On Friday, October 31st, many children will dress up in costumes and walk door to door saying “trick-or-treat” and receive candy from neighbors. I have always enjoyed Halloween. As a child, my brother and I would carefully think about our costumes we would make. Some of my favorites include the year I was a lady bug and another year when I was a bag of Jelly Bellies. The night was magical, it was as if you could be anything and do anything. The rest of the world fell away and things seemed to be different.  

For us as Protestants, October 31st has another meaning completely. This day marks the anniversary of the Reformation. On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther, the founder of the Lutheran Church, posted a list of 95 items that needed to be addressed by the Roman Catholic Church on the doors of the Wittenberg Church. Four hundred years later we are still celebrating the challenges and changes of that momentous moment.

With the Reformation began the numerous divisions, denominations and disagreements between Christians which have made it harder to see what makes us similar. Instead, we see the things that make us different first. This moment in history marks when we lost some of that unique connectivity of the Christian faith of having one church that everyone belonged to. 

But the changes became significant because the reformers challenged us to have faith as our own instead of what we are told to believe by the church. We began to read the Bible ourselves to uncover God’s word for us today. 

The one thing that I believe was most important about the Reformation was that the reformers emphasized the gift of God’s grace. No longer were penance or financial gifts required; instead it was the immovable and unshakable gift of God’s grace given for us. 

Grace is one of those things that we understand, and we don’t understand, all at the same time. In some ways, it makes complete sense that God would love us enough to forgive mistakes, sins and brokenness…and yet we all know people who are hard to forgive, sins that seem unforgivable, and brokenness of hate, anger and war that plague our world which makes grace something like a far-off dream.

I wonder if this is one of the reasons that Halloween has become such a significant holiday in our society. We want to dress up as superheroes that will capture the bad guys, the princesses who always meet the prince, and the adorable animals that children dress up as. Even the scary costumes have become an escape from the world we live in today. Not a world of grace but the feeling of a complete absence of grace.

Which is why I think, in times like these, we need a reminder of what grace looks like. Grace looks like the laughter of a child, friends sitting down to eat together, worship, a hug from a friend, forgiveness, working together and coming home. 

My favorite reminder of grace comes from the wag from my dear dog, Calvin. And not just because his name is Calvin, named after the Reformation leader and founder of the Presbyterian Church, John Calvin. But because in every circumstance, his tail is always wagging when I come home. On days when I come home late, when things didn’t go the way I expected, in moments when I made mistakes or on really great days, I walk in the door and Calvin runs into my arms and is glad that I am home. 

God’s grace is like that. Jesus greets us with whatever happened that day with the everlasting grace that says I love you anyway. 

This Friday, Calvin will be dressing up as a sheriff and will help me hand out candy to children who come to our house dressed up for Halloween, and I will be reminded of John Calvin and Martin Luther, who, on this day many years ago, fought for us to truly understand the grace of Jesus for us. Happy Reformation Day!

This past weekend children, teens and adults joined together for our All Church Family Camp where we learned about how our spiritual gifts make us God’s superheroes. And when I say superheroes, the first thing we think of is Superman, Spiderman and Wonder Woman. But we moved past these people with the miraculous gifts of flying, climbing walls and super strength, to the gifts God gives us of kindness, love, helping others and smiling.

Spiritual gifts are a unique and special part of how God made each of us. They shape and form our careers, free time, hobbies and communities without us even realizing it. For example, a person might be an artist because they have an eye for seeing the beauty in things the way another might not. A teacher has a way of explaining the American Revolution that makes a teen feel like they were fighting alongside George Washington. Or a child is able to explain the complications of life in simple and matter-of-fact ways.

But these gifts go beyond the basics of everyday life to help us do the work God has called us to do. The artist sees the beauty in the desert, paints it and helps us non-artistic folks give thanks for the beauty of the cactus. The teacher blesses us by teaching teens when we think history seems boring, and the child makes our complicated and full lives simple so that we might enjoy God’s pleasures. Each person has their own gifts to share and we all have gifts to receive.

The church provides lots of opportunities for us to use our spiritual gifts - from teaching Children’s Church School to volunteering at Andre House, helping in the office to taking pictures at special events at the church. I hope you all have found a place to do that (if not please call me I will find you a place to share your gifts.)  :-)

The challenge, I think, is seeing our whole life as the work of God in us and through us. Each simple slice of our life is a part of God’s work in us. The thing that makes us God’s heroes is when we take those spiritual gifts and use them to do Jesus’ work. This means using your gift of listening to spend time with a friend who needs someone to talk to, the gift of organization to keep sanity in our life and others, or the gift of helping others to support a person in need.

This morning the song Do Something by Matthew West came on the radio and the lyrics push us to go beyond seeing our life introspectively, to focus outwardly as God’s heroes. In the song, Matthew West challenges us to get up and do something about the hurt, brokenness, and lack of love in the world instead of just learning about it or talking about it. More often than not, we struggle to believe that we can do much about war half-a-world away, racism that plagues our country and illness that destroys life.

But we can by living and using our spiritual gifts. In the music video of Do Something, people from all ages, backgrounds and cultures hold up signs of what they are going to do. Some are life goals like "adopt", "fight for justice", and "heal the hurting." Others are one-day or one-hour challenges like "rebuild" and "feed the hungry." But the ones that you can do today are as simple as laugh, love, give a hug and pray. These spiritual gifts make a difference in the world.

My questions to you are “What will you do?" "How will you use your spiritual gifts?”

The other day I was in my yoga class and our teacher had us in tree pose. For those of you who don’t know, tree pose is a balance pose that asks us to stand on one leg with our foot balancing on our thigh with our knee pointed out towards the side wall. This pose is often very hard because you are focused on only on balancing on one leg while also keeping your foot pushing on your balanced leg. 

Midway through our left leg was when she said something that I wasn’t expecting and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.  She said, “While we often think that this pose is about balance or gathering your inner core strength, this pose is actually a test to see how well we handle falling.”

Falling, I thought. You want me fall? You want me to experience failure? Of course, I was doing all this while balancing on one leg and that is when I realized that I probably needed to fall. When we fall, there are four common responses. Frustration at ourselves for falling, shame that it happened to us, blame because it couldn’t have been our fault that we fell, or getting up and trying it again. 

What has interested me so much is that our responses to falling in yoga are not far off from our responses to falling in life. We are all trying to balance work, family, friends, laundry, stress, and life. The balancing gets harder and that is when we fall. We fall when we forget something, fail at a project, feel guilty about what we “should” have done, or make mistakes. When we lose our jobs, our temper, our keys, or our mind. We fall when we sin.

And every time we fall we have a choice of how we will respond. We might feel frustrated, ashamed, blame something, or worse, someone, have a glass of wine or some chocolate, or will we laugh about it and try again. What kind of fall we made probably determines what kind of response we make, but either way somehow we respond.

What I am afraid of is that too often we believe that we fall all on our own. We allow the shame, guilt, frustration, mistakes, and sin build up inside us instead of trusting the one who promises to be there with us when we fall. Jesus—the one who forgives sin, loves us anyway, and doesn’t care how many times we fall as long as we recognize that Jesus is there when we hit the floor. 

Jesus is there filled with the grace that covers all falls and the truth that he will never leave us and forsake us. Not for anything. And most importantly, Jesus is there to say, “I love you just the way you are, bruises and all.”

Maybe we need to “practice” falling a bit more in order to recognize what it means to not depend on ourselves, but on our savior next to us. I am not sure what it means to “practice falling” beyond yoga balance poses except to say that next time you fall, remember to look next to you because Jesus is right there.