First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

Proverbs 8 and Romans 5

“Blowing Glass”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

June 3, 2007

            A few months ago I made a passing comment regarding the investment of a fair portion of my life toward studying an adverb.  It was meant to suggest that our intellectual endeavors can lose sight of life.  Even at the time, this realization hit me.  I think it was the third chapter where it became clear to me that I had given up my heart as it were to understanding a Latin adverb that appeared in the writings of John Calvin.  It was a moment of clarity where all I could think was, you are a lost soul my friend.  The adverb was, or is if you consider Latin alive, “magis ac magis”; literally it means “more and more.”

            I didn’t start with an adverb.  I started with a gnawing question from my childhood.  Raised in the altar call tradition, the holiness tradition of the Wesleyans (who are Methodists that believed the Methodists weren’t strict enough, Bible believing enough, and so on), raised in a tradition where the public conversions of the Great Revivals of the 1830s still prevailed. My childhood question was a great uneasiness about what came after the sinner’s prayer.

            It emerged from watching the same people go to the altar.  In the reflective tradition of the Presbyterians we too had demand for a conversion experience that needed to be publicly described.  Yet, in our tradition it was really meant to be a one way trip, a single season on the sinners’ bench.  For those of you who do not know, the sinners’ bench was a pew in the front of the church where the unconverted were compelled to occupy. I still skulk to the back of a church with idea that that the front is for the compelled.  Yet in the church of my childhood, there was not a sinners’ bench as people came from all over, again and again, to pray, to weep, to seek strength at the “altar.”

            The question I took with me, one that reemerged with great force, was not what it meant to believe for the first time or to be converted at the altar or sinners’ bench, but what did it mean to make progress in salvation?  I wanted to know what happened the next day.  And as luck or fate or what not would have it, progress, spiritual progress, was a key notion of Calvin.  It was what really made me feel at home in his writings and indeed his mind.  He kept asking the question and making the claims of progress.  He would write, and we are united more and more unto Christ, even unto one.  Late in his life he would add “even unto one substance” which conjures up the image of a mystical union.

            For the better part of three years I was set loose to ask this question, "What does Calvin mean when he says we make progress more and more?"  From time to time there were exams, bothersome classes on church polity or preaching, things I was convinced I would never need or use, always much more confident than right; from time to time there moments where I thought I got it, an answer, and then a whole new dimension of the sixteenth century would emerge and off I would go. 

            The greatest challenge of this was not the concepts or the doctrines themselves.  They are somewhat straightforward.  What was challenging was seeing the world how Calvin viewed it, to see with his imagination.  That was hard, is hard.  For instance, in Calvin’s day a lightening storm was an omen, not a meteorological occurrence.  The most important difference, though, was what it meant to be human.  For him it was different than it is today. 

            To be human for Calvin was to be a soul first.  A soul first, and then a body; and this body and soul were occupied by a spirit.  A soul was the image of God impressed upon us at creation.  It was a trinity within us of memory, will, and understanding.  Today we have reduced what it means to be human to a mind, a body, and a neurotic tangle of emotions.  So when he calls faith a firm and certain understanding, in our world we can imagine that as merely a kind of knowledge.  Yet what I had to learn with Calvin was that in the sixteenth century, understanding was something the whole soul was engaged in.  Understanding wasn’t cognitive; it was soulful, tripartite, and much more than neurons firing. 

            Most importantly I needed to see how he imagined the will the understanding and the memory making progress, what happened to them in the Spirit of God engrafting us into Christ?  How was it we were to become more and more, and what was this more and more?

            Ultimately I was humbled by how rich Calvin’s imagination was and how limited was my imagination.  And it wasn’t that he was smarter or more creative- although that was certainly true.  In the end it was his time.  In the sixteenth century people imagined what it meant to be human in ways that were much more than what we do today.  What was the more was so much more than I was prepared to imagine.

            Over the years, when I have bumped into this in other writers and other times and eras, I laugh and think of blowing glass.  In the time of the Roman Empire, glass blowing had been elevated to an exquisite art and was so common that all levels of society were able to enjoy its beauty.  And then the barbarians came.  (I always have to insert that my family lineage would have been counted here- barbarian.)  The barbarians came and sacked Rome and thus began the long decline and fall of the Roman Empire.  And with it went glass blowing.

            We simply forgot how to do it.  There were no glass blowers in the West for nearly 800 years.  It just didn’t happen.  We forgot how to think of sand and heat and air and sulfur as good things to put together. And then in the Renaissance, the rebirth of the Greek and Roman world, glass blowing was rediscovered. 

            It wasn’t that we didn’t know what glass was, we just didn’t know anymore to imagine glass as being blown.  We forgot.

            Reading Proverbs today is a challenge for this reason.  We have forgotten what a world looks like with a spiritual dimension, a world before worlds, a light before light, a time before time.  To follow Wisdom as she moves through the days of creation is lovely, and we can rejoice with the idea that creation was good and that everyone liked us in the beginning.  But to imagine the heavens, the realms of angelic light, to stride with the first of creation, is not something we can do.

            Now this wasn’t always the case.  There have been times in the church where we have looked at creation with this kind of imagination, the kind described in proverbs.  When Augustine commented on the days of creation and he was faced with the challenge of explaining how God separated light from dark on the first day and yet created the sun, moon, and stars on the fourth day, when asked "What was this light before there were the lights?"  Augustine said, "There is an angelic light and an angelic darkness that is super-structure of creation, a kind of spiritual foundation as it were."  That was sixteen hundred years ago.

            About three hundred years ago we started to forget; we forgot how to imagine the world could be in such terms; we forgot how to blow glass as it were.

            So when wisdom says, the Lord created me at the beginning, we can understand it sequentially, but we are not really ready to imagine what the world looks like this way.  What would the world look like if it had within and around it a spirit?  What if there were angels, “millions of spiritual creatures [who] walk the earth unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep: all these with ceaseless praise his works behold both day and night?”  If we thought of things this way it wouldn’t be hard to understand John Milton as this was the way he imagined creation; these were his words; he was writing in the 1660s. 

            In his Paradise Lost he describes the time Proverbs speaks of.  Yet instead of it being a kind of glorious tour of jobs well done, for Milton, he saw this time as a brawl in heaven, a fight for the redemption of creation.  Like our passage, Milton was seeking to describe what happened before anything happened, the time before time, the world before there was earth. 

            Mainly he described it as long arguments, debates, and battles.  Yet, in his imagination he described one of the greatest images of Christ.  He paints the picture of Jesus in the midst of the angelic debate about what to do with the creation now that Satan was speeding its doom.  Here in the midst of this the Son of God stands up and says, and speaks to the father praising all the grace that has been bestowed upon humankind, how easily it is found and ready for all needs.  And then he says, but once they have fallen to sin, they will have no way to find it, no hope of enjoying all the good things given.  And then he says, “Atonement for himself or offering meet, indebted and undone, hath none to bring: behold me then, me for him, life for life I offer, on me let thine anger fall; account me man; I for his sake will leave thy bosom, and this glory next to thee freely put off, and for him lastly die well pleased.”

            The poetry may not please our ears, but the image is so glorious.  Before Adam and Eve fall to temptation, before the snake says, you won’t die, before there was death, the Son rises and says, me for him.  That is how it must be.  And I am ready.

            Some could say this is just Milton, or Proverbs is just being poetic, not literal, but what if that is just the only voice we have now that we long lost the imagination to see the image of God in us, the angelic structure of life, the trinity as it were?  What if there is a whole part of life we have stopped seeing?

            On Trinity Sunday it seems obligatory to speak of what cannot be told, to describe what cannot be seen.  Yet, what if there are whole parts of life we can see that we have just forgotten?

            In our Romans passage, a passage we’ve heard again and again, there is a glaring image we cannot see today, or we struggle to see today because we just no longer imagine life this way.  Paul writes “we are justified by faith, we have peace, we stand in grace, we boast, we hope, we suffer, we endure, and we have a Holy Spirit poured into our hearts.”  While he never says I or each or everyone that is how we read this.  We read his words from limit of one.  I am justified, I have peace, I stand in grace, I boast, I hope and on and on.      Deep into the research on Calvin I saw the real reason I was not appreciating what he was trying to convey: I was imagining the individual only, and not the church.  The more wasn’t the individual, it was a "we", it was an "us", it was "our" progress.  What I could see was what I didn’t know how to imagine: the more was not more for me, the more and more was what we become, not me.

            When I left the holiness tradition and became a Presbyterian the greatest gain for me was to lose the weight of expectation.  It had been a kind of hyper fear for the progress of the soul.  Everyone needed to achieve a level of holiness.  Casting off this weight I reveled as young people will in misguided freedom.  But at the same time, slowly, but surely, I came to see that it was not what I become, but what we become.

            Paul wrote of justification not to a person, but to a church.  We are a church.  This is what we will become, this is the more.  This is the more that will sanctify us, redeem us, reconcile us.  This is the more that will challenge us to be good men and women, good husbands and wives, good mothers and father, good sons and daughters.  This is the more we cannot conjure on our own.  Yet, even today we cannot see it.  We cannot see the church as something more than an extension of ourselves.

            Trinity Sunday is about the mystery of our faith.  Here is the mystery for today: we are made one more and more, we are engrafted into Christ even unto one in the power of the Holy Spirit.  To live this mystery we cannot proceed until we see what “we” means.  Someday we will see it.  Someday we will remember it.  Someday we will blow some glass.  Amen.