Bible Passages: John 16:12-14; Romans 5:1-5
Summary: Pastor Tig Intagliata shares about his experience in Zurich learning about the beginnings of the Anabaptist movement, and highlights from the Anabaptism@500 worship service, held in the Grossmunster Church. He reflects on how the Holy Spirit led the early Anabaptists to uncover Biblical truths and empowered them to live out their faith convictions in the face of persecution.
This is a view that became very familiar to Karen and I when we were in Zurich Switzerland a couple of weeks ago for the Anabaptism@500 celebration. The Limatt River and the Grossmunster Church both played significant roles in the beginnings of the Anabaptist movement in 1525, as we’ll see in a few minutes.
Karen and I are very grateful and fortunate to have been able to be at this event, which drew about 3,500 Mennonites and other Anabaptist Christians from all over the world. Mennonite World Conference took the lead in planning the event.
There was no registration or fee for attending, but there was a table with all kinds of information and friendly faces to welcome us and give us a bright green sticker to wear so we all could identify other Anabaptists on the streets of Zurich.
This is the Zwingliplatz, or plaza named after Ulrich Zwingli, which is adjacent to the Grossmunster Church which is where he preached and pastored for several years. This plaza was the main gathering place for people at the celebration. How could it not be, with a food truck serving free ice cream all afternoon!
We ran into lots of people who we knew from the past, including several from our years in Bolivia—Jack and Irene Suderman, Nathan Penner and Leidy Munoz, former country representatives for Mennonite Central Committee in Bolivia; and Karen is talking with Margrit Kipfer, who’s a Swiss Mennonite from near Bern, who took our place in Bolivia in 1991, married a Bolivian who was part of our church, and they’ve been leaders in the Bolivian Mennonite Church ever since.
And look who we ran into in Zurich! Our former pastor, Earl Zimmerman and his wife Ruth! They were on one of many tour groups organized around the event.
Zurich is a very walkable city, with lots of bridges going across the Limatt River. This map highlights the places on the Anabaptist history walking tour. All of the sites on the tour were right around the Limatt River. I actually led two walking tours; one with Karen’s family, and a week later, one with some friends we were traveling with the second half of our trip.
One of the stops on the walking tour was the house of Conrad Grebel, one of the first Anabaptists. There’s a Mennonite university named after Grebel in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The plaque on his house reads “In this house lived Conrad Grebel, who together with Feliz Manz, founded the Anabaptist movement.”
Last week I showed this statue of Huldrych Zwingli, which is a stone’s throw from the Grossmunster Church. He was the most important leader of the Reformation movement in Switzerland.
Zwingli had several protests about the state Catholic Church of his day. I don’t know if he had 95 theses like Martin Luther did, but here are several reforms that Zwingli wanted to implement into a new emerging Protestant church:
- Preach sequentially from the Bible. He started with the gospel of Matthew.
- He wanted all images/statues taken out of the church, and to abolish praying to saints.
- He thought that music was a distraction to worship, and banned choirs and organs and other instruments, and basically didn’t want any music in church.
- He protested the Catholic idea of original sin, and instead he believed that children who weren’t baptized were saved by God’s grace and would not go to hell.
Therefore, Zwingli was originally was open to the idea of not baptizing infants and letting people decide when they’re ready to be baptized, known as “believers baptism”. BUT the Zurich City Council was NOT open to this idea, and ruled that people who didn’t baptize their babies would face consequences.
So Zwingli decided to not rock the boat–he wanted to stay in good graces with the government, so he backed down on the baptism conflict and decided to go along with the city government’s ruling. But some of Zwingli’s young disciples were really disappointed with him for compromising his convictions to please the state.
Conrad Grebel, Felix Manz, and George Blaurock were some of these followers, and they felt so strongly about believer’s baptism and a couple other things that they broke from Zwingli and decided to form their own group. The three key differences as I understand them were:
- Believer’s baptism- Rejecting infant baptism and instead baptizing people faith when they were ready to follow Jesus and be part of the church.
- Separation of the Church from the State– for the very reasons they saw with baptism —the values of the state will inevitably conflict with the values of Jesus and his Kingdom, and you can’t serve two masters.
- And third, these early Anabaptists rejected the use of violence, including taking up arms to defend your faith. They took Jesus’ words seriously to love one’s enemies and pray for those who persecute you.
- Now I could add a fourth way the Anabaptists differed from Zwingli, and that would be in relation to music.
This is the Ausbund, which is a hymnal that grew out of the persecution that early Anabaptists experienced. It’s still used in Amish churches today. One of the songs in the Ausbund was written by Hans Haslibacher. I actually took this picture at a display in the tower of the Trachselwald Castle that I talked about last week.
Haslibacher was imprisoned in that castle, and later martyred in Bern. His song has 32 verses, and they talk about his life, his persecution, and his faith in the midst of suffering. All of the verses of the song are in the Ausbund. Songs like his inspired other Anabaptists as they lived as a countercultural community.
Speaking of music, the EMU Chamber Choir performed in Zurich a couple of times during the event, and they helped lead the singing during the big worship service—they sat up above the altar, so were very visible. They did a great job!
Now back to the differences the Anabaptists had with Zwingli and the other reformers. This small group of radicals started meeting on their own, and they were committed to live according to what they believed the Bible taught.
They were considered a threat by the Zurich City Council, and the council ordered them to stop their meetings, and they ordered that all unbaptized babies needed to be baptized within 8 days. But the threat didn’t deter this group of dissenters. On January 21, 1525, they had a secret meeting at the house of Felix Manz, which was a stone’s throw away from the Grossmunster church.
After some discussion and prayer, they decided to re-baptize each other upon confession of faith, and this meeting is considered the beginning of the Anabaptist movement—Anabaptist means, “re-baptizer”.
There’s Georg Blaurock asked Conrad Grebel to baptize him. Then Blaurock got up and baptized the others who were present.
Ulrich Zwingli continued to pastor and preach in the Grossmunster church. But when the Catholic Church made efforts to crush the reformation movement in Zurich, Zwingli appealed to the city council to organize an army to defend themselves.
“For God’s sake, do something courageous”, Zwingli said. He himself went to the battlefield, and in 1531 was killed in a battle against Catholic forces. This is where he lived, and the plaque on the wall commemorates his death in the battle.
It’s actually this quote of Zwingli, “Do something courageous” which inspired the theme for the Anabaptism@500 celebration, “The Courage to Love”.
While giving up his life in battle definitely took a lot of courage, the event’s organizers wanted to emphasize the courage that early Anabaptists showed in loving their enemies and in staying true to their convictions.
And in today’s world, they wanted to emphasize the courage to love in relation to seeking forgiveness and reconciliation with other faith traditions Mennonites have been divided from due to past persecution, theological differences, or simply pride.
Which leads me to the worship service at the Grossmunster Church, which is what I want to spend the rest of the time I have left talking about. It was a beautiful service filled with words and symbolic actions of reconciliation.
Here we see Larry Miller representing MWC and a representative of the global Lutheran Church anointing each other with oil, reaffirming the reconciliation that took place back in 2010. They shared: “We thank God that more and more Lutherans and Mennonites appreciate each other’s witness to the gospel.”
And here we see MWC General Secretary Cesar Garcia and a leader of the global Reformed Church washing each other’s feet as a sign of reconciliation.
Then one of the highlights of the service for me was when a Catholic Cardinal was sent by the new Pope, Leo XIV to bring his personal greetings. The Pope sent this message to us:
“In the context of our war-torn world, or ongoing journey of healing and deepening fraternity has a vital role to play, for the more united Christians are, the more effective will be our witness to Christ, the Prince of Peace.. I assure you of my prayers that our fraternal relations will deepen and grow.”
As a cradle Catholic who still values my Catholic heritage, that was music to my ears!
Cesar Garcia preached a sermon on “The Courage to Love”, and he asked: What does it mean to do something courageous for God’s sake? Empowered by the Holy Spirit, can we find the courage to break the cycles of violence? For the early Anabaptists, the courage to love, made possible by the work of the Holy Spirit, was the only path to a new humanity.”
Those are profound and challenging words. His questions connect with our scripture today on Jesus’ promise of sending the Holy Spirit to his disciples to empower them to follow the way that he showed them, the way of peace and love.
Someone on Threads named Amber said it like this: The Holy Spirit loves movement and compels us to go, to act, to serve, to lay down our lives for others. Speaking of movement, there was something surprising that happened during the worship service in Zurich:
Right in the middle of the service, some people in the balcony started dropping all these leaflets containing the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount, and those dropping the leaflets yelled out things like “to the powerful we say war is contrary to the will of God.” And “we will obey God rather than human authority.”
This disruption was styled after what George Blaurock did to interrupt a sermon once in a nearby town. Maybe if they would have had a sermon response time like we do, he would’ve waited to talk until then instead of disrupting the sermon!
Overall, the service was really inspiring with lots of great music, singing in many different languages. Our service today is using the Call to Worship and the Benediction from that service, along with two of the songs that we will sing, at the end of the sermon and at the end of the service.
I want to close with a couple more thoughts and quotes, as I reflect on my experience in Zurich and the spirit and witness of the early Anabaptists.
Here I’m sitting looking at a plaque that was put up in 2004 to remember the Anabaptists who were martyred in Zurich. The plaque reads: here in the middle of the Limatt River from a fishing platform Felix Manz and 5 other Anabaptists were drowned between 1527-32 during the Reformation. The last Anabaptist executed in Zurich was Hans Landis in 1614.
I sat here for quite a while contemplating the suffering of my spiritual ancestors and the courage they had to live out their convictions, at the cost of their lives. I thought of the passage from Romans that we heard earlier, how suffering produces endurance, and endurance, character, and character, hope, a hope that doesn’t disappoint because of the joy and power experienced through the God’s Holy Spirit.
I’m also inspired by a quote from Dutch Anabaptist leader Menno Simons, as he reflected on a passage later in Romans on love, where he says: “For this is the nature of pure love, to pray for our persecutors, to render good for evil, to love one’s enemies, to heap coals of fire on their heads, and to leave vengeance to him who judges rightly.You can find that in the Anabaptist Community Bible, Rom 12.
I also reflected on the idea of how the Holy Spirit revealed new things to the early Anabaptists as they read and discussed scripture, prayed together, truths that had been distorted or buried by the institutional church over the years, even centuries.
Things like choosing to follow Jesus freely and making faith your own, loving enemies, and the dangers of compromising faith convictions for the sake of political power or protection. These truths are as important to us now as they were to them 500 years ago.
I want to close with a quote by a theologian named Brian McLaren, from a section on “Alive in the Spirit of God” in his book We Make the Road by Walking.
This healing teaching leads us beyond a fixed or frozen understanding of God. After all, if God in Christ surprised us once, showing us we had a lot left to learn, shouldn’t we expect more surprises? And if Jesus told us the Spirit would guide us into more truth when we were ready to hear it, shouldn’t we expect to learn more whenever we can bear more?
Prayer: God, as your Spirit guided our Anabaptist forbears into new understandings of what it meant to be a faithful follower of Jesus in their time, may the Holy Spirit also guide us in these times, and may we be inspired by their courage and conviction, and empowered by your Spirit to speak and act as witnesses of your compassion, peace and justice in the world around us. Amen.
