(Jeff Barrett reads this from the rear) As has been our custom on the Sunday nearest to the 31st of October, the date when Luther posted his 95 Thesis on the Door of the Church at Wittenburg, challenging many of the practices of the Roman Catholic Church of which he was a monk, setting in motion a reformation of the church that reverberates down to the present.  Last year we met Martin Luther, the prime mover in the Reformation.  This year we encounter John Calvin, the French theologian who became the father of the Reformed Faith, that branch of Protestantism of which we are a part. We meet Monsieur Calvin toward the close of his life and ministry in Geneva.  The year is 1564.Here comes Monsieur Calvin now.

Jay (Calvin) walks out from the sacristy in costume and says: 

Bonjour! Dear friends in Christ.  You have asked me to tell something of my life and faith and I will seek to do so, giving honor to our loving God and Heavenly Father and Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, whose grace and providence are the source and ground of my and your faith.

I was born in the year of our Lord One thousand fifteen hundred and nine in the French town of  Noyon, about sixty miles north of Paris.  My father was a lawyer to the Cathedral chapter and many clerical visitors visited my home which was close by the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Noyon.  Our family were devoted members of the church and it was assumed of me from my youth that I would take clerical orders, and the Chapter of the Cathedral subsidized my early education.  I studied with the family of the Montmors, a well to do family of my town.  At age fourteen I left Toyon with two of the Montmor sons and my cousin Claude de Hangest for the University at Paris.  The morals of the students and Parisians were quite lax even by the standards of that time. At first I was an arts student and I had the good fortune to be taught Latin by one of the greatest Frech Schoolmasters, Mathurin Cordier.  His training would prove invaluable to me in the writing I undertook, and I dedicated my commentary on the First Epistle to the Thessalonians to him.

I then proceeded to study theology reading the work of scholars from the later Middle Ages, and having some exposure to the early church fathers of the Third to Fifth centuries.  The writings and thought of Luther were being discussed throughout Germany and much of Europe, but I was as yet not caught up by them.  Meanwhile my father had a falling out with the clergy in Noyon and decided that I should not be a theologian but a lawyer instead, noting that such a path often brought wealth with it.

So I left Paris at age nineteen for the study of law at Orleans for nearly a year and then on to Bourges.  I worked hard at my studies and often substituted as a teacher for my professors when requested to do so.  This training was to serve me well later in Geneva when I wrestled with the Council in Geneva as I sought to build a church and city that would glorify God.  The intellectual atmosphere at Orleans was more open and there I began to read the Classic writings of Greek  and Roman Philosophy and literature.  It was there I learned Greek, which opened a whole new world of learning for me and proved invaluable as I later studied the New Testament in the original language.

My father died three years after this and I felt myself free to pursue my own interests which were the classics of literature.  I wanted to be a scholar of the humanities like the great Erasmus of Rotterdam. At the age of twenty-three I wrote and published my first book, a commentary of a book by the Roman scholar Seneca called De Clementia.  During the next year and a half my life and faith were dramatically redirected.  The writing of Luther and other reformers struck fire in my heart and mind.  God opened my eyes and brought my mind to a teachable frame.  I realized with Luther that we are not made right with God by our good deeds or efforts, but rather by the grace of God demonstrated in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  God has done for us what we cannot do for ourselves, and for all my life I have taken comfort in the truth that God is the author of salvation and will bring to completion the good work he has begun in us, even as we read earlier in this service from the first Chapter of the Epistle to the Philippians.  How could this great truth of the Scriptures have been obscured for so long by the church? 

I was not alone in my conversion. My good friend, Nicholas Cop, rector of the University of Paris preached a sermon on this theme, a sermon in which I had some role in composing, and the theologians at Paris rose up and demanded he be tried for heresy.  He fled the country as did I.  It was dangerous to speak reformed convictions in Catholic France.  I went to Basel, Switzerland and settled into what I hoped would be the life of a scholar.  I began the study of Hebrew so as to study the Old Testament in the original language.  In 1535 I published my first edition of The Priniiples of the Christian Religion, or what are now called The Institutes of the Christian Religion.  I dedicated that work to King Francis I of France, saying that my purpose was solely to transmit certain rudiments by which those who are touched with any zeal for religion might be shaped to true godliness.  I undertook this  labor especially for our French countrymen very many of whom I knew to be hungering and thirsting for Christ; but I saw very few who had been duly imbued with even a slight knowledge of him.  My first edition was just six chapters in length, and followed the outline of the Apostles Creed. Over four subsequent editions the work has grown to sixty chapters.  This work has been translated from Latin into French, English, and German and has circulated more widely than I had dare imagine.