There is a way of looking at the personal stories of certain women and men to learn of the richness and the potential of human life lived by the grace of God. We are going to do that over the next weeks in this series of sermons we have chosen to name "Saints Who Shaped the Church."

The people we will consider convey something of the breadth of Christian history. They are a rich assortment of young and old, learned and ignorant, people of action and people of thought, whose common denominator is simply that the grace of God worked mightily within them.

We will consider:

• John Calvin, God’s man for the time, and how he shaped the Reformed church;

• John Wesley, who saw religion as issues of the heart, and his shaping of the Methodist church;

• William Booth, his deep concern for the soul’s safety, and how he shaped the Salvation Army.

• Martin Luther, his lifting up of God’s grace gives new shapes for an old church.

• Mother Teresa, a contemporary Roman Catholic nun, and how her Christ-like concern for the poor and dying has shaped compassionate ministries around the world.

These saints who shaped the church have, indeed, given the world examples of human lives inspired by the power of God.

Today, we will talk about Augustine, defender of the faith. He struggled with his own sin and shaped the theology of Christianity.

Augustine was born in North Africa on November 13, 354, a little over 300 years after Christ’s death on the cross. His father was a pagan. His mother was a Christian, later named St. Monica in the Roman church. He abandoned what Christianity he had and took on a concubine for fifteen years. For nine years, he embraced a religion called Manichaeism.

Then, he went on to Rome and taught rhetoric. From there, he traveled to Milan, where he was influenced by St. Ambrose. In fact, he was baptized into the Christian faith by St. Ambrose at the Easter Vigil in 387, after finding the Scripture verse, Romans 13:13-14:

Let us conduct ourselves properly, as people who live in the light of day - no orgies or drunkenness, no immorality or indecency, no fighting or jealousy. But take up the weapons of the Lord Jesus Christ, and stop paying attention to your sinful nature and satisfying its desires.

Augustine went back to Africa and opened a kind of monastery at Tagaste, where he and his Christian friends lived. On a visit to Hippo, the people compelled the bishop to ordain him. At age 42 he became a bishop of the See of Hippo (a region of North Africa), and for 35 years he served in that capacity in God’s church.

As bishop, he had to deal with three major heresies. As so often is true in Christianity, the majority of his writings opposed what he did not believe. That shaped his theology and the theology of early Christianity.

The truths he discovered and wrote about were 1) sin is the result of free will and imperfect creatures, 2) evil does not stop at the church doors, and 3) as a member of the human race, it is only by God’s grace that we are saved.

The Manicheans claimed there was an evil god or power which was eternally opposed to the good god. Augustine defended the essential goodness of all creation. He claimed evil is the product of free will and our own imperfect nature.

Augustine knew first-hand! He had tried out the lust of the flesh and lived a self-indulgent life, right up to his baptism. His writings, The Confessions of Augustine, graphically portray the kind of hedonistic life in which he tried to find fulfillment and satisfaction, but to no avail.

In his Confessions he wrote these words: "Solitude was more suitable for weeping, so I moved far enough away that even his presence could not embarrass me ... After this manner I spoke to you: ‘How long, O Lord, how long?’ ... Why is there not this moment an end to my wickedness?"

"So I was speaking and weeping in the bitter contrition of my heart, when suddenly I heard from a neighboring house a voice, ‘Take up and read, take up and read.’

"... in silence I read that passage on which my eyes first fell: ‘Let us conduct ourselves properly, as people who live in the light of day - no orgies or drunkenness, no immorality or indecency, no fighting or jealousy. But take up the weapons of the Lord Jesus Christ, and stop paying attention to your sinful nature and satisfying its desires.’ "

- Confessions, VIII, 12 translation, P.H.B. based on the translation of Edward B. Pusey.

These words have a lot to say to us who live 1,600 years after the "defender of the faith." It is always a struggle to be a Christian. If we are not struggling, we probably don’t yet have the correct concept of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ.

Those evil desires of our imperfect nature tempt and convince us, also:

• that lust to possess others sexually;

• that greed to get and keep all we can;

• that self-centered ego which tells us to tramp on others to get ahead;

• that lack of self-esteem which drives us to be critical of everyone else;

• and that which our American way of life encourages: "If it feels good, do it."

Augustine’s and St. Paul’s struggle is our struggle: "Let us conduct ourselves properly, as people who live in the light of day ... and stop paying attention to your sinful nature and satisfying its desires."

Our Human Nature Says:

• Cheat if no one will know.

• We must keep up with the neighbors.

• Everyone else is doing it.

• Get wealth any way you can and keep it for yourself - that’s happiness.

• Get even no matter what - that’s what it means to be a man.

God Says:

• You and I will know.

• Pride goes before a fall.

• You are my family and that means self-discipline.

• The real joy of life is what you give away and share with others.

• Love those who persecute you.

• Love your enemies and you will be blessed.

St. Augustine would condemn any practice of faith which simply endorses what the masses want. He would want to talk to Christians who join the church and fail to experience a real change in their lives, except for that certain respectability they feel because they attend worship occasionally.

Usually we want the faith to put a stamp of approval on what we as sinful humans want, rather than what our creator God intended for us.

Augustine would remind us that evil is still with us through our free will, our humanness. He would tell us the struggle goes on until we join the other imperfect saints on the opposite side of that glorious resurrection.

An executive was having a bad day. He decided to cheer himself up by calling home and talking to his wife. The maid answered the telephone. "I’d like to speak to my wife." "She’s having an affair with the butler and can’t talk to you now," she said. "Get my gun and shoot the both of them!" he ordered. There was a long silence on the line. Finally, the maid came back to the phone. She said, "I shot them both and, to be of help to you, I threw both their bodies in the swimming pool." "Swimming pool? We don’t have a swimming pool! Is this 278-0246?"

Our lives are imperfect, and we do deserve to be shot. We all need to hear Augustine’s favorite Scripture: "Let us conduct ourselves properly, as people who live in the light of day ... and stop paying attention to your sinful nature and satisfying its desires."

Evil does not stop at the church doors. The heresy of the Donatist compelled Augustine to rethink his definition of the church. He finally came to the right conclusion, that "The church is holy because of her purposes and not her members." Further, he believed, "She contains within her fold both good persons and evil."

The church is not, as some believe, a place for the display of good people. Within the congregation we find all the symptoms of being human that we find anywhere else. We gather because we know we are imperfect and sinful. We come to celebrate that God still gives us blessed forgiveness.

Our relationship to each other is not a demand for perfection, but rather it is an expectation of undeserved forgiveness.

There is neither a perfect pastor unscarred by mistakes, nor a perfect member who has discipleship accomplished.

Like ill people who gather in hospitals and uneducated people in schools, we sinners gather in churches. Only Christ is holy and perfect. Only his word and sacraments are his pure, undiluted presence in the world.

This is the reason no one political candidate or party can be designated "of God" and the other of "the evil one."

In fact, it seems clear that the human organization of the church so blunders and limps along with its human organization that it would have died out years ago had it not been "of God."

This has a lot to say about our behavior as church members. Of course, you can easily find many reasons not to give your offering. Of course, you can find hundreds of hypocrites in the congregation, beginning with you and me. Of course, you can find serious errors in any pastor’s attempt at ministry. Of course, you can find better-run, less offensive, more attractive "entertainment" than here in the church where sinners gather. That’s because we need to be better and desperately need God’s help and guidance to do it. Jesus knew that, and he told the church members of his day, "Why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the log in your own eye?" (Matthew 7:3).

As members of the human race, only God’s grace saves us. If that idea, put forth by Augustine, has a familiar ring to it, remember that Martin Luther was an Augustinian friar. He became a monk in the very order that Augustine founded, and there he learned his basic theology.

Augustine called for a radical change in what was called Pelagianism. He taught: we, by our birth into the human race, inherit a moral disease - from these evils we can be saved only by God’s grace. It is not our choice. The Almighty elected and chose us to be the saved and part of his redeemed family. (This idea of predestination and election profoundly shaped the belief of John Calvin, about whom we will hear more later in this series.)

Dean Fischer at Grand View College here in Des Moines tells a humorous story about graduation day last spring. He was amazed to see, complete with robe and mortar board, one of the Kuwaiti students from Grand View in line for graduation. The young lad had not completed his requirements, but was going to go up and get his diploma anyway. The dean literally had to pull him out of line. In that part of the world, the Kuwaiti think that everything can be negotiated and bargained for.

We are like that Kuwaiti student. We do not deserve the award by our actions and grades, but God lets us be here anyway.

Our whole attitude now is not one of pride that we have accomplished a religious and moral victory. Rather, we are amazed, astonished, and thankful that God chose us. When we eventually understand that idea, how our attitudes toward church, and even God, change! We do not "do him a favor" by being here. He is not flattered that we select him over the golf course, the football game, or an outing at the lake.

Another passage in Romans reads, "But God has shown us how much he loves us - it was while we were still sinners that Christ died for us! We rejoice because of what God has done through our Lord Jesus Christ, who has now made us God’s friends" (Romans 5:8, 11b).

How this changes our attitude toward each other, our church, and its ministry and mission!

• No more resentment when the church asks for help, be it with our time or our money.

• No more excuses when the church offers opportunity to learn and mature further in our faith.

• No more anger when mistakes are made by pastors, staff, and council.

• No more timidity when the opportunity comes to serve and witness to our faith.

Humility replaces pride, gentleness replaces meanness, and sincerity replaces hypocrisy.

Augustine, defender of the faith, was one of the great teachers of the church and a great Christian thinker. Both Roman Catholics and Protestants acknowledge his importance as a theologian and shaper of the church.

He taught us that:

1. Sin is the result of free will and imperfection.

2. Evil does not stop at the church doors.

3. As a member of the human race, it is only by God’s grace that we are saved.

All this came from his own early life of debauchery, and from God, who spoke to him in Romans 13: "Let us conduct ourselves properly, as people who live in the light of day ... take up the weapons of the Lord Jesus Christ, and stop paying attention to your sinful nature and satisfying its desires."

Augustine established his monastic rule of St. Augustine. During the Vandals’ seige of Hippo in 430, he was seized with a fever and died on August 28, 430 AD, the date on which he is now commemorated. Truly, he was a saint who shaped the church.