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.

You will have seen that an alteration has been announced in the times of administering the Holy Communion in this chapel. Hitherto it has been offered to the congregation every Sunday. After Christmas Day, the celebration of it during the regular service will be either on the second Sunday of each month, or else on the second Sunday of each Term. I propose also to administer it during the greater part of the year, on the fourth Sunday of the month, at eight o’clock in the morning; oftener, at that hour, if a desire should be expressed for it by those who frequent the chapel.

This change has been adopted partly because it has been ascertained that the attendance at the Communion during the year was greater when it was administered once a month than it has been of late; partly because the habitual omission of the Exhortation has been felt by many to be a serious loss. It may be true that we have been acting both according to ancient precedent, and according to the reason of the case, in connecting our worship every week with the Eucharist, which explains its object and binds together the different parts of it. But if from any cause, either local and accidental, or lying more deeply in ourselves, there is warrant for believing that our sense of the importance of the service has not been increased by the repetition of it, we are doing what the authors of the precedent would have approved,—we are yielding to the very reason which influenced us before—when we try another course. To depart from a commandment can never be right. To abandon even a good practice may often be right. For the most blessed means may become worthless if we do not recollect the end for which they have been granted; we honour them most when we resolve that they shall not intercept our sight of the end.

I think St. Paul had a lesson for us upon this subject in the Epistle which was read to us last Sunday. I desire to make use of it this afternoon. It belongs to the whole period of Advent, as well as to the first Sunday of it,—to no day more properly than to this, on which we are praying that we may learn patience and comfort from the Scriptures, and may hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life which is given us in Jesus Christ our Lord.

There is some difficulty in the construction of the sentence. It is not very obvious whether the opening words, “And that,” refer merely to the remark which they introduce, or are meant to connect it with the passage which has preceded. A majority of intelligent commentators have judged that the last opinion is most in accordance with the manner of St. Paul, even if it assumes something more of an ellipsis, and demands something more of a paraphrase. He had been bidding the Romans “owe no man anything, but to love one another,” because love was “the fulfilling of the law.” He had illustrated that position by quoting different commandments as all fulfilled in the one, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” Then he seems to recollect how this commandment, though issuing from the mouth of Christ Himself, though sealed by the mysteries of the last Passover, though stamped with His Cross and Passion, might nevertheless be forgotten by His Church,—that a torpor might creep over it even in its earliest days; that it might become a helpless, loveless society, amidst all the arguments and pledges of love. And this, too, he exclaims, we must do,—this effort to love one another we must make, not only on the general ground, not only because the law enjoining it is so absolute and divine; but from a consideration of times and seasons, of the history of our own lives, of our place in the world’s history. For surely it is not time to be asleep. The morning approaches. There are already streaks of dawn. We must be up and alive. For the Deliverer whose name we bear is not a deceiver. He came to bring Light, and His Light will shine more and more unto the perfect day. We believed once that He came to save us out of a thick darkness, and “now is our salvation nearer than when we believed.”

There are many thoughts crowded together here, but each is necessary to the other. They will not bear to be separated, but we must disentangle them by considering how each of them bears on our own life and practice.

I. It is clear that the sleep or torpor which the Apostle speaks of is not one into which Jews or Heathens had fallen. He was not writing to them. He was writing to a society of men confessing the faith of Jesus Christ, declaring Him to be the Image of God and the Head of men. He was writing to a society which was reminded continually of its own profession by the derision of the world; which was stimulated by hostility, knit together by persecution. It was a society which St. Paul had not visited, but which he knew by the reports of others to be maintaining its ground in the capital of the world, under the eye of the Cæsars. It was a society which was not accused of any looseness in doctrine or failure in duty. How could the Apostle think that such a society would fall into sleep? Because he knew what the temptation to it was in himself. He knew that he, who had been called by Christ Himself, who had had visions and revelations, who had been in the third heaven, might sink into indifference and listlessness. He knew that recollections of the past, tokens of the Divine care and love in the present, would not of themselves avail to quicken him. He knew that persecutions from without could not do this work for him; apart from other powers and influences they might retard it.

II. For, secondly, the words I have quoted to you leave no doubt about the character of the sleep to which he alludes. The words of Christ, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,” express the principle of a Society’s life. This love, circulating through the different members of it, is that which holds it together as a society, which keeps it from dissolving into the separate atoms of which it consists. A society is sleeping a death-sleep when this love becomes stagnant, when it is not a vigorous, operative power. Now St. Paul knew that no circumstances imparted this love to him; that if he depended on circumstances it perished. He would not be stirred by it because he preached of it to others; the habit of throwing his feelings outwards might make them cold within. He could not gain it by the care of all the Churches; that brought him in contact with vexations and ingratitude. He could not obtain it through the sentences of Sanhedrins, the conspiracies of zealots, through imprisonment by Proconsuls or Emperors. Exasperation and bitterness were the natural result of their injustice. From personal experience he could testify that love to man might be as much killed by frosts as by suns; that if it is not kindled from within, everything from without may be fatal to it.

III. And how does he ward off the danger from himself? What contrivance does he use to wake them out of their slumbers? His method, you would say, is a very strange one. No one was more profoundly conscious than he was, that the loss of love in a society of human beings is the loss of everything; that a state of utter lovelessness is a state of damnation. Why, then, did he not tell them this? Why did he not frighten them with the thought of the pit of perdition into which they might sink, if this temper of mind became fixed and habitual with them? He did tell them this; he did set this peril before them: for he spoke of Salvation. He reminded them that this indifference, lovelessness, this contention, self-seeking, was the accursed state out of which Christ came to redeem them. It was this hell into which He found His creatures sinking. It was to rescue them from this hell that He took flesh and dwelt among them, and died on the cross, and rose again, and ascended on high. It was that they might raise other men out of this Hell and bring them into the Kingdom of Heaven, which is under the government of the perfectly righteous and loving Lord, that He sent His Spirit to dwell in them. They had received the first pledges of this Redemption, of this Salvation. They had been enabled to feel and suffer for others, to desire their good, to love them as themselves. It was but a beginning; the glimpse of a Paradise; a first taste of the Tree of Life. There were other thoughts within them which had no fellowship with Paradise, no savour of the Tree of Life. They had a natural gravitation to self-indulgence, a preference for self-will, a desire for self-glory. These tendencies were always threatening to become supreme. Let vigilance be intermitted; let the Christian converts fancy that by some trick of fortune, by some peculiarity which raised them above their fellow-men, they were out of the reach of the world’s evils; and those evils would certainly be seen in the Church, more, not less, than among those whom they had left. Therefore St. Paul bids them think of the Salvation which Christ had promised as something yet to come, as a blessing yet to be attained. In one sense he always spoke of it as a blessing bestowed, as a state on which they had entered; they were members of Christ’s body; they were complete in Him, the perfectly righteous, unselfish Being; they had been taken out of the kingdom of darkness, they had been translated into the kingdom of God’s dear Son. But if that were so, then they must be continually assuring themselves that nothing which was base or evil in themselves, or in the world, would be suffered to continue. They must be expecting the entire dispersion of every mist and cloud which concealed the face of God from them. They must be waiting till the kingdom which is abiding because it is righteous, the kingdom of our God and His Christ, should prove itself above all principalities and powers in this world or in the world to come; should overthrow whatever was opposed to it. This salvation from all which clogged their progress and hindered them from seeing things as they were,—this salvation from lies, from hatred, from indifference—was all contained in the promise that He in whom is light and no darkness at all, should be fully manifested. Every day and hour was hastening on this manifestation, and therefore this salvation. Our salvation, the Apostle calls it; yours if it is mine, mine if it is yours. For if we are not waiting for a common Saviour, if I am looking for one and you for another, what has our profession meant? Why have we received the same baptism? Why do we bear the same cross?

I do not know that I need say more in explanation of the words of the text, as they bear upon the condition of the men of that age; because I am satisfied that we shall only understand them as we read them in reference to our own condition. “Knowing the time” must mean, to us, knowing our time, our opportunities, whereabouts we are standing, what temptations are assailing us, where we can turn as a refuge from them. We must make an estimate of the difference and the resemblance of our position and that of those to whom the Apostle was writing; then we may judge how many or how few of his words may be taken home to our hearts.

1. First, we must strike off all the persecutions to which Christians, either as such or as general subjects of Nero’s tyranny, may have been liable. We must strike off all other changes which a thousand years of Christian civilization may have produced upon us. We must strike out all that belongs to the circumstances of a Greek colony dwelling in a Latin capital; to a body composed partly of descendants of Abraham, partly of men who had been worshippers of Jupiter and Apollo. Make these vast deductions, and then there will still remain the fact that these Christians in Rome, being creatures of the same flesh and blood as we are, were baptized into the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, as we have been; ate the bread of which Christ said, “This is my body;” drank the wine of which He said, “This is my blood of the new testament,” as we do. It will still remain true that the command, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,” is, for us as it was for them, the summary and essence of all the commandments. It is still true for us as for them that all sacraments are Divine instruments for giving effect to this law, for binding us to Him who fulfilled it, that we may dwell in Him, and His love may dwell in us. And it is still true for us as it was for them that sleep may overtake us, in spite of all the signs and badges of our Christian profession, in spite of a sincere respect for them, even of a passionate zeal in behalf of them, because that new commandment has no real dominion over us, because we are repeating it but not keeping it.

2. This is the next point upon which I would preach to you and to myself. If we know the time, I think we shall all feel that we want to be preached to about it; that in one way or other God Himself will be the preacher. Only consider for a moment what powers and influences there are which are leading us not to keep that commandment, but to break it continually. Do not let us overlook, as among the chief of them, our familiarity with the words. We know them so well,—they have become so much household words to us,—that we almost assume they have entered into our life, that we have been recast and remoulded in conformity with them. For congregations of Christian men not to think so of themselves, for clergymen not to think so of themselves, is the hardest and most painful thing possible. And we must do justice to this notion, deceitful and dangerous as it is. This law has moulded our laws, institutions, customs, in a marvellous manner. It has moulded our own perceptions more than we are aware. There is a tacit confession that life would be a contradiction and a horror if it were lost; that to enact the opposite law would be simply a return to anarchy and chaos. There is this acknowledgment in our hearts, too strong even for the practice and the theories that most rebel against it. There is this 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 is setting at naught this first principle of the Kingdom of God in his daily discourse, in his daily acts? It is not the vigorous conscious act of selfishness, that which leads to some determined outrage upon the peace or rights of others; it is the lazy, sleepy indifference about them, of which we have most to accuse ourselves, and which in the end produces most mischief. It is this, I think, to which St. Paul chiefly alludes, as that out of which the Roman Christians had need to arouse themselves. Everything in their circumstances seemed likely to break that slumber; the cock-crowing was in their ears continually. The monotony of our social life, the monotony of our religious life, help to make us forget that any energy of thought or sympathy is called for. We think love will come of itself, that it will drop upon us.

And supposing it were dropping upon us, as in one way it is, consider how little effort we make to detain the drops; nay, rather, how much effort we make to hinder them from penetrating into us. What is half the intercourse of society but the repeating or the inventing of things, clever or stupid, against each other? What is the busiest and most popular part of literature but an appeal to the contempt of men for each other, but a machinery for cultivating it? Do you not expect, when you hear of a meeting which is called together for the glory of God, that a great part of its business will be to revile men who are made in the image of God? And all these things become so natural to us, so much a matter of course, that we take no heed to them. We are not watching to counteract their influence upon ourselves. We are not trying to stem the current or to turn it in another direction. There is competition in everything; but competition in contempt is the most active of all. If we cannot do much, at least we can expose the absurdity of those who are trying to do anything.

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

It may appear to many an idle dream; it will be nothing more while we sleep. But the voice of the Archangel, the trump of God may yet awake us out of that sleep. The still small voice may yet say to us, “Now is your salvation nearer than when you believed.” Sacraments have existed to testify of a love which passeth knowledge; of a love which was gathered up once in the Cross of Calvary; of a love which shall be discovered to be the root of all Creation. To dwell in that love, to see it as it is, this must be the Salvation of the Universe. While we look for it and desire it, it becomes ours. For that which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor it hath entered into the heart of man to perceive, God hath prepared for them that love Him; and if we believe in His love, and look for the revelation of it, it will take possession of us; it will drive out of us our indifference and heartlessness and hatred; it will go forth in acts of blessing to those who are near and to those who are afar off. As the Apostle prayed for us in the Epistle of this morning, “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!”