The Sleep of the Church

“And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed.”—Romans xiii. 11.

The passage: Paul says that, knowing the time, it is now high time to wake from sleep, because our salvation is nearer than when we first believed.

You will have seen the announcement that the times for the Holy Communion in this chapel are changing. Until now it has been offered every Sunday. After Christmas Day, it will be celebrated during the regular service either on the second Sunday of each month or on the second Sunday of each Term. For most of the year I also propose to administer it at eight in the morning on the fourth Sunday of the month, and more often at that hour if those who attend the chapel wish it.

I have made the change partly because attendance at the Communion was greater when it was monthly than it has been lately. I have made it partly because many have felt the regular omission of the Exhortation as a serious loss. We may well have been right, by ancient precedent and by the reason of the case, to connect our weekly worship with the Eucharist, which explains its purpose and binds its parts together. But suppose there is reason to believe, whether from local accident or from something deeper in ourselves, that repeating the service has not increased our sense of its importance. Then in trying another course we are doing what the authors of the precedent would have approved, and following the very reason that guided us before. To depart from a commandment can never be right. To give up even a good practice may often be right. The most blessed means become worthless if we forget the end for which they were given, and we honour them most when we refuse to let them block our sight of that end.

I think St. Paul had a lesson on this in the Epistle read last Sunday, and I want to use it this afternoon. It belongs to the whole of Advent, and to no day more than this one, on which we pray to learn patience and comfort from the Scriptures and to hold fast the hope of everlasting life given in Jesus Christ.

The sentence is hard to construct. It is not obvious whether the opening words, “And that,” refer only to the remark they introduce or connect it with the passage before. Most intelligent commentators have held the second, as more like St. Paul’s manner, even though it requires supplying an ellipsis and a paraphrase. He had told the Romans to owe no one anything except to love one another, because love fulfils the law. He had shown this by quoting commandments that are all fulfilled in “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” Then he seems to recall how this commandment might be forgotten by the Church, though it came from Christ’s own mouth, was sealed by the last Passover, and was stamped with his Cross. A torpor might creep over the Church even in its earliest days, and it might become a helpless, loveless society amid all the arguments and pledges of love. And this too, he exclaims, we must do: we must make this effort to love one another, not only because the law is absolute and divine, but because of times and seasons, of our own history and our place in the world’s. It is not time to be asleep. The morning approaches and the dawn has already begun to show, so we must be up and alive. The Deliverer whose name we bear does not deceive. He came to bring Light, and his Light will shine more and more to the perfect day. We once believed he came to save us out of thick darkness, and now our salvation is nearer than when we believed.

Many thoughts are crowded together here, and each needs the others. They cannot be separated, but we must untangle them by asking how each bears on our own life and practice.

I. The sleep the Apostle speaks of is clearly not one that Jews or heathens had fallen into, for he was not writing to them. He was writing to a society of men who confessed Jesus Christ as the Image of God and Head of men. The world’s derision kept reminding that society of its profession, hostility stimulated it, and persecution knit it together. Paul had not visited it, but he knew from others’ reports that it was holding its ground in the capital of the world under the eye of the Cæsars. It was accused of no looseness in doctrine and no failure in duty. How could he think such a society would fall asleep? Because he knew the temptation in himself. He had been called by Christ, had had visions and revelations, and had been in the third heaven, yet he knew he might sink into indifference and listlessness. He knew that memories of the past and tokens of God’s present love would not of themselves quicken him. Persecution from outside could not do it either; apart from other powers, it might retard it.

II. The words I quoted leave no doubt about the character of this sleep. “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” expresses the principle of a society’s life. This love, circulating through its members, holds it together and keeps it from dissolving into separate atoms. A society sleeps a death-sleep when this love grows stagnant and ceases to be a vigorous, working power. Paul knew that no circumstances gave him this love, and that if he depended on circumstances it perished. Preaching it to others would not stir it in him; throwing his feelings outward might make them cold within. The care of all the Churches could not give it to him, since it brought him vexation and ingratitude. Neither could Sanhedrins’ sentences, zealots’ conspiracies, or imprisonment by Proconsuls and Emperors; their injustice naturally bred exasperation and bitterness. He could testify from experience that love to man can be killed by frost as easily as by sun, and that if it is not kindled from within, everything outside may be fatal to it.

III. How, then, does he ward off the danger from himself and wake them from their slumbers? You would call his method strange. No one knew better than he that the loss of love in a human society is the loss of everything, and that utter lovelessness is damnation. Why did he not say so? Why did he not frighten them with the pit they might sink into if this temper became fixed in them? He did tell them this and set the peril before them, for he spoke of Salvation. He reminded them that this indifference, lovelessness, contention and self-seeking was the accursed state Christ came to redeem them from. It was the hell into which he found his creatures sinking. To rescue them from it he took flesh, lived among them, died on the cross, rose again and ascended on high. He sent his Spirit to dwell in them so that they might raise other men out of this hell into the Kingdom of Heaven, which is governed by the perfectly righteous and loving Lord. They had received the first pledges of this Salvation. They had been enabled to feel and suffer for others, to desire their good, to love them as themselves. But it was only a beginning, a glimpse of Paradise and a first taste of the Tree of Life. Other thoughts in them had no fellowship with Paradise: a natural pull toward self-indulgence, a preference for self-will, a desire for self-glory. These always threatened to become supreme. If vigilance lapsed, or the converts imagined that some trick of fortune or special quality had put them beyond the world’s evils, those evils would appear in the Church, and more, not less, than among those they had left. So Paul bids them think of the salvation Christ promised as something still to come. In one sense he always spoke of it as already given, a state they had entered: they were members of Christ’s body, complete in him, the perfectly righteous and unselfish One, taken out of the kingdom of darkness and translated into the kingdom of God’s dear Son. But if so, they must keep assuring themselves that nothing base or evil, in themselves or in the world, would be allowed to continue. They must expect every mist and cloud that hid God’s face to be wholly dispersed. They must wait until the kingdom that abides because it is righteous, the kingdom of our God and his Christ, proves itself above all principalities and powers in this world or the next, and overthrows whatever opposes it. This salvation from all that clogged their progress and kept them from seeing things as they were, from lies, hatred and indifference, was contained in the promise that he in whom is light and no darkness at all would be fully manifested. Every day and hour hastened this manifestation, and so this salvation. Paul calls it our salvation: yours if it is mine, mine if it is yours. If we are not waiting for a common Saviour, if I look for one and you for another, what has our profession meant? Why did we receive the same baptism, and why do we bear the same cross?

I need say no more to explain the text as it bore on the men of that age, because we will understand it only by reading it in reference to our own condition. “Knowing the time” must mean, for us, knowing our time and opportunities, where we stand, what temptations assail us, and where we can turn for refuge. We must weigh the difference and the likeness between our position and that of those Paul wrote to, and then we can judge how much of his language we should take to heart.

1. First, we must strike off the persecutions Christians may have suffered, whether as Christians or as subjects of Nero’s tyranny. We must strike off every other change a thousand years of Christian civilization has made in us. We must strike off whatever belonged to a Greek colony living in a Latin capital, or to a body made partly of Abraham’s descendants and partly of former worshippers of Jupiter and Apollo. After these vast deductions something still remains. These Christians in Rome, creatures of the same flesh and blood as we, were baptized into the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, as we have been. They ate the bread of which Christ said “This is my body” and drank the wine of which he said “This is my blood of the new testament,” as we do. It remains true for us, as for them, that “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” is the summary and essence of all the commandments. It remains true that all sacraments are Divine instruments for giving effect to this law and binding us to him who fulfilled it, so that we may dwell in him and his love in us. And it remains true for us as for them that sleep may overtake us despite every sign and badge of Christian profession, despite sincere respect and even passionate zeal for them. It comes when the new commandment has no real dominion over us, because we repeat it without keeping it.

2. This is the next point on which I would preach to you and to myself. If we know the time, I think we will all feel that we need to be preached to about it, and that in one way or another God himself will be the preacher. Consider what powers are leading us to break that commandment continually rather than keep it. Among the chief is our familiarity with the words. We know them so well, and they have become so much household words, that we almost assume they have entered our life and recast us in their mould. For Christian congregations and clergymen not to think this of themselves is the hardest and most painful thing there is. Yet we must do justice to this notion, deceitful and dangerous as it is. This law has moulded our laws, institutions and customs marvellously, and our own perceptions more than we realise. There is a tacit confession that life would be a contradiction and a horror if it were lost, and that enacting the opposite law would be a return to anarchy and chaos. This acknowledgment in our hearts is too strong even for the practice and theories that most rebel against it. It is a witness of a Kingdom of God compassing us round and hemming us in.

But oh, my brethren, does not each of us know that he sets at naught this first principle of the Kingdom of God in his daily talk and acts? What we have most to accuse ourselves of, and what in the end does most mischief, is not the vigorous, conscious act of selfishness that outrages the peace or rights of others. It is lazy, sleepy indifference to them. I think this is chiefly what St. Paul has in mind as the thing the Roman Christians needed to rouse themselves from. Everything in their circumstances seemed likely to break that slumber; the cock-crowing was constantly in their ears. The monotony of our social life and of our religious life helps us forget that any energy of thought or sympathy is required. We think love will come of itself and drop upon us.

Suppose it were dropping upon us, as in one way it is. Consider how little effort we make to catch the drops, and how much we make to keep them from soaking in. What is half the conversation of society but repeating or inventing things, clever or stupid, against one another? What is the busiest and most popular part of literature but an appeal to men’s contempt for each other, a machine for cultivating it? When you hear of a meeting called for the glory of God, do you not expect a great part of its business to be reviling men made in God’s image? All this becomes so natural and so much a matter of course that we take no heed of it. We do not watch to counteract its influence on us, or try to stem the current or turn it another way. There is competition in everything, but competition in contempt is the most active of all. If we cannot do much, we can at least expose the absurdity of those who are trying to do anything.

3. It is out of this sleep that the Apostle would have us awake. It is a sleep so far as any manly action for our fellows is concerned, but one in which we may dream all kinds of mischief against them and utter our dreams. The invitation would be hopeless if it came only from an Apostle. But it comes from him who sent the Apostles, the Restorer and Life-giver. If we can hear his voice in his own Feast, calling us to come and be clothed with his strength and renewed by his Spirit, we may be thankful for anything that has reminded us that the most frequent reception of it without him is worth nothing. It may be humbling to need such a lesson, but humiliations, in whatever form, are profitable; God at least means them to be. Much becomes clear when we learn that he wishes to educate and raise our wills, and that there is no love except what is kindled in them and kept alive there by his Holy Spirit. Then the exhortation to stir up that Spirit within us can be followed, because we are never alone in our efforts. When we think our best thoughts and form our best resolves, we are only thinking what he is working in us to think and resolving what he inspires us to resolve. Is it not also true, brethren, that this Spirit is with us to quicken and guide our social intercourse? He draws out of us the deep inward convictions and heart-utterances that really answer one another, makes our words real instead of mocking, and changes us from scoffing critics into human beings. Shall a body of men who know each other, help each other to fight, sustain each other in falls and hold out to each other the prize of a common victory not be possible once more on earth? Are we to live in an age when every mechanical means of communication between men is multiplied ten-thousandfold, only so that the inward isolation of those who meet constantly may grow far greater? Is this to be civilization’s final reward, grinning masks instead of human faces and lumps of ice instead of beating hearts? May not even in this nineteenth century a communion exist worthy of the name, of men united by holy sacraments of affection because of service and devotion to Christ and to those for whom he died?

To many this may seem an idle dream, and it will be nothing more while we sleep. But the voice of the Archangel and the trump of God may yet awake us, and the still small voice may yet say to us, “Now is your salvation nearer than when you believed.” Sacraments exist to testify of a love that passes knowledge, gathered up once in the Cross of Calvary and to be discovered as the root of all Creation. To dwell in that love and see it as it is must be the Salvation of the Universe. While we look for it and desire it, it becomes ours. God has prepared for those who love him what eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man perceived. If we believe in his love and look for its revelation, it will take possession of us and drive out our indifference, heartlessness and hatred. It will go out in acts of blessing to those near and far. So the Apostle prayed for us in this morning’s Epistle: “May the God of patience and consolation grant us to be like-minded one toward another, according to Christ Jesus, that we may with one mind and one mouth glorify God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!”