Seeking a New City                                                              2/27/49

 

Scripture:  Hebrews 13: 5-16

 

Text:  Hebrews 13: 14;  “For here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come.”

 

When you ride on a train into a great city like Chicago or New York you may be excited by its size, the variety and also the uniformity of endeavor required of its residents, the pressure of its hurrying, the sense of its importance.  Or you may be a bit overcome at being swallowed deeper and deeper, as the train speeds toward the railway terminal near its center, into the power, the unwieldy compulsion, and the possible evil of something so big.  But in either case, the city seems too big to change.  And whether you regard it hopefully or helplessly, you may have the feeling that it will not change -- or that if it should change it will do so only slowly.

 

Then perhaps you back off, mentally, from its nearness and look quickly at history - especially very recent history.  And you recall suddenly that cities have changed sharply -- both physically, and more particularly in the experience of their citizens.  Within this generation; within this decade, cities that were thriving, throbbing with life, have been blasted to a trickle of their former vitality.  Warsaw lies a mass of rubble.  Much of Hiroshima is man-made desert.  The Pearl of the Pacific, Manila, lies gouged of its brilliance.  Berlin is a mixture of ruin and hatred.

 

More impressive than the physical changes that have been wrought are the ideological changes which have taken place before our eyes.  Do you remember the apprehension, and the sinking feeling which crept over us at the fall, seventeen years ago, of Moukden in Manchuria to foreign conquerors?  Then Peiping, Shanghai and Nanking?  And do you remember how that stability which you had taken for granted in your life was further shaken, blasted, uprooted in the storm which saw the fall of Addis Ababa, Warsaw, Oslo, Rotterdam, Brussels, Paris Hongkong, Manila, Singapore, Rangoon?  And you wondered for a few anxious months whether Honolulu might follow, whether bombs might fall on San Francisco, New York, Detroit.  You saw, in your mind’s eye, the steady blasting of London’s body and you witnessed the stubborn refusal of London’s soul to give up the ghost.  Have a few short months, and shorter years, dimmed already the evidence in our experience that great cities can fall, have fallen, do now fall, and probably will continue to fall?

 

It is not just that one set of flags in pulled down and new ones raised in their place.  It is not even that governments have toppled, sometimes repeatedly, in ruins around us.  It has meant the disappearance of landmarks which we had taken for granted from earliest childhood.  It is a sobering, even frightening, reminder that the world is by no means the stable place we had supposed, and wished, it to be.  Great multitudes of people have been forcibly introduced to new ways of life, whether they like those ways of not; taught new ideals, new standards of judgment, new ideas of value, whether they sought them or not.

 

We are being compelled to adjust ourselves to a world as fluid as molten lava, in the remaking, with no possibility of returning to the discarded past.  It is a frightening experience for some.  It seems an exciting experience for some.  It is hopeless, grim, or hopeful -- from the point of view from which one sees the changing scene.

 

Though the past is gone, it is enlightening to look back over it with the long look for some steadying quality and seasoned understanding.  The church has faced, endured and survived terrific crises in the past just as it faces the great crises of the present.  Probably far worse than the crisis of our present day was the situation once presented to the church when the great city of Rome fell to barbarian hordes more than 1500 years ago.  Rome had been inviolate for centuries; it was the Eternal City in the thinking of its citizens; it was the accepted center of civilization to all but its barbarian enemies.  Conditioned, far beyond their power to realize it, to the permanence and worth of the city and all it meant to them, they were shattered in spirit when its power and prestige tumbled into ruin.  Try to imagine what would be our outlook in the western world were we informed that London, New York and Washington had all at once fallen to an invading power.  Could we surmount the ensuing fear that everything we hold most dear was being crushed and obliterated?

 

In that hour of blackness and despair among “civilized” people of 1500 years ago, at least one man proved adequate to the situation.  While others were helpless and hopeless in fear, an old bishop, nearly sixty years of age, sat down to write a book which took him nearly thirteen years to finish and which is still a great classic of Christian literature.  He did not write “Concerning the City of Rome” as one might have expected.  But he called his book by this title: “Concerning the City of God.”  And the author, Augustine, explains the origin of the book thus: “After the storming and sack of Rome by the Goths ---- my zeal was kindled for the house of God and I was induced to defend the city of God against the calumnies and misrepresentations of its foes.”

 

In writing that book, the good old bishop, Augustine, was attempting to answer the kind of questions men were asking then, questions similar to the kind of questions many are now asking today.  The book is one of the most penetrating defenses of God’s ways to man.  But its main theme is the difference between the cities of men and the “city of God.”

 

In effect, Augustine says to his readers: you thought of the Christian church as the state church of the Roman Empire.  You had grown accustomed to the supposition that the two were inextricably bound together.  So it seemed to you that, with the passing of Rome’s influence and stability, the end of everything had come also for the church.

 

My friends, there are those who feel the same apprehension in the threatening, but as yet not-quite-so-severe crisis of today.  If western civilization should fall, the powers of the east are intent on the destruction of the church, we are told.  And we are being whipped up to a pitch of ideological war, cold war, if not eventually to the point of pitched battle, on behalf of the safety of the organized church.  That is one of Christendom’s great and grievous errors.  It is true that the church, as an expression of Western thinking, is being attacked.  It was pushed around vigorously by the fascists of Europe and Asia very recently.  It is being vigorously kicked out of parts of communist Europe and Asia right now.  But what is being kicked around is not the essence of Christianity, which cannot fall, but the organized mind of man which can be attacked and even overcome.  And the church that becomes merely an expression of communist ideology will be fully as sorry a sight, and just as fallible, even to the socialist ideology, as is the “western church” right now.

 

Augustine said to his discouraged  contemporaries that they had supposed the state and their civilization were inseparable.  You are utterly wrong, was the message of Augustine.  Rome could never have lasted.  It was built by men.  Its order and stability were the contrivances of men.  They must needs die as men die. Rome was “an earthly city which shall not be everlasting.”

 

God’s “city” is different.  It is divine and therefore indestructible.  It is the soul of the church and is His instrument for fulfilling his purposes in the world.  The holy church, the spiritual church, the Christian church universal, is composed of men and women who recognize that they are but “sojourners in that earthly city” and that their true citizenship is in the city of God.

 

Augustine remained calm and confident at the end of an age because he believed that, come what might, the true church and the city of God will go on building.  The “new order” which was struggling then to be born was six dark centuries in coming.  But in the long view of history, Augustine was right.  There finally emerged a civilization with the city of God, the church, at its sacrificial best, rooted in the heart of that order.

 

We, too, live in a changing world.  Can we share the faith of Augustine and make his distinction between the cities of men and the new city of God?  We take it for granted that any such change as that taking place in eastern Europe and in Northern Asia now may bring with it the death of the church, the death of free democratic relationships such as we love, the death of those ideals to which in our luncheon clubs and fraternal groups we give lip-and-hand-service.  We forget that our organizations are man-made and afflicted with the narrowness of vision of men.  The city of God is not man-made and is beyond the destructions brought by man when he pulls down his walls on his own head.

 

I have been talking in the vein of thinking of a Scot missionary now in Communist China, last heard from before the fall of Peiping, China.  He was, until that time - and may still be - minister of the Union Church of Peiping.  He is the Rev. D. Allan Easton, and he asked his congregation just before the fall of their city to the communists: “What does it mean to be a good citizen of the city of God?”  And then he suggested four lines of thought.

 

1)  In the first place, we share a common loyalty which transcends all lesser loyalties which separate us.  It is a tragedy that the churches have broken into numerous sects which have all too little to do with each other in common understanding and effort.  The general move toward closer understanding, broad tolerance and constructive re-thinking of the essence of Christianity is to the good.  The spirit of sincere search, of repentance for one’s faults, of renewed consecration at the Amsterdam assembly of the World Council of Churches is a sign of spiritual health.

 

Our citizenship in the new city of God is sorely tested by our partisan denominationalism.  Now it is just as surely tested by the determination to make the church come to heel in violently partisan states.  Can we remember the common loyalty we owe to Christ, quite above and apart from the demands of man-made organizations?  We Christians of this land had better be on our knees in prayer and meditation about this, quite as much as those who are forced to rethink their Christianity quickly by the pressure of a new political regime.

 

2)  In the second place, the citizen of the city of God sits lightly to earthly goods and chattels.  He accepts the pleasures of this world as gifts of God.  He does not needlessly court poverty or suffering.  Neither does he run from them in abject fear.  For he will not be enslaved by his material possessions.  Commenting on the loss and acute suffering among Christians of his day, Augustine wrote:  “They lost all that they had --- But did they lose their faith?  Did they lose their godliness?  Did they lose the treasures of the heart?  This is the wealth of the Christian.”

 

Surely you and I, and Christians everywhere, ought to meditate earnestly on this matter.  Is it possible that a measure of judgment is coming upon us because our Christian witness is offered in too costless and comfortable a fashion?  Have we made the love of God real within our hearts?  That love was “all-out” with no limit and no reserve in the life of our Lord!

 

3)  In the third place we must be reminded that the citizen of the city of God builds the boundaries of that city not by force but by love alone, and the giving of friendship.  If we find our patience sorely tried, shall we not all the more faithfully remember this?

 

Buried in the Crimea is the body of a young Englishman, John Howard, who was noted, many years ago, for his readiness to be of service to all who came his way.  Carved on his tomb, in Latin and in Russian, are words to this effect:

 

            “Stranger, whosoever thou art, thou art standing at the tomb of a man who was thy friend.”

 

It were well for any Christian to deserve that final epitaph by his life!

 

4)  Finally, whatever happens in this world, the citizen of God’s city remains calm, confident, and unmoved on the Rock of Ages.  Those who have no loyalty beyond their earthly city soon lose all sense of perspective.  They are beaten this way and that by the tornado winds of our time.  Earthly victory represents fulfillment of their hopes; earthly defeat the destruction of all they hold dear.

 

The citizen of God’s city, insofar as lies within his spiritual power, rejoices with them in their victories and mourns with them in their defeats.  Yet he never forgets that the only ultimate and unchanging power we perceive in this world is the love of God as made known in Jesus Christ.  He knows that whatever be the fate of man’s cities, the purpose of God continues indestructibly at work among his children.

 

It is not in man’s power to banish sin from the earth.  He is too hopelessly involved in its net himself.  But it is within the power of God to conquer Satan’s hosts.  In this confidence we wait always for deliverance.  The Christian knows that beyond the heaviest clouds, God’s sun shines forever.

 

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, February 27, 1949.