A Lenten Journey; Where We Start. 2/22/42
Scripture: Matthew 4: 16-25
Text: Matthew 4: 17 “From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
The period of the year leading up to the passion of our Lord and the triumph of Easter, commonly known as the Lenten season, is a time of thoughtfulness. There is great value to us in specially observed seasons of the year. The joyful spirit of sharing and giving at Christmas flows from the recognition of the Greatest Gift to the people of the world; the joy of Easter pushes back our narrow horizons beyond the limits of brief earthly existence.
The observance of Washington’s birthday occasions our thoughtful appreciation of the price in life and a strong character and godly purpose spent for our precious national liberty.
The Lenten season is a longer, and more sustained, period when we Christian folk give our attention to the renewal and deepening of our spiritual life. During the Sunday morning services of this pre-Easter season, I propose that we take “A Lenten Journey” in our thoughts. (The idea for this journey is suggested by William Pierson Merrill.) Today we consider “Where We Start.”
Well, where did Jesus start? If he is our teacher, our leader, our savior, has not he the word for us? After his own personal preparation - his baptism and his self-examination (commonly called temptation) in the wilderness, he entered on his ministry with a call to his hearers to repent. No wonder he was not popular with a great section of the people of his land! The call to repentance is not a popular call. But there it is. “From that day, Jesus began to preach, and to say, Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
Jesus was preaching to people who were the same kind of human beings that you and I are; busy with the interests and ambitions and pleasures and worries of our living; resentful of the injuries inflicted upon us by others; jealous of our position and sometimes covetous of our neighbor’s position and possessions; willing to minimize and condone our faults, while magnifying the sins of others.
Jesus is “the way, the truth and the life” for us. He is our best guide. George Bernard Shaw said: “I am not a Christian, any more than Pilate was. But I confess that I see no way out of the present mess save the way Jesus would take, should he essay the role of a modern statesman.”
If Jesus is our “way” let us listen earnestly to him; and be willing to start where he started. And his first message is, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” He was speaking to people who believed in a kingdom of heaven, who looked forward to it and longed for it, who prayed for a Messiah to come and lead them into it. Jesus had to tell them that the heavenly kingdom was not some golden age of the future, over which to dream, but a very present reality. The Kingdom of God is always “at hand;” it may come in any moment. To be ready for it, to reach out our hands and hearts and receive it, we must be prepared for it, through repentance. We must start by searching our minds and hearts both as individuals and as groups.
This word of repentance is, as I said a moment ago, not popular. We shun it. For some devilish reason, we dislike the idea of being sorry for our wrongs; even more do we dislike admitting and examining our sins. It must be the pride within us, which Jesus so profoundly distrusted. We respond readily to the comfort of our religion, so much so that a mass of agnostic and atheistic peoples persistently refer to religion as the “opiate of the people.” Well, the comfort of true religion is no opiate! It is the most vitally real, and hard-bought serenity there is. It follows the soul-testing experience of subduing all the self-willed, persistent, stubborn, sins of a proud nature and resolutely offering one’s will, one’s strength, one’s life to God, to be directed and disciplined by His will.
The word “Repent” is no opiate. There is no lullaby in Jesus’ words as recorded in the 23rd chapter of Matthew where the call to repentance is continued, as it was throughout his preaching ministry. Listen: “Woe unto you --- hypocrites!” You are concerned with trifles, but ignore “the weightier matters --- judgment, mercy and faith.” You ought to have attended to these, without neglecting the details. “Woe unto you --- hypocrites!” For you “clean the outside of a cup” and leave it filthy inside.
“Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell? Wherefore, behold, I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes; and some of them ye shall kill and crucify; and some of them ye shall scourge --- and persecute --- from city to city.”
“Verily I say unto you, all these things shall come upon this generation.”
Those are words of Jesus - a part of the Christian scriptures. I wouldn’t call that “opium.” Where could you find a sterner stab at our complacent self-satisfaction? Jesus began with a terrible word when he said “Repent.” And he repeated it on appropriate occasions many times.
We live in a time when our past sins and shortcomings stand out in painful clearness. We have been materially selfish, as people who have much in the face of whole nations of people who have little; - people who are chronically starved. We have shared in certain limited ways, but we could have shared more generously and comprehensively. We have shared the spiritual gospel to a very considerable extent. But we might have shared it to a greater extent. And we could have avoided nullifying it by practicing on the street and in the market what betrays our words in the sanctuary.
A row of Chinese coolies with their rickshaws were drawn up like taxis at a spot where a fare seemed possible. One of them had stopped at a spot ordinarily reserved for a parking automobile. While he stood there a car drove up bringing a missionary of a certain denomination. Finding the space blocked, the ruffled ecclesiastic got out of the car and gave the coolie a shameful tongue-lashing. Whereupon the coolie silently moved away to wait in another spot for the few cents fare that would mean, literally, the difference between a little food, and stark hunger for his family that night. A fellow missionary saw the incident and observed how hopeless it would be, after that, to win that coolie, or any other Chinese, for that matter, to a gospel spoken by one who had been observed so shamefully to lose his temper. We all disapprove that sort of thing; yet, as Jesus said to a crowd of people filled with righteous indignation at the sin of one caught red-handed in a wrong for which the customary penalty was death by stoning, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”
It doesn’t take much searching to begin to uncover some of the things in our character that ought not to be there. And it takes a great deal of searching to uncover them all!
How much of our present worries are due to our own failure to play hard enough at the game of good will, mutual help, cooperation, steadfast defense of honor and righteousness?
What about the things that hurt people near by - the slurs and the gossip that are so easily spoken and entertained, and so lusciously passed on? A great and capable writer once pictured evil speaking in this pointed, and rather horrible paragraph: “Cannibalism,” he said, “is dying out among the barbarous tribes, but it still survives among the most highly civilized peoples. You might find yourself in difficulty if you invited a company of friends to a feast in which the principal dish was a well roasted neighbor. Everybody would refuse with horror. But if you wish to serve up somebody’s character at a social entertainment, or pick the bones of somebody’s reputation in a quiet corner, you will find ready guests and almost incredible appetites.”
Do we all make it an absolute rule that no gossip which reaches us, no unverified rumor of evil, shall go beyond us? And also that a sorry truth shall stop unretold, so far as we are concerned, when no good purpose can be served by passing it on?
Let us repent, search our hearts, purge the evils that have beset every one of us since time began. Let us seek God’s forgiveness and prepare ourselves for His guidance. That is the hard, the unpopular, the only straight way to find the kingdom of God that is at hand.
We never needed to be right more than now. We never needed strength of character more than now. Though we must walk through the mire of contamination that covers this earth, and though we may slip and fall at times, we must not lie there and we must not wallow.
We must learn how to be indignant, without cursing; to abhor evil, without damning the soul of the evildoer; to resent injury and resist and conquer evil without plotting revenge; to be patriotic with all our being without indiscriminate and blinding prejudice; to be hurt and not to hate; to be stealthily wronged yet ready openly to forgive; to despise an enemy’s works of destruction yet to continue loving his constructive art; to detest tyranny without detesting the helplessly enslaved; to love our own kind so intensely and wisely that that love may flower in wise good will; to oppose without malice (in the spirit of Lincoln); to say with our Lord, “Father, forgive” without for a moment condoning the sin that calls for both condemnation and forgiveness.
Christ needs disciples right now! The Kingdom of heaven is at hand! It waits only for His loyal subjects!
Let our self-examination be not in the spirit of those who grovel, nor of those who fear or despair. Let us remember that our Lord is gracious, and full of compassion; slow to anger, and of great mercy. “The Lord is good to all; and his tender mercies are over all his works.” (End)
If we make these (forty) days of Lent a time for thorough self-examination of ourselves, of our religion, of our citizenship, of all that we have and all that we are, and, sorry for our sins and mistakes, “turn from them unto God” with full purpose to know and obey His will, we may enter into a new life of real and loyal service to God and man.
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dates and places delivered:
Wisconsin Rapids, February 22, 1942
Nekoosa Congregational Church, March 11, 1942
W.F.H.R., Wisconsin Rapids, June 18, 1942