3/4/56

Scripture: I John 1

Text: I John 1: 3; “That which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you so that you may have fellowship with us; and our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.”

Dr. Frederick Meek, who is pastor of Old South Church in Boston, was a few years ago the purchaser, from a friend who sells old books, of a document that is significant in American religious life. It is a copy of a sermon preached February 6, 1812, at the Tabernacle in Salem, Massachusetts. The preacher of that 144 [151] year old sermon was the Rev. Leonard Woods, Abbot Professor of Christian Theology in the Theological Seminary in Andover. The occasion of the sermon was the ordination of Samuel Newell, Adoniram Judson, Samuel Nott, Gordon Hall, and Luther Rice. These men were being commissioned the first missionaries to be sent out by the American Board of our churches to Asia. It was a moving occasion.

Incidentally, Dr. Meek bought the yellowing copy of that sermon for just 20 cents, which seemed to be its fair market value. A comparably important political document would be eagerly sought, and might be bid in at as much as a thousand dollars at some auction to collectors of Americana. And Dr. Meek has expressed an uneasy feeling, in which others of us share, that this difference in money value between a thousand dollars and twenty cents, might reflect the comparative importance which this day attaches to these two areas of our experience -- our political framework and our framework of the claims of the Son of God. Or it may be that there is no rush to become collectors of old sermons!

At any rate, salvation of bewildered people, and direction for their living, is found finally only in our relations with God rather than with government. Both men and nations stand before the bar of His judgment. If we forget the Son of God, it will not have been enough for us to have remembered and depended upon the ballot box and the nation.

At any rate, that old American Board sermon can serve to remind the people of our churches of the precious foundation of our religious heritage; the vision, the sacrifice, the daring, the consecration, the sharing that have aided in bringing Christian folk to this moment. We are living in a situation that is different from that of the young men who were then about to leave for mission stations in Asia. Some of these walked into hostility. The foes arrayed against us are more implacably hostile. Can you recall a time when war and peace, safety and destruction have teetered more precariously on a historical knife-edge? And can you remember when have the patterns of life which guide people and nations been more fluid and less restraining?

It seems quite possible that we may be forced to make further major Christian retreats and retrenchment such as the tragic one in China. There is a lot of resistance to Christian witnessing in many nations of the earth. We are confronted with the fanatical faith of communism which is more widespread than that Islamic faith of Mohammed which seized and smothered a large share of the Christian world in another century. Communism is itself “missionary minded.” It has an amazing record of success in the past 25 [30] years. So far as numbers of people who have come under its dominance, it dwarfs the achievements of Christians in the past 150 years. [Read Robbins quotation]. If ever we longed, in easier, “tamer” days, for more dangerous times, they are here! What we have done in the way of Christian witnessing in some times of the past is not adequate for now, nor for tomorrow.

See some of the circumstances under which the contemporary battle is being waged! Lines which have separated people in the past are being obliterated or hurdled. Oceans no longer separate, or keep secure, the nations. Political barriers are crumbling, realigning themselves. Racial distinctions are being hurdled, and the efforts to preserve the “supremacy” of one race over another are futile, except on the most alarmingly temporary basis. Masses of people have realized, and suddenly asserted that they are important as human beings, that they are destined to have a fair share of the world in which they live. For the present, these seekers understandably think of their future in terms of food, of possessions, and of freedom. And yet, whether they know it or not, this is a spiritual pilgrimage for them. The rights and freedoms which alone will fully satisfy are of the spirit.

Perhaps we of the English-speaking churches do not yet sense how large is our share of direct responsibility for this world-wide upsurge. For nearly a century and a half we have been going to the ends of the earth with the Christian gospel and its transforming message. Whether people accepted Christ as Lord, or not, they were at least lured by the Christian idea of human equality. They might ignore the fact that it is equality before God. They were lured by the Christian teaching of a human being’s infinite worth, even though they ignored the fact that such worth is never the government’s gift, but springs basically from God’s love for man as a person, and as a child. These experiences are our Gospel’s contribution to mankind, from the proudest to the humblest of men. But somehow we have let others take away the credit for it all from our Lord, and have let them give it to current political figures and practices.

Today’s secular concern with brotherhood, and with universality, is not a twentieth century product coming from modern transportation and communication. Listen to these words from that old sermon of Leonard Woods in 1812: “In every human being you see a brother or a sister. O forget not the partners of you blood, send some of your preachers to your dear kindred in Asia.” The idea of brotherhood and universality has long been ours. But today it searches Christians uncomfortably. Do we actually feel that we have Christ’s “dear kindred” behind the iron curtain and the bamboo curtain and any palm curtains being drawn? There are those who believe that political differences and dictatorial circumstances shut people off from our concern and from Christ’s grace and saving power!

Meanwhile we, many of us, are of all people, uneasy in the midst of this ferment. We of this country are children of a political revolution. We of the Christian family are children of the most revolutionary of all ways of life. Shall we be timid and vacillating?

We have been fairly generous materially. But we are spiritually inept, and sometimes selfish. We have feared the rising new life of the races, for this upsurge will, eventually, surely overturn the present balance of the world, economic and political. And yet, if we believe our Gospel to be true, we cannot think it confined to the few. For Christ’s inheritance is for all mankind, and we must trust our Gospel even more than political forms. We have a responsibility for the ferment; and we are responsible for putting out our gospel of Christ, and his truth, in the midst of it. How shall we come to terms with what this means?

The people of our churches, many of them, do not yet really understand that the kind of “foreign missions” we understood in the last century is finished. It must a new kind of witnessing. For our Christian witnessing is as necessary as ever! And it must be on a world scale! It can never again be fitted into a pattern of special privilege. It is not a case of “West” going to the “East” with the gospel. It is a matter of Christians going to other Christians and together reaching out with compassionate offering of the Gospel to others - to non-Christians.

Missionaries are still needed, not fewer, but more of them. But they are needed, and desired, as co-workers and not as directors of Christian activities in sister nations. When we remind ourselves of the communist missionary zeal at winning converts for that perverted faith, we know that we cannot be content with anything less than winning peoples’ lives for our Lord. Nothing else can impel men to live differently; with different attitude toward fellow men; and a concern for the well-being of neighbors. These are social fruits of Christian conversion.

Our fathers had a sense of urgency, because they believed that the Gospel made “all the difference in the world.” They believed that people were in the gravest possible danger if they knew not Christ and his way. Many of us have not been so sure. But it is obvious that multitudes of this generation are lost, estranged from God’s way. And when people are lost here and now, it matters not only now, but eternally. For there are intimations that this life is only a prelude to that which is to continue.

The sense of urgency which our fathers knew ought to be no less among us. As Dr. Woods puts it: “In the name of Him Who died on Calvary, I call on you, O Christians, to labor for the salvation of beings that will never die. The souls of all these are as precious as your own.”

Our prime concern is not to bring men and women to the benefits of our culture, important as these may be, without putting them in touch with our Lord and with the Father God, who values people limitlessly, and loves them unceasingly, as they are never valued or loved otherwise.

The one conviction under which Christian witnessing can be planned is that the Christian Gospel is God’s eternal truth about Himself. If we believe that God discloses Himself uniquely in the person of Jesus Christ, then we are culpably negligent if we fail to witness for him, so that the saving power of Jesus Christ may be known!

We hear a good deal being poured out over the face of the earth about the saving power of Mao Tse-Tung, or the party of the Kremlin; or, in some quarters, the saving power of the American dollar. But these cut a sorry figure in the presence of Jesus of Nazareth! We who are concerned with Christian witness will have to witness directly, both to leaders and masses, through floods of literature, over radio, in conversation, and so on, if the Gospel is to be carried to millions of ordinary and extraordinary people. Much of the witnessing is going to be done by laymen rather than by professional religious leaders. More power to the growth of a consecrated lay peoples’ movement! And the witness will be divorced from our financial strength. It will depend on courage and daring and astuteness and consecration of men and women, as it did in other generations.

During the time of the Religious Reformation in Europe, much of the Christian ferment was underground in nature. People went from the comparative safety of training in Geneva, to the relative danger of witnessing in other parts of Europe. They found capture and imprisonment or death if taken by the opposition. It may be, as some responsible leaders think, that some of the Christian witness will again have to go underground, facing the same kind of danger that earlier adventurers of the spirit had to encounter, in order that the Gospel may be carried, for Christ’s sake, by living witnesses. People may speak in many parts of the world at the peril of their lives!

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As Dr. Woods neared the end of his sermon to that assembly in 1812, he said to the congregation: “Brethren and friends, these young men are going to preach that religion which is your comfort in life, your hope in death, your guide to heaven. Consider yourselves now looking upon them for the last time before you shall meet them at the tribunal of Christ.” And to the young men themselves he said, “We bid you farewell, for we do not anticipate that we shall ever see your faces again.” That willingness so to go in the face of incredible odds and danger, but to go with confidence, is the mark of the Christian’s deep concern.

The picture of contemporary life is uncertain. But there is less uncertainty about what we must be doing about it, because “that which we have seen and heard, we proclaim.” The church, to be the sustainer for that witness, today and tomorrow, must be continually reborn. The Christian members of the church must continually be reborn and renewed in spirit. Only committed, convinced Christians are able for the witness that is asked of Christ’s church.

When the Christian way has brought a new life to you and me, we are so grateful that we are impelled to share what we know and have found: “That which we have seen and heard, we proclaim.” The Gospel (so far as each one of us in concerned) happens to us first! And when it happens it is something like this:

A transistor is one of the most important advances in the field of communication since invention of the radio tube decades ago. A transistor is a little device. A hundred could be piled on a man’s hand. But one of them can amplify sound a hundred thousand times with a minimum of power. The secret of this effectiveness appears to be this; the essential metal, germanium, must be purified until there is no more than one part of foreign matter to one hundred million parts of the pure metal, germanium.

We ordinary folk are called upon to be the transistors of Christian witnessing. When, because of our Christian commitment, we may become so refined that we are His, completely, then we can and will proclaim the faith. And only in the proclaiming of the faith, near and far, can we truly be the church; for the church is mission.

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, March 4, 1956.

Also in Wisconsin Rapids, July 14, 1963.