Calvin Without Hobbes

The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
August 2, 2009

Calvin Without Hobbes
1 Corinthians 11:23-26

I can’t even imagine how big the cake would have to be.
Six feet across, maybe ten feet?
Where could we find an oven big enough?

Imagine a birthday cake big enough to hold
not just a hundred candles;
not two hundred;
No, I am talking about a cake big enough
to hold 500 candles!

This year marks the 500th anniversary
of the birth of John Calvin,
the great Reformation theologian.

Now when we hear the name Calvin,
we are probably more likely to think of the
precocious six-year old of the comic strip,
the one with his friend, the stuffed tiger Hobbes.

Bill Watterson, the comic strip’s creator,
named his character for the theologian.
Why he would name a mischievous six-year old
comic strip character
for a 16th century French lawyer and theologian
is a question I cannot answer.
If you remember the strip
Calvin was a boy who could turn
an ordinary cardboard box into a time traveling machine,
or a machine to transmogrify him into various animals,
or even duplicate himself so he could read comic books
while his double would do his homework
and take out the garbage.
He did not have much in common with a theologian
who five hundred years later
is thought of as dour and intense.

Had John Calvin not been born,
Watterson would probably still have had his comic strip.
Had Calvin not been born
we would still be gathered here to worship God
on Sunday mornings.
I would still be standing before you
about to preside at the Lord’s Supper.

But I would probably be standing before an altar
rather than the Lord's Table.
This would probably not be a Presbyterian Church.
We probably would not consider ourselves Protestants.
There might have been no Reformation.

It was John Calvin and his older ally Martin Luther,
who were the driving forces behind
what we now call the Reformation.
Luther led the charge
when he posted his Ninety-Five Theses on the door
of the church in Wittenburg Germany in 1517,
his 95 charges of corruption
against the Roman Catholic church,
especially its practice of indulgences,
the lucrative but faithless “pay-to-pray” scheme.

Calvin, with his lawyer’s mind and training,
brought order to efforts to root out corruption
and reform the church.
For Luther, Calvin, and a handful of others
the church had strayed far from God,
far from what Christ had intended,
far from what Paul had encouraged the first generation
of Christians to build up in Corinth, Thessalonica,
Philippi, Rome and other places.

Calvin thought it was past time
to go back to what had become a little-used book
and see what the dusty pages of the Bible had to say
about the church.
“Sola scriptura,” said Calvin:
Look to Scripture and Scripture alone
to guide church leaders,
and always remember that Christ is the head of the church,
not a man sitting on a throne in Rome.

Calvin wrote prolifically;
he wrote commentaries on every book of the Bible;
every book but one, actually.
He thought that the Revelation
should not have been included in the canon,
so he never wrote a commentary on that book.
Given how wildly that book has been misinterpreted
and misused, maybe he was right to skip over it.

His greatest work, a work that endures to this day,
was a dense four-part set
he called simply “The Institutes of Religion”.
It was first published in the 1530s;
Calvin was not even 30 when the first edition was printed.

It was and is an exhaustive examination and analysis
of the theological foundation
for how we live our faith.
The Institutes provided the framework
for Reformed Theology,
which is how we as Presbyterians practice our faith.

Calvin’s thinking is woven deeply in our church.
We find his influence in the Confessions
that are part of our Church’s constitution.
We find his influence in the words of the ordination vows
that Elders, Deacons, and Ministers all take:
“Do you sincerely receive and adopt the essential tenets
of the Reformed faith
as expressed in the confessions of our church?”
(W-4.4003c)
For those of you have been ordained as Elders or Deacons,
do you remember taking that vow?

There is much in Calvin’s work that is dated,
much that reflects the time in which he lived and wrote,
but there is much in his work that is timeless,
that instructs us and guides us still.

He helps us to understand
why we celebrate two sacraments rather than seven.
He provided a theological framework for baptism,
and a theological framework for the Lord’s supper.

It was the Lord’s Supper where he found himself
having to walk through a maze of differing opinions
and approaches to what seemed on the surface so simple:
A loaf of bread, a cup of wine, shared in community.
Paul thought the Lord’s Supper so straightforward,
that the few verses we find in his letter to the Corinthians
sum up his thinking.

Five hundred years ago, the teaching of the church
was that the bread and the wine
were transformed into the body and blood of Christ,
that in the Lord’s Supper,
we eat the body and blood of Christ.
This theological thinking has a strong biblical foundation.
Jesus says very clearly of the bread:
"this is my body". (Matthew 26:26; Luke 22:19)
And of the cup he says, "this is my blood".
(Matthew 26:28; Luke 22:20)
In John’s gospel we hear Jesus say,
“my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink”.
(John 6:55)
To our ears, this sounds confusing and
disconcerting.
Even his own disciples struggled with Jesus’ words,
“This teaching is difficult” (John 6:60)

By Calvin’s day some were arguing that
Jesus was speaking metaphorically,
that the Lord’s Supper was really an ordinary meal:
the ordinary bread and wine
remained ordinary bread and wine.
What mattered were the words,
“do this in remembrance of me”.
The meal was an opportunity to remember,
remember Jesus’ teachings,
remember Jesus’ death on the Cross.

Calvin took a different approach:
He said the meal was more than a time to gather and remember,
but that we were not consuming the actual body and blood of Christ.
What happens for us, he wrote, is that the Holy Spirit
transforms the bread and wine
from ordinary food meant to nourish and refresh the body,
to spiritual food meant to nourish and refresh our spirits.

Here’s how Calvin explains it:
“…From the physical things set forth in the Sacrament
we are led by a sort of analogy to spiritual things.
Thus, when bread is given as a symbol of Christ’s body,
we must at once grasp this comparison:
as bread nourishes, sustains, and keeps the life of our body,
so Christ’s body is the only food to invigorate and enliven our soul.
When we see wine set forth as a symbol of blood,
we must reflect on the benefits which wine imparts to the body,
and so realize that the same are spiritually imparted to us
by Christ’s blood.
These benefits are to nourish, refresh,
strengthen and gladden.” (Institutes, 4.17.3)

Now as you come to this table in a few minutes,
don’t worry about whether you have a full understanding
of Calvin’s theology,
or an understanding of the difference between
transubstantiation and consubstantiation.

Come because Jesus invites you,
invites you to this table,
invites you to share in this meal that he has prepared for us.

Come to this table
and take a piece of bread
-- tear off a big piece --
and dip it in the cup
and know that what you are about to take
has been transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit:
transformed from the ordinary to the spiritual,
transformed to help you transform
from the ordinary to the spiritual.

Come in response to the invitation,
extended by the grace of God that is Jesus Christ,
Come, as Calvin teaches us,
to be nourished, refreshed,
strengthened and gladdened in Spirit.

You will find no theological disputations at this table.
Here at this table you will community.
Here at this table you fill find renewal.
And, as Calvin would remind us,
here at this table, you will find Christ.
AMEN