3/10/57

Scripture: (Read Micah 6: 1-8)

Among some of our friends we hear of certain days as “days of religious obligation.” One is assumed to be obligated to attend the appointed worship; perhaps to fast, or otherwise to eat in prescribed manner; to meditate on one’s sins or spiritual needs, or upon the means of grace.

Many of us regard it as a kind of obligation, or perhaps an opportunity, to deepen our spiritual life during a Lenten season. We resolve to attend church services most faithfully. Perhaps we decide to give up some frivolity or something else in Lent as evidence of self-discipline. At least we go through some kind of form. But forms can become shockingly empty unless we find meaning through them.

There was a time when ancient Hebrew folk found satisfaction in forms that would be utterly abhorrent to us. For generations they had been accustomed to the idea that a sincere, God-fearing person would make sacrifices on an altar to the deity. Products of the farm, the barn, the orchard, were brought to the altar to become burnt offerings. There was a feeling that the first fruits should be thus sacrificed in order that there might be a blessing of future produce -- or sacrificed out of sheer gratitude for the crop!

The idea went even further in some parts of the Near East. For, in a land where human sacrifices were offered, it was even considered by some that a couple should really sacrifice their first-born child to deity in order that God might be pleased to give them more children and prosperity.

It is not too difficult to reconstruct the scene of such a ritual. The altar on a high place; the priests and the people chanting; the precious blood of a sacrifice and oil being poured on the altar fire; and the stirring feeling of the people that something mighty had been accomplished.

But now and then some prophet would show up to declare that it takes more than this to fulfill one’s religious obligation! And, after all, in relation to human sacrifice, it becomes absurd to think that one can make amends for his transgression by burning his child as an offering to God. This, after all, was only murder, and it added to one’s sins rather than absolving the worshipper. It must have been exceedingly offensive to the Deity.

With this background in mind, we come to the well-known saying of the prophet Micah about what God really wants of man. Micah raises the question as to whether the sacrifice of life -- blood sacrifice -- is really acceptable, or what God wants. And he seems to come to the conclusion that it is just irrelevant. The real demands of God on man are moral and spiritual, and the proper worship of God is a life obedient to these demands. We hear Micah proclaiming, “He hath showed thee, O Man, what is good; and what doth the lord require of thee but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”

People can read that, and breathe easier. “O, is that what God wants? You mean, Mr. Micah, that we don’t have to sacrifice our property, or our crops, or our children on the altar? All that we have to do is something ‘spiritual’ like doing what is right, being merciful, walking in proper humility with God? Well, that’s more like it!”

And yet is it so easy? Or is it, perhaps, a demand so difficult to satisfy that a sacrifice, because of its very concreteness, would be easier? “To do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.” Or, as Moffatt translates it: “To be just, and kind, and live in quiet fellowship with God.” This may sound comforting and comfortable to the man who has never tried it. But the unanimous verdict of the prophets through the ages underscores its costliness. Every student of law must know how difficult the quest for justice has been, and continues to be. Mercy and humility are surely two of the holiest of virtues. Yet no others are more difficult of the kind of achievement that God requires. For we are not alone to hear this imperative word from the prophet; we are to do it and be it. Long after the prophet Micah, we read in the book of James: “Be ye doers of the word and not hearers only.” [James 1: 22].

It is easy to see why agnostic and cynical men have no patience with magical religion. They label it “opium of the people.” They regard it as a tool of exploiters to get the masses of people to do as they want them to do. But what it is well to remember is that the classic offensive against magical religion does not come from agnostic or atheistic attackers outside the church, but from within the ranks of religion itself. It was the prophets of Israel who attacked the crude and corrupt other-worldliness. It was the prophets who proclaimed that, no matter how impressive the sacrifices offered at the altar, no matter how elaborate the ritual, no matter how minutely observed the law, something much deeper is required.

Wherewith shall I come before the Lord,

And bow myself before the high God?

Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,

With calves of a year old?

Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,

Or with ten thousands of rivers of oil?

Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,

The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?

In these words, the prophet enumerates the approved forms of his peoples’ religion. Then with a single stroke, he sweeps them away:

He hath showed thee, O man, what is good;

And what doth the Lord require of thee,

But to do justly, and to love mercy,

And to walk humbly with thy God?

Here is a prophet’s demand that man come to terms, not just with ethics, but with religion; with reality. He must face his sin, the failure of his efforts, the undoing of his best intentions. He must not try to escape into magic -- turning of stones into bread -- nor to bargaining for power over the kingdoms of the world. But he must learn the deeps that can face tragedy without fear. Dr. Fosdick puts it understandably when he speaks of Christianity as being not a form but a force.

In the United States today there are probably well over 60 million members of Christian churches. As a matter of form at least, we go through the motions of attending church regularly, or occasionally, and of promoting some of the activity we deem to be characteristic of church affiliation. But if anything like 60 million people were making Christ’s way a force, the condition of this country could be far better than it is.

One understands the lines of a modern poet who writes this jingle:

They do it every Sunday,

They’ll be all right on Monday;

It’s just a little habit they’ve acquired.

Of American religion, this can be said: first, we are not pagans, utterly untouched by the influence of the Christian heritage. There is a great deal that can be said gratefully about the genuine faith and character in our churches and among our people. The long-accumulated effect of Christian teaching is mediated in countless ways, through our social customs, in our family life, in our literature. We know, in a general way, what the Christian faith is about.

Further, we are as a people respectful toward Christianity and grateful that it is here. But though we are not a pagan people, nor are we atheistic in opposition to Christianity, multitudes of us are not much more than complacent toward it and acquiescent in it. We have the form of religion; but we have hardly allowed it to be a force with us. Stanley Jones put it this way: “We have been inoculated with a mild form of Christianity,” he says, “and have become immune to the real article.”

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Today, all Christianity that is merely conventional, formal, or even nebulous, faces a fearful challenge that concerns us all. An anti-Christian attack has plunged the world into fear and foment. It is not a form but a force. It is vital, dynamic, sacrificial, terrific, massing millions behind an anti-Christian way of life.

We cannot meet this force with form. It takes dynamic force to overcome dynamic force. All great faiths now confront this demand for reality. Our democracy, for example, must be a real force. It is a lot more than an Election Day technique. It is a spirit that must inform all our social and economic and racial relationships. It is not alone a privilege but a demanding responsibility. It must be dynamic and powerful if it is to overcome totalitarianism.

It is true that Christianity must be dynamic. A college president [Mildred McAfee, Wellesley] observed that well over 98% of students entered the school with some church affiliation. Most of them were found to be essentially ignorant of the history and literature of the religious tradition to which they claimed allegiance. If that college president’s remark is even remotely true, Christianity in this land stands in peril. For this is a generation when the whole earth is a battleground, not of forms but of dynamic forces.

Perhaps it takes an encounter with destructive forces to call up Christianity as a force in us. During World War II, a group of American fliers were forced down on a South Sea island and had to spend weeks with the natives before they could escape. Those natives had been under the influence of earnest missionaries and were Christian. And, believe it or not, those American young men later said that, persuaded by these South Sea islanders, they became Christian there. Returning, they let it be known that, as for them, they are Christian now.

Our first reaction may be to inquire, “Well, weren’t they already Christian? Hadn’t they heard all about it before? Weren’t they connected with churches back home?” Probably they were. But it takes soil as well as seed to make a crop. And the soil of their urgent need became the medium in which the seeds of Christian acquaintance could grow into Christian conviction.

It may be that it is in an encounter with other forces that our Christianity becomes deeper rooted and growing. Discouragement is a force; fear, disillusionment and cynicism are forces that assail our souls. We must have a resistant force to stand up to them. In our deep need for such power, it is sometimes revealed to us that Christ --- His faith about life, His way of living, His power for sustaining life --- becomes food for our hunger, water for our thirst, medicine for our sickness, power to carry on. Our religion becomes a force (1) when we wake up to our need of it, and (2) when we experience it personally as a source of inward power.

The saddest failure of the church is not hypocrisy. I do not run into much that seems to me to be real conscious, deliberate hypocrisy. But the saddest failure of the church is that its members should find so little force in their faith. A man in an eastern city said to his minister: “I have been a member of my church since I was baptized and joined it 25 years ago. Why has nothing vital happened to me in all that time?” He knew about Christianity; he believed in it; he had observed its customs and served its institutions. But it was still more form than force to him after 25 years.

O that we may all find our Christian religion as a force! See how it works under stress! Know its power and strength in distress!

A fellow who was a musician in civil life had to take up arms with the others during war time. He found himself before too long in Sicily as a captain over a unit with no chaplain. So he made himself responsible for the spiritual needs of his men. Writing home, he said: “These boys are very ‘practical’ about their religion. That is, they actually look to it for strength to bear their immediate problems.” Well, that’s what it is for! Not alone in war but in grief, in reversals, in unsolved problems, before vital decisions, it is to be more than a form. It is to be a moving force!

Our Christianity can become a dynamic reality in life when we (1) wake up to our need of it; (2) discover that it is a real source of power; and (3) when we discover that its basic faiths are everlastingly true. It is a supreme moment in a person’s experience when he gets his eye on something that he is persuaded is eternally true. Then he finds himself not so much possessing something as being possessed by that to which his mind and heart belong!

Early Christians were warned to expect hard times among men who would be selfish, fond of possessions and power, boastful, haughty, callous, abusive, disobedient, dissolute, savage; who would be treacherous, reckless, conceited, hating goodness, and preferring pleasure to God. All the more because they would find this so, the early Christians were exhorted to make their faith not a form but a force.

Consider, further, that Christianity becomes a dynamic power in life when it becomes a strong, organized, devoted fellowship. Our church -- any church -- should be a fellowship of friendliness and mutual strength in shared experience. There have been times and places wherein the church had to preserve some form against a better day.

During the Civil War, the college of William and Mary in Virginia was damaged and closed. After the battles, it opened precariously and then had to close again -- this time for seven years! During those 7 barren years, there were no students. The faculty had disappeared. Rain seeped through leaky roofs on desolate buildings. But the college president still rang the bell! He was keeping up a form, confident that the intellectual life would come back again to fill those empty halls with reality. And it did!

The church has had to do that sometimes -- and may have to do it again. But right now the times cry out for a vigorous, vital, friendly, strong, convinced fellowship.

A historian at Columbia University, Prof. Shotwell, has said, “Religion moves, vast and potent, in the world today. One must be blind, indeed, not so see the evidences of its power in both the structure and the movement of our modern world.”

May it be so with the Christian church, and with all Christian people, that we know the power of our faith and dedicate it to God’s holy use.

Therefore, let us share; let us witness in word and action and if need be in marching where marches are needed.

Let us be more concerned with spending and sharing than with receiving and getting.

Let genuineness move us not to any ritual of burning up our first fruits, but to the sacrifice --- the giving and spending of our whole selves in Christ’s name and spirit!

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, March 10, 1957.

Also in Arpin, WI (union “World Day of Prayer” service)

February 21, 1958.

Also in Wisconsin Rapids, March 28, 1965.