C-R is for Christian Re-foundation

The visible appearance of Christian lives was not altered much by Luther's Reformation. To be sure, his rambunctious colleague Karlstadt "purified" churches of images, statues, vestments, etc. But Luther rebuked him sharply not only for unpastoral haste, but even more for missing the point, for emphasizing externals just as much as the Roman church did: the other side of the same, counterfeit coin.

So, the result of Luther's teaching was that the liturgy looked and sounded different, but not unrecognizably so. And, Christians went about their daily business, to basic appearances, as before.

One could say, Luther's work was not to re-form Christian life, that is, to alter its shape, but rather to change its heart, to reconstitute it. He re-founded it on "the only foundation that can be laid, Jesus Christ."

This Reformation issue of "Crossings" takes up this re-founding in two of Crossings' favorite ways. First is how daily work is re-founded. Second is an experience of how the refounding actually happened on a summer church youth trip.

Pastor Paige G. Evers, recently elected a director of Crossings, took up daily work as a sermon topic for her church, First English Evangelical Lutheran Church of Baltimore, Maryland. Pastor Evers recognizes how brassy it is for her to be able to use the word "vocation" to refer to a layman's career. For, in Luther's day, "vocation" had meant the special religious calling to priesthood or cloister. But Luther kidnapped the term and used it to baptize the working life of the butcher, the milkmaid, the merchant and the hangman. All honest work that serves humanity is a calling (vocatio) from God. And when a Christian, as Pastor Evers points out, does her daily work out of faith, her work is even God-pleasing, just because of her trust in Christ.

Bonhoeffer said in Cost of Discipleship, chapter 1,

Luther's return from the cloister to the world was the worst blow the world had suffered since the days of early Christianity. The renunciation he made when he became a monk was child's play compared with that which he had to make when he returned to the world. Now came the frontal assault. The only way to follow Jesus was by living in the world. Hitherto the Christian life had been the achievement of a few choice spirits under the exceptionally favorable conditions of monasticism; now it is a duty laid on every Christian living in the world. The commandment of Jesus must be accorded perfect obedience in one's daily vocation of life.

You will read how Pastor Evers staged an experience to provide her congregation the view of their daily duties as the holy vocations of Christ's saints. The faith that makes us holy also redeems our work from the curse God had laid on Adam's labor! Jobs are not re-formed by Christian faith, they're re-founded.

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