To say I wasn't allowed to go trick-or-treating when I was a kid creates a picture of me--long, long ago--standing at the door in a Superman outfit, shopping bag in hand, bawling, being told that leaving the house would mean not coming back. It was nothing that draconian.
My not going trick-or-treating was a given: it didn't have to be said. I knew the day should have been given--and it was in our house--to commemorating the great Reformation, to Luther hurling ink at Satan, to Calvin, the mayor of Geneva, to Zwingli, Beza, and Tyndale and a whole host of rebellious Catholics determined to bring the Bible to the people.
I was in graduate school when I read about English canon law that mandated churches taking the huge Bible on the table in front of the pulpit and turning it around so it faced the people, not prelate. No single event of the Reformation was so strikingly symbolic. The Reformation made the Word of God available to ordinary people. It was epoch-making, a sea-change theologically, but also politically. If the Reformation of the Christian church didn't give birth to democracy, it was most certainly midwife.
Much of the animus against Roman Catholicism when I was a boy--including Uncle Jay literally preaching the horror of rule-by-Pope should Kennedy become President--had to do with church doctrine: their sad adoration of Mary, mother of Christ; their idiotic fish on Fridays; praying to idols madness; their immoderate drinking; their priests' impossible chastity. I don't remember my parents ever maintaining that the Pope was the anti-Christ, but it was somehow clear that my people had such a claim not all that long ago. And, well, who knows. It Zwingli said it, after all. . .
What I'm saying is that I didn't go trick-or-treating on Halloween because I grew up closer to the effects--for good or ill--of the Reformation. I distrusted Catholics for the pretentions of their macabre faith--all those tall, vaulted ceilings in those scary, silent churches surrounded by an array of sculptured saints.
We were children of the Reformation. We were not minnow-munchers. I didn't go trick-or-treating because, as a boy, I knew it was wrong even to believe I could. "Here I stand," Luther said when accused. "I can do no other."
That's what October 31st was all about.
True? Yes. But excessive? Yes, again.
Last night our church worshipped with three others in an annual celebration of the Reformation of the Christian church. It was glorious, perfectly glorious. Nobody canonized Luther or Calvin, nobody said a thing about those wretched Roman Catholics, nobody gloried in the great revolution. We sang "A Mighty Fortress" and participated in a litany that featured the four "solas." The sermon, about God being with us on stormy seas, had very little to do with the Reformation.
Just getting along in life requires maintaining balances, many of them, or so it seems to me. Mutual contradictions abound amid life's paradoxes. Truth is elliptical, an old preacher once told me. It always has two centers, not just one. We need to maintain balances.
The Reformation tore the Christian faith apart. True. It's a crime--a sin--what Christian people do to themselves and their fellow Christians and has been as long as people have worshipped, no matter how they do it. Yes.
But that doesn't mean the church didn't need reforming, or that the Reformation didn't do wonderful things, like deliver democracy by insisting everyone--every man and woman and child--had the right to read the Bible.
Last night people got together in commemoration of the Reformation of the Christian church, and it was lovely. It was good. It was beautiful.
It was blessed.
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