Church Life: Rock to Sand to Rock Again
Feast of St. Argula von Grumbach
Given at the Celebration of New Ministry for The Rev. Ryan Missel, 20 July 2024
I was planning to start this sermon with a fun little anecdote about our saint we celebrate today, but that just doesn’t feel right under the circumstances. Like many of you, I was shocked and horrified at the assassination attempt against former President Trump last night. I was already feeling so disheartened about the future of our nation, and that just made it worse. I’m scared, and I’m upset, and I feel helpless.
Anyone with me in those feelings? We just seem to be spiraling further and further into hostility and despair and it seems like we’re headed for a black hole of chaos and violence. And you know why else I’m upset? Because this day and this sermon is supposed to be about Christ Church Cape and Father Ryan and the joy of your ministry together. I don’t want to talk about our stupid political environment and how horrible everything is.
Well, it turns out that the joy of building new ministry and our stupid political environment and how horrible everything is are intimately connected, and they always have been. Our saint for today, Argula von Grumbach, knew a thing or two about trying to do church when everything was going to hell in a handbasket.
Argula was a reformer. She was a pioneering female theologian born in 1492, and she found herself with a great number of very firm thoughts on how the church needed to be changed, thoughts that the great male theologians did not at first want to hear. Highly influenced by Martin Luther’s writings and his translation of the Bible, she began a correspondence with Luther and met him face-to-face in 1530.
In 1523, a young Lutheran university student was arrested for his Protestant views and forced to recant his beliefs on the Bible. Argula was furious and wrote an angry but extremely well-argued and Biblically grounded letter of protest to the university faculty. The letter went viral and became an overnight best-seller. It also aroused vicious controversy and Argula was attacked in all the usual ways women theologians are: she was called a failure and an abomination as a wife, mother, woman and person, and her husband got fired. Nevertheless, she persisted, and continued to travel and write, stirring up trouble and advancing the cause of the Reformation.
The reason I go into the story of her life in such detail is because I believe her circumstances are highly relevant to us today. The Protestant Reformation was a time of violent upheaval both in the secular world and the church. People were realizing that the old ways of being church were not working anymore. They wanted to bring some parts of the tradition forward, but realized that others needed to die. And this was happening in a political culture saturated by fear, enmity, and outrage. Sound familiar? They felt like the very ground beneath them was shifting and sliding away.
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