Am I the Avocado, or Only the Word Reforms

 This presentation was delivered at 1517’s 2022 Here We Still Stand Conference in San Diego on October 13, 2022.

I have to start with a confession. I’m a horrible person, and here’s how you can tell: My dear mother once got us a subscription to People magazine, and I read it cover-to-cover every Saturday over my breakfast of soft-cooked eggs. This means I’m fully aware of lurching papparoxysms focusing on poor Prince Harry and Meghan. If People magazine weren’t bad enough, I’ve also been gripped by the sordid media conglomerate machinations of the characters on HBO’s Succession. (They’re worse than the British royal family.) And most telling of all, on the Reddit social media platform I revel in reading the “Am I the Asshole'' subreddit. (I also have modicum piety, tact, and good taste, so I think I can get through the rest of this without using that A-word that I learned early on at the feet of my alcoholic little-churched great uncles. Let’s make it easier on ourselves. Instead of doing linguistic acrobatics, let’s just substitute “avocado” for the other A-word.)

The descriptor for AITA on Reddit’s thread says, “A catharsis for the frustrated moral philosopher in all of us, and a place to finally find out if you were wrong in an argument that's been bothering you. Tell us about any non-violent conflict you have experienced; give us both sides of the story, and find out if you're right, or you're the [avocado].” People submit stories of family drama at weddings and funerals, conflicts with vegan children, and squabbles about making the world safe for high anthropology while being utterly astounded at how low their fellow human beings can actually sink into the mire of a-holery. AITA for making my son eat off dirty dishes? AITA for telling my sister I’m never babysitting for her again? AITA for still being mad my brother stole my daughter’s name for his own child? I have a sinner inside me who loves the feeling of Schadenfreude these threads raise in me. I get to pat myself on the back for not being an awful friend or cruel step-sibling. I get to feel good about not having paid people costumed as Mickey and Minnie Mouse to be props at my wedding reception rather than choosing to feed my guests or being angry that the kids blew up condoms and taped them to my Ford F-150 at our reception and ruined the truck’s bright red finish.

This year marks 500 years since an Am-I-the-Avocado-eligible occurrence went down in Martin Luther’s city of Wittenberg. Since back in 2017, when we celebrated the 500th anniversary of Luther’s 95 Theses, we’ve had a number of similar anniversaries that have come down the pike including the Heidelberg Disputation in 2019 and Luther’s appearance before the Diet of Worms last year. This year is the 500th anniversary of Luther’s abandoning the safety of the kingdom of the birds at the Wartburg Castle and his return to his home base of Wittenberg that was reeling in his absence.

While the reforming cat was away, the true-believing avocado green-tinged mice played. Luther’s fellow University professor Andreas Bodenstein von Carlstadt was one of the culprits. Carlstadt was in full agreement with Luther’s teaching on justification and supported his efforts to counter what he thought were Rome’s abuses. He just didn’t think that things were being fixed quickly enough. He and others took it upon themselves to take advantage of the full liberty they’d been given in Christ and, heeding Paul’s dictum in Galatians 5, refused to submit again to a yoke of slavery. Carlstadt led worship without donning the proper pastoral vestments. Academic robes worked just fine for a free faculty member. And the worship service was held not in sacred and flowing Latin (Ecce homo!) but in the low and guttural German. (Ach du lieber Gott!) What an avocado. At the same time, statues in houses of worship were removed to avoid worshiping graven images and breaking the First Commandment, sub-clause A, as the legal brief would put it. Wittenberg had been left in the solid theological hands of Luther’s friend and university colleague Phillip Melanchthon, who the previous year had produced the best systematic rendering of evangelical teaching yet, but he wasn’t administrator enough, politician enough, or cojones-bearer enough to wangle a solution to the iconoclasm. Eventually, the controversy drew Luther home from the Wartburg.

At an inn on the way home from Eisenach a couple students, who themselves were heading to Wittenberg, encountered Luther. But because he’d grown a Scott Keith beard and pandemic hair, they didn’t recognize him. Whether he’d cleaned himself up for it or not, the whole iconoclastic mess of Schwärmerei found it’s conclusion with a set of eight sermons Luther preached at the City Church starting on Invocavit Sunday. The sermons are Luther’s way of saying “AITA? You all are. Everyone sucks here.” The Invocavit sermons are worth reading, especially since Luther decided to be more brief than usual. In the first of the sermons, Luther didn't call anyone out as an avocado by name, but he did advocate a go-slow approach to instituting change in the church. You become the Christian A in AITA when you don’t consider the ramifications of your actions on those who aren’t as advanced in the faith as you think you are.

Thirty-five years ago I had the privilege of going spelunking at Jewel Cave National Monument in the Black Hills of South Dakota, the third longest cave in the world. That afternoon of cave-crawling was one of the best nature experiences I’ve ever had. There were a half dozen of us, along with our ranger, outfitted with gloves, helmets, and lamps. At the orientation on the visitor center patio, we learned that, along with the stricture to pack everything out of the cave you brought in, including waste of every stripe, there was another important rule. People who cave-crawl follow the dictum that it’s life-threatening to assume that you’re responsible for keeping up with the person in front of you; instead, you’re in charge of the person behind you. In other words, the slowest person in the group sets the pace. That way, no one gets lost and abandoned in the cave.

The iconoclasts and enthusiasts in Wittenberg decided they knew best how reform should happen. They set the pace in the electoral city and assumed others would have to keep up with them. But Luther argued that they’d left behind those who weren’t quite there with them yet and had endangered their faith. The best-intentioned reforms, even though well-meant, did damage. And since justification comes through faith alone, the reforming actions of the iconoclasts threatened others’ salvation. Luther’s take was that even the best decisions need to have the weakest among us at the forefront of our thinking. The work of reform should follow spelunking rules. We ought always consider the laggards and slowpokes, the thick-headed and reluctant. Luther argued that Carlstadt and the leaders of his pack of pace-setter were attempting to feed a nice Iowa corn-fed rib-eye steak to newborns who hadn’t even made it to Gerber strained peas yet. Even if a change is due, it gets tabled to make sure there’s time for God to bring folks on board.

A dozen years later in Münster, a city near the border with the Netherlands, a Dutch baker named Jan Matthijs and other virulently anti-Roman partisans led a rebellion of anabaptists against the city’s leaders. They attempted to establish the kingdom of God here on earth. They ousted the mayor and city council and installed fellow anabaptists in positions of authority. The bishop, Franz von Waldeck, was expelled to a corner of Westphalia. With the bishop ensconced in his figurative Volkswagen campervan, earnest anabaptist reforms began to be dictated to the people of Münster.

It didn’t take much time for other besieged anabaptists of the low countries to get word that Münster had become a haven for folks who agreed with the Wittenberg reformers about what they considered to be the faithless and craven policies and practices of the church in Rome. They flocked to Münster, because the newly selected leaders made it not just a haven of the godly but also the exact location where God was visibly breaking in to rule and to bring about the new apocalyptic age they’d expected and naturally knew themselves to be worthy of. That Münster’s population was by-and-large  regarded as famously wealthy didn’t hurt matters, which was a draw for the poor of the low countries.

But the Münster anabaptists were also certain that Luther hadn’t gone far enough. To them, Luther had been fairly lily-livered, and he certainly had the whole baptism thing wrong. The Münster rebels established a sectarian government that wasn’t just neutral toward the faith but actively pushed societal structures and laws to ensure the protection of radical reformation tenets. The council decreed that all adults had to be rebaptized, because the sacrament administered to them as infants and children was invalid and required an assent of the will that only an adult believer could give. On January 5, 1534, more than 1000 adults were rebaptized in Münster.

The story gets worse. The property of those who disagreed with the anabaptists and left Münster to protect their lives and limbs was confiscated and distributed to the poor, after which followed a decree that all property was now to be held in common. They made like the Stasi, the East German secret police who once sought to arrest my grandfather, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. They started shredding everything: deeds, contracts, loan documents, anything that indicated private ownership. Let there be no Ananias and Sapphira holding onto their beloved stuff in the city of Münster! Like the community of believers in Acts, you’re  going to share for Jesus’ sake! Or else. (Although — spoiler alert — later in the story people in Münster would be struck dead by non-divine hands.) When the former bishop returned to besiege the city, Jan Matthijs, who regarded himself as a 16th century Gideon out to judge the faithless, thought merely leading a small procession against the bishop’s forces would do the trick of defending Münster handily. They had God on their side after all. But Matthijs was captured and beheaded. His head was placed on a pike and his “junk,” shall we say, was nailed to the city gate as a warning to present and future rebels.

A new leader was called for. In the place of Matthijs, John of Leyden proclaimed himself the king of the New Jerusalem. Because of the influx of anabaptist immigrants, Münster faced a vexing problem. There were twice as many women as men in the city. Something had to be done to provide for poor females who had arrived with millennial expectations but no male relative to care for them. Leyden now decreed that polygamy was compulsory. He himself took sixteen wives. One report says that a woman, Elizabeth Wandscherer, who’d caught his eye, was beheaded in the city square for refusing to marry him. By the time the bishop’s siege had gone on for a year, food stores had diminished and people in Münster were starving.

On June 24, 1535, about the time Luther was lecturing on Galatians, the siege succeeded. Münster was retaken, and John of Leyden, the so-called king of the New Jerusalem, was arrested along with the anabaptist mayor, Bernhard Knipperdolling, and another leader, Bernhard Krechting. The three anabaptists sat in a dungeon in a neighboring city for months until midwinter when they were trotted out to the Münster Marktplatz for public humiliation, torture, and execution. Over the course of an hour, they were tied to poles with spiked collars and had their flesh ripped away with red-hot tongs. Finally, their tongues were torn out, and they were killed with a heated dagger to the heart. But that wasn’t enough vengeance inflicted. The three dead bodies were then hoisted in seven-foot-tall cages to hang from the 300-foot spire of the recently completed Sankt Lamberti church on the town square, to rot away for the next fifty years and be pecked apart by scavenging birds. The message was clear: don’t follow these guys’ take on Christian nationalism; instead allow us to coerce you to our version. The three anabaptists’ cages hang above the Münster marketplace to this day. Given the empty pews in German churches these days, I’m not sure they’ve had the desired effect of inducing religious fervor. If only John of Leyden had posted a subreddit query about the events in Münster. I’m sure that Reddit readers’ response would be that everyone sucks here, both the anabaptist zealots and those who took back Münster. AITAA? Am I the anabaptist avocado here? Yes, indeed. But it’s also possible to be told you’re the evangelical avocado.

In the Augsburg Confession of 1530, our old friend Philip Melanchthon gives us a subtle hint about instituting reform in the church and avoiding acting like an avocado, whether of the anabaptist or evangelical variety. After four articles that trace Luther’s foundational teaching about God, sin, the work of Christ, and justification by faith, Melanchthon gives us Article 5: The Office of Preaching. In it he declares that, in order to create saving faith, God gives the word proclaimed in law and gospel and in the sacraments. There’s no other remedy for the condition of sin he raises earlier. All that’s needed is what Luther’s hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” calls “one little Word” that has the power to subdue the eternal foes of faith.

In Luther’s 1522 Invocavit sermons, he told the Wittenbergers sitting in the pews in the City Church that the word can do its work without us dictating the terms of its job description, thank you very much. All that’s needed for this saving work to happen is a willing preacher at one end, a gap filled by the Holy Spirit with the word, and finally the Kingdom of God at the other. Luther said, “While Philip and Amsdorf and I sat around drinking Wittenberg beer, the word did everything.” The word didn’t need no stinkin’ Wittenberg iconoclasts preaching in the vernacular with their feet in sneakers and with their shirt tails untucked for contemporary relevance. In Münster a decade later, the word didn’t need a hand from any highly religious and terribly admirable folks who established a sectarian government that determined exactly what the Kingdom of God would look like in their city. The word didn’t need people whose cocksure belief blinded them and led them to trample on weaker believers or less-sophisticated theological rubes, much less unbelievers still shackled by Sin. For this Christ died? Probably not.

What Luther didn’t include in his sermon was how the word’s work happens in practice. It doesn’t happen from within a moral system, from worldly wisdom, and certainly not from a stance of power and control. The story of Bill W., one of the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, can be instructive for us. When he and Dr. Bill got sober in Akron, Ohio, in 1935, it was just two drunks leaning on each other, admitting they were powerless over their obsession with potent potables. Call it the mutual conversation and consolation of the blitzed and besotted. Bill W. expected his experience of enlightenment and inspirational success would lead others to achieve sobriety. But what he discovered was that telling his glorious story of victory didn’t ever help anybody want to get clean or stay sober. Actual gutter drunks facing their weakness couldn’t imagine being able to achieve such a thing. It was only when Bill W. found drunks on bar stools in saloons and told them his own sordid history, how far he’d fallen, how he’d bottomed out, that anyone could ever imagine not regularly seeing themselves looking back from the bottom of a glass. Then they could see themselves not as people who would quit drinking permanently but as busted-up people who don’t start drinking again…today. They could begin to savor that other fermented delight, daily bread, rather than daily dread.

My obsession — the status, power, and control of Ken Jones — is the primary reason why I get indignant if a worship service doesn’t begin with confession and forgiveness. I walk into the nave of the church with a bound will that wants to settle into a pew with a padded cushion and lay my petty tinkerable peccadilloes before God, decide to reform myself, and later walk out with a newly strengthened spine and perhaps a few tips for building a more successful suburban spirituality gleaned from a winsome pastor’s sermon. But what I really need is the truth that my sin runs deeper than a few minor tweakable quirks. I need to be the sinful equivalent of one of Bill W.’s falling-off-a-barstool drunks who can at last be honest about how messed-up an avocado I am. So I need to confess. Not only that, I need more than just speaking a line about how I haven’t measured up. I’ve had it with confessions that don’t confess anything big enough to need the cross to repair. I need to declare my bondage. I have to get real about my obsession with myself and my addiction to all things that will secure the Ken Jones I so carefully curate and present to others. In other words, Ken Jones —the fallow, used up ground for the word that will be preached — must be broken open and laid bare. The sordid truth must be made known.

A couple decades ago in a Luther Seminary chapel sermon, I think it was, Steve Paulson made a surprising statement. He said that there are places where the gospel is more true than in others. What I think he meant was that the gospel is not the gospel when it’s proclaimed to those whose comfort and security provide them insulation from the vicissitudes of life. The gospel isn’t the gospel for those who have no ears to hear. So, when Luther said in the Invocavit Sermons that the word did everything, it was a specific word with a specific set of auditors. It was only the word that was preached to people living under the burden of their crosses.

This is what it means to be a theologian of the cross. The word does no good planted in glory. Like Jesus, the embodied word himself, the gospel comes to and is heard by Robert Capon’s litany of L-words: the least, the last, the lost, the lame, the leper, the lachrymose, the l’broken, the l’captive, and the l’godless. This is why the easiest place I’ve ever preached or taught is St. Dysmas Lutheran Church in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. It’s a congregation behind the walls of the South Dakota State Penitentiary. Its members are, to a person, convicted of crimes, guilty of misdemeanors and felonies: murderers, assaulters, pedophiles, and purveyors of highly desired mood-enhancing substances. No preacher needs to convince people of their sin when they’re known by a number rather than a name and their future is determined by the worst day in their past. To stand at the lectern in a Thursday evening worship service at St. Dysmas is to encounter a bunch of men in tan scrubs who are ravenous for a word that can raise them from the death they live every boring day, with every tasteless meal, with every demand from a corrections officer, and at the sound of every clanging sally port door. To preach to these men who don’t have the luxury of pretending they’re okay like I do is to stand at the mouth of Lazarus’ tomb and deliver the only word that can possibly knit bone to bone in Ezekiel’s valley.

When the word enters the grave, then at long last sigh of relief its public proclaimers can kick back with a Wittenberg beer and trust that the gospel will do its work without their wisdom, understanding, or effort. But if the word is delivered to the self-sufficient, well-composed, and highly-effective, then it will require constant monitoring or, worse, coercion. The bound will cannot choose to change. The law will have to stand over it, less like the pedagogue of Galatians and more as the Egyptian taskmasters threatening enslaved Israelites in Exodus. Even something as well intended as John Calvin’s establishment of a Christian city council in sixteenth century Geneva misses the mark. Certainly, it’s why the Christian nationalism that has been so hotly debated of late is hardly Christian at all. It has no need of Jesus save as a good example. The cross is superfluous. It’s all based on the law, uses only the law, and requires the constant monitoring of the law to maintain its sovereignty. As Luther said in the Heidelberg Disputation, “The Law says ‘Do this,” and it is never done.” More law will have to be enacted. Nits will have to be picked. More strictures will need to be laid down. More demands will be placed on already broken sinners. And when it’s done in the name of God, the result is what was felt by an obscure Augustinian friar named Martin Luther who came to despair of ever finding a way out. He was done with a God who placed such burdens on him. Insult to injury. Salt in wounds. Enough of that. If that’s the God you have on offer, better worship at the Wittenberg Starbucks at the other end of Kollegienstraße by the bordello. At least the people in both those places are honest about what’s for sale.

As Luther argued, better to deal with full-on Pelagian heretics than the semi-Pelagian self-helpers hoping for a little human agency, decency, and initiative, and demanding we do what is within us to do. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of my beloved teacher Gerhard Forde’s book Where God Meets Man. I picked it up again last weekend and found this gem among the few rare sections I haven’t highlighted over the years:

“[Luther] was striving for the whole [person], for a completely restored [person], for an entirely free [person]; we have bargained only for little bits — a little bit of freedom, a little bit of integrity, a little bit of left-over created goodness. And we get, in such matters, just what we bargained for: a Christianity of ‘little bits’ — a little bit of freedom but mostly bondage to legalistic codes; a little bit of devotion but mostly a despising of life and human achievement; a little bit in the collection plate on Sunday but mostly nothing for the larger concerns of human justice and social improvement. Our Christianity is an indication of our theology. We insist on a little bit of freedom and integrity that is all we ever get — and it shows).”

Forde is still on target. We’re left with what often happens when I buy avocados. I stand before a pile of these dark green, unripe things at the supermarket, thinking of the future wondrous creations my hands will create. Homemade guacamole. Bacon, lettuce, tomato, and avocado sandwiches on homemade artisanal bread. I test five or six avocados and find them all hard, but I figure that in three days time they’ll do. All it’ll take is a bit of Mad-Eye Moody’s “constant vigilance.” But my desired vigilance is never enough. My observational acuity always comes up lacking. I am ever the guaca-failure. I slice my avocados open and discover very little luscious green but find instead the fruit are brown and riddled with rot. Instead of being the enjoyer of the gift of green, I am perpetually the champion avocado slayer of North Walnut Creek Drive, left with only a tiny morsel of fatty green goodness. To repeat Forde: “We have bargained only for little bits — a little bit of freedom, a little bit of integrity, a little bit of left-over created goodness.” Sinners starving for grace and mercy are given a little brown mush and go away with empty bellies. The church in our day and its so-called “leaders” by and large deliver moral-therapeutic deism disconnected from God’s actual work of death and resurrection. Jesus, the only word whose work is powerful enough to allow for the relaxed drinking of Wittenberg beer, is a mere dealer add-on to the main vehicle of our plans and schemes, in spite of our sorry history and sordid outcomes.

Years after the Invocavit sermons, in 1530 it was only after Philip Melanchthon asserted in the Augsburg Confession that the word of God brings saving faith through preaching and the sacraments that he spoke of reforms. After Article 5 on the Office of Preaching, came Article 6 on the New Obedience. Only when the gospel is delivered in its truth and purity can any honest and real change happen. The gospel is more true when one person drunk on themselves gets it declared to them by another person drunk on themselves but who's been saved from their self-obsession by being pulled into the embrace of God’s word. In the Small Catechism Luther answered the question, “What does baptism mean for daily living?” He said, “It means that our old sinful self with all its evil deeds and desires should be drowned through daily repentance, and a new self arise to live with God in righteousness and purity forever.” Sounds an awful lot like a 12-Step program, with the added benefit of some actual specific good news attached to it.

It’s interesting that Melanchthon never provided any details about what that new obedience actually looks like. That’s because the Holy Spirit is so blamed unpredictable. The Spirit blows willy-nilly and not only produces faith “when and where it wills” but also produces results in ways we can’t imagine in advance — and often among people my mom would prefer I not associate with. It is a manifestation of my sin to seek reform apart from the word of the cross and to bray and crow with wisdom about what my self-sanctified imagination leads me to envision as the kingdom. When Jesus read from the Isaiah scroll in Nazareth in Luke 4, he told us the gospel would appear at the verge of the grave: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Each of the recipients of the Lord’s favor is as good as dead. It’s echoed in Revelation 21: “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them and be their God; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” The kingdom looks like a freshly filled grave and the church looks like people in mourning attire having a laugh at the ridiculousness of their veils and black armbands. There are countless and varied routes to the City of God, but every single one leads through the cross and grave. If it doesn’t cross those city limits, you’re not using a gospel GPS system.

If I truly want to change the world, I can’t use the Law to coerce anyone into my religious or political camp. The faithful response to sin and brokenness around me is not more Law. That’s the move of a theologian of glory. Moses, God love him, has never been our savior. The task, instead, is that of a theologian of the cross: the bestowal of the gospel that brings the barely imaginable future of the lion lying down with the lamb, toddlers playing safely near the adders’ den, and me and my neighbor being raised from the dead. It’s not my business to demand that you contort yourself to my favored political brand, my love of John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism, or my immaculate taste in cheesy 1970s top-40 one-hit wonders, much less to say your faith has to play out in a specific way. You’re free to be an “Undercover Angel” to bring people to their “Heaven on the Seventh Floor.” As C.S. Lewis said in The Problem of Pain, “[Y]ou will certainly carry out God's purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.” God’s kingdom will come in and reforms will happen one way or another. Or to put it another way, the Spirit will do its work whether you’re the avocado or not.

All I can do is give it to you straight: You’re dead in sin, and Jesus Christ is determined to raise you from the dead and swaddle you in his love and mercy. With that said, it’s time for me to kick back with my own Philip and Amsdorf and have a beer or a decaf-latte-whole-milk-with-sugar-free-vanilla and watch what happens in the hearts of all you avocados. You’ll be out there in the world doing the opposite of what happens on my kitchen counter: turning from brown mush, ripening and sweetening, and becoming as green as the paraments in ordinary time. You’ll be voting in a couple weeks. Maybe for a party that’s not mine. You’ll be tweaking the technology you somehow managed to cobble together in the height of the pandemic worship tsunami. You’ll be gathering with family for a Thanksgiving spread, baking Christmas delights. Feeling smug that you don’t live up north in January. Feeling grumpy that you don’t live in El Paso in January. You’ll celebrate love on Singles’ Awareness Day on February 14. You’ll go through the whole year with Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You” and Neil Sedaka’s “Calendar Girl.” All the while, unbeknownst to you, God’s spirit will keep using the word to work on you and make you into the fruit borne by the Tree of Life. Let’s get back together in this place a year from now and use our hindsight to see if what I’ve given you today, what God gives you in your baptism, what he provides in the Lord’s Supper, and what is proclaimed to you again and again and again is a word — no, the word — that reforms you, repents you, and resurrects you. Here’s to a coming year of new life and the fact that the Reformation catchphrase remains true: Verbum dei manet in aeternum, the Word of God abides forever.