"Remembering Who We Are"    Theodore J. Wardlaw

Luke 21:6-19

I am so grateful that this congregation, like so many others in this year, has decided to focus a good bit of its time on the witness and legacy of John Calvin, who—had he believed in patron saints—would surely be, by now, the patron saint of Presbyterians and other Reformed Christians everywhere.  This is the five hundredth anniversary of Calvin’s birth, and so it’s been a good year for us to think seriously about him, and about his profound contributions to theological and churchly life over these past five hundred years.   

To be fair, this birthday has also provoked a certain amount of humor.  Someone preaching in the Presbyterian pulpit that I used to preach from in Atlanta drew a big laugh earlier this year when he mentioned the “Calvin Jubilee” which Austin Seminary co-sponsored this past Summer in Montreat, and suggested that the term “Calvin Jubilee” is probably an oxymoron.  Calvin, in the contemporary imagination, after all, is often pictured, wrongly, as a priggish, narrow-minded, right-wing extremist.  Most Calvin-bashers in our time are unaware that, as Peter Steinfels of the New York Times wrote a while back, Calvin “was a product of Renaissance humanism, a student of the Greek and Roman classics who read Cicero every year, a writer of exceptional grace and lucidity in both Latin and French, a man of prodigious learning, who did not dwell on damnation but rather exulted in a sovereign but not at all distant God, a God whose glory was manifest in the goodness of the world and the potential of humanity.”[1]   

Most knee-jerk critics of Calvin don’t know that about him.  What they are apt to dwell on instead is that his theological descendents have bequeathed a good bit of churchly rancor to these last five hundred years.  It is true that, of all the traditions flowing out of the Reformation—including the Lutherans and the Anabaptists and the Zwinglians and maybe even the Anglicans—the Calvinists are the ones who have divided and fought with one another the most.  You’ve heard the joke, maybe, about the ship of colonists from England heading toward the New World.  And when they landed, there were only eight of them who had survived the long crossing.  Two were Catholics, and when they got off the boat they established St. Mary’s Catholic Church.  Two were Anglicans, and they established Trinity Episcopal.  Two were Lutherans and they established Zion Lutheran.  And two were Calvinists, and they established First Presbyterian and Second Presbyterian.

That’s our legacy.  But all the same, I’m glad that U.P.C. is taking time to be serious, too, about the contributions of one of the most pivotal figures in history.  In the newly-published biography entitled Calvin, which was written by Bruce Gordon from Yale Divinity School, Gordon suggests that Calvin “transformed the…Reformation message of inner spirituality and the journey to salvation into a vision of church life that could be lived in the maelstrom of the early-modern world.”  And so it is, as Steinfels points out, that Calvin’s legacy has been traced in everything from modern marriage to modern liberal government to modern capitalism.  “By many accounts,” says Steinfels, “[Calvin] is a major source of modernity’s very understanding of the self…”[2]

I’ve titled this sermon “Remembering Who We Are,” and I hope that, in this anniversary year, we will cultivate anew a sense of memory—of who we are, and who we are not, as heirs of the Reformed Tradition and as theological descendents of John Calvin.  For it’s important on an occasion like this, especially when it comes to a figure as misunderstood as Calvin, that we endeavor to remember him carefully and well.  He was a man in constant motion, forever beleaguered by political and religious turmoil, forever navigating factions and bitter quarrels over things like the meaning of the Lord’s Supper.  Surely, in terms of his physical energy, he was possessed by these various currents in those formative years of the Reformation.  “From the crack of dawn to the last flicker of candlelight,” says Steinfels, “he studied, he preached, he lectured, he joined and adjudicated debates, he wrote tirelessly, despite migraines, bowel problems, hookworms, kidney stones and eventually pulmonary tuberculosis.  He was haunted, Professor Gordon says, with ‘a sense of the hourglass running out.’ No one could have lived more of a purpose-driven life.”[3] 

And if you ask me, to remember Calvin and his legacy is to start, I believe, with the lynchpin of his theology—the unrelenting emphasis upon the sovereignty of God, the notion that God is God and we are not God.  This is the central premise that led H. Richard Niebuhr, for example, to observe that, “The converse of radical dependence upon God is radical independence of everything less than God.”  It’s the premise that in more recent years has led Christopher Morse up at Union Seminary in New York to discuss Christianity in terms of “faithful disbelief”—the notion that the faith is not just a matter of what we believe, but is also a matter of what we refuse to believe in the name of the gospel.  And we are certainly called in this time to claim not just what we believe, but also what we dare not believe.  This matter of the sovereignty of God is at the heart—since Calvin—of the relentless Reformed critique of the prevailing “powers that be” in every generation.  To believe, after all, in God’s absolute sovereignty is to be appropriately skeptical of any absolutist pretenses on the part of any government or government figure. 

And finally, when it comes to church government, it is to understand the theological assumptions behind the way Calvinists ever since Calvin have organized and governed their churches.  I don’t know of a more thoughtful theological polity than ours, and when I see that polity at work—elders and deacons and ministers of Word and Sacrament sharing the burden of prayerful discernment and leadership in a careful balance of power—I am proud to be a Presbyterian.  It all starts with the Sovereignty of God.  And in our time, when the specter of Empire looms ever larger in our world as all but a deity itself, it is critically important that we turn once again to this lynchpin doctrine as a helpmeet in our own practice of “faithful disbelief” in the face of the blasphemous claims of empire.

Oh, for sure, Empire is not a new challenge to Christians.  We’ve often dealt with empires.  The life and death of Jesus Christ, the theology of St. Paul, the birth of the church, all were formulated against the backdrop of the Roman Empire.  And it was an empire, after all, that in great measure colonized this country and bequeathed unto it so many Presbyterians.  And the great waves of missionary activity and the global spread of Christianity from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries were shaped and formed against the backdrop of the colonial empires of first Spain and Portugal, and then later Great Britain.  The truth is that Christianity cannot be understood apart from Empire.  I’m reminded of a New Yorker cartoon I saw years ago.  It’s back during the Crusades, and a Turk who has been knocked off his horse in the midst of battle is lying on the ground as a crusader—still on his horse—is pointing a very impressive-looking sword at the man’s chest.  He looks up at his conqueror and says, “Tell me more about this Christianity of yours—I’m suddenly very interested.”

We cannot understand Christianity apart from having some sense of the seductive power of Empire.  But what exactly does “Empire” mean in a world as small and interdependent as ours?  Is it simply one nation’s flag planted all over the world, or in these days is it more complicated, maybe, than that?  Five years ago, at the 24th General Council meeting of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches in Accra, Ghana, a new theological statement was introduced, defining “Empire” in this way:  Empire, says the letter from Accra, is “the convergence of economic, political, cultural, geographic, and military imperial interests, systems and networks for the purpose of amassing political power and economic wealth.  Empire typically forces and facilitates the flow of wealth and power from vulnerable persons, communities and countries to the more powerful.”[4]

I was in Zambia for most of June, teaching at our sister seminary there, and I saw first-hand that definition of Empire.  It wasn’t some new country planting its flag all over Zambia like Britain once did.  No, instead it was an economic colonialism, where big corporations from around the world, and especially from China, come in and snatch up the natural resources and pay desperately poor people wages that are criminal so that they can risk their lives in dangerous work environments, primarily the copper mines—the copper mines in Zambia are the most dangerous mines in the world.  While I was there, I went and saw the recent movie “The International,” and saw how, in our time, Empire is almost like a living, amorphous beast—bigger than any one nation’s influence, bigger than any one nation’s military, bigger than banks or parliaments or congresses, bigger, finally, than any one network of strategists and coordinators calling all the shots.  It has its own life, in other words.

While I was in Zambia, the Dean at our sister seminary there, Dr. Henk Van Den Bosch, went to South Africa to give an address at a conference on Calvin.  His address focused in part on Calvin and the role of the state; and in this address, he acknowledged Calvin’s claim that “civil government is ordained by God as an expression of God’s providential care; [humanity] is therefore called to obedience to civil government (IV.xx4, 6, 23).”

But he called for a closer reading of the text, which “reveals some surprising elements in [Calvin’s] thinking.  Central to this [closer reading] is the notion that if civil governments are ordained by God, this simultaneously means that earthly governments derive their authority from God and are therefore subordinated to God (IV.xx.4); they are called by God [in Calvin’s words] ‘to represent in themselves to men [and women] some image of divine providence, protection, goodness, benevolence and justice’, and if they fail to live up to this high calling, [again in Calvin’s words] ‘they are not only wrongdoers…but are also insulting toward God himself, whose most holy judgments they defile’ (IV.xx.6).  Van den Bosch notes that “this emphasis on God’s absolute sovereignty, which is characteristic of Calvin’s entire theology, undermines the absolutist pretenses of empire and allows the believer to understand that, behind the façade of imperial authority, ultimately God is in control…”[5]  That’s Calvin’s Sovereignty of God!  Oh, of course, as van den Bosch puts it himself, “All of this does not turn Calvin into a liberation theologian who is preaching active resistance against the forces of government.  But beyond the dominant strand of his theology that confirms the status quo in issues of politics and government there is a theological ‘surplus’ that …calls for a critical approach [to] the forces that abrogate their power by disobeying God’s command.”[6]

Are we being called in this day and time to remember that, when, as children of Calvin and as children of God, we remember who we are?          

I think of this question as I come to our text.  Jesus and his disciples were coming out of the Temple—the temple of Jerusalem, the sort of “Washington Cathedral” in the ecclesial imagination of Luke’s church.  In their corporate memory, at least, this temple had been a place designed for prayer and for meeting God and for learning the language of faith.  But Luke reports that this temple so dear to their memories had in fact been corrupted—the rich people throwing their pocket change into the treasury, while the widow gave everything she had.  The temple had become enmeshed, somehow, into a living, amorphous beast composed of a collection of other value systems; until its primary purpose had been compromised.  So the disciples in this text looked around at all the fine architectural details, all the grandeur of it, and one of them made a perfectly innocent comment about how pretty it was.

And Jesus just blew him out of the water.  He said, “As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.”  A little later, someone asked a follow-up question.  And Jesus responded with strange language about wars and rumors of wars, and nations going against nations, and kingdoms going against kingdoms, and earthquakes and famines and plagues and all the rest. 

But Luke was hoping that his community would read this language of Jesus and discern that it wasn’t so much about times to come—that instead it was about the front page of the morning paper.  It wasn’t so much a prediction of trials in the future, as it was a snapshot of their trouble in the present.  Persecution from without; insecurity within; popular prosperity gospel preachers with slick, upbeat messages of a Christ without a cross; others trying to wed the faith with the patriotic ideology of the nation; all the chaos in the world—it was all there in Luke’s day, just as it is in ours.  He didn’t use the word “empire,” but that word does come to mind.

Back around mid-Summer, on the eve of the Fourth of July, there was another one of those tea parties in Austin.  It was held in a big park downtown, and the guest speaker was Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, aka “Joe the Plumber.”  Now I don’t know how you feel about Joe the Plumber; I kind of like him.  I think he symbolizes something important for many Americans.  I wouldn’t vote for him if he were running for office, but I think he’s interesting.  Joe the Plumber, who by the way is no longer a plumber, had a lot to say apparently about politics, and God’s ideas about taxes, God’s ideas about how to discipline your children, things like that.  And then, in the next day’s edition of the Austin American-Statesman, an editorialist cautioned the readership to be wary of anyone with the middle name “the”—as in “Ivan the Terrible,” or “Vlad the Impaler.”  Not bad advice for all of us.  My party, the true party.  Presbyterians, the righteous ones.  This or that partisan group of Presbyterians, the true and faithful Christians.

You know, the grave danger in staking our theological system upon the premise of the Sovereignty of God is that it makes us vulnerable to that kind of triumphalism.  A world-view or theological system that assumes we’re always right because God is always on our side.  What Calvin might remind us of is that God is not on our side; rather it is we who are called to be on God’s side.  It is we who belong to God and not the other way around. 

Jesus in this text was encouraging those disciples not to confuse all those lesser loyalties with the Sovereign One toward Whom he was leading them.  Don’t get attached to all of those lesser loyalties—not even the Temple, not even the church.  With all of their power to compel and with all of their power to destroy, they don’t offer the last word.  Don’t forget that radical dependence upon God means radical independence of everything less than God.

Remembering who we are, and Whose, begins with remembering that God alone is sovereign.  When we forget that, we lose sight of the only empire that ever really matters.

And speaking of empires, in a particularly vivid history of the life of Alexander the Great (another one of those figures with the middle name “the”!), there’s a very effective and dramatic re-creation of a memorable day when the Greek army that was following Alexander across Asia Minor was seized by terror and dismay when they discovered that they had marched clean off their maps.  The only maps they had were Greek maps, which contained only a small segment of Asia Minor.  They had marched clean off their maps, and now the rest was blank space.  All they had to go by was what they could see ahead—the towering Himalayas, and God only knew what else.  It was all mystery now.  But if they could forsake their maps, and trust instead the God Who made those mountains that lay ahead, then perhaps they would have noticed a companion going with them on their journey through those mountains.

What do we do when we march off our maps?  Don’t we feel that way in our time—that, maybe, within our culture, and certainly within our church, things have changed so radically that, in effect, it’s as if we’ve marched off our maps?  When the temple falls, when all the other sovereignties to which we are inclined to attach ourselves disappoint us, or implode, or change in ways that threaten us; what do we do?  Do we give up?  Do we go it alone? 

Or do we march on ahead with our Sovereign One, Who has continued to companion, by the way, all those others who in times past have marched off other maps?

We know, of course, what the church does when at its best.  We remember who we are, we remember Whose we are, and we march on.  Other sovereigns, other systems, other ecclesial bodies, will rise and fall and rise and fall and rise and fall again.  But we march on, companioned by the ultimate Sovereign—One Who is not at all distant, but Whose glory is manifest in the goodness of the world.  We have been left, after all, with more than just a few interesting ideas and a few historic old creeds.  We have been left, in fact, with the ongoing invitation to come out and be a part of a people whose presence, and whose eating and drinking with Jesus, is a sign of that Sovereign’s companionship.  And when we do that, we remember who we are—over and over again.