Stephen F. Bayne - "Obedience, Mission, and Unity" (October 1, 1961)
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Transcript
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- | And the last verse of that lesson that I just read, | 0:04 |
"We cannot, but speak of what we have seen and heard". | 0:09 | |
This is a verse about obedience. | 0:16 | |
The whole passage is a very full | 0:21 | |
and rather thought provoking little vignette | 0:26 | |
of the beginning church. | 0:29 | |
It is a church filled with power, | 0:33 | |
a church through which God does astonishing things, | 0:36 | |
which brings the church almost at once into collision | 0:42 | |
with the establishment. | 0:47 | |
The establishment is incredulous. | 0:50 | |
The church speaks to the establishment. | 0:53 | |
The establishment says, | 0:57 | |
"Very well, this is fine, but don't do it again", | 0:59 | |
which is ever the way the establishment, whatever it is, | 1:02 | |
deals with such thing. | 1:05 | |
And then with singular honesty and courage, | 1:08 | |
at the very end, they say, | 1:13 | |
"well you must judge what you do, | 1:14 | |
but as for us, we cannot but say the things | 1:19 | |
we have seen and heard". | 1:23 | |
This is plain, honest. | 1:27 | |
"They were ignorant and unlearned men", it says, | 1:32 | |
"but they took notice of them that they had been with Jesus, | 1:37 | |
and he has communicated this to them". | 1:41 | |
Here it is, this little band of people | 1:45 | |
standing against all the world, bound together in obedience. | 1:50 | |
We cannot but speak the things we have seen and heard. | 1:58 | |
I would think that this comes very close | 2:08 | |
to being the secrets of the Apostolic church. | 2:11 | |
And by the same token, | 2:16 | |
I should imagine that it remains the secrets | 2:19 | |
of Apostolic Christianity now as then, | 2:24 | |
that it is first of all a faith born in obedience | 2:29 | |
to what God has done and is doing. | 2:35 | |
We cannot but speak the things we have seen and heard. | 2:40 | |
The service in which we are engaged this morning | 2:46 | |
is a type of this kind of obedience. | 2:50 | |
Sometimes we are given to think of the Holy Communion, | 2:54 | |
whatever our tradition, in terms of our own share in it, | 2:59 | |
particularly in moments when liturgical interest | 3:07 | |
is strong in the church. | 3:12 | |
We are given to think of it as our service to be designed | 3:16 | |
and redesigned, to be presented and shared | 3:20 | |
and adorned with music and all the rest of it | 3:25 | |
as if this was some kind of thing that we do. | 3:28 | |
It is a thing that we do, | 3:32 | |
but the reason that we do it is that he did it. | 3:33 | |
All my life as an Episcopalian, | 3:38 | |
I have been used to the service of the Holy Communion | 3:40 | |
as we know it in the Episcopalian prayer book, | 3:43 | |
and it's not markedly unlike the services | 3:46 | |
of other Christian traditions. | 3:49 | |
One of the most interesting things, | 3:52 | |
but you don't discover this until you get to be an old man | 3:54 | |
and look back on it, | 3:57 | |
one of the most interesting things | 3:58 | |
are the detailed directions known as the rubrics, | 3:59 | |
which are printed in italics alongside the text. | 4:04 | |
Here the priest takes the bread. | 4:08 | |
Here he lays his hand on all the bread. | 4:12 | |
Here he takes the cup in his hand. | 4:16 | |
Here he lays his hand on all the wine to be consecrated. | 4:18 | |
These are nothing in the world but ceremonial direction, | 4:24 | |
just as any other rubric in the prayer book | 4:28 | |
or in any other service is nothing | 4:31 | |
but a ceremonial direction, | 4:32 | |
but what lies behind it is what interests me. | 4:34 | |
In the Holy Communion, we say these things | 4:39 | |
and we do these things for one reason only, | 4:43 | |
and that is that he said these things | 4:46 | |
and he laid his command on us to say them and to do them. | 4:50 | |
Heaven knows what we would produce if it were our task | 4:58 | |
to design a service of a sacramental nature. | 5:02 | |
I don't know that I would have that much trust | 5:08 | |
in American self-restraint or anybody else's self-restraint | 5:10 | |
to design a service for ourselves | 5:13 | |
of what we thought was appropriate, | 5:16 | |
but the point is that this is utterly irrelevant. | 5:17 | |
We cannot but speak of the things that we have seen | 5:20 | |
and heard. | 5:24 | |
He said, "do this", | 5:26 | |
and so year in and year out, century after century, | 5:30 | |
praying men and women have come together | 5:36 | |
and have taken the bread and the wine | 5:40 | |
and have broken these things and shared them, | 5:42 | |
and we have understood all along that this was not ours, | 5:45 | |
but that it was his, | 5:49 | |
and that the command that was laid on us | 5:51 | |
was the command of what we had seen and heard. | 5:53 | |
We've understood it, we had eyes to see it, | 5:58 | |
that the minister of the church | 6:01 | |
is never the one who says the word | 6:02 | |
and who performs the actions, that he is as we all are, | 6:05 | |
nothing more than the hands | 6:11 | |
and the voice of the one minister that counts. | 6:13 | |
Now, this is obedience. | 6:18 | |
This perception in depth that the literature is not ours, | 6:21 | |
that these services, whether they are communion services | 6:25 | |
or any act of worship, | 6:28 | |
that these things are not ours at all, | 6:30 | |
but they are simply our speaking | 6:32 | |
of what we have seen and heard. | 6:36 | |
Where this deep vein of obedience | 6:41 | |
does not run through the church, then there is no church. | 6:45 | |
There are well-intentioned people gathered in a society, | 6:50 | |
which is of some dubious benefits to American civilization, | 6:55 | |
but nothing more than this. | 7:00 | |
But where we are people who speak | 7:04 | |
of what we have seen and heard, | 7:08 | |
then our Lord has the chance to get his work done through us | 7:15 | |
and not outside the church. | 7:22 | |
This has something to say to mission, | 7:26 | |
to the mission of the church. | 7:31 | |
One of my responsibilities, | 7:36 | |
if I may be personal for a minute, | 7:38 | |
in this new inter-Anglican ministry | 7:41 | |
is to be what we would call a liaison officer | 7:44 | |
between the 18 churches, | 7:49 | |
which have descended from the Church of England. | 7:51 | |
The Episcopal church in this country is one, | 7:54 | |
and so the 16 others in Asia and in Africa | 7:57 | |
and South America and so on. | 8:03 | |
And it is my quite unique privilege to travel | 8:06 | |
from one to another and to try to interpret one to another, | 8:10 | |
try to understand what each of our churches is feeling | 8:14 | |
and thinking, so that little by little, | 8:18 | |
the unity that God has given | 8:21 | |
to this little chunk of Christians in the Anglican communion | 8:24 | |
can be fulfilled. | 8:28 | |
Well, in that, it is difficult as you can imagine, | 8:31 | |
to interpret east to west and vice versa. | 8:34 | |
When some of our Chinese Anglicans came to Prague | 8:39 | |
a few months ago, | 8:45 | |
they had some intensely sharp things to say | 8:47 | |
about Western Christianity, about American Christianity. | 8:50 | |
And this doesn't sit too well with us American Christians, | 8:56 | |
we tend to say sharp things back. | 9:00 | |
They say that we American Christians are war mongers, | 9:03 | |
and that the church should bear a firmer witness | 9:08 | |
against the war mongering tendencies | 9:10 | |
of American capitalist civilization. | 9:13 | |
And I don't need to tell you | 9:16 | |
what the characteristic American response is. | 9:17 | |
We send a rocket back about this captive church | 9:21 | |
or whatever it may be. | 9:26 | |
Well, I'm not arguing this point. | 9:28 | |
A man says what he has got to say. | 9:32 | |
The point at issue is that the church in both east and west | 9:34 | |
has got to learn to look below the culture | 9:40 | |
or else its mission becomes meaningless. | 9:45 | |
If you ask the average American in the streets, | 9:50 | |
obviously not in this chapel, | 9:55 | |
the average American in the street | 9:58 | |
what his solution to the Chinese problem was, | 10:00 | |
what his sense of the mission of American Christianity | 10:03 | |
to China was, his answer would be, first of all, | 10:06 | |
to let 600 million Chinese just sort of disappear | 10:08 | |
and then be replaced | 10:12 | |
by 600 million comfortable middle-class American people, | 10:13 | |
that this would be the solution which we would recognize. | 10:20 | |
Otherwise we are doomed to be uncomfortable, | 10:23 | |
coping with the 600 million who do not share our heritage | 10:27 | |
or our attitude at all. | 10:32 | |
This is to me an unlikely event, but even if it were likely, | 10:35 | |
I'm not sure how characteristic it would be of the gospel, | 10:40 | |
because the obedience to what we have seen and heard | 10:44 | |
is that which penetrates below culture | 10:49 | |
and helps little by little to set men and women free | 10:53 | |
from everything in culture which restrains them | 10:57 | |
and makes prisoners out of them. | 11:01 | |
The worst thing that has happened to Christianity, | 11:04 | |
both east and west, | 11:06 | |
is that it has become tied to the apron strings | 11:08 | |
of national and cultural direction, | 11:11 | |
so that we speak of American Christian | 11:17 | |
or even worse American Christianity or Chinese Christianity | 11:21 | |
or Indian or European or whatever. | 11:26 | |
As we are prepared to speak of those things | 11:32 | |
which we have seen and heard, | 11:36 | |
to that degree, God sets us free from being prisoner | 11:40 | |
of what we are, to reach more and more | 11:46 | |
to the unity of God's action in the world. | 11:51 | |
What matters in mission, believe me, | 11:56 | |
is not what individual Christians and their churches do, | 11:59 | |
what matters in mission is what God is doing. | 12:03 | |
The missionary goes out into the world, | 12:07 | |
whether it's in his own society in America | 12:10 | |
or in Southeast Asia, makes no difference. | 12:12 | |
He goes out in the world not bringing something to the world | 12:15 | |
that the world knows nothing about, | 12:18 | |
but he goes out into the world | 12:21 | |
to meet God already in action in the world, | 12:23 | |
to recognize that God, and it may be to identify him | 12:28 | |
by his own obedience. | 12:34 | |
The church, we Christian people have nothing to give | 12:37 | |
to the needs of mankind. | 12:41 | |
God has it to give and God is giving it. | 12:43 | |
And the note of mission is always the note of obedience, | 12:49 | |
thankful and penitent obedience | 12:53 | |
to what God has done and is doing | 12:57 | |
and will unfailingly do in the world. | 13:00 | |
Let us not ever think God is limited | 13:04 | |
to what his church can say or do. | 13:07 | |
It is the church's hope | 13:12 | |
that somehow we may keep up to God somehow, | 13:14 | |
and say obediently what he is saying, | 13:19 | |
the God who in judgment reigns over the affairs | 13:23 | |
of this world, the God who is at work in all of the tumult | 13:27 | |
and the up swelling of new nations everywhere in the world, | 13:31 | |
the God who is at work through our history, | 13:35 | |
standing in the middle of the tension and the perplexity | 13:38 | |
and the warfare, the God who never changes, | 13:41 | |
who is moving in the hearts of men, men who do not know him, | 13:44 | |
men who do not believe in him, | 13:47 | |
men who do not believe that there is any God at all. | 13:50 | |
God is still reigning and it is still our privilege | 13:53 | |
to speak obediently, and this is mission. | 13:58 | |
And so it is unity as well. | 14:03 | |
This morning in this moving service, | 14:05 | |
which for more than 25 years, I guess, | 14:11 | |
has been celebrated the world around, | 14:16 | |
Christians of many traditions come together | 14:19 | |
to celebrate the Lord's supper. | 14:22 | |
We know that there is something a little unreal about this | 14:26 | |
because our minds cannot but go to the hundreds of millions | 14:29 | |
of Christians who do not share this, who cannot share this. | 14:33 | |
We remember the breaches in the body of Christ | 14:37 | |
which are not healed, even though when we come together, | 14:40 | |
it is as if we were acting in the confident hope | 14:44 | |
that they will be healed, and so we are, | 14:48 | |
but still the body is broken. | 14:51 | |
What we do here is unusual. | 14:54 | |
And so we are perplexed by the ecumenical problem. | 15:00 | |
Ecumenical movement is rooted again in God | 15:09 | |
and not in ourselves, | 15:14 | |
as far as there is truth in our reach toward unity. | 15:17 | |
It is because we are speaking what we have heard and seen. | 15:24 | |
All too often, we go at this the other way around. | 15:31 | |
We start for the idea that it would fit in very well | 15:35 | |
with our divided society. | 15:38 | |
It would add enormously to the strength | 15:42 | |
of Christian witness. | 15:44 | |
It would simplify and coordinate all of the efforts | 15:46 | |
of separate churches. | 15:49 | |
It would avoid the painful | 15:50 | |
and sometimes embarrassing social divisions among us, | 15:52 | |
if we could reach unity within the church. | 15:56 | |
Not one of these things is true or important. | 15:59 | |
The only thing that matters is what God wants. | 16:04 | |
This is the only impulse to unity which matters. | 16:08 | |
If we act as if the church is ours, | 16:14 | |
then the church becomes nothing more than the little club | 16:17 | |
of like-minded people which we try to manage. | 16:21 | |
Many of us have been worried a little bit. | 16:26 | |
I have been worried like all Americans | 16:28 | |
about the stirring of unrest against the church | 16:30 | |
in many parts of America, | 16:34 | |
the constant criticism of the church | 16:36 | |
because it is doing this or that, | 16:39 | |
because of the presence of what are called | 16:41 | |
subversive elements in the church, | 16:44 | |
or because the church persists | 16:46 | |
in talking about non-religious problems so these people say, | 16:48 | |
that the church meddle is in politics, | 16:53 | |
meddles in international affairs, meddles in race relations, | 16:56 | |
meddles in tax problems. | 16:59 | |
I am very tired of hearing all this, | 17:02 | |
but recognize it for what it is. | 17:06 | |
This is the price we pay now for the appalling religiosity | 17:08 | |
of the last 25 years in American life, | 17:13 | |
when the church has gathered more pious barnacles, | 17:17 | |
and now are being slowed and held by people | 17:22 | |
who for all of their good intentions | 17:25 | |
have not a clue as to what the church is. | 17:27 | |
It is not a club of people run by people | 17:30 | |
to fit the fashions of people. | 17:34 | |
It is the little group of those who cannot but speak | 17:39 | |
of what they have heard and seen of the mighty acts of God. | 17:45 | |
And this deep and tranquil spirit | 17:52 | |
at the heart of the church, this is the ecumenical drive. | 17:56 | |
God does not care two hoots whether it is more efficient | 18:03 | |
to have one church than it is two or five, | 18:09 | |
he does not care about the social discomfort | 18:13 | |
of like-minded people | 18:17 | |
who now have to go to different churches. | 18:19 | |
God does not give a hoot about the Episcopal church | 18:23 | |
or the Methodist church of the Roman Catholic church | 18:27 | |
or any other outfits in human terms. | 18:31 | |
The only thing that matters | 18:35 | |
is whether we are obedient to him, | 18:37 | |
in his great acts in Christ. | 18:40 | |
If there is one saving act, | 18:47 | |
if God in Christ for us men and for our salvation | 18:51 | |
came down from heaven to make men one | 18:55 | |
and to make them whole, | 18:58 | |
then our only job is to speak this, | 19:01 | |
to speak of the one Lord and the one baptism | 19:07 | |
and the one faith, | 19:10 | |
until in time we get our idea of a church | 19:13 | |
back on its base again, | 19:16 | |
and think of it not as our creature, | 19:18 | |
but as the obedience of God. | 19:22 | |
Now, keep that in your hearts as we go through | 19:27 | |
this glorious service. | 19:30 | |
Remember that the words you hear and the things done | 19:33 | |
are not done because it's our idea, | 19:37 | |
but because he said, "Do this". | 19:40 | |
Remember the mission and witness of the church | 19:43 | |
and the call to unity and keep, I pray, | 19:47 | |
the word obedience very dear to your heart, | 19:52 | |
because there is no other way to understand the church, | 19:57 | |
except as the obedient company of those who speak | 20:02 | |
of what they have seen and heard, | 20:09 | |
of the mighty acts of God unto whom be glory and power | 20:13 | |
and dominion for ever and ever. | 20:18 | |
Amen. | 20:22 |
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