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"U"
Stands for Unconditional Election Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis July 27, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Genesis 1:26-31 "According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: having predestined us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will to the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath named us accepted in the beloved." "What comfort," asks the Heidelberg Catechism, "does the return of Christ 'to judge the living and the dead' give you?" Answer: "That in all affliction and persecution I may await with head held high the very Judge from heaven who has already submitted himself to the judgment of God for me and has removed all the curse from me; that he will cast all his enemies and mine into everlasting condemnation, but he shall take me, together with all his elect, to himself into heavenly joy and glory." Somehow, I do not find myself comforted by those words. Nevertheless, we turn--in our T.U.L.I.P. series--to the doctrine of unconditional election or, as it is more often called, the doctrine of predestination, asking the question that prompted the doctrine: who shall be saved? We read that "The old theologians used to end their work with the doctrines of eternal blessedness and eternal damnation, and in this context to ask how the blessed feel when they think of the damned. The answer was that the thought does not trouble them; on the contrary, when they look at the damned they rejoice that God's honor is so great." Throughout the history of Christian thought and especially within our own Reformed tradition, there has been the claim, well supported by much in scripture, that salvation is intended only for some…that Christian salvation and thus the Christian faith is essentially and finally an exclusive affair. "We shall never be clearly persuaded, as we ought to be," wrote John Calvin in his Institutes on the subject of predestination, "that our salvation flows from the wellspring of God's free mercy until we come to know his eternal election, which illumines God's grace by this contrast: that God does not indiscriminately adopt all into the hope of salvation but gives to some what God denies to others." If you should go on from there to read Calvin's argument from scripture for what he himself calls a "somewhat difficult" doctrine, you would be shamed by even the most minor question put to God's greater purposes in electing some…or to God's incredible mercy in saving a few…or to God's eternal wisdom in condemning the many to eternal darkness. Christ was born for this? Apparently so! Yet at the heart of this difficult doctrine is the positive proclamation that our lives and our deaths are in God's hand; that we are loved of God not by our own merit but by God's gracious initiative toward us; that we need not spend our lives in good works in order to be saved but only in response to being loved. Still there is this menacing little caveat: if we are among the chosen of God. Who shall be saved? "One of my ancestors was a ship's captain," begins Prior, a character living with AIDS in the play "Angels in America." "[He] made money bringing whale oil to Europe and returning with immigrants--Irish mostly, packed in tight, so many dollars per head. The last ship he captained foundered off the coast of Nova Scotia in a winter tempest and sank to the bottom. He went down with the ship--la Grande Geste--but his crew took seventy women and kids in the ship's only longboat, this big, open rowboat, and when the weather got too rough, and they thought the boat was overcrowded, the crew started lifting people up and hurling them into the sea. Until they got the ballast right. They walked up and down the longboat, eyes to the waterline, and when the boat rode low in the water they'd grab the nearest passengers and throw them into the sea. The boat was leaky, see; seventy people; they arrived in Halifax with nine people on board." "Jesus," replies Prior's Jewish lover. " I think about that story a lot now," continues Prior from his sickbed. "People in a boat, waiting, terrified, while implacable, unsmiling men, irresistibly strong, seize…maybe the person next to you, maybe you, and with no warning at all, with time only for a quick intake of air you are pitched into freezing, turbulent water and salt and darkness to drown." How, ask the old theologians, do the blessed feel when they think of the damned? Do the survivors feel when they think of the drowned? Do the living feel when they think of the dying? The thought does not trouble them, the old theologians say. I think about this doctrine a lot now. I think about this doctrine in a time when the church appears to be a leaky boat in the hands of implacable, unsmiling Christians who are determined to get the ballast right. I think about this doctrine and this story and this country in a confusing admixture of theology and nationalism, watching the most vulnerable waiting, terrified, turned away by implacable, unsmiling men working furiously to get the ballast right in this nation. Who shall be saved? The question posed by the doctrine of unconditional election-a question that has ecclesial and social implications--is whether the hope set before us in the gospel is essentially exclusive? Or whether the hope in which we live and on which we stand is a hope purposed for all creation? Though perhaps the question is posed more graphically in the metaphor for the morning: Does getting the ballast right when it comes to the proclamation of the gospel, when it comes to being the church, when it comes to being a nation under God, involve pitching people out? Or is the ballast of this vessel of faith called Christian existence and this vessel of state called America right only when all are on board? Who shall be saved? Scripture, as we have seen, can easily be read to reveal an exclusive hope. From God's scandalous election of the Israelites, to the more apocalyptic sayings of Jesus concerning the Day of Judgment, to the visions of the elder John in Revelation, much has been averred theologically concerning God's purposeful selectivity on that great gettin' up morning. Calvin counsels that we should accept such revelation as a mystery not meant to make present sense. "Human curiosity," he says, "renders the discussion of predestination...very confusing and even dangerous...If allowed it will leave no secret to God that it will not search out and unravel...[Hence] if anyone with carefree assurance breaks into this place, he will not succeed in satisfying his curiosity and he will enter a labyrinth from which he can find no exit." If such theological wonderings were left to the mystery of God, perhaps we could take unconditional election (read: predestination, eternal blessedness and eternal damnation) as idle information about the Almighty and not much more. But church doctrine has a way--as it should if it has hold of the truth--of ordering, of shaping, of affecting the Christian life. Calvin's caution holds within it the fact that not only human curiosity but human arrogance and its underside, human insecurity, cannot help but take into human hands the implied judgment of God toward those who do not seem to exhibit right belief or right behavior. And by secular extension, national insecurity cannot help but pitch overboard any who would compromise the dream we now so tenuously and exclusively possess within these borders and assorted boardrooms. Who shall be saved? Old theologians notwithstanding, there is another reading of the biblical witness which, if it errs--as it more readily will admit it does, errs on the side of grace and from the deck of a lifeboat whose ballast is miraculously maintained--no matter the accumulated weight and woes of its passengers--by One whose placability knows no end. It is a reading of the biblical witness which understands the election of Israel as an election for the sake of the whole world; it is a reading which takes the election of the likes of you and me in Jesus Christ as an election for the sake of all people; it is a reading which hopes in the promise that they, apart from us, will not be made perfect. Says the most prominent spokesperson for such a reading of the biblical witness in our time and in direct response to the 52nd question and answer of the Heidelberg Catechism, "It would be better to restrain ourselves here (where the blessed are not troubled by the damned) and not sing with Dante the song of paradise, much less the more famous song of hell. If we want to understand condemnation correctly, we must hold fast the fact that all [people] are [God's] enemies--but that we all go to meet the Judge who gave himself for us [all]. It is true that he is the Judge; there can be no doctrine of universal salvation. Nevertheless, he is the Judge whom we may know. Would it not be better in the time of grace in which we still live to proclaim to all people this good news...to confess and bear witness that Christ died for all...and that Christ suffered also for them. Then the contrast between the elect (us) and the damned (them) can continue to concern us only humorously. For the elect who awaits his Judge with head held high, there can be no alternative but to proclaim this Judge to those who do not yet know him and thus to remain in solidarity with all [people]. But this means," concludes Karl Barth, "that all pictures of judgment day are wrong. They are profoundly unchristian pictures" and as such, unbiblical! Perhaps, then, it should come as no surprise on a secular New York stage and in a play about the very people many have considered damned, that the final scene and so vision is a more profoundly Christian picture of judgment day than we find in the 52nd question of the Heidelberg Catechism. Prior, the one whose ancestor was a ship's captain, now has been living with AIDS for five years. He is standing at his favorite place in New York City and in the whole universe: the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park. "This angel," says Prior. "She's my favorite angel...This is the angel of Bethesda. Louis will tell you her story." Louis, Prior's former Jewish lover, begins, "Oh. Um, well, she was this angel, she landed in the Temple Square in Jerusalem, in the days of the Second Temple, right in the middle of a working day she descended and just her foot touched the earth. And where it did, a fountain shot up from the ground. When the Romans destroyed the Temple, the fountain of Bethesda ran dry." "And Belize," interrupts Prior pointing to his gay black friend, "will tell you about the nature of the fountain before its flowing stopped." "If anyone who was suffering," says Belize who has seen his share, "in the body or spirit, walked through the waters of the fountain of Bethesda, they would be healed, washed clean of pain." "When the Millennium comes," breaks in Hannah, a matronly white Mormon mother who has cared for these three, "…the fountain of Bethesda will flow again. And I told Prior I would personally take him there to bathe. We will all bathe ourselves clean." What comfort does the return of Christ 'to judge the living and the dead' give you? Simply this: That he comes to judge us all and save us all. In the meantime, the least we can do is do our best to keep all of God's children afloat and together in the church and in the world for Christ's sake! Amen. |