Sermon for October 10th, 2026

Isaiah 55:6-11 (OT page 685 NGNV)

⁶Seek you the Lord while he may be found: call you upon him while he is near. ⁷Let the wicked forsake his ways, and the unrighteous his own imaginations, and return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he is very ready to forgive. ⁸For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord. ⁹For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts above your thoughts. ¹⁰Surely as the rain comes down, and the snow from heaven, and returns not thither but waters the earth, and makes it to bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread unto him that eats, ¹¹so shall my word be, that goes out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I will, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.

John Wycliffe: The Morning Star

If you don't speak Latin, and if you were able to hear and understand the words of the scripture passage we just read, you have one person to thank more than any other: John Wycliffe.

John Wycliffe was not a Presbyterian, and he lived almost 150 years before the start of the 16th century Reformation that gave birth to the Protestant movement, but he is often called the "Morning Star" of the Reformation.

The planet Venus is the original "morning star," shining brightest just before dawn, long a signal to sailors and travelers that the darkness is nearly over, and a new day about to begin.

So Wycliffe was a lone beacon in a dark age for the church. A harbinger, really, of everything that came after. The Renaissance. The Reformation. And eventually the Enlightenment.

His key ideas were condemned in his lifetime, by the church, his peers, and his country. But clearly, the centuries that followed thought better of them. So who was this man?

First, a sketch of his life, then two of his ideas that are still part of our church DNA.

John Wycliffe was born on a sheep farm in northern England sometime around the year 1320. He left home to attend Oxford University, where he remained for much of his life as a scholar and teacher.

At Oxford he studied mathematics and natural science, then philosophy and theology, until he was considered the university's leading scholar. This was during the "Western Schism," when two rival popes each claimed to be the real pope, and each demanded England's financial tribute. Wycliffe advised England to pay neither one of them, believing that the church should not rule the state, and that a wealthy church in Rome was far from the example of Christ and his disciples, who owned nothing.

For this, the Roman church charged Wycliffe with heresy, but he drew a large following among the poor and stayed just out of his accusers' reach. He lost his Oxford post. He kept writing, preaching, and arguing for reform until he died of a stroke at the age of 64.

Thirty years after his death, the church finally declared Wycliffe a heretic, dug up his bones, burned them, and threw them in the river. One of his biographers wrote that Wycliffe's bones were much easier to dispose of than his teachings: "Thus the brook hath conveyed his ashes into Avon; Avon into Severn; Severn into the narrow seas; and they into the main ocean. And thus the ashes of Wycliffe are the emblem of his doctrine which now is dispersed the world over."

Wycliffe's whole gospel, if you had to put it in a single word, was access. The Word of God in everyone's hands. The Communion Table within everyone's reach. And all this against a church that hoarded both to keep its grip on power.

So the first of his two great ideas has to do with Communion, or the Lord's Supper.

In the medieval church, everyone ate the bread, but only the priest drank from the cup. Everyone else just looked at it, hoping it would somehow do them some good. Wycliffe's training in science and philosophy set him against transubstantiation, the doctrine that when the priest spoke the words of institution and rang the bell, the bread literally became Christ's flesh and the wine literally became his blood.

Wycliffe didn't buy it. Christ was truly present, he said, but the bread remained bread and the wine remained wine. Why does this matter?

Because the church used the doctrine as power. Gatekeeping, really. Only the priest can speak the transforming words, they said, and without him it isn't real, it isn't effective. But Wycliffe believed the Lord's Table was a gift for everyone, not something to be given as a reward and withheld as a punishment. Today, we embrace this idea passionately here at First Presbyterian Church. And we're thankful for reformers like Wycliffe, who stood up for the idea long before it was safe to do so.

But Wycliffe's greater contribution, the one the whole world remembers him for, was the Bible itself.

Wycliffe's key conviction, the one that drove the church leaders of his day crazy, was that the Bible, not church policy, should be the rule and guide for spiritual life. Which meant people had to read it in their own language. The church at the time forbade this, as something "too complicated" for ordinary minds.

Wycliffe acted on his conviction. He and his circle of friends and scholars set to work translating the Scriptures into English, and their work became the basis for the Wycliffe Bible--the first complete Bible ever rendered in the English language. In arguing for the translation, Wycliffe said, "Englishmen learn Christ's law best in English. Moses heard God's law in his own tongue; so did Christ's apostles."

We take this for granted. But we owe our translated Bibles, Protestants and Catholics alike, to John Wycliffe.

Why does it matter? Because of what the words of Isaiah, in our scripture reading today, actually say: "Let the wicked forsake his ways, and the unrighteous his own imaginations." And this: "My thoughts are NOT your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord." This is worth remembering, whenever we're absolutely certain that God agrees with us.

And here is where I want to press a little.

Wycliffe spent his life prying the Word and the Table out of the hands of hoarders. What have we done with them since?

Some of us carry fifty translations of the Bible on our phones and we haven't opened a single one in weeks. We possess what Wycliffe's generation would have given anything to hold, and we treat it like furniture. The problem is no longer access. The problem today is ingratitude.

But I suspect our hardest struggles aren't with the parts we don't understand. They're with the parts we understand perfectly well. Jesus tells us to love our enemies. We know what that means. We just have excellent reasons why our situation should be the exception. Jesus tells us to forgive, and we can explain at great length why the person who hurt us doesn't deserve it. We want God to change other people's minds. How willing are we to let him change ours?

And some of us have done with the Communion Table exactly what the medieval church did with the cup--not by doctrine but by indifference. People in our lives, our neighborhoods, this city, have never once been invited to the table, or to the church. The gift is still withheld, only by much quieter means.

They hoarded grace by doctrine. We hoard it by neglect.

Listen carefully to the rest of verse seven in Isaiah: "Let them return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon them; and to our God, for he is very ready to forgive." Someone in this room today needs to hear that. The one who regrets. The one who's been told they don't belong. God says, come back. There is mercy here, for you, too.

In Jesus Christ we see just how far God will go to bring us back. He prayed for forgiveness for the very people who were putting him to death. And we can't seem to offer that mercy to someone else. But it's already been offered to us.

Next week we are welcoming the Palmer family, missionaries this congregation has supported for over a decade. Silas and Zoe met at Wycliffe Bible Translators, named for the very man we've been discussing. Silas and Zoe work in Asia now, translating the Bible into a language that never had one, in a country that is hostile to Christianity.

Silas was one of my best friends at Princeton seminary. He got me through my Hebrew classes. I've been the person who needed help understanding the words of the Bible; Silas was the one who helped me. He's one of the smartest people I've ever known. He and his wife Zoe have devoted their lives to putting Scripture into hands that never held it. They have paid a contemporary price for a medieval conviction. And our church has a share in it.

So here is what I ask of you today, plainly. Just two things.

First: read the Bible. Pick it up this week (any translation) not out of guilt, but out of gratitude--gratitude for the people who died to put it in your hands, and for the people still risking everything today to put it into hands that have never held it.

Second: open the communion table a little bit wider. Think of one person, one neighbor, one coworker, or estranged friend, never invited, and invite them. To worship. To dinner. To the conversation. The Table was never a reward for the worthy. It was always a gift for the hungry.

God did not withhold his Word. He sent it, through the prophets, through the apostles, and finally in person, through Jesus Christ. And his promise stands over every translation, every missionary, every worn pew Bible in this room: "So shall my word be, that goes out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I will, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it."

They burned John Wycliffe's bones and threw them in the river. But his words scattered further than his ashes, into every English Bible ever printed, every language that has received one since, the very words you heard this morning.

The brook conveyed his ashes into the river, and the river into the sea. But the Word goes out, and it does not return empty. Thanks be to God.