grave, a site that would not attract the attention in the future that he eschewed in life. +++

Transcription

1 CALVIN 500 YEARS LATER October 25, 2002, Reformation Sunday, 500 th Anniversary of Calvin s Birth Hebrews 7: Michael L. Lindvall, The Brick Presbyterian Church of New York City Theme: The historic insights of John Calvin and the Reformed tradition cast a light for modern Christians seeking their way to a faithful future. Almighty God, may your word fall fresh upon our ears this day like a melody familiar but heard afresh. May your word strike us like a crisp, sharp fall breeze, blowing away stale air. May your word make us stand resolute, holding fast to that which is old, but still firm and solid. And now may the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Amen. On the last day of October in the year 1517, a German monk named Martin Luther nailed to the door of his parish church a long list of the gnawing problems he saw in the late-medieval Church. There were no fewer than 95 points on the list. Luther called them theses and meant them to be debating points which he hoped would lead to changes in the church he loved. He had no intention of breaking away and starting a new denomination, especially not one named after him. Luther didn t quite know it that October day, but he was lighting dry tinder. He struck a match that started that firestorm of needed change and tragic division, stunning creativity and deadly bellicosity later named the Reformation. The summer before that fall day of 1517, a young boy in the town of Noyon in Picardy in central France turned eight years old. Little Jean would one day become the greatest leader of the second generation of the Reformation movement. Jean Cauvin John Calvin as we Anglicize it, was born in 1509, 500 years ago this year. So it is fit on this particular Reformation Sunday that we recall Calvin. As Presbyterians, we are the indisputable heirs of his work. Calvin would perhaps not be much pleased by this remembering. All it life he struggled to avoid the limelight, insisting to his dying day that it was not about him, but always about God. Indeed, when he died in Geneva in 1564, Calvin insisted on an unmarked - 1 -

2 grave, a site that would not attract the attention in the future that he eschewed in life. This sermon, I warn you, will be rather teachier, less directly Biblical, and a tad longer than most I preach. There are at least two reasons why I judged it needful to shape this service of worship around Calvin and to preach a sermon about him and his legacy. The first is reactive: Few figures in history have been more maligned and misunderstood than John Calvin. Say Calvin and most people do not get warm, fuzzy feelings. Say Calvinism and the images you generally invoke are dour. The Calvin most people know is, in fact, a straw man, a caricature and not a handsome one. But any close reading of Calvin himself, any real understanding of his time and place put a lie to these stereotypes. The negative portrait many have of Calvin today is a combination product of two things, at least. First, many of his later followers, especially in the 17 th Century, did indeed slip into rigidity and judgmentalism. So what modern people are often reacting to is not Calvin himself, but the genuinely rigid scholastic Calvinism that came along 100 years later. Second, many modern non-christian secular historians and critics simply dislike everything Calvin stood for. They dislike his connection to the rise of modern capitalism. They wrongly believe Calvin established a theocracy in Geneva. Shy and bookish, physically ill for most of his life, an exile in a city where exiles were resented, John Calvin may never have been the most fun guy at the party, but he was not the Grinch who stole Geneva. If the first reason for this sermon is to react to reductionist stereotyping, the second reason is proactive. So much of what Calvin had to say really matters; it still matters. So much of it was wise 500 years ago, and is wise today. Let me say that I, personally, count myself as a Calvinist in a nuanced sense. That is to say, I am not really a follower of John Calvin; I am a follower of Jesus Christ. I don t agree with everything Calvin said or did. I am not under Calvin s authority in the way I am under the Lordship of Jesus Christ

3 One example of where I, and most of you, would take exception to Calvin. John Calvin infamously consented to the execution of a Spanish heretic named Servetus who sought exile in Geneva. It was simply wrong, but you must recall that Calvin did not instigate the execution; the City Council, a body not under his control, did so. And you must remember that almost everybody in Europe at the time Protestant and Catholic alike was calling for Servetus demise. From our modern perspective, Calvin was wrong, but it is unfair to pick him out of a whole age that was wrong about executing people for thought crimes. Another example. I believe that the doctrine of predestination is at the end of the day a hubristic bit of over-reasoning. But remember that predestination was not Calvin s idea alone; most theologians at the time affirmed some form of the idea. Nevertheless, it was and is a generally unhelpful doctrine. More on predestination later. Such caveats aside, the larger truth is that John Calvin offered brilliant insights into what following Jesus meant and still means. They are insights that can illume the Christian path today and I want to offer you a glimpse of them But first a bit of his story. Calvin was a brilliant young scholar who had gone to study the law in Paris. He studied with several of the great humanist teachers of the day, reading the Latin and Greek classics as well as the Bible. While at college, he was also influenced by faculty who had been reading the works of that German reformer named Luther. The local authorities became alarmed at growing Protestant influence at the University of Paris and conducted something of a pogrom. Calvin and others fled for their lives. Calvin ended up, rather by accident, in the French-speaking city-state of Geneva where he was invited to stay and help lead the reform movement of that modest city. He would spend most of the rest of his life there, doing just that. But Calvin would have far-reaching influence beyond that little city at the western tip of Lac Leman. This is true for at least three reasons. First, agree with him or no, the man was both brilliant and eloquent. Secondly, Calvin wrote the book that

4 would become the single most influential of the Reformation. It s called the Institutes of the Christian Religion. And he happened to write it just after the invention of the printing press and he happened to write it in a city full of professional printers with Protestant sympathies. Thirdly, Calvin founded schools and harbored refuges in his Geneva. These educated refugees would return to their home countries and there lead reform movements patterned after Calvin s thinking. Most importantly for us, such educated refugees would return to Scotland, England, Ireland and Holland, where they would found churches Presbyterian and Reformed churches. And beginning less than a century later, these are the very countries and churches that would send waves of colonists to the New World, precisely to places like New York. Our congregation, the Brick Presbyterian Church, would be founded about 200 years after Calvin by his English, Scots, and Dutch followers What I would like to do in this sermon is offer you a Calvin sampler, a topographical survey of the thought of Calvin from about two miles up, if you will. I am going to shape this little bit of Calvin 101 around the doctrine of the Trinity, that understanding of God that has long shaped the way most all Christians think about their faith. So, first, what Calvin taught about God. Second, what Calvin taught about Jesus Christ and the church. Third, what Calvin taught about the Holy Spirit. So first, God always the place to begin. Calvin, more than most any other Christian thinker, understood that in order for God to be God, we had to confess that the Divine Being is necessarily radically sovereign, ultimately mysterious and incomprehensively infinite a God who cannot be contained by any human ideas about God. This God, Calvin said, is the ultimate author of every good thing. It is God who initiates relationship with humanity. God reaches out to us to find relationship with us more than we search for God. That is to say, God is not lost;

5 we are. If we hunger for God, it is God who planted the hunger in us. If we imagine we are looking for God, the deeper truth is that it was God s Spirit that provoked us to search in the first place. It is just at this intellectual intersection that Calvin and many others turned down the road that led to the doctrine of predestination. Here s how the reasoning went. If God is the sovereign initiator of our relationship with God, our salvation if you will, why is it faith comes to some and not to others? Free will? If it were a matter of simple human choice, it would mean that human beings, not God, were in the driver s seat. So, the reasoning went, it follows that God must choose to come to some and not to others. This doctrine of predestination would lead in the next centuries to a lot of terminal navel gazing, spiritual self-abuse and obnoxious religious snobbery. Personally, I do not so much believe it or disbelieve it as I think it s a presumptuous idea. That is, it simply presumes to know too much. It presumes to offer tidy answers to mysteries better left to God. Rather than getting bogged down in predestination controversies, it s better to remember that Calvin s radically sovereign God was always, always a God of grace more than a God of judgment. Calvin s two favorite images for God are, first, that of a loving parent (he speaks of both God as Father and as Mother) and, second, God as a flowing fountain, a fountain gushing out unsearchable love, copious blessing, and unspeakable beauty. Calvin is often downright sentimental when he speaks of the grace and goodness of God God the dotting father or tireless mother, God endlessly attentive to beloved children. Calvin can grow rhapsodic, even mystical, about utter loveliness of the Divine goodness that arches over all creation, this good and blessed and sweet world that God has set us to live in. This last brings us to Calvin s understanding of Jesus Christ. It is primarily Jesus, Calvin reminds us, who reveals this love and grace of God. In Jesus life and death, and resurrection, God disclosed the great and blessed truth that this vast, mysterious and sovereign God loves us so passionately as to die for our poor sakes

6 And, Calvin goes on, it is this Jesus Christ who is our mediator; it is he who is the God-authored link between us in our mortal imperfection and earthliness and God in God s eternal and heavenly perfection. There is no other mediator, not the church and not the clergy. Here is where he locks horns with the medieval Roman church. Calvin reimagines the church in a radical way. The medieval tradition had envisioned the church as the link between humanity down here and God up there. God was revealed to people, this thinking said, through the sacramental system of the church; human beings then responded to God, but not directly, rather only through the church. All wrong, Calvin said. It is through Christ, not the church, that God comes to us and it is through Christ, not the church, that we respond to God. The church is not in between God and people; rather the church is the people; the church is the fellowship of regular people struggling to live faithfully before God. This totally realigned both clergy and church. The church was us, not them. Clergy were not above us; they came from were and among us. This all stems from Calvin s very Biblical insistence, one reflected closely in the passage Don read earlier from the Book of Hebrews, that Christ alone is our Mediator, to use the words of that Bible passage, Jesus Christ alone is our only High Priest Finally, Calvin was very much a theologian of the Holy Spirit. This truth, more than any other, pushes back against the stereotypes so many have of the man as spiritless and rigid. The Spirit simply bursts through everywhere in Calvin s writing. Let me offer you two parallel examples. First, a huge question in his day was how we understand God to be present in the Sacrament of Holy Communion. Calvin very much believed in the real presence of Christ in the sacrament. It was no mere symbol or nor a human simple act of remembrance. Yet Calvin could make no sense out of the Roman Catholic idea of transubstantiation, a theology that had been developed by Thomas Aquinas 300 years earlier. Rather, Calvin said that Christ is really present in the sacrament by the work of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit moving in the hearts of faithful worshippers, rather than by God somehow physically altering the bread and wine. It was a

7 brilliant insight, and it shaped the way we understand the real presence of Christ in communion in our church today. A parallel example of Calvin s emphasis on the Holy Spirit. Calvin s anthropology, that is how he understood the human condition, was notoriously realistic, shall we say. Calvin believed that all good came from God and that everything, everything human beings do and think falls short; all we do is tainted by sin as he would have said. I love the old chestnut about the minister who one day explained the Calvinist doctrine of sin to a sweet little old lady in the congregation, noting how everything we do is inevitably shadowed by self-regard, tangled up in the skein of human brokenness. The little old lady swallowed hard and answered, Well, if it s as bad as all that, then God help us. Which was precisely Calvin s point God does indeed help us. God helps us by the Holy Spirit, that present-tense presence of God. God s spirit empowers human beings, who are not exactly basically good, to do things that are very good and very great indeed. So Calvin, relentlessly sanguine on human nature as he was, was nevertheless boundlessly hopeful about what human beings can accomplish. This sermon is still only about a quarter as long as one Calvin might have preached, but you ve got lunch to eat and blood to give and a movie to see, so I ll end this lecture-sermon with two pleas: First, refuse to put Calvin in a box of prejudice that many have tried to confine him to. Second, I appeal to the church, to you and to me, and all John Calvin s heirs in Reform to reconsider him and his wisdom. He was a wise and eloquent, faithful and rigorous disciple of Jesus Christ, and he can help us these 500 years later to live lives as wise and eloquent, faithful and rigorous disciples of Jesus Christ. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen