In just 2 days, we’re all going to be inundated with the annual swarm of costumed kids knocking at our doors, reciting those hollow-ween words, “Trick or Treat;” hollow because no kid comes prepared to do a trick anymore. They’re banging on our doors for one thing and one thing only, “a candy treat!”
On Halloween 500 years ago, Professor Martin Luther knocked on but one door, the door to the All Saints’ Church on the campus of Wittenberg U. in Germany. Well, he didn’t exactly knock, he nailed – 95 Theses to that door to make public his personal grievances with his Mother Church and request a theological forum to debate his concerns. Now he didn’t harbor any sinister motive to trick his church into promoting him within it; much less did he trick his church by starting a mutiny that triggered the Protestant Reformation.
But his action was no treat either, either for him, or for his church. What he did do, was publish a Treatise that listed his litany of objections to his church’s slide down the slippery slope of theological orthodoxy.
“The Rest of Story” informs us that Martin Luther was excommunicated on January 3rd, 1521 and just four months later, on May 26th, was declared a heretic. Why not come this Reformation Sunday to hear about his “Tower Experience” that catapulted his life and career along a much different trajectory?