"Always Being Reformed"

...we believe in the possibility of change and in the necessity of reform, not just of institutions, but of people – because churches, schools, businesses, and governments are made up of people – and as they change, the institutions they create and sustain, change too.

[1] by Nelly Bube of Kazakhstan

Joel 2:23-32 and Luke 18:9-14

October 26, 2025

Dr. Todd R. Wright

Can people change?

It’s an important question to be asking on Reformation Sunday – the day when Presbyterians all over the world don their T-shirts and Presbyterian blue ball caps emblazoned with the letters RAAR (pronounced roar!) for Reformed and Always Reforming!

(Hey! Where are your T-shirts?)

But seriously, we believe in the possibility of change and in the necessity of reform, not just of institutions, but of people – because churches, schools, businesses, and governments are made up of people – and as they change, the institutions they create and sustain, change too.

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So I ask again, can people change?

Joel thinks so!

He was a prophet working during the Persian period, after the Babylonian exile, after King Cyrus had begun to let Jews return to Jerusalem and start to rebuild the Temple.

He stepped into the limelight when a plague of locust devastated the land and brought starvation. He called for a day of lament and repentance to seek God’s mercy.

You don’t do that unless you think people can change. After all, repentance means to change direction, to change behavior, a change of heart or mind that leads to a change of action.

So they repented … and God had pity on them and promised that their threshing floors would soon be full of grain and their vats overflowing with wine – a holy feast!

But it wasn’t just about starving bellies filled. Joel also promised that God would pour out God’s spirit into all souls and the results would be dramatic:

Sons, written off as too immature and distracted by their phones to be trusted with the family business, would be joined by their sisters as equal partners in hearing and speaking God’s word!

Old men who couldn’t make it through the night without getting up to visit the bathroom, would dream until the dawn – and such dreams, from those who had grumpily said they’d seen it all, dreams of a new day of justice and peace!

The young would have visions of a world turned upside down!

Even the slaves, often ignored like cogs in a machine, would get a splash of God’s Spirit!

In short, people would not be left in their same old roles. They would be changed!

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It is a hopeful picture, I know! God is always at work remaking and remolding, restructuring and reorganizing, restoring and reforming … its revolutionary!

But then Jesus tells a parable about two people who do not seem primed to change at all!

Of course, that is their role in this parable – to represent two stops on the spectrum:

a self-congratulatory Pharisee who struts and stands in the presence of God,

who lists his righteous acts and looks down his nose at … everyone else.

and a tax man who steals into the Temple and slides into the shadows,

who avoids eye-contact with God as he pummels his body and cries out for mercy.

They both seem stuck.

One thinks he has no need to change; the other seems to doubt he can be redeemed.

So can people change?

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It may help to skip to the end. That’s where Jesus surprised everyone by saying that it was

the tax collector who went home justified.

He was, by his own admission, a sinful man. Now, suddenly, his status had changed – he was counted as righteous. Not because he had earned it, but out of God’s pure grace!

Isn’t that the good news, and great discovery, of the Reformation – that we are blessed with God’s grace? And that it is God, not us, who works this change in us!

David Lose puts it this way: “This parable — and indeed the whole Reformation — was and is an attempt to shift our attention from ourselves — our piety or our passions, our faith or our failure, our glory or our shame — to God, the God who delights in justifying the ungodly, welcoming the outcast, and healing all who are in need.”[2]

Can people change? Yes – by God’s grace, we can! Amen

[1] by Nelly Bube of Kazakhstan

[2] From "The Pharisee, The Tax Collector, and the Reformation", 10/21/2013