10/3/65

Scripture: Hebrews 10: 11-25.

Text: Hebrews 10: 22a; “Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith.”

Today, millions of Christians will be in their houses of worship to celebrate World-Wide Communion Sunday. They will be present at the Lord’s Supper. They will kneel, sit or stand to receive Holy Communion as it is offered in the manner of each household of faith. In a world so broken and divided; so confused and lost; let there be rejoicing that, for these few moments on a Communion day, Christian people can recognize their essential unity in the spirit. We can share in a simple, precious sacrament. God has shared something wonderful with us. We can be sharers with others. Christians are people who come together to acknowledge that the God they worship is One who has shared Himself with all mankind everywhere, whether they acknowledge His Lordship or not.

The sacrament is not alone the remembering of past events. It is an affirmation that God yet participates in our life today. In the spirit of Christ, God offers Himself anew to us now, and every day. And we are, by His spirit, moved to share in the lives of others --- their hopes and anxieties and joys; their needs and accomplishments.

There are many meanings in the Communion Service, of which the sacrament of sharing is only one. When we enter into it with expectation, some new facet of understanding may be the reward of our participation. But we need to come to the table unencumbered with the hatred and evils that block our entrance to His Kingdom of appreciation and love of life.

Part of the invitation to the Lord’s Supper is often phrased in the words: “You who truly and earnestly repent of your sins, and are in love and charity with your neighbors, and intend to lead a new life, following the commandments of God and walking from henceforth in His holy ways, draw near with reverence, faith and thanksgiving, and take this Supper of the Lord to your comfort.” Assuming that you and I do truly repent of our wrong attitudes and acts, our haughty pride, our wanton neglects and willful defiance; that we are in love and charity with our neighbors of many sorts; that we do intend to lead a new life walking in His holy and righteous ways; then we come to this suggestion, alive with meaning: “Draw near with faith.” It is as though one could hear the Master’s own voice inviting us to the meaning and experience of his table. Let us think on that phrase for a few minutes today as we join millions of others in approaching the table.

Some of us are old enough to remember a technique once used in certain young people’s meetings of an earlier day. I once visited a neighboring youth gathering wherein the leader “gave out Scripture passages,” as they said. That is, he would have certain verses, or groups of verses, from the Bible ready to suggest. Volunteers would volunteer to take them, look them up, stand up and read them back, and comment on what meaning they suggested for the reader and those others present. Well, we are not doing that today. But I do think that there is useful suggestion for us in referring to several passages of Scripture for light on this matter of drawing near with faith.

Here, first of all, is reference to the sixth chapter of John. “No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him.” [John 6: 44]. The emphasis here is that God begins the process. It is like a kind of magnetism. We are attracted by God in His creation -- the loveliness of some sunny day; an appreciation of the autumn colors; the fascination of some new discovery awaiting our understanding; the chance to build strength in body, mind and spirit -- these and many other phenomena in God’s creation draw us to an appreciation of the Creator. God draws us first.

Then in the twelfth chapter of John, we read these wonderful words of Jesus: “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.” [John 12: 32]. These words of his teaching indicate a magnetism about his cross. For there is a drawing power in the realization that Jesus accomplished so much by going to it. It is the last thing on earth that one would expect to have any drawing power. One look at such an instrument of torture, punishment and death would seem to repel anyone. But the truth seems to be that the figure of Christ, lifted up from the earth and impaled on a cross, has attracted wistful, lonely, longing souls all over the world and in every age of the past two thousand years. You can’t keep your eyes off it. “And they that passed by reviled him” ... yet the world has, ever since, turned to take another wondering look. For righteousness has never been so deeply underlined as it is in the figure of Jesus suffering for its sake upon a cross.

A cross may be beautiful as an ornament. It has its significant place as a reminder on the printed page and in church architecture. But this cross with Jesus on it, described so vividly in New Testament scripture -- well, that’s something different from ornament. Others crosses may be, and are, symbolic. But when Christ is on a cross, you and I feel drawn toward it.

It is reported that a big crowd gathered, one foggy night several years ago, on Madison street in Chicago. The people were looking up at the steeple cross of a downtown church, and police couldn’t get them out of the street. Finally the police officers sent someone to go up in the church to see, because several in the crowd were saying, “There’s a man up there;” “I think he’s going to commit suicide.” Others said, “It’s just a religious fanatic; he’s trying to get up on the cross.” A careful check by somebody whom the police sent up the ladders to find out, revealed that there was nobody on the cross of the church steeple, and nobody near it. The fog was swirling in such a way that it looked like somebody up there. After a couple of hours, rain dispersed the fog in the air and the people on the street.

It was an illusion, of course. But the incident points up an interesting observation: There are crosses all over the world; but people don’t pay very much attention to them until they think there is a man on the cross. And when they see the son of God on a cross, they are drawn to it -- and to him.

We turn to another scripture passage in the book of Hebrews, in the tenth chapter, from which our lesson was read today. The writer says to the Hebrew Christians, “Let us draw with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.” This is a direct source of the invitation to commune. The composer of that liturgical invitation went straight to this passage, because this is it: “Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith.” The writer of the book of Hebrews is, of course, doing more than to suggest that we “draw near.” He suggests some of the prerequisites: “Our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience.” What he suggests is that there must be a cleansing -- a washing -- a preparation. It is more than coming to communion, washed up with clean hands. We need come with a clean heart. “Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith.”

Still another scripture passage is in the book of James. In the fourth chapter of that book is this assurance: “Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you.” [James 4: 8]. How true it is, that it is a two-way appeal. God calls us, and we call God! When you start toward Him, He starts toward you. We can depend upon it. It is as sure as was the love of the old father for his prodigal son in the New Testament story. [Luke 15: 11-32]. You can almost see that elderly father looking down the road. As the son decides to come home, the father doesn’t wait for him to get there. He gets up and out, and starts toward him. When a person sincerely starts toward God, be assured that God is already on His way toward the lonely heart.

Some theologians who try to make out that God is hard to reach, remote, austere; with a nature so completely different from the nature of man as to be incomprehensible, have a point. We have no idea how repellent sin is; no notion of how far removed we are; no sense of what a great gulf is fixed between God and man. Probably some of this emphasis is needed as an antidote to some of the thinking of recent years wherein God is understood as a man lifted a little higher; benevolent and kind but also indulgent toward us. We are all a little bad and with quite a bit of good in us. There is “a lot of good in the worst of us, and a lot of bad in the bad of us.” We stand in need of a sterner theology than that.

Nevertheless, it is right to declare again, as Jesus did, that God cares and that He is a loving and forgiving God. The New Testament account is a story of the loving God who is trying to find us. When we start toward Him, He has already started toward us. But there is no “short cut” for us. It requires a willing heart. We must have a hunger and thirst after righteousness. But when that hunger and thirst is present righteousness comes. “Knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” We remember this when we come to communion.

Draw near with faith. That is part of the invitation. And faith does not mean what the boy said: “Believing what you know ain’t so.” Faith is a venture of the spirit. It is resting on the Eternal strength. It is the outreach of your own being toward the unseen. Many years ago, a thoughtful person put it this way: “Faith is not belief in spite of evidence, but it is life in scorn of consequence.” You live, through thick and thin, by what you believe to be true, and in scorn of consequence. Like Job, we say of God and His goodness, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.” [Job 13: 15]. When we draw near with faith, the experience can be like a miracle. It is like the healing and refreshing of a family reunion with the warmth and wonder of homecoming. There is the security of being at home with friends and A Friend.

No wonder that this one act has remained central in the Christian church for so long. No wonder that nearly every branch of the church uses it in one form or another. No wonder that many refer to Christians not just alone as church members, but as “communicants.”

As we enter into the simple mystery of the service, we are close to the center of our faith. Surely Jesus did not intend, at his last supper with the disciples, to initiate communion as a magical rite. But, in a spiritual sense, this act of remembrance and of entry into some communication with him and with God and with fellow worshippers, gets near the center of our Christian experience. So the invitation to commune is: “Draw near with faith.”

Let us, therefore, “get together” in this old, familiar, and yet always new rite -- together with each other and with our Lord -- where “heaven comes our souls to greet,” where redemption is wrought all over again in our poor and hungry hearts. It is a wonderful invitation: “Draw near with faith.”

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, October 3, 1965 (World-wide Communion Sunday.)