Vital Choices - Safety or Sacrifice 4/18/43

Scripture: Mark 11: 1-10; Mark 8: 34-36

I trust that we are all in hearty accord with the work of safety councils. Every step taken to preserve life and limb and the health and efficiency of human beings at work, is a good step. As a people we ought never to allow any potential injury to go unchallenged. “Safety first” is a good motto for the machine shop, the planing mill, the highway, the railroad crossing, the swimming pool, the school yard, the household kitchen, the engineer’s cab, the farm. It is also good in the laboratory - in all of these areas and occupations, wiithin certain limits.

But life must also be adventurous, and at times risky. Sometimes high values call for throwing caution and safety aside. Indeed, Bishop Oldham suggests that “Safety First” is a motto ignoble and unworthy of a Christian, or of any true man.

To be more specific, he insists that the church has no business putting safety first among its purposes. The members of the church ought not to be concerned first with safety. For there are times when to seek safety becomes evasion or cowardice. When evil threatens, and need appears, and great tasks await the doing, our religion bids us forget self in service.

Charlotte Perkins Stetson writes a few lines of verse on this theme:

“A man must live!” We justify

Low shift and trick to treason high,

A little vote for a little gold

To a whole Senate bought and sold,

By that self-evident reply.

But is it so? Pray tell me why

Life at such cost you have to buy?

In what religion were you told

A man must live?

There are times when a man must die.

Imagine, for a battle-cry,

From soldiers, with a sword to hold-

From soldiers, with the flag unrolled -

That coward’s whine, this liar’s lie-

“A man must live.”

In realms of spiritual values, “safety first” does not make a good motto. For one thing, I think that one should dare to venture in his religious thinking. It is sometimes far from comfortable, as I discovered my first year in seminary. But you and I can’t grow without it.

Dr. G. A. Johnston-Ross, a great preacher of the Church of Scotland, was a venturesome and vigorous soul. His mind and spirit were a high inspiration to his students during the years when he was a professor in the Union Theological Seminary of New York. He was also something of a challenge to those of his friends who belonged to very conservative churches. He had capable friends, who belonged to the Roman Catholic church, who used to be concerned for the welfare of his soul, especially when in their discussions with him they knew he was really struggling with some great spiritual problem.

One of them spoke to him one day in this vein: “Ross, why don’t you come into the Catholic Church where there is certainty and safety, where the creed is definite and the authority of the church is dependable? In here it is warm and comforting. Out there, where you are, it is so cold and bleak.” And Ross instantly replied, “Yes, I know it’s bleak. But it’s br-r-racing!”

I sometimes think our religion doesn’t mean nearly enough to us until we have been willing to struggle with it in an honest, venturesome combat with life as we find it.

The spirit of “safety first” is altogether too dominant among many Christians. If the church is the fellowship of saints, let it be very clearly understood what a saint is. A saint is not a person of completed perfection. A saint is one who knows he is a sinner, but gets up after every fall or stumble, and keeps on trying. He is forever uncomplacent in the presence of his vision of God and of a perfect, saving Christ.

An English writer caustically commented that “the Church is drenched with self-regard.” Someone else taunts that most Christians have been inoculated with a mild form of Christianity and have thus become immune to the real thing. Now statements like these are exaggerations. But they shed a spotlight on enough truth to make us uncomfortable and to set us thinking.

If we think of the church as the “Ark of Salvation” wherein we shall all be safe, we have only seen part of it. It the church truly proclaims the Gospel of salvation, it is a fellowship of safety. But that safety is not the safety of escape; it is the safety of struggle.

In the Sunday School which I attended as a youngster, we were taught to sing - in fact fairly to shout - a gospel song: “Saved! Saved! My sins are all pardoned, my guilt is all gone! Saved! Glory I’m saved! Saved by the blood of the crucified one!”

Well, I suspect that when a man thinks he has been permanently redeemed and made perfect in one broad sweep, so that it is impossible for him to sin any more, he is on ground that is about as dangerous, spiritually, as any that he can find. Every moment of honest God-accepted repentance is a moment of salvation and ought to bring grateful joy to our hearts. But every moment of the future brings new threats from the wiles of the devil within us. Did not loyal, impetuous, redeemed Peter, who fought for his Lord in the night, thrice deny that same Lord, with cursing, before a rooster heralded the end of the same night? And did he not go out weeping bitterly? [Matthew 26: 69-75]. We are never released in this earthly life from the need of repentance, and of self discipline within; nor from the threat of evil from without.

The historic church, at its best in spiritual vigor, has not been a haven of safety from the world’s dangers, but it has been an invitation to risk, to righteous daring, and sometimes to martyrdom.

Again in our day, we have heard its voice saying: “It isn’t the business of the church to conquer. It is the business of the church to suffer.” And once more the church has suffered and is suffering with the persecuted, the wronged and down-trodden of the world. Again in our day, Christian leaders have accepted punishment, torture, confinement, because they will not sell the church to the state. A generation ago, the head of an evil government shouted in rage at a bishop of the church in Europe, “You dirty traitor! You ought to have your head cut off!” only to receive the calm reply, “Well, here I am.”

In our day, men and women have said, “we will accept imprisonment, the misunderstanding of friends, death, or any other danger or hardship, but we will not bow to that which in our hearts we believe to be wrong.” Men and women are “saved to serve,” and in some instances the church is a fellowship of the militant redeemed.

Let no Christian conceive his duty in purely negative terms nor allow others that impression. Years ago, an army raw recruit was sized up by his fellow recruits in this way: “He doesn’t smoke or drink or swear and is very quiet. We think he must be very religious.” Well, no one ought to be allowed to jump that far to such a conclusion. For those very same qualities might characterize a pickpocket or a traitor.

If one is happy and sociable and generous, will he be necessarily considered religious? How religion suffers in reputation from a negative attitude, as though a Christian was one who chiefly does not do certain things instead of one who does; one who refrains from evil instead of one who does good.

The church is not a haven of eternal rest, nor a hoarder’s storehouse. It is a commitment to service, and a powerhouse. If we doubt it, we had better reexamine the life of our Lord. The first Christian in time and rank was a doer! His was the stripe of temper which could stand up in a convention of proud and influential Pharisees and tell them that crooked tax collectors and sinners would get into the kingdom of heaven before they would. And you remember he was thrown out, literally, for his utterance. He was the kind of person who could tell people to deny themselves - but never stopped there. That was only prelude to the positive command - “Take up your cross and follow me.” He wasn’t just shepherd, he is leader!

Do you know the pathetic story of the wounded German soldier of World War II who lay in a French hospital? The French doctor came to treat and care for him. But he said “Nein.” Later the doctor came again, and again his help and skill were refused. Before the doctor left the hospital, he came once more and said, “Don’t you know that you are seriously wounded and may die? Why don’t you let me care for you?” And the poor, misguided German kid shook his head and said, “No, I haven’t suffered enough yet for my Fuehrer.”

Well, I believe that the deliberate cultivation of suffering is an ascetic evil. If it ever had any virtue, that was negative. But are we Christian people prepared to suffer necessary hardship and peril with our Leader? If the Christian Church acquires something of this spirit, we shall begin to conquer the mighty forces of evil that threaten, and intend, to dominate the world.

So many people had pinned their own kind of hope on the Jesus of Nazareth who rode in spiritual triumph into Jerusalem. They had a normal, freedom-loving people’s hatred of a tyrannical, corrupt, foreign government and longed to throw it off. They expected a leader to come and rally them to do the job.

As Jesus rode down the slope into town with people shouting, waving branches, throwing branches and cloaks on his path; their hope rose, fiery and fanatic. Many of them would have fought at the slightest command.

But the strength of armed might, much as they desired enough of it to get rid of the Romans, was not for them. Jesus knew from personal observation that there was too much corruption among his people, especially in high places, for any hope of the strength to deserve redemption. A free people must be a people of great moral strength and integrity. Again and again, throughout their history, the Jewish people had established themselves in blood and sweat and toil and in righteous, godly fear. Again and again they had fallen disastrously and terribly when weakened by their own corruption.

Right now, a people who were “chosen of God” were supposed to worship Him in a temple as lovely as human hands could build. But after all one has to have a few comforts, and how better secure them than through trade - even though it be over sacred things and brought into the outer court of the temple itself? And so evil had crept, uncontested, into the hearts of men who became shallow and bigoted - tithers of kitchen spices and meticulous pray-ers-in-the-market-place, but robbers of the poor and neglecters of the needy and schemers after themselves.

Jesus wasn’t headed for Rome! He was headed straight for Jerusalem! And it was dangerous business he was undertaking. Those people weren’t fit for freedom unless they could clean out their temple, forget themselves, repent in sack cloth before God, take up the work of mercy, offer themselves completely on the altar of sacrifice for salvation. And the probability that he would be killed for this trip didn’t stop our Lord. It isn’t “safe” to follow a man like that. It is a noble risk.

But our first concern is what Jesus may do as he rides into Washington and Madison and Wisconsin Rapids [and Birmingham and Johannesburg] and into his churches! If we hope to preserve or deserve liberty, that freedom must begin right in our own hearts with the determination to follow his leadership whatever may be the cost in suffering or sacrifice. It must be not only for ourselves but for all people. We have a triumphant leader who has said that whosoever will offer his life and lose himself shall save a life that is worth something to God. [Matthew 10: 38, 39].

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Dates and places delivered:

Wisconsin Rapids, April 18, 1943 (Palm Sunday)

Planning Conference, Racine, April 24, 1946

Wisconsin Rapids, (Union Service) August 26, 1951

Wisconsin Rapids, June 2, 1963