The First Works                                                                                 9/3/44

 

Scripture:  Revelation 2: 1-7

 

Text:  Revelation 2b;  “ ... repent, and do the first works; or else I will remove thy candlestick.”

 

The book of Revelation is not easy reading for many people.  I am one of the many!  But a bit of hard reading sometimes reveals a shining jewel of truth upon which to ponder.

 

These first seven verses of the second chapter were addressed to the early church at Ephesus.  It is less than 100 years after the birth of our Lord; hardly 60 years after his ascension; that these words are believed to have been written.

 

Ephesus was a famed city of Asia Minor.  It was rich; it was proud; it was intellectual;  - and it was corrupt.  Land travel caravans ended their travels here, after dangerous and trying trips over long trails.  Sailing ships anchored here after voyages to distant parts.  Ephesus was a crossroads of a busy world.

 

The city was said to have reeked with idolatry.  Revelry and debauchery were common.

 

One day the great apostle, Paul, had come into that proud and sordid center.  There he preached for some time the good news of the Christ, and when he went on, he left behind him a small band of Christians.  Later, Apollos came and helped strengthen the group.  And afterward, John made the building of the church at Ephesus his life work.

 

That church, in that city, had no easy time of it!  But it was faithful and stood its ground.  It had a zeal for its belief, and stood out constantly for truth.  It was a band of people who had convictions, and spoke them, and stood by them.

 

And yet, faithful as it had been, this church came to need some further admonition.  To some of its members, religion grew to be an argument, rather than a testimony, and a speculation rather than a life; a form rather than love.  There was intolerance, and a severe, forbidding kind of orthodoxy.

 

And so here comes this word to that church.  “I know thy works, and thy labor, and thy patience, and how thou canst not bear them which are evil; and thou hast --- borne, and hast patience, and for my name’s sake hast labored, and hast not fainted.”

 

“Nevertheless, ..... thou hast left thy first love.  Remember, therefore, .... and repent, and do the first works; or else I will ... remove thy candlestick.”

 

That word “repent” will bear a bit of scrutiny from most of us.  It is not a word which we like to use, and is not, I suppose, heard often from the lips of many of us.  It sounds like humiliation and sackcloth and ashes.  It sounds like sorrow for our wrongs; like whipping ourselves in order to be purged from evil.  And it is sorrow for our wrongs.  But the word also means to change one’s mind - and here is its more important meaning.

 

A chicken thief might “repent” in sorrow for his thievery every Saturday night or on each Sunday.  He may confess how mean he had been and tell how badly he feels about it, every week or so.  But if he goes back to stealing chickens each Monday night, he knows only a fraction of the meaning of repentance - and the neighbors aren’t satisfied with it!  What he needs is to change his mind, to live honestly, to raise his own chickens and to leave alone those on his neighbor’s roost.  That is more important for him and for his neighbors, too.

 

A genuine love of what is right is the best part of repentance.

 

And what is the “right?”  Is it that which people have decided should be the governing standard of life?  People can make some strange and terrible decisions as to what is right.  Men in Germany decided that the Christian Church, and the religion it holds as its faith, was decadent.  What is “German” is right.  And we decide what is truly German, said they.  It became “right” that one race should be superior to all others; and that one nationality should be superior to all others within that race.  It became “right” to degrade, torture, kill or otherwise destroy the being of all who happened to be of the Jewish faith.  We are indignantly aware of all that in Nazi Germany.

 

But we don’t have to look to Germany for illustration of the evils of mankind’s arrogance.  We can find them in our own country.  There is an alarming prevalence of prejudice against Jews, as Jews, in our own country.  There is the formation of pressure groups to get advantage for themselves in the laws to be made by our Congress and in the regulations of government agencies.  Whenever you or I or my neighbor, or your neighbor makes a headstrong decision as to what is right because it will benefit you or me or the neighbor, we have sufficient illustration of man’s attempt to decree what is right.

 

 - And that is never a safe standard.  The only right to be sought by a “repentant,” sincere person is the moral right which God has ordained and built into his universe.  God has determined what is good, and what is evil.  It is our business, not to decree what is “right,” but to find out what is right.

 

Now I am going to make a dogmatic statement, and you see what you think of it!  Only those people are righteous who seek to know and to do the will of God, as to what is right.  Unless I’m wrong in that statement, it is therefore the primary business of every member of every Church of Christ to seek knowledge of God’s will and to do it.

 

The repentant person is one who is “converted,” who has changed his mind in a decision to do right in the sight of God.  His decision is an act of faith and a determination to put first in his life the things that are first in importance.

 

Well, tomorrow is Labor Day and today is Labor Sunday.  This annual observance in our land, and in our churches, is a recognition of something basic in the life of mankind.  In the deep spiritual insight of the book of Genesis, it is revealed that man must live by effort, by work, by the “sweat of his brow.”  He must help God to produce his very living by the labor of his body and the knowledge and ingenuity of his mind.  Generally speaking, without work accomplished, man’s living vanishes.  [Qualify].

 

Now the labor of men’s minds is often not recognized.  Much of the patient, persistent, seeking, driving work of the great scientists, for instance, is unrecognized until we discover that some scientist’s discovery of earlier months or years is opening the way toward greater abundance or comfort or opportunity for all.

 

And as for the labor of men’s hands and backs - how often has it been abused and exploited and virtually stolen in the history of mankind.  A man, or a group of men, become shrewd enough to get into a position of advantage and power.  If they are not men of scrupulous desire for right, they follow their temptation to use their power to live better than they ought off the labor of others who are in their power.  And so slavery of one sort or another, has been a persistent evil throughout men’s history.  The Israelites suffered under it through agonized years in Egypt while the Egyptian rulers became more and more arrogant and demanding.

 

Later, slavery was widely countenanced in Europe.  Our own country had its modern genesis in the desire of men to be free in their faith and in their labor.  And that ideal is still a great light in our land, thank God.  But it has had its ups and downs.  Men whose poverty made ships’ passage to the new world impossible became indentured servants to those in the new America who could afford to pay the passage.  And by that indenture, the servants’ labor became the property of the master for a definite number of years.  The system had its good points in that it represented a willing  agreement and was pointed toward the ultimate freedom and new opportunity of the servant.  It had its evils in the abuse of some masters.

 

But there also appeared a traffic in the life and labor of people who were brought unwillingly, and sold like draft animals - who were never to know freedom and whose effort was for their lifetime, to contribute chiefly to the living and comfort of a master.

 

Through the years, sometimes at agonizing cost, that kind of slavery has been broken and abolished in our land.  But still the struggle goes on - and all over the world - for a free and fair share of living to the man who does the heavy labor.  And it has seemed necessary for laborers to organize in order to secure enough strength to bargain for their share of labor’s fruits.  A host of laborers do not receive much of a living in our world.  But another host of laborers do.  And, organized as they are, they find themselves in possession of power.

 

Now power over people is an exceedingly dangerous tool - like a band saw.  It can be wielded rightly for great good - or mishandled for terrible harm.  And so organized labor, like organized management, and organized commerce, finds itself in possession of a tool which is good or bad according to the moral use made of it!

 

The Church belongs to no group of class or race.  It is not its business to “line up” with a particular “side” when disputes arise.  The church has a concern for every group, and more particularly, for every person.  It should have such relationship with both laborers and employers that both may find in its fellowship the light and the truth and the right that will guide them in their work and their dealings.

 

We hear it said that the church in America is a “middle class institution,” or a fellowship of the privileged.  There is enough truth in that, my friends, to be sobering and a cause for some anxiety.  But that is not all of the truth.  After a member of my church had come home from a State meeting of our fellowship feeling “ragged” about his own church on that score, I scanned the list of members and discovered in a quick glance, the names of perhaps a couple of dozen members who with their families are members of their trade or labor unions.  Someday I’m going to study that list still more carefully.  There ought to be more laborers on our church membership rolls.  But there are now enough to prove that the church is not a “class institution,”
but a fellowship of people who seek to know the will of God.

 

The Christian Church is interested in people, and in what is right for people, and in the conviction that God determines what is right for people.

 

For a long time now, much of church opinion has defended the right of collective bargaining for laborers. And I believe that defense has been wise.  Now, large sections of labor have a power which matches the power of management.

 

The churches, however, cannot be satisfied with a situation in which two massive powers approximately balance each other, if their relationship is one of tension and frequent hostility, each merely defending what it thinks are its own rights and privileges.

 

The far-seeing, sincere, I may say Christian, men of management have had a concern for the fair living, the self respect, and the sense of partnership of the laborers in their employ.  Bishop Francis J. Haas reminds us that “It is the clear common sense duty of every union officer and member to assist the employer by regarding the business as something of a cooperative enterprise.”  Management produces the initiative, the guidance, the business judgment, the advertising and financial policy which make production possible and the product salable.  Labor produces the goods and moves it to its market.  The only right way is for labor and management to live with each other, not on each other.

 

Christian folk ought to study the problems of labor relations, and when possible arrive at some conclusion about them.  But “a single convert from the [so called] comfortable class, raising his voice at a board of directors meeting in behalf of the brotherhood of bread, will do more for the cause of labor than all the pronouncements of the church at her stated conventions.”  And one Christian man raising his voice in his union meeting for a fair agreement with the manager will do more good for the cause of God’s right than all the pronouncements of that man’s minister.

 

As for our churches, we must in all righteousness, make it perfectly clear that all, of every race, nationality, class or occupation, are welcome into our fellowship on the basis of men and women and children seeking together the will of God.  The family who have a hard time getting enough clothes to cover, in cleanly decency, the back of each child, should feel just as welcomed into our pews as the woman in furs who arrives with her husband in a fine automobile.

 

While over at Grand Rapids last June, attending the General Council meeting of Congregational Christian Churches, I sat at lunch one day with a considerable group of folk who had lived in Hawaii, or who now live there, or who are on the way to live there.  Among them was a minister who has been known for years as a friend of labor.  He has made it his business to study and know the problems of labor, the points of irritation and injustice and need for improvement in relation to management.  He has been known to take labor’s side in numerous disputes at points where he felt that the right lay there.  Labor has not always returned his proffered friendship, but much of it does recognize him as the right kind of friend.  The Church of the Crossroads, where he ministers, is one of the most interesting churches I know about - interracial in membership, open to the meetings of others who have no house of worship, (the Jews and the Quakers of Honolulu among them), and very advanced in its study of all sorts of man’s social problems in the light of God’s truth.

 

Another minister at that table in Grand Rapids was a young, vigorous man who is about to begin a pastorate in the great Central Union Church of Honolulu.  That church numbers nearly 1800 members and has in that membership a fair number of the wealthy and managing group in Hawaii’s business life.  A man who had been pastor of that church before said to him, “Alan, don’t be afraid to minister to the wealthy folk of your new congregation.  They need you.  They are plagued with the problems of their position, with the designs of all sorts of people who want to get money out of them, and with the problems common to people of every group.   Let them have a friend in their minister.”

 

Well there you are!

 

The church, in its ministry and lay fellowship alike, must look to its “first works” if it is to keep its light.  To laborers, as to all other folks, it must say “repent [that is seek a right mind in the will of God] and do the first works.”  That is the only gospel of lasting success for Labor, for Industrial Management, or for that matter for the Christian Church itself.

 

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, September 3, 1944 (Union Labor Sunday service at the Methodist Church).