I loved seminary. I attended Lancaster Theological Seminary in Lancaster, PA. It was an amazing three-year experience. I learned so much, my faith deepened, and I understood God’s call on my life better.

At our graduation celebration, it was customary to give out teasing awards. This was done to lift up the character of each class, poke fun at the professors and staff, and have a good time.  I was awarded with two other fellow science fiction fans, the “Theologians of the Future” Award. They gave me a figure of Spock from Star Trek. Spock is a Vulcan, an alien race that is super-logical and have no emotions. This balances out Captain Kirk and his impulsive and emotional leadership style.

I asked why Spock, which is super ironic because Vulcans want things explained. Bryce, a fellow geek who was awarded the same prize, said, “Spock journeys from facts and figures to poetry and art. You lead with your brain first, but there’s a heart for others in there as well. Your logic is solid, but you have moved to be more humble and willing to learn.” I’m still working on that.

It’s hard to see yourself from another’s point of view. It’s not always a comfortable thing, but it is a necessary thing. Spock is my guy. He’s all logic. He doesn’t understand the emotional realities and actions of his shipmates. I feel the same way. And I think Zwingli would agree. Take for example the seminary chapel.

Lancaster Theological Seminary’s chapel is a spiritual place for me. There’s a lot of dark wood, grey stone, and stained-glass windows. The stone makes me think of Christ saying to build on stone and not sand, and it supports the wooden arches that reach toward the heavens. In the front right of the chapel is a stained-glass window. At the top is John Calvin, whom we featured last Sunday. Then Scottish reformer John Knox. At the bottom is Ulrich Zwingli. He’s got a funny hat on and is holding a sword. The ironic thing is that he used that sword to smash stained-glass windows in his church at Zurich. Here’s a stained-glass window of a guy who smashed up stained-glass windows. It makes no logical sense that this window should exist in any universe. Yet here it is. You humans are weird, we Vulcans… Never mind.

Upon reflection, this window is fitting for Zwingli. He’s a paradox in many senses of the word. He’s a great musician who temporarily banned music from his worship. He preached against war yet died in battle. It is fitting that my seminary’s chapel has a stained-glass window of this reformer.

Zwingli was born in eastern Switzerland to a prosperous farming family. He was bright and enjoyed the best education available. He became a parish priest in Glarus, and as was tradition in that town, became army chaplain for the local army.[1] He was a great preacher and scholar and won over a lot of people in his time there. He was promoted to be the pastor in Zurich, a very cosmopolitan and thriving city.

Zwingli was a humanist like Calvin, who relies on reason and evidence. He studied scripture because it was the source of Christian faith, and humanism encouraged such a return to the sources verses what is “commonly known” or what “tradition said about the scriptures.” [2] Using the Bible, he began his attacks against superstition in faith and the unjust use of power, which over time became more focused on the pope. He did these things not because of Luther, but in a parallel movement. They arrived at a similar place, taking different routes to get there. Zwingli and Luther didn’t actually get along. Zwingli was too radical for Luther, and they disagreed on communion. More on that later.

Zwingli’s mentor was the great scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam. Church historian Justo Gonzalez wrote about the influence of Erasmus on Zwingli, “Zwingli shared Erasmus’s belief that God intended Christianity to be an engine of change and improvement in human society. He echoed Erasmus’s anti-war stance, having experienced the horrors of war first hand, and he warmed to Erasmus’s emphasis of the Holy Spirit being key to understanding God’s relationship to humanity.”[3]

It’s so important to have a mentor, both in your life and career. You’ve met one of mine, The Rev. Dr. David Andersen at my installation. He’s an amazing mentor and friend. He’s able to help guide me, give me honest gut checks, and genuinely cares about me and my family. His words and stances carry weight. None of us are in this life alone. Someone has raised us up. They’ve shown us the ropes. They’ve given us insight on life. They’ve taken us under their wing and shared their hard-won wisdom that life has given them. This is how it should be. We might not all have the same institutional education level, but we all attend the school of hard knocks. It is the job of a mentor to help make those knocks less hard. To help us know where the knocks will come from and how to recover from an especially hard one. Who has mentored you? Can you name someone? Who have you mentored? Do you have someone in mind? Let me know this week!

I was going through a rough patch early on in my ministry. I was leading a Bible study and kept getting really negative reactions from a few of the members. I couldn’t understand where they were coming from and why they were reacting so strongly.

“You know, Luke,” David began. “Not everyone approaches the Bible like you do. You come at it directly. You’re curious about its words. You want to understand the context, why things were written, what was going on, what the deeper story is. You take a layered approach and once you figure out what you think the Bible story is saying, you try to live according to that. Yet others engage in what’s called ‘Presuppositional Apologetics.’ It means they start with what they want to be true, and then work backwards from there. I had to deal with this a lot in my American Baptist circles. We presupposed the Bible was against alcohol, and worked backwards from there. The water changed to wine at the wedding at Cana only happened because the water at the time was so bad. We didn’t stop to consider why Jesus just didn’t use a Brita filter to purify the water.”

Zwingli wanted to dispose of presuppositional apologetics. If it wasn’t in scripture, the church shouldn’t do it. That’s why in 1522, Zwingli gave up Lent for Lent. He ate sausages and encouraged his church to do the same because Lent wasn’t explicit in the scriptures.

In today’s scripture, we think Jesus is saying to pay your taxes and tithe to your church. That’s what he means when he holds the coin, right? It’s good to be a citizen, it’s necessary to pay taxes. However, Jesus was not a citizen of the Roman Empire. He doesn’t even have a coin.

“Show me the coin used for the tax.” Jesus asks. The Pharisees bring him the coin. “Whose head is this, and whose title?” They answer, “The emperor’s.” “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s and to God the things that are God’s.”

In Jewish thought, everything is God’s. Even your life. You are powered by the breath of God, your life is a gift and when God wants it back, that’s it for you. God owns everything. We are just the stewards of it. Jesus knows that there are two types of people, there are those who can extrapolate from incomplete data. Jesus says this for those who would hear it. If everything is God’s, what’s left for the emperor?

That’s how Zwingli came at the Bible. Wrestle with it, see what it means for our daily living, and then endeavor to do that. He did this to go after the Truth. He wanted religion to be part of the government. He wanted the church to set the rules gleaned from scripture, and the city councils to enforce them.  He was all about ethics and morality gleaned from his biblical studies.

He took on priests who were morally lax. Many priests at the time would not be married, which was then as it is now for Roman Catholic priests, but many had permanent mistresses. He took on one priest who had a mistress and six children. He took his fight to the Bishop of Constance, who ignored him. Seeing no Biblical prohibition on clergy marrying, Zwingli thought that was the right way to go. He married Anna Reinhard in 1524. He was tough on clergy and demanded a higher ethical standard for them.

Seeing all the moral laxity, the societal upheaval, the corruption of his own beloved church, Zwingli decided to go back to the basics. He was staunchly against idolatry, taking to heart the ten commandments’ “Thou Shalt not have graven images.” He smashed all the stained-glass windows from his church and chopped up the statues. This caused the Zurich city officials to respond. Zwingli was called to settle the contention and unrest in the city. He then wrote his Sixty-Seven Theses. Some of these theses are as follows:
#2: The sum and substance of the gospel is that our Lord Jesus Christ, the true son of God, has made known to us the will of his heavenly Father and has with his sinlessness released us from death and reconciled us to God.
#3 Hence Christ is the only way to salvation for all who ever were, are and shall be. -He balances this with #58 & #59 “The fate of the dead is known to God alone. And the less God has let us know concerning it, the less we should endeavor to know about it.”

I think Zwingli, more than Calvin or Luther has shaped the construction of our church building. Our stained-glass windows are beautiful, yet they hold no images. No faces and the only symbols are in the chapel and new library. We have a place for the banners, which are simple. We are focused. We are all about Jesus, yet we allow the fate of the dead and of any other Christian or non-Christian to be known by God.

Yet the biggest inheritance we have gained from Zwingli is how we view the sacrament of communion. Each time I have presided over the sacrament, I have said the words of institution which are “On the night he was betrayed, he took the bread and said, ‘This is my body given for you.’ He took the cup and blessed it and poured it and said, ‘This is my blood. The blood of the new covenant for the forgiveness of sins. When you do this, do so in remembrance of me.’”  Then I say, “And so we remember through this sign and symbol.”

In Zwingli’s time, there were all these stories about how the host, the communion bread, healed people. There was all this superstition around it; it couldn’t touch the ground, or the hands of peasants, only the priest could handle it and place it on your tongue because the ordinary person was too unholy, that the bread and wine were the physical body and blood of Christ. Zwingli couldn’t stand it. Christ could hardly be ON the communion table when all the creeds state he is sitting at the right hand of God.[4]

If the Eucharist was to be viewed as a sacrifice, then it’s one of faith and thankfulness by Christians to God—remembering what God has done in Christ. It was a huge mistake, one born from the corrupt ego and power-drunk church to think it could re-create the sacrifice Christ made and turn bread and wine into the actual body and blood. For Zwingli, the meaning of the sacraments shifted away from something which God did for humanity which was re-enacted by the church, your ONLY portal to God, to something which humanity did for God. To remember God’s actions and love toward us and then live that love out toward our neighbors. There are other traditions that state otherwise, but this is our stance in the UCC and has been since Zwingli. Here we stand and can do no other.

Zwingli’s influence is still with us in our stained glass. He’s with us in our approach to scripture and the sacraments. We have been so shaped and formed by a man whose name we might not have known before now… but isn’t that true anyhow? I never met my great-great grandparents nor do I know the mentors of my mom. Yet I have been influenced by them. I am because others were. We are because others were. One of those others was Ulrich Zwingli.

Works Cited

Gonzalez, Justo L. The Story of Christianity, Volume 2: The Reformation to Present Day. Harper One, 1985.

Janz, Denis R. A Reformation Reader: Primary Texts with Introductions, Second Edition. Fortress Press, 2008.

MacCuloch, Diarmaid. The Reformation: A History. Penguin Books, 2003.

[1] MacCulloch, page 137
[2] Gonzalez, page 51
[3] Ibid, 137.
[4] MacCulloch, page 147