Brothers and sisters, there is something gloriously fitting about celebrating the Reformation around a table. Here are the saints, and here are the children. Here is the food, and here is the ample evidence that our heavenly Father is not a stingy host. Christ reigns, and our sins are forgiven. The bread has arrived, and somebody here ought to be smiling.
And yet, if you learned about Reformed Christianity entirely from the internet, you might reasonably conclude that the chief end of man is to expose another Presbyterian and to enjoy their humiliation forever.
Every week brings another controversy, another denunciation, another man with a microphone explaining why the fellow with the other microphone is the greatest threat to Christendom since the invention of the indulgence box.
Sometimes the public rebuke is necessary. Sometimes the wolves really are wearing clerical collars. That’s good and right. Scripture commands us to expose false teaching, to confront sin, and to protect Christ’s sheep. Paul rebuked Peter publicly when his conduct compromised the truth of the gospel.
Faithfulness requires courage. But a brother in Christ is not a wolf merely because he has irritated us, and an audience is not a flock you’ve been called to pastor simply because it enjoys watching you take the next bite.
There is a temptation we must name plainly in our day, and it disheartens me: a pastor can discover that attacking another pastor will grow his audience, his market share, and his brand.
Controversy brings algorithmic attention, and attention brings subscribers, and subscribers bring influence, and influence brings income and speaking engagements and signed book sales and everything else. Before long, another man’s reputation simply becomes the raw material for your little media empire.
When we attack brothers to increase our market share, we’re putting a price tag on the peace of Jesus’s church.
Now, I can’t see everyone’s motives; God can. But every man with a pulpit, a podcast, or a publish button ought to ask himself whether he wants his brother restored or whether he simply wants his brother’s listeners. And those of us who are the audience of these shows must ask ourselves why we keep buying tickets.
We confess that Christ will disciple the nations. We sing about His dominion extending from sea to sea. We expect our grandchildren to build upon the ground we’ve taken. Splendid. Then surely we can stop firing shots into our own ranks, as if that’s the way we’re going to win the war.
An army that spends its breakfast shooting its own officers shouldn’t boast too loudly when it’s overrun by supper.
Our warfare is spiritual. Our weapons are the Word of God and prayer and repentance and faithful discipline and sacrificial love and the proclamation of the gospel. Our neighbors are people we are to win, including those who presently oppose us.
The devil, falsehood, and sin are the enemies we fight. The brother beside us, with whom we share one Lord, one faith, one baptism, belongs under the same banner we do.
That brings me to Martin Bucer.
If there was ever a man the Reformation produced who tried to stop Christians from using their finest ammunition on one another, it was Martin Bucer, the stubborn little shepherd from Strasbourg.
He was born in 1491 in Schlettstadt, in Alsace. He came from an artisan family, received a strong education, and entered the Dominican Order as a young man. He studied at Heidelberg, where his reading brought him under the influence of Erasmus.
Then, in 1518, he heard Martin Luther at the Heidelberg Disputation, and his theological world shifted. Here was a proclamation of grace that drove him back to the gospel.
The Lord was preparing a man who would spend his life insisting that the gospel reconciles sinners to God, and that the same gospel obligates sinners in the church to love one another.
Bucer left the Dominican Order in 1521. In 1522, he married Elisabeth Silbereisen, a former nun.
By 1523, after opposition to his preaching elsewhere, he came to Strasbourg, where he became a leading figure of the city’s Reformation and of the wider Reformation. He is also the namesake of our presbytery, Bucer Presbytery.
But leaving Rome didn’t mean leaving conflict behind.
The Reformers were tearing themselves apart. Luther and Zwingli disagreed so profoundly on the Lord’s Supper that Luther said Zwingli was a son of the devil, literally a love child between his mother and Satan. Luther said these things.
Bucer couldn’t settle them by telling everyone to stop caring about doctrine either. He had to do something much harder. He had to listen carefully. He had to distinguish actual disagreement from misunderstanding. He had to work as a middleman in the Reformation to bring the factions together. And that kind of work takes patience, especially when every man at the table has a formidable mind and some of them have a personality like Martin Luther’s.
In 1529, Bucer participated in the Marburg Colloquy, where Luther and Zwingli met in an effort to resolve their differences. They reached substantial agreement, but the dispute over the Lord’s Supper remained unresolved, and the wider Protestant cause divided into what we see today: nearly 25,000 denominations, and still splintering.
But Bucer kept working.
In 1530, at the Diet of Augsburg, he and Wolfgang Capito prepared the Tetrapolitan Confession for Strasbourg. Constance, Memmingen, and Lindau also joined. Four cities speaking together; four communities refusing to remain isolated.
Their confession grounded preaching in Scripture and confessed salvation by God’s grace through Christ. It did not unite every Protestant disagreement under one banner, but it did give those cities a shared confession.
That’s the first lesson: when you cannot bring the entire army together today, you start by faithfully standing with the brothers you can gather right now.
Then came years of further negotiations. In 1534, Bucer reached an agreement with Philip Melanchthon at Kassel. In 1536, he helped bring the South German theologians into agreement with Luther and Melanchthon through the Wittenberg Concord. The agreement addressed the Lord’s Supper and narrowed the breach that had divided the evangelical churches.
Consider what that required. He had to return to difficult conversations again. He had to explain himself again. He had to hear objections again. And if you’ve ever been in the middle of a conflict, you know you get shot from both sides.
Some of us declare a man impossible after three comments and one misunderstood text message, and we’re done. But Bucer kept after it for years and years and years.
And here’s the picture I want us to carry home tonight.
The Reformation at the time was a formidable force, but formidable the way five open fingers are formidable. They are not very strong. If you try to punch someone with five open fingers, you’re going to break your fingers.
Bucer was trying to close that hand. He was trying to bring the factions together so they actually had punch, so they actually had force. And we need Martin Bucers today.
The reason I wanted to talk about this tonight is that we need reformation in this country and in the church. Much of that is doctrinal reformation. Absolutely, we’ve lost sight of what it means to be saved by grace.
But among those who know that salvation is by grace alone through faith alone, we’ve lost something else. We’ve lost unity. We’ve lost love. We’ve lost brotherhood.
We’re never going to see Jesus’s kingdom advance if we keep shooting each other. We’re never going to see Jesus’s kingdom advance if we keep acting more like Americans than Christians.
We need a reformation, and we need men and women like you to be Martin Bucers, to work for it, to see Jesus’s prayer come true.
Do you know what Jesus prayed on the night before He died? “That they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You” (John 17:21).
May we never be caught working against that prayer of Christ, and may we always be caught working for it.
Let us pray.
God, we thank You. We thank You for Martin Bucer, and for the wonderful work he did in Strasbourg and in bringing the Reformers together.
Lord, would You cause us to have that spirit, to see unity be central to our efforts? Lord, we know that we cannot unite in heresy, we cannot unite in egregious error, but, Lord, we also need not shoot the ones who call upon Your name.
Lord, let us show our love for You in the way that we love one another. Let us, this little church in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, be mighty and bold in our love for You and in spreading the gospel in this land, and also in our love for one another and for Your church.
You left heaven to die for Your church, so that she would be Your spotless bride. Lord, let us not bride bash and wage brother wars. Let us be faithful to love those whom You have called and whom You have loved.
In Jesus’s name, amen.
