May 24

May 24, 2009
Kirkin’ of the Tartans

The Man Behind Scotland’s Reformation –
Or, The Danger of Staying with a French Lawyer
a sermon on Ephesians 2.1-10
by David C. Mauldin
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Mobile, Alabama

The one person outside the British Isles who most influenced Scotland and the legacy Scotland has given to us was a French lawyer who never once set foot in Scotland. Although he was by training a lawyer and a classical scholar, his life’s work and his influence were in the area of religion. The Presbyterian Church, as well as the United States Constitution, exists because of his teachings. And this year is the 500th anniversary of his birth. I speak, of course, of John Calvin—the much beloved and much vilified father of Presbyterianism and the Reformation in Scotland.

Before I explain how he came to have such a large influence in Scotland, let me tell you a little about the man himself. Calvin was an accidental church reformer. He never set out to change the world. He wanted to be a scholar. As a young man in Catholic France in the early 16th century, he came to Protestant convictions. Those were intolerant times, and Christians of different stripes had not learned to live together as we have today. Persecution forced young Calvin to become a refugee. While traveling through the city of Geneva, just passing through, he caught the attention of a reformer working in that city who persuaded him to stay and help in the work. Thus Calvin’s career as a pastor and reformer began.

The city of Geneva was run by a town council elected by the citizens. It is a common myth that Calvin was a dictator and Geneva his little theocracy. The truth is, Calvin did not even have the right to vote until late in his life. He had the status of a resident alien, and he worked under the authority of the council. Often they did not go along with his recommendations. In fact, they fired him after just two years; and he went to Strasbourg. He spent the three happiest years of his life there, pasturing a church, getting married, and having a child. (He later lost both his wife and child to death.) Geneva needed him, however, and the council finally got him to agree to return. Once back, his agenda to reform the church still faced significant opposition for the next 17 years. Only in 1555 did town politics allow him to do things the way he really wanted.

This timing is important for Scotland. Calvin was not the only refugee to seek safety in Geneva. Under his leadership, it became a popular haven for persecuted Protestants, most of them from France, but many from England and Scotland.

I’ll trust you know how Henry VIII broke from Rome because he wanted a divorce and founded the Church of England. It quickly took a Protestant direction, especially after Henry’s death when his young son Edward ruled. Because of his age, England was run by a tight-knit group of Protestants. But in 1553, young Edward died, and his half sister Mary Tudor got the crown. Mary was Catholic, and her persecution of Protestants earned her the nickname “Bloody Mary.” Meanwhile in Scotland, Mary I, Queen of Scots, had been ruling for a decade. She too was Catholic. What had happened was, Scots of Protestant conviction had fled south to the safety of England. John Knox was one of them. Suddenly England wasn’t safe anymore. Where could they go? The answer for many, including Knox, was Calvin’s Geneva. Thus they came under the influence of Calvin, and they were delighted by what they found.

When the first of the Marian exiles reached Geneva, Calvin had been pushing his vision for 12 years. As I said, he faced opposition, and he didn’t always get his way. For example, Calvin thought the Lord’s Supper should be celebrated every Sunday. The council said no. We Presbyterians still do not celebrate the Lord’s Supper weekly. Nevertheless, the church in Geneva had been formed largely along the lines laid down by Calvin. Knox and his fellow refugees studied it firsthand, and when they returned to Scotland to establish the Reformation there, it was the pattern they used. This was the beginning of the Presbyterian Church.

Let me tell you what I admire in Calvin. He had a heart for God. His personal seal, which he designed, featured a hand holding out a heart aflame with the words, “My heart I give you, O Lord, freely and fully.” Calvin was not right about everything. He was a bit cranky toward the end of his life because of health problems. It is hard to be pleasant when you have lots of aches and pains. People think he was too serious, too tightly wound, and hated fun; but that’s not true. If some of his later followers became that way, they were not imitating him. He was brilliant but humble. He almost never spoke of himself in his sermons or writings. He was buried in an unmarked grave on his own instructions. Above all, his humility comes out in how he read scripture. He always tried to let scripture say what it wanted to say, whether what it said pleased him or not. His attitude stands in sharp contrast to many today who pick and choose religious ideas like food at a buffet. They pay attention to the Bible when it says what they want to hear and dismiss it when it doesn’t. Anyway, Calvin is not what I would call a hero to me, but I do admire him. I think he would prefer it that way.

Now I want to narrow our focus to two ways Calvin shaped our lives and our world. His influence extends beyond Scotland and even the United States. The nation today with the most Presbyterians is South Korea. Among the truths Calvin helped us to see are these: the dignity of work and the centrality of grace.

First, the dignity of work. Before Calvin, work—as in manual labor—was despised. It wasn’t just that people would rather goof off than work. That’s always been a popular attitude and always will be. Rather, people then thought that work robbed a person of dignity. Manual labor was beneath the dignity of truly worthy persons—or so they thought. No self respecting person with money would degrade himself by taking up an occupation. Of course, only a tiny minority could afford a life of leisure. Most people had to work. That was their misfortune and shame.

Calvin thought otherwise. He saw work as not only something good for society but also a blessing from God for the laborer. Calvin began with the Christian idea of a calling from God. God not only calls certain people to be pastors, elders, or deacons in the church. God also calls people to be teachers, merchants, tradesmen—almost anything. Any work that is honest and moral can be a calling from God. By working, the worker blesses the community and honors God.

This was a radical idea. The carpenter at his workbench and the dairy maid at her milking could see their work as a way to honor God—almost a kind of worship. Honest work done for God and for his glory pleases God, and we are blessed in doing it—even if it is something we might prefer not to do.

Scottish refugees would have seen and experienced the results of Calvin’s teaching about work. Many aristocrats fled to Geneva. They had never worked a day in their lives. In Geneva they were obliged to work, if they were physically able. One French aristocrat was shocked when he visited Geneva and found a former nobleman he knew who had become a button maker. A button maker!? How could someone accustomed to leisure and being served take up such a humble trade? In Geneva, that was a step up, for a productive occupation pleases God more than the casual life of a noble.

Our concern with this truth is living for God. Calvin realized that all of life is holy. It is not just the time you spend in worship but also the time you spend at work and in your leisure that belongs to God. As our scripture reading says, “We are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.” Calvin’s vision has a dangerous flaw, however, that we must avoid. It is vulnerable to secularization. When all of life is holy, the difference between what is holy and what is not disappears. But then it is very easy for us to slip into thinking nothing is holy. If we forget God, we lose the sense that anything is holy. This is why we need to worship and we need special times and places devoted specifically to God. They remind us that all of life is holy.

The second important truth Calvin helps us understand is the centrality of God’s grace. In a nutshell: Calvin believed that every human is so broken that our only hope is the grace of God. One reaction to this is anger: “What?! Me? Broken? Nonsense! I’m a wonderful person.” If this is your attitude, you can think about something else for the rest of the sermon, for you are not ready to hear Good News. When Jesus encountered a self-satisfied attitude, his first response was to tear it down. Most of us are too honest for that attitude, though. We are reflective enough to perceive something dark in our hearts, a stubborn selfish streak. We are not the people we know we ought to be.

For us, the necessity of grace is uplifting and hopeful. If we are broken, God can fix us. If we have sinned, he can forgive us. If, however, we are supposed to be the way we are, and we can never be anything more—well to me that’s the really depressing way to look at life. We should be hopeful, like Calvin. He knew there was absolutely nothing he could do to earn God’s favor. He could never put God in his debt, so that God would feel obligated to give him eternal life. Rather, everything comes by grace. God gives it to us as a gift—free of charge to us, although it cost God the cross. God gives us this grace because he loves us. Even our faith is not something we do that makes us worthy to receive eternal life. Faith is nothing more than the empty hand that accepts God’s gift, and even faith itself is a gift from God.

One legacy of Calvin’s emphasis on grace that we live with every day is the Constitution of the United States. Our government is a representative democracy with a system of checks and balances. Where did the Founding Fathers get such an idea? From the Presbyterian Church. Calvin faced a problem when he organized the church in Geneva. How to keep power from being misused? Calvin believed that the holiest saint among us is nothing more or less than a sinner saved by grace. He also believed that although there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ, our old sinful nature never completely dies until we do. At the resurrection, God will perfect us. Until then, we remain prone to sin. If this is so, then putting a lot of power into one person’s hands is risky, for even the godliest among us is not above temptation. Calvin’s answer came from the Bible. He read how Moses had appointed elders over the people of Israel and how Paul had appointed elders in the churches he started. Calvin concluded the best approach was a church ruled by pastors and lay elders, with a separation of powers which required them to work together.

When Reformers tried this out in Scotland, they found Scotland was so much bigger geographically than Geneva that the system had to be adapted. They invented the presbytery, a group of churches close together that are mutually accountable to one another. The Founding Fathers of the United States found these principles true and practical. No wonder King George III called the Revolution “that Presbyterian rebellion.”

That is just one way that Calvin’s legacy lives on and touches our lives. Our main concern today is far more personal than that. Our main concern is not really with Calvin or history or government or even our heritage. The real needs we all bring to God’s Word this morning are our own brokenness and need for hope. Calvin didn’t invent his teaching about grace. He simply repeated what he found in the Bible.

Our scripture reading compares our life before Christ to death. “You were dead through trespasses and sins.” What can a dead person do to be alive again? Nothing. Resurrection is an act of God. Hence the importance of grace. Apart from grace, we are so lost that we do not even know we are lost. We are so separated from God that although we feel a hunger for him in our souls, we do not know who or what we are hungry for—so we try to satisfy our longing in various ways, none of which lasts for long. Are we made to go on searching forever? Is life a series of desperate attempts to find meaning and fulfillment, all of which are destined to fail?

No. God made us for himself, and he wants us to know and enjoy him. This is why, rich in mercy and with great love, God sent us a Savior. Jesus did for us what we could not do for ourselves. Through him, God raises us to new life. God promises to show us the immeasurable riches of his grace in the ages to come. That’s not an attempt to be elegant or poetic. It is Paul’s best effort to find words to describe something we are incapable of imagining. You cannot, in your wildest dreams, conceive of the beauty and wonder God has in store for his children. The human mind is inadequate. Even a tiny glimpse of it would be too much, like trying to run the latest, graphics-intense video game on one of those old computers that came out in the mid 1980s.

Yet God has given us clues. The same God who created us and invented the glory of the cosmos … the wonder of nature … and music … and love (romantic love, the love of a parent for a child, the love among friends)—this God, the only true and living God, has promised us eternal life better than anything we can imagine.

And what do we have to do to receive this happy destiny? Nothing. Christ did all that was necessary. All we need is him. When you have him, you have all the good things he gives. Without him, they are impossible, because he himself is the heart of the new life. The life we were created to enjoy turns out to be life in him. We do nothing to enter this life. “By grace you have been saved, through faith. It—salvation—is the gift of God.”

By baptism and faith, a person is united with Christ. Once you begin the new life, God starts a rebuilding job. It will last throughout your whole life. You can be sure he will not stop until you are everything he created you to be—and that is something so beautiful you cannot imagine it now. All of this is grace—from first to last. God raises us from spiritual death to a new way of life, then from physical death to eternal life. All because he loves us.

We should be thankful, not only that our ancestors came under the influence of one who taught the truth of God’s grace with such conviction, but also that we ourselves have heard the Good News. God’s promises are timeless. They are for us … and for our children … and for our children’s children, until the end of time. Therefore, let us rejoice and give thanks … and honor God who loved us with such overwhelming love. Amen.

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