Soft Knox
Joel 2:23-32; 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5

October 28, 2001

As we get closer to our 50th anniversary as Knox-Metropolitan United Church, it is appropriate on Reformation Sunday to consider why we are first of all "Knox." Historically, Knox Presbyterian Church gathered many of Scottish background and ancestry. Not all Knox Regina congregants were Scottish, of course, but it is from the Scottish Kirks that our minds were initially molded.

Listen to how Scottish Christians are described: "The Scots, for centuries, have defined themselves against England, their large neighbour to the south. In the Middle Ages, during the Great Schism when there were rival popes, the Scots took care to back the pope that England did not. For centuries, too, the Scots have been good Europeans, eager to adopt the latest fashions in thought from the Continent. Since the Reformation this has meant divinity professors trained first in France, later in Holland, and later still in Germany. Finally, also for centuries, Scotland's major export has been people, and links with the Scottish diaspora have served to keep Scottish theology unparochial" (Alistair Mason, "Scottish Christian thought," The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought [Oxford, 2000] 651-2).

Sounds like a bunch of Canadians-in-training to me! No wonder there are 64 or so Knox churches in the United Church of Canada today. John Knox was a popular person after whom to name a church - did he deserve such adulation? If we are still a reformed and reforming church, is there anything about John Knox to goad us forward?

The answer at first may well be No. The Reverend Dean Burns, the last Knox United pastor and along with Harry Mutchmor the architect of that courageous union of two downtown congregations 50 years back, earned his doctorate from New College, Edinburgh, outside of which stands a striking stone statue of John Knox. That is exactly where and how most Scottish intellectuals have wanted to keep Knox's memory and legacy - etched in stone and bolted in one place where they can keep an eye on it.

John Knox is not a romantic figure of the Scottish Reformation and its Presbyterian descendants, but he is the Scottish Reformation made flesh, for he is the product of a terrible time. We should not ignore him, even if we disdain what he became.

Born in 1513, John Knox eventually went to university at St. Andrew's in Fife. By 1536 he was ordained a priest, which is what you did if you did not want to be a farmer. That seductive Reformation stuff came filtering up from the Continent, and by 1547 Knox had become a Protestant, and an emphatic Protestant at that.

His first sermon minced no words attacking the Church of Rome and the Pope. This was not the most opportune time to preach such an anti-Catholic line for in a few months the French captured St. Andrew's and the Roman Catholic rulers sentenced Knox to two years' slave labour on galleys. They bullied him to make adorations to the Virgin Mary. It wasn't healthy exercise for Knox, but he was fortunate to be released early. He went back to England where he was received well and had considerable success preaching in Berwick.

Knox's problem in the next few years were with women named Mary: Mary of Guise, Mary Tudor, Mary Stuart. They were infamously staunch Roman Catholics, regents and queens, and women. Knox was compelled to flee in exile to Geneva where he found the work of John Calvin and the Reformed experiment to be the most idyllic center of Christ's reign on earth. In his last stint he pastored an English-speaking colony of refugees and engaged in some of his most important and vigourous writing.

Putting words down on paper can get you into trouble, as it often did for John Knox. He was vehemently opposed to the Catholic Mass and it was Mary, Queen of Scots' insistence upon receiving Mass at the court which drove him to some literary excesses. Knox argued the Reformed view that the Mass is a superficial and idolatrous substitute for the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, emphasizing the repeated sacrifice of Christ instead of understanding Christ's sacrifice on the cross as once-for-all-time. Knox also began the Puritan/Reformed practice of using common bread rather than wafers and sitting down instead of kneeling. Such are our roots.

But while he was in Geneva he wrote his most infamous treatise, The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. It targeted the Marys who had done harm to him and other Protestants, but he didn't know that Mary Tudor had died and Elizabeth, a Protestant, had come to the throne. Queen Elizabeth I, upon reading the essay, was not amused, and when Knox returned from Geneva did not allow him passage through England. Even John Calvin thought the piece was too extreme into its anti-feminism. Elizabeth remained cool to Calvin ever after, believing he should have intervened to stop the impetuous Knox.

Knox did return finally in 1559 to assume the pastorate of the Church of St. Giles in Edinburgh, where he remained until his death in 1572. Political intrigue, murder and assassination were the rule of the day, but the Reformed side eventually triumphed. The Scottish Parliament established Protestantism as the national religion in 1560. Knox's Scottish Confession is deemed by many to be better than the more famous Westminster Confession and his Book of Common Order remained the worship service book in Scotland for centuries.

We have virtually no common ground with John Knox today. Little of his theology would be found palatable and he certainly would not last a year as a United Church minister. He was a ferocious, fearless preacher who was exhilarating and embarrassing at the same time. When he knew the new husband of Queen Mary was in his church, he preached a sermon comparing the royal couple to King Ahab and Jezebel. He preached on the average for two hours, sometimes three. Women had no place in leadership in God's eyes and definitely not in his. No ecumenical text has ever dared to quote Knox, for he frankly would have none of it.

This is what Reformation is about: no gentle conversion, no school of "soft Knox," but a shot to the head and to the heart. John Knox lived in a violent time and one's faith proclaimed one's identity. No quarter could be given or you would be crushed. Not much different today, eh?

John Knox's basic principle of his Reformed faith was, however, one we must still maintain, if not recover. All that we do, all that we believe about God, all that we assume about ourselves comes from the word of God, the Scriptures. We're not talking about a fundamentalist pickiness over the details of the Bible, but the general attitude that we are not God and we get into serious trouble every time we pretend we are God. A Reformation of the 16th century, as well as the 21st century, must always begin from that point. John Knox says it bluntly, forcefully, in a terribly human and faulted way. Nevertheless, he declares that God matters, Christ matters, and that the Church matters to both God and Christ; and if all these don't matter a whit to us, then we have gone to hell.

But when it does matter, matters so deeply that it can hurt, God's grace overwhelms our failings.

I am happy that we bear the name of Knox, in particular for its plentiful warts. We, after all, share many of those same warts and we desparately need to be re-formed. Having Knox as a patron saint sort of explains an awful lot about our Presbyterian heritage! We are reformed, and still reforming.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan