October

October is filled with images of hot cider, harvest meals, Oktoberfest brews and a bit of snow on the peaks around Anchorage. It is also the time when we celebrate the Reformation. The Refor..what you say?

Reformation, it is based on the word to reform. Martin Luther was a monk who felt there were some things that needed to be reformed in the church. When he listed a few of them, ninety five to be precise, and put them up on the town bulletin board (which happened to be a church door and he was out of tacks so he used a hammer and a nail) as a call for public debate, well things got a little out of hand. There was this new invention that some people were just waiting for an opportunity to show what it could do; it was called the printing press. The printing press people saw these ninety five debate points nailed up to the church door and thought, cool, this would be a nice test run to see how this printing press thing works. Well.. it worked.

The next think you know Luther’s ideas were floating all around the area and everyone was talking about them. They brought up ideas like human rights and democracy and questioned the authority of the church, which together with a few kings, princes, priests and emperors ran things. Luther also questioned the church’s ability to sell “Get out of Hell Free” cards called indulgences. Since the sale of these “Get out of Hell Free” cards was a fundraiser the Pope was using to raise money to build a nice new church called St. Peter’s Basilica, and worked much better than selling cookies, he became angry and thought about making Luther eat worms, but instead made him come to a meeting (called a Diet) in the city of Worms.

At this Diet, or meeting, Luther was asked to recant (which is like officially saying, oops, I was just kidding) but instead Luther took a stand and said I can’t recant and was officially declared a criminal with a price on his head and was to be given a head start before they came after him. On his way home some masked men grabbed him and the story went out that they strung him up for the reward, but in reality they worked for a wise prince called Fredrick who was on Luther’s side. Fredrick hid Luther in a castle in the Wartburg city of Eisenach. It was here he dressed up like a knight, translated New Testament in the Bible from Latin and Greek into German and threw ink at the wall in his room.

Luther’s idea of reforming the church wasn’t working out so well and the church had a price on his head where he was wanted dead or alive so he decided being a priest was no longer a good career choice. His writings also had started a revolution so he started a new church. He didn’t like the name but others started calling it a Lutheran church.

He never liked the idea of priests not being allowed to marry so he arranged something fishy for the priests who followed him into this new church. There were some nuns who had been reading some of his books and they wanted to join this new church. One day a merchant delivered several large wooden barrels of pickled herring to the convent and while there he picked up the old empty barrels and several of the nuns hid inside the barrels and snuck out. Luther arranged for all of the nuns to marry these new Lutheran priests and was successful in all but one case. A feisty young lady named Katie just wouldn’t go for it. After she turned down all the men Luther found for her, Luther got mad at her and yelled, “Well then who are you going to marry???!!!!!” She looked at him and said ….. YOU!! Luther knew when to stop arguing so he got married instead.

They set up a large home in Wittenberg where Luther sat around and drank beer and taught classes, wrote songs, organized a new church structure, wrote several books and started a reformation that changed the whole world. In the mean time, Katie had six children, got up at 4am (earning her the nickname of Morning Star) and ran a farm and a brewery to help fund the reformation and feed all the people Martin kept inviting home for dinner who would sometimes stay for months.

Some things that came about because of Luther and his friend Philip Melanchthon were:
• Lots of new songs for the church including several that were pop tunes of the day with new words written for them
• Two sacraments, communion and baptism, for the church instead of seven.
• Free medical care for the towns people
• Free education for all the towns children
• A sanitation system and fresh clean water for all the towns people
• One of the first environmental laws passed (allowing Katie to draw clean water from the river to make beer)
• The small catechism for families to use to teach their children in their homes all about God’s grace.
• A whole new movement in faith with the focus on salvation coming from God because God loves us the way a parent loves a child, he called it grace.
• A new political idea based on the church’s new bottom up idea of how each of us stands before God, it became known as democracy.
• A revolution that changed and continues to change the whole world.
• And a whole bunch of other good things.

So, Join us this month as we get ready to celebrate this wonderful event called the Reformation and remember that God loves you.