Ninth Sunday after Trinity
(NOT PREACHED)
August 1, 1858
“Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear My voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with Me.”—Revelation iii. 20.
The passage: Christ says he stands at the door and knocks. If anyone hears his voice and opens the door, he will come in and eat with that person, and that person with him.
I took the text of my last sermon from one of those messages to the Churches with which the Apocalypse opens. This sentence comes from another of them.
Taken literally, it at once recalls the Lord’s Supper, of which I have been speaking so much. Must we get rid of the letter, or explain it away, to find its spiritual meaning? Surely not, unless you are determined that the Lord’s Supper shall have no spiritual meaning and be a dry form. If you think it speaks of a Presence that only a man’s spirit can enter, and that is near us even when we refuse to own it, then it speaks as the text speaks, and each is the faithful interpreter of the other.
I shall be reminded that the promise was made to a particular Church, one of the Apostolic age. It was, and we must not forget what that Church was like. Let me read the earlier part of the message. The Amen, the faithful and true Witness, the Beginning of God’s creation, writes to the angel of the Church of the Laodiceans. He knows their works: they are neither cold nor hot, and he wishes they were one or the other. Because they are lukewarm, he will spit them out of his mouth. They say they are rich, have gained goods, and need nothing, and they do not know that they are wretched, miserable, poor, blind and naked. He counsels them to buy from him gold refined in fire to be rich, white clothing to cover the shame of their nakedness, and eyesalve to see. He rebukes and disciplines those he loves, so they should be zealous and repent.
I. (1) Many of us would gladly accept this as a portrait of an Asiatic city that had taken on Greek civilization and Roman rule. How exactly, we would say, it shows the exhausted, heartless, hopeless and yet self-conceited temper of such a society, and how well it fits the age of the twelve Caesars! But if some pagan of that time or some later infidel charged the Church in that city, set up as a witness to what is highest and divinest, with the same qualities, we would be scandalized. We would insist that the baptized body was the great exception to the general corruption, and that the reverse of what was seen elsewhere was found there. “It may not be so now,” we would say, “since the Church is mingled with the world, debased by State patronage, and free from trials. But it was so then.” At the least, we would say, the minister of the Church must have been an example to Jews and heathens of the difference the Gospel makes. Such conclusions, reached in advance, might hold out against the evidence of fallible men, but they cannot stand against the testimony of St. John and of One higher than St. John. We are bound to believe that a Christian society, living under St. John’s eye, answered to this report. I mean not an Asiatic or Romanized society, and not the society apart from its angel or minister, but the body as represented by him: “Thou art lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold.”
(2) No further words can make that description more vivid. These people have no heat, no fervour for any great cause or object, none of that earnestness which leads men
“To scorn delights, and live laborious days,”
to forget themselves and throw themselves away. But they are not cold. Against other men they still maintain doctrines that have stopped ruling them or giving them courage and devotion. They even feel a pleasant approach to warmth in proving that those who differ from them are wrong. They can almost persuade themselves that they believe, while they convict others of disbelieving.
(3) Better any state than this, says the message: better the most rash and ill-judged vehemence for a conviction, better a coldness that causes acute pain. Calm energy may follow the first excess, and the sufferers from the second may cry out for a live coal to kindle them. “I would,” says the Lord of Man, “that you were cold or hot. I try the hearts and reins, and I know either state to be less deadly than this middle one. If it settles into a permanent habit, the Church must cease to be mine and be left to itself. I will spit you out of my mouth.”
(4) Yet near as the dissolution of such a society is, it has no awareness of it. The Laodiceans were rich, increased in goods, and thought they needed nothing. Wherever you find the lukewarmness denounced in the previous verse, I believe you will find this contentment and self-glorification. A society that has found an exact, reasonable balance between excesses, and says, “We are not too zealous like such foolish people, nor inclined to infidelity like those unhappy ones; thank God, we have hit the mean between enthusiasm and frigidity,” is wrapped in vanity and Phariseeism. Whether it fasts and tithes, or feasts and withholds tithes, it prays like the man who exalted himself in the Temple and did not go home justified.
(5) For such a society to see that it is poor, miserable, blind and naked must be exceedingly hard. Yet he who spoke to Laodicea declares that this knowledge is necessary to its very existence. Why? Because such a society utters a lie in every confession, and is a lie, the most terrible and blasphemous of lies, if its riches, light and virtues are not all in Christ, or if it has anything it can claim as its own. This was the elementary truth involved in baptism, which its members learnt when preparing for it. If it has been lost, every step must be walked again until it is recovered. If the Church of Laodicea fancied that what was acknowledged at its founding need not be acknowledged now, or if any member fancied that though he was poor and blind and naked before his conversion, he had since gained some wealth, light and covering of his own, then the sooner the delusion was torn away, even by the most terrible humiliations, the safer they would be.
(6) And there is One who declares that he has methods of discipline and correction, and is using them for this very end. He cares for those whose lukewarmness is hurrying them to ruin, who take the symptoms of disease for signs of health. Because he cares, he will not stop punishing them until he has brought them to loathe what they cherish and boast of, and made them earnest in self-renunciation and in turning to him. “As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten: be zealous therefore, and repent.”
II. (1) I have gone over this exhortation chiefly to show how little there was in this early community to entitle it to any rare or special blessing. Suppose the Laodicean Church was in a worse state than our own, or its faults were of a wholly different kind from ours. Neither would be a reason why we may not claim the promise our Lord makes to them. But I should be dishonest if I did not own a remarkable likeness between the condition of certain Churches today and this one. I should be dishonest if I left “certain” ambiguous, and did not say that I allude especially to the Church I know best and love best. To be neither hot nor cold, not much in earnest for any principle yet decently respectful of principles, and to congratulate ourselves on this temperance as a high virtue, fruitful in ways the torrid or frigid zones of past ages could not be: I cannot but regard these as distinctive marks of our period and country. We know it from what passes in ourselves. Each of us finds it hard to overcome this lukewarmness, or to set an object before him and pursue it as a matter of life and death. Each is tempted to think himself wiser, clearer-sighted, less liable to extremes and delusions than the men he reads of and patronizingly admires. We talk of the heroic times and wish we were in them. But honestly examined, we think those heroes were toiling amid confusion to make us what we are. Our compliments to their simple faith come with secret self-congratulation that we are far beyond the stage where such faith was possible. At least half our praise of their energy is meant to explain why we may be, must be, ought to be, listless. The laudator temporis acti, who praises times gone by, often shows the same disposition that appears more coarsely in the man who boasts all day of our enlightenment and progress.
And how dare we distinguish between the people of England and the Church of England, and say the Laodicean vices belong to the one but not the other? No such distinction was possible in the first age, though then the Church seemed to stand in direct contrast to the world around it. The Church, considered as a collection of men with a certain name and certain opinions, could not show such a contrast. It necessarily embodied the tendencies of those around it. More than that, it showed the evil affecting the heathen in its root and principle. Churchmen showed it in a more complete form, with what was scattered in others concentrated in them. Let us not hide this from ourselves. By the very law of the Church’s existence it must be so. The horrors of ecclesiastical history are inexplicable if we refuse to recognize the Church’s relation to mankind. In the light of that relation they are more appalling but quite intelligible. I want us to bring this conviction home, and to test it less by the records of past times than by what we are doing and thinking, and still more by what we are not doing and not thinking.
There is indeed in society at large a want of heat or cold. It lacks the courage to confess or to deny. It is skilled at spotting every difficulty that excuses inaction. It is unsure whether any end is worth the trouble, or whether those who venture for Truth will ever be adequately rewarded. Where does this habit of mind come from? From the half-belief of us, who pretend to champion belief. It comes from our nervous anxiety lest the wit of men shake doctrines we say came from God. It comes from the proof we give that we are calculating the advantages of obeying God, and so making his service the service of self. Here is the worldly temper, not only infecting our religion but nourished by it and growing stronger from it.
The same is true of the other Laodicean symptom so closely tied to this one. Have we the right to accuse irreligious men of boasting that they are rich and increased in goods? Who boasts like us? When we speak of our Church, a convenient synonym for ourselves, how ready we are to say: “What a delightful medium we have found between the tinsel and worldliness of Rome and the rigidness and nakedness of Geneva. No outrageous extremes, no vehemence, all mildness, equity, propriety. We honour the wealthy, we are very good to the poor. What have we need of?”
Some do not use this language. For them the established Church is a mere outward Church with certain privileges, quite distinct from the body of true believers. A very natural opinion! But does it keep them from saying that they, the believers and the true Church, are rich, increased in goods and in need of nothing? Does not this temptation lie fearfully near them as they mark the boundaries between themselves and the world? Are they not copying the world’s worst traits, its pride and exclusiveness, in the very act of severing themselves from it? But perhaps we are aware of these dangers and have lived through them. “We are not anxious to divide ourselves from Rome; we long for fellowship with it, to repulse those vile men content with the name of Protestants.” Or: “We are not anxious to sever ourselves from foreign Churches or the Dissenters at home; we want their aid against the wretches who would bring us into communion with Rome.” Hopeful experiments both! But are those who engage in them not “rich and increased in goods,” very wise, very superior to their neighbours, needing nothing but that their own schemes be realized?
(2) My brethren, I feel the danger of speaking this way of different classes of my fellow-Churchmen. In referring to them I am liable to commit the very faults I impute to them, and to think myself better than they are, possessed of riches and wisdom they lack. Why do I enter on this subject at all, except to tell you so? I want to confess how hard and perilous I feel the task of warning and exhorting to be, how often I want to shrink from it in shame, knowing that in condemning others I condemn myself. I can find no fault in them that they might not detect in an aggravated form in me, if I have not detected it in myself. I admit that this is the fearful position of those whose office calls them to reprove. Often they feel it a sin to open their lips, and often a sin to be silent. Often they suspect that it matters little to others which they do, since their words are mere sounds mingling with all the rest in the air, scarcely producing a flutter in any human spirit. But good comes out of this uncertainty and despondency. The minister who thought himself somebody finds that he is nobody, and his imaginary goods and riches disappear. He knows he is poor and blind, and he knows who has shown him so: One who can make his reproofs and chastenings felt, and who rebukes and chastens not from hatred but from love. So the minister can in some measure understand the text, and present it to his congregation as written as much for each of them as for him.
(3) “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.” I know many say, “This is figurative language. We find it hard enough to acknowledge the history of the Bible. If we reluctantly accept that, must we also attach special meaning to its metaphors?” I know divines say, “This is spiritual language that only spiritual persons can understand. What we must set before ordinary worldly men are the plain declarations of Scripture. If they reject or half confess the literal passages, how idle to discourse to them of these mysteries!”
My brethren, I never expect any man to believe the history of the Bible, except as a tradition he accepts from his fathers and fears to reject, until he listens to these words. I am satisfied that in no day would faith in the history without this have been worth anything to man or in God’s sight. In our day, I am satisfied that no doubter will be brought, by the most pompous array of evidences, even to an intellectual acceptance of the Gospel narratives, let alone the articles of the Creed. Nor dare I grieve that God has ordered it so. For I find the secret of our lukewarmness and self-conceit in men’s attempt to divide what God has joined together: the testimony of the Conscience from the facts of the History, and the voice of Christ at the door of the heart from the voice of Christ in his acts on earth or in the Book that records them. If one of these voices is treated as figurative, so will the other be. If one is supposed to be only for a select class, so will the other be. And that select class will suffer even more than those they have cut off. They will put dead phrases in place of a living Christ, and language that meant everything to their fathers will soon mean nothing to them. So I hold that we ought to declare constantly, with all our energy, that we know we are not using a figure of rhetoric when we repeat this text. We announce a fact that concerns every man. When we speak of the conscience in a man, we mean that which God created to hear this voice and answer it, not an abstraction that philosophers or divines may debate.
If in making this proclamation we exalt valleys and level hills, so that the so-called unbelievers find Christ speaking to them and calling them to repent, and the so-called believers find the same, that is just the office John the Baptist had when he came to witness of the Christ, and it should be ours. If we seem to assume that communion between God and Man is not the rare privilege of a few but the foundation on which our race stands, so that without it there would be no thought, memory, hope, kinship, friendship or affection, we are only restating the doctrine of the Bible and confirming what all nations anticipated. We are cutting down human pride so that the Lord alone may be exalted.
(4) Because the text asserts this great and comfortable truth, does it deny that men exclude themselves, as far as they can, from this communion, and wish to be rid of it altogether? No! Otherwise what would be the force of the invitation to open the door? That surely implies a power in man to close his mind and stop his ears. All Scripture and experience compel us to recognize this terrible power. Only let it always be understood that it is a power to deny our proper rights and true humanity, to make a lie.
The sensualist who blocks his heart with contemptible objects and vile imaginations, and the proud religionist, like those who persecuted St. Stephen and St. Paul, who blocks his heart with pride in his own righteousness and contempt of others, were both created and redeemed for fellowship with the Father and the Son. Christ is telling each of them so even while he rejects it.
(5) Is it not then true that this communion is in one sense the primary necessity of man, implied in all he does and costing him effort to repel, and also his final reward, the perfect good which the purest and best have seemed not to possess but to hope for? The words “I will come in to him and sup with him and he with Me” fully bear out this doctrine. They must mean the fullest intercourse a man can have with him whom all the Host of Heaven worship. So that we may feel this, the language is of the simplest, earthliest kind, such as peasants can grasp, and the awfulness is increased by the familiarity. At the close of the divine Book, as we reach the last and highest revelation, all is still common and human. Less than ever is there a separation between the little and the great, the humble and the sublime, the Cross and the Throne. The verse carries us back to the Supper where Jesus sat with his disciples, and with the one who betrayed him, the night before he suffered. It carries us forward to the time when all shall be accomplished in the Kingdom of God. The Apostles sat at that Passover as representatives of their nation, giving thanks for its deliverance. They sat there as representatives of Mankind, to whom they were to witness of the true Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. These words tell every man that only the self-seeking Judas spirit can cut him off from his great human promise. Once he gives up the dream that he is rich, increased in goods and in need of nothing, the words hold the pledge that he is the inheritor of all things.
Therefore, brethren, the Lord’s Supper renews this warning, promise and hope from generation to generation. It says to each one, “The Judge is at the door,” and also, “If you will open the door, that Judge is willing to claim you as his friend, and to remove whatever separates you from him, from his Father, and from the whole universe.” It is the witness against all the vices that have destroyed Churches and nations and turned them from witnesses for God into his greatest enemies. It shows how those vices may be eradicated, so that we may become, socially and individually, all we are meant to be. For these reasons I hold it a better remedy for the lukewarmness and conceit of our time than all the schemes man’s art can devise. We may try by sudden, desperate efforts to revive religion among us. But who are to be the revivers? Do not we, who should call others to repent, need repentance ourselves? Do not we, who would pass on our faith, need it sifted, to see how much is from above, how much from the earth, how much from the devil? We want One to rouse us out of death, in whom dwells the Spirit of calm, eternal life. He does not wait for our vehement solicitation but is ever standing at the door of our hearts, knocking. He does not raise a few above the rest but humbles all that he may exalt all. He does not terrify us into a self-seeking religion but tells us we shall have fellowship with him, and that if we overcome we shall “sit with Him on His throne, as He has overcome and has set down with His Father on His throne.”