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| Reformation Wall, Geneva |
2 Corinthians 5:16-6:10
A Sermon for Reformation
Sunday
27th October 2013
First “Hilltop” Presbyterian Church,
Mendham, NJ
Sola scriptura. Sola
gratia. Sola fide. Solus Christus. Soli Deo gloria. These are known as the
Five Solae, five Latin phrases that together sum up the core theological vision
of the Protestant Reformation. Scripture alone. Grace alone.
Faith alone. Christ alone. Glory to God alone. They’re the pillars of the Reformation. They’re not found in one particular text, but
represent the broad theological tenets that emerged throughout the Church’s
Reformation in the early sixteenth century.
Each one is a counter claim, a rejection of prevailing theological views
of the Roman Catholic Church at the time.
Scripture alone has authority, not tradition. Grace, faith, alone, not works
righteousness. Christ, not the
Pope. God’s glory, not the glory of the
Church or the glory of humanity. These
were the beliefs that rocked the Church in the early 1500s, which split the
Church, which unleashed a movement of reform that the Church had never
witnessed before or since.
Today,
as Presbyterians, as a people reformed, we are heirs of this movement. When on the 31st October 1517, in
Wittenberg, Germany, Martin Luther (1483-1536) posted ninety-five reasons why
the Church should not be involved in the sale of indulgences he never dreamed
we would be remembering him these many years later. Indulgences were basically
certificates one could buy to release a loved one from the confines of
purgatory. One of the indulgence sellers, Johann Tetzel (1465-1519) even came
up with a little jingle: “When the coin
in the copper rings, the soul from purgatory springs.” The proceeds were used to build St. Peter’s
Basilica in Rome. When Luther protested the sale of indulgences, he didn’t
anticipate that centuries later we would be honoring his act of
conscience. Hence, on this Reformation
Sunday, the Sunday closest to the 31st October, Protestants around
the world celebrate today, we remember the reformers, such as: Luther in
Germany, Jean Cauvin (1509-1564) in Geneva, Ülrich Zwingli (1484-1531) and Heinrich
Bullinger (1504-1574) in Zurich, John Knox (c.1514-1572) in St. Andrews and
Edinburgh, Scotland—we remember their passion, their commitment, their courage,
their love for the gospel and need to reform the church.
Whenever
I’m back in St. Andrews (which, as many of you know, is, thankfully, often) I
always walk past the ruins of the bishop’s castle and the entrance to St.
Salvator’s, the university chapel. If
you look down in the road outside the castle and in the sidewalk near the
chapel, you’ll find the initials of the men who in the 1500s were burned at the
stake for their beliefs, at that location, martyred for their reforming
spirit. One of my favorite places in St.
Andrews is the hill situated along the North Sea where the Martyrs Monument
stands. Inscribed there are the names of the reformers who died for their faith
in St. Andrews. (When I was there in
June I was happy to see that the base of the monument was recently restored.) I often think of them, what they experienced,
consider their courage, their dedication to the gospel, their commitment to
these beliefs—sola scriptura, sola gatia,
sola fide, solus Christos, soli Deo gloria—could I, would I do the same? Would
you? Could you?
In
four years, 2017, we will witness the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. Almost five hundred years on, the spirit of reform
is still moving through the world, particularly in China and many nations in
Africa. The Protestant movement is still
moving. But, to be honest, in the West, it’s losing steam. I’ve been to Geneva, twice, the city of
Calvin. The Protestant ethos is there in
the people, but the churches are empty.
Iain Torrance, former president of Princeton Seminary, former moderator
of the Church of Scotland, and now professor at New College, Edinburgh, recently
commented that Reformed Christianity (the heirs of Calvin) has lost its way. We
have lost our vision.
For
several years now I’ve felt that something is seriously wrong with the Reformed
tradition. It’s been difficult to put a
finger on it. It’s more a sense, an
intuition that something is missing. Personally,
I’ve come to feel that Christianity is in trouble. Yes, there are healthy and vibrant churches
around. I give thanks to God for
churches such as Hilltop and the Catonsville church that I serve, and so many
others, churches that are vital, engaged, alive. I don’t want to be pessimistic or negative,
but you need to know this isn’t the norm.
So many churches are struggling to survive, plagued by conflict (just
ask the presbytery executive or the chair of the Committee on Ministry),
pastors are burning out, seminaries are struggling as enrollment continues to
decline.
The
associate pastor at the Catonsville Church just returned from a visit to
London. She spent a day visiting Oxford
and showed me a photo of a sign situated at the entrance to the chapel of Christ
Church College. It reads: “What is the
church?” The sign provides a description
of Christian worship and beliefs. Now, you
don’t have to explain what a church is if people already know, you don’t have
to explain what goes on in church if people are going to church, if they’re part
of a church. The sign is itself a
symbol, a symbol that points to the deeper, pervasive reality that the church
is becoming (has already become?) a relic from another time.
I’m not trying to be
negative or pessimistic. Believe me, I wish the opposite were true. What we need, though, is a healthy dose of
realism. So what do we do? We can
celebrate our past, I guess. We can commemorate
the Reformation, reaffirm our beliefs—teach our children well—remember what
makes us Protestants.
There was a time when I
thought knowing what we believe and why was enough. There was a time when I
thought getting the ideas right, getting the theology right was the cure for
what ails the Church. After twenty-three
years of ministry, I’m not so sure. Don’t
get me wrong, ideas matter, theology matters.
But there’s a lot of loopy theology out there in the Church these days. What I’ve come to know is this: Tending
belief is high-maintenance. Beliefs
require verification, right? And defense, right? And proof, right? And
argument. And then they require protection, right? We have to defend them. Welcome to the belligerent world of beliefs! What I’ve found in the belligerent world of
beliefs is that very often these beliefs have little to do with the reality of
God. Instead we’re often dealing with are embattled egos, beliefs as extensions
of frightened egos, beliefs used as
weapons by frightened egos against people who appear threatening. All of this has absolutely nothing to do with
the gospel.
The world has grown
tired of beliefs. The world knows the
costly price of dogmatic assertions and fundamentalisms of every kind. And the world has lost faith, is losing
faith, in what the Church believes because the Church has failed to really
embody it—incarnate it, enflesh it—in its practice.
I, too, have grown tired
of beliefs. Sounds odd coming from a
preacher, right? For those who know me
well, this might sound very odd coming from me.
The first Jesus
followers did not have a “belief system.” Jesus called people to follow him,
which meant more than believing in him, more than simply confessing certain
theological ideas about him, and
certainly more than attempting an anemic ethical do-goodism (which often passes
as “Christian” these days). The first followers of Christ had an experience of
the holy, an encounter with the divine, and they participated in the power and
grace and intensity of God’s Spirit unleashed upon the world in a new way, gospeling creation in the flesh, in a
person, in Jesus Christ, calling humanity to embark, like him, on a heroic
journey of divine dimensions and cosmic proportions. That was the Apostle Paul’s
experience too. Whatever Paul came to believe about Christ was first experienced in
and with and through Christ and what he continued to experience
through the Spirit.
These are rich,
theological claims we find in 2 Corinthians.
This is Paul as his finest, with soaring rhetoric and sublime theology. “So, if anyone is in Christ, there is a new
creation; everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to
himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that
is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their
trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us” (2
Cor. 5:17-19).
Now we can dissect this
text, isolating all the theological claims, the beliefs of the church: new creation, reconciliation, ministry. We can go deeper and say something about
God’s relationship with Christ, Christ’s relationship with God, something about
the doctrine of atonement, how God dealt with sin. Implied here, too, is Paul’s understanding of
the cross, salvation, resurrection. All
of this (and more!) is going on in 5:16-21.
We can “mine” these verses for their theological claims, come up with a
list of what one might believe about the faith.
But all of this misses the point.
It misses what’s behind these
claims, what’s behind the text, which is Paul’s own life-experience, what he
came to know through his own encounter with the Risen Christ. And this encounter didn’t happen once but
again and again, it was ongoing. Hear again
verse 21, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him
we might become the righteousness of God.”
Did you hear that? “…that in him we might become the righteousness
of God.” And now listen again to 6:1,
“As we work together with him, we urge you also not to accept the grace of God
in vain.” Did you hear that? “...As we work together with him, we urge you …not to accept the
grace of God in vain.” And then Paul continues to talk about the nature of his
ministry, a ministry, a life that flows from an experience of God’s grace, not
from trust in ideas or beliefs. The
ministry does not consist of defending ideas or beliefs, but a ministry urged
on by the love of Christ. It’s a life, a
ministry that is, right now, participating
in the presence of the Risen Christ. Participating in Christ enabled Paul, led Paul
to encounter, to undergo “great endurance, in afflictions, hardships,
calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger:
by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love,
truthful speech, and the power of God” (2 Cor. 6:4-7). And I should note that “knowledge” here is not
“theoretical understanding of theological propositions” but a deep, personal
awareness of what Paul is being called to do.[1]
The Reformed tradition
has never been comfortable with personal experience. We prefer our rational,
theological systems; we prefer to think our way to faith. We are a people of creeds and confessions. Don’t get me wrong: there’s a place for all
of these. So please don’t call out the Church Heresy Police on me. But if beliefs hinder us from actually
experiencing the grace we says, as Protestants, actually saves, then something
is missing, something is terribly, seriously wrong. Even Calvin, known for his methodical,
systematic thinking, developed as his personal symbol the image of an upturned
hand, an open palm holding a heart with a flame above it: a heart set on fire
offered up to God, “Promptly and Sincerely.”[2] Even Calvin, Mr. Cerebral Theologian that he
was, knew that unless the gospel is inwardly digested, made real in hearts, as
well as minds, then the gospel is distant from us and far away. It needs to penetrate the psyche, become part
of who we are, shape how we see the world; it needs to be embodied in our
lives. Without this our theological
beliefs are just crafty cerebrations that do little to transform our lives. And
if our lives aren’t transformed, if we ourselves aren’t reforming and always
being reformed by the Spirit of God, then how on earth can we be expected to
help reform the world?
That’s why these days
I’m reading less theology and more psychology, specifically the work of the
Swiss psychiatrist Carl G. Jung (1875-1961). He has a lot to offer the
contemporary Church; he has a lot to say about how we view Christian
experience. Jung was truly one of the
seminal geniuses of the twentieth century. The reason why I think he has a lot
to teach us is because he himself was a child of the manse. His father was a Reformed pastor. Carl came
from a long line of Reformed pastors and professors. Carl learned the catechism from his father;
he read widely from his father’s library, he was confirmed in the church. But
when he first joined the church, when he first partook of Communion, it was a
lifeless experience, both for him and seemingly everyone else sitting around
him. Jung knew that his father lost the
zeal of his faith. His father knew the
creeds, knew the beliefs of the church, regurgitated them in sermons week after
week, but they didn’t touch the depths of his soul. Carl, himself, had profound
religious experiences as a child. He
always had a fire in his belly for the divine.
Jung eventually collaborated with Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) in the
emerging field of psychoanalysis, but in the end it was the question of
religion, the experience of the holy, the numinous, that led to their break. Freud wanted nothing to do with religion (he
saw it as a source of neurosis); for Jung, the psyche was and is essentially
religious.[3]
The last thirty years of
Jung’s life were spent exploring the psychological aspects of Christianity. And he was very critical of theologians. Jung knew then, in the 1930s, that the church
was in trouble; he knew that Christianity was in trouble. So he approached Christianity as if it were a
patient in need of therapy, in need of healing.[4] He wanted to help heal
the church, heal Christianity, because he saw it as the best hope for humanity. And he wanted to help heal the Protestant
soul, which he knew was sick in Europe, especially after the Second World War. The Protestant soul is still in need of deep
healing.
In a famous interview
with the BBC in 1959, Jung was asked, “Dr. Jung, do you believe in God.” After pausing for a moment, he said, “I don’t
believe. I know.”[5] I know—knowledge
rooted in experience. Jung said, “The
Churches stand for traditional and collective convictions which in the case of
many of its adherents are no longer based on their own inner experience but on unreflecting belief, which is
notoriously apt to disappear as soon as one begins thinking about it.”[6] This is why Jung insisted that “Christian
civilization has proved hollow to a terrifying degree: it is all veneer, but
the inner man has remained untouched and therefore unchanged. His soul is out of key with his external
beliefs;….”[7] The strongest indictment of Christianity was
the fact that so-called “Christian” Europe tore itself apart, and the world
with it, in not one but two cataclysmic world wars. “Christian education has
done all that is humanly possible,” Jung wrote, “but it has not been
enough. Too few people have experienced
the divine image as the innermost possession of their own souls. Christ only meets them from without, never
from within the soul.”[8]
Jung wrote, “The
advocates of Christianity squander their energies in the mere preservation of
what has come down to them, with no thought of building on their house and
making it roomier.”[9] Jung is right. The church of Jesus Christ is
not a museum, preserving the past. We’re
called to reform, reformed by the Spirit who is calling us to a new day. We need to become roomier, to build new homes
for the human spirit to thrive in. We’re
not called to preserve the past or live in the past. Christ is alive. Christ is
at work within us, now.
It’s in the soul, in the heart, in the core of our being
where the reformation of God’s love and grace must be experienced in radically
new ways, in order for it to be seen in the world, in order for the world to be
reformed all for the glory of God. “In Christ there is a new creation: everything
old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” Reformed and always being reformed. When we experience the ongoing reformation of
God’s grace—not just believe in it, but know
it, feel it, experience it—then the Church will really have something profound
and meaningful and relevant to offer the world again. May it be so. Amen.
[1] Ernest Best, Second Corinthians-Interpretation: A Bible
Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1987), 61.
[2] Calvin’s personal motto
was: “I offer my heart to thee O Lord, promptly and sincerely.” (Cor Meum Tibi Offero Domine Prompte Et Sincere).
[3] See Carl G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Aniela Jaffé, editor (New York: Vintage
Books, 2011).
[4] See Murray Stein, Jung’s Treatment of Christianity: The
Psychotherapy of a Religious Tradition (Chiron Publications, 1986).
[6] C. G. Jung, “The
Undiscovered Self (Present and Future),” CW
10, cited in Anthony Storr, ed., The
Essential Jung: Selected Writings
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 366.
[7] C. G. Jung,
“Introduction to the Religious and Psychological Problems of Alchemy,” Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12, cited in Storr, 261.
[8] C. G. Jung, cited in Storr, 261.
[9] C. G. Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of
the Self, CW 9, II, par. 170
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 109.
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