Last night, I was outside meeting with my neighbors via Zoom when I heard “SCREEEeeeech, ka….crunch….hhhooooonnnnk.” The telltale sounds told me that someone had blown through the four way stop in front of my house, but instead of saving themselves a couple of seconds in doing so, they hit another car. The problem? Failure to stop and check. 
It’s amazing what stopping and checking can do. It’s also amazing what NOT stopping and checking does. The latter is the problem for a lot of people these days who I would argue are not really living up to what it means to be a Lutheran. This isn’t to say that these people aren’t Christians, just that they’re not living up to the heritage that should be involved in calling yourself a Lutheran.
So let’s talk about what being a Lutheran is NOT. Being a Lutheran isn’t loving “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” or organ music in general. There are plenty of Presbyterians and Episcopalians who love that stuff. It’s not loving a good potluck, because we know that our Baptist friends love that too. Beer loving? See Presbyterians again. Sitting in the back pew and/or being generally unfriendly? Most any human can identify with that stuff. German heritage? There are actually more German Roman Catholics than German Lutherans. (And besides – isn’t that a bit…I dunno…let’s say “ethnocentric” to imply that you have to be German to be Lutheran?) All of that stuff makes you about as “Lutheran” as wearing a Tyrannosaurus Rex costume on Halloween makes me a dinosaur.
You wanna be a Lutheran? Stop. And check. And reform. That’s what Luther did. He stopped and he checked. He stopped and checked his understanding of God against Scripture. He stopped and checked his Bible. He stopped and checked if a God who created an outrageous plan of salvation involving the crucifixion, death, and resurrection of His Son made sense with the pettiness of what was passing as theology in his day. It didn’t, so he reformed based on what he stopped to see and what he checked against. He reformed based on what Scripture and the Gospel told Him about God.
Stop. Check. Reform. If you do that, you might just find that being a Lutheran is a whole lot more meaningful than some vapid and imprecise stereotype. You might find out that it is a calling to be a part of a movement within the people of God to call us back to what is “most certainly true.”
