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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 21, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
In this ongoing sermon series about differences, this Sunday we’ll look at the difference between Protestants and Catholics. When did the Protestants split from the Catholics and why?
The history of the Christian religion goes back to the days after the death of Rabbi Jesus. He had been a teacher in the Jewish religion, showing the people how to be righteous, what love looked like, redirecting their attention to what was important: loving God and loving your neighbor. His followers were confused and disheartened. 49 days after the first day of Passover, 49 days after the events leading to Jesus’s execution had begun, the disciples grew inspired and encouraged to go spread the word. Accounts of this event, called Pentecost, say tongues of flame rested upon their heads and they began to speak in tongues. One kind of literal mind might say that there were actual flames on their heads, and another kind of literal mind would say it was probably just that someone said “hey, I have an idea!” and since there were no light bulbs back then to “appear” over someone’s head at the arrival of a bright idea, they spoke of flames. “Let’s go speak to other people in other countries about this!”
So the story began to spread. The authorities tried to stamp it out. One of the first persecuters was Saul. He traveled far and wide to execute Christians until he had a dramatic conversion experience and started to spread the word with more dedication, skill and privilege (being a citizen of Rome) than anyone else had done before. The disciples had been preaching a reformation of Judaism, so if people wanted to become followers of Jesus, they had to become Jews first, which meant circumcision. This made recruitment more difficult than it needed to be. Saul, who had changed his name to Paul, said no one needed to become Jewish first, that you could go straight from being a worshipper of Diana and Zeus to being a follower of Jesus. This is what made it a new religion, which, in the Roman world, had little to do with its roots in Judaism. Because Paul worked all over the Roman Empire, whose center was Rome, Rome became the center of the new religion. After 300 years of persecution by the emperors, the Emperor Constantine made it the official religion of the empire.
Lots of Gospels had been written, stories of the origins and teachings of Jesus. There was a Gospel of Thomas, a Gospel of Mary, a Gospel of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Many teachers were interpreting the story and making rules about how people should think, act, and believe from a combination of Jesus teachings, found in all of those gospels (the earliest of which was written about thirty years after the rabbi’s death), and their own thoughts. Arguments among the followers of the various teachers grew so virulent that the empire itself was losing its peace. “Get yourselves figured out!” Constantine demanded. “Decide what you believe and teach that and make everybody stick to it. No more fighting!”
The first Church Council, to decide these matters, was held in the year 325. They chose four gospels, and wrote the Nicene Creed, which is recited in Roman Catholic churches as a statement of belief. Many councils were held after that, continuing to the present day. The councils determine what is orthodoxy (the teachings the mainstream churches agree on) and what is heresy (the answers declared to be wrong by the councils.) The church evolved, absorbing local pagan holidays, continuing to develop dogma and traditions. With the fall of the empire, the barbarians came in. People didn’t learn to read. There was war and pestilence. Some of the priests learned to read, and so the knowledge of what was in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures was spotty. Whatever the priests said was what the religion taught. All authority was with the Pope. Many of them were fine people but some were corrupt and power hungry. Fighting for authority and power with the kings and queens of various countries caused turmoil. Crusades were expensive. In 1054 the Eastern Orthodox Church split from the Roman Catholic church. That’s a story for another sermon. By the fifteen hundreds, one of the fund raising techniques was the sale of “indulgences.” This was a corruption of what indulgences were, originally, when they were not sold, but given in recognition of good works or a pilgrimage. By the middle ages, the process had been corrupted. Instead of doing the penance for your sin you could pay a priest to do it for you. He would say the prayers and you’d be in the clear. That devolved eventually to some folks being able to buy indulgences before they even committed the sin, just to have the penance in the bank. This practice was one of the targets of protest.
The protest began in 1517. A priest named Martin Luther wrote a pamphlet disputing the efficacy and power of indulgences, called the 95 theses. Legend says that he nailed it to the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church. The Reformation of the Church had begun. The growing number of protesters were called Protestants. Just as the Arab Spring could not have happened without the Internet, the Protestant Reformation could not have happened without the printing press. Books began being printed in Europe (although the technology was invented in Korea in the 1300’s) in the mid 1400’s. A goldsmith name Gutenberg invented a printing press which could turn out 3600 pages a day. He printed a Bible in Latin. Educated people began reading it for themselves, and discussing what they found. It was no longer enough for the priest to say it was so, people wanted what the priest said to agree with what the Bible said. The Protestants had many differences with the Catholic Church. They liked plain sanctuaries, without stained glass or statues to detract from focus on God and the Bible. They would rampage through Catholic Churches and smash statues with the righteousness of the Taliban.
In the early days, you could say Protestants had three main points where they diverged from Catholics.
1. Sola Scriptura: it is only by the scripture that we learn about God. Ministers teach that word, and the sermon is the center of the worship service. How churches have done things throughout history has very little weight. / in the RC, Orthodox and Episcopal churches, church tradition and teachings is given equal weight.
2. Sola Fide: It is only by our faith that we are saved from hell. All you have to do is believe correctly and you will go to heaven. You are supposed to do good works and be righteous, but your actions and works are not what get you to heaven. It’s Jesus’s righteousness which is laid around you like a cloak. In gratitude for being saved you are a good person./ non Protestants need to do good works in addition to being believers in order to be saved. You have to go to Mass, give a tithe, not sin badly.
3. Sola Gratia “By grace alone.” You can’t decide to have a saving faith, it is given to you by God’s grace. Your righteous deeds are nothing, you are good as a gift of God’s grace. No priest can bless you, only God blesses with any authority. Denominations differ on how much you participate in your salvation. If it’s none at all, you have baptism of infants, because even adults don’t have any partnership with god in their salvation, so why not baptize you when you’re a baby? If it’s a partnership, if you have choices, they wait until the age of reason to baptize you. You can walk up to the rail for communion. In denominations where they want to remind you that you have no part in your salvation, the communion comes to you as you sit in the pew. We’ll talk more about that if we talk about the differences among the Protestant denominations.
Unitarian Universalism is closer to Protestantism. We have roots there, as we do in the early Christian heresy of Arianism (which we will talk about in another sermon in the “what’s the difference?” series: Trinitarian and Unitarian). Like the Protestants, we don’t have priests. We believe in the priesthood of all believers. That shows up, even in something as simple as the animal blessing, where the blessing doesn’t come from the minister, but rather from each of us, all of us reading the blessing together. We center the worship service on the word and music rather than on a litany recited by a priest. Our sanctuaries are usually plain. Sometimes we light candles, which feels too Catholic to some and feels good to others. Sometimes there is a committee that decorates the sanctuary with art, although that feels too fussy for some and delightful to others.
Unlike Catholics or Protestants, we center authority in the individual in relationship to community. Not in the Pope, not in the Bible.
Light of ages and of nations
“Singing the Living Tradition” – Hymn 190
Light of ages and of nations,
every race and every time
has received thine inspirations,
glimpses of thy truth sublime.
Always spirits in rapt visions
passed the heavenly veil within,
always hearts bowed in contrition
found salvation from their sin.
Reason’s noble aspirations
truth in growing clearness saw;
conscience spoke its condemnation,
or proclaimed eternal law.
While thine inward revelations
told thy saint their prayers were heard,
prophets to the guilty nations
spoke thine everlasting word.
Lo, that word abideth ever,
revelation is not sealed,
answering now to or endeavor,
truth and right are still revealed.
That which came to ancient sages,
Greek, Barbarian, Roman, Jew,
written in the soul’s deep pages,
shines today, forever new.
Unlike Catholics and Protestants, we do not say that revelation of truth about God and humanity is “sealed,” set. We believe it is ongoing. We can always learn more. Our theology evolves as our understanding evolves. As science, art, morality, law and culture evolve, so does our understanding of what is important, what is required to be a good person. No one book or person has the answers.
We bless one another. We call religious professionals to teach, preach and administrate, but they are not more holy than anyone else. Our minds can change. There is no eternal punishment for being wrong in your beliefs. We think through our beliefs and check them with the community. Our actions don’t save us, but we hope they go some way toward healing the world. Our hope is in love, in action, in justice, in one another, and in that mystery which shows up, bidden and unbidden, to surprise us with insight, connection, joy and grace.
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