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Luther was protesting many things – his effort was not to start a new church, but to reform the church from the inside. And yet a new church was born. It is helpful now to think about both parts of that label – Protestant Reformation – and it will be helpful to think about them at the end of all of this. What Luther, first, and then many others, were protesting, was foremost a theological point. It was the notion of grace, what we have been considering for the past couple of weeks. Luther was deeply troubled by what he was experiencing in his own life, and what he was witnessing in the lives of those he was serving as a rural German priest. Fear, anxiety, hopelessness, a deep sense of unworthiness – about their salvation. The church had convinced them that only by saying the right thing or buying the right thing – in this case, “indulgences,” religious artifacts – could their eternal salvation be guaranteed. Luther discovered, or re-discovered, Ephesians 2:8, “for by grace you have been saved by faith, and this is not your own doing; it is a gift from God.” Luther realized that the church was getting in the way of people making that discovery. That was his protest. The Reformation came as the church changed and adapted to allow that discovery to happen for all the people of God. It was a reformation along a spectrum. Luther took it so far, some took it very far. Others stopped somewhere in between. We Presbyterians were of that type. John Calvin did not know Luther. He was just a child when the Wittenberg drama unfolded. His later wrote with deep appreciation for Luther, though never in total agreement with him. They agreed on basic premises and disagreed on many particulars. Not to matter today. Calvin, like Luther, was not out to start a new church. His intent was reforming, to advance the ball down the field just a little bit more. He took Luther’s insistence on salvation by grace and expanded it – in his teaching, in his preaching, in is application of it across all of the avenues of the life of church and society. In the few weeks remaining this fall, we will consider that more directly – Calvin and the church, Calvin and politics. They are important considerations that have huge implications about how we live and do things. But first – on this Reformation Day – to Calvin, and Job (Not Calvin and Hobbes, but Calvin and Job!). Last Sunday we left Job in his dramatic encounter with God, the voice booming out of the whirlwind, putting Job in his place. Today we conclude. Job acknowledges God’s sovereignty – “I know that you can do all things.” Job is thankful that he has encountered God personally, face-to-face. And he repents. The lectionary skips over the account of what happens to his friends – the ones who seek an explanation of Job’s calamities, the know-it-all friends who explain to you why you’ve lost your job or your marriage has fallen apart or cancer has come your way. As a sidebar to all of this, what we learn is is that the best friendship is the kind that is simply present, a silent witness, that journeys with and accepts rather than trying to explain or understand. The friends are set right. And then Job’s life is set right. His fortunes are restored. Relationships. Wealth. It all comes back. He dies a wealthy, happy old man. It is perhaps too neat and tidy. Scholars and artists have said that all along. They have protested the notion of God setting Job up like this in the first place, and then making it all go away in the end – a kind of “do over” because Job has persisted. Indeed: James Newsome writes that those looking for quick and easy answers are bound t o be disappointed. (Texts for Preaching: Year B, page 558) And more so, we are perplexed if the happy ending seems like a reward – the whole point of Job is that such is not the case. Bad things happen to people, good or otherwise, not because they are good or bad, but because they are people, plain and simple. That’s life. And God is God to all people, good or bad, bad or good, in good times and bad, all the time. Newsome writes that “(God) loves Job, and (God) has loved Job right through the time of his torment.” We make a mistake, Newsome asserts (even though it’s a mistake easily made, I would add) if we equate “Job’s new happiness (as the) result of some new righteousness on Job’s part,” any more than his sufferings were a punishment. “God’s ways are mysterious and past our understanding,” Newsome writes but God is a God of “compassion whose ultimate will for all persons is peace and joy.” If that is the interpretation, and not an easier one that makes grace cheap and God’s sovereignty some sort of mechanical formula, then good. That makes all of this Protestant Reformation stuff worth it, and makes it still matter. Even this week, bad things have happened to people in this room, or by connection, those about whom we care. What I so love about Job, and appreciate about John Calvin, is the notion of confronting God, of confessing before God, not so much confessing sin, though that’s the case, but sharing everything with God, of presuming the very good news that God’s business is our business, that our business is God’s business. I have been reading a lot of Calvin this fall – you all have been the gracious recipients, perhaps victims, of that effort. You will be glad when I get back to simpler topics like the plight of the Presbyterian Church and Ohio State football. But perhaps because some have represented Calvin in a way that I find troublesome – arbitrary punisher, unfair judge – that this has been an important recovery process. Calvin does not need our defense. But he helps us, we who live in a world where people are convinced that they can save themselves, that they are rich enough or clever enough or good enough, to make it on their own. Calvin sometimes is accused of trying to convince us that the opposite is true so much, that we are such wretches, such losers, that the message of grace gets lost, that we are so buried in fear and anxiety hat we can never come up for the air of grace. “Calvinism is back,” Time magazine declared. “John Calvin’s sixteenth-century reply to medieval Catholicism’s buy-your-way-out-of-purgatory excesses is evangelicalism’s latest success story complete with an utterly sovereign and micromanaging deity, sinful and puny humanity, and the combination’s logical consequence, predestination: the belief that before time’s dawn, God decided whom he would save (or not), unaffected by any subsequent human action or decision.” (March 12, 2009) Well yes…but. In the early 1900’s, our Presbyterian forbears revised the very dour Westminster Confession of faith, for centuries the standard-bearer of belief. The revisions… (along with dropping our conviction that the Pope was the anti-Christ!) to mention briefly the concept of love, divine love. It seems a rather important notion to leave out. It was added 100 years ago, and is recounted now, not to make us feel better about ourselves, nor to allow us outthink that grace does not matter after all, that our “lovability” conquers all. No we wrote about love then, and recount it now, because the biblical testimony is a testimony of love. We make the mistake of calling the Old Testament a book of law and the New Testament a book of love. In fact, God loves Job. It is a complex, mysterious love. But it is love. That was Luther’s re-discovery. His fear was met by God’s love. Calvin wrote about God’s mercy more than God’s love, or at least God as the first person of the Trinity. We might want to explore the notion of “father” another time, but he wrote extensively and convincingly about the “father’s care and mercy,” which cannot be anything but love. Christ’s love, which we would not separate from our understanding of who this God is, is quite another story. Calvin wrote that “Unless we are harder than iron we cannot keep from devoting ourselves entirely to Christ when we remember what great love he showed toward us…” (Commentary on II Corinthians) As I have said, Reformation Day is one of my favorites. In years past, it was the day when we Protestants could display our superiority to Roman Catholics. Those days, thankfully, are over. What I love about Reformation day now, brought into focus by this commemoration of Calvin’s 500th birthday, is the renewal of a theological vision. I love the church, and spend a lot of time thinking about it. But that thinking and effort would be in vain if it were not for the vision of faith undergirding it all. We receive it from Job, complex and mysterious, one we wrestle with, but one that ultimately reminds us of God’s sovereignty, sovereign love, mercy, God being with us and for us. We call that grace, and it is more than a doctrine. It is a promise. Luther, and Calvin, and many other saints, protested, because they were concerned that the church itself was getting in the way of our encounter with this loving, gracious, sovereign God, and the reform must continue at any point when our teaching or activity is a stumbling block to that radical good news. There are no Hallmark cards for such a day – either Reformation Day or Calvin’s 500th birthday, though I did see a picture of a John Calvin tattoo recently. I couldn’t tell if it was permanent or temporary. No, the real gift is a reminder of the vision, and a church where that vision can play itself out, no more so in the complex, modern lives of this 21st century, than those of 500 years ago. For we seek the same thing: * No easy answers, but a place to take our questions. Amen.
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