Let’s face it, kids can be cruel. And no more so for me than during roll call one day in elementary school. Specifically, the teacher asked us to give out our full names – middle names included.
You see, I hated my middle name and guarded it jealously. It sounded old-fashioned and corny. I still remember the teasing from my classmates, both boys and girls.
So now, as I begin my very first sermon ever in a Methodist church, I’m obliged to reveal that name…Calvin.
Worse still, I’m named after my great-grandfather, The Rev. Thomas Calvin Leinbach, himself a preacher in the Calvinist tradition, in this case the German Reformed Church (now part of the United Church of Christ – my denomination).
As you may know, Calvin and Wesley are often thought opposites, with competing theologies. While true to some extent, their differences today are rarely debated much less detectable in actual practice.
But just in case, I’m comforted by these entries taken from John Wesley’s diary:
“In St. Anne’s. Was asked not to come back anymore.”
“Preached at St. John’s. Deacons said, ‘Get out and stay out.’”
“Preached in St. Jude’s. Can’t go back there, either.”
“Preached in St. Somebody Else’s. Deacons called special meeting and said I couldn’t return.”
I even read years ago that Wesley once complained about not being kicked out of a church!
Thus emboldened, I must confess I’m more a Calvinist than a Wesleyan, despite marrying a Methodist. And the reason has to do with sin. I believe in it, in other words. Though to be fair, so did Wesley. The trouble is that many today don’t, and that’s a problem.
Then again, I didn’t always see things this way either. The seeds of change probably began as early as 7th grade. I was sitting in social studies class on an ordinary Friday afternoon just moments before we were to be released for the weekend.
Suddenly, out of the blue, the public address system came on, a highly unusual occurrence. At first we didn’t know what was happening. The principal had piped in a radio broadcast in progress. Slowly it dawned on us that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. It was November 22, 1963.
In retrospect, this probably was the moment my childhood innocence began to falter, even if imperceptibly. It would only build as the disruptions of the 60’s accelerated at a dizzying pace.
Combined, these disruptions seemed to tear apart the very fabric of society, and along with it my comfortable, safe little world. By the time I started college in 1969, I was convinced not only that something was terribly wrong with America but that the adult world was solely responsible for it.
Thus, I was sympathetic to the many voices around me calling for radical change. The world my generation had inherited was hopelessly corrupt. Something needed to take its place. (Clearly, I was much smarter then!)
It wasn’t until I my mid-20s that I had a revelation of sorts. And that was that I, too, was a sinner.
Now you may wonder what took me so long. But like many of my generation, I thought society’s problems were outside of myself. There was nothing wrong with me. I was on the side of angels. It was society that had to change.
But as I got out into the world and faced real struggles, I realized I was anything but perfect. The proverbial light had dawned over Marblehead! I soon deduced that the very social structures I blamed for spoiling my unassailable right to a perfect world were merely a projection of my own sin writ large.
Of course institutions are imperfect. Because every single human being is imperfect. The logic is inescapable. Even Wesley would agree.
That means all societies fall short of the glory of God, bar none. Including our own.
Now I know it’s fashionable to denigrate the United States these days, to point out its flaws and failures, of which there are many. In so doing, however, we run the risk of overlooking its noble aims and worthy historical accomplishments, of which there also are many.
And yet one shouldn’t easily dismiss the heartbreaking disparity between the perfection to which we rightly aspire and the lesser realities of everyday existence. We’re hardwired, after all, to seek the unqualified good, to know life as God intends it. Just ask any child.
What inevitably gets lost in this life is our primary experience of home, that place of belonging into which we all are born. It is a loss not only of that which connects us to a living past but which binds us to the present and future. Our loss is, as British philosopher Roger Scruton puts it, “the bleak interruption of needed continuities.”
With this loss of continuity, of home, of our rightful place in the world, we reluctantly face the fact that something vital has disappeared, perhaps leaving a fearful emptiness. It’s the loss of a dream. It’s Paradise Lost. No wonder we get upset.
Within Judeo-Christian tradition, however, we are urged to actively mourn such loss, not flee from it, that we might better bear it. Grieving life’s inevitable losses is properly understood as a sacrifice consecrated to something higher than oneself.
Today, however, in our increasingly secular age, the tendency is to flee from loss, from tragedy, grief, and mourning – and thus from the sacred and ennobling dignity of human struggle.
Rather than facing our losses with humility, patiently awaiting God’s certain response, and along with it divine healing, we put our faith in progress, in earthly solutions. There’s no need to concern ourselves with the past, or so we assume, since we’re building an ideal future where everything gets fixed, where the sufferings of the past will one day be rendered unintelligible, as if we humans could ever perfect life this side of heaven. (Calvin anyone?)
Consider the testimony of Israel. Forcibly banished into exile, distraught, and far from home, it offers this godly lament (taken from Psalm 137):
By the rivers of Babylon – there we sat down and there we wept, when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our harps. For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither! Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy.
But hear then Jahweh’s faithful response, by way of the prophet Jeremiah:
Build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.
This may be seen as a parable of sorts, urging us to reclaim our lost home, our earthly home, even though, as Christians, we admit at once heavenly Zion to be our truest home. Our earthly existence is understood therefore as provisional, temporary. We are but strangers in a strange land, sojourners, pilgrims “on the way.”
Yet in our forced “exile,” short of a desired perfection, we are urged to work for the good of the earthly city, to live as fully and as godly a life as possible, for in its welfare, we are told, is our welfare. Yet we are never to forget Augustine’s cautionary distinction between what he called the City of God vs. the City of Man. We must never confuse our temporary home for our heavenly one.
Ultimately, this is properly understood only within the context of the Resurrection. Only in its promise of a timeless, exultant future can we credibly face the inevitable losses and imperfections of earthly existence.
Though all too commonly assumed, the resurrection promise is not merely compensation or consolation for the life we have lost, though it is that.
More importantly, it is the promise of restoration, that what has been lost shall one day be returned to us in full – the love, the loved ones, the goods, and the beauties of this life – yet in a new and unimaginable way. Heaven shall be, as Tim Keller puts it, “a reversal of the seeming irreversibility of loss…”
Not to mention, I would add, the fulfillment of our primal and unceasing longing for home. Amen.