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Previously during Advent, I spoke of a teacher of mine who led a Bible Study, who I will again refer to as “Mr. Smith”. Mr. Smith was a member in the Presbyterian Church of America, which led to a deep fondness in him for the reformer Jean Calvin. I have found Calvin often evokes a great deal of emotion from people in one direction or another. We cannot, however, look past his impact on the Christian Faith as well as in our own Anglican heritage.
There was something Mr. Smith said about Calvin that I struggled with for years. He held up Calvin to us as someone who never changed his mind, as someone who always retained and remained true to his believes.
Whether we really want to say that’s true or not, it is a tempting thing to admire and want to emulate. We all want to be right. We all want to have the truth. If we never change our minds, it means we have always possessed that truth, at least if we, like Calvin, can make claim to be one of the most important theologians of all time.
Over the years, though, I’ve come to see the problems with Mr. Smith’s way of thinking on this. Remaining static in our thought not only makes us out to be something we are not, it also closes us from God’s influence over us. Our Faith is all about recognizing that we need healing and transformation, and that includes in our thoughts and in our minds.
Praising remaining the same also fails to recognize the journeys of two of our major figures in Faith, two people Calvin himself would have admired greatly. Those people are Paul and Peter, who we hear about in our readings today.
Paul, also known as Saul, goes from being a fervent oppressor of the church to one of the church’s great evangelists. This only occurs because Paul is open to his encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus and that openness allows him to change.
Peter too goes through an adjustment in his life of Faith. As a Disciple, he was known as the leader of the group. Then at Jesus’ greatest hour of need, he runs away scared and denies Jesus three times. Yet Jesus allows him the chance for repentance in the call to move away from his spirit of denial into accepting Jesus’ call to “feed His lambs.”
Our Faith is about change and transformation, and that is a good thing. Without that hope, Paul would have remained the most reviled person by the church instead of one of our heroes. Without the opportunity to turn back, Peter might have been swept away in the guilt of his denial and never become one of the greatest Apostles of the church, the head of the church in Jerusalem.
Without the grace of new life, we would be stuck in our sins and never have the chance to grow closer with God. We wouldn’t have the chance to make our way back to the Lord.
It’s easy to want to stay the same. There is comfort in that. There’s a sense of “rightness” in our ways if they never change. Yet as we see with Peter and Paul, transformation is necessary in our life with Jesus. The hope of that transformation is that we will move to rightness. The hope is that we will be able to turn into better people. The hope is that we will finally have the opportunity to actually come closer to God and be made one with our Lord.