Imagine the biblical scene: a bearded, rough-cut prophet with a stave in his hand turns to the crowd following him: "Sorry, no. I’m John the Methodist."

This is the Sunday before All Saints: Hallowe’en. It’s also Reformation Sunday. I wondered at first if the Rev. Dr. George Wirth was out of his carpetbagger mind when he invited me to preach on Reformation. If you want a Presbyterian, sorry, no. I’m Ross the Episcopalian.

The trouble with Reformation Sunday is that it provided too many occasions for over-againstness from each other, worst of all, for anti-Catholicism.

Anti-Catholicism. Now there’s a deadly sin, if you want to add it to the seven. Twenty years ago people were saying that the troubles in Ireland would be ended when the last Catholic killed the last Protestant–or vice versa. Some of your own families know well about the animosities. Bruce Modahl, a Lutheran pastor in Illinois, wrote recently of how, when his mother was married in 1944, her best friend watched from the doorway of St. Matthew Lutheran Church in St. Louis. A Roman Catholic, she could not participate in the wedding service. Accepting the invitation to be the maid of honor was out of the question for a Catholic. Her priest forbade her.

The division was true of Protestants, too. When I was a student, I served for a summer in a little parish on the Island of Skye. The village, with not more than one or two hundred residents, had three Presbyterian churches, vigorously, even viciously separated from one another.

How could anyone read the Gospel about Jesus praying for his followers,". . . that they all may be one"? or sing the old tub thumper with the lines, "We are not divided, all one body we," when we by demonstration were not?

Something enormously good is happening within our time. It is so vast we haven’t yet got scope or scale of it yet.

One of the wisest of the Islamic mystics, Jalaluddin Rumi, wrote this 700 years ago: "Nothing," he said, can be undertaken until a pain–a yearning and love for a thing–is awakened inside us." On the edge of the centuries, we are living in a time when a yearning and love for a better way for the church has become all but universal in the Christian churches.

I’ve sometimes wondered if the Holy Spirit, that great cleansing wind of God, awakens that pain and yearning and love for the church every five hundred years or so.

In the fifth century the best minds in Christendom were in despair about what was happening to the church. And then–a big gust–the Spirit came and a yearning and a love for renewal came to expression in the great movement we call monasticism.

In the tenth century another arousal came in the form of a massive attempt on the part of Christian scholars to capture the mind of Europe and to relate the Christian Gospel to the emerging currents of thought and art and philosophy. We call that movement scholasticism.

Five hundred years later, the wind of the Spirit blew again in the Reformation of the sixteenth century. Luther in Germany, Calvin in Switzerland, Cranmer in England, Knox in Scotland and hundreds like them, yearned for the Gospel and Christ to regain its centrality in the church’s faith and life.

Here we are, another five hundred years later, on the edge of a new century, and living in the dawn of another great movement of reform.

It’s good news, and I offer five pieces of evidence for the new reformation.

1. The Bible and Bible study. In the late 20^th century, the Bible, or parts of the Bible, is available for over 80 percent of the world’s population in more than 2000 languages, most of them in Africa and Asia. In Latin America, there are thousands of base-type communities in which reading the Bible constantly rotates around the question, "How do we tell the poor of this world that God loves them?"

In the United States, Bible study is not a Wednesday evening practice by evangelical Protestants only but a regular experience practice in Catholic parishes. We have resources never before available in such abundance: translations like the NRSV or the NIV, or paraphrases like The Message; or the Kerygma Bible study program from Pittsburgh; or the Education for Ministry program from Sewanee, Tennessee. Every renewal movement in 2000 years has had its source and center in a re-appropriation of the biblical message.

2. Theology. The church needs theology, because theology’s main task is to help the community of faith in its search for a way of living that truly follows in the footsteps of Jesus of Nazareth.

All over this country small groups of people–and you have them in this great congregation–come regularly together for spiritual discernment; seeking new ways to rework traditional doctrines of God, Christ, and the Spirit.

Think of how we are learning to think about God with a quite different picture of divine sovereignty that most of us grew up on. In the classical scheme, God is above all, seated on a throne, infinitely distant from us, above time, above space, above us.

How do we think of God now? Not as up there, but as all over the place, in everything, in space, time, and light. God is the energy, passion, yearning, and love that makes everything go, not a vague impersonal power somewhere in the great beyond. God is before the Big Bang, and God will still be when the universe crunches into itself. This is the same God whose name Moses heard–"I Am"–and when he heard, he took his shoes off, for it was holy ground. It is the same God who spoke when Jesus said, "You, Father, are in me, and I in you," the same God who speaks when any one of us says, "Father, thou art in heaven."

Theology is a demanding discipline, but it is the engine that drives reform.

Example #1: Many Christians in our country are asking how they can trade a relentless consumerism for a more intellectually and spiritually rich life and for what really matters to them: family, relationships, community involvement, environmental concern, and more satisfying kinds of work. Theology is at work. Let me commend here Vicki Robin’s book, Your Money or Your Life, co-authored with Joe Dominguez. A kind of road map for simple living, it was for more than a year on Business Week’s best seller list.

Example #2: Only a generation ago, the great minds of the day believed that science not only disproved, but replaced God. Now science is one of the major factors in making the idea of God a serious subject again. It is the scientists who seem to be taking the lead from the theologians. Let me commend here an older book by Paul Davies, God and the New Physics, or a newer one by Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages. The enemy today isn’t evolution. It is dogmatism and intolerance, scientific or religious, a tradition as old as human beings and as inhibiting of growth and change.

3. The meaning of faith in Jesus. It isn’t only mainline Protestantism, it is contemporary Catholicism also that is attempting to make clear the real claim of Jesus Christ. The interest has never been more intense or more widespread.

In Washington, DC, last February Marcus Borg and N. Thomas Wright had a dialog, as a liberal and an evangelical, on the meaning of Jesus. Four thousand people came to listen. When these two scholars came to the Chautauqua Institution this past summer, they doubled the capacity of the hall where they spoke for five days.

For Reformation Sunday, let Martin Luther preach a little sermon to us: "Faith," he says, "does not require information, knowledge, and certainty, but a free surrender and joyful bet on [God’s] unfelt, untried, and unknown goodness. What, as a matter of fact, does Christ do for Christians? The answer is: He gives us a confidence that our life counts for something because God has given it to us, and that we are invited to a life that constantly draws on Jesus as its inspiration.

4. The unity of the churches. In the great wind of the Spirit that’s blowing in our time, Christians have increasingly felt the pain of separation from one another. Count off one by one the achievements of the ecumenical movement: the union of mission churches in South India and North India from the 1940s to the 1970s; in this country, the formation of the United Church of Christ in 1957 and the United Methodist Church in 1968. The Consultation on Church Union, begun in 1962 in response to a sermon by Presbyterian Eugene Carson Blake, sought to achieve full communion among the participating bodies. When the second Vatican Council ended in 1965, the Roman Catholic Church entered into a series of conversations with Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Baptists and others. Last summer, after three days of intense debate, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America approved a document that opens the way to full communion with the Episcopal Church.

Nearly 40 years ago, Pope John Paul XXIII said that the Spirit was blowing again, and he called a council at the Vatican with the immediate task of renewing the church. This very day, Reformation Sunday, October 31, 1999, representatives of the Lutheran World Federation and the Vatican will sign a statement lifting the mutual condemnations of the 16^th century, including a joint statement on the doctrine of justification, the very doctrine that split the church in that century.

We can’t fall back on the old nonsense that Catholics teach a doctrine of works and Protestants the doctrine of faith. Separated, yes, we are, but we’re using the same language in a way we’ve never done before. It’s breath-taking. No, it is breath-giving; it’s a new gust of the Spirit in our midst.

5. Hymns and worship. If you go a lot around the churches, as I do, you’ll find that people are singing the same spiritual tunes all over the place. There is an unprecedented reformation going on in hymnody today. All the mainline churches have prepared new hymnals in the last generation. No sad songs for us! Dead churches don’t sing, and they certainly don’t sing old hymns. Read the introduction to your own Presbyterian Hymnal. The hymns chosen, it says, will (1) relate to Reformed doctrines and (2) embrace the diversity of our historical traditions. The United Methodist Hymnal similarly says: This hymnal "reflects our Wesleyan heritage and witness: evangelical and ecumenical." Catholics today are singing Luther’s "A Mighty Fortress" as lustily as Lutherans, and Baptists and Methodists have fallen in love with Catholic chants.

It’s the same when we say our prayers publicly. I grew up in Scotland in the tradition of free prayer. It was offensive to use a prayer book. Now even the most evangelical churches are asking, Can we draw on the whole liturgical tradition of Christianity to give richness to our Sunday prayers?

Consider Holy Communion, the great prayer of thanksgiving. John Calvin wanted the Reformed churches to meet at the table for the Supper every Lord’s Day. Name any other celebration in which all the participants are more fully built up into communion with Christ and with one another. There is none. I offer you this challenge to incorporate an emphasis that was Presbyterian in its origins but has not yet been fully expressed: a weekly celebration of Holy Communion will transform the life of any Christian community: the Lords Supper for the Lord’s own people on the Lord’s own day. "Dear God," wrote little Mary Ellen in one of her letters to God, "My family, the Sandersons, is pleased to invite your family, the Gods, over for bread and wine (I figured you might like this) . . . Please respond in writing or on a tablet. Very truly yours." The almost universal Christian testimony is that the place where Christians most feel the presence and work of the Holy Spirit is at the Eucharist or Holy Communion. Let’s all get to the party.

So things are happening all over the place: all of them, I think, our responses to the pain we felt in those days about the divisions in the Christian Church, our responses to the yearning and love that have been awakened for its unity.

Almighty Father, whose blessed Son before his passion prayed for his disciples that they might be one, as you and he are one: Grant that your Church, being bound together in love and obedience to you, may be united in one body by the one Spirit, that the world may believe in him whom you have sent, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.