Initially preached at Central Baptist Church, Lexington, KY, June 9, 1968; subsequently, with minor variations, at Capton Baptist Church, Campton, KY, August 18, 1968; Reid Village Baptist Church, Mt. Sterling, KY, March 1, 1970; Campbellsville BSU Retreat, Sept. 1970; Berea BSU Missions Banquet, Jan. 15, 1971; University of Kentucky BSU, Jan. 19, 1971; Maryland BSU Spring Retreat, April 24, 1971; First Baptist Church, Laurel, MD, April 25, 1971; Kensington Baptist Church, Kensington, MD, May 2, 1971; North Henderson Baptist Church, Henderson, NC, May 9, 1971; First Baptist Church, Hyattsville, MD, May 16, 1971; Beltsville Baptist Church, May 30, 1971; First Baptist Church, Silver Spring, MD, May 30, 1971; Hillandale Baptist Church, Adelphi, MD, June 13, 1971; Twinbrook Baptist Church, Rockville, MD July 11, 1971; Luther Rice Memorial Baptist Church, Silver Spring, MD, August 13, 1972; Calverton Baptist Church, Silver Spring, MD, Dec. 3, 1972; Greenbelt Baptist Church, Greenbelt, MD, Nov. 18, 1973; Wisconsin Avenue Baptist Church, Washington, DC, April 20, 1975; Carrollan Woods Baptist Church, New Carrollton, MD, May 4, 1975; Takoma Park Baptist Church, Washington, DC, June 23, 1985.
In his novel, The Fall, the French writer Albert Camus tells a revealing parable about two strangers walking together one night on the streets of Amsterdam. Their footsteps led them by and by to a bridge crosslng one of the many waterways that lace that city, and at the abutment of the bridge the conversation of the two is abruptly cut short. One of them stops, turns to the other, and says, "I'll leave you near this bridge. I never cross a bridge at night. It's the result of a vow. Suppose, after all, that someone should jump in the water. One of two things: either you do likewise to fish him out and, in cold weather, you run a great risk. Or you forsake him there, and suppressed dives sometimes leave one strangely aching. Good night."
Suppressed dives leave one strangely aching. Can it be that this is not only a parable of modern man in general, but that this is also a picture of the church? Can it be that Camus' poignant stranger is no stranger at all, but is one whom we know quite well? Can he be ourselves? Can it be that the church, the people of God, has in the Twentieth Century arrived at the bridge that leads from mere piety and mindless jargon and from otherworldliness, leading to relevance and involvement, but that at that crucial spot we have turned back? Can it not be that we too in the church feel often a strange aching, a longing, a desperate feeling that we are not having the influence and the relevance we ought to have; and can it not be also that that strange aching has to do with some suppressed dives? We have not dived full force into the world, with all its risks, for we might lose ourselves in the process. We are not taking the bridge, we are suppressing our instinct to plunge and help and save. And so we ache; much more, we anguish when men today wave their fists at the church and insist that Christians have nothing to say to the present crisis.
You see, what I am saying is that we know who we are, we know that we are God's chosen people, we know that we are here to be instruments of healing in a broken and sick world, and yet we are not acting upon our knowledge. We are not discharging our responsibilities; we are not being ministers of reconciliation to a world where men hate and fight and kill.
Why is this so? Why is it that we of the church have still not found our way into creative ministry to a needy world? Why has the Great Commission become so vague and so ethereal that it not longer stirs us into vital involvement? Deeper yet, why doesn't our practice of the Christian faith cost us something, why doesn't it get us into trouble? Where is the old revolutionary spirit which once was said to have turned the whole world upside down?
There are, I suppose, as many answers as there are Christians. Each of us has made his own private compromises, each of us has managed to wriggle out of the youthful idealism that once gripped him. But there is one reason in particular that seems meaningful to me; there is one outstanding reason why we fail to minister to the world, and that is that we are afraid of it! We are scared to become prophetically involved.
You see, you and I are the children of a religious tradition which has told us to shun the world. It has said to us, "Be careful of the world; stay away from it as much as possible. Ask the world only for food, shelter, and clothing; for the rest remain uncommitted.” Always there have been Christians who felt that the only way to remain Christian was to fear and to fell the world.
This morning I want to point to and old Scripture in a new way, a new way of seeing the world. We are very much in danger, as someone has said, of becoming so heavenly minded that we will be of no earthly use. And so let us look afresh at the Gospel, indeed at the very heart of the Gospel, this morning, and let us see whether there are not some better guidelines. Let us turn to Christendom's most familiar and best-loved passage, to John 3:16, and let us discover there what it means to be a modern Christian, in touch with God’s will for our lives.
I
The first and most crucial affirmation we need to hear from the Gospel is this: that God loved the world. This Scripture most emphatically does not say that God loved the church and gave himself for her; but God loved the world. It is the world, not the church, for whom Christ died; it is the world, not the church, over which the great Creator God labored and brooded, and finally uttered words of love, "It is good, very good." It is "the earth" which is the Lord's, and – hear it – the fullness thereof. Everything in the world belongs to the Lord. The spiritual has a true instinct, "He's got the whole world in his hands".
Today we need to recover a sense of the total ownership and lordship of God. I suspect that you and I l are very prone to think of God as bottled up in the church, as our God, the God who belongs to the church. We have tried to capture God in our own categories, in our own concepts, and most of all, in the church. We have turned up pious noses at what we call the secular world, the world of buying and selling and politicking and horse-trading and learning and teaching and digging ditches and running presses -- we have murmured that God is not involved in all that, he doesn't love all that, it's dirty and materialistic and rough. He loves the church, we say; he loves religion and hymns and prayers and Bible readings and, worst of all, He loves sermons! God, we say, loves the church, not the world.
But hear this word again: God so loved the world. Because it is His, He loves it. And because He loves it we cannot hate it or fear it or be indifferent to it. God so loved the world.
II
But there is, of course, more. God so loved the world that He gave His Son. He became personally involved, He gave of His very self. His love was no idle, armchair abstraction; it was intimate, total personal investment and involvement. And further, His giving was a life-and-death matter; it was self-giving to the point of self-sacrifice, of cruel and shameful death on a Roman cross. God so loved that He gave Himself, His life became intertwined and identified with the lives of men. You could not even tell that God was God, except as the eye of faith revealed it. He became one with the world because of his love for it.
But what of the church? To what does it give itself? How does it invest itself in the life of the world? I am afraid that all too often we are found giving ourselves to ourselves, and not to the world. We are all wrapped up in institutional life, in counting heads and polishing images and adding up Bible verses read and conducting building campaigns. All that is important, but what does it say? We don’t love the world nearly so much as we love ourselves. We are like the player on the golf course whose play took him to the edge of the course, where there was a home going up in flames. And as the fires consumed the house, the lady who lived there staggered out onto the golf course, crying and screaming. To all this our sporting friend snarled, “Woman stop sobbing while I’m trying to make this putt!" The world is crashing in fames of anger all around us, and we only wish they would be more quiet so that we could hear ourselves pray and sing.
But you cannot read the Gospels and see Jesus acting this way. Yes, he did attend worship; yes, he was concerned about religious education; yes, he did begin the church. But He did not find the focus of his ministry in what we call today "church work"; it was not the frantic busyness and self-serving that marks the modern church in America. Rather this was God so loving the world that He gave himself to that world, He invested himself in it. He did not escape into an easy cardboard world of pious unreality; rather he spent his time with assorted shady characters, with tax collectors and extortioners and women of ill fame and swarthy, rough fishermen. He could not waste his time trimming candles in the temple when there were blazing fires burning in the hearts of men and women in the social fabric.
I once heard a University student describe the way the church handled him when he made a decision to follow Christ with personal involvement. He said that he went to his pastor to relate to him how he felt that God was calling him to some form of service. He recounted his commitment to people, to human needs, to the Christian cause, and then asked if there was not something he could do to help. Was there not some way he could invest his talents in the service of God's people and God's world? And his pastor, pious keeper of the ecclesiastical establishment, replied, "Would you mow the church lawn for us this summer?" Arid so once again, the Christian community, designed, as one author puts it, to be "God's Colony in Man's World", becomes instead "Man’s prison in God’s world".
Or again I remember my own conversation with a Baptist deacon about some of my ideas and my plans for a more pertinent ministry with students. We had been discussing the peculiar attraction of a certain beer joint for the student population of the college, and I commented that perhaps it would be a creative investment of my time to go to that bar on a Saturday night and mingle with the students and engage them in conversation about what they were doing. I suspected, I told him, that I could have a far more meaningful ministry there than in a Sunday school class the next morning. To all this he replied in horror, “But a Christian has got to protect his reputation.” No, God so loved the world that he protected his reputation? God so loved the world that he polished his image? Most certainly not! God so loved the world that He gave His Son, so loved that He invested His reputation, He thrust Himself and His very life into the world, loving it despite its shame and its filth. In Jesus of Nazareth God became man in order to give Himself wholly for others, even though He was bound to be misunderstood and mistreated and even stripped of life.
God so loved that He gave himself, and this is to be the pattern for Christians and for the church. We are not committed to serving ourselves, to building up the institution; we are to be committed to serving mankind; spiritually, yes, but also physically, emotionally, intellectually, materially. Wherever man has need, there the church is to be, even though its presence may not be appreciated, it may not be understood, it may even lose its life.
III
This brings us then to the third and final dimension of God's relationship to the world and therefore of the church's relationship to the world. God so loved the world; he so loved that he gave his only begotten Son; and also God sent not his son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved. God's involvement was creative, redemptive; he was not just "passing through." He was present in order to save and to give and to redeem.
You see, the Great Commission does not simply say, "Go ye into all the world" and stop there. It says, "Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature." I once heard a Jamaican pastor, Azariah McKenzie, remind a group of Baptist World Alliance delegates that it does not say, “Go into all the world and take pictures of it!” Go into all the world that God loves and proclaim liberation, renewal, freedom. Go into every situation, go to every man, get involved in every structure of society and there work God's work. This is what Bishop John Robinson calls "holy worldliness”, involvement in all of life with all of the Gospel, involvement in politics, in civil rights, in the urban ghetto, in the business world, but with the good news that God cares about human dignity and worth. God came not to condemn the world, not to utter lofty words of reproach and judgment, not to enslave men, but that the world through him might be saved. God came that the world might be restored to harmony and love
What message could be more pertinent to the sort of world in which you and I live, the kind of world revealed in all its starkness and need. Where is the church now? How are we going to become involved in the world redemptively? How are we going to dedicate ourselves to rooting out every form of hatred and prejudice that ensnares the mind of man?
It was the great preacher Halford Luccock who said of American Christians, "Having made civilization out of the wilderness, you ••• now struggle with forces which threaten to make a wilderness out of civilization. And it was Arthur Koestler, the novelist and social observer, who reminded us that what the 20th Century needs is some kind of blend of saint and revolutionary, someone whose faith in God, whose moral and spiritual values drive him into the world with great energy, with enormous commitment, and at the same time, with a healthy dose of political savvy. And yet, you see, we still can remember the revolution God has already worked: God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, God sent not his son to condemn the world. Let us not entertain our despair forever, God is not going to allow us to destroy ourselves totally. But that the world through Him might be saved.
This morning, then, the summons is to come and be a part of what God is doing. The invitation is to love the world as He loves it, to come out of whatever protections and whatever excuses you have built up for yourselves, whether it is the four walls of the church or the white split-level suburbs or the concern for reputation. The invitation is to come out and to get busy, to get involved in the needs of the world, to lose ourselves in service. And the demand of our Lord is clear: to go into all the world and there to exercise the ministry of reconciliation; our Lord's demand is that we love one another, even as He has loved us, and that means all the way to Calvary.
