What does it mean to be a Lutheran? Honestly, if you had asked me that eleven years ago I would’ve had no idea how to respond. I’m not of German ancestry. I wasn’t raised in church. And most of my ancestors were either Roman Catholic or Methodist.
So why did I, at the age of 24, decide to join this crazy branch of Christianity called Lutheranism? There are many reasons that I could point to, but one of the main ones was the fact that the Lutheran Church has preserved what I would consider the best contributions of the Reformation and in a way that speaks powerfully to our culture today.
Some have defined the Reformation as a prophetic movement, with Martin Luther and his contemporaries calling the Church, God’s people, to repent of the ways in which they had betrayed God and departed from the Scriptures. Others have defined the Reformation as a missionary movement, with Luther and the reformers reintroducing a pagan people to the true faith and preaching to those who, despite living under the auspices of Christendom, had not heard the good news.
And while both of these pictures contain an element of the truth, neither of them fully captures the spirit and essential nature of the Reformation. I would argue that the Reformation was essentially a Gospel movement. That may sound overly simple, but I believe that this, more than anything, brings together both the prophetic and missionary aspects of the Reformation movement. At its core the Reformation was about reintroducing people, Christian and non-Christian alike, to the good news that God, apart from any work or merit of our own, entered into our world and redeemed us through Jesus Christ. We are carried along by the words of St. Paul: “But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).
We live in a world that desperately needs that message. As I consider both my generation and the one that is coming after me, what I see is a generation of people who are spiritually hungry and desperately undernourished by the empty promises of the world around them. We look for our identities in things like our jobs, our sexuality, our social media status, our political leanings, or our activism.
We pursue them with an almost religious zeal only to find that these things simply eat us alive and leave us empty and longing for something more.
As a spiritual seeker I found that more in Jesus, and what I love about the Lutheran church is that we are committed to allowing Jesus to be Himself and shine in all His glory. Our commitment to the Scriptures, the sacraments, and the confessions are all there simply as arrows pointing to the one who alone can satisfy the deepest longings of the human heart. And we are called to be a church committed to sharing that message with the world.
For me, that is what it means to be Joyfully Lutheran.
