3/16/58

Scripture: Isaiah 58: 2-12; Matthew 6: 16-18

Among church folk whose observance of Lent calls for a strict sort of discipline, there are many who suppose that they must properly give up something during the season for 40 week days before Easter. The Sundays are still “feast days,” but those 40 week days of the entire season are “fast days.” Often the denials practiced during Lent are superficial. One decides to give up candy, or smoking, or movies, or more than one of such items.

Or, instead of subtracting one of these items from their list of accustomed satisfactions, people try adding such self-imposed disciplines as going to church more regularly, reading the Bible more attentively, and praying more frequently. One wonders how many who do set such disciplines for themselves really face any deeper meaning in their Christian lives, and how many merely “fool themselves with trivial devotions” as Brother Lawrence has referred to it. Brother Lawrence was a simple sort of Christian who was born about 300 years ago in France, and was named Nicholas Herman. At the age of 18, following service as a footman and soldier, he was religiously converted by reflections on a bare tree in winter that, he reflected, would be changed, revived, beautified and fruitful with the coming of spring. He was admitted as a Lay brother among the barefooted Carmelites in Paris in 1666, received the name, “Brother Lawrence,” and lived a life of very simple, whole-hearted trust.

He told his interviewers that the foundation of the spiritual life in him had been a high notion of God in faith. Once he had understood this, he had no other care but to reject every other thought so that he might “perform all his actions for the love of God.” He said that in the beginning of the spiritual life we ought to be faithful in doing our duty and denying ourselves; but after that, unspeakable pleasures followed.

I doubt that the simple-minded Lay Brother could have found satisfaction in some of the denials or disciplines we contemplate practicing in place of the giving of our whole selves to the will of God through the grace of Christ. Of course the self-denials of some of the recluse folk in religious history approach the ridiculous. In an effort to “put off your old nature --- and put on the new nature, created after the likeness of God,” [Ephesians 4: 22-24] as Paul exhorted the Ephesians to do, one old monk achieved an unusual distinction. At the beginning of the 5th century, AD, a thirteen-year-old shepherd lad came out of the hills of Syria, and went to church for the first time. He was so profoundly moved that he determined to become a saint. So, three years later, age 16, he entered a monastery.

After a while, his fellow monks expelled him because he was too devout even for a monastery! His extreme asceticism embarrassed the brethren who had renounced all, to lead an ascetic life. After that, the young man lived in a hut at what is now Talents. There he began his life-long practice of abstaining from food and drink during all of Lent. Later, he added the discipline of standing continuously, as long as his legs would support him.

Unsatisfied with the stringency of his discipline in the little hut, he withdrew to a rocky place in the desert, marked off an area 20 yards in diameter, and thereafter confined himself to that place. But his fame got around, and people flocked out to the desert to see this extraordinary man of God who, seeking seclusion, found himself the center of a colony! He was so consistently pestered by visitors that he reasoned it would do no good to move.

So he took an unusual step, directed, he said, to do so in a revelation. He was led, he said, to build a platform on a pillar and remain there for life! (The crowd of visitors could bring him the bare minimum of life’s absolute essentials.) Simeon was his name, and he is designated Stylites, from a Greek word meaning pillar (“Simeon of the pillar”).

Simeon Stylites’ first pillar was only about 9 feet high. Replacements increased in height. And with increased height his broader horizons increased his view of the world beneath him. When he finally died on his tiny platform, it is reported that he was atop a pillar 40 feet high.

At first, Simeon’s weird approach to the withdrawn life incurred the resentment of adjoining Nitrian monks, who threatened to have him excommunicated. But the intensity of his devotion, the purity of his purpose, his success in converting the heathen, his fame as a worker of miracles, and the healings which were reported to occur at the foot of his pillar -- all combined to spread his fame. His fame became so great that his picture became prevalent in Rome. It is said to have given major impetus to the reverence accorded statues, leading to controversy over the merits of such reverence.

One Emperor [Theodosius], being greatly influenced by Simeon, sent for his advice. He once dispatched 3 bishops to persuade the hermit to come down so that physicians could treat his serious illness. Another emperor, Leo, respected Simeon’s letter to him regarding an important council. Dignitaries of all sorts climbed a ladder kept near by in order to seek that saint’s counsel. And occasionally Simeon would deliver addresses from his platform.

There was no shelter up there. At first, he had a stake set, on the platform, to which he bound himself during Lent, lest he fall off during the weakness from his annual prolonged fast. But in later years, he stood without support. For 36 years he lived on the pillar without descending from his platform (unless it be to erect a taller pillar), and he died in 459 AD at the age of 71.

Now, lest some one of us should feel over-urged to go and do likewise unto Simeon Stylites (perish the thought!) it is not amiss to reflect further upon some of the so-called spiritual disciplines to which we may subject ourselves. Whether they be as trivial as doing without chocolate candy, or whether they be as thorough-going as those of the rigorous saint-on-a-pillar, do they really accomplish a transformation of character acceptable to God, or do they just inflate one’s spiritual pride and thus trap us in one more pitfall?

Does not Jesus have something to say to us about all this? “When you fast, do not look dismal, like hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by men. Truly, I say to you, they have their reward. But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, that your fasting may not be seen by men but by your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” [Matthew 6: 16-18].

Then Jesus went on to speak of how to build real treasures where no thief can break through nor steal - treasures not of the world, but treasures of the spirit, in heaven. [Matthew 6: 19-21]. And what is this kind of treasure? Is it not the spending of one’s self rather than the seeking of one’s self?

The prophet Zechariah gives the word of the Lord to his people, saying, “Thus says the Lord of hosts: render true judgments, show kindness and mercy each to his brother; do not oppress the widow, the fatherless, the sojourner, or the poor; and let none of you devise evil against his brother in your heart.” [Zechariah 7: 9-10].

The prophet Isaiah had been yet more pointed in his message to the people. He declared that people were complaining that, though they fasted at the proper times, God appeared not to see it. For the fasting was for their own satisfaction. It was accompanied only by quarreling and fighting. What good did it do to fast, to put on sack cloth and ashes, to bow the head like one of the rushes, if one supposed that only this was acceptable to the Lord?

Then Isaiah brings to the people this word of the Lord: “Is not this the fast that I choose? to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke --- to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house, when you see one without clothing, cover him, and hide not yourself from your own flesh.” (Don’t be so self-exalted about even the good that you do!)

“Then you shall call and the Lord will answer; you shall cry, and he will say, Here I am.” “If you pour yourself out for the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then shall your light rise in the darkness and your gloom be as the noonday. And the Lord will guide you continually.”

What we, of the year 1958, need, is not so much “resolution” as “revolution” --- change in the same sense that Jesus brought about change 19 and one-half centuries ago, and in the ages since. His was the spending of his life in its wholeness. And so was that of his immediate disciples. Theirs was such a thorough giving that Paul would say, “It is no longer I who believe, but Christ who lives in me.” [Galatians 2: 20].

It is probably a good thing, in Lent, or at any other appropriate time, to take a good look at ourselves, in order to see what we really are. Like Whittier, we may well say sternly: “Stand still, my soul, in the silent dark, I would question thee.” But let us not get all tangled up in self-introspection, in concern for our own peace and comfort. The needs of this sinful and fearsome world cry unto God for succor. And who shall be the instruments of God’s answering, unless it be those who are dedicated in Christian service?

It is altogether in keeping with Lent that on one Sunday of the season we join the churches of 35 denominations in the 15th annual observance of a Great Hour of Sharing. This is only one of the countless ways open to us for the spending of self and substance in mercy and compassion and service. The distribution of the Scriptures, in such efforts as those of the Gideons and the American Bible Society, is another. We do not have to look far to find some place to take hold!

Let me tell you briefly about an exemplary kind of service on the part of a fine man --- the sort of attitude and the kind of self-giving that can grow out of our Lenten fasting. There has lived in our time, a great Swiss theologian named Emil Brunner. For the most part, he has lived and worked, thought, written and taught in his own native portion of Europe. But in 1949, he visited Japan, giving lectures, offering forthright advice and helpful criticism to the Christian folk laboring there to make theirs a better country. The Japanese pastors expected learned theological discussion. They felt a little bit apologetic for being so busy administering relief and doing reconstruction work that they had little time for theological meditation and study. To their surprise, Dr. Brunner advised them to leave their studies and to go out into the highways and hedges and bring the plain people into the church. He reminded them of Jesus’ warning: “Inasmuch as you did it not unto one of the least of these my brethren you did it not unto me.” [Matthew 25: 45]. He reminded them that they had barely made a beginning.

But he did more than offer advice and exhortation. The struggling Christian church in Japan won Brunner’s heart. Returning to Switzerland, he wound up his work as professor in the University at Basel. And then, at the height of his powers, he accepted an invitation to serve for a time on the faculty of the new, and struggling, Japan International Christian University near Tokyo. His assignment was to teach religion, through an interpreter, not to graduate students, but to immature first and second year college undergraduates. Undismayed, Dr. Brunner went about the task with all of his brilliant gifts and strong will.

He made himself available to all of the theological schools of Japan. He came to be an indispensable lecturer to almost every institute for pastors or church school teachers. He did not spare himself from individual counseling, or indeed from effort of any kind. Christians of Japan, high and low, great and small, opened their hearts to him and took him in, welcoming his blunt, fatherly injunctions and his warnings.

When, at length, he had finished his time there, he delivered a farewell message on the subject, “My hope for Japan.” The gist of it was that Japan, like her roads, has modern ways, but insufficient foundation for those ways. He pleaded with Christians to give themselves as the hard concrete of faith and integrity on which the heavy traffic of the New Japan may travel. His address climaxed at the cross - “Where,” he said, “we not only come to see God, but also first come to know ourselves as sinners. Here it is that our capital ‘I’ becomes the ‘Thou,’ and Jesus Christ becomes the Lord of all life.”

If Lent begins with a penitent ‘I’, it should end with a joyful self-effacing ‘Thou.’ For even salvation is found as it is spent!

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Dates and places delivered:

Wisconsin Rapids, March 16, 1958

Union Lenten Service, Wisconsin Rapids, March 10, 1963.