First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

Jeremiah 1 and Luke 4

“Ordinary Means”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

January 28, 2007

The Westminster Confession was written in the seventeenth century when the Puritans took control of England. It was a moment in history that is known as the British Civil War. A very unique aspect of this part of British history was the clergy of the movement. They were called the divines and they sought to put into a place a godly government, a commonwealth. They tried and it lasted about forty years. And then it fell apart; it didn’t last. The monarchy was restored and most of the Puritans ended up in America or fading into the background of English politics. What has survived, some 350 plus years, is their confession- what they believed.

Although not seen with the same luster it was once esteemed, the confession is a part of our church’s constitution. It was then and for all intents and purposes still is now our law as it were. For over 175 years it was the only confession of the Presbyterian Church in America. It was the only document one could point to in our denomination and say, this is what Presbyterians believe. Then, in 1967, a half dozen more confessions were added. Most of these were confessions written before the Westminster divines tried to craft their faith in a creed. And they were not simply added for affirmation, but as a way of creating a broader historical picture and to add a more contemporary voice as two of the additional works made constitutional were written in the 20^th century.

Since 1967, the Westminster Confession of Faith has continued to fade. It is often seen as a wooden, legalistic, and far too conservative voice for our needs today. The Westminster is cast in a disparaging light to suggest that we have evolved beyond this kind of staunch puritanical beliefs. When people speak of the "frozen chosen" they are knowingly or unknowingly making reference to the beliefs concerning predestination found in the Westminster. The work of the divines are quickly becoming the domain of the historians who seek the obscure or the radically conservative who want to return to the glory days of the church before the 1960s.

This is the story told by one of the leading Presbyterian scholars of our creeds and confessions, Jack Rogers. Dr. Rogers began his academic pursuits with the Puritans and the divines, and while not an ambassador, he seems to have a soft spot for the Westminster. Such devotion is hard to shake off when you spend four-to-five years of your life trying to articulate one line of the confession. As only a doctoral dissertation can, Rogers spent years on one line from chapter seven of the Westminster. (When I was working on my divinity degree, for instance, I was given a year to work on one Latin adverb.)

The irony of such obscure efforts though is that they force you to find what is really true in life for all; you search until you can answer, what does this really mean for all? The line in Chapter seven Rogers gave a portion of his life to understand is part of what the divines believe about scripture. In the confession as to what Scripture is and what kind of authority it maintains and what books are to be considered as scripture, they said something that caught his eye, while scripture has many unique facets and aspects, singular events and individuals, the experience of salvation is not such. "Salvation," they said, "is experienced by ordinary means."

Rogers was set to the task of asking, what is ordinary means? What did ordinary mean to the divines of the seventeenth century and how was this related to salvation? While it may seem like such a simple question, or perhaps even an unnecessary question, it proved to be neither easy nor mundane. In what must have amounted to countless hours of research and thought, Rogers achieved an answer. For the divines to experience salvation by ordinary means meant three things: loving your family, working with honor and purpose, and Sunday worship.

These three things were the way salvation was seen in life ordinarily. And true to form, ordinarily, this is how I live my life. The parts of life that are important to me are my family, my work, and worship. Finding the balance of these, finding the peace of life in the midst of these, understanding what they mean and how they are to be lived is truly the lion share of my life. There are moments, distractions really, that fall outside of these. Yet for the most part, my salvation, when my soul is made good, good enough to stand before God, this is found in my family, in work, and in worship.

Notice, the divines didn’t say something like all of life boils down to, or all you need in life is . . . family, work, and worship. We like to boil things down or reduce them to something very simple. While these three achieve a kind of simplicity, they are not simplistic. Families can be glorious and sublime, but they also are the most heartbreaking. Good work, purposeful work, finding the balance of work and rest, knowing what you are doing and doing it very well, these are things we strive after with back breaking effort, and yet rarely do we gain a sense of achievement or completion. And worship, worship sounds so simple, but how many people do you know that have achieved a discipline of worship in their life? How many people do you know who have found the sheer strength of will to come to church each Sunday?

I believe the divines were right on; these are places where I find salvation. It is in family where I sense the pull to be a good man, to be a good husband and father and son, and in the moments of grace where my faults and failed attempts are met with mercy, when my forgetfulness is balanced with steadfast love- there is salvation. As I was writing these very words, almost on cue, our youngest came to me, rested his head on my shoulder, and then walked on. Did that save me for all eternity? No. But for a moment, in the midst of the ordinary, there was salvation.

Our passages today are really about the extra-ordinary. There was nothing ordinary about Jeremiah. His voice was unique in all the prophets before him and since. Where the prophets before him had always couched their criticisms with the hope of mercy, if you repent God will restore, Jeremiah was given the great weight of being the message, repent, do better, fine, but the Babylonians are coming anyway and nothing is going to save you. All will be lost.

His calling passage, where God says, before you were I knew you in the womb. In our culture of self today it is so easy to project ourselves into this and believe God has such knowledge of all people. It is easy to read Jeremiah’s call as a kind of standard when just the opposite should be the case. Such knowledge and crafting was to make a very unique moment. It was when the ordinary means of salvation would be put aside. Jeremiah would wander through the streets of Jerusalem wearing a yoke to say, your life is coming to an end and this is what awaits you.

In Luke we have a similar struggle with the extra ordinary. The people of Nazareth were struggling to see Jesus as capable of being the words of a prophet when he was just a carpenter’s son. His declaration meant the ordinary was being put aside in him. God was going to do something in him. And God does extra ordinary things. And, truly, God would do the extra ordinary in his Son. He would do this so that our ordinary would become salvation.

On the cliff outside of Nazareth, just like the streets of Jerusalem in the time of Jeremiah, that God was doing something unimaginable would prove quite a challenge. Just as they prove a challenge to us right now. For the Gospel is not that having a family, working, and going to church makes you right. The Gospel is that in this one, we have been given the grace and mercy so that the living out of our family, the work with which we toil, and the gathering to worship will bring us unto salvation. Family, work, church, they are all fine and well, good and bad, helpful and harmful, yet in this one, in believing in the one, they become salvation and we find our lives are made good, good enough to stand before God.

At the very beginning of the movie The Big Chill, the scene is a funeral for a man who took his life. The funeral was for a man who never seemed to find salvation in the ordinary means. He never achieved the love of family, purposeful work, and worship. The pastor giving his funeral homily finds that his emotions have carried him away for he shakes as he asks "Are not the satisfactions which come to us good enough for the common man?" To this we must say no. The scripture says it is not enough to just do you best, to love your family, to work hard, to be pious or religious. The gospel is that only in trusting this one, only loving your family through with and in Christ, this is only enough when the work is recast as a devotion to the Son of God, it is only enough when our worship is not for us, but for him. Only then are common satisfactions enough to be salvation.

In Jesus Christ the ordinary means become salvation.

The Westminster divines have long since left us, yet the long pilgrim path where they searched for salvation is the same one we trod today. We are looking for the moment where our family has peace and happiness, yet all the while finding it more likely in their forgiveness than in moments of perfection. We want our work to be good. We love to do something good and lasting and true; yet, so often there never seems to be enough. There is always the next day, the next hurdle and again and again the lingering doubts of whether what we do is just folly. So it was for the divines and so it is for us.

Where we have tried a different path, though, is worship. The divines were steadfast in their belief that worship was part of the life God intends. We have made it an option, a piece for another day, maybe another time. Yet what if worship, rather than being the least important of the three, was the key to them all? What if achieving a devotion and discipline of worship were the foundation of family and work, rather than what you do if work and family allow?

Family, work, and worship are the ordinary means of salvation. I believe that. I also believe these three are perhaps the most challenging part of life as well. When I described these to John Sudduth this week I loved his response. I could see him checking them off in his mind. Family, love them; work, did that; worship, I show up. He gave me a look that said, hey, pretty close.

The truth is we are pretty close to salvation. In fact it is in our midst all the time. Salvation is not fantastic or miraculous; it is not something extra-ordinary. It is in the ordinary. It is in the simple embrace of a boy, the moment of satisfaction in a job well done, as it is in the sense of transcending the mundane for just a moment in prayer and song and silence. In Jesus Christ, bringing the extra-ordinary to our ordinary, we are indeed pretty close. Amen.