Sunday, October 8, 2017 | 8:00, 9:30, and 11:00 a.m.

Depraved and Confused

“Always Reforming”
A Sermon Series Marking the 500th Anniversary of the Reformation

Matt Helms
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 51:1–9
Isaiah 64:1–8
Romans 3:9–20

We know too well from experience how often we fall, even when our intention is good. Our reason is exposed to so many forms of delusion, is liable to so many errors, stumbles on so many obstacles, is entangled by so many snares, that it is ever wandering from the right direction.

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion

Before we begin, I want to send best wishes and encouragement from afar to all of the marathon runners out there today—and in particular a special shout-out to all of those who are running on behalf of Chicago Lights. The Chicago Lights Marathon Team is an incredible group of forty-two people, one that includes seasoned pros as well as marathon first-timers like Shannon Kershner and Max Downham, who at age eighty-one decided to run in his first marathon to support the life-changing outreach of Chicago Lights. We are so proud of our team and are praying for their strength, endurance, and health as they join 45,000 other runners, many of whom are also running on behalf of other organizations that are seeking to make our city and world a better place.

But even as this day is filled with cheering and fanfare in our streets and the uniting of our city around the triumph of the human spirit, I think most of us still come here carrying in our hearts the weight of last Sunday night’s shooting in Las Vegas. It is a juxtaposition that seems to define this time that we live in as all of us, myself included, look for signs of hope in the wake of another national tragedy. We are left with hearts divided, wanting to believe in the better side of humanity while also left shaken by what it can do. In conversations with friends and colleagues this week, and in the service of lament we held here on Wednesday, I’ve seen a range of emotions: feelings of confusion, of sadness and grief, of renewed determination, of resignation, of anger, of helplessness. I’ve felt each one of those things at varying points this week, and my guess is that you have as well as we all continue to ask ourselves not just how something like this can occur, but why. There are no easy answers for questions that large, but I know that we’ll continue to search for answers as best we can, both as individuals and as a church. We will continue to try and be a light in this city, changing lives one at a time, using our faith as a guide, and we will continue to advocate for legislation that we believe will save lives. We know that no program or piece of legislation will ever be a panacea to all that is broken in our country and world, but we know the stakes are too high for us to sit back in resignation. Changing our culture of violence and brokenness starts with the transformation of each one of us to build a stronger, loving world shaped by Christ’s love and the power of God’s Holy Spirit, and it is to that idea that we turn now in our Second Lesson for the day: Romans 3:9–20.

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This Sunday marks the third week in our “Always Reforming” sermon series, in which we have been unpacking foundational beliefs within our Reformed theological heritage and what those beliefs mean for us today, all while looking forward to celebrating the 500th anniversary of the Reformation at the end of this month. The last two weeks have explored a belief in God’s “sovereignty”—God’s freedom to act in the world as God wishes—and a belief in the “priesthood of all believers”—a belief that holds, among other things, the idea that each of us has the potential to minister for God in our own lives. This week, however, we come to a more challenging topic: the doctrine of total depravity.

I’m betting that many of us would actually rather be out running in the marathon than spending time in worship thinking about total depravity. When I found out this was the topic I had been assigned, I took a cursory look at the marathon’s late registration policy; unfortunately, the registration window had closed months ago, so here we are. Our shared aversion to this topic comes from how we use the word depravity colloquially, I think. Total depravity isn’t a topic for church in our minds; it’s the realm of bachelor parties and college spring break in Cabo. But although I’m sure that Calvin would have had some choice words to say about those things, it may not surprise you to learn that he and other Reformers viewed the meaning of total depravity a bit differently.

The doctrine of total depravity is, at its core, a belief that human beings are unable to make themselves right with God through their own actions—that we are not able to fix our brokenness even despite our best intentions. This doctrine has roots that stretch back through Augustine’s concept of Original Sin—that humanity is born fallen and captive to sin—and through our second lesson from Paul, among other biblical texts, that even a close adherence to God’s Law would not be enough to make us right with God. For Calvin, for Augustine, for Paul, and for the psalmists that Paul cites, this means that God must act first in the relationship with all of creation in order for that relationship to be truly restored.

It’s important to note here that total depravity—and the doctrine of original Sin for that matter—is not trying to assert that humanity is incapable of doing good on its own. We see examples of goodness around us every day, sometimes even in the darkest of circumstances—I’ve been touched by some of the powerful stories of heroism coming out of the Las Vegas shooting, or from the response of community members in the wake of flooding from the hurricanes that have ravaged Puerto Rico, Florida, Texas, and others. To believe in total depravity is not to deny humanity’s capacity for goodness; it is to deny any claim humanity might make to perfection and control. In the words of Paul, shortly after our second lesson: “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”.

This is heavy stuff for a Marathon Sunday morning, but it is one of the crucial building blocks of understanding our Reformed theology today. Without acknowledging our own brokenness, acknowledging our imperfections, acknowledging that each of us have let God down not just through things that we’ve done, but also through all that we’ve not done, we close ourselves off from God. It’s why we confess our sin each week here in worship, to remind ourselves that we have fallen short, not just as individuals or the church, but as humanity.

Sadly, though we don’t need many reminders of the brokenness that exists all around us, they keep appearing anyway. One of the more sobering exchanges I heard this past week was a question about how the kids in our Monday night Tutoring program reacted to the news about the shooting in Las Vegas—the question was met with a shrug; that hearing gunshots ring out in the street was already a potential everyday reality for most of these kids. That’s brokenness. We turn on the news and see the struggling relief efforts in Puerto Rico, that one out of every eight people have electricity and barely over half have clean water, and yet our country’s bureaucracy has hampered relief efforts to date. That’s brokenness, too. We need not look far to find other examples of systemic brokenness in our country: the continual widening of the gap between rich and poor, a collective loss of faith in all of our institutions, or the fact that there are dozens of for-profit prisons in this country, ones that are publicly traded on the stock market—making billions of dollars annually from the detention of tens of thousands of prisoners. When Calvin and others spoke of ‘total depravity’, they were not referring only to individual sins, but our collective, systemic sin—that part of us that try as we might to avoid it, we are inextricably caught up in.

It’s enough to make us feel resigned—to throw up our hands and say there’s nothing that can be done—and truly, if taken on its own, the doctrine of total depravity does invoke a sense of futility and depression. But it’s important to remember that this doctrine does not stand on its own in Reformed theology—because we believe that God acted on our behalf in the person of Christ, we believe we are no longer separated from God and bound to our collective sin. Though we are broken, the promise of Christ is that we can be remade.

This was Paul’s message to the Romans—that through our faith, each of us may be saved from the worst parts of ourselves. That we must ask God’s Holy Spirit, again and again, to recreate our hearts in order that we might reflect the image of God—imago Dei—that each of us were created in. Through our faith in Christ, we do not believe that humanity is bound to sin any longer; but likewise we try to be clear-eyed about the role that it still plays in our lives. As Presbyterian theologian Donald McKim puts it: “We seek our own wills rather than God’s will. Without God’s help to give us new wills and hearts and minds in Jesus Christ, we will always choose the sinful path. Our only hope is for God’s gracious love to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves—give us wills to have faith and trust in God.”

This sort of guiding and reshaping is exactly what Isaiah was writing about in our first lesson, notably in the wake of a great national tragedy for Israel in the Exile. Facing an uncertain future upon the Israelite people’s return to the land, Isaiah lifts up a heartfelt prayer to God in the closing chapters of his book. “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,” Isaiah writes. “We have all become like one who is unclean; we all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind take us away. . . . yet, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.”

This image of clay and potter appears multiple times throughout the Bible, both in the prophets and in Paul’s work. For me, and perhaps for you, the thought of clay conjures up memories of being back in elementary school, pressing and shaping and modeling this malleable material until it was exactly as I wanted it before firing it in a kiln so that it would remain exactly as I intended. Being the potter is fun; you are in control, you can design and shape things as you see fit. As a closet control freak, I find a lot of satisfaction in that—I can ascribe to the myth that I can fix any problem on my own, that I alone hold the solutions, that I am not part of the problem myself. As a disciple of Jesus, however, I’m challenged to let go—because to believe in total depravity is to deny any claim we might make to perfection and control.

It is difficult to put ourselves in the mindset of clay rather than that of the potter, of allowing our lives to be shaped by someone other than ourselves. There is a passivity in that identity that sounds wholly unappealing. But in acknowledging our brokenness, and in opening ourselves up to being remade, in understanding our identity through the lens of God’s grace, our faith and belief that God can transcend our sinful nature demands hope and action from us. God responds to Isaiah’s desire to be remade by a promise, not just of recreation, but that our labor would not be in vain. Each one of us are called to participate in God’s recreation of all of creation, as we were reminded by Shannon last week as she discussed our Reformed understanding of the “priesthood of all believers.” “We are all a part of God’s priesthood,” she said. “We are all called to help each other see God’s presence, to know God’s comfort, to hear God’s challenges for our lives and for this world. We are not simply part-time helpers, or passive receivers of the programming, the ministry and mission of the church. Every single one of us is called to ministry. Every single person who follows God in the way of Jesus is called and sent out to be a minister, a missionary, and a servant of God, not just part-time but full-time, whatever our occupation might be. None of us is off the hook.”

As we look out at a world that sometimes seems irreparably broken, we believe that God has called each of us, imperfect and broken as we may be, to allow ourselves to be shaped as Christ’s disciples, and to bring about healing in whatever way that we can. The promise of God’s grace is that God wishes to remake us—and that means we are in turn called to remake the world through God’s help, one person, one life at a time. As I shared at the start, I still am struggling with feelings of helplessness, numbness, and resignation in the wake of yet another tragedy—the broken, sinful part of me that says “Why bother?” “How much difference could I possibly make in a country of 323 million people, or a world of over 7 billion?” But even though we cannot change the world on our own, we do not believe that we are on our own—we believe God is shaping both us and our world anew each day.

So, friends, as disciples of Christ, guided by compassion, empowered by the Holy Spirit, may each of us take up God’s call to be remade. May we be shaken from our apathy, sapped of our cynicism, and steeled against withdrawal. May we share God’s love with everyone we encounter, not just today or tomorrow, but every day, because we believe, deep down, that love is stronger than any of the hate and hurt we see in our world. May we not just hope for a better world, or count on others to build it for us, but may we each accept our call to participate in its recreation through God’s grace at work in our lives. That is the call that God extends to each of us, breaking through even our own depravity, for in God’s sovereignty our hope is assured. So thanks be to God for that gift—and thanks be to God for our call. Amen.