come into fruition: that of equality between the genders, that of equal opportunity for everyone, that of a shared ministry of laity and clergy.
The Reformation took Christ down from the cross and exalted Him in Heaven. The Reformation took the church from center stage and placed Christ back there in His rightful position. The Reformation took power from the church and returned it to God. But most of all, the Reformation returned God from the valley, where He had be relegated to second class citizenship, and returned Him to His rightful place as Sovereign, who is worthy of praise and source of our salvation.
Sometimes there are people who sit on mountaintops and lord it over those in the valley and God will send someone to scale that mountain and topple those tyrants. Sometimes there are people who live extended periods in low valleys, and God will send someone to lift them up to peaks and pinnacles the likes they had never seen.
In Luke 6, Jesus comes down from the mountain and begins to preach what Luke calls The Sermon On The Plain, or the Sermon in the Valley. In Matthew 6, Jesus ascends from the valley below to the mountain above and preached what Matthew calls the Sermon on the Mount. They are ostensibly the same thing, the same words the same ideals. And for the next few weeks, we're going to be looking at those words. We are, like Luther, going to let the scripture speak for themselves instead of trying to impose our words on the scriptures. We are, like Luther, going to listen to the scriptures.
In the late 15th century, the clergy had taken God and locked Him away. And in due course, God sent a pickpocket named Martin Luther to spring him. In the first century, the Pharisees had taken God and locked Him away. And in due course, at just the right time, God sent a locksmith named Jesus Christ to set us free. And on this Reformation Day, my prayer is that we can join with Annabelle in saying, "Bless God! He sent me a professional!"
© Rev. Duane Brown, 2003
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