Schultz, Raymond L.

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Call, challenge, and reformation

Wilfrid Laurier University

ConsensusVolume 32Issue 2 Cultural Reception of the Gospel Article 105-1-2008Call, challenge, and reformationRaymond L. SchultzFollow this and additional works at: http://scholars.wlu.ca/consensusThis Sermons is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in Consensus by anauthorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.Recommended CitationSchultz, Raymond L. (2008) "Call, challenge, and reformation ," Consensus: Vol. 32 : Iss. 2 , Article 10.Available at: http://scholars.wlu.ca/consensus/vol32/iss2/10HISTORICAL SERIES, 15Call, Challenge, and ReformationRaymond L. SchultzNational Bishop, Evangelical Lutheran Church in CanadaWinipeg, Manitoba(Rev. Raymond L. Schultz is the third National Bishop of theEvangelical Lutheran Church In Canada [ELCIC], havingsucceeded Rev. Telmor G. Sartison in that ministry in 2001. Prior tothat he was the second Bishop of the British Columbia Synod of theELCIC, serving from 1998 to 2001. This sermon was preached onReformation Sunday, 28 October 2001, at All Saints AnglicanCathedral in Edmonton. Present were the diocesan bishop, the VeryReverend Victoria Matthews and the Most Reverend Michael Peers,the then Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada.)I am delighted to be among you tonight. Greetings from your sistersand brothers in the Evangelical Lutheran Church In Canada. Thissummer’s assemblies of our two Churches made permanent thatwhich was tentative. Interim sharing of the Eucharist has become fullcommunion. 1The destination we have reached is so joyous because we havebeen on a marvelous journey together. The journey has been full ofchallenge, discovery, and adventure. Sometimes it has been full ofconfusion. When we agreed to full communion we did not specify, inadvance, everything we will eventually have to decide. We all knowthat sometimes the journey to get somewhere is more important thanthe place at which we arrive. How we travel with each other and howwe awaken each other’s imagination is more important than theparticular shape we give our institutions at any given point in history.I am often asked to speculate on the shape of things to come, nowthat we are in full communion. What people really want to know iswhether the Lutheran Church will begin to look more Anglican orvice versa. What I reply is that I cannot predict the future because, aswe journey together, we will stimulate each other’s imagination, andwhat will emerge will be a new thing that neither of us has presentlyseen or embodied. In other things we will simply share, each giving119Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2008the other parts of ourselves as gifts. Who we are is not a staticcondition: it is shaped by the times we encounter and the companionswho accompany us.Our Churches are shaped by the Holy Spirit, who calls us throughthe Gospel to be the people of God. Martin Luther’s Small Catechismsays of the third Article of the Apostles Creed, “I cannot by my ownunderstanding or strength believe in Jesus Christ my Lord, or cometo him, but the Holy Spirit has called me through the Gospel,enlightened me with his gifts, and sanctified and kept me in the onetrue faith.” The church is not our possession. The church is thecreation of God, shaped on the move as its people live out theircalling amid the changing times of world history. Whenever someonetries to solidify a particular expression of the church and declare thatexpression to be the ultimate sacred shape, the Holy Spirit will openthe ears of someone with imagination to hear the needs of thatgeneration looking to be the church for the bread of new life. Thesolid will begin to melt, and a new shape will emerge which respondsto the hunger for the Gospel being expressed by the people of thatplace and time. That’s what I celebrate when our Church commemorates theReformation. It is, for me, a feast of the Holy Spirit who does not letour obsession with building towers of Babel interfere with the joyousevangelical mission of Christ to declare release to the captives, visionto the blind, healing to the sick, and joy to the broken-hearted. The story of the people of God, as we have it captured in ourScriptures, is the story of a people on the move. It begins in a gardenand ends in a city. An ancient Hebrew creed says, “A wanderingAramean was my ancestor.” The ancient saga includes a sojourn inEgypt and an exile in Babylon. Israel becomes the vassal state ofAssyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks and Romans. Those Jewswho follow Jesus soon find themselves outnumbered by Gentiles,who fall into a captivity centuries long – although they do not knowit at the time they celebrate Constantine making Christianity the statereligion of the Roman Empire. It is only when the politics of theempire co-opts the church into its ambitions and divisions, that thedarkness is revealed. The Churches of the East and of the West goseparate ways. The Church of the West fragments into sixteenthcentury divisions of Lutherans, Calvinist, Anabaptist, and Anglicanexpressions. It’s the story of the Tower of Babel all over again. 120 Consensushttp://scholars.wlu.ca/consensus/vol32/iss2/10However, in each of these apparent disasters someone amongGod’s people saw the light in the midst of darkness, and rediscoveredthe calling of the Spirit to proclaim the unconditional love of God tothose who were hungry to receive it. When I was a boy, I think I believed that the Lutheran Church hadsupplanted the Church of Rome. Even though we were a smallcommunity and the Roman one was huge, I believed it would be onlya matter of time until God would give us our due and topple the giant.How little I knew about the immensity of God’s grace! In the spaceand time God put between our Churches we learned to surrender ourchauvinism and speak to each other about our desire for restoredcommunion. Lutherans and Roman Catholics have come to commonagreement on the very doctrine which caused the divide of theReformation. When I reviewed those condemnations of the sixteenth centurywhich led to the irreconcilable differences between Lutherans andRoman Catholics, I was amazed that they had not been able to settlethem. They weren’t that complicated. But I was looking at themthrough the eyes of the present, in which many things have changedbecause of our experiences on the journey. While I believe that our coming to full communion is an end initself, so that the children of God might be one, it is also only thebeginning of a call to share in one mission. History has handed us anopportunity in the upcoming generation of youth in this country. Ouryouth have been parented and grand-parented by people who havesought fulfilment in secular materialism. The Baby Boomers tried tobe hippies and other idealists who dreamed of changing Westernsociety, but they degenerated into establishmentarians in businesssuits and corporate offices. The children of the Boomers becamemore entrepreneurial, but their value systems were extremely self-centred. Both generations ceased participation in the church. TheBoomers at least knew which Church it was they didn’t attend; theGen X-ers couldn’t tell one from another. Neither of thosegenerations has spoken to their children about personal faith andbelief – even those who have remained in the church. What they haveshown their children is that their materialist achievements have notbrought them peace of spirit. And so the young are curious and open. They are good kids readyfor God to show them a new way of life. At the same time, they haveCall, Challenge, and Reformation 121Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2008inherited a pluralist world. Every religious idea is equal to every otherin their world. None stands out. They hunt and peck, snip and paste,the same way they write school papers using material they find on theInternet. Here lies the calling of the Spirit: to share the gospel with ageneration that is hungry for it out of sheer spiritual malnutrition. Here lies the challenge: will we do this simply because they needit, or because we desperately want to refill our declining churches? Here comes the reforming: the questions our youth ask will be inwords and concepts we do not presently understand. We areparticularists in a pluralist landscape; they are surfers on adimensionless sea. We are landlubbers, they are mariners. In order forus to hear their questions, we will have to learn a new vocabulary andbecome familiar with a religious inventory that comes fromunfamiliar communities most of us have never visited.Yet our newest generation values friendships with a passion, andour young people hope to have enduring marriages and families. Thatis the land on which they hope to build their homes. We have the giftsto help them build those homes. Community through communion isa way of describing ourselves. We teach an understanding of love thatis not a transient feeling, but an enduring policy of meeting the needsof the other. We worship a God who reshapes religious communities,so that they can serve the Spirit’s ends. Our poetry is full of images of the God who does these things:God is a potter. God is a mother giving birth. God is the new-bornchild. God is a whirlwind. God is utter silence. These are images of life-changing experiences. Some call forsubmission of the will, others call for a new plan of action. God asksus to sit in dark silence and listen, God asks us to gird up our loinsand get going. But whatever God asks will not be shaped by our needfor order. God is always driven by the passionate desire to love everyone of us with an unconditional fondness that defies reason andpracticality. That is why we keep needing reformation. Institution-builders are practical rationalists. God is Don Quixote dreaming theimpossible dream.The dreams I have for you, my Lord,are only a shadow of the dreams you have for me;only a shadow of all that will be,if I but follow you.2122 Consensushttp://scholars.wlu.ca/consensus/vol32/iss2/10Notes1 In 2001 both the National Convention of the Evangelical LutheranChurch In Canada and the General Synod of the Anglican Church ofCanada adopted “The Waterloo Declaration” which declared the twoChurches to be in “full communion” with one another. See theIntroduction above for details.2 Carey Landrey, “Only A Shadow,” published in Glory and Praise:Parish Music Programs (Phoenix, Arizona: North American LiturgyResources, 1984).Call, Challenge, and Reformation 123Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2008

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