Reformed Evangelical Synod of America

Author Archive

One question our Synod has fielded in the past is “Why the Heidelberg Catechism?”.

As our Synodical work progresses, we will be issuing a revision of the Heidelberg Catechism adapted for our own use. But why not begin de novo?

Hopefully our introduction we provide to a work on the Heidelberg helps answer that question.

The Heidelberg Catechism reflects the fruit not only of that generation but represents a crystallization of thought within the Western Christian tradition itself. It stands as witness to the “Catholicity” of the doctrine of Justification by Faith available to all those who find their hope in Jesus Christ alone through faith alone. In our day of increasingly “churchless” Christianity, the Catechism also bears witness to a paradigm for the Christian life that emerges from the Baptismal Covenant.

With Baptism as the starting point, our faith resides in the objective promise of God through the Church (the Body of Christ in its witness). The other alternative is that we are left disastrously to the subjective experience of the autonomous individual who considers himself free to interpret the Bible however he may will and yet claim to be a “Christian”. In other words, the Heidelberg stands as document that connects the primitive catholic tradition with the challenges of our own day.

For these reasons, our Synod builds upon this classic symbol of the faithful and hopes with it to forge a new Reformed and Evangelical consensus. We pray that such a consensus results in a vibrant contemporary mission and ministry for this day and age.

Scripture Readings for this Lord’s Day:

Joshua 24:1-2a,14-18
Psalm 71
Hebrews 11:24-28
John 6:60-69

Our readings from God’s Word today have been about how we answer the question – where will we go to find LIFE?

As Joshua talked to the people who entered the Promised Land, he called them not to serve the false gods their fathers served in Egypt. Find life in the One who has delivered you, Joshua said.

Moses, the Book of Hebrews reminds us, “chose to be mistreated with the people of God rather than enjoy the temporary blessings of sin”. By faith he turned his back on comfort and security and took God at His Word and was delivered from the judgement brought by the Angel of Death.

Jesus’ disciples this day in the Synagogue had plenty of examples throughout Scripture of taking God at His Word…trusting God to do the impossible and bearing the shame of following the Lord when the supposedly “smart bet” was on the power of the forces of this world.

Jesus has been looking them in the eye and telling them that unless they were fed by Jesus Himself becoming united with them in that mystery St. Paul calls “Christ in you the hope of glory” (Col 1: 27), then there was no hope for them.

Now, even Jesus’ own disciples are grumbling just like the unbelieving Jewish leaders were!

It’s important to remember what has gone on earlier in Chapter 6 – Jesus has fed the 5000 in the Wilderness with a miraculous display of God’s Power… then Jesus has walked on the water.

They loved Jesus for doing these things!

In other words, they loved the things Jesus could do for them. They loved it when Jesus put on a good show. They loved having a Messiah at their disposal! They loved it when Jesus would pour out God’s blessing on them but when it came to being united with the one who is Truly God and Truly Man – they rebelled at that and were repelled by that.

And Jesus doesn’t water His words down to keep them around. He wants them to know that eternal life only comes to those who eat Jesus’ flesh and drink Jesus’ blood. “Eating His flesh” and “Drinking His blood” which we do sacramentally in the Lord’s Supper means to become one with Jesus and it refers to what happens when Jesus in His Ascension pours out the Holy Spirit. It is through the Holy Spirit that Jesus’ glorified Body becomes the source and wellspring of eternal life for everyone who is united to Jesus. Through the indwelling life of the glorified Christ applied to us through the ministry of the Holy Spirit, we become people who are alive in Christ instead of remaining those who will die in Adam.

We have a perspective these disciples didn’t have. We have the entire New Testament and what I consider Paul the Apostle’s reflection on this topic in Colossians 1 to help us understand… but Jesus didn’t let them off the hook. He let them know He wasn’t talking about “cannibalism” or something earthly and carnal. He was talking about a new world coming where, to enter it, these disciples would have to be transformed by Jesus. But evidently even His disciples weren’t ready to hear about that.

They wanted blessings, but they didn’t want anything that would require them to become something they weren’t already. It goes back to thinking they were already fitted for heaven. Jesus says no, you’re not! You can only be fitted for eternal life if you are drawn by the Father and united with Jesus Christ’s lifegiving existence in ways they couldn’t – and didn’t care to – comprehend.

Jesus notes their unbelief – He essentially says “If that offends you, what’s going to happen when you see me ascend back to heaven?”

Jesus as the Son of Man is the fulfillment of Daniel’s prophecy in Daniel 7:1-13. Jesus is the Son of Man whose kingdom will overcome every other kingdom of the world and before whom the nations will bow! But Jesus tells us that His invincible kingdom will not come without Him, the Son of Man, first being lifted up on the Cross through His suffering and agonies on the cross. There will be an ascension – and incomprehensibly to the Jews – a shameful death along the way. (see John 3:14)

If there’s one thing they didn’t want more than to have to be transformed to be fitted for eternal life, they didn’t want to risk their eternal destiny on a Messiah who says He is going to ultimately conquer – but after a Cross. Nor do they want to be reminded that to benefit from our Lord’s Ascension, they must consider themselves sick and dying like those sinful Israelites in the Wilderness! After all, for Jesus to be lifted up like the Serpent in the Wilderness, those looking to Him must consider themselves as weakened, sick, vulnerable, and sinful as those dying Israelites who were healed there! And so they reject Him just like His enemies.

Jesus explains that this unbelief has resulted because these people have not been given the gift of believing in Jesus from the Father (v. 64). When Jesus told the people that they must not have been chosen by the Father to follow Jesus because of their unbelief, that was the “straw that broke the camel’s back”! Jesus’ words strike at their own concept of themselves as the elect People of God by virtue of their lineage. St. Paul discusses this topic at length in Romans 9-11. Here Jesus simply states that trusting in Him is the Gift of God, of grace and not of works (cf. John 6:29)

Our Lord then asks the Twelve whether they will leave too…

St. Peter asks “To whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life! You are the Holy One of God!”

By calling Jesus the “Holy One”, Peter echoes today’s Psalter selection – Psalm 71 – and ascribes to Jesus the faithfulness and blessing Israel ascribed to Yahweh, the Lord:

Your righteousness, O God, reaches the high heavens. You who have done great things, O God, who is like you? You who have made me see many troubles and calamities will revive me again; from the depths of the earth you will bring me up again. You will increase my greatness and comfort me again. I will also praise you with the harp for your faithfulness, O my God; I will sing praises to you with the lyre, O Holy One of Israel. Psalm 71:19-22

Just who ARE we saying Jesus is when we call Him “Lord”? If Jesus is truly “Lord” in the fullness of the language of scripture, He is truly the one in whom the fullness of Yahweh dwells bodily (see Col. 2:9). Only in that way can He be the “Holy One of God” who is the “Holy One of Israel”. As such, He is the One who exists for His own purposes and not for ours. In His grace, His own purposes effect our salvation and blessing, but those mercies flow from His purpose to bless. They are not ours to command as we will.

Many who call themselves disciples, pastors, ministers today are like those who abandoned our Lord. They love the idea of Jesus for what they can receive. There are ministers who are “in it” for the money no matter what part of their soul must be for sale. There are many disciples who will follow Jesus because they hope He is a Messiah who’ll fill their belly, fatten their wallet, and build their (our!) little empires.

But tell them that everything must change about us, that even our ability to believe is the gift of God, that before the eternal glory is revealed, the agony, humiliation, and pain of a cross must be carried. Tell someone they must be born again and repent more profoundly than they have ever known before… and they will find another pastor who will massage their ears to avoid hard words.

Suddenly we reveal that, to us, Jesus Christ is not the Holy one of God. For us, if we will not repent, we show that we considered Jesus to be a Messiah at our disposal and the heavenly gifts at our command. We deny by our lack of repentance that our Lord has come for His own purposes and we are called to humble ourselves before Him!

Blessed are those who can hear these hard words of Jesus and not turn away!

Blessed are those who realize – there’s no place else to go to find eternal life!

Blessed are those who are willing to have their sins and shortcomings removed and to be filled with all the fullness of God!

Bishop Huckaby’s sermon on this topic is available here: To Whom Shall We Go?

Also available:

M. F. Sadler The Gospel According To Saint John

St. Andrew’s Church is the Episcopal Base of Bishop Chuck Huckaby.

Here is a document provided people who attend St. Andrew’s Church to describe the church’s – and this synod’s – vision for discipleship. Local pastors are free to express this in their own words as we see here, but all share these common concerns:

Making Disciples At St. Andrew’s Church

“Catechesis” (whether it’s called that or not) is anything we do to transmit the Christian faith from one person to another! Teaching the Christian faith to others and making disciples is what Jesus told us to do in the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20) and what Pastors and mature Christians are required to do when planting a church according to St. Paul (2 Tim. 2:2; Titus 2:3-5). It’s our duty to teach the Lord’s Word wherever we are and go (Deut 6:4-7).

It is the Pastor’s duty to see that the saints of God are equipped to fulfill these commands (Eph. 4: 11-16). Here are the four corporate ways I plan to do that in St. Andrew’s Church: through Worship, Structured Bible Reading, the Catechism and the Psalms.

A. Our Worship is structured to teach us how to live the Christian Life… To enter God’s Presence humbly and with praise, to repent of our sins, to hear God’s promise of forgiveness, to reverently hear the Word of God, to confess the sufficiency of Jesus Christ in all our lives, to move from hearing God’s Word, to prayer, then offering ourselves to Christ and being fed and transformed by Him – and then being sent out into the World on mission.

B. Structured Bible Reading in worship means that as God’s People we will seek to read large amounts of God’s Word weekly and specifically cover the Life of our Lord Jesus Christ. My preaching will aim to help us be conformed to Christ’s Image (Rom. 8: 29) and to encourage us by God’s grace to present our bodies to Him as living sacrifices in response to His Lordship (Rom. 12:1,2). This method focuses on the story line of the Bible.

C. Catechism is a way to train Christians by way of question and answer. This method is slightly different than the catechism involved in reading the Bible’s narrative of Christ’s Life. It focuses on a summary of the Bible as a whole and “doctrine” instead of Bible stories. Ultimately we have to systematize the stories of the Bible into our doctrine. The catechism we will use focuses on the essentials of the Christian Life: Sin, Salvation, and Christian Living and the 10 Commandments, Apostle’s Creed, and Lord’s Prayer.

D. The Psalms composed the original hymn book of the Church but have been pushed out of our praise and worship. We will, by God’s grace both read the Psalms and learn how to sing God’s inspired hymns as part of our worship so that we can encourage “one another with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.” Eph. 5:19.

Yesterday evening, my wife and I were doing our evening devotions from the simplified office of our Synod’s provisional Book of Common Prayer. We read ahead to today’s commemoration of the Anglican Sister Constance and her Companions who lived, served, and died in Christ within a few hours of our home. In a world filled with secular heroes, and anti heroes, it is good from time to time to reflect on the lives of the saints to deepen our own understanding of faithfulness to Christ in the midst of a world devoted to “self”. May the Lord bless this commemoration to your spirit.

In Christ,

+Chuck Huckaby
Bishop
Reformed Evangelical Synod of America

In 1878 Memphis, Tennessee was struck by an epidemic of yellow fever, which so depopulated the area that the city lost its charter and was not reorganized for fourteen years. Almost everyone who could afford to do so left the city and fled to higher ground away from the river. There were in the city several communities of nuns, Anglican and Roman Catholic, who had the opportunity of leaving, but chose to stay and nurse the sick. Most of them, thirty-eight in all, were themselves killed by the fever. One of the first to die (on September 9, 1878) was Constance, head of the (Anglican) Community of St. Mary.

COLLECT
God of compassion, we give you thanks and praise for the heroic witness of Constance and her companions, who, in a time of plague and pestilence, were steadfast in their care for the sick and dying, and loved not their own lives, even unto death: Inspire in us a like love and commitment to those in need, following the example of our Savior Jesus Christ; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, now and forever. Amen.

John Nevin’s History and Genius of the Heidelberg Catechism is a short yet powerful work that introduces the Heidelberg Catechism in its original German context.

In the American experience, the Heidelberg Catechism is normally interpreted in correlation with other confessions. In the German Reformed setting in America, it stood alone as the sole confession of that church. That was a unique situation. In Hungary, the Heidelberg Catechism is held in conjunction with the 2nd Helvetic Confession and in churches descended from Holland, that catechism is juxtaposed with the Belgic Confession and the Canons of the Synod of Dordt. American Presbyterians while holding to the Westminster standards often esteemed the Heidelberg catechism highly alongside those documents.

In the original context of the Palatinate, the Heidelberg can be said to be held in conjunction with the prevailing Protestant confession of that day – Melancthon’s Augsburg Confession! When the catechism was tested for it’s orthodoxy, it was by Melancthon’s document that the catechism was judged.

As the Reformed Evangelical Synod of America continues to form, we will adopt a modern language version of the Heidelberg and it will be held in conjunction not only with the historic creeds but also with our own Articles of Religion. These articles are based on the 39 Articles of the Anglican church with our own concerns thoroughly expressed.

Our intention in following this pattern is to create a synod where the Heidelberg Catechism can be lived out in a context very similar to that which formulated the document – a churchly body committed to the historic faith of the church across the ages and renewed in the age of Reformation.

For us, the History and Genius of the Heidelberg Catechism are too wonderful to be left in the past. They must be fleshed out in contemporary mission!

+Chuck Huckaby
Bishop
Reformed Evangelical Synod of America

Are you satisfied with who you are?

Are you happy with the way your life is?

If you aren’t would you say your life just needs a “mild tweak” to nudge it forward into “perfection”?

If it needs “something more” – how radical a change are you willing to admit you need?

As the Lord’s Day lections for Proper 19 in Year B continue the Church’s readings through John 6 (John 6:41-51), we find our Lord’s encounter with the Jewish leaders who despise His assertion “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” In our Lord’s response we find some of His most open assertions of His own diety and exclusive claims as the unique Savior of not only God’s ancient covenant people, but also, all nations of the world.

In dismissing their arguments against Him as the fountain of salvation because they recognize him outwardly as truly man but not as He who is truly Immanuel, God with us, He equates the logic they find so convincing to mere whining – the opposite of the blessing they should pronounce upon the manifestation of God’s true heavenly bread.

Jesus’ hearers are not condemned for their failure to penetrate the mysteries of the Holy Trinity – instead they are criticized for their spiritual presumption. In a practical sense, they denied their need for a Messiah who offered more than a superficial restructuring of the failed Old Covenant economy. The failure of that economy becomes the focus of passages such as Galatians 3:10-12 and the extended argument of the Book of Hebrews.

To the holy nation which is so clearly suffering the effects of God’s curse for their sin (Deut. 28:16ff) and even in Jesus’ Day only experiencing the preliminary blessings of the restoration promised by the prophets and yet to be fully revealed in the New Covenant (Ezek. 36:24ff), Jesus the Messiah offers more than they are willing to hope for! To those whose wedding day joy is about be stifled by the absence of wine, Jesus turns the water into wine (John 2). He offers the life that characterizes the love, joy, peace and transfiguring power of heaven itself to those who believe Yahweh only offers them some pale extension of the life known through Adam (John 3).

Their sin is in underestimating the grace of God and the power of God. They presume that they as an accursed people already have the fullness of light (John 1) and that they are not blind but are able to discern what the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ requires of them and has planned for them (John 9). Therefore Jesus says in John 6:49 “Your fathers ate manna in the wilderness and they died.”

Our Old Testament  lection from 1 Kings 19:3-9 is one of the many lessons from Scripture demonstrating our Lord’s point. When Israel was on  the verge of a complete apostasy under King Ahab, God’s prophet Elijah is raised up. Though empowered by the living God to defeat the prophets of Baal (1 Kings 18), in the hour of his need and human fear and weakness even the prophet who was taken up directly into heaven must be fed by bread from heaven. That manna which fed a generation in the wilderness did not suffice and God’s gracious sustenance from the Angel of the Lord’s own hand must be given for a new day.

Presumption on God’s grace from the past had become an obstacle to entering into the blessing Jesus comes into the world to establish. Presumption on past grace, then, means that they had established a new idolatry that trusted their present status quo as sufficient, as is, to inherit God’s blessing without the Angel of the Lord coming to not only give bread from heaven but to be the bread of heaven.

The One who becomes for us the bread of heaven unto eternal life gives Himself to those who trust not in the nourishment present in themselves or available to them by any natural means. He is the bread of eternal life to all those who feast upon His flesh through faith (6:47). Unlike the former bread given in the wilderness, this bread does not spoil by nightfall – nor do those who partake of this bread ever die (6:50). Like the bush through which God Almighty revealed His covenant name (Exodus 3:1ff) was not consumed, He who is heaven’s bread is likewise never consumed because He is the living bread ever pulsating with life in and of Himself and renewing  with heaven’s life all those who commune with Him.

Presumption on past blessing prevents present grace. It is true for us as well as these self-satisfied grumblers. We are in constant danger of embracing an idolatrous view of our own strength, our own spiritual capacities, and the status of our relationship with God and deny the radical transformation yet required in us. We too are an accursed people without hope except that which comes from feeding upon Jesus Christ.

This day there are those who trust in a distant baptism or a prior religious experience they equate with the operations of God’s Spirit.  Yet they walk in the way of sin and darkness. They declare themselves Christians and yet reveal by their lives they have not been known by God or been taught by Him. They – as much as Jesus’ hearers then – are in danger or worshipping an illusion of spiritual security. Instead all people are called to examine themselves and feed by faith upon Jesus Christ the Risen Lord and the bread of Heaven come down.

Will you give yourself to the One who can transform you radically? Will you lay down your life for Him?

A sermon with study notes is available here: Presumption On Past Blessing Prevents Present Grace