10/10/54

Scripture: I Kings 12: 1-17

Text: I Kings 12: 16; “To your tents, O Israel.”

Those times that appear great, in the retrospect of history, are usually stormy times. It was so at the birth of our own nation. The achieving of independence meant anxious and costly struggle for all who were associated with George Washington. It was so in the crisis that surrounded Lincoln’s administration. Great decisions were made, and great events issued from those decisions. But the times were far from comfortable! The conflict of ideas and of arms was terrible.

Some of the history of the Jewish people points to the same truth. The reign of David is a great period in Jewish memory. Yet there is a record of conflict during that period. As a youth, David’s very life was now and then threatened. As a king, David had at least two armed rebellions on his hands. David’s son, Solomon, had a brilliant reign. Yet the seeds of dissent developed into a weed patch of discontent. Jeroboam had to escape to another realm to save his life, for Solomon sought to do away with him. When Solomon died, his son, Rehoboam became the ruler. Unfortunately, Rehoboam did not have the wisdom of his father. Nor did he heed the wisdom of those elder statesmen whose experience was accumulated during Solomon’s reign. He let the advice of young hot-heads form his decisions. A people, already discontented and rebellious over the severity of his father’s rule, turned upon young Rehoboam.

When he was crowned king, representatives of his people petitioned him to lighten some of the burdens that had been fastened upon them during Solomon’s reign. Some of the glory of Solomon’s reign resulted from forced labor. Now they hoped to be done with it! But Rehoboam, taking the advice of the young fellows who advocated an iron hand, told his people that he was going to make it a lot tougher for them! They didn’t yell: “Heil Rehoboam!” Instead, the cry went out:” To your tents, O Israel.” Well, what did that mean! It had been a long time since the Hebrews had lived in tents. They had settled in villages and towns. The tents of their nomadic days had been replaced by permanent houses of brick and stone. It was more comfortable to live in those houses than in tents. Why then this rallying cry, “To your tents, O Israel?” Was it a call to arms? Were they suddenly to become an army camp? That does not seem to be the meaning of the cry.

What was in the minds of those people seems, rather, to be this: so long as they remained in their permanent, comfortable homes, they felt that the tyrant could collect heavy taxes, send and find them for forced labor, and manipulate them according to his will, while they were fixed in ways and places that he could count on. But rather than submit to the whims of the tyrant, rather than continue their submission to forced labor, they would risk everything in resistance! If they returned to tents, they would be mobile. When the king’s agents came to their fixed homes to drag them off to forced labor, they could be somewhere else in their tents. Hence that rallying cry: “To your tents, O Israel.” It was their method of defiantly meeting the demands of a stupid and arrogant young king. Not, “To arms,” but “back home to the desert,” is the meaning of the cry.

Rehoboam was rash enough to send Adoram to collect tribute (taxes and labor). Adoram was already hated for his severity as a former taskmaster. So these rebellious Hebrews stoned him to death, and Rehoboam himself had to flee to Jerusalem for his life. The refugee, Jeroboam, who had fled from Solomon’s wrath, now heard about young Rehoboam’s trouble. He came back and was acclaimed king over the major portion of Hebrew tribes.

Well, what has this bit of ancient Hebrew history to do with us --- most of us non-Hebrew; living thousands of years later in history; dwelling in a land far distant from stormy little Palestine; enjoying the comforts of a materialistic age, and constantly striving for more of such comforts? After all, our homes are important to us. We in Wisconsin have no desire to take to tents in a climate where winters made survival of even the primitive Indians an annual question mark. We have settled in this community to establish the kind of homes we’ve wanted. Many have mortgaged their future for years ahead to pay for these homes. We like it here.

Many a couple begins married life in some horrid little apartment somewhere, then moves into a house in some crowded neighborhood, then falls in love with some more spacious location and decides to build there “for good.” What labor and planning and expense go into the establishment of a home in that house! This seems to be good -- everyone says it’s good. One ought to have the convenience and efficiency that will release him for more worthwhile things than bucking up the wood pile or climbing endless stairs, or carrying water from the nearest stream. And one ought to live amid beauty rather than be surrounded by ugliness. Children should be in a safe area with sunlight and shelter and space to play in.

Come to think of it, what would a minister know about this, since most ministers live most of their lives in what someone has called “semi-public housing projects” of someone else’s choosing and someone else’s arrangement? Well, now and then some minister acquires a little patch of ground somewhere -- a woodsy place, or a river-side shack, or an old farm house -- and then lets himself go, spending his recreation hours and vacation days fixing it the way he wants it to be. An Episcopal minister, who has since become a Bishop in Connecticut [Hatch], got such a summer place in New Hampshire. He put the love of his heart and the labor of his capable hands into that old farm house (on land that wouldn’t support a farm family!) until it became his pride and joy. But one day after he had taken a visitor on a tour of the wonders his labor had wrought, he smiled and said: “You know, this can become a sin!”

Perhaps, quite subtly, the house and the garden can become such an expression of our pride, and an extension of our ego, that we become possessed of our possessions! We may judge our community and its development in terms of “How will this affect me and my house?” Is it not pertinent for us to ask: “How will this home increase my useful service to my community?”

Leave the house for a minute and take a quick imaginary trip to New York City. There meet a New Yorker who takes pride in his knowledge of the great city. He has started, with an oriental friend from one point to another via the subway. Starting out with seats on a local train, he pulls his friend to the door of the car at a given station and hurries him across the platform into an express train where they stand in the crowded aisle for the rest of the trip. At the end of the ride, they walk briskly toward the escalator while the New Yorker explains to his friend that they actually saved two minutes by changing to the express train! Whereupon, as they step upon the escalator, the New Yorker hears from his friend the quiet question: “What significant thing shall we do with the two minutes that we have saved?”

Now let’s come back to the houses which are our homes. What significant thing shall we do with them? How shall we relate them to the world? Our times have striking similarity to those times of 2800 or 2900 years ago. With tyranny, oppression and revolution rampant, a lot of the world is taking to its tents! What shall we do? What shall we, as Christians, do?

Shall we pull into the quiet shelter of our homes and be separated from all the uproar? Some try to do that. Their aim appears to be a sort of antiseptic isolation within which they can remain fairly uncontaminated and “good” -- though good for what is not always clear enough.

Loring Chase says that this is like the clock in a glass case on a Victorian mantelpiece: “remote, dust-free, and losing time.” Isaiah was bitterly sarcastic when he said, “Come, my people, enter your chambers, and shut your doors behind you; hide yourselves for a little while until the wrath is past.” [Isaiah 26: 20]. If we hide, we are simply losing time, be we ever so free of dust. And it may well be that time is running out!

How shall we regard our church sanctuary and church school rooms in this house of worship? We must surely keep it comfortable and convenient and useable if we are to continue using a house that has stood for 50 years. And we must keep on with the improvements just as one must do with a private house. But is all this for our own comfort and convenience alone? Or is it to enable us to serve better the community and the world of which we are a part? We need a certain disciplined reserve to the idea of our own comfort and convenience.

When Jeroboam became king over that majority of tribes that rebelled against Rehoboam, he faced a problem that had him worried. The faithful still went to Jerusalem to worship. And Jeroboam was “just sure” that they would there fall under Rehoboam’s influence again, making it that much harder for him to rule them. So he fixed up a couple of finely engraved golden calves at two different places in his realm and said to his people, “It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem: behold thy gods.” After all, it is more convenient to worship here before these things than to undertake the long hard journey to Jerusalem on foot or by pack animal.

If we are asked how our civilization is superior to former modes of living, would not most of cite our material comforts and conveniences? Our labor is being delivered of drudgery. Our homes are more convenient, our church buildings are improved, we make time for recreation. Jeroboam was applying the principle of comfort and convenience to the realm of Hebrew religion. But how far can this cult of convenience go, with either Jeroboam’s people or with us?

Is our church to give us merely what we want? Or is it to point us to our duty? There is a certain propriety in studying how the church can make its message and its facilities appealing to people -- how to bring aching hearts and turbulent souls to the healing touch of the Great Physician. But one must remember that the church of the living God must serve the needs of people rather than cater to their desires. It must influence people to be good rather than merely to feel good.

The cross, however beautifully symbolized, is not a couch. The gospel of Him who was crucified to death on its rough beams cannot be harmonized with physical comfort. If our increased comfort and well-being in this sanctuary and church building, or any building to be added, is to be justified, it must set us to a better performance of the tasks of Christian training and living.

Our children must be trained in Christian living. This means not a few, but dozens of responsible folk who will voluntarily undertake the teaching and administrative work of the church school without making this service a constant anxiety to one or two officers. It means that those who have the capacity to contribute to the ministry of music in our worship, will volunteer for the discipline and regularity of service in a choir, lifting rather than crushing those who are willing to give leadership.

It means a patient, persistent service in the offices, and on the committees, of the church organization, until there is reached the common understanding under which the work goes forward. It mean that we also look beyond the hum of our own activity to the needs and longings of others, near and far.

There are tough-spirited young folk who are willing to enter a new kind of Christian missionary service among people of other lands -- young folk who are willing to identify themselves with the life of the folk with whom they would labor rather than set themselves up as some kind of privileged example. Well, let’s send them! The place where people need help is right where they live!

“To your tents, O Israel,” is a rallying call to citizens and governments. We must relate ourselves helpfully, with our interest, our concern, and our property, to the rest of the world. The assistance which we have, through our government, given to the people of other countries, enabling them to help themselves, is one kind of such relating. Continuing Christian missions, at home and abroad, is another.

It was for freedom from enslavement that the rallying cry of Israel went up. It was for the ancient freedom to think independent thoughts, and to give them utterance that their cry went up (a freedom for which the priests of the Hebrews even preserved the anti-priestly writings of the prophets!) -- (a freedom for the sake of which kind David submitted to the withering scorn of Nathan [II Samuel 12]; and king Ahab let Elijah call him names [I Kings 21: 17-29].)

It was for the hope of freedom from fear, when every man of them might confidently sit under his own vine and fig tree -- it was for this also that Israel “took to the tents.” It is for freedom to put ourselves under discipline that we ponder the same lesson. If the cult of convenience and comfort separates a soul from the one true God, it becomes sin, just as the convenient worship of those two golden calves became a sin to the people of Jeroboam’s realm.

God is a Father. And we His children keep communion with Him by cultivating the same attitudes which hold children to an earthly parent. If a child is to keep a wholesome relationship to an earthly parent, he must develop it through obedience, discipline, study and self-sacrifice. His momentary, petulant desires must yield to the parent’s longer experience. If the child grows up seeking, and experiencing, only his own desire and satisfaction, he become spoiled for living; he alienates himself from understanding fellowship with his parent. If he never puts himself out to help or please his father or mother, he has not learned one of the most vital lessons of mortal existence.

--------------------

Henry C. Link, the psychologist who wrote “The Return to Religion” some years ago, gave the following interesting reasons for going to church: he said: “I go because I would rather lie in bed on Sunday mornings. --- I go because I would rather read the Sunday papers. I go because I know it will please my old father, when he learns of it, and my parents-in-law whom I shall undoubtedly see there. I go because I shall meet and have to shake hands with people, many of whom do not interest me in the least; because, if I don’t go, my children consider that they have a good reason for not going to Sunday School ---because I may disagree with what the minister has to say --- I go because I do not believe in all the doctrines of this church, or any other church. I go, in short, because I hate to go and because I know that it will do me good.”

The only way to make room for God in our lives is to put ourselves out. The gods of comfort only lead to the grave. But the God who urges us to “come out” and serve and obey and struggle under His blessing, calls us to life that is real living!

---------------------------

Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, October 10, 1954.

Also, in Wisconsin Rapids, October 8, 1961.