Angel Johnson

This is my first year in a church that celebrates Reformation Day, so I’m pretty new to it, but here is the basic idea:

On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the doors of a church in Wittenburg, Germany. He actually nailed them to the door, which was the common practice of that time. If you had something you wanted to discuss with the clergy, that was how you let them know. Printers saw the sheer volume of theses that he posted, however, and sensed a story, so they quickly translated (he had written them in Latin, the Catholic Church’s official language for teaching and communication) and distributed his papers. His ideas were so at odds with the church’s that word spread quickly, and everyone wanted to read them… and they were so widely distributed that everyone could. After Luther’s excommunication from the church soon after, there was a massive revolt.

This holiday even has an official color, which is red, to remind us of the Holy Spirit descending on Christ’s followers in tongues of fire on the Day of Pentecost. It was also, of course, the Holy Spirit who inspired Luther and his colleagues to begin the Reformation of the church.

On this holiday we celebrate what God achieved through Martin Luther- the return to the knowledge of salvation by grace through faith, instead of what the church had turned to… selling indulgences. Indulgences were certificates that you could purchase from the church to free yourself or someone else from purgatory, or lessen their suffering. Johann Tetzel is famous for his quote (which angered Luther enough to write his theses): “As soon as a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs”.  So basically, the Catholic Church needed to raise money to build St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome, and so they told people that for enough money, they could save their dead loved ones from hell. Cuz, ya know… God cares more about having a beautiful cathedral than true repentance for sins by the sinner himself.

Anyhoo… our church had a picnic at one of the church family’s homes on Saturday, and I took some pictures. They have a farm, and there were fires for hotdogs and s’mores, a hay ride, and Reformation trivia. It was a lot of fun, and there were probably about 75 people, or so. <- Drew will have to help me out with this, I’m really bad at judging the number of people in crowds. It could have been 50, or it could have been 150. I’m shooting for something modest inbetween.

It was just really pretty with all the fall colors, so I snapped a few shots. I wanted to take more, and get some better ones, but I was trying to be discreet. I wasn’t sure if it was weird that I was taking pictures… I would think it was kind of strange if someone came to my house and started taking pictures of my garage, or something. But anyway, here’s what I got.

Also, here are a few more that were interesting. This first one is me and Riley about to set off on the hay ride. He hates loud noises and was afraid the tractor would be loud. It wasn’t.

Evidently there were some other-wordly vistors, too… according to this photo of orbs.

Or the hay was dusty.

This one is just strange. I was trying our some different settings on my camera to take pictures by fire-light without blinding everyone with my flash, and Riley was my guinea pig. This one just struck me as really creepy, for some reason, so I thought I’d share.