Love Actually

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

January 31, 2010

Preached by Rev. Trina Zelle

“Aren’t you the ones who believe in predestination?”

That’s the question I usually get when people learn that I’m a Presbyterian minister. 

Aren’t you the ones who believe in predestination?

“Well, yeah, sort of, “ I shrug and weakly laugh.  “Not really though.  Not anymore. I guess.”

To the extent that anyone thinks about it – and I’m not sure that the people who ask me even know what it means -- predestination is a hard concept to understand.  A tough nut to crack.  At its most dire and depressing, it says that before the world started turning, God decided which people would be saved and which would be condemned. Having nothing to do with what anyone did or did not do.  Just because. 

What an evangelism theme!  “Come join us – not that it’s going to make any difference!”  Actually that’s why, at one point in our nation’s history, some Presbyterian churches in eastern Kentucky and the hills of Virginia didn’t believe in evangelism.  Why bother? It’s already been decided – although, interestingly enough, they themselves continued to go to church.

It sounds dreadful – just the opposite of the loving God that Jesus came to tell us about.  Why would anyone believe such a thing much less build a church around it?

Because originally, arbitrary condemnation was not what predestination was supposed describe.  Instead, ironically, it grew out of John Calvin’s  insight that God’s grace alone is the source of human redemption.  That our redemption has nothing to do with anything we might do to earn it – including “right belief.” That God’s grace is so fundamental to creation, that before God even created the world, God had decided to save us, no matter what we did.  Actually, Presbyterian minister Frederick Buechner, not John Calvin, has the best definition of grace: there’s NOTHING you have to do.  There’s nothing YOU have to do.  There’s nothing you HAVE to do. 

So how did we get from “for God so loved the world” to divine Russian roulette?  Or one potato two potato.  You. You.  Not you.  Here’s my theory.  John Calvin, the founder of the Presbyterian church and a contemporary of Martin Luther – both sixteenth century guys --  was a lawyer.  A French lawyer.  He loved logic.  He loved systems – after all his training was in the system we call “the law.”  He loved logical systems.  This probably made him constitutionally incapable of sharing his insight about God’s overwhelming grace – and letting it go at that.  He had to take that theological insight and make sure that it was consistent with his other theological insights – such as God’s absolute freedom to act as God wishes and the necessity of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.  Give the guy some credit, his magnum opus, the Institutes of the Christian Religion provides a brilliant and coherent framework for our Reformed tradition even today.  But he has also left us with the legacy of predestination.  The doctrine that makes us look like jerks to the rest of the religious world.  But, in all fairness, I have to say, other faiths have their own issues too.  For example, some believe that even after someone has been saved, it’s possible for them to backslide and lose their salvation – hence the repeated altar calls.  We, at least, believe that once saved, God never lets us go, no matter what.  Remember Frederick Buechner – there’s NOTHING YOU HAVE to do.  

But back to Calvin.  And so, instead of being associated with the absolutely lovely doctrine of grace that says that God loves us so much that we were redeemed before we even had a chance to go wrong; instead of being the church that celebrates God’s grace, Calvin’s heirs -- including us – are stuck with the image of a God who would just as soon pitch us as keep us.   

In response, the modern Presbyterian church has done what any sane community of faith would do – we have essentially jettisoned predestination. And most of those who haven’t, have relegated it to the notion of “mystery” – meaning, we don’t feel comfortable tossing out a doctrine adhered to by our founder but we don’t really believe it either so we’ll just put it over here.  Kind of like that painting with the hideous frame your great aunt sent you.  You don’t want to offend her and actually toss it, and you’re too cheap to get it reframed, so you hang it in bathroom.  We don’t want to deal with predestination so we end up losing what it frames as well.

Put another way, we’ve thrown the baby out with the bath in that we don’t talk about grace either -- the thing that truly is distinctive and wonderful about Presbyterianism.  God’s grace.  There’s NOTHING YOU HAVE to do.

That’s too bad, because we deprive ourselves – and those whom we could be reaching -- of such comfort and joy.  Do you know what happens to Presbyterianism without grace?  We get the Protestant work ethic. Works righteousness every bit as lethal as that confronted by Luther.  A grim striving to succeed and prove our worthiness. A life lived without knowledge of grace is one of never quite being good enough, never quite getting there. Of nightmares that we will be “left behind” 

But with God’s grace as the basis of our self-understanding, we become the embodiment of Paul’s description of love in his letter to the Corinthians.  Rejoicing in the good.  Not arrogant or puffed up.  Believing all things, enduring all things.  Hoping all things.  No desperate attempts to be good enough  –  because none of us are – that’s the point!  Your not OK, I’m not OK, and that’s OK!

In  his book, Theology for Liberal Presbyterians and Other Endangered Species, seminary professor and theologian Douglas Ottati talks about how our understanding of grace has everything to do with the kind of faith community we are.  He admits, however that this particular notion of a gracious God is out of synch with much of the American church today. 

It is, Ottati writes, “almost counter-intuitive to our system. To conclude that salvation is a matter of divine faithfulness rather than of our own actions and beliefs will no doubt seem strange in the context of much American Protestantism, with its characteristic emphasis on a decision for Jesus as Lord and Savior.  It may seem stranger still in a popular culture that stresses human freedom and self-determination and that also tends to look at heaven as a reward for being good and hell as a punishment for being bad.  But if it seems strange, it is only because it follows, not from a typically human celebration of human activity and achievement, but from the strange logic of grace alone. 

Ottati then imagines the church that really understands this strange logic of grace alone: “A church that acknowledges a gracious God will not be exclusionary.  Rather than seeing itself as an elite corps of spiritual and  moral gymnasts – the few and the righteous – it will see itself as a ragtag collection of wayward but nevertheless graced sinners. . . By the strange logic of grace, the church is made up not of the deserving but of undeserving beneficiaries who, in response to the disarming and assuring knowledge of a graceful God, try to make as faithful and inclusive a witness as they can.”

Are we that kind of church?  Could we be? Do we want to be? Should we be?  I think so.  Let me tell you a story that a pastor friend of mine shared with me.  It’s absolutely true.

“When I was a pastor in Albuquerque years ago,” my friend writes, “I visited a young couple – Marty and Sandy – who had attended our church at the invitation of one of our members.  Marty, the husband, was curious about the church, and had a lot of questions. Sandy was sitting back in her chair, arms crossed over her chest, eyebrows knitted.  Everything about her body language said: there’s a preacher in the room, and that is not okay.  Marty owned up to being a backslidden Lutheran, who remembered a lot of his Lutheran catechism, and asked, “you Presbyterians believe in predestination, don’t you?”  I said that most wouldn’t know what it was, some didn’t believe it, but that officially we did, yes.  He asked again, “What do you think?”  I allowed as how, yes, I did.

At that point, Sandy sat forward, and asked, “What is predestination?”  So I explained about adoption, God choosing us in Christ before the foundation of the world (to quote Ephesians), and that our salvation was not about what we did or didn’t do, but only about God’s grace.  Her jaw dropped, and she said, “That’s the most wonderful thing I ever heard!”

Nobody ever said that to me before, or since, about predestination.  But when I heard her story, I understood.  She had been a member of a particularly narrow church there in Albuquerque. All she really knew of Christianity was that there were her kind of Christians, and there were Catholics (and no one was too sure about them).  When she decided to divorce an alcoholic, abusive husband before he killed her, the elders of the church came to her and asked her to repent of her great wickedness. (Never said a thing to him, that she knew.)  When she moved out and got a job waiting tables at a restaurant that served beer and wine, some of those good church folks hung out at the back door of the place and harassed her on the way to her car, to repent so she wouldn’t go to hell. 

Can you see why, when I told her that we are NOT the captains of our souls, and that salvation is not in what we do, but in God’s free grace, that was, for her, a liberating doctrine? And so it is.  We don’t have to come to the manger; it came to us."

What a relief for us as well! At the end of the day, the strange logic of grace alone is what sustains this thing we call church -- not our own efforts or talents.  So, new elders and deacons, old elders and deacons, people of University Presbyterian Church, be not afraid. While we will all do our best to make this UPC’s best year ever, what we do isn’t really the issue.  God’s grace is going to carry each one of us and all of us through – just as it has all along. 

And if anyone says to you: “so you’re a Presbyterian.  Don’t you all believe in predestination?” you tell them: “We believe in God’s grace.  That’s all anyone needs.”  Amen.