3/17/46
[the first nine pages of the handwritten manuscript are missing; this part begins on page 10, and runs to the end.]
A preacher somewhere in our nation said to his congregation at the end of November, “We kept Thanksgiving in this country. We did indeed. And we polluted and desecrated it; we profaned and violated every decent thing about it. We turned it into a sacrilege and a blasphemy - a sacrilege against the soul of humanity, a blasphemy against God. We were thankful we were not as other countries - we whom other countries by their blood and famine have helped to save. We thanked God for the opportunity of gluttony -- gluttony unbridled and unlimited while millions starve. Greed -- greed of profits, greed of wages, stark, ugly greed, while the children of the homeless waste and wither, and forsaken multitudes pine and die. Why do we not admit,” he asked, “that Christianity has departed from this land?”
About that time, one of our Congregational young people working in an English mission wrote home of attending a mass meeting in London’s huge Albert Hall. 7,000 people from all walks of life were there to urge that food be sent from their own meager store to feed hungry children in ---- where? ---- vanquished Germany. She wrote further: “I was filled with horror to think that in the midst of the appalling need, we had just announced to the world that we were giving up all rationing.”
Do you suppose that hope and pride of country rise again in that American girl’s breast at the appeal to Americans now to ration themselves voluntarily, so that the starving of the world can be at least partially fed? If so will we justify that hope? You and I answer that question at our own tables every day.
Some of my remarks last Sunday may have had amusing repercussions. But I wasn’t joking when I suggested that Sunday dinner time is a good, practical occasion for real Christian sharing with our starving human brothers and sisters all over Europe and in Asia and in the Islands of the sea.
How can we be Christian; how can Lent mean anything unless in some way our hearts leap to meet the awful need of all the sons and daughters of God?
Douglas Horton informs us that on December 6th, the needs of the people in Europe and Asia and of the British Congregational churches having now proved to be far beyond what was known when our churches set up their 3-year, four and one-half million dollar post-war goal of sacrificial giving, it was voted by the Executive Committee of our General Council that appeal be made for oversubscribing our present goals in the hope of raising at least another million dollars for increased relief to war victims. I’m not conducting nor suggesting a drive for further subscriptions. I believe we are meeting our share of “quotas.” But I am laying on your hearts the possibility of real Christian sharing. It could be done in Lent by keeping certain of our meals at the simple level of sufficiency in order not to consume what can save others’ lives, nor waste what is not really needed. And it could be further accomplished by putting the cash saving that represents into an envelope at Easter time marked “War Victims and Services.” And still it would be no sacrifice to match that of our Lord and the sufferers.
Those whom the spirit of the Lord moveth, let them move with their strength!
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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, March 17, 1946.