The Epistle: I John 3:13-24 * The
Gospel: Luke 14:16-24
Today’s Epistle speaks clearly about the duties
of Christian love, that is, charity (agape). It speaks of practical ways
to live as a Christian among real people in the real world: “But whoso hath
this world's good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels
of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him? My little
children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth.”
In light of the Gospel reading appointed for this day, we need to see that
another practical way to love our neighbor is stated in the Parable: “Go out
into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be
filled.”
Do we see the mission of the Church, evangelism, as a duty of charity? If we do
not see it that way, then it means we fail to believe inwardly the very
religion we practice outwardly. We stand at a crossroads, or even better, we
are at a fork in the road. It is clear to me, from years of observation, that
for a few people the whole idea of Continuing the old ways of
genuine Prayer Book Anglicanism never got beyond the legitimate concern of
self-interest.
I do not condemn that. It is right to have enlightened self-interest. The
commandment, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” does little good for
someone who lacks enlightened self-interest. It is certainly not intended for
those who are self-destructive that they love their neighbor only to the degree
that they love themselves. It is right to love thyself in the
proper sense, which above all is based on loving God. For, if you love God, it
is your first duty not to throw away your own soul, and that is because He has
placed so great a value on your soul that it was redeemed by the costly and
most worthy thing of all, the blood of His only begotten Son. Christ loved you
and gave Himself for you. So, enlightened self-interest is part of fulfilling
the First and Great Commandment to love the Lord thy God.
Nonetheless, the whole idea of Continuing the old ways of
genuine Prayer Book Anglicanism is quite worthy in itself, if we believe the
Gospel at the center of it; and, this is true not merely for own sakes. Right
as the legitimate kind of self-interest is, we must move forward beyond its
limitations. We have preserved something good and valuable. More than that, we
have at the very core of who we are and what we believe the Gospel of Jesus
Christ, the very lifeline needed by each and every human being.
The riches of
God have been given to us so that we may be generous to those in need. A
reality, a kind of law at work, is that the more we give away our spiritual
wealth, the richer we become inwardly.
Let’s think seriously about the words, “Go out into the highways and hedges,
and compel them to come in,” in light of where we are and in light of the
times. We need to be realistic and practical, which is the only real way to be
spiritual. So, where are we, and what are the times?
1. This country is not a Christian country at
present.
It has been a
long time since anyone could honestly make a case that it is. Let us look at
something said by the second President of the United States
Without a moral
foundation of God’s universal and unchanging Law, what does freedom produce,
and what do free people demand of a representative government? Right now
mothers are free to have their unborn children assassinated, as long as the
assassin has the right license. In jurisprudence the word “marriage” has finally
become utterly meaningless, not just by rampant divorce and immorality, but by
a new legal definition that has no true meaning whatsoever;
for, we know by revelation that God created marriage as part of human life, and
that by it a man and a woman become one flesh; we know that He blesses marriages
by the birth of children. John Adams has been proved right: “Our Constitution was made
only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the
government of any other.”
2. In the absence of God’s law.
My younger brother, in his book Atheist Delusions, argues in one
part of it that spokesmen for the new Atheist movement have no logical reason
to suppose that ethical or moral principles can be sustained by atheism.
Indeed, if they managed to free society from what they call “religion,” each
succeeding generation would only find itself brought up farther and farther
away from any reason whatsoever even so much as to care about ethical
considerations of any kind.
I can tell you what a non-religious society would most resemble, even in terms
of its ethical standards: It would most resemble the first twenty minutes or so
of the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey. If such a society became ordered
it would look like all of the tyrannies of recent times, be they the Nazis or
Communists. Ideology would exist, but not ideals that we could recognize.
Above all, even the semblance of two very important things, justice and
compassion, would vanish away from the structures of an Atheist society, just
as these two things were almost entirely absent in every form of pagan religion
known to the real academic discipline of History. Whether the Suhtees of
India, the strangulation of emperor’s widows (as late as the 15th century)
in China, the daily human sacrifices on Aztec altars, or even centuries before
that, the mass human sacrifices by fire among the Celts in the Wicker Man
ceremonies, pagan religions have proved to be cruel. Atheism would fare no
better than paganism, as the Communist regimes demonstrated. They had their
very large shares of human sacrifices too, sacrifices to the god of the State
and of ideology that exists in isolation from an absolute moral code from the
Divine Lawgiver.
It is safe to say, on the basis of history, that the Church created compassion
as a social and cultural norm. Today, we expect to find hospitals and medicine
in any inhabited place. We expect courts of law to be about, at the very least,
some effort towards justice for all. But, why should we expect these things? If
we raise successive generations without a Church that can say, Thus
saith the Lord, we may well expect nothing but cruelty in place of
compassion and the exercise of raw power in place of justice. Even today we see
medicine becoming mere business, and judicial authority too much the servant of
political power.
3. We are all missionaries here and now
“Here,”
because we are not living in a Christian culture,
except insofar as it is a memory, a memory which cannot long sustain influence
over the population. “Now,” because we must act wisely in light of the times.
We have not yet
begun to think of ourselves as missionaries, however. We are living with the
illusion that everybody knows the Gospel, and that the churches are filled
everywhere, and that most children are raised to know the Ten Commandments and
to believe in God. But we have baptized elderly people in the nursing home; we must
not presume anything.
And, let me be
clear. Evangelism is always the
mission of the Church, in every place and time. We cannot assume that people
know the Lord of the Church simply because they have church
membership somewhere. But, as it is, if we are to be effective in our own
country in this, our generation, it is time to wake up and be realistic about
what has happened to the culture all around us.
Ideally, we will
embrace the reality, of where and when we are, as an opportunity to serve God.
I do not pretend to have all the answers for the positively best way to present
our message. I welcome ideas. But, more important than a solid program of
evangelism is the foundation for making the effort; that is, the belief in each
heart that the Christ we know, the Gospel we believe, and the Church in which
we have found both truth and valid sacraments to meet the needs of our own
souls, is so good that we must share this wealth. What matters first is that
this practical and vital part of our faith is the unshakable conviction of each
heart.
“Go out into the
highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.”
It helps a great
deal if we know that here, in Christ, is the food and drink of eternal life,
the word and ministry of reconciliation with God, and the only true medicine
for the soul. Practically speaking, for those of us who have decided to Continue the
Anglican Way
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