3/11/56

Scripture: Luke 2: 41-51

In the Lenten season, we naturally think of the journey of Our Lord toward Jerusalem and to the events there in the last week of his life, his death and resurrection.

But that was not the first time Jesus had been to Jerusalem. He was taken there as a babe, and presented in the Temple in an act of dedication by his parents such as we parents now experience when we bring our children to the church for baptism. A dozen years later Jesus returned to the Temple with his parents - this time for a little longer stay during one of the religious festivals. The Temple, after all, was a long way from their home up north in Nazareth of Galilee. It was a rare occasion, long and carefully planned, when they might go there. The trip was made in company with quite a large group of people who planned to go together. Most of their religious activity and study centered around the synagogue in their own town. But once in a long while numbers of these Jewish folk would manage to get to Jerusalem to worship in the Temple.

And so Jesus, at the age of 12 years, had been in the party of folk from Nazareth who traveled to Jerusalem and rejoiced in the chance to worship there for a time. But all trips and pilgrimages come to an end. And so did this one.

Word had undoubtedly gone around that the caravan for Nazareth would leave Jerusalem early one morning. Quite naturally the Nazarenes supposed everyone knew about it. Those villagers took to the homeward road, Mary and Joseph with them. And not until after they were on the way did Mary and Joseph discover that the young Jesus was not with them. They supposed he was somewhere among the children of the company. But not until they all stopped for the night did they face the bleak fact that Jesus was not with them and was surely left behind.

So they left the caravan to go on toward home without them while they hurried back to Jerusalem looking for the boy. What an anxious day that must have been for them! We do not know where they went in their search for him. And they may have been quite worn out when they finally found him in the Temple ... the very place where they had themselves come to visit on this trip.

There he was - sitting all absorbed in the conversation of some of the teachers. Probably he did not even know that they had started off for home and had left him. But they knew it! Relieved, and tired, and probably cross over it, Mary reproved her son with the only rebuke we have recorded by her. "Son, why have you treated us like this? We have been looking for you anxiously!"

Then it was Jesus’ turn to be astonished. Not because they had returned for him, but because they had been hunting. Why the search? "How is it that you were looking for me? I’m right here! Didn’t you know that I must be in my Father’s house?"

And as Mary and Joseph thought about it on their homeward trip, they must have recognized, and been pleased by, what the boy had done. Deeper than their parental irritation over what seemed his carelessness and neglect of them must have been their gratitude for his remembrance of God. It was clear that he had a growing awareness of, and absorption in, the religious heritage of their fathers.

They had tried to surround him with love for the Law, the Temple and God. Surround him with these and they will be his spiritual home --- this was the testimony and experience of Joseph and Mary.

It is a good thing for people to feel at home in the church. That is the way folk ought to be able to feel about it. It is a fine thing to respect the church and to honor it. But that is not enough. You and I need to love the church; to feel that in some special personal way we belong here; that we are at home here; if we are ever to feel the power of the church in our lives.

A few years ago it was a favorite quip, uttered as a sly joke, to say, when taking leave of an acquaintance: "Goodbye! See you in church!" A lot of people who said it had no intention of being in church -- unless they should want to get married there, or unless, having died, they should be carried there at the request of some pious relative or friend.

Some have felt uneasy there. A man I knew some years ago looked into the church building where I served as pastor. He needed to know in what state of repose the building was after having been moved about one block, for he was an official in the company responsible for the moving. But all he could think of to say was a joking remark that the "roof might have fallen in on him," since he so seldom entered a church.

A character in an old novel put the experience of going to church this way. "It always makes me feel queer -- as though I had suddenly fallen through a trap door into another world, not our world." You hardly know whether to laugh or cry at one so ill at ease in the church. Surely he would not understand at all Jesus’ feeling at home here. Perhaps half of the adult citizens of this country who do not belong to any church would agree with him.

"There is no earthly reason," says Harold Bosley, "why the church should take this kind of either deliberate misrepresentation or dilettante misunderstanding lying down." For, so far from being concerned with some other world, the church if anything is too much a creature of this world. It would be splendid if everyone who steps through the door of a church home should be made immediately aware of another world -- a bigger, broader, better world than the world where they usually are. And that bigger, broader, better world is what God wants it to be.

It would be a good idea for the church to take the offensive --- for people who know, and love, and believe in the church and who feel at home in it, to go among their friends and neighbors with the sincere salutation, "I’ll see you in church!" It might make a revolutionary difference if 600 millions Christians all around the world started doing this. There is something so sound about it that we can rightly wrest that slogan out of the hands and mouths of the jokesters and put it to honest work once more. If we use the words honestly they will work this kind of wonder: they will be saying to others: "I believe in the church; I want you to believe in it, too. It stands for what everyone needs, and needs all his life. I’m going to church. Won’t you join me?"

And to pagans and lukewarm Christians alike we can make out a tremendous case simply by listing the things that the church alone can do for us and for them.

(1) For one thing, the church can help us to worship God. That is a good reason for being found in a church. Of course you can worship God outside the church - one would be stupid not to see that. But one would be not the less stupid to admit that not many do worship God outside the church as they do, or might do, in the fellowship and encouragement of the church.

The church is the only institution that openly, deliberately, and consciously sets herself to the regular worship of God. God is the central fact in the life of the church -- in all that is said and done here. The worship of God is the central purpose of the church. When people come to church they are confronted by this fact and invited to bow before the reality of God in humble adoration and confident trust.

We do not rightly come here just to "meet the right people," or to get our feet on the beginning rungs of a social ladder, or to be seen of men. We come here to be seen of God, and if it may be, to see Him a little more clearly ourselves.

We are not asked to worship an "unknown God" like the ancient Athenians of Paul’s time. For we have a Christ who showed us what God is like by living in god-like ways in the flesh. The church is not so much a debating society as a sanctuary where we learn that religion (or relationship to God) is the first and last thing --- the beginning and the end of our being and our efforts.

God, for the church, is not a set of ideas so much as a fact --- the one truly fundamental thing about the universe --- and God deserves to be treated as such.

(2) Another good reason for extending the invitation to come to church is that the church confronts us with Jesus Christ. The church does this; or else it isn’t done. For nearly 2,000 years now, it has been the business of the church to do it. Over that period of time, though other institutions have done other worthy things, the church has tried to present Jesus Christ to each succeeding generation, and to people to the ends of the earth. It was so in Paul’s day. It is equally so today. And I hope no sophistication on our part will turn us away from this evangelical emphasis. We do not dabble with magic as we confront people with Jesus Christ. For we believe that we see God’s will for mankind more clearly in Jesus’ life and teaching than anywhere else. That is why we exalt him. That is why we study him. That is why we take him as our Savior. He made faith powerful, and belief in God workable. No man ever spoke like he spoke. To put it poetically, He turns our sunsets into sunrises. That is why we need to love and feel at home in the church of Jesus Christ that is dedicated to the task of studying and interpreting his message for our life and times.

Fugitive forays into the church once or twice a year, or occasionally, are not enough to fill our need. We need to give it the time and serious attention that it deserves. Believing Jesus Christ to be the most significant person in history, we need to know him ourselves. Our children, and their children, need to know him too. And the example of our own attendance at, and participation in, the life of the church is one of the most significant pieces of teaching that can come to the children and to the inquiring youth of any generation.

(3) A third reason to want to feel at home in the church is that the church can teach the Bible. We ought to shudder at the prospect of both R.S.V. and A.V. Bibles purchased and owned but unread. We hardly get the beginning of its good if we glance only at the 23rd Psalm and the 13th chapter of I Corinthians before putting it on the shelf. It is the most farsighted book known to mankind and it deserves constant reading and re-reading.

The church continues the study of the Bible in the repeating of its stories to children, in the earnest inquiry of mature classes, in the weekly reading of portions of it at worship and in the attempt to shed understanding upon it in sermons.

The church draws its life from the Bible. It knows that its witness is weakened unless its people are readers and students of the Bible, as being the book we should own and live and share with others. But it is a hard book to read and to understand. And that is where the church comes in with its continued effort to exalt the Bible and to help it come alive in the affairs of mankind.

When we invite people to come into the church we are inviting them to learn to love and feel at home in the institution that exalts the Bible as the most important book in the world. Its life and work are based on the Word.

(4) A final reason for letting your respect for the church blossom into a contagious love and devotion is simply that it can give you a place in the Christian fellowship. There you may find your best self, and there you can find work to do that deserves your complete loyalty. These are needs that haunt every human being until they are met.

We need to find ourselves in the fellowship of those who make progress in filling the same need for all. It is a great thing to belong to the fellowship that, with all its many faults, has come triumphantly through nearly 2,000 years bearing aloft its faith in God, in Christ, in the Bible and in the Kingdom of God.

Even when reduced to repentance and contrition over the sins and shortcomings of the church, it never occurs to some of us to desert the church. For no other institution that I know of will live for and fight for these things that are at the center of its thought and life.

If you and I are responsible people we will do more than murmur a polite "thank you" at the church. The best thanks for a church member is phrased in the words, "Please let me help! Where am I needed?" For we had better mean business!

So I hope you will say "See you in church" to the people you know. Say it with contagious affection I your voice and heart. Be ready to give your reasons to those who inquire. And if any seem surprised at your deepening devotion to your church, be prepared to say, in all humility, what was said so long ago; "Where should I be but in my Father’s house? What better deserves my time, efforts and abilities than doing His will?"

And if you are not now a member of Christ’s church, won’t you give careful, thoughtful, prayerful attention to the matter of joining it? For there you will surely be about your Father’s business -- Our Father’s business!

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Dates and places delivered:

Wisconsin Rapids, March 11, 1956

Nekoosa, February 26, 1958

Wisconsin Rapids, June 9, 1963