It started small, as protests often do. Almost a month and a half ago, one by one, they started occupying a park not far from Wall Street in New York City. At first, they seemed to be mostly young people and they looked the part. But soon, others began showing up and the image of the protestors widened to include all ages. They were and are veterans, families with children, retirees, the unemployed and the employed, students, unions. For a while, people were confused what exactly they were protesting, what they wanted. But soon a refrain emerged: We are the 99%. Behind this phrase is the statistic that 1% of the population of this country holds a ridiculous amount of wealth and that the gap between the classes has widened exponentially in the past 30 years. And it’s not just about money,but the connections between money and power—how corporations, lobbyists, and those who can pay end up dictating a majority of our government. Whoever has the most money really does win in some circles. Let me give you an example from a recent article, “From Occupy Wall street to Occupy Earth,” written for Grist Magazine about how power and money affects our environment and health: “Extreme disparity and deep inequality generate a double standard with profound consequences,” Chip Ward writes:

 

If you’re a CEO who skims millions of dollars off other people's labor, it's called a "bonus." If you are a flood victim who breaks into a sporting goods store to grab a lifejacket, it's called looting. If you lose your job and fall behind on your mortgage, you get evicted. If you are a banker-broker who designed flawed mortgages that caused a million people to lose their homes, you get a second-home vacation-mansion near a golf course…If you drag heavy fishnets across the ocean floor and pulverize an entire ecosystem, ending thousands of years of dynamic evolution and depriving future generations of a healthy ocean, it's called free enterprise. But if, [like Tim DeChristopher,] you disrupt an auction of public land to oil and gas companies, it's called a crime and you get two years in jail.[1]   

 

You get the picture. It’s about money, it’s about power—these things go hand in hand.

 

The inequalities related to the connection between money and power are not new. They stretch back to the time of Christ and even further. There are countless examples of Jesus’ call to give up both power and money in hopes of a better way of living and the church has always been engaged in such a conversation. Today is Reformation Sunday. It seems incredibly relevant that as many in the country are tuned into a protest against money and power that we remember another act of protest, 500 years ago that started the Protestant Reformation. On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther, a Catholic priest, nailed pieces of paper to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany. They were his 95 theses and they contained a list of abuses by the Catholic Church and its clergy. At the forefront of his critique was the selling of indulgences by the Catholic Church. The selling of indulgences was basically the selling of forgiveness. You could buy forgiveness from God and reconciliation with the Church. The richer you were the more forgiven. The poor were left to deal with their estrangement from God and the church by themselves. The more powerful you were the better your standing with God and the church. Money and power—these things go hand in hand.

 

But Martin Luther confronted the corruption of the Catholic Church head on and Christianity has never been the same. We here at Umstead Park UCC are descendants of that act. Martin Luther could never have envisioned the myriad ways that people now express their faith and organize church leadership nor could he have envisioned a democratic government. But he did understand the connection between money, power and corruption.

 

In a world ruled by the church—one that is hard for us today to imagine, Martin Luther’s act was incredibly heroic and brave. It carried with it the hope of thousands of people that their relationship with God and the Church could be different. But his act was supported by the life and teachings of Jesus. In our scripture reading for this morning, Jesus takes the way people saw religious leaders and turns it upside down. Like Germany in the 16th century, the religious elite of Jesus’ time were top dogs. But Jesus says that their status, their authority is meaningless and not only meaningless but that their teachings regarding certain issues were harmful.

 

“Instead of giving you God’s law as food and drink by which you can banquet on God,” Jesus says in this translation, “they package it in bundles of rules, loading you down like pack animals.” In other words – don’t let anyone limit you from the wonderful and delicious realm of God. And furthermore, Jesus says, “You all have a single teacher and you are all classmates. Don’t set people up as experts over your life, letting them tell you what to do. Save that authority for God.”[2] These words must have had a tremendous affect on Martin Luther as he contemplated standing up to the Catholic Church and they can have tremendous meaning for us today as well. Martin Luther’s Catholic Church was the false idol of his day—it was what people put their trust in more than they put their trust in God and for us—well, I’ll ask you—what do we put our trust in more than we put our trust in God? Many, many things—but money and the economy are at the top of the list.

 

Judson Memorial Church, a UCC congregation in New York City joined in with the protestors on Wall Street a few weeks ago. They paraded a golden calf around the streets which they named the Wall Street Bull—a false idol of sorts. As you may remember, the golden calf was a favored idol for the Israelites. They organized other faith leaders from the city and over 100 people marched this Wall Street Bull down the streets and to Zucotti Park.

 

By carrying the Wall Street Bull down the streets of New York City, harkening back to stories of idolatry in the Old Testament, the members of Judson Memorial Church were calling attention to the ways that we make a god out of our economy and our money. Therefore, as Judson pastor Mike Ellick makes clear, what is being captured in these protests is not simply a secular issue. In a sermon a few weeks ago he had this to say:

 

Reporters were asking us—what do we think we’re going to add? Do we have a specific set of demands? What is it that we’re asking for? Now a lot of people have been asking these questions of Occupy Wall Street, but I had asked our faith leaders to resist falling for, and responding to, this line of reasoning. Because I believe that what we’re seeing in Zuccotti Park is the first real movement of the national conscience to hit the street in a long time, and it has more than just one thing to say. It’s bigger than that. As I said it down in the park: this isn’t just a jobs issue, or a tax issue, or even an immigration issue. It’s a spiritual issue, about what the United States has become.[3]

 

Michael Ellick is not the only person to remark that what we’re dealing with is a spiritual issue. Diana Butler Bass, Church Historian extraordinaire had this to say to mark the convergence of Occupy Wall Street with Reformation Sunday: “On this Reformation Day, Protestant churches would benefit by starting a church-based protest movement to challenge two things:  bad government and cruel capitalism.”

 

Whatever your opinion on government and whatever your opinion of capitalism, perhaps we can agree that something is not working and that many, many components of capitalism are very cruel indeed when children are homeless, when insurance companies can refuse to treat the sick, when the environment and people’s health is ruined just for easy profit. In the face of such pain and corruption it is very easy to give up, to become cynical and lose hope. And this is one reason that I have personally been so taken by this new movement—because I had begun to lose hope not only that we could do anything to change the system, but that anyone would even try. I had thought that everyone else had given up, too. And so the presence of bodies and voices in parks all over the country—in Occupy Wall Street to Occupy Boston to Occupy Raleigh, has given me immense hope that we are not done protesting whenever we see injustice.

 

Diana Butler Bass reminds us that we’re called Protestants for a reason. “It strikes me as interesting,” she writes:

 

…that those who followed the teaching of the new reform movement did not come to be known as “Reformists,” rather the moniker that stuck was “Protestant.”  Luther and his associates were protesters rather than reformers—they stood up against the religious conventions of the day, arguing on behalf of those suffering under religious, social, and economic oppression…The original Protestants preached, taught, and argued for freedom—spiritual, economic, and political—and for God’s justice to be embodied in the church and the world.”

 

None of these ideas should be foreign to you, Umstead Park UCC—for you have claimed your place in the protesting branch of the Christian family tree by your very existence. This story of protest and reform, of imagining another way in the world, of speaking truth to power and trying to live according to the radical love and extravagant welcome of God is our story. Sometimes we think that what we’re doing is new but it is old – it stretches back 500 years to Germany and back even further. As this great church historian reminds us:

 

The heart of Protestantism is the courage to challenge injustice and to give voice to those who have no voice.  Protestantism opened access for all people to experience God’s grace and God’s bounty, not only spiritually but actually.  The early Protestants believed that they were not only creating a new church, but they were creating a new world, one that would resemble more fully God’s desire for humanity.  The original Protestant impulse was to resist powers of worldly dominion and domination in favor of the power of God’s spirit to transform human hearts and society.  Protestants were not content with the status quo.  They felt a deep discomfort within.  They knew things were not right.  And they set out to change the world.[4]

 

The world needs protestors. The world needs hope. Maybe the last thing the world needs is another cynic. So on this Reformation Sunday, let’s remember all those protestors – from the ones today who protest against injustice in whatever form and in whatever way, to those of you who protested in the 60s, to the countless people who marched and sang and rode buses and sat at lunch counters so that Jim Crow would no longer dominate our public spaces, to the women who spoke up and labored for years and years until they won the right to vote, to the thousands who protested and traveled in search of religious freedom. Our history, our story is not over. May the words and life of Jesus, may a different vision of compassion and equality, and may the reminder of courageous Martin Luther nailing his words to the church door inspire us to continue that work started long, long ago.

Amen.

 

 

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