Sermon for the 13th Sunday of Trinity.

Psalm 139; 1- 16

You have searched me, Lord,

    and you know me.

2 You know when I sit and when I rise;

    you perceive my thoughts from afar.

3 You discern my going out and my lying down;

    you are familiar with all my ways.

4 Before a word is on my tongue

    you, Lord, know it completely.

5 You hem me in behind and before,

    and you lay your hand upon me.

6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,

    too lofty for me to attain.

7 Where can I go from your Spirit?

    Where can I flee from your presence?

8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there;

    if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.

9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn,

    if I settle on the far side of the sea,

10 even there your hand will guide me,

    your right hand will hold me fast.

11 If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me

    and the light become night around me,”

12 even the darkness will not be dark to you;

    the night will shine like the day,

    for darkness is as light to you.

13 For you created my inmost being;

    you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;

    your works are wonderful,

    I know that full well.

15 My frame was not hidden from you

    when I was made in the secret place,

    when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.

16 Your eyes saw my unformed body;

    all the days ordained for me were written in your book

    before one of them came to be.

Matthew 16; 21-27

21 From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.

22 Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. “Never, Lord!” he said. “This shall never happen to you!”

23 Jesus turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”

24 Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 25 For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. 26 What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? 27 For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what they have done.

Whilst wandering around the churchyard of St Cuthbert’s, Little Sessay, up in North Yorkshire, I found the gravestone of Rev’d John Overton. He had been a Victorian Vicar of that obscure country hamlet.

The memorial said little of his life, but it did say he was the son of the Rev’d John Overton who wrote 'The True Churchmen Ascertained.'

I was suprised that Rev’d John Overton, junior was deemed note worthy mainly as being the son of Rev'd John Overton, senior.

It must be a challenge to have a famous and able father, and perhaps to feel under pressure to live up to his name.

I got myself a copy of, 'The True Churchmen Ascertained,' to see why it should merit a place of honour on the tombstone of the author's son, and found it to be written in defence of Calvinistic Christianity.

Overton's argument is that Calvinism is true to the founding documents of the Church of England, and thereby to the teachings of Jesus and the early Church, and that critics of Calvinism are are neither true to the founding documents of the Church of England, nor to the teachings of Jesus and the early Church.

To put it bluntly, Rev'd John Overton is saying that everyone who is not a Calvinist is neither a true Anglican, nor a true Christian.

As I read I began to see why a man of such uncompromising views might prove to be a dominating influence as a father.

Calvinism stems from the work of John Calvin, the 16^th century theologian and reformer, it is distinguished by two doctrines, Predestination, and Total Depravity.

The doctrine of Predestination teaches that before Creation God determined who would be saved, that is who would be a member of 'the elect.'

There is a mild, and a strong form of this.

The mild form is that God inspires some people to repent, and justly leaves the rest to their hellish fate. There is in this a notional concept of freewill, God enables us to repent - which we couldn't do by our own strength.

The stronger form argues that God decided before Creation who was to be saved and who was to be damned. In this there is not even a notional sense of freewill.

Everything we do, for good or ill, is determined by God.

Rev'd Overton is of the first type, he terms this 'moderate Calvinism', and in his stringent manner condemns “the higher species of Calvinism” as “a frightful system of nothing but absolute decrees, absolute Reprobation, and other extravagancies which we absolutely disavow...”

Overton writes, “...that man's salvation is wholly of grace, but his perdition is of himself...”

However, the argument that God enables some to repent, allowing others to be damned, sounds to me only a difference in degree, not a difference in kind, to the argument that He decides both who will repent, and who will be damned.

In neither case are we able to repent by our own volition.

If we cannot freely respond to the love of God, in what sense is the love of God genuine?

To be genuine love must be offered, not commanded.

Calvinists insist on Predestination because they hold even if we may or may not be capable of damning ourselves, we are in no way capable of saving ourselves.

We are rendered incapable of making any contribution to our salvation because of the second element of Calvinist doctrine - total depravity. The argument is that as a result of the sin of Adam every part of us is corrupted by sin, leaving people completely unable to repent, or to perform any truly good work.

We are born thoroughly bad, and stay bad unless God intervenes.

I find there are multiple problems with this.

Firstly, the idea of Original Sin, that is the sin of Adam, infecting all humanity, requires that your take Adam to literally be the first human being. However, the name 'Adam' in Hebrew means “man,” “human,” or “humankind.” So Adam an archetype, he is you and me, created good, in the image of God, but fallen short of that glory.

We do have to hold the story of Adam and Eve as true, we just do not have to hold it as chronological.

Anyway, we cannot blame Adam for our sin. Adam tried blaming Eve, and Eve tried blaming the Serpent, and God held each accountable for their own actions.

Morality, like love, is only meaningful if we have freewill.

Secondly, it is true that salvation not by our works, but repentance is not a 'work', it is an admission of our fallen humanity. Turning to God by our own freewill doesn't mean we have saved ourselves. You would not say a drowning man who grasped the hand of someone trying to save him had in fact saved himself.

Thirdly, and most serious of all, I object to the doctrine of 'total depravity' because it contradicts the plain meaning of scripture, we are not made bad, we are made good.

Genesis chapter one says again and again that God's creation is good, it is the chiming refrain of that chapter, and in Psalm 139, we read we are “... fearfully and wonderfully made...” That's fearful as in awesome – we are made awesomely.

I think there is a real danger that people who have been told they are worthless by those who abuse them, or people who have disorders that make them feel worthless, or people of low self esteem, may hear a message from the Church that God also says they are fundamentally bad.

If in the Kingdom of this world you are counted among the least, in the Kingdom of Heaven you are counted among the first.

However, the Rev'd John Overton is correct, the founding documents of the Church of England are heavily influenced by Calvinism, but the fact he finds himself debating with other Clergymen shows that the Church of England has always been a broad church, and he is entirely incorrect to say that Jesus and the early Church taught Calvinistic doctrines.

That said, Calvinists did much good: William Wilberforce, John Milton, John Bunyan, and orphanage-founder Charles Spurgeon were all Calvinists. Calvinism greatly advanced working-class literacy, and care for the poorest and most vulnerable.

Rev'd John Overton Junior, and Rev'd John Overton Senior, were equally “fearfully and wonderfully made,” just as we all are; we are all loved eternally by our God who makes all things good, and who will redeem all creation through His Son.

Amen.