YMCA

04.06.1983

The founders of the YMCA had in mind to educate, to bring out a generation of young people full of the faith of God, capable of discerning the signs of the time and judging those signs by the standards of God, not by the changing standards of history and man’s sagacity or folly. The Lord by the words of Isaiah had told us centuries ago, “My ways are not your ways and My thoughts are not your thoughts.” God’s thoughts in the wise sagacity of men are folly but the wisdom of men is folly in the eyes of God. And we must either be possessed of or recapture this vision of the early founders of the Movement, not be beguiled by the desire to follow the ways of the world forgetting our true Christian vocation to preach God’s word of love, confront the world with the judgement of God and not the judgement of men and build a society which is worthy of God and of the greatness of man, not of the passing hopes of mankind.

The judgements of God are very different from ours and His warnings are clear. Did not Isaiah say, “They will say, ‘Peace, peace’, and no peace will be given them”? Because, and these are not Isaiah’s words but my comment, because the peace which is sought for, is sought for the wrong reasons, in the wrong ways, it is not the peace of God, the harmony between the Lord and His creation. Did not the Lord warn us, “When you shall hear of wars and rumours of wars, lift up your heads”? He has not given us the spirit of timidity and of fear but a daring spirit, the spirit of Christ, fearless, ready to give His life for what was right and true in the eyes of God and not in the eyes of men. Yet, we are called to take part in the building of a world which will be, could be a home for mankind but also the dwelling place of our Lord Jesus Christ. Nothing less can be the vocation of Christians. The society which we are called to build is the Church extending, engulfing mankind, making mankind at least into the beginnings of God’s Kingdom. Never shall this Kingdom be achieved on earth. We are warned by the Holy Scriptures: Shall Christ find love when He comes again? We must remember that our history is a tragic history, that the end will come as a tragedy and not as a human fulfilment, and our vocation in this earth is to preach God’s judgement, God’s word and God’s ways. The society which God has called into being, the Church of Christ is a body which is beyond any human standards or measurements, or scale. The Church as the beginning of the Kingdom is a body, a living organism both, equally human and divine. It is human in us, sinful and frail, but it is also human in the Lord Jesus Christ Who reveals to us in all His person the greatness of man. A true man is only one who like the Lord Jesus Christ is at one with God, not only in simple harmony but has become in the daring words of Peter the Apostle, partaker of the divine nature. We are called to become God’s by participation, and nothing less is the true scale of our human vocation. So that within the Church there abides one image of mankind, one true image of man – the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. And it is to Him, according to His standards and ways that we must adjust, there can be no adjustment for the Christian than to God Himself.

But the Church is not only human in the perfection of Christ and the imperfection of His followers, of us all, it is also Divine in His person. He is truly God become man, He is truly at the same time man and God, and the fullness of God abides in Him. And the Church is possessed, held, carried, filled, transformed and transfigured by the Holy Spirit, whom the Lord Jesus Christ has sent us, and again in the Spirit and in Christ we become, we are called to become the sons and daughters of the Most High. Less than this a Christian can not recognise either his personal vocation or as the vocation of the Church and of all mankind. And this is what we must set at the heart of all our activities, all our thinking. It is not enough to make of the world a liveable place, our vocation is to make of it the place where God can dwell. The city of men, which we Christians are called to build, is a city that should or must be coextensive with the city of God, a city so vast, so deep, so perfect, so heavenly that its first citizen should be the Son of God become the Son of man, nothing less but this. And that means that we must face the world, in which we live, with standards and judgements and use and approaches which are not those of our contemporaries. In the world in which we live we must at the same time be members of it, living, active members – and strangers. Our citizenship is in heaven, to use a phrase of the Authorised version, Our King is the Lord Jesus Christ, we bend our knee only to the living God, no power on earth can ultimately claim our allegiance.

When the Lord Jesus Christ was asked whether one should pay tribute to Caesar, He ask for a coin and showing to His disciples He said, “Whose image is on it?” It was Caesar’s. And He told them, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, but to God what is God’s.” What does this mean? What does this last phrase mean? It means that each of us is like a coin stamped with the image of God; we are created in His image, we are struggling for His likeness and we belong to Him as completely as the coin belongs to him who has stamped is. Nothing less. Do we live up to God’s expectation?

He saved us by His life and his death. Do we respond to this gift of life and this gift of death by offering ourselves, as we repeatedly say, as a living sacrifice in soul and body? And do we offer ourselves to the world and to our neighbour on the same terms: take my life that you may live?

We live in a society which is in a state of crisis, but the Greek word “κρίσίς” does not only mean “problems” and “trouble”. It means nothing of the sort, it means “judgement”. We are being judged by God, we have created a world which is monstrous as contrasted with that world which God has willed and dreamt and created. We are being judged. Are we going to be found unworthy as Christians? Are we going to be faithful to the end? Are we bringing into this world God’s standards and measurements? We pray for the hungry and for the poor and for the needy. What do we do about it? We struggle for more comfort, for more opulence, for an easier life, we claim more and more on whatever level of society we live. And at the same time we have the arrogance of praying for those who die of hunger while we live with what is superfluous and unnecessary. We claim it in word, we claim it in strikes, we claim it in thousands of ways, and at the same time we live too well, and indeed the words of the Old Testament come true against us, “They have grown fat and they have forgotten God.”

We must bring into the world, in which we live, a new stream of life with fortitude, with courage and daring, we must be prepared to stand and be (?counted) and say to the world that surrounds us, “Enough of greed, enough of hatred, enough of fear, enough of Godlessness not only in thought but also in the practice of life. It is not enough to patch up the evils of the world – they will multiply, it is not enough to sew new cloth to the old clothes – it will tear, we must learn to speak with the power of the Spirit, to be rejected if necessary, to be mocked, to be persecuted. Haven’t we been praying for those who are persecuted in so many countries for their faith? And what about us? Aren’t we adjusted to a life which is in contradiction with the Gospel, unworthy of it? Isn’t it time for us who claim to be bodies, whose vocation is to build God’s Kingdom of justice and of truth, and of love, and of abundance of life, isn’t it time to begin at home and to become poor so that the surplus of our wealth could be given to others? Not to identify with vociferous claimers but to identify with those who are prepared to give themselves and what they possess.

The early Church was of no account, it was made of people who had nothing in common, neither language, nor class, nor wealth, nor position in the world, nothing but one thing: they all believed unreservedly in the Lord Jesus Christ, in His Gospel, in His ways. And they were prepared to go out into the world on the same terms as Christ – as sheep among the wolves or, as Christ put it to James and John, “Are you prepared to drink My cup? Are you prepared to be merged into the ordeal which will be Mine?” It is not enough to say, “Yes, o Lord”, and to hope that the ordeal would pass us by. We are called to be on earth Christ’s own incarnate presence. The early Church of no account was one although it was scattered, persecuted, poor, despised because all and each were possessed of the same conviction that they were pilgrims on earth, strangers but they were, to use a phrase of Moffat’s translation of the Scriptures, they were a vanguard of the Kingdom, soldiers, ready to fight and ready to die, ready to wounds, and ready for victory. They went into the world, twelve men, then a few more, then thousands and the Empire crumbled and the world outlook of a Godless or secular world was exploded and a new time began. They were persecuted and yet not defeated, they were the poorest of all men but they made all people around them rich, because what they gave was Heaven, was hope, was victory over evil.

Like the early Christian’s our struggle is not against flesh and blood, it is against the darkness and the evil of Satan, and this is where we must direct all our efforts. The hearts of men must become light, the minds of men must be pervaded in a new way by the message of God, of another justice, of another righteousness, of another dimension of society. Short of this we will have betrayed our vocation. We are a vanguard of Heaven and we must conquer this world for the Lord of lords and the King of kings. The rest indeed we must do but only against the background of this fundamental and essential vocation of ours. We must every day in the face of what we see around us ask ourselves, where do we belong? Is there fear in our hearts? If there is, we are not Christians. If there is greed in our hearts, if there is greed, we are not disciples of Christ. If there is hatred in our hearts, we are disciples and followers of the adversary, not of Him Who is the Teacher of love and Who was love incarnate.

Let us begin by asking ourselves whether for us to live is Christ, to die is the longing of our hearts, because as long as we live on earth, we are separated from Christ. And in the face of this longing, let us ask ourselves whether we can say like Paul that we are prepared to renounce even meeting Christ as soon as we can for the sake of our neighbour who needs us, our care, yes, but our faith, our God, a new vision. This vision did belong to the founders of the YMCA, it must remain with all those who praise their name because to praise the men or to sing the praise of God means only one thing: to take him as a model and follow him wherever he will lead us. Amen.