500 years ago on Tuesday, yes on Halloween, Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral, and started the Protestant Reformation.  That’s “The hammer stroke of Luther” that we sang about earlier.

Or at least that’s the legend.  The other version of the story is that he mailed his theses to the local archbishop, which isn’t nearly so dramatic.

But however his statement was delivered, the impact was shattering.  World changing.  The previously monolithic Christian church broke apart.  The Christian church had already split East and West about 500 years earlier.  Now, the Roman church, called “catholic” which means “includes everything” found itself losing further grip on a lot of the Christians it had once embraced.

Luther meant to “reform” the Christian church not start a new church, so in a sense he failed.  Soon, from Luther, and then Calvin, and then a host of others, dozens of separate Protestant churches were born, each finding something of their own to protest.  Now there are dozens of Protestant denominations and thousands of independent churches comprising about one third of all Christians, worldwide.

So what’s the difference?

Luther proposed two major reforms.  They go by the terms, “Sola Fide” and “Sola Scriptura”  Or Faith Alone and Scripture Alone.

Faith Alone is Luther’s belief that a Christian is justified to God entirely through faith.  Belief.  “Accepting Jesus as your personal savior” as evangelicals put it.  Christians don’t need to do anything.  Just believe.  Only faith.  

What does that mean?

In Christian theology, every human being is born in a state of sin, called Original Sin.  Our sin must be forgiven to achieve salvation.  We are “justified” before God when our sins are forgiven.  Forgiveness of sin must come from God, of course.  But the Catholic Church also taught that a person could increase their favor in God’s judgment by doing certain actions, such as going to Mass and giving to the church.  In other words, the Catholic Church taught that human beings could influence God’s decision.  Justification was a combined effort of God’s grace and a person’s own effort, or “works.”

Luther called this theology “works righteousness” and he thought it was ridiculous.  He reasoned that God, being God, couldn’t be manipulated, or persuaded, or ordered around by lowly humans.  He concluded then, that if we are saved it must be entirely by God’s entirely free decision.  We are saved by God’s grace, not by our effort.  That’s the meaning of the hymn, “Amazing Grace.”  It’s grace that saves wretches like us, not our own work.  We simply believe, and wait, and hope.  That’s all.  Faith alone.  Sola fide.

In particular, Luther was incensed at the Catholic Church’s practice of selling indulgences. For a fee, the church would issue a letter saying that a certain number of years had been subtracted from your time in Purgatory.  Absurd, thought Luther.  Eventually the Catholic Church agreed, by the way.  They ended the practice of selling indulgences at the Council of Trent, 50 years after Luther’s 95 Theses called them out on that practice.

But the debate over whether we are saved by works or by grace continues. Is it really true that God doesn’t care what we do?  Does it really not matter that we do works, including works like giving to charity, or feeding the hungry or just trying to be nice? 

The logical problem, as Luther saw it, is that God, being all-powerful, is the cause behind every action or decision you ever make.  If you’re “good” it’s only because God made you that way.  It’s no credit to you.  And, because God is eternal, God knows what actions or decisions you’re going to make long before you make them. That’s part of the job of being the omnipotent and eternal ruler of the universe.

By this logic, it follows that human beings don’t really have free will.  Our wills are captive to a plan already set out by God since before creation.  Luther called this, “the bondage of the will.”  Therefore, God having already decided what we will do, and knowing what we will do long before we do it, it makes logical sense that our actually doing the thing, eventually, won’t make any difference to God.  Our salvation, or damnation, is already decided, a decision made by God, long ago entirely independent of us.  That’s called predestination.

  It’s not our will that saves us, but God’s grace.  Will and Grace, the eternal theological debate, and also a TV sitcom.

Sola Scriptura, was the other part of Luther’s critique of the Catholic Church.

Luther believed that God, being good, meant to communicate to us everything we needed to know about the salvation scheme.  God wouldn’t have kept necessary information secret.  In fact, Luther believed, God put everything we needed to know in one, easy to find place: the Bible.  Therefore, Luther wanted to make the Bible available to everyone.  The Bible should be translated from Latin into the languages that regular people speak everyday.  Copies of the Bible should be printed and read at home.  And the focus of worship in the church should be a minister teaching from the Bible and explaining the meaning.

The Catholic Church saw no need for lay people to read the Bible.  People are not saved by Biblical literacy but by the sacraments.  They felt the focus of worship should be a Priest, performing the Mass and hearing confession, and so on.  It was the sacraments that saved our souls.  And furthermore, the Catholic Church, through the apostolic tradition, had access to special religious truth beyond what was written in the Bible.  The Pope could have revelations.  The saints could intervene.  Peter had the keys to heaven.

Luther said, no.  Sola scriptura.  Only scripture.  That’s all you need.

Luther’s reforms were a democratizing influence on the church.  Luther moved power away from the ordained hierarchy of the Pope and the Cardinals and the Bishops, and down to the people themselves.  Literally putting the Bible in their hands.  Lay people in charge of their own spiritual lives served by a minister who acted as a companion and mentor.  

But Luther’s largest democratizing influence was simply in the act of protesting.  Luther showed that it was possible for a single person, any person, to talk back to the authority of the church, to speak truth to power.  

So very quickly, a lot of people started speaking their minds about the Christian faith.  And soon there were dozens, and then thousands of versions of Christianity, each slightly different from the others, or in many cases, pretty much the same as others but with different people in charge.

At first, most of the new churches retained some sort of denominational structure.  That means, like the Catholic church there is one central structure that oversees many local churches:  like Wells Fargo has branches on every corner.  The Lutheran church is like this, as is the Episcopal Church, and the Methodists and the Presbyterians.  There is one main guy at the top, who keeps order, controls the corporate assets, and insures that all the local churches properly represent the faith.

But this structure, too, could be protested.  Why should it be that many churches must be yoked together?  And why should that one guy, in Rome, or Geneva, or Canterbury, be in charge?  Sola Fide.  Sola Scriptura.  All we need is faith, and a copy of the Bible, and we can be our own church.

So people began to form small groups that read and studied the Bible on their own.  If they wanted a minister, they called somebody up from their own community.  If they wanted a church building, they raised the money together and built it.  They answered to no one.  They depended on no one.  Instead of denominational polity, they organized under congregational polity:  groups of lay people, making decisions as a congregation, or electing a board of elders from among their members to lead them.

The Puritan churches of colonial America were congregationalist.  Later those churches split into a more conservative branch now called the United Church of Christ (which is actually quite liberal), and a more liberal branch called the Unitarians.  The Universalists split off from the Baptist churches, which were also congregationalist in polity.

So here we are today, progeny of the Protestant Reformation, the 500 year old children of Luther.  Far from the Catholic Church. Congregationalist.  Each Unitarian Universalist church independent and only loosely linked to each other through a voluntary association called the Unitarian Universalist Association, not denomination.

Our organizational structure, or “polity” to use the religious term, is an expression of our theology.  We follow our own paths.  We are personally smart enough, strong enough and good enough to save ourselves.  We disagree with Luther.  We are sure we are saved by our works, not by God’s grace.  We follow our free will, not a pre-destined fate.  We read the Bible that Luther put in our hands and find that it says, in the second chapter of the Book of James:  “Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith.”

And we work hard.  The church Board and the congregational meeting are cornerstones of how we do church.  Every member is given a vote.  You elect your leaders.  We make our own decisions.  Our congregations cherish the freedom to call their own minister, if you want one, rather than have a minister appointed over you by a Bishop or such.  If you don’t like your minister you know you have the power to replace them.

Ministers also appreciate our freedom.  We can say what we like from the pulpit, following our own conscience, knowing that our job is to serve the people in front of us, not answer to some ecclesiastical authority in Rome, or Boston as it were.  We, ministers and congregations, are free, in all the ways that freedom is good.

But we are free in all the difficult ways, too.

We can decide how we want to spend our money, but we have to raise our own money, first.  We can lead ourselves, but we have to train and nurture and respect our own leaders.  If we’re doing well, no one’s going to stop us.  But if we get in trouble, no one’s going to come bail us out either.

What happens then, is that congregational polity works very well when churches are doing well.  But congregationalism becomes a self-reinforcing disaster when congregations aren’t doing well.  A congregation that depends entirely on its own resources can enter a sickness trap, where a small slip into ill health can rapidly compound, a small sickness causing a descent into ever-increasing problems.

The blessing of congregational polity is that we can do for ourselves.  The curse of congregational polity is the answer to the question, “But what happens when we can’t do for ourselves?”  With no strong denominational structure there is nowhere to turn for help.  There’s no central pool of financial resources that we can lean on when we can’t raise the money we need on our own.  Even if the UUA had money to give they wouldn’t hand it out without also insisting on having a say in how it’s spent.  The UUA has wise people we can ask for counsel, but the decisions we make, good or bad, are still up to us.  No person outside our own congregation has the authority to make decisions for us, even if they see us clearly stepping off a cliff.

So what happens to a congregation when their own members lack the expertise required to make good decisions?  And what happens to the resources built up in a congregation: property and endowments and history and the good name of Unitarian Universalism; when the local congregation loses the capacity to be capable stewards?  Unfortunately the answer to that question is not good.  Our Unitarian Universalism throughout the country is littered with examples of mis-used and under-used resources.

The problem is especially severe for small congregations.  The majority of Unitarian Universalist congregations are very small.  And most Unitarian Universalists belong to small congregations.

Think of all of the skills and resources that a congregation needs in order to thrive.  Preachers, teachers, healers, out-going social organizers, musicians, publicists, writers, graphic designers, sound engineers, carpenters and plumbers, accountants, bookkeepers, attorneys, activists and advocates and parlimentarians.  Luther is wrong.  It takes a lot more than faith and a Bible to make a church.  As we sang in our opening hymn, “We sing of the prophets, the teachers, the dreamers, designers, creators, and workers, and seers.”  A larger congregation can usually find the skills it needs among it’s own members.  But if a congregation only has 50 or 60 people, they would have to be very lucky to have all of those talents within their own small membership.  And if they don’t have enough money to hire the professionals they lack then those jobs simply won’t get done.

And congregations are not composed only of professionals eager to offer their skills.  Churches are for everyone.  Some people join a church because they have something to give.  But churches are also places where people come because they have something they need to receive.  People come to church seeking spiritual transcendence or education, or healing, or friends.  They come wanting to get away from work, not do more of it.

As we sang this morning, “For needs which others serve, for services we give, for work and its rewards, for hours of rest and love; we come with praise and thanks.”  We come to church as givers and receivers.  And everyone is a mix of both in various ways and at various times in their lives.  But that means that half of a congregation at any one time, are there to receive.  Some have nothing to give.  And some are tired of giving.  Givers need times to rest and receive also.  The constant pressure to give and give more can lead a congregation’s strongest members to burn out and give up.  That puts even more pressure on the remainder of the congregation and the downward spiral continues.

This is the bargain we accept with congregational polity.  Freedom.  Yes.  Local control.  Great.  But we also then face the tempting danger of imagining that we can flourish entirely separate from other churches and self-sufficient among ourselves.

The UUA has attempted in many ways to solve this structural flaw within our congregational polity.  We are encouraged to embrace our covenantal theology, going back to the Puritans and the system of mutual aid and admonition they outlined in the Cambridge Platform.  More recently, the UUA is encouraging churches to find ways to link together, to share resources so that single small congregations aren’t required to provide every diverse skill and program they need from within their own abilities.

But these efforts are insufficient.  As long as the models they suggest are voluntary, healthy congregations will have little incentive to share their resources with unhealthy congregations.  Like insurance or taxes, these systems only work if everyone participates.  As long as the UUA lacks an enforcement authority we will continue to take their advice only when it suits us, and ignore their admonitions when they inconvenience us.

I don’t imagine our congregational polity is going away any time soon.  So as long as voluntary connections of mutual aid and admonition are all we have I urge us as a movement to take our covenantal connections between our congregations seriously.  And not just when we have something we need, but when we have something to give.  We, who are smart, and strong, and good, and in charge of our own destinies, let’s do this, for the good of us all.

What’s called for then, is humility among Unitarian Universalism.  Sometimes we aren’t the ones who know best.  Sometimes we don’t have the answer.  Sometimes we don’t have the vision, or the solution.  Or sometimes we have the vision but not the strategy to make it real.  Sometimes we know we aren’t strong enough but are too ashamed to ask for help.  Other times we don’t recognize our weakness.  Sometimes we are blinded by personal desire, or fear or our ignorance, and cannot make out the good path we are called to walk.  Sometimes we are called to step forward as leaders, but often, too, we should humbly step aside, and permit the ones with more skill and passion and commitment take over for a time.

I don’t imagine our congregational polity is going away any time soon.  But who knows, Luther didn’t know the nail that attached his 95 Theses to the door of Wittenbergy Cathedral would also be the first nail in the new Protestant Church.  So maybe we could reform our loose association of congregations into a stronger, better resourced, and more powerful denomination.

What’s called for then is a reformation, not of theology but of polity.  A reformation where we forego some individual freedom, in order to gain some communal security.  A reformation that takes seriously the truth that we exist in interdependent relationships and rejects the lie that we are self-created and self-sustaining.   A reformation that sees that the future of our faith is at stake and that creating a strong future is worth the sacrifice of the present. A reformation that acknowledges that our freedom to do what we will, will not alone save us, because even Unitarian Universalists require graceful gifts from time to time, from something larger than ourselves.