WHY GO TO CHURCH
“Ye are come unto mount Sion,
and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem,
and to an innumerable company of angels,
to the general assembly and church of the firstborn,
which are written in heaven,
and to God the Judge of all,
and to the spirits of just men made perfect,
and to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant,
and to the blood of sprinkling,
that speaketh better things than that of Abel.
See that ye refuse not him that speaketh.” – Hebrews xii. 22-25-
WHAT THIS WRITER is doing is
to describe what it felt like in those early generations to belong to the Christian community –
and what it ought to feel like to belong to that community still today.
He is trying to give some idea of the amazingly rich inheritance
which is ours in the Church, the Body of Christ.
“When you meet in your places of worship,”
he says in effect, “with whom are you meeting?”
And then he proceeds to tell them.
He tells them first negatively,
casting his mind back to the old days before God
in the fullness of time had sent forth His Son.
“You have not come unto the mount that might be touched,
and that burned with fire,
nor unto blackness, and darkness, and tempest”:
you have not come, that is, to Sinai,
to the voice of thunder that might freeze the blood and terrify the soul;
not come to the old rigid system of exclusion,
where only Moses could see the face of God,
and common sinners had to keep their distance and tremble in their God-forsakenness –
you have not come to that!
All that, having served its day, is past and finished.
And then he goes on to tell them positively.
“You have come to Mount Zion,
to myriads of angels in festal array,
to the Church of the firstborn written in heaven,
to the God of all who is Judge,
to the spirits of the blessed departed,
and to Jesus and His saving blood.”
This is your Christian heritage,
declares this man to his readers,
and says it still to you and me;
this is the truth about the Church at worship.
And notice precisely how he puts it.
He does not say “You shall come,”
forecasting something dim and far away,
in another world beyond the grave.
He says, “You have come”: meaning,
“This is what actually happens every time you meet for worship.
This is the fellowship into which you enter.”
If only we could realise the riches of our heritage!
It is an amazing wealth of suggestion that
this writer has piled up here in disorderly profusion.
Can we get some order out of it?
I think we can.
He is saying 5 things about our fellowship of Christian worship in the Church.
He begins with this: it is a spiritual fellowship.
“You have come unto mount Zion,
the city of the living God,
the heavenly Jerusalem.”
“You Christians,” he means, “have direct touch
with that invisible spiritual world which is the only ultimate
reality. You are not prisoners behind the bars of a narrow earth-
bound existence, where men push and jostle one another for
their tawdry, perishable prizes, and breathe the suffocating,
poisonous air of a materialist philosophy. You are done with
that! You have had your horizons stretched immeasurably.
You are breathing the ampler air of spiritual truth. You have
come unto mount Zion.” For the bedrock reality of the universe
is spiritual.
Let us be clear, however, what this means and what it does
not mean. There is a frequent error we must guard against here.
Far too often the spiritual has been set over against the secular
as though these were different realms. This is a complete mis-
understanding of the biblical revelation. The spiritual world is
emphatically not something apart from the world of mundane
affairs and the ordinary workaday life of men. How could it be,
seeing that it is precisely in that world and its relationships
that God keeps drawing near to us? It is ultimately there we
have to find and acknowledge Him, if He is ever to be found at
all. Therefore to isolate the sacred from the secular, as is so often
done, is thoroughly alien to the intention of the gospel. The final
rebuke to such a false division is the incarnation itself, when
spirit and matter were for ever united by the fiat of God, and
the Word was made flesh.
But now notice: so far from making acts of worship unneces-
sary, this renders them all the more essential. For we are not
likely to go on believing for very long that God is with us in
every common task and duty, including the hours when we
cannot consciously be thinking of Him at all, unless we make
room for times and seasons when we think of Him above every-
thing else, and deliberately “stay our mind upon Him”. “All
life ought to be worship,” declared William Temple; but he
went on to add, “We know quite well there is no chance it will
be worship unless we have times when we have worship and
nothing else.”
Now you know, as I know, how this highway of the spirit
tends to get blocked by the dust and drudgery of life. The great
Indian mystic, Rabindranath Tagore, once wrote a poem in
which he compared our daily life to a narrow lane overhung with
high buildings, between which there could be seen above a
single strip of blue sky torn out of space. The lane, seeing the
sun only for a few minutes at midday, asks herself-Is it real?
Feeling some wayward breeze of spring wafted in from far-off
fields, she asks-Is it real? But the dust and rubbish never
rouse her to question. The noise of traffic, the jolting carts, the
refuse, the smoke-these she accepts, these she concludes are
clearly the real and actual things of life; and as for that
strange strip of blue above, she soon ceases even to wonder
about it, for so manifestly it is only a fancy, nothing real. This,
says Tagore in effect, is precisely the truth about our ordinary
mundane existence. The near things, the tangible, material
things- these we accept, these we say are obviously the things
that matter, they are solid, substantial fact: not recognising
that it is that streak of blue above, that far glimpse of the
spiritual, which is the essential reality for which every soul of
man is made, and which alone gives meaning and perspective to
all life’s tasks and relationships.
Yes, we forget it; and yet sometimes, thank God, it comes
back to haunt us. Sometimes, as Browning knew, “a sunset
touch, a fancy from a flower-bell, someone’s death” will disturb
our too confident security. And specially in the worship of the
Church, and above all through the mystery of Holy Commun-
ion, the world unseen may break right in upon us. Eternity
then stirs within our hearts, and we can doubt the spiritual
realities no longer, and we know we are going to be restless until
we rest in God. God grant that this may happen every time we
come up into His courts. “You have come unto mount Zion, the
city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem.”
I pass to the second fact our text underlines concerning the fellowship of Christian worship:
it is a universal fellowship.
“You have come to the Church of the firstborn,
who are written in heaven.”
The writer is thinking there not of the Church in glory but of the actual Christian society.
In other words, this is the magnificent idea of the beloved community.
You who belong to Christ, he declares, are no longer isolated and alone.
You are members of the greatest fellowship on earth, the Church universal.
Now, of course, it is a great thing to be loyal to one’s own
congregation, to be able to say that the very stones of the
building where you worship week by week are dear to your
heart. That is splendid. But do let us remember the greater
heritage and the wider horizon! Think of belonging to a fellow-
ship which from its small beginnings in an upper room has
grown and extended until today it is as wide as the world.
Dead must he be of soul who does not feel the thrill of belonging
to a fellowship like that!
Faber in one of his hymns complains-“We make God’s love
too narrow by false limits of our own.” He might have said
the very same thing about the Church. We make God’s Church
too narrow by false limits of our own. Too often men have built
again with mistaken zeal the very barriers Christ came to level
to the dust, racial barriers, class barriers, barriers of sect,
denomination and government, of taste and temperament,
until the whole fellowship ideal has been pitifully impoverished
and restricted. But in the providence of God, such has been the
innate vitality of this ideal that not all the excesses of militant
nationalism, not all the outbursts of racial bitterness, not all the
mad follies of the sectarian spirit, not all the pathetic spiritual
exclusiveness which has claimed a monopoly of the grace of
God, have ever been quite able to destroy it. It is a tremendous
fact, the universal fellowship. Surely it does mean something to
us all that the hymns we sing here in church are being sung in
Africa, in India, in China, in the islands of the furthest seas.
It does mean something that a Kagawa in Japan, a Schweitzer in
Africa, a Bonhöffer in Europe, could feel themselves to be blood-
brothers in Christ. It does mean something to me to receive, as
I did in the days just before the last missionaries had to with-
draw from China, a letter from the city of Sian in the province of
Shensi, telling me of a great open-air gathering of young Chinese
students and others who had come together to listen to half a
dozen of their own number speaking of-what do you think?
Communism? Nonsense! “What Jesus Christ means to me.”
And it does matter mightily that you and I within this church
today should know that we are not isolated units brought
together by the fact of meeting beneath the same roof or
belonging to one congregation, but that outside these walls
there is a great unnumbered host worshipping the same Lord
Christ, feeling towards Jesus just as we feel towards Him, thank-
ing God for Jesus just as we thank God for Him, pledged to
stand up and fight for Jesus just as we are pledged to stand up
and fight for Him.
There is no other fellowship -social, political or international
– which can compare for a moment with this. Some of you may
remember those dreadful militaristic demonstrations which we
could hear broadcast from Europe occasionally before the war,
thousands of voices shouting fanatically “Sieg, Heil!” – yelling it
in menacing unison, “Sieg, Heil”! There is a louder chorus than
that across the world today, if only we were able to hear it. And
if I could stand in this pulpit and shout the words “Christ is
risen” across the thousands of miles to Nigeria, Uganda, Bengal,
Manchuria, Brazil, Jamaica, back would come the cry, drown-
ing all other sounds, “Yes, He is risen indeed! Hallelujah!”
It is an incomparable thing, this universal fellowship. And
every time you come to church, says this writer to the Hebrews,
this is the fellowship you enter. “You have come to the Church
of the firstborn, who are written in heaven.”
I pass to the third description he gives of our fellowship in Christian worship.
It is an immortal fellowship.
“You have come to myriads of angels in festal array,
and to the spirits of just men made perfect.”
He is away now, you see, across the river in the Church invisible and triumphant.
He is away in that other world where all the celestial hosts sing to the Lord,
ten thousand times ten thousand uniting in the great Te Deum of heaven:
“Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing.” And what he says is immensely important for all of us who here on earth have had to face the sorrow of separation,
all for whom the poet in his bereavement spoke:
Thy voice is on the rolling air;
I hear thee where the waters run;
Thou standest in the rising sun,
And in the setting thou art fair.
For what this writer says to us is this: “When you Christians
are at worship, bowing in prayer before the throne on high,
then your loved ones on the other side are very near to you,
and the cloud of witnesses is all round about you. In coming to
commune with the world unseen, you are come to the spirits
of just men made perfect – the immortal fellowship.”
There is a lovely old Greek play, the Alcestis of Euripides,
which tells how the hero Heracles, the Samson of the Greeks,
once met and conquered death. There was a day when Heracles
on a journey came to the palace of King Admetus; and there he
found everyone desolate with grief because Death, that bitter
tyrant, had carried off the fair young Queen Alcestis. Where-
upon Heracles, who in his day had fought and tamed many wild
beasts and dangerous monsters, the lion and the bull, the Hydra
and Cerberus, offered to go out to the grave and face this last
grim enemy and rob him of his prize. Away out to the lonely
tomb he went; and there he met the monster Death, and grap-
pled with him and vanquished him, and set his victim free. And
the most beautiful scene in the drama is that in which Heracles
comes leading by the hand someone completely covered with
a white veil, and stands before the heartbroken King, and
cries-
Look on her, if in aught she seems to thee
Like to thy wife. Step forth from grief to bliss.
And he lifts the veil, and there is Alcestis, alive and fair and
smiling as of old. “See, O King, I give her back to thee.” Of
course the Greeks knew that it was myth and fable. That kind
of thing does not happen in this world. But come across into
Christianity, and it is no myth nor fable now. A greater than
Heracles is here. Our Master has met the last enemy and
vanquished it for ever: so that today from across the river there
comes, blown back to you, the sound of singing:
Ev’n as a bird
Out of the fowler’s snare
Escapes away,
So is our soul set free:
Broke are their nets,
And thus escaped we.
“See,” says Christ to you whom death has robbed, “I give him
back – I give her back – to you!” And with that, you know that
your loved one is alive for ever and intimately near you still.
No, they are not far away, the spirits of just men made
perfect; and those who love God never meet for the last time.
They are still watching over us who are left journeying and
battling here, still rallying our faint hearts to cheer us on our way.
It is said that when Napoleon with his Grand Army was crossing
the Alps the troops at one point began to mutiny, refusing to
march further, giving up the whole adventure in despair,
beaten by the cold and the toilsomeness of that frightful
journey. But someone suddenly had an idea: why should the
band not play the Marseillaise? As soon as the notes of that
thrilling, jubilant melody were heard, there in the wilds of the
Alps, the light flashed back into listless eyes, and the strength
returned to weary limbs, and they went on and breasted the
summits and turned defeat to victory. So our dear ones, from
where they dwell with Christ in glory, still cheer and urge us on;
and every echo of the new song they sing is a thing to bring the
light to our eyes and strength to our fainting hearts. And
remember, says this writer to the Hebrews, when you come
together for worship they are very near to you then. It is just
as if they were holding Christ’s right hand, and you His left.
They are as near to you as that. “You are come to the spirits of
just men made perfect” – the immortal fellowship.
Fourth, it is a divine fellowship.
“You have come to the God of all who is Judge,
and to Jesus the Mediator of the new covenant.”
In your worship, he tells them,
reaching now the very heart of the matter,
you have come to God as revealed in Jesus.
And, indeed, without this all the other great things
he has spoken of would be insufficient and unavailing.
But beyond all these, he now says,
deeper than all these, you have come right through to Christ.
It is said that a friend of Leonardo da Vinci’s,
looking at the unfinished picture of the Last Supper,
was entranced by the loveliness of two silver cups on the table in front of Jesus,
and immediately exclaimed at the artistic skill of their design,
Leonardo’s retort was to take his brush and paint them out.
“It is not that I want you to see,” he exclaimed,
“it is that Face!”
And is there anything we need to see but just that face of Jesus?
For never a congregation meets for worship but some are
present perplexed and baffled and oppressed by the difficult
problems of life; and the inarticulate longing of their hearts is –
“Sir, we would see Jesus.” Are there indeed any of us exempt
from this experience? Somewhere, we feel sure, there must be a
solution to the vexing enigmas of our life, somewhere a trans-
figuring light across all its meaningless frustrations, somewhere
an interpretation of all the discipline we have to bear. And
no mere philosophy of life is adequate, no stoic abstract view
can finally avail. It is a divine heart we want to speak to, a
Friend who will understand, a living love on which we may
confidently lean. “Sir, we would see Jesus.”
There is a characteristic little story which is told about Dr.
John Duncan. He was scholar, mystic, theologian. He knew
the Hebrew language like his mother tongue. It was rumoured
among his students that when “Rabbi” Duncan said his prayers
at night he prayed to God in Hebrew. One day two of them re-
solved to listen outside his door at the time of prayer: they would
hear those flights of mysticism and theology going up to God in
the Hebrew tongue. They listened, and this is what they heard:
Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,
Look upon a little child,
Pity my simplicity,
Suffer me to come to Thee.
There is nothing deeper than that. We would see Jesus. We
are all one in this critical, final need. Suffer me to come to
Thee!
And those happy souls who do in fact discover Christ-how
different life looks to them! You know the kind of testimony they
can bear. “I was battered by trouble, and Christ was my strength
and stay. I was lost and groping, and Christ was my guiding
light. I have trembled in the fierce fury of the storm, and Christ
came to me over the waves and held me up, delivering my soul
from death and turning the tempest into calm.” This is the
testimony.
When the earthquake broke on Philippi, and the prison walls
were shaken and the doors burst open, and the gaoler rushed in
on Paul and Silas, crying “What shall I do?”-I do not read
that the apostles answered, “Run, man, for your life! Quick,
before the walls crush you!” What they did say – and the words
ring like a trumpet-was “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ
and thou shalt be saved.” This is our deepest need. “If there be
one of you,” cried a Covenanting preacher to his flock dis-
persing across the moors when the approach of the enemy was
signalled, “if there be one of you, He will be the second, If there
be two of you, He will be the third, You will never, never lack
for company.” And every time you come to worship, says this
writer to the Hebrews, you can be quite certain you are coming
to Jesus. Do you think any of us could stay away from church
if we realised that?
One other fact about our fellowship in worship he adds,
and so makes an end: it is a redeeming fellowship.
“You have come to the blood of sprinkling,
that speaketh better things than that of Abel.”
For when all is said and done, it is sin that is the trouble.
It is these weak-willed,
wayward hearts of ours that are so desperately undependable.
It is not only the stubborn sway of the sins of the flesh:
it is even more the satanic subtlety of the sins of the spirit,
which make us amid all our religious profession so terribly unlike Jesus-
the pride of intellect patronising simpler folk,
the pride of judgment imputing motives,
the pride of religious life making us feel that
we are doing rather creditably and certainly a good deal better than many others.
It is these
things that make our very virtues shabby and our righteousnesses like filthy rags;
it is these which, when we come alive to them,
may well reduce us to despair,
as we realise the devastating truth that even at our best we are bankrupt utterly,
and that all we have ever done or can do is nothing.
But, says this man,
“you have come to the blood of sprinkling.”
Where should any of us be if that were not true?
If Christianity were not above everything else a religion of redemption?
And, he goes on, it “speaketh better things than that of
Abel”, or as it might more accurately be translated, “it cries
louder than that of Abel”. “The voice of thy brother’s blood,”
said God to Cain in the old story, “crieth unto Me from the
ground”; our secret sins, our frequent defeats, go crying up to
God in heaven. If this were all, hope would be gone, and we
could never lift our heads again. But here enters the gospel. For
when our sins cry out to God for punishment and vengeance,
something else also happens, declares this writer to the Heb-
rews: the blood of Christ cries louder, overbears and drowns
and silences the very crying of our sins, and God for Christ’s sake forgives.
There is a moving scene in Ian Maclaren’s Bonnie Brier Bush,
where the old country doctor MacLure, who for more than
forty years had been a familiar and well-loved figure in the glen
where he had gone his rounds, has come himself at last to the
end of the day. Beside him in the gloaming there sits his friend
the farmer Drumsheugh. The dying man asks him to read aloud
to him out of the old Book; and Drumsheugh opens the Bible at
the fourteenth of St. John. “Ma mither aye wantit this read tae
her when she was weak.” But MacLure stopped him. “It’s a
bonnie word, but it’s no for the like o’ me. It’s ower gude; a’
daurna tak it. Shut the buik an’ let it open itsel.” The farmer
obeyed. He shut the book, and it opened of itself at a much
thumbed page-the story of the penitent sinner in the temple
who “would not lift up so much as his eyes to heaven” -and
through his tears he read these words:
“God be merciful to me a sinner.”
And whoever we are, and whatever we are-minister, elder,
deacon, church member, social worker – we all come to that at
last. God be merciful to me a sinner. And the only question that
ultimately matters is, Can God be merciful to such a one as I
am, who must have wearied His mercy so often? Can His
patience indeed hold out to the end? Let me answer it, not in
my own words, but in words that have gone on singing their
way down three hundred years from the Elizabethan age, since
first they were written by John Donne, Dean of St. Paul’s, in his
Hymn to God the Father:
Wilt Thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
And do run still, though still I do deplore?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done,
For I have more.
Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I have won
Others to sin, and made my sin their door?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year or two, but wallowed in, a score?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done,
For I have more.
I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by Thyself, that at my death Thy Son
Shall shine as He shines now, and heretofore;
And having done that, Thou hast done,
I fear no more.
And every time you come to church, says this man,
you are coming to the blood of sprinkling,
that forgives-everything.
Everything!
“See that ye refuse not Him that speaketh.”