Luke 12:32

THE MINISTRY AND THE KINGDOM

‘Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.’

Luke 12:32

I ask you to dwell with me for a little while on some thoughts about the Christian ministry, its ennobling hopes, its inevitable perils. I have taken as a text our Lord’s own words to His disciples.

I. Sureness of victory.—The phrase rings out high encouragement and cheer. And the hearers needed such cheer. They were just then, it would seem, beginning to realise, however dimly, that their position was not going to be quite what they had been picturing to themselves a little while before. Yes, the triumphs they had looked for and talked about were going to be quite different from what they had first supposed. The work set them to do would not be in the least like what in the enthusiasm of the first days they had imagined, and so the Master is encouraging them. You are not going to have, He says, the applause of men; you are not going to have sympathy. Things will seem to be all going against you, but you are to conquer all the same. The Father loves His little flock, and bids them remember that they are part of His army, that army which is marching along with Him at its head. It would be disloyal to look upon it except as certain to triumph. The men who feel (and which of our clergy has not felt it hundreds of times, quite as often as our critics can?) the men who feel their own littleness in power, in experience, in moral courage, in stern resolve, sometimes even in earnestness of purpose, are allowed to remember with confidence that they in their office are but a little portion of that great thing, His Kingdom, which has advanced and is advancing to victory. If the man, weak as he is, be but faithful to what we rightly call his ‘high calling,’ he will be carried along in the unresting, irresistible march of Christ’s army. He will co-operate in his Captain’s work and share in His triumph.

II. The history of the Kingdom.—Look back to what that living force of His has done in the world, not by the clergy, but by the Church, clergy and people both. Look forth upon what wants doing now. Look upward and onward to Him Who is at our head, and to the promise He has given. Then, indeed, thank God and take courage. What is it, one wonders, that makes good men so often seem to forget the history of the Kingdom of Christ, which makes them speak as though the Church were engaged simply in holding a beleaguered fortress, or were joining in what might be called a forlorn hope against a resistless foe, instead of expecting and proclaiming all along the line the victory of our Master. It has not been when the Church of Christ was meekly bowing its head to a coming storm that the Church has been most blest. It has been when, with head erect and with larger expectancy, men and women were going forth in quietness and confidence against cruelty and impurity and selfishness and greed, against dishonesty in word or act; inspired, glowing with a desire to let people know and understand the revelation of their Father’s love, and the story of Bethlehem and Nazareth and Calvary, the spoken word, miracle, and parable, the uplifted Cross and the opened tomb. We are proud of, and we are reliant upon, His promise to be with us all the days. But do we always remember that that promise is linked indissolubly to the command, ‘Go forth, bear My message of pardoning love. Do your part. Then, because you are fulfilling My trust and My command, Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world.’ Well, we say all that, and then there arises unbidden in the minds of not a few of us, and I am sure it is rising now, the disquieting question, But is this advance so sure a thing after all? Is it so certain that the Kingdom of the Lord Jesus is making way amongst us? We hear such voices raised sometimes, we are reminded of what is called a flood of infidelity surging around us, or of active anti-Christian influence now at work in our midst from the University common room to the workshop, influencing our legislature, permeating the newspapers, and making its voice heard in our streets. Is this a time for us to be speaking in tones of assurance about the victorious progress of the Master’s Kingdom in our midst? I firmly believe it is. So far as our own national Christianity is concerned, the thoughtful observer can surely find no reason for hesitation or doubt. We are bound as well as privileged to thank God and take courage. The walls of our old cathedrals and parish churches have looked down, some of them for hundreds and hundreds of years, upon a variety of scenes connected with our Church’s history. They have echoed as the centuries have passed to voices of very different men, face to face with needs constantly changing, constantly new as well as old. But never in the long and varied series of men and things have our altars and our pulpits been the centre of a greater earnestness, of more practical efforts and aims, more widespread care, a deeper personal devotion, above all, harder and more genuine work for Christ, than in the last twenty or twenty-five years of English history. Shortcomings and blunders have left their mark upon every page of our Church’s story, and very certainly they are leaving it not least upon the page only half-written now. We need penitence and humiliation, even shame, as we contrast what we might have been and ought to be with what we are. And so remembering, we bring the past with all its failures, and the present with all its weaknesses, all its cares and all its sin, unto Him that loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood, and made us a kingdom of priests unto God our Father. And we ask Him for faith to give substance to our hope, and make our prayers come true. We know only too well the mass of sin and wrong, and the dead weight of sheer indifference which lies across our path, but we should be false to Him Who has called us if we did not still, in face of our weaknesses and failures, note that on the whole the onward march of our Church’s life in these later days is steady and persistent.

III. From generation to generation.—We have all heard of the classic contest of the burning torch. The account of it takes many forms, but the most significant was this: A band of youths of one tribe contended against a band of youths of another tribe. The contestants of each tribe were stationed at intervals along the course, and a lighted torch was handed to the first runner of each tribe. He was to run at his topmost speed and hand it on to the youth stationed next to him, who was to run and hand it on to the next, and so on until the goal was reached. The tribe was winner whose last runner first reached the goal with the torch still burning. It is from such a picture that one gathers the true meaning of the word tradition—handing on. One generation of workers, one generation of hearers and worshippers, handing on the torch of inspiration and work to another. ‘One generation shall praise Thy work unto another and declare Thy power.’ ‘Thy power,’ that which helped ministers and people in the past, that self-same power will be given to you according to your need, given to you in answer to and in proportion to your daily prayers, given to you in the blessed Sacrament of the Lord’s love, given to you for crisis-times of joy and sorrow, and for the ordinary common, prosaic, humdrum days, given it will be, and when given it must be borne and handed on. ‘Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s pleasure to give you the Kingdom.’

Archbishop Randall Davidson.

Illustration

‘Infidelity, we are told, is rife amongst us, and wickedness abounds on every hand. Yes, it is absolutely true, but when was it not true? Is it a peculiarity of our time? Take a century or two ago and compare, with as much care in regard to detail as you can bring to the work, its literature, its popular creed, its moral standard, with ours to-day. Do we always realise what the faith and morals of educated England were a century ago, in the days of the Prince Regent and his friends? Or to take a more favourable period, two hundred years ago—the reign of Queen Anne—a time, that is, when the Church was supposed to be especially awake and powerful, when the characteristic torpor, the somnolence of the coming eighteenth century, had not yet begun. Turn to the sparkling pages of the journals and magazines, the Tatler and the Spectator of that day, and see how men like Steele and Addison, clear thinkers, draw a picture of moral turpitude and intellectual creedlessness blacker, surely, by far than anything we are familiar with to-day. Take Addison’s scathing essay on the supposed visit of an Indian king to St. Paul’s Cathedral, or Swift’s satirical “Argument against abolishing Christianity.” It is necessary to understand this aright, to realise a prevalence of godlessness among educated people to which the twentieth century offers, I think, no parallel at all. Pass on half a century to 1751, and we find a most careful and most learned public man, Bishop Butler, opening his famous charge to the clergy of Durham with a complaint that “the influence of religion is wearing out of the minds of men”; and again, “it is come, I know not how, to be taken for granted by many persons that Christianity is not so much an object for inquiry, but is now discovered to be fictitious, nothing remains but to set it up as a principal subject of mirth and ridicule.” He proceeds to answer all that, but that was the thought about religion in men’s minds at that time. It would be easy to multiply such statements from the pages of friends and foes. Archbishop Secker, in 1776, speaking of the country squires of his time, says: “If they sometimes vouchsafed their attendance at Divine service in the country, they seldom or never would do so in town.” Bishop Newton, a hundred and twenty years ago, quotes as a signal and unusual instance of attention to religious duty, that a particular man, whom he named, regularly attended the service of the Church every Sunday morning even when he held political office. Sunday, a great historian tells us, was in those days the usual day for Cabinet Councils. Montesquieu, writing a little earlier, in a tone of bitterest hostility to England, said he could not see evidence of any religion whatever in the country. The subject excited nothing but ridicule, so far as he could learn. Not more than four or five members of the House of Commons, he affirmed, were regular attenders at Church. No doubt he exaggerated, but he was a great writer and thinker, and he described what he believed to be true. Fifty years later another French writer said there “was only just enough religion left in England to distinguish Tories, who had little, from Whigs, who had none.” The whole literature of three generations tells the same tale. The picture is, no doubt, overdrawn, but it is important for us to remember when we hear constant talk of the evils in the world to-day and the impossibility of our standing up against them, that there have always been these evils, and that there is no use being faint-hearted. It is only by such comparisons as the foregoing that we are to recognise the Church’s onward march. It seems to us slow, but it is progress after all, and the sentence I have quoted would be ludicrously inappropriate as statements of existing facts to-day.’