Remarks at Joint Catholic-Lutheran observance of the anniversary of the Reformation

The following are Homily notations I used during the joint Catholic-Lutheran prayer service in observance of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. Notations like these are used by me to guide the discourse, though I occasionally elaborate extemporaneously on particular points. 

The service was held at St John the Baptist Catholic Church in San Juan, Texas on October 29, 2017; it had both a penitential and a hopeful character. Obviously, Catholics and Lutherans look on the Reformation through different eyes. This does not, however, preclude our speaking to each other about it in amicable ways. That is part of the way forward.

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The vine is Christ. 

The Baptismal creed we will commonly recite shortly witnesses to our common faith in the saving work of God. By baptism into this faith we are inserted into Christ, the firstborn of all creation. We have been grafted onto the Vine by the grace of faith, as St Paul so clearly teaches. 

1. The primacy of Grace

Years of ecumenical dialogue have clarified some misconceptions. Among them, I think, our mutual acknowledgment that we both profess the primacy of grace ranks as the most significant. The primacy of grace means that we profess that we are saved by the free gift of Christ, the WORD whose coming into the world is the primordial gift. Our response to him in faith is also a grace.

The Catholic Church has reason to lament that this primacy of grace has not always been transparently evident in all places and times in our 2000 year history; this lack was partially responsible for the divisions that the years since the Reformation have brought.

Catholics hold that the Church was promised the grace that she would not err in matters of faith and morals; but this does not mean that she will always and in every place be transparent to the faith she professes. In this sense, for Catholics to recall the Reformation is to hear a call for continual examination of conscience. 

Yet, it is also true that how we Catholics and Lutherans live this primacy of grace differs in significant ways. The practice of the Catholic Church is not always the expression of a shortfall; in certain matters it is a manifestation of the gift that is the faith of the Church.

Catholic practice, for example, with regard to the Eucharistic Mystery differs from that of the Lutheran confession. These differences are reflections of a difference in what we believe about what Christ has given us, and they are too important for all of us to seek facile, nominal solutions.

It is mutual respect and not recrimination that bids us, purified, to recognize the differences that remain, and how these differences at times touch on deep matters. We still have a way to go before full reconciliation. Better to say this at the outset.

Indeed, we both share responsibility for the fact that after 500 years of argument, the culture we live in tends to equate faith with strongly held opinion. Our Western culture largely thinks that there is no sure way to support a claim on behalf of truth by either Catholics or Protestants. 

Yet, faith for Luther or Zwingli or Calvin, as much as for Pope Leo X or for Erasmus or for Cardinal Cajetan, was not simply a matter of opinion. It is a graced adherence to Christ. It is more certain than anything known by the natural sciences. What we believe mattered to them as it should to us. One of the things the current moment calls for is a common witness to the importance of truth, and its proper expression. We do this by embracing the grace that will sustain the hard work ahead. We still have a ways to go. 

The grace of this time is present in the fact that we move forward with realism, amicably, in a recognition of what we profess in common.

2. The faith we live and pray together.

Our common and deepest tradition is rooted in faith as adherence to a person, namely Christ Jesus, in whom, by the Spirit, the Father has revealed his love. We believe that God speaks through the Word that is his Son.

Our common faith flows from the love shown by Christ on the Cross:  it is not that we have first loved God, but rather, as St John says, it is that “God has first loved us”. In this we believe. We must not lose sight of the importance of witnessing together to this truth in the midst of the world today. For we are in a time when it is not simply that many young people do not believe in God, but, perhaps more radically, they are losing faith in love. 

We have lost much in the last 500 years. And the culture bears witness that we lost it together. Part of what has been lost in the West is the conviction that grace and truth are words that mean something; they are not place-holders in a nominalist lexicon. They are realities that flow powerfully to us through the Word Incarnate and by his Spirit.

This is part of the witness our age needs: Grace is the gift of Christ Jesus himself; his unmerited coming changes the life of anyone who by faith accepts his coming as the gift of the Father. We have much to offer by giving this common witness.

During these days my mind has turned spontaneously to two witnesses who are signs for us as we move forward: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and St Maximilian Kolbe. One a Lutheran Pastor, the other a Franciscan evangelizer. Both Bonhoeffer and Maximilian Kolbe gave witness in the darkest hours of World War II. Bonhoeffer would recognize no party or führer as absolute ruler. In his own way he witnessed to Christ the King. He was killed in 1945. Kolbe died in Auschwitz, some short time before Bonhoeffer, having given his life, in a supreme act of charity, so as to die in place of another condemned man. 

They both testify to something we hardly knew but which we have always known. That our common fidelity to Christ is yet a powerful sign and carries with it a merciful grace. In this windswept house, where the thought of God is banished and human dignity forgotten both Bonhoeffer and Kolbe made their profession of faith.

In this our time, their common witness to Christ was inseparable from their unshakable conviction that the assaults on human dignity represented by Auschwitz and the other human atrocities unleashed at that time was an assault on the Christ himself: “What you did for the least of mine, you did for me..”

The Ecumenism of blood is not about us, it is, rather, about Christ and the world he desires to save from itself. Without him, we are lost.

The Sacrifice of Christ founds the Church. Bonhoeffer and Kolbe show us that our common sacrifice for Christ will guide us to a fuller reconciliation. Their sacrifice points forward to a reconciled horizon, which when it comes, will be a work of grace because it will be a fruit of the Sacrifice of Christ.

3. The eschatological horizon of the baptismal creed:

The Apostles Creed we will shortly profess concludes, as do all the ancient creedal expressions, with a view toward eschatological finality, the hope of the Church. 

We believe in a world that will be reconciled by grace offered and accepted, and we acknowledge that we have a duty to reconcile and be reconciled in this grace. Not simply for our own sakes, but really for the sake of Christ.

But, like a mother and daughter who have not spoken in a while, the way back to each other is also a way forward together. It involves acknowledging our common source of life in grace and our call in grace to witness to his presence in even the darkest moments and places our world constructs.

There is still a ways to go, but how we must go should be clearer to us. Bonhoeffer and Kolbe show us that the path to reconciliation lies within the eschatological horizon of our common witness to Christ. The more we try to be transparent to the God who gives all for the sake of the world, the more clear will be our path forward.

Fidelity to Christ in this way of common and eschatological witness opens a way that is unclear beyond our immediate next steps: but we pray “Lead kindly light.” When full reconciliation comes it will be by way of grace, by way of the person of our Christ Jesus our Lord.

May the truth that is Christ in person, come and set us free.

Amen.

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