A new reformation?

This year marks the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s Reformation, a movement that saw nearly an entire continent transformed and millions of people gain access to the Word of God for the first time. 

Fast forward to now, the transformational effects of this reformation seem to have waned. Our society is in distress, our relationships are broken, the Church is polarized over any number of issues, and Christians struggle to have positive impact on public policy and debate. 

We need another reformation, but of what sort? We have the worship movements, the prayer movements, the missions movements, but still we see society going in the opposite direction of God’s commands. So what’s missing? 

One of the greatest revivals recorded in the Bible took place under the reign of King Josiah. It is written of him, “Neither before nor after Josiah was there a king like him who turned to the Lord as he did—with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his strength, in accordance with all the Law of Moses” (2 Kings 23:25). 

Josiah places among the last in a long line of kings of Israel and Judah, most of whom did evil in the eyes of the Lord. But even at a young age, he had a heart after God and took steps to repair the temple. At one point, the high priest finds the Book of the Law (known to us as the Mosaic Law in Leviticus and Deuteronomy) underneath a pile of rubble and brings it to the king. Upon hearing the Book of the Law read aloud, Josiah tears his robes because he realizes how far away God’s people have strayed. He then inquires of the Lord - who in turn was pleased with his responsiveness and humility (2 Kings 22:29); he gathers the community together - the elders, the priests and prophets, and “all the people from the least to the greatest” (23:1-2); he has the Book of the Law read aloud to the people; and finally, he renews the covenant in the presence of the Lord, essentially instigating a societal transformation (23:3). 

The parallels between this story and our present day are really quite striking. Our temple (both physical body and church) is in disrepair. Many popular pastors and teachers don’t preach from the Old Testament apart from Psalms and Proverbs, and very few broach the subject of Mosaic Law. Instead we focus on the life and teachings of Jesus, forgetting that Jesus himself said that he came to fulfill the Law, not abolish it.

This begs the question, what is it about the Law that was so important to God and to Jesus? And how far have we strayed?

The Mosaic Law is commonly summarized in the Ten Commandments and was even more succinctly interpreted by Jesus as the following: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these” (Mark 12:29-31). 

In essence, the Law was given to guide people into right relationship with their God and right relationship with their neighbor. The intention was for God’s chosen people Israel to be set apart, holy, different from the rest. That is still God’s intention for his people. Since we gentiles have been grafted in, it’s his intention for us to be set apart, holy, different from the rest. Which we believe and preach in theory, but are we really that different in practice? 

Let’s look at capitalism. Our entire system is built on debt and interest. Yet this goes directly against God’s framework in Deuteronomy: “Do not charge your brother interest…” (23:19-20), and “At the end of every seven years you must cancel debts…” (15:1-4). How far have we who call ourselves Christians gone to question these mechanisms in our economic system? How many of us are drowning in debt? How many of us play the stock market and invest in funds that we really don’t know that much about? We trust financial planners to invest our money, but do we do the research to find out whether or not our money is funding industries that honor God’s principles? 

Let’s look at work ethic. The Sabbath (day of rest) was of utmost importance to the Lord. Yet how many of us struggle to find work-life balance? How many of us consistently work late, or on the weekends and during times when we should be prioritizing family and other relationships? How many of us make career decisions based on salary and upward mobility rather than on what’s best for the marriage, the kids or the extended family? 

Let’s talk about the criminal justice system. Most of us would agree that criminals should pay for their crime and serve time in jail. But how aware are we of the fact that prison didn’t exist in Hebrew culture? Offenders didn’t get removed from society like they do today. Instead, the offender and the community had to live with one another, forcing them to find the means to restore what had been broken and seek forgiveness from and restitution for the people who had been hurt. This is relational justice, and God is not anything if not relational. Criminal justice should seek the wellbeing of the victim, the offender and society as whole, but this rarely happens. How often do we as Christians question the destructive and non-relational dynamics of our prison system? 

By largely discounting the Mosaic Law as no longer applicable since we are now ‘under grace’, we’ve essentially neglected God’s commands and left them under our own pile of rubble.

The first reformation brought people out of spiritual darkness. Today we need a reformation that will bring us out of relational dysfunction. Let us follow the example of Josiah, the king who turned to the Lord “with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his strength, in accordance with all the Law of Moses.” Let us seek the Father’s heart behind the seemingly harsh and culturally irrelevant rules of Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Let the Book of the Law be read aloud again and let us renew our covenant with the God who loves us, who has plans to prosper us and not to harm us, plans to give us a hope and a future (Jer. 29:11). 

The Alcotts and what they did for America

Orchard House - Concord, Massachussetts

Today on my way home from work I stopped for a spontaneous tour of Orchard House, the home where Louisa May Alcott lived and famously wrote Little Women. Like so many others, I have read the book, loved the movie, cried every time poor Beth dies….

But I didn’t realize until today just how extraordinary the whole Alcott family was. Louisa’s parents were both social reformers in their own right: Bronson Alcott kept getting fired from his teaching jobs because the establishment thought his ideas about recess, educating girls, and refusing to publicly humiliate a child were quite simply absurd. Abby May Alcott became a women’s rights advocate at the age of 15 and remained so all her life. Both Bronson and Abby were passionate abolitionists, and their home was part of the Underground Railroad during the Civil War. Bronson was known to tutor anyone who came to him, including runaway slaves. Today I stood in that very study. 

Louisa was not only a (gasp) female writer who (gasp) made enough money during her relatively short life to pay off her father's debts and finance her sister's art education in Europe, she was also a strong believer in the importance of physical exercise - which for a Victorian woman was seen as distasteful, scandalous even. Additionally, she worked as a nurse during the Civil War and was known to treat both Union and Confederate soldiers. Because though she was a fierce abolitionist, she was not a “heathen.”  

May Alcott, the youngest sister (depicted as Amy in the book), was a very talented artist. Thanks to her sister's profitable writing career, May was able to study in Paris, Rome and London, and actually achieved some critical acclaim amongst the Parisian artists of her day, including that of her friend Edgar Degas. But the story that nearly inspired tears at the end of the house tour was this one: 

A young man was failing his courses at MIT because all he seemed to want to do was sculpt. His parents despaired and hired May Alcott to tutor their son in his artistic expressions since he didn’t seem to be good for anything else. She quickly saw that he had a talent that far surpassed what she could teach him, so instead she introduced him to other talented sculptors and gave him her own unused sculpting tools as a way to invest in his talent and encourage him to pursue it. This young man’s name was Daniel Chester French, otherwise known as the man who went on to create this: 

Anecdotal history has it that Chester French carved out space on the backside of the Lincoln statue, placed there May Alcott’s tools that she had given him, and sealed it up again as a symbolic gesture of what her encouragement had meant to him. 

Are you not inspired!?!?!

Abby Alcott died before women were granted the right to vote, but without her championing the cause for so many years, who knows how much longer women would have had to wait to be recognized as legitimate voices in the democratic process! 

Bronson Alcott died before his ‘absurd’ ideas about education became normalized in the American school system, but without his perseverance, how long would it have taken this self-proclaimed “greatest nation on earth” to champion the education of females and slaves? 

Louisa died at the age of 55 after chronic sickness caused by mercury poisoning. During her service as a Civil War nurse, she contracted typhoid and was treated with medicine containing mercury, and her health was never the same after that. Even so, she was quite the formidable woman... America's Jane Austen? 

May Alcott died at the age of 39, six weeks after giving birth to her only child. She never reached the peak of her career as a painter, but she was the encouraging force behind the man who gave us one of our most precious national monuments. 

Oh to be a person who is willing to put up with being ridiculed because I have vision for a future that doesn’t yet exist. Oh to be a person who nurtures and encourages the school dropout who ends up gifting an entire nation. Oh to be such a social reformer who thinks and lives beyond herself; who lives not extravagantly, but generously and expansively. 

Today, I am inspired.