James L. Price, Jr. - "The Recovery of the Church" (October 13, 1963)
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| (orchestral music) | 0:40 | |
| Preacher | Oh God, in token of our recognition | 1:09 |
| that we receive everything from thee, | 1:12 | |
| and as a part of our dedication of self to thee, | 1:15 | |
| we now present these offerings for thy use | 1:20 | |
| and pray thy blessings upon them in the using | 1:23 | |
| and upon us in the giving | 1:27 | |
| through Jesus Christ, our Lord, Amen. | 1:29 | |
| (mumbles) | 1:35 | |
| Will you think with me about the church | 2:04 | |
| and our relation to it? | 2:07 | |
| If this question interests you at all, | 2:10 | |
| you may wonder what it means. | 2:13 | |
| Just to mention the church raises a bewildering variety | 2:16 | |
| of images and responses among us. | 2:20 | |
| Perhaps it is clear that the church | 2:25 | |
| means something more than | 2:28 | |
| the church downtown or in suburbia, | 2:31 | |
| which may have our name on its roles, | 2:34 | |
| but it is also clear that this something more is ambiguous. | 2:39 | |
| Churches yes, we've firsthand knowledge of some of these, | 2:45 | |
| but the church. | 2:52 | |
| What on earth is that or more pointedly, | 2:54 | |
| where on earth does one find it? | 2:58 | |
| I must be allowed to back away from this latter question, | 3:03 | |
| if by one means, whose church is the church? | 3:08 | |
| But the former question is more promising, | 3:14 | |
| the more promising of the two, | 3:17 | |
| what essentially is the church | 3:20 | |
| to which we can relate ourselves? | 3:23 | |
| We shall need to answer this one, | 3:26 | |
| at least in a tentative way | 3:29 | |
| before we can take a single step together. | 3:32 | |
| By the church, I mean that | 3:37 | |
| visible community of persons were so ever found | 3:40 | |
| confessing Jesus Christ to be Lord | 3:45 | |
| under the glory of God, the father. | 3:48 | |
| At the outset, | 3:52 | |
| we would stress that the church is visible | 3:53 | |
| in its contemporaneity. | 3:57 | |
| Of course, we can speak of the church | 4:00 | |
| as including all those generations of men | 4:01 | |
| who have died in this faith, | 4:04 | |
| and we can sing of mystical sweet communion | 4:07 | |
| with those whose rest is one, | 4:11 | |
| but we are not concerned with the invisible church. | 4:14 | |
| In this sense, | 4:18 | |
| for the living cannot relate themselves | 4:21 | |
| in any responsible way to the dead, | 4:23 | |
| but there is another reason for emphasizing | 4:28 | |
| the visibility of the church. | 4:31 | |
| We do not wish to refer | 4:34 | |
| to some ideal church or of the church, | 4:36 | |
| neither to some platonic essence, | 4:42 | |
| nowhere visible or actual, | 4:45 | |
| not to some indeterminate, indefinable number of saints | 4:48 | |
| in the midst of sinners visible only to God. | 4:52 | |
| The church is a concrete, not an abstract noun | 4:57 | |
| referring to a community that is visible in history | 5:03 | |
| at the present time. | 5:07 | |
| Of course this church traces its lineage way back | 5:10 | |
| to that particular community organized in Palestine, | 5:14 | |
| the historical consequence | 5:19 | |
| of Jesus' life, and death and resurrection. | 5:21 | |
| But the church exists within history | 5:25 | |
| as surely now as it did then, | 5:28 | |
| wherever else, or whenever. | 5:32 | |
| We may conceiver this existence. | 5:36 | |
| Now the very fact that Jesus | 5:40 | |
| is confessed to be the Lord of the church, | 5:42 | |
| suggests something else essential to its character. | 5:45 | |
| The church exists in response to his call, | 5:50 | |
| the call of this man from Nazareth, | 5:54 | |
| proclaiming the kingdom or the reign of God among men, | 5:57 | |
| both as a present and as a future reality. | 6:02 | |
| This Jesus left no book, no creed, | 6:07 | |
| no chatter for organizing a society | 6:10 | |
| and certainly not an institution, | 6:14 | |
| but he deliberately called together a small group | 6:17 | |
| of first of group. | 6:20 | |
| He sent these persons forth to | 6:22 | |
| witness to him into what he had done, | 6:25 | |
| called on them to acknowledge his Lordship. | 6:28 | |
| The common relation to Christ united these disciples, | 6:33 | |
| a community in him existed | 6:38 | |
| before they had attained full self understanding, | 6:41 | |
| now found our group solidarity. | 6:46 | |
| The church therefore was given in the fact of Christ | 6:50 | |
| and his call. | 6:53 | |
| This is why there has never survived | 6:55 | |
| or any significant time, a churchless Christianity | 6:58 | |
| consisting of some shifting consensus | 7:04 | |
| of religious ideas or moral principles. | 7:07 | |
| Now can we rightly conceive of the church | 7:12 | |
| as the end product of the collective actions of men | 7:15 | |
| voluntarily forming churches | 7:20 | |
| later perhaps achieving a Federation of Churches, | 7:23 | |
| and finally, in some conceivable time, | 7:27 | |
| a super structure called the church. | 7:30 | |
| Rather we confess the Christ convocation | 7:35 | |
| brought into existence the congregation, | 7:39 | |
| Ekklesia the church. | 7:43 | |
| And the name became the proper designation | 7:45 | |
| equally applicable to small groups of Christians | 7:49 | |
| meeting in someone's home | 7:52 | |
| as also for that totality of Christ confessors, | 7:55 | |
| wheresoever they dispersed. | 7:59 | |
| By such considerations as these | 8:02 | |
| one is able to affirm the reality of the church | 8:04 | |
| of Jesus Christ, | 8:07 | |
| moreover to believe in its catholicity, | 8:09 | |
| that is its unity and its universality. | 8:13 | |
| Likewise one can believe that this church is holy, | 8:17 | |
| certainly not because of the moral quality of its members, | 8:21 | |
| but because of the churches calling | 8:26 | |
| to proclaim the glory of God | 8:29 | |
| in the gospel of Jesus Christ. | 8:32 | |
| It is this church, which is precisely as visible among us | 8:35 | |
| as any Christian man | 8:41 | |
| for the actual church is given in the call of Christ to men | 8:44 | |
| and in that faith response to him. | 8:49 | |
| Now what may we say, | 8:53 | |
| of the relation of modern men to this church? | 8:55 | |
| It's obvious that there are many persons | 9:00 | |
| attending public worship today, | 9:03 | |
| ostensibly interested in Christianity, | 9:06 | |
| who are indifferent to if not contemptuous of the church. | 9:09 | |
| Of course there are many others | 9:16 | |
| who seldom if ever enter the church buildings. | 9:19 | |
| Some of these also are not unsympathetic to the convictions, | 9:23 | |
| which distinguished their Christian friends. | 9:27 | |
| I think especially of the sincere humanists | 9:31 | |
| among the college educated in our community, | 9:34 | |
| but among these, the church is often an offense. | 9:38 | |
| The mention of the word brings a snare, | 9:43 | |
| or evokes some surprisingly catty remark. | 9:46 | |
| One easily learns the principle cause | 9:52 | |
| for this contempt, this is gone, | 9:55 | |
| which one encountered so frequently today. | 9:58 | |
| It arises of course, from a very honest revulsion | 10:02 | |
| against the evil in the church, | 10:06 | |
| against the shame of organized Christianity. | 10:10 | |
| Perhaps the disdain of some critics of the church | 10:16 | |
| has in it elements of irrationality. | 10:19 | |
| All churchmen of Todd with the same brush, | 10:22 | |
| stereotypes abound of Methodist, Baptist, | 10:27 | |
| cartoons of the minister persist, | 10:31 | |
| church dogma is confused with dogmatism, | 10:35 | |
| theologically illiterate men, otherwise educated, | 10:39 | |
| mistake genuine Christian doctrines | 10:44 | |
| for crude character tools | 10:47 | |
| and then pontificate | 10:50 | |
| as if they know what they're talking about. | 10:52 | |
| But these reflections aside, | 10:56 | |
| let us now acknowledge without any qualification, | 10:59 | |
| without any reservation, | 11:02 | |
| the existence of sin and corruption in the church. | 11:05 | |
| In fact we must confess | 11:10 | |
| that many of the churches critics | 11:12 | |
| who are limited in their knowledge | 11:14 | |
| are unaware of its actual sin and corruption. | 11:16 | |
| There is no defense open to us by way of denial, | 11:21 | |
| all attempts to abstract the congregation of the faithful | 11:26 | |
| from the actual congregations which sicken the scornful | 11:31 | |
| must be resisted. | 11:36 | |
| To speak of the sinfulness of church members, | 11:38 | |
| which somehow does not involve the church in sin | 11:41 | |
| is nonsense, | 11:45 | |
| if we affirm the visible historical character of the church. | 11:47 | |
| The church then fails, has failed and is failing | 11:52 | |
| in the failures of its members. | 11:57 | |
| For all these critics, holy fail. | 12:02 | |
| Do they realize that the church in its essential nature | 12:06 | |
| must be a fellowship of sinners? | 12:10 | |
| Do they really know that the gospel of Christ | 12:14 | |
| offers men salvation by grace and not by works? | 12:17 | |
| That repentant sinners receive forgiveness, | 12:23 | |
| but never release from their sinful finitude? | 12:26 | |
| It is easy for Christians to expect | 12:32 | |
| too little of themselves, | 12:34 | |
| but it's also easy for non-Christians to demand | 12:37 | |
| too much of us, | 12:39 | |
| indeed to demand the impossible. | 12:41 | |
| To those who remain aloof from the church | 12:45 | |
| because of its tragic failures, | 12:47 | |
| our only plea can be, | 12:50 | |
| join us in the effort to recover the glory of the church, | 12:53 | |
| the glory that may be hidden in this shame. | 12:57 | |
| Do not condemn us from the outside, | 13:02 | |
| valuable as such exposures may be, | 13:05 | |
| but criticism from within maybe more constructive | 13:09 | |
| and possibly corrective. | 13:13 | |
| Well not the very fact that you are sensitive | 13:16 | |
| to the failures of the church, | 13:19 | |
| helping overcoming its Pharisaical moralism, | 13:21 | |
| its parochial horizons | 13:24 | |
| in clarifying the essential Christian doctrines. | 13:27 | |
| Your critical thought can help us | 13:32 | |
| in purifying the worship of the church, | 13:35 | |
| your own self dedication can lead the way. | 13:38 | |
| Become comrades with us in Christianizing the church. | 13:42 | |
| And we must also say to these non-Christians | 13:48 | |
| by dwelling upon the sins of the church, | 13:53 | |
| by being rightly suspicious of it's often covert corruption, | 13:57 | |
| you may be blind to the fact | 14:02 | |
| that the of the raison d'être church | 14:04 | |
| is the proclamation of the gospel of Christ. | 14:07 | |
| The sinful responses, which its members give to this gospel, | 14:11 | |
| that infidelities to Christ, | 14:16 | |
| comprised with one dimension of the church's existence. | 14:19 | |
| The twin aspect of this congregation | 14:24 | |
| is Christ convocation. | 14:28 | |
| The church falters and fails, | 14:31 | |
| we cannot deny it, | 14:34 | |
| but it still ever reaches forward in its faith, | 14:36 | |
| it's hope and it's love towards it's savior. | 14:39 | |
| Acutely aware of its need | 14:44 | |
| it knows that it must depend upon God's grace | 14:47 | |
| and forgiveness every moment of life. | 14:49 | |
| That it must submit to a common judgment, | 14:54 | |
| pray for his transforming spirit | 14:57 | |
| for the coming of his kingdom. | 15:00 | |
| We must also appealed to these non-Christians, | 15:03 | |
| join with us in order to receive as well as to give, | 15:07 | |
| to learn of Christ as well as to instruct his brethren, | 15:13 | |
| to be judged as well as to judge, | 15:18 | |
| and so to confess your own sins, | 15:22 | |
| but also to be transformed | 15:26 | |
| by the saving power of his gospel, | 15:28 | |
| by whose judgments the church must ever | 15:31 | |
| and ever again be reformed. | 15:34 | |
| The church is indeed the community of sinners, | 15:38 | |
| which you see and declaw, | 15:41 | |
| but it is also the community over which Christ | 15:44 | |
| would exercise his Lordship. | 15:47 | |
| Christ is the glory of the church, | 15:50 | |
| and in him there is our hope. | 15:54 | |
| But now what of us who call ourselves Christian? | 15:59 | |
| How do we conceive our relation to the church? | 16:04 | |
| Are we not within it irrevocably? | 16:09 | |
| As we confess Christ as Lord, | 16:15 | |
| there is much in the life of a university, | 16:19 | |
| which effectively obscures this truth from us. | 16:21 | |
| As students, we tend to think of the church | 16:26 | |
| only as that local institution back home, or off campus, | 16:30 | |
| who's inhibiting influences, we would like to slough off. | 16:35 | |
| One grows accustomed to the idea that in a university | 16:40 | |
| one becomes an individual | 16:46 | |
| emancipated from one's heritage | 16:49 | |
| and from the institutions which have formed | 16:52 | |
| and previously shaped one's life.` | 16:54 | |
| Here one wishes to become a free man, | 16:58 | |
| a solitary soul, | 17:02 | |
| a lovely critic and eclectic, | 17:04 | |
| creating one's own private culture | 17:09 | |
| by choosing what he likes from all cultures | 17:12 | |
| within this frame of mind and mood, | 17:17 | |
| the critics of the church have a field day. | 17:21 | |
| It's something of a paradox | 17:25 | |
| that while we aim to be independently objective | 17:27 | |
| in viewing all social institutions, | 17:30 | |
| we listen quite uncritically | 17:33 | |
| and with a kind of raw amusement to the debunkers, | 17:37 | |
| exposing the shame and the sham of the church. | 17:42 | |
| We somehow imagine, | 17:47 | |
| that we too stand over against the church, | 17:49 | |
| that we too can fix the blame, | 17:55 | |
| here or there | 17:58 | |
| on anybody else but ourselves | 18:01 | |
| or perhaps we all finding here, | 18:06 | |
| the old concept of the invisible church useful. | 18:08 | |
| The church becomes in effect our church | 18:13 | |
| containing those people whom we, | 18:17 | |
| at our present stage of enlightenment and detachment | 18:20 | |
| would regard as all fit associates. | 18:24 | |
| Christians can easily fall into these illusions | 18:28 | |
| while in college. | 18:31 | |
| I know from my own experience as a student and as a teacher. | 18:33 | |
| But we must have faced up to illusion | 18:39 | |
| and the sooner the better for us. | 18:42 | |
| If we wish to be free men, | 18:46 | |
| christian individualist, | 18:49 | |
| the old and the new, church or group, | 18:52 | |
| let us consider this fact about our existence. | 18:56 | |
| There is no private relation to Jesus Christ, | 19:00 | |
| to confess him is to be in his church. | 19:05 | |
| To be sure each of us has to face from time to time, | 19:10 | |
| the necessity of those personal decisions concerning him, | 19:13 | |
| but his gospel comes to us in the witness of the church | 19:18 | |
| and our faith must be confessed in its fellowship | 19:23 | |
| and nurtured via. | 19:27 | |
| According to the new Testament, | 19:30 | |
| a Christian's existence is always a membership | 19:31 | |
| in a family, | 19:35 | |
| a household, | 19:37 | |
| a colony, | 19:39 | |
| a flock, | 19:40 | |
| a chosen nation, | 19:42 | |
| a race, | 19:43 | |
| but never is it pictured of a life of detachment, | 19:45 | |
| especially not where the heir is the Apostle's image | 19:51 | |
| of the body of Christ, | 19:55 | |
| bringing to our imaginations | 19:57 | |
| such changing pictures of the church | 19:59 | |
| as that place in which God's redemption of men | 20:02 | |
| is wrought in Christ | 20:07 | |
| as that realm in which his promise of eternal life is given | 20:09 | |
| and received. | 20:14 | |
| It is this image which reveals our interdependence upon | 20:17 | |
| the one body that was broken | 20:22 | |
| and the one food that nourishes our faith and hope, | 20:25 | |
| as well as that independence, interdependence, | 20:29 | |
| which all the gifts of the holy spirit inevitably establish. | 20:34 | |
| If the institutional church repels you | 20:41 | |
| and you imagine yourself belonging to some ideal church, | 20:45 | |
| but to no specific church | 20:50 | |
| ponder these incisive words of call bond. | 20:53 | |
| According to the new Testament, | 20:59 | |
| to believe in the church is to belong to one | 21:02 | |
| and within it to confess the church universal | 21:07 | |
| from then on one may be able to see what is good | 21:12 | |
| in other churches. | 21:16 | |
| What in them is faithful to the word of God | 21:18 | |
| and learn from them and maybe transfer to another church. | 21:20 | |
| But the important thing is never to separate the church | 21:27 | |
| from the visible church. | 21:32 | |
| Let us not hover over the clouds over every church, | 21:35 | |
| identifying our lives with no church. | 21:40 | |
| Concretely to believe in the church | 21:45 | |
| is to accept concretely to live within a church. | 21:49 | |
| Let us consider seriously then | 21:57 | |
| our need as Christians for the supports afforded | 21:59 | |
| by some particular company of | 22:03 | |
| believing sinners like ourselves. | 22:05 | |
| However in conclusion, let us not dwell upon our needs | 22:11 | |
| to a participating in the life of a church, | 22:16 | |
| and so to express our faith in the church, | 22:19 | |
| but let us think for a moment of the needs of the church, | 22:24 | |
| which we are called to serve | 22:28 | |
| and which for the present we may be ignoring. | 22:31 | |
| We following the way of one, | 22:36 | |
| we must constantly remind ourselves | 22:38 | |
| who came not so much to be served as to serve | 22:41 | |
| in the way of the son of man | 22:47 | |
| who plowed his life into his community | 22:49 | |
| and gave it as a ransom price for many. | 22:53 | |
| There is a sickness in the church today, | 22:57 | |
| but I cannot believe it is a sickness unto death. | 23:01 | |
| There are in fact many hopeful signs of recovery, | 23:06 | |
| but we all blind to them or perhaps indifferent to them. | 23:10 | |
| Christians all over the world | 23:15 | |
| are reaching out to each other, | 23:17 | |
| expressing shame and guilt over the brokenness, | 23:19 | |
| the effectiveness of the church, | 23:22 | |
| long praying, striving for the reunion of all churches, | 23:25 | |
| not the achievement mind you, | 23:32 | |
| but the realization of that unity which is ours in Christ. | 23:34 | |
| When the Pope following his predecessor explicitly states | 23:40 | |
| that it is the purpose of the ecumenical council, | 23:46 | |
| now in session | 23:48 | |
| to reform the Roman church | 23:50 | |
| in order to carry out prerequisites | 23:53 | |
| for the reunion of the church. | 23:55 | |
| When he speaks of Protestants as separated brethren | 23:58 | |
| and not as systematics and heretics, | 24:02 | |
| there are indeed bright signals of hope, | 24:06 | |
| but what of the churches we represent? | 24:10 | |
| Are there signs within them of self-criticism, | 24:14 | |
| honest hard self-criticism? | 24:19 | |
| Signs of reformation, renewal, | 24:23 | |
| fortunately some signs, | 24:27 | |
| but signs that are needed to be strengthened and extended. | 24:30 | |
| And the question presses in upon us, | 24:34 | |
| are we helping with the solution | 24:38 | |
| or becoming part of the problem? | 24:41 | |
| Are we enabling men to see the glory? | 24:45 | |
| The hidden glory, | 24:50 | |
| as well as the shame of the church. | 24:53 | |
| The recovery of the church is not a task | 24:57 | |
| to be accomplished by ecclesiastical troubleshooters, | 24:59 | |
| or reunion negotiators, | 25:03 | |
| perhaps least of all by these. | 25:06 | |
| It is an imperative facing each one of us, | 25:10 | |
| every 20th century Christian, | 25:14 | |
| the divisions among us | 25:18 | |
| and our content to remain entrenched in them, | 25:20 | |
| our halfhearted loyalties to the churches, | 25:24 | |
| to which we have nominal attachment. | 25:27 | |
| These things are a scandal to the world. | 25:31 | |
| Men are exonerated to a degree | 25:34 | |
| from even given heed to the call of Christ because of this. | 25:37 | |
| Nothing less than his mission to the world is at stake. | 25:43 | |
| To stand aloof from the physical church | 25:49 | |
| is effectively to deny our Lord. | 25:53 | |
| But to lose ourselves in the life and work of the body, | 25:58 | |
| his body which is the church | 26:04 | |
| is to enable others and ourselves | 26:07 | |
| to find new life in him. | 26:12 | |
| Let us pray. | 26:17 | |
| Oh God, father of our Lord Jesus Christ | 26:26 | |
| revive thy holy Catholic church | 26:33 | |
| beginning with me. | 26:38 | |
| The grace of our Lord, Jesus Christ, | 26:44 | |
| the love of God, | 26:46 | |
| fellowship of his holy spirit be with us | 26:48 | |
| and all of God's people everywhere this day and always, | 26:52 | |
| Amen. | 26:58 | |
| (orchestral music) | 27:04 |
