Sixth Sunday after Pentecost: Calvin Anniversary Sunday
I never liked that John man. Long beard, looked down his nose at me, scowled whenever we met. You could tell he thought I was a typical teenage girl - frivolous, head stuffed full of fashion and boyfriends and nothing else. Well, when I was anywhere near him, I did rather play that up. He looked as if he never had any fun - but that didn't mean he had the right to spoil it for everyone else. And the way he talked was so bo-ring. On and on for hours and hours about politics and how the king should behave and who the king should and shouldn't marry.
The only reason I listened to any of it, to be honest, was that my step-father Herod was the king, because he'd married my mum after my own dad, his brother, had died. I think he must have had a guilty conscience, or why should Herod care what some stupid desert prophet thought about him? After all, if you're the king, you make the laws, right? No one tells kings what to do, especially if they're going to drag God into it. Because that was what this man John did, on and on and on. What God wanted, what God didn't want. I began to think his God was as boring as he was.
After a while, it started getting on Mum's nerves too. I mean, what woman wants to hear her marriage is a sham and her husband should divorce her? Really rude, I thought John was - kept on muttering something weird about ‘the monstrous regiment of women'? Whatever. But I knew Mum wouldn't take it lying down. So when it came to my birthday party, she and I hatched a little plot together.
I go to dancing classes, and I'm not half bad if I say so myself. I mean, the teacher has to say I'm wonderful because I'm the king's daughter and she'd be thrown in prison otherwise, but I still am pretty good when I do my Michael Jackson routine. You should have heard all those VIPs clapping. And when silly old Herod did his ‘anything up to half my kingdom!' stuff, Mum and me knew just what to ask for. Horrid old John's head on a plate, that's what. It was a bit gory, when the soldiers came back and gave it to me. Even though he was dead, his eyes sort of looked through me, and for a moment I felt like everything had gone pear-shaped.
But no more boring lectures about how to be good from John, anyway! Only my dad tells me what to do. And he's dead anyway, so what's the point in having rules? I can choose what I want as well as any grown-up can, and no one can stop me having fun. It's my right, having fun. Except that everyone looks at me out of the corner of their eye, almost as if they're scared of me. And I'm not sleeping too well just now.
I wonder who you were sympathising with in that story, whose part you might imagine yourself taking?
• Herod, trying to rule a kingdom under the Romans, caught up in power struggles but with half an uneasy eye on God and what this prophet John said about what was right and wrong?
• Herodias, his wife, who'd already lost one husband and didn't want some religious nutter cutting her off from the support of another?
• Salome, bored to tears with grown-ups who wouldn't let her have a good time, but still shocked when things went too far?
• Or John, speaking truth to power, and refusing to shut up, however bad things got for him?
His story is a good one for us to think about today, when we're remembering John Calvin, whose 500th birthday we are celebrating today. The two Johns have quite a lot in common, quite apart from their name. They were interested in political and religious reform. They wouldn't keep quiet just because powerful people told them to shut up. They got into trouble with the civil authorities - the first time Calvin tried to make Geneva in Switzerland a city run according to God's laws, the city council showed him the door, and he never did manage to shut down all the pubs and turn them into coffee shops instead. And, as you can tell from that last example, a lot of people are inclined to think of them both as party-poopers, dour and solemn people who didn't want any fun themselves and tried to stop other people having a good time too.
In both cases, we as Christians and people from a Presbyterian heritage are likely to see the other side of the story. We admire John for sticking to his principles as well as for being the first public figure to recognise Jesus' ministry and tell others to follow him. We admire John Calvin, and John Knox after him, for being properly serious and not frivolous about religion, for challenging the societies of their day to take God seriously in the public street as well as in churches and in homes.
But I can't help feeling sorry for Salome if - as John Earwicker guesses - she was no sultry temptress throwing off seven veils but a mixed-up teenage girl whose father was dead, trying to make sense of the power struggles of the dangerous court in which she was growing up. Young people growing up today without either the restraints or the safety nets that many of you had in your younger years, need our support, not finger-pointing condemnation. And we do better to admit our own faults than to feel smug about those of other people.
So as we celebrate John Calvin, let us never, as some Calvinists may have done, be tempted to become caricatures of God's prophets, stern and relentless in condemning and chasing down sinners. Let us be followers of Jesus, to whom both Johns point us, whose promise is forgiveness and whose command is love.
R&S 669 is also a psalm - Psalm 1 - following Calvin's desire that only psalms should be sung in Christian worship. It is a modern paraphrase by Erik Routley, once organist at Mansfield College, Oxford, where the Minister trained for ordination. The tune Sri Lampang is a Thai folk hymn, underlining the fact that there are churches of Presbyterian origin all over the world.
R&S 501 is a sixteenth century hymn which has been attributed to Calvin himself, though this is now in doubt. It was translated from French in the nineteenth century by Elizabeth Smith. The tune set is Song 24, by Orlando Gibbons, a contemporary of the hymn's author though a member of the established Church.
The true Church is found... comes from a twenty-first century Reformed theologian and hymnodist, Alan Gaunt, first published in the latest issue of Reform, the URC monthly magazine which everyone at St Andrew's should be reading. The Bard of Armagh is an Irish traditional tune.
Amos 7:7-15; Psalm 24; Mark 6:14-29; Ephesians 1:3-14
If we're already thinking about prophets who lay down the law, Amos fits well into that tradition. He comes to the main temple in the northern kingdom of Israel, at Bethel - northerners didn't want to worship in the southern kingdom of Judah, at Jerusalem - and in the hearing of Amaziah, the official chief priest, he passes on God's judgment on Israel. The whole nation is out of true, like a wall built crooked, and Amos' words are like a plumbline reminding people how they should be living. Oh yes, and there's a penalty: the whole country is going to collapse, enemies will overrun it and everyone will go into exile.
Amaziah feels it's his patriotic duty to tell King Jereboam Amos' treacherous words, and tells Amos, if he must be a prophet, to go off and bother the southerners instead. But Amos refuses. He's not a prophet, he insists. It's not his tradition or his family business. If God hadn't taken him away from his ordinary affairs, looking after herds and plantations, he'd never have done it; but who can go against the power of God?
John Calvin may have had some fellow feeling with Amos. His father wanted him to train for the Catholic priesthood, but he annoyed some powerful people in Paris and decided to train as a lawyer instead, leaving France when he got into big trouble with the Catholic authorities. Because of his scholarship Calvin was asked by his friend Farel to move to Geneva to help reform the church there. Apart from being shown the door once by the city council, he stayed there the rest of his life, writing books of theology and Bible commentaries, trying to make Geneva into God's perfect city. Yet he had never intended to be a reformer. Life would be much more comfortable for us if Amos and Calvin - and John the Baptist, come to that - had been professional prophets, coming from a long line of people trained up specially for the job. That way we could breathe a sigh of relief and leave all thoughts of changing our world into God's world to the professionals. But if God speaks to amateurs, could God be speaking to us too?
Leaving that for you to consider, let's look in a little more detail at what Calvin thought; but don't panic, you've not let yourselves in for an hour's lecture! One good way to get into his way of thinking is to look at the very beginning of the catechism about the basics of Christianity he wrote for children to learn by heart when they were preparing for church membership. Listen:
Minister: What is the chief end of man?
Child: It is to know God his creator.
Minister: What reason have you for this answer?
Child: Because God has created us and placed us in this world that he may be glorified in us. And it is certainly right, as he is the author of our life, that it should advance his glory.
And it goes on that way for chapters and chapters.
As far as Calvin is concerned, because God has created us - and please don't get hung up on creationism here!, that's not his point - relationship with God should be our chief purpose in life, motivating all that we say, do and are.
I can't really imagine someone like Salome, the stroppy teenager demanding to have fun and John the Baptist's head on a platter, finding it easy to become Calvin's perfect catechism candidate. Most of us will find ourselves somewhere on the spectrum between the two. But everything Calvin believed and taught, whether it's about original sin, our inevitable lapses from God's perfection, or about predestination, God's supreme power over our destiny, derives from his basic conviction of God's total authority over the whole of creation, including human society.
This is not always easy for us to hear, faithful churchgoers though we may be. Society teaches us that science will one day be able to solve all our problems, that we can go on using up the world's resources with no bill to pay, that whatever we human beings choose to have, we deserve to have and will have. But in the long run, I reckon Calvin's reminder that ‘man proposes, God disposes' is more realistic - though that should never stop us from trying to improve this world while we are in it, and many good Presbyterians and other Calvinists have worked their socks off doing just that.
But where does Calvin think we can get the inspiration and the stamina even to aspire to live as God wants, let alone managing it day by day? Easy: he's a Reformer, so he takes us back to the words of the Bible, pointing us to Christ. And our reading from Ephesians is a good example of that. David Hill tells me that in the Greek all this is one long, breathless sentence - though I implored him to use an English translation so he didn't run out of breath - and we can see why the writer is getting so excited about his topic. The Christians in Ephesus, a small and struggling church among many religions and cults in central Asia, are being reminded that it is not our idea but God's that we should follow Jesus; that it is God who will give us all the resources - forgiveness for past mistakes, wisdom for present choices and the hope of future transformation - we need. And if our own faith or hope or love run low, God has given us external resources: the love of others in this church, the sustenance of Communion, which Calvin would have liked to celebrate every week, and the power of God's Spirit within us, connecting us with Jesus.
Calvin would have laughed to scorn the modern idea that religion is a private matter; for him, every part of life, from work to leisure to worship, was holy to God. And five hundred years after his birth, we can be thankful for his insistence that God reigns supreme. Yet in some ways Calvin is a strange ancestor for us to have. I suspect many of us, though our church comes from the Presbyterian tradition, have never read or heard much about his thought or that of or his disciple, John Knox, whose influence on our churches in Scotland and Ireland has been so enormous. He comes across in popular culture as a condemnatory killjoy - not precisely an attractive role model. But to be fair, I think he would have been horrified at being a role model at all. Like John the Baptist and Amos before him, his intention was to point people towards a life orientated on God, a life he reckoned was the best a human being could get. This approach may put us in danger of becoming so adept at pointing out failings, others' or our own, that we despair of humanity. But then we only need to remember Jesus: God's supreme power, who yet chose to become powerless for love of us and of all.
