Reality in Religion                                                                 9/26/48

 

Scripture:  Matthew 7: 15-29

 

Text:  Matthew 7: 28-29;  “..the people were astonished --- for he taught them as one having authorrity --”

 

Today through next Sunday, September 26 through October 3, is a period designated as Religious Education Week.  It has been so observed in many communities for some years and is so proclaimed in this state by the acting Governor of Wisconsin.

 

Seizing upon the emphasis of this week, I would remind you of the importance of teaching our religion.  Our church school is second in importance only to the weekly services of worship.  We need not only to bow in awe and adoration before God, but we must have knowledge of our religion, its history, expression of belief, truth in Christ, the mistakes and the triumphs of human decision in the light of God’s way.  We must teach these things to our children, train them to pray, to worship and to know.  They should be present regularly in the church school -- and more adults should be prepared to spend the time and energy required for teaching in the Sunday School.  It is particularly the sacred, Christian responsibility of parents to train up their children in the way they should go.  The church school really is a way of banding together to do some of the job effectively.  Some parents teach while their families are growing, some after the children are grown enough to ease the pressure of household responsibility.  Others teach because they like children, whether or not they have youngsters of their own.  All ought to be interested in, and concerned for, the cultivation of tested knowledge, high ideals and worthy motives springing from acquaintance with Christ and Christian people in God.

 

We need to love God, we adults and our children too.  Love God in knowledge of Him as revealed in the Bible and in all other experience.  Love God with the mind by intellectual honesty.  Love God with the mind by engaging in a fearless quest for truth.  Love God in the spirit of wise tolerance.  I would underline the “wise.”  For it is not wise, or Christian, to develop easy tolerance of the many wrongs that flourish with seeming respectability before the eyes of folk who seem blind to the evil.  Love God with strength and service.

 

The intellect has its rights in religion.  Religious expression has oft times fallen on evil ways when men ceased to think honestly about it.

 

I had thought, early this week, to speak further today on “Religion of the Mind” and so advertised in newspaper and church calendar copy.  For it seems that Religious Education Week underlines the significance of the intellectual in religion.

 

But I want to go further than the few thoughts I have suggested in outline thus far, and to talk about “Reality In Religion.”  The Gospel of Matthew records that Jesus astonished people by teaching as one with authority.  Another translation uses, instead of the word “authority,” the word “reality.”  Jesus taught them as one having reality.  And that is exactly the quality that has so great an appeal in our day as well as in the days of Jesus’ presence over 1900 years ago.

 

When Jesus talked about God, God was to him an intimate Father, and with Him Jesus believed that he could do anything that ought to be done.  When he talked about what is right in man’s relation to others, he said, “Ye have heard it said -- Thou shalt not kill -- but I say - be not angry with your brother.”  [Matthew 5: 21, 22].  That is much more profound.  Without anger, we should hardly need the command not to kill.

 

Jesus said there are infinite and eternal divine resources available for everyone - for you and for me - “Ask and it shall be given you; seek and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”  [Matthew 7: 7].  And he said these things with the accent of reality.

 

Jesus gave us a religion that meets three great needs in living; (1) one’s relation to God; (2) one’s relation toward others; (3) one’s relation with himself.

 

(1)  Is this a cold, unreasoning and unreasonable world wherein we are fortunate by chance one day, and caught like rats in a trap the next day?  Or is this God’s world wherein we have a destiny divinely determined?  (2)  Do we have continuing obligations toward others, and to people in general, or is my only obligation fulfilled when I have paid my respects to God in church on Sunday morning?  (3)  Should I live like any other animal or insect or am I a child of God with a divine dignity to maintain?

 

These matters will have to be rightly answered in our lives if we are to have the reality in religion that Jesus had and that we must have.  And reality is the demand of our time.  The atheistic communists have staked their lives on what they think is reality.  They expect to achieve the same kind of power which has often been seen in our world, the kind that brings affluence and the pride of social superiority to the party governing; servitude and suffering to the governed; and spiritual degradation to all.  To this ambitious end they bring any technique that seems to them to work - lies, fraud, violence, the appearance of righteous agitation, deliberate attack on religious faith and morality.  They are attempting to deal with life in terms of reality on a frank and brutal materialistic, animalistic, cunning basis.  Their techniques are so effective that they can hardly be destroyed, but must rather be controlled, in a free society.

 

Now the only thing that will, or can, save the peoples of the world from the supposed reality proposed by an aggressive, hard-working and shrewd Communist party whose top men and women must actually expect to succeed within our time, is a better reality.  The better reality -- the only true reality -- is that which we see and know in Jesus Christ, which is the root of our Christian civilization.  We Christian folk ought to come vitally alive with it - not because it is a last resort in a world of desperation, but because the faith of Jesus Christ is the way of salvation and dignity and freedom and real joy.

 

Now let us think for a few moments on the three great needs of human life mentioned earlier, and the way Jesus puts reality into them.

 

(1)  Jesus puts reality into religion by a great faith in God.  He could so identify himself with the spirit of God that he could assure his closest friends: “He that hath seen me,” that is, really known me, “hath seen the Father.”  [John 14: 9].  And he could pause to pray: “Father, I thank thee that thou hearest me always.”  [John 11: 41].

 

Two attitudes toward the universe strive for mastery over men’s minds.  One affirms that there is no God and that the forces of nature are as indifferent to man as the Pacific ocean is to a fish.  The other view affirms that Something higher than man has laid hold of him as one person might lay hold of the shoulder of another.  There is beauty, and value and goodness, not of man’s creation, that takes hold of us and ought to do so.  They are the deepest realities of life.

 

There is a knowledge of land and of cattle, of machines and of factories, of manipulation and of movement.  There is also a knowledge of spiritual values which we must have and communicate to our children.  A hundred million people, displaced by war, divested of property, without homes and with barely enough shelter, live not by vacuum cleaners, but by faith and hope.  That is virtually all they have and it is real.

 

Now the mind ought to help us have sense about our faith in God.  I once heard one legislator say of another, “You know, Charley is one of the best vote-getters and one of the cleverest fellows in our legislature.  He is also a devoted member of his own church.  But he would no more play a game of poker, or enter the legislative hall on a day when his pet measure comes up for voting without his rabbit foot in his pocket than he would fly.”  There is a false, superstitious quality in the religious thinking of many people that errs and weakens and denies the true power of the spirit.

 

There is, on the other hand, the story of a famous English actor who was being honored with a great banquet when he retired from public life on the stage.  After dinner, in place of the usual speeches and toasts, he offered to recite any dramatic role he had played that might be requested.  There was the usual awkward pause while people thought a bit.  Then an old minister who sat in the gathering spoke up and asked the actor to recite the 23rd Psalm.  After a moment’s thought, the actor agreed to do so provided the minister would repeat it after him.  The old clergyman finally agreed with some regrets.

 

The actor recited the 23rd Psalm with all the oratory and histrionic ability that had made him famous and finished in a burst of applause.  Then the minister began reciting slowly, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.”  When he had finished, there was no applause.  But here and there were moist eyes and bowed heads.  The actor sensed the situation instantly.  Putting his hand on the old man’s shoulder he said, “I appealed to your ears, but this man appealed to your hearts.  I know the 23rd Psalm, but this man knows the Shepherd.”

 

The reality in religion is to know the Shepherd and to dare to trust him until one is sure of God - as sure as he is of home and friends.

 

“Well,” someone says, “Nobody believes that anymore.”  I am aware of the fact that many do not believe it.  That is precisely the danger to our way of life!  Let us try to believe that we are sons of God and so lift the level of our life and religion to reality.

 

(2)  Our second thought is this: that Jesus put reality into religion by a life of goodness that became contagious.  Young people sometimes ask, either audibly or silently, “Why does evil seem so much more attractive than the good?”  The answer to that is this, that evil seems good only when colored up with imagination.  Generally it seems more attractive before its experience than afterward.  That is because of the coloring of anticipating imagination.  Anyone looking back over the evil deeds of yesterday cannot believe that they are more attractive than the good they have known.

 

A fellow going up the elevator to work in an office building says to his friend, “I am not going to drink tonight as I did last night.  It leaves such a rotten taste in my mouth, and my head feels like a rain barrel.”  The night before it seemed much more attractive than the morning after.

 

A college girl said of her sorority sister, “I wish June could be elected president of our sorority.  But her ideals are too high.”  Well June didn’t lower her ideals.  And two years later she was chosen president.

 

A fellow went to a university where he was pledged to a fraternity after the fall class had been initiated.  One Sunday morning he came down to find the living room full of alumni and active members, all dressed in their best.  He said, “good morning,” and started to leave.  The president said, “Where are you going?”  He replied, “To church.”  “O, no you’re not,” said the fraternity president.  “We’re going to initiate you this morning.”  He steadied himself and then said something like this:  “Gentlemen, I always go to church on Sunday morning.  I would like very much to be initiated into this group.  But I always go to church.  I will be back shortly after twelve and if you are willing to initiate me then, I shall be glad to have the experience.”  He went to church and was initiated after twelve.  That fellow was laughed at and razzed for years afterward.  But just the same, two years later he was elected president by that bunch of fellows who respected his sincerity.

 

The quality of goodness could be the general solvent of our social problems today.  If you and I and other professing Christians will be realistic enough to put it in our religion, it will be that solvent.

 

(3)  Once more, we, as Jesus, may put reality into our religion by being courageous.  Thomas Carlyle remarked that “Every man has a coward and a hero inside of him.”  The coward is out for safety, the hero for victory.  Everything the coward purposes is detestable to the hero.  Everything the hero purposes is unreasonable to the coward.  The hero says, “Be a man, courageous, true to your best.”  The coward says, “Be careful, look out for yourself.”  There is some of each in us.  But the hero must be elevated within us.  The United Nations Mediator to Palestine must have lived proudly even though in danger that finally took his life.  His life will not have been lived in vain!

 

Religion helps subdue the coward and elevate the hero in us by the ideals it gives us.  The Bible is Joseph going to prison for his convictions of purity; Moses giving up royal ease for leadership of his outcast people; Daniel purposing in his heart that he would not defile himself; Paul, stoned and beaten, yet carrying the Gospel all over southern Europe; Jesus hanging on a cross.

 

Heroism can make religion real.  Great faith in God can make it real.  Goodness in our relations with others can make it real.

 

A rough and ready preacher of Iowa used the subject “What kind of religion do you have?”  He was talking reality when he developed 3 points.

 

            (1)  Do you have religion?

            (2)  Do you have the catchin’ kind?

            (3)  How many have caught it from you?

 

There is the quality that will make Religious Education Week and every other week come alive with living significance.  For real religion is “caught” and “taught” and becomes the one way of salvation for all people.

 

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, September 26, 1948.