A Fourth Church Sermon by Calum I. MacLeod

May 25, 2003 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Chosen

Calum I. MacLeod
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 98
Genesis 35:9–15
John 15:12–17

It’s nice to see so many of you in church this morning. I thought Chicago disappeared to Lake Geneva on Memorial Day, but I see that at least some of you have stayed in town.

Memorial Day this weekend. I understand it traditionally marks the beginning of summer. For some odd reason, I believe I am now allowed to wear white pants. That’s something I never really got—the prohibition on white clothing before Memorial Day. I think Dana Ferguson told me that first, actually. So it’s the time for cookouts and barbecues, for baseball games and white clothes and Monday off.

When it comes to this time of year, I find myself asking that thorny old question we use at Christmas: “What’s the reason for the season?” I looked into some of the history just for my own benefit, to learn about Memorial Day, and discovered its roots as Decoration Day, the day when the graves of the war dead would be cleaned up and decorated by family, particularly dating from after the Civil War. The heart of this weekend is a remembrance of the war dead.

It’s very interesting for me, culturally, how differently that is done here than in the United Kingdom. Our equivalent of Memorial Day is called Remembrance Day. It’s always the Sunday closest to November 11, the day of the Armistice in 1918, the end of the First World War. Everyone wears red poppies as a sign of remembrance, the poppies representing the flowers in the fields of France where the First World War was fought. It’s a time of great solemnity. In churches throughout the land people stand during church services and hold a minute of silence in remembrance. The famous words of poet Nicholas Binyon are read.

They shall not grow old
as we that are left grow old.
Age shall not weary them,
nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun,
and in the morning,
we shall remember them.

Sometimes there’s tension around that day. A struggle between those two things of remembering those who gave of themselves for freedom and wondering at what point does it become a glorification of war. It is, I think, an important thing for us to live in that tension at this time as we still know the reality of conflict in Iraq.

Throughout the United Kingdom are monuments in the town squares and city centers, monuments to the war dead. And often on those monuments will be these words: “Greater love has no one than this. Than that they lay down their life for their friends.” These words of Jesus are a beautiful lyrical statement about the implications of the Christian faith. It strikes me as something of a shame that so often those words are allied to remembrance of war.

And so I want to reflect a little on what that text might mean for us today. But I want to do it obliquely. I want to do it from a different approach—by looking at some other words of Jesus in that text. Jesus said, “You did not choose me, but I chose you.” I think that there is something counterintuitive for us when we hear these words, particularly in twenty-first century American Protestant culture, where so often it seems that relationship with God begins with the decision for Christ, the response to the altar call, choosing to follow. And yet Jesus says, “You did not choose me, but I chose you.”

So what does it mean to be chosen by God in Jesus Christ? I know we enter dangerous territory here as Presbyterians when we use the language of chosenness, of election. The dread word predestination raises its head for us this morning. For those of you who are maybe visiting, I just want you to know that Fourth Church did not import some ghastly Scottish Calvinist today to preach at you about predestination. My own impulse to think about this partly comes from the fact that I do many of the new member orientation classes here at Fourth Presbyterian Church and we have many people coming from different backgrounds. I would say that in about 90 percent of the classes, someone, normally from a Lutheran background, asks the dread question, “Ah, but what about ’predestination’?”

What they mean by that is a doctrine that was formulated out of an understanding of some of John Calvin’s writings developed mainly in the seventeenth century in which it was understood that God, because of God’s power and knowledge, must know and therefore have decided before time that some would be saved and some would be damned. Some would be part of God’s plan for eternity and others would be lost.

Almost as soon as that doctrine was developed, it was satirized by writers and poets. In a famous poem, Robert Burns, Scottish poet, satirizes it. The poem is called “Holy Willie’s Prayer.” Burns wrote the poem imagining how Holy Willie (who is based on a real character, an elder in the local church) would pray. This is the first stanza. (The original Scottish words that Burns wrote and that a Chicago audience would find particularly difficult is in brackets.)

Oh Thou who (wha) in the Heavens dost dwell
Who (wha) as it pleases best yourself (thysel’),
Sends one (ane) to heaven and ten to hell
Al (A’) for Thy glory,
And not for any good (ony guid) or ill
They’ve done before (afore) thee.

In a satirical sense, that’s a classic statement of the arbitrariness of that understanding of predestination. William Placher is an American theologian who recently wrote a very fine book called The Domestication of Transcendence. He subtitles it How Thinking about God Went Wrong. The argument he makes is that in the seventeenth century, in the context of Enlightenment rationality, people took Calvin’s understanding of how God chooses to love humanity and forced it into a system that limited God by choosing certain decrees of God.

It’s satirized again in another fine poem, which I excerpted for you this morning and quoted at the front of your bulletin. Edwin Muir, a twentieth-century Scottish poet described what had happened. He said that God had become

three angry letters in a book,
and there the logical hook
on which the mystery is impaled and bent
into an ideological instrument.

An attempt to understand God’s love and God’s choosing us had been deformed into an instrument to be used against certain people. Who was elect and who was not? That became the religious issue that people cared about. It became about judgment, about superiority, about exclusivity.

And yet Jesus said, “You did not choose me, but I chose you.”

That concept, that theme of chosenness is one that runs right through our scriptures from the Old Testament into the New. In the Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures, God creates a relationship with the children of Israel, first through individuals through our common father Abraham and then with Isaac. And, in our story from the Old Testament this morning, with Jacob, whom God gives a new name: “You will be called Israel.” A new name, a new community, a promise to a people, a promise in the Exodus of freedom from oppression. “You will be my people,” says God. “You will be my people and I will be your God”—right through to the prophets: “Do not be afraid, for I have redeemed you, I have called you by name, you are mine.”

“You did not choose me,” said Jesus, “but I chose you.”

Gail O’Day, one of the commentators on this passage, writes that here Jesus reminds the disciples, including the readers (that’s us!), that their place with Jesus is a result of his initiative, not theirs. That, friends, is grace, not predestination in that God cares for some and not others.

John Leith, one of the finest interpreters of the Reformed tradition in the United States says this: “Predestination means that human life is rooted in the will and intention of God.”

God intends this. Like the great modern prayer from the Iona Community that gives thanks to God who “made the world and meant it.”

God means this to be. God means us to be. It’s not about you or me or our denomination and how we are doing and we’re fine and others are not. Leith goes on: “Our relationship with God lies not first in the decision of individuals or the community, but in the election of God.” God’s choice is first. That is grace. Leith loves this scripture. “We love because God loved us first.” And our faith is a response to that love, itself a gift of God’s grace in which God opens our eyes and our imagination to see God with us, Emannuel. Even despite our lack of deserving that.

Go back to Calvin. In his book The Eternal Predestination of God, he writes of God’s love like this: “That it is a love that persistently and invincibly pursues the distraught and the alienated.” Those are words of comfort for this morning. That God will pursue us in love even at our most distraught or alienated. A word of comfort, it is also a word of challenge in our chosenness.

Do you know the old story about Goldstein who is 92? He survived the pogroms in Poland. Survived the concentration camps, went through dozens of other persecutions of the Jews, and at the end of his life, he prays, “Lord, isn’t it true that we are your chosen people?” “Yes,” a heavenly voice replies, ’the Jews are my chosen people.” “Well,” replies Goldstein, “isn’t time you chose someone else?”

To be chosen is not to be given easy grace or to languish triumphantly and exclude others. There is a cost involved—what Bonhoeffer called the cost of discipleship. For we are chosen and freed by God’s love so that we in turn might love, we in turn might serve, that we in turn might give. That each day in small but important ways that we would lay down our lives for our friends.

Jesus said, “Greater love has no one than this. Than that they lay down their life for their friends.” And Jesus says, “I did it.” So today this is not glorifying death, this is not a manifesto for war to look after your own; this is about the content of who we are called to become in the one who loved us even unto suffering and death on a cross. And as usual, it is put most beautifully by the poets and the hymn writers. A new hymn for you this morning that we’re going to sing after the service is printed in your bulletin. John Bell of the Iona Community wrote it. Second verse:

We rejoice to be God’s chosen,
to be gathered to God’s side
not to build a pious ghetto
or be steeped in selfish pride;
but to celebrate the goodness
of the One who sets us free
from the smallness of our vision
to become, not just to be.

Thanks be to God. Amen.