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"I" Stands for
Irresistible Grace Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis August 17, 2003, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Exodus 33:12-23
So we come to the fourth in our series on the disputed Calvinist doctrines: "I" stand for irresistible grace. A colleague of mine often said that his favorite heresy was the belief that, when we die and find ourselves before the throne of grace, no matter the atheism or agnosticism by which we have denied our belief in God's reality between birth and death, in spite of our lives lived running from the God who has called us by name, God's grace and love will be irresistible and we will be saved. In other words, when the fullness of God's grace is revealed face to face, when we behold the One who has loved us with a love we neither earned nor deserve, we will be irresistibly drawn--joyfully, freely--into the loving embrace of the God who has been with us and for us from the beginning. To my mind, my colleague's heresy was one way of understanding the "I" of T.U.L.I.P.: God's grace is irresistible, right? Not on your life! For you see, the human questions addressed in each of these Calvinist doctrines narrow to one burning question: exactly who is in and who is out, eternally, when it comes to God's love, grace and favor? Total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace and the perseverance of the saints all mean to draw a line in the sand of human salvation. On one side of the line stand the elect, and on the other fall the reprobate [read: the depraved, the corrupt, the rejected of God.] Suddenly the doctrine of irresistible grace sounds neither irresistible nor graceful as regards most of the human race! The orthodox Calvinist take on this doctrine tells us that God offers to all people the news of God's saving work in Jesus Christ-the external call of God is available to all in the gospel. But in addition, God extends an internal call to the elect, a call that the elect cannot resist. That internal call alone is the irresistible grace [the saving grace] to which this doctrine, in all of its Calvinist severity, refers. As for those not elected, those rejected of God, they will forever resist God's grace, all the way to their eternal damnation, where they will dwell forever in God's absence. A lot follows from this doctrine. For one, the doctrine dictates a particular kind of ecclesiology, a specific understanding of the nature of the church. Not only are these believers a bit obsessed with figuring out who belongs in the society of the elect, but throughout the history of the church, the consciously elect have felt the need to stick together, separating themselves from the madding crowd of God's rejected lest the church's witness to truth and goodness be sullied. In the words of Richard Mouw, President of Fuller Seminary and one of the more moderate spokespersons for the conservative Calvinist camp, "When we downplay the reality of a deep dividing line between two actual groups of people, the believing community and the rest of humankind, we run the risk of…[weakening] our sense of allegiance to a people called together to stand against the seductions of this present age." Though because Mouw is in the moderate camp, he goes on to struggle with the question that has dogged "compassionate conservative" Calvinists from the beginning: what are we to make of those who, obviously rejected of God, nevertheless show forth the light of God's grace during their doomed existence on earth? This question has to do not so much with one's understanding of the church, but with one's theology of culture. To do business with this question, in 1924, Dutch Calvinists affirmed, alongside the doctrine of irresistible [saving] grace, a doctrine of common grace. Common grace, they confessed, though not without controversy, was a kind of non-saving "attitude of divine favor toward all human beings, manifested in three ways: (1) the bestowal of natural gifts, such as rain and sunshine, upon creatures in general [bad things happening to good people and good things happening to bad people], (2) the restraining of sin in human affairs, so that the unredeemed do not produce all of the evil that their depraved natures might otherwise bring about [the Nazis, after all, were good parents], and (3) the ability of unbelievers to perform acts of civic good [Benjamin Franklin had a lot to offer in spite of his obvious depravity]." What should be the response of the elect to the common grace found in the general culture of unbelieving, unsaved reprobates? Well, there are options. First, the believer can simply trust that God is using the reprobate as "means to God's goal of bringing human beings to their foreordained destinies." Thumbs up or thumbs down, either way, even the reprobate plays a role in fulfilling God's saving purposes for the elect, God's creation of the world being, of course, all about the elect. Second, the believer can take the approach that when "an unbelieving poet makes use of an apt metaphor, or when a foul-mouthed major league outfielder leaps high in the air to make a stunning catch" [Mouw's examples], "God [and so the believer] can enjoy the event without necessarily approving of anything in the agents involved": a sort of variation on the theme of loving the sinner, hating the sin. Third, the believer may have empathy for the unbeliever. In a stunning example, Mouw tells of the rape of a Muslim woman during the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. As the soldiers are finishing with her, the woman's baby begins to cry. She pleads that they spare her so she might nurse the child. One of the soldiers grabs the baby, cuts the child's head off and places it on her breast. "Let us assume," says Mouw, "that this woman was not one of God's elect…[Is this where a doctrine of saving grace takes us?]…Does the heart of God also break," he asks, "when something like this happens? Is the eternal destiny of the people involved the only thing that influences God's assessment when [God] views such an incident?" Mouw's conclusion is that God places in us the feeling of empathy-even for the reprobate-so we may have empathy for the fallen world around us. In the end, seeing human existence through the lens of saving grace and common grace, even if the focus is softened by the caveat that "much of what we now think of as common grace may [finally] be revealed to be saving grace," leaves me fearful about what this growing theological perspective portends for the church and the world. To wit, how blithely the connection is being made between God's rejection of the reprobate and the elect's own attempted ejection-from the church or social privilege or human dignity-of those who do not mirror their better selves. How easily the alliance has been sealed between the theology and the politics of a saved elite. And then how imperceptibly the substance of our Reformed theological tradition has escaped our mainline Protestant minds, making of us casual believers who thought Christian "values" and a vague sense of God's existence were a sufficient inheritance for our children and our children's children. So it is that Paul's words to the Corinthians have taken on an urgency for me as I watch the divisions among Episcopalians play out and anticipate our own. Our text for the morning is a text that partakes more of the heresy with which we began than the hard doctrine developed by the confidently elect. "Now I would remind you," writes Paul to the divided Corinthians, "of the good news that I proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand." It is the testimony of apostle who was given God's grace for the sake of those whom the religious authorities deemed to be rejected by God, and who were now rejecting one another. The apostle Paul himself had been there and done that. Yet now he identifies himself to these warring Christians as "one untimely born, the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle." Not with the swagger of the elect, but with the shame of a sinner, Paul would turn us irresistibly toward God's grace. "First," he writes, "I handed on to you…" Paul knew himself first as a steward of God's grace, and if a steward, then not a possessor. Those called by God to proclaim God's grace, he said, are given grace not for themselves, but for another: hence the press to proclaim. "Oh miracle," exclaims George Bernanos' country priest, "thus to be able to give what we ourselves do not possess-sweet miracle of our empty hands!…Lord, I was stripped bare of all thing as you alone can strip us bear, whose fearful care nothing escapes nor your terrible love!" Then in the second place Paul writes, "By the grace of God, I am what I am." Paul knew that the gift of the vocation that sent him into the world to proclaim God's grace was God's grace to him…is God's grace still to those who are, by definition, unfit for the office. Before the intractability of this good but fallen creation, we find ourselves stammering for a word that is not our own, bowed down because it is only on our knees that we are given the courage to stand, grateful in some perverse way to have been thus needed, and yet deeply aware that it was not our self that was needed, but God and the assurance of God's unmerited grace and favor in Jesus Christ, an assurance we can barely believe for ourselves, though for another we are sure it is true! Perhaps that is why, as Paul acknowledges himself to be the least of the apostles and unfit to be called an apostle, we begin to suspect that it is nothing other than God's grace creating in us this sense of unfitness which will not let us go. For unless we are never far from the moment when we most need God's love and do not know where to turn, unless there is yet something in us that prefaces even the hint of God's grace by our own unworthiness, unless we struggle sometimes into the night with the suspicion that finally we have strayed too far to be found by the One who searches for us all, then we will never begin to catch the urgency of this Word of grace we are given to proclaim, in its breadth and length and height and depth, to every last and least one of God's children. My friends, the coincidence of those sent into the world to proclaim God's grace and those who stand in greatest need of God's grace is, I am sure, no coincidence at all, but it is God's terrible and tender mercy come together in all who are the very least of the saints, in you and in me. Thanks be to God for the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ given to me for you. |