Laymen’s Religion                                                                2/6/44

 

Scripture:  Matthew 23: 1-12

 

Text:  Matthew 23: 8b;  “One is your Master, even Christ, and all ye are brethren.”

 

For some time, the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America has asked churches of the several denominations to observe the month of February as Brotherhood month.  It is obvious that the state of the world abroad and at home demands that some careful thought be given to the right way for people to get along with each other.

 

Christians have an answer.  Whether Christians really believe in it, and whether the non-Christian world wants to accept it, will largely determine the character of the world in this or any age.

 

Next Sunday, I expect to speak more specifically on a brotherhood theme.  Today I want to talk on a theme that relates closely to it.  I announced that I would preach on “Laymen’s Religion.”  Perhaps I should have said “Religion among Laymen” or used some such wording.  Certainly I do not mean to suggest at the outset, nor at any time later, that a laymen’s religion should differ from a clergyman’s religion.

 

Our Lord was frequently very hard on the so-called professionals in religion.  No doubt, he learned much of the traditions of his people and of the Scriptures, from his parents.  And he almost certainly learned a lot of it also at the feet of some faithful teacher or Rabbi in the nearest Synagogue.

 

But during the course of his young life (after all, he lived on earth a much shorter span of life than mine is now) he must have been profoundly stirred by some characteristics which he found in too many religious leaders - pride, love of the prominent seats and the conspicuous places of honor; greed; evil compromise; complacency; arrogance.  For he lost patience with Pharisees, with Saducees, with Rabbis in many an instance and spoke of them, and sometimes to them, in scathing terms.

 

The fact is that Jesus was a layman!!  He was the son of tradespeople.  He understood the experiences of farmers, fishermen, carpenters, businessmen from the standpoint of one of them.  He addressed himself to laymen.  For his closest friends and disciples he chose laymen.  Neither Jesus, nor any of his disciples were members of priesthood or clergy.  Several of his close friends were fishermen; one was a government tax collector; later on a tentmaker and a physician were attracted to his following.

 

When we remember that Christianity is a laymen’s religion, we are getting down in our thinking to the place where Christianity started.  (Incidentally, the Congregational churches are among those which recognize that fact in their very character.  For the churches of our fellowship are groups of local people bonded together in a covenant relationship, voting democratically on all important matters that govern the character and direction of their local church.)

 

Remember that our Lord was a layman himself, that he talked laymen’s language.  God a shepherd tending faithfully his sheep, an orchard owner pruning his trees and vines, a farmer sowing seed and harvesting grain and fighting weeds, a merchant seeking pearls, a householder raising a difficult family and directing his stewards.  Jesus constantly brushes past the academic language of schools and deals in plain speech with the areas where laymen and lay women live and work.

 

Alas it was too soon changed when men began to organize their Christian fellowship.  It was changed in several directions.  There was the sacramental route.  The old idea, pagan in its persistence, was that God is a very mysterious power, dangerous to deal with, impossible to understand much; so that a special class, the priests, must learn and manipulate the techniques by which God’s grace can be secured and mediated to the multitude.  So there were priests!

 

I think that if I were to stand by one of the turbines generating electrical current at the Consolidated dam, I would be perfectly satisfied to let a competent electrician handle the harnessing and direction of that current for me and my household.  I would rather not fool with any such power, for sheer fear that in my ignorance of its ways I might get knocked out.  I suppose multitudes of people have mistakenly felt the same way about the power of God, not realizing that the two are very different matters and that no such analogy is valid.

 

When the Protestant Reformation came, the division between clergy and laymen shifted its basis, but remained strong.  The minister came to be “parson” the person who could qualify to expound the Word of God.  So he was on the whole, ruler of the church.  In the Puritan commonwealth, he largely ruled the community, too!  It was his business to expound the Word of God.  It was the layman’s business to listen.

 

Even today the difference persists in another way.  We think of progress in terms of specialties.  Laborers in various fields of industry, business managers, scientists, teachers, inventors specialize in differing tasks.  We live in the era of the expert!  So, the minister becomes the specialist, presumably the expert, in religion.  That is his business.  Laymen pay their doctors to care for their health, their lawyers to protect their rights and property, their grocers to secure and distribute their food, their mechanics to keep the family car running, and perhaps their minister to take care of their religion.  Insofar as that becomes the viewpoint, we still have the old division in another form.

 

When that division exists, it is an unhealthy situation.  Christ never meant it to be that way!

 

If you will look about you, you will see that the place where Christianity has its most crucial battle is in the laymen’s realm - in regular daily morals, in home life, at school, in the store, in the city council and the legislature, in the army, in the diplomatic field, in politics.  There is where Christ’s gospel is tested out.  If Christian spirit and ethics can be made effective by the Christian laymen in these, and other, fields where Christian laymen work and struggle with non-Christian policies, that gospel becomes real.  If Christian laymen constantly fail to make effective that spirit and those ethics, then the religion of the sanctuary and the word from the pulpit is reduced to meaningless twaddle, or at best a sort of prophecy of doom.

 

The worst result of this assumption among many church folk and especially by many on the so-called fringe of church interest, that the clergyman is a specialist in something the layman can hardly hope to understand, is a sort of double standard; the clergyman - minister, priest, or rabbi - is expected to be more religious than the layman, a holier man, under more solemn obligation to be that way.  It isn’t so!

 

See the things that can be specialized, where we can avail ourselves of the results of differentiated labor with benefit, while not knowing the nature or skills of that specialty.  The electrician, the engineer, the physician, the lawyer - they can specialize, and we can by cooperation and compensation, purchase many of the results.  But just as soon as we get to life’s profoundest experiences we are in another realm where specialty can’t be bought.  No one can breathe the air’s oxygen for you.  Either you get it into your blood through your own lungs, or you don’t - and cease to breathe.  No one can eat for you.  No one can fall in love for you.  Some one may by chance or design introduce you to the right woman, the right man.  But you love, or don’t love; no one else can determine that for you.  No one can be forgiven for you; no one can love your brother in your stead.  No one can pray for you.  Someone can lead, or point the way in prayer.  But if it is prayer to you, it is the lifting of your own aspiration to God.

 

“There are no proxies for the soul,” says Dr. Fosdick.  In certain most vital areas, there is no specialization by which I can beg, buy, borrow or steal from another man.

 

From time to time, here in this church, I talk to you about prayer.  I think you want me to.  I ought to be able to, and I do my best.  But with all the reminders of the need of prayer, the reasonable arguments for prayer, the splendid illustrations of the effectiveness of prayer, the lovely phraseology in which others far more capable than myself, have been able to couch prayer, it still is true that you must pray for yourself.  Our major difficulties in prayer spring not from what a clergyman says or leaves unsaid about prayer, not from anything written in good books or left unwritten about prayer; but in the practice of prayer, where clergymen and laymen are all alike.

 

The techniques of prayer are not in language nor special knowledge.  They are in reverence, humility and sincerity where all men should be alike.

 

Did you ever think seriously for a few moments on a matter like this:  a group of men, most of them members of the several Christian churches, are about to sit down to a meal at a banquet or perhaps a luncheon club.  If it is felt proper, and a priest or minister is present, Father Priest or the Reverend Mr. Minister is asked to say grace, or ask the blessing.  If no clergyman is present, the matter may go by default and the meal gets more quickly under way.  If it is well to ask divine blessing (and I believe it is) is it a matter of clerical courtesy to ask a specialist to perform a function from which many laymen shrink and shy?

 

Is there any good reason why more than one man among many presumably Christian laymen could not just as effectively say “We thank you God for this food and we want to feel that you are present in this company.  Amen.” ?   As could some clergyman say, “We beseech thee O Lord, to receive our unfeigned thanks; grant thy bounteous blessing upon these tokens of thy grace, and may we dwell now and evermore in fellowship with each other and with thee who art ever the same Father, Son and Holy Ghost, world without end.  Amen.”  ?

 

For heaven’s sake, and for the sake of the kingdom of brotherhood on earth, don’t let the technique of words or professional practice stand between all Christian men and women and the God of us all.  At this point, the difference between clergyman and layman vanishes.

 

Perhaps you come to church and want me to talk to you about forgiveness, how the grace of God can do for you what was done for the Prodigal, who after foolish and disastrous mistakes was given another chance.  Well, I should be able to talk about that.  The talk could be termed the minister’s specialty.  But I have no corner on the basic law of forgiveness.  I can not grant you forgiveness, nor can I forgive your neighbor for you.  The basic law, which applies to minister and laymen alike is in Jesus’ words to all his hearers:  “If ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”  And that is not just law on Sunday at church.  It is moral law on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, in family life, in politics, in merchandising, in industry - in every realm of life.

 

The old Quaker protest against having a specialized and paid clergy at all is very pointed here.  The power of Christianity among Quakers is a power that laymen know. 

 

Now I am by no means ashamed of, or apologetic for, my calling as a minister.  In spite of its liabilities, I think the ministry is a necessary calling.  I glory in its opportunities which carry me at times where a layman might more tardily be welcome.  But I am deeply concerned that everyone realize that the ministry is not an exclusive specialty and that active religion must be the possession and practice of all Christian laymen and women if it is to have any telling effect on this evil old world, on this tempted and tormented flesh, and on the designs of the devil.

 

In 1880, a US revenue cutter sailed into harbor at Wilmington, NC.  Captain Charles Jones, the skipper, took the opportunity while the cutter lay at anchor, to tell the Chinese cabin boy the story of Christ and the gospel.  That Chinese boy’s name was Soong.  He returned to China and became the father of the Soong family, every one of whom is illustrious, and all of whom are Christian. One of his children was named Mei-Ling.  She is now Madame Chiang Kai-Shek.  Believe me, that was a great day’s work when that sea-going layman spoke to that cabin boy!

 

Laymen have a marvelous opportunity for getting next to people in the ordinary intimate dealings with folks day by day, where Christianity meets its practical test.  So has the minister.

 

Twice in a week, I have read a wise crack to the effect that the Unitarians of New England believe in the Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the neighborhood of Boston.  Well, any such smug day is over for all of us.  Now it is the Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the leadership of Christ, and the neighborhood of the world if we are to have any hope at all!

 

We ministers will do our best to help.  Along with you laymen we will build churches and congregations like this, and better.  We will tackle the breaking down of artificial barriers of creed, race, nation, which come between the face of God and our brethren everywhere.  But still the final test is the world where you live and work.

 

This pulpit robe I wear is not the symbol of the coming of the Kingdom.  The hand of friendship and understanding is.  Our Lord made it very specific when he said,  “One is your Master, your teacher, even Christ, and all ye are brethren.”

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, February 6, 1944.