1. What does it mean to be Reformed? Especially now, many hundreds of years after the Reformation, how much of it is still alive and important for our real lives as Christians? Of what personal relevance are those old theological theories and arguments? Or, as Question 59 of the Heidelberg Catechism asks, “But how does it help you now that you believe all this?” Today I want to focus our thoughts and imaginations on some of the ideas that were all but lost when Luther, Calvin and company rediscovered them, because these are, in the nature of things, always at risk of being forgotten again, and because they are, I am convinced, of great help to us. In fact, it seems to me that without the crucial insights of the Reformation all we’re left with are some bits and pieces of the Christian religion, not a faith in the living God.
2. Think first about the way the Reformers described the human condition, about their rediscovery of the awful depth and insidious power of sin. People always assume they know what sin is. Even people who aren’t Christians, or religious in any way, think they know all about sin. Sin is what you’ll have to quit doing in order to get right with God. God wants us to do certain things that we don’t want to do, and he wants us not to do certain things that we want to do. Someone says: “I’m not ready to become a Christian yet. I’m not ready to stop cheating on exams, gossiping about my roommate; I’m not ready to give up my shady business practices, sex, drugs, and rock and roll” or whatever. Sin, people think, is what you repent of to make things right between you and God. According to this point of view, the human problem, the problem of sin, is that we want to be bad. As though this is how the Fall took place: Adam -- this is before fig leaves came into fashion -- sees Eve and says “I want to be bad! Let’s do evil! Let’s go wild!” But of course this is wrong. The real problem of the human race, our fallenness, is what the Word of God says it is. Adam and Eve wanted to be good, they wanted to be like God, discerning and deciding between good and evil. The reality of sin is this desire we have to be good, because it is always, everywhere and in everyone a desire to have our own goodness, not to depend on God for our goodness. We are sinners because rather than trusting God to know us and to declare us his good creatures, we want to justify ourselves. We chose not to rely on God to know and do what is good, especially good for us, but to take this upon ourselves, killing God in our hearts and taking his place.
Human beings want reality to accord with their illusions about their power and goodness, so we tell ourselves that it does. Think how very rare it is for someone to say “Yes I did that because I wanted to do something bad.” People almost never admit that what they are doing is evil; people have to tell some story that makes them seem o.k. in their own eyes. We are hopelessly self-justifying creatures. “I’m not hurting other people, I’m just standing up for myself!” “I’m not fighting for slavery, I’m fighting for my property rights!” Even the psychopath who climbs up in the tower and shoots dozens of innocent people feels that he is in the right, that the ‘system’ has done him wrong and that ‘they’ have it coming. When people do what’s wrong they tell themselves what they’re doing is right. Ever since the day Adam tried to pin the blame on Eve, and she blamed the snake, we have been endlessly evasive, experts at ignoring reality in favor of a self-deception that makes us feel in the right.
Rather than facing the truth about ourselves and our desire to be like gods, knowing good and evil, we trivialize sin, inventing rules for good people like us to follow and bad people like them to break. We create the illusion that sin is the desire to do bad things, have bad attitudes, and think bad thoughts, evading the awful reality and depth of human sin, which lives precisely in our passion to be right and righteous. Obviously enough, humans do do bad and even terrible things, but these actions are ultimately the symptoms of our underlying desperate condition. It is in our good works that we are most Godless. Sin is at its strongest and most treacherous precisely where we feel most sure of being right. The Reformation brought to light the intensity of the rebellion of the human heart that years of moralizing religious tradition had hidden from sight. The news about us is much worse than we feared.
3. But the good news that burst forth again in the Reformation was even better than we could have imagined. The good news is that Jesus Christ is not for those who want to be good, respectable people. He is for those of us who are sick and tired of trying to be good. He offers himself to us as we repent of our desire to be as God, knowing good and evil, as we reject our desire to be right, and in the right on our own. There are plenty of empty words about sin thrown around and about what to do about it. But there is exactly one solution to the problem of sin: trust God. The essence of sin is our distrust of God, our refusal to let him, rather than us, be God. So the cure for sin must be the opposite: trust God. Most of us one way or another feel and act as though there is some other solution, like stop sinning, or want to stop sinning, or try to stop, or want to try to stop, or try to want to try to stop doing whatever it is we’ve noticed as our bad behavior. This is a maze with no way out. This will make you crazy. These strategies are not ways to defeat the power of sin in our lives; they exemplify its power, manifesting the conviction that we must be able to do something to make ourselves right in God’s eyes.
But the good news, the gospel of Jesus Christ, is that even though there is absolutely nothing you can do to put yourself into God's good graces, nonetheless he accepts you as you are. There is no condition you can satisfy that will make you o.k. in his sight, but he accepts you unconditionally. The good news still echoing from the Reformation is that God loves you and accepts you no strings attached. He doesn't say: "Be good in this way and I'll give you what it takes to make me like you." He doesn't say: "Do the best you can with what you've got and I'll help you along the rest of the way." This would be a cruel tease for anyone, like you or me, who is really completely helpless!
Instead, God says, "even though you are not at all good I am going to count you as good. In fact, from now on I'm going to see the goodness, righteousness, and faithfulness of Jesus Christ when I look at you! From now on, you may see yourself as bad, weak, and worthless, but I'm declaring that a lie! The goodness of Jesus now counts as yours!" God has spoken, he has had his good word so now there is literally nothing we can do to make God like us any more, or any less, than he does right now!
When we are joined to Jesus by faith, God sees us in him: in God’s sight, we are covered with the innocence and perfect holiness of Jesus (Q. 36). As the Reformers were especially insistent to point out, our being justified in this way is not a reward for believing the right things, a prize for having faith. On the contrary, faith itself is a free gift from God, not a work of the mind and heart by which we earn his favor. One later Reformed theologian said: the point of the Reformed confession is not so much that we’re justified by faith and not by works, as it is that it is God and not us that brings about our justification.
How do we react to this? Of course, we say that's too good to be true! And what that means is we're not willing to trust God for our goodness; we think that can't be the way God is; there’s got to be a catch, something we have to do to satisfy him. People with big investments in being good, right and religious, not only outside Christianity but even within it, have always and will always try to reject and suppress this good news. "What would happen if people really started to believe this? What if people, especially the young people, who are bad enough anyway, hear that God loves them no matter what they do! You can bet they'll go wild and make a mess of their own lives and ours too!" Trusting God on this, trusting him for a righteousness imputed to us, rather than insisting on a righteousness that is there within us where we can keep an eye on it, is the hardest thing of all for fallen humans who want to be like gods, knowing and controlling our own righteousness, hell-bent on putting ourselves in the right. Sometimes we’re afraid that the grace of God will be cheap. But it’s worse than that: it’s free!
The Reformers' outrageous claims about God's outrageous grace don't stand alone. What becomes especially clear in the Reformed branches of the Christian family is that this gospel of unconditional grace is not spoken into a vacuum. We don't have to fear that human beings will go bananas if they find out God accepts them just as they are, and figure out that their rotten behavior will not separate them from the love of God. For the very same God who died for us, is the God who created us. Creation and Gospel are not separated or at odds. The same gracious God is at work for us in creation and on the cross. He made us for this very purpose: to live trusting him for our righteousness and for everything else. In hearing the gospel of his no strings attached acceptance of us we are trusting our Creator. It is, in the deepest sense, natural for us to respond in love and gratitude to the God who accepts us without condition. As the Reformers were fond of saying: the fruit of good works grows naturally out of the root of the gospel! There’s often not much point in telling ourselves and one another what we ought to be doing. Despite the great popularity of this it almost never works. But we are always in need of hearing God’s efficacious, transforming word about what he is doing for us.
When we confess the good news that God declares us good with the goodness of Jesus we cannot forget who is doing this declaring. God is not like us. Our tendency is to love and accept other people conditionally. We might care very much what they do and what they become; if they foul up badly enough, if they cause themselves and us enough pain and trouble we'll dump them, cutting off our love. Or maybe we do accept them just as they are, without conditions, but only because at bottom we really don't much care what they do, or what they make of themselves. Our love is either conditional or careless. We associate unconditional acceptance with not really caring what someone does.
This is not the way God is. The God who loves us absolutely unconditionally is the very same God who cares passionately what becomes of us. This is not the sentimental acceptance of an indulgent grandfather. The true God is a consuming fire who wills to heal us. He cares about us more than we care for ourselves and he will have his way in the end. The righteousness he has reckoned as ours will become fully ours; he will finally settle for no less. There is nothing mushy in his tender but tenacious love for us. This is no flaky religion of thinking nice thoughts and having plenty of self-esteem. God’s acceptance of us in Christ is no exercise in wishful thinking; it is the exacting promise of the reality he will bring to pass.
3. "But how does it help you now that you believe all this?" Empowered to trust God, we are saved from our religions of condemnation and control, we are rescued from the final despair of giving up on ourselves. We’re no longer caught in the trap of performance and achievement to prove our worth. Instead of the endless futile attempt to be, or to convince ourselves or at least everyone else, that we really do make it, that we’re good enough, we are now enabled to focus our attention on the amazing fact that God has declared us good enough. Gratitude to our Creator and Savior is the only response that makes any sense at all.
For us, in our calling as Christ’s students and scholars, an immediate practical implication of being shaped by the good news of God’s grace is that we begin to become free and confident in our faith. Once we know that our faith in God itself depends on his free and irresistible decision to accept us for the sake of Jesus, being insecure, uptight and defensive about that faith becomes absurd. The goodness of God’s grace is the one secure anchor for all our feeling and thinking. We can trust God with our hearts and minds, with our doubts and questions. Faith can now bravely, creatively, relentlessly seek understanding. We’re free but securely held in God’s grace. We can now aim at becoming the best questioners and challengers of our own most cherished beliefs and values. In a world in which most of us wall ourselves off from people who don’t agree with us, and close our ears to the hard questions and unfamiliar ideas that threaten the beliefs by which we define and justify ourselves, those who are hearing the word of God can express their gratitude by committing themselves to living an intellectual life worthy of the gospel, a model honesty and integrity. In this way the gospel spoken afresh at the time of the Reformation is the foundation of all genuine Christian action, including the work of the Christian liberal arts college, the work to which we are now called.
We have confidence because the work of our salvation is not our work; it is God’s work. In the same way, we can have confidence that what goes on in the world at large is in God’s hands. When we don’t trust God, and instead pursue the illusion of a righteousness of our own making, we’re easily seduced by some program for the moral improvement of the world. But here too the work is not ours but God’s. It is not, finally, our job to try to change the world. It is not primarily our task to save the world, or Western Civilization or America, from the liberals, or the conservatives, or the secular humanists, or the fundamentalists. It is our task to witness to the fact that God has decisively acted to change the world in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The gospel of God’s unconditional love for human beings, fully realized on the cross, is the one great transforming force in human affairs. We can have no ultimate loyalty to anything else, no matter how good and urgent.
Does this mean that we are not to care about what goes on in the world? Here again the Reformed tradition supplies the broader context that helps us make sense of, and authentically live, the good news. Our witness to God’s grace in Jesus is not simply a matter of private, personal faithfulness, nor is it just a matter of telling people what God has done on their behalf. These are of vital importance, but the crucified God is also the Lord Creator, and he claims every square inch, every corner, of his world, inviting us in all our activities to work with him in its transformation into his kingdom. As witnesses, we are invited to be co-workers, not spectators.
4. What does it mean to be Reformed today? I think above all it means not accepting any version of Christianity that forgets the core message of the gospel. It means not making the mistake of thinking we can put the good news of God’s unconditional love for us away safely on the shelf of doctrines we all accept and take for granted. It means to be vividly aware of how easily the word of God can be drowned out by other voices, calling us to try to do the right thing and justify ourselves. To be Reformed is to be hearing, and telling, and acting out the good news that is always transforming us, always undermining our assumptions, usually a bit scary, but forever new and unexpected.
Prayer: Go now in grace and peace, gratefully knowing you are righteous in Christ before God, heirs of eternal life. Amen.