Week 46 Sunday
Week 46 Sunday
The Way Is the Way of Creative Contagion
1 Thessalonians 1:2-8
We ended yesterday by saying that the church at Antioch was creative. Dynamic impulses went out from that little group that remade the individual and connective life of many a land. The Way is the way of creative contagion. The Way is a way of cultivation, but it is also a way of contagion. Everyone who adopts it feels the impulse and the obligation to share it. If there is no impulse to share it, then the life within is dead or moribund. For the creative impulse is within this new life by its very nature. Evangelism, therefore, is not something imposed. It is inherent.
Evangelism is not something specially connected with an occupation, certain people set aside for it by vocation and occupation. It is not an occupation but an outcome. It is the outcome of the nature of the life itself. Inherent in all life is the impulse to create; life produces life. If it doesn’t create, it dies.
This impulse to create and share is seen in Philip. He was given a job that was not supposed to be evangelistic. In fact, the apostles gave up this work of serving tables so they could be evangelistic. But, strangely enough, the only man who had the title of “evangelist” was the man who had a layperson’s job imposed upon him and was not supposed to do evangelistic work. But the impulse was greater than the imposition. The reach of his soul went beyond the reach of his hand; he shared a gospel as well as goods. “Philip the evangelist” (Acts 21:8) was an example of a man who embodied the evangelistic impulse in and through and beyond his occupation. A lay evangelist kept the apostles trotting to keep up. He went beyond the apostles in several ways.
First, in his message. When he went down to Samaria, he “preached Christ” to them, and “the crowds attended like one man to what was said by Philip” (Acts 8:5-6 Moffatt). Why? The verses below interpret what the gospel he preached was, “the gospel of the Reign of God and the name of Jesus” (v. 12), a new Order, the kingdom of God, and the Person, Jesus. He combined in his message the necessity of an Order and a Person, a gospel for the whole of life.
O Christ, I too would have this creative impulse within me, for this and only this matters. I know this, for it matters everything to me. Help me to share this with everybody, everywhere. For it was shared with me and became everything to me. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I will not remain evangelical unless I become evangelistic.
Week 46 Monday
The Way Is the Way of Reconciliation
Ephesians 2:14-22
We saw yesterday that Philip grasped the essential Christian message: Christ, the Person, embodying the Order, the kingdom of God. These two must be together, for the Order without the Person is too impersonal, and the Person without the Order is too personal, lacks corporate meaning. But together they comprehend the whole of life. The conservatives emphasize the Person; the liberals emphasize the Order. But Philip put them together. So did Paul, “He preached the Reign of God and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ” (Acts 28:31 Moffatt). The two men who most clearly caught the essential elements of the Christian gospel were both laypeople, outside the stream of “apostolic succession.” They were both the most evangelistic and, as a consequence, the most evangelical. Running streams are usually clearer than stagnant pools. Their theology was out of Life to life.
Second, Philip went beyond the apostles in his reconciling impact. His evangelism was what all evangelism should be—reconciliation. It runs through everything he did. And that is the heart of evangelism. The one verse that sums up the Christian gospel better than any other, I believe, is this, “In Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, . . . and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation” (2 Cor. 5:19). God was reconciling people when they didn’t want to be reconciled, and the price God paid to get to them in spite of their sins was the cross. And what God does we must do; we must reconcile people, even though it costs a cross. For the chief business of the Christian is to reconcile others. We must reconcile in four directions: between person and God, between person and person, between person and self, and between person and nature. This fourfold reconciliation is the one business of the Christian; all else is subsidiary. If we are not reconciling, we are not Christian. The Way is the way of reconciliation.
The center of that reconciliation is the reconciliation between person and God. As long as the central estrangement is there between a person and God, then all relations have the shadow of estrangement upon them. Life lacks central harmony. Unreconciled with God you are unreconciled with yourself, with your brothers and sisters, with nature.
O God, you are reconciling us when we fear reconciliation, for we have become naturalized in the unnatural—we have tried to be at home away from Home. Help us to be reconciled and to reconcile. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Today I shall touch everything with a healing touch.
Week 46 Tuesday
Bridging Gaps
Acts 20:33-35; Ephesians 2:11-13
We saw yesterday that the essence of the Christian impact is reconciliation. And the world needs it. For there are broken bodies, broken hearts, broken homes, a broken church, a broken world, and broken hopes. Philip reconciled in these directions:
(1) He bridged the gap between the material and the spiritual. He spiritualized the material, and materialized the spiritual, made it walk in flesh and blood. Someone spoke of a certain great Christian as a man who was “a mystic who had a strong sense of double-entry bookkeeping.” We need practical mysticism and mystic practicality. Philip was at home in two worlds at once. He served tables as a deacon, but he won people to Christ as an evangelist, and the two were not two, but one.
(2) He bridged the gap between Greek and Jew. He was a Greek wholly trusted by the Jews. When the race question arose, he was the one to settle it in his own person. He belonged to everybody because he belonged to Christ. The Christian is pro-everybody, only anti-evil. “Is So-and-so a pacifist?” was asked of a certain Christian. The reply, “Like his Master, he is not an ‘ist’ of anything. He is not a pacifist, but peace itself; he heals everything he touches.” We need people, not to bring races together, so much as to rise above race and see in every person a person and treat them all as such. In many interracial meetings, race sticks out everywhere. We need people who are unconscious of race but deeply conscious of people. Philip, without mentioning race, solved the question in his own person by his transcendence of race. A Greek served Jews and did it racelessly.
(3) He bridged the gap between Jew and Samaritan. The tension between Jew and Samaritan was great. The Samaritans would not receive Jesus and the disciples because their faces were set in the direction of Jerusalem, and to call a Jew a Samaritan was to abuse him. But here was a Greek reconciling Jew and Samaritan (see Acts 8:5-6). Philip did such a great work among the Samaritans that the apostles had to come down and lay their hands on them that they might receive the Holy Spirit. Hitherto they had wanted to call down fire on them to destroy them; now it was the fire of the Spirit.
O God, in a world torn and fragmented, help me to heal everything I touch, and help me to touch everything. Give me the healing hands and the healing heart. For you are sending me to reconcile everywhere. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Today I shall reconcile, reconstruct, and release.
Week 46 Wednesday
Reconciling between Races
Revelation 7:9-17
We pursue the reconciling spirit of Philip: (4) He reconciled between black and white. The Spirit told Philip to join himself to the chariot of an Ethiopian. He obeyed implicitly (Acts 8:27). Philip didn’t see the man’s skin; he saw his soul. And it was a great soul.
Skin is precarious. Some Africans think that white people are wearing their skin inside out. A little Chinese girl put her arm alongside the white arm of a missionary and said, “You must have been very sick.” A little girl who had never seen a black child before went up to her and passed her fingers over her face to see if the color would rub off; when she found it didn’t, she kissed her. The child bridged the gap through simplicity. Philip did it through his Christian faith. But some people’s Christian faith does not function at this point. Someone said to a deacon who was expressing pronounced racial prejudices, “But what does God say about it?” The deacon replied, “I don’t care what God thinks about it; this is what I believe.” And he still thought he was a Christian. His racial self was dominant and vocal; his Christian self was inoperative.
In a Christian center there is a building called “The World Brotherhood Building” in which an African American is not allowed to stay. Another Christian center talks brotherhood by the square yard and practices it by the square inch, for African Americans are not allowed to take part in the proceedings. When I called attention to this, a woman naively said, “But there are a lot of them working around on these grounds.” As if to have them there as servants fulfilled the Christian conscience! An African American soldier was asked to get out of a car into a Jim Crow car, and as he hobbled away on crutches, he said, “I was crippled for this.” Now look at this picture: At a mass meeting for women, an African American woman’s baby began to cry, and she got up to take it out. A white woman took the baby from the mother, took it outside and attended to it during the rest of the service so the mother could stay. Early Christianity bridged the gap in the person of Philip; he reconciled between black and white.
O God, who has made of one blood all people everywhere and has bound us at your feet in fellowship, help us to get rid of everything that makes for separation between person and person, of whatever race or color. For all are equal in your sight. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Today I shall see in every person of every race not a problem but a possibility.
Week 46 Thursday
Appreciating People with Disabilities
Acts 3:1-16
Yesterday we saw how Philip reconciled between white and colored.
(5) He reconciled between the physically disabled and the physically whole. He talked to the eunuch with the same respect that he would accord a physically whole person. To be able to see the person behind the physical difference is a Christian attitude and accomplishment. People have despised the disabled and the blind and the leper. When the blind man called to Jesus to have mercy on him, the people told him to keep still, and then Jesus stopped and asked him to be called. Then they ran to him and said, “Courage! Get up, he is calling you” (Mark 10:49 Moffatt). They were not interested in him until Jesus was interested; their interest followed his. It is still true. Jesus makes the uninteresting interesting. Even a eunuch becomes creative, on other levels, under his touch.
Tyranny had laid hold of the eunuch, had mutilated him to make him useful and safe in a royal court among women. He was cut off from all procreation. Society does the same today, but in other forms. It lays hold on people, compels them to live in crowded slums where soul and body and mind are mutilated and rendered noncreative. This is all so subtle, hidden, and camouflaged that only experienced eyes, and Christian, can see it. Again, when it kills off our youth in war and makes marriage impossible for a great many young people, denies them a home and children, it is still in the process of mutilation. When it drops bombs out of God’s skies on whole populations and makes little children start life under the Great Terror with stunted minds and bodies, this again is mutilation. When we keep food from getting to the hungry because, while God’s earth is bountiful, we refuse to get past the logjam of distribution, then this too is mutilation. Today our Christianity must function in terms of the underprivileged and the mutilated. When news of the end of World War I came to the bishops of The Methodist Episcopal Church, then in session, they called on the great orator Bishop William A. Quayle to speak. He said one sentence, “We must now be decent to the Negro [sic].” It was his most eloquent speech.
O God, we come to you to be awakened to the worthwhileness of people everywhere. Stab us broad awake and make us sensitive to any human need, anywhere. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: “Democracy is that madness that believes about men what isn’t so, and yet without that faith they will never become what we believe them to be.”*
*No published source found.
Week 46 Friday
Single Life a Christian Institution?
1 Corinthians 7:8-9, 17-28
We now look at the final reconciliation that Philip effected: (6) He reconciled between the married and the unmarried state. The account says that Philip had “four unmarried daughters who prophesied” (Acts 21:8 Moffatt). To have a grown unmarried daughter was almost unheard of; to have four was news. Marriages in those days, as in some cultures today, were arranged by the parents. To have four daughters unmarried showed parents who were very remiss, or daughters who were very remarkable. The latter is probable, for “who prophesied” gives us the clue. To prophesy meant not so much to foretell as to forth-tell. These young women were so creative in passing on the message that they were not frustrated at all. They sublimated their sex life in creative work, in newborn souls, creating hope and new movements. They were not suppressing sex but expressing it on another level.
So single life is a Christian institution. It grew out of the fact that the Christian impact made creation possible outside of marriage, and thus opened up harmonious living whether with or without the marriage relation. Single people, then, are in a line of creative succession. And they have kept it up. Their contribution to American life through teaching school and in other ways is perhaps the greatest contribution of any group. Here’s to the single people who have uniquely helped to make America what it is! They deserve our gratitude, God bless them! And they perhaps have been as happy and adjusted as the married. Maybe more so, if the divorce courts are any indication.
Philip is the patron saint of the unmarried, for he showed four unmarried daughters so useful that it had to be recorded for all ages. He reconciled the married and the unmarried state as equally fruitful if lived under the will of God. So “Philip the evangelist” drew everything together. He healed everything he touched, and he touched everything. As a young man named Ted Adams was ordained by his father, the sermon outline was: (1) Keep close to God. (2) Keep close to man. (3) Bring man and God together. Philip did that—the reconciler.
O living Christ, make my heart the place where everything is brought and everything is healed. Make me a reconciler everywhere, to everybody, in everything. For it is a broken world, and in you we have the healing—the only healing. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Today I shall see every person in God and what that person can become in God.
Week 46 Saturday
Evangelism the Life Blood of the Church
Daniel 12:3; 2 Timothy 4:1-5; Revelation 12:10-11
We come now to sum up the study on the evangelistic impulse. It is said in the last book of Scripture, “Blessed is he who reads aloud” (Rev. 1:3 Moffatt), who passes on to others what is read, the outgoing, sharing type. No benediction is pronounced on those who read to themselves only. Nor does it say, “Let the redeemed of the Lord keep their mouths shut.” Psychology is saying the same thing in psychological terms; you must be the sharing, communicative type to he healthy-minded. It is said, “They gained the victory over him on account of the blood of the Lamb, and the word of their witness” (Rev. 12:11 CEB). They conquered by what he did for them (“the blood of the Lamb”) and by what they did for him (by “their witness”). Here was taking and telling, the alternate beats of the Christian heart. For when something happens to us, then something happens through us.
Two things characterize real Christians: we listen to God, and we talk to people. Many reverse that: they listen to people, and they talk to God. It was said of John the Baptist, “He came for the purpose of witnessing” (John 1:7 Moffatt). That is psychologically sound. The center was outside himself; he was not talking about himself. That made a healthy-minded person, and effective.
As soon as one finds Christ, there is an impulse to find another and bring that person to Christ. In the first chapter of John are three “finds”: Andrew “finds” Peter, Jesus “finds” Philip, and Philip “finds” Nathaniel. The gospel is a gospel of finding. Of the forty healings in the Gospels, all but seven were brought in by someone else.
As Jesse M. Bader says, “We have been ringing church bells when we should be ringing doorbells. . . . We have been doing by proxy what we should do by proximity . . . by purse what we should be doing in person.”*
George Lansbury, a leader in the British government, said to me, “I have not been unsuccessful in politics, but if I had to do it over again, I would invest my life in people, in personally changing people, rather than investing in programs.”
O Christ, you have given me the greatest work in the world, the work of bringing others to you. Help me here and now to dedicate myself to that simple task, and help me to be faithful to that dedication. For nothing counts so much as this. In your name. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Nothing is really mine until I share it.
*Jesse Moren Bader, Evangelism in a Changing America (St. Louis: Bethany Press, 1957), 99.