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*** I don’t know why you are here. I am here because of a series of events that some might claim to be accidental, but I do not. I know that had I been born elsewhere, or into a different family, I might be elsewhere this morning, if anywhere at all. But I am here, with you. We are here together. And if you take nothing else away from an autumn full of Sundays with John Calvin, it’s that I believe that God somehow has something to do with this. All of this. You could say I am here because my dad was a minister, and that would be a factor. But there are lots of PK’s, “preacher’s kids,” who end up as far away from church as possible. I went to church as a child and youth, and valued it deeply. I loved the church and the church loved me. Though there were several Presbyterian congregations involved, church was always a place where I belonged. My real conversion experience came when I went to college, a time to put away childish things in exchange for other childish things. I slept in on a Sunday morning early in my first fall. I skipped church. It felt odd. I am not sure I felt guilt, the gift that keeps on giving, but I felt something. So the next Sunday I did not sleep in. I got up and went to church, the Presbyterian church on the college campus. It was different, though somehow familiar. There were students, faculty, people from the town, business people, farmers. And I kept going back. What I felt was a hole in my living that church filled. I am sure there is something psychological about all of that, but that’s OK. I soon joined the choir, then the church itself. I became an elder. It was from that church that I became a candidate for ministry; its pastors steered me to my seminary. I was ordained there in its sanctuary. That’s my conversion story, or part of it, anyway. One Sunday morning when I didn’t sleep in. I don’t know what yours is. Thank God that all such stories do not end up with people being ministers, but what I want to testify to is that gap, that absence, that in my mind and in my living, only a faith community can fill. That is not to say several things. It is not to say that the church is perfect; heavens no. It is also not to say that the church is the only place where faith can happen; heavens no. But it is to say something powerful and true about the church. That church matters. While John Calvin wrote about theological doctrine a great deal, he primarily conceived of himself as a church person. That’s what he did – he led churches, and that’s what he wrote about. He wrote about why they mattered, how they should be organized and led, what they should do. Some things to Calvin were essential – the marks of the true church, he called them. The proper teaching and preaching of the word of God, the correct manner of experiencing the sacraments, the church as a moral and theological shaper of people, “discipline,” he called it. But on a surprising number of things, particularly for one so associated with order and control, Calvin was “indifferent.” That was his word – “indifferent.” A sermon about the church is an interesting thing. Like sports, it’s probably better to play the game than to read about it. But every once in a while, it’s good to step back. So here are three images from Calvin about who the church is and what the church is called to be. Perhaps they can serve as yardsticks or barometers for how we are doing, how we are perceiving our call and acting on it. * The first is the church as “mother.” A mother cares for, nurtures, provides sustenance. What did that look like for Calvin? Regular worship, at least once a week. Daily Bible teaching. Such things were the ways you got fed by your mother, were nurtured and raised in the faith. That is why we spend so much energy and focus on worship, on educating our children and youth and adults. It’s not just for the sake of nifty programming; it is for our faith formation. It is what I think I missed my one Sunday of playing hooky from church. We’ve turned church into an obligation. Calvin conceived of it as life-support. People will tell me that they don’t need the church to experience God, and that’s right. Part of that view is based on the individualism of the 21st century; part of that view is that the church has not always made a good case for itself, either by what it’s done or what it’s not done. But when people say that to me, I respectfully say that they cannot fully experience God away from a community of faith, that faith is, at heart, a communal experience. And I further say – in the context of this mother language – that we cannot make it on our own, that we need the nurturing and care that the church offers in order to fully experience what God intends for us. * The second image is of the church as a body, a “unified body.” If you look in the yellow pages, if there are still yellow pages, under “churches,” and then “Presbyterian churches,” you will see not only lots of choices, but several denominations, among many, many other denominations. Calvin would be horrified by that, and saddened. He wrote passionately about church unity. “Always, by word and deed, I have protested how eager I was for unity.” He was distressed when the church exhibited “only the broken pieces of a torn body.” (See William Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Portrait, pages 214 and ff) That body was healthiest when it reflected the representative democracy that Calvin thought best for church and politics. But the details would work themselves out. That unity, by the way, can be a burden. There are days when it would be much easier to go it alone, when relationships in our own region are difficult, or when our denomination does something that either drives us crazy or incenses us. No matter – work for unity, Calvin would insist. We are doing it now in our presbytery, with the eleven Presbyterian congregations within the city of Rochester. We are doing it in lots of other ways. An ecumenical and interfaith Thanksgiving service. RAIHN. A Presbyterian partnership trip to New Orleans. Sending overtures to presbytery. All for the health of the body, much more compelling than any organizational theory about the church could ever be. * And the church as “leaven.” The church changes lives, but it is also called to change the world. If you take away two words from this fall, they would be “sovereignty” and “grace.” An affirmation of the sovereignty of God would demand that God is God of the world, and not just the church, so the church is called to pursue that sovereignty in all of the world’s arenas.
Like leaven that is placed in the dough to transform what the bread will become, so the church is to function in the world. We are all in this together, not just in the church, but in the world. You can read a great deal, as I have done, about Calvin’s doctrine of the church, but the proof is in the pudding, how the church functioned in Calvin’s Geneva of the 1500’s. How it cared for refugees. How it cared for children. How it cared for those without means. I am not clever enough to understand the intricacies of health care legislation. But I do know that Calvin’s Geneva saw to it that those who were without resources were provided with medical care. Whatever a public option is, to me it’s not socialist, but Calvinist. It is the leaven of the church transforming society and culture, shaping it, forming it, to more closely resemble God’s vision for all of God’s children. There are other images, but these three – mother, united body, leaven in the loaf – may be enough right now. Calvin thought about this church stuff a lot – about order and discipline, about teaching for all ages, about the church caring for all, including prisoners, about how city and country churches are connected to one another, about the church’s unity. Some of us should think about that a lot as well. But all of us should do it. We should focus on what matters, here, in this place, and in the broader body into which we are called. I don’t know why you are here. Perhaps you were born into this church. Perhaps your parents dragged you here, back then or now. Perhaps this church being Presbyterian is the thing that drew you here, or conversely, the last thing you cared about – but rather our nursery, or music, or our terrific parking situation. But we are here, and it’s no accident. While being Presbyterian isn’t the most critical thing about us, it shapes and forms us. We live in a post-church, post-denomination world. Doing what we do is surely counter cultural, and not always fashionable. We are declining, we Presbyterians, from 4 million in the 1960’s to 2.1 million now. Not because we’ve become too liberal, as some would argue, but because of declining birth rates, because of changes in culture, because the county seats and small towns and big cities that were our bread and butter are no more, because we’ve not always adapted to the so-called “market” of religious practice in the U.S. I am a denominational loyalist, sometimes to the point of being too parochial. But I believe in the church that Calvin believed in. The Presbyterian form of the experiment attracted me, and continues to attract me, and the Third Presbyterian form of the experiment is what draws us here, together. It is not perfect, and it is not the only way to do it. Jesus – Christ our king – did not die for the Presbyterian Church, did not die for its Book of Order, for Session or Presbytery meetings, for General Assembly overtures. But he did die for the vision and values that undergird all of this, and that we, at our best moments, embody and embrace – the church as a mother that nurtures us and transforms, the church as the body, a visible witness to the unity we experience in Christ, the church as the thing that will change the world. It may not matter what church you belong to, but it matters that you belong to his body, and this is one way, one sometimes pretty good way, that it manifests itself. That’s probably enough of John Calvin for awhile. I am thankful for him this day. Amen.
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