THE FAITH DIRECTION Arthur M. Romig
Revelation 21:1-8: Hebrews 12:1-2 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
April 23, 1978 Columbus, Ohio

You have been very good in the past to allow me to speak very directly and
personally to you, the good people of the Broad Street Church, So today again
give me the privilege to be very personal, Where do we start?

Perhaps because I am older than my colleagues you might think that I would be
rather nostalgic about the past and what we in the Church said and did years ago,
This is Passover for our Jewish brethers and sisters and it is a time when the
backward look would be appropriate. Hut as they are reminded of past deliverance,
they look forward to future freedom. But Let us examine cur faith and see if that
is the direction of our search for guidance,

Through the years of wy ministry and especially in the past decade or two I
have heard not once, but again and again, this refrain: "Get back to the fundamentals
of our faith." My problem, however, when faced with this remark is that I am not
sure just where we have left the fundamentals. If we have, we certainly must get
back to them, Of course, some people have forgotten them and some perhaps never knew
them in the first place, Sometimes I feel like the man who was asked if he had
become reconciled with God, and he replied, "I didn't know that we had ever
quarreled."

But there are many that feel that we have quarreled with God and have deserted
the fundamental precepts of our Christian faith, Please don't think that I take this
lightly, Through my years of ministry - and they have been many and varied - I have
searched myself, together with what we say and do in the Church, very deeply. I know
that you do not want to believe or live superficially, Nor do I, I want to live
according to the very essence of life, to drink of it deeply and enjoy it fully. I
want to go as deeply as I know how, to the very center of the Christian faith and
then to live faithfully as close to that center as I can, This means acceptance,
followed by obedience to the Good News of the Gospel. I always recognize that I may
be mistaken about what is central but I also firmly believe in a living Spirit who
will direct us to what is fundamental, if we keep our minds alert, our eyes open
and our ears free from wax, Do you remember that old hymn that meant much to me in
my youth, "Where He Leads me I will follow?" Seldom have I felt the need more to be
led by the Spirit than I have these past decades or two, Never have I tried to be
more open to the wind of God's Spirit, and I believe it must be true for you also,
in these fast moving days of change,

So today let me share with you some of the things that have been going through
my mind t» help me answer the question I pose in this sermon: ‘What is the direction
we must take to discover the fundamentals of our faith?'' I will not attempt to give
a list of what is fundamental, but only point out what the Scriptures say to me to
be the direction we take to find them, Is it to the right or te the left? Is it
forward or backward? Where are the essential elements of faith to which I must
cling to be a Christian in these days? From the way the question is usually pre-
sented to me the logical answer comes, "Back to the fundamentals", as though we have
to Look backward to a bygone day when we were more firmly rooted and secure, Who
among us, who has passed the age of fifty, or perhaps even forty, has not wished for
simpler anl less confusing days ~ First and Second World Wars - were much more
easily understood than our more recent engagements. We seem to have simpler reasons
even for the great depression of the 30's than for our economic problems today, We
have become enmeshed in the total life of the world in strange and complex ways, and
we become frightened,

~2-

The problems we face today are not really new but they seem new to us, They
are in a different context and on a wider scope, We face the problems of hunger
and poverty not just in our country but in India, Africa and around the world; we
struggle with over-population, not so much here as in the undeveloped countries
with population control in Brazil, Mexico, India and world wide, We struggle with
peaca, mot between our states, but in the Middle East. We try to understand crime
in cur land but our attention goes to kidnapping in Ltaly, a bombing in Ireland, a
demonstration in Rhodesia or a high- jacking in Turkey, We see them in our living
rooms almast as soon as they happen, We have become part of the one world we live
in and we cannot escape from it, James Russell Lowell's words ring in my ear, “New
occasions teach new duties, Time makes ancient good uncouth", and I wonder what is
the new good, Then I ask myself and you today, "Do I believe in a living God, that
is alive and creating new things today?" We were offended, were we not, when some
theologians told us that "God is dead"? Well, is He? Or is He alive and leading
us into new ways of obedience right now? I happen to think, though many of you
may disagree, that the recent treaty vote of the Senate is a new duty for our new
day and I rejoice in it,

Some time ago I conducted a funeral service for one who had no church member-
ship, In visiting with the family I was told that he was a good Christian though
not a church member, which I presume to be possible, because he had tried to Live
by the Golden Rule, I try to do that also but I do not call myself a Christian
on that account, I might even be a Buddhist, a Confucianist, a Hindu, a Jew or a
humanist and hold te that very simple ethic, That is hardly the Christian funda-
mental to which [I must return though I would hope we would abide by it,

I have been told to go back to the Ten Commandments and I believe that the
Commandments are fundamental, but I wonder what we mean by saying get back to them,
Advertising, as we know it today, plays upon my covetousness and I am afraid we
have all disobeyed the Tenth Commandment again and again: "Thou shalt not covet,"
I find that almost all of us disobey the Fourth Commandment ~- "Six days shalt thou
labor and do ail thy work," Rest on the seventh, But we require others to work

_fer us even if we did not ourselves perform the functions of our employment, for

we do want to have the utilities coming to our homes and stores open for aur con-
venience, We have made for ourselves many gods ~ position, wealth, power, nation,
race, social status, economic theory - and few of us have obeyed the very first
of the Ten Commandments: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me," Go go down
the list of killing, lying, stealing, adultery, dishonoring father or mother, and
see if we have even in the past built our Christian life on these enough to go back
to a day when we did, Then see if the essence of our faith lies in them or in the
words of Jesus, "I am come not to destroy the law but to fulfill it,” telling us
that the law of the Old Testament is not enough, but that there is something more
basic and fundamental, JI hear Jesus say, "You have heard of oid, you shall net
kill, but I say to you, love your enemy," Such obedience is still te be had in
the future,

What more is basic? The Bible? Yes, of course we who are Protestant and
Presbyterian have always taken the Bible as our primary authority, But what does
the Bible say? To me it says, "Keep our eyes fixed on Jesus on whom faith depends
from start to finish," It never tells me that I must believe the Seriptuses for
their own sake but thdt L mast believe God and trust in Him for my salvation,’
and that God wac in Orist, so that T must look ta Jesus tha Christ as the root

-3-

and foundation for my faith and the source of Life, He is the one that the Bible
tells about and by knowing Him I begin to know something of God the Father,

If my experience is correct ~ perhaps —E had better say the reading of my
experience is correct ~ and something like yours, the challenging thing to me is
that this Jesus seems always to be ahead of me, He beckons me to follow Him and in
following I never seem to catch up, The learning procass is never finished, There
is always something new to experience each day that helps me know the ways of the
Lord, I am told to forget the things that are behind and stretch out to the things
that are before, Tf I had to determine the text of Jesus’ Serron on the Mount I
would say it is "Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness," The key
words are to "Seek the Kingdom", for the Kingdom is at hand, almost within reach -
not something that is only in the past, It is to be sought,

Jesus faced the scholar Nicoderus who came searching for the truth - the funda~
mentais of faith - and Jesus told him, "You must be born again" inte a new creature
made by God's Spirit. The central thing that is needed is to be something new, not
something old. Nicodemus was not told to go back to the Law of Moses but to Look to
the new day of which the prophets spoke ~ Isalah, Jeremiah, Micah and others. The
day is to come when the Lord will reign in all His glory ~ when swords will be
beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks" and when all people will ;
recognize the supremacy of God in their Lives. If you have been watching the movie
Holocaust you might, with me, wonder how that will ever be. But do we realize that
the New Testament closes in the last two chapters of the Book of Revelation, not by
saying, "This wraps it up, it is now done and completed, The work of God through
Christ is over," Rather, it says there is still something new, stiil something
ahead to be achieved, "Come, Lord Jesus, Come" is the way the writer puts it, The
New Testament ends with a dream of the day when there shall be no more tears, suffer-
ing will be at an end, battles done. There will no longer be any separation between
God and man, Indeed "it doth not appear what we shail be,"

We find it easy to speak of the backwardness of some of the undeveloped
countries or even of a country with a great culture such as China, If this is true
it seems to me partly at least a result of a backward look that is part and parcel
of their religicus outlook, The Buddhist whe does not accept the human desires but
tries to run away from the real world, and the Canfucianist who has always looked
back to a golden age that existed 2500 years ago in the time of Confucius, The
Christian faith, on the other hand, has always lived by a dream - the prophecies
of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, a kingdom where reghteousness reigns, an unfolding of
life still to come, the dream of Martin Luther King when racism no longer exists,

a dream of renewal and progress toward God, the achieving of the impossible because
God wants it so,

In the aarly Church the baptismal formula was very simple. To confess "Jesus
Christ is my Lord’ was all that was required, We have confused it in our day as we
ask, "What do you believe about this and that? Do your beliefs correspond with mine?
If they do we can worship together and we can receive you into our fellowship." But
when the Philippian jailer asked Paul what he needed to do to be saved the answer
was very clear: "Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved," But this
confession was more than the saying of so many words, It involved obedience to the
Lord he had said was to be his lord, You recall the new commandment Jesus gave His
disciples, It was to love one another as He had loved them, Then He goes on to say,
"The man who has received my commands and obeys them ~ he it is that loves me; and
he who loves me will be loved by my Father," Obedience to the Lord Jesua Christ
becomes the standard test for love,

-&-

Do you recall the test for love at the last judgment? The scene is the court
room where Jesus is the judge, People and nations are brought before Him, He
separates the sheep from the goats, the obedient from the neglectful or disobedient,
The test was not that they knew the right words or had gone through the right
ceremonies in their worship, It was something much more fundamental, even as He
had said before, “not everyone that says Lord, Lord will enter the kingdom, but
rather they that obey." No, to the one group He says, "Enter inte the joy of the
Lord", while to the other it was consignment to utter darkness, To one group it was
“When I was hungry you gave me something to eat, or thirsty something to drink,
naked you clothed me,,," but to the other, “When I was hungry you did nothing, you
gave me no food..." "We never did that," they said. "0 yes, you did for when you
did it to one of the least of my brethren you did it to me," And the others, "We
did the right things, We believed, we worshipped, we went through ceremonies..."
"But you never obeyed the law of love by doing the things that express that love,"

ft is fashionable to say the central theme of the Christian faith is love and
so it is, but it is only true when that love leads to obedience and love for one
another, Friends, we have never really been obedient, Our forefathers were not
either, We too have wroshipped the golden calves of wealth, efficiency, power and
race, Obedience is still in the future,

I am quite sure I have not fully answered the question I posed at the beginning.
Some of my fellow staff members chided me for putting in the news sheet (This Week
at Broadstreat) that { would try to answer the question about direction to the
fundamentals of our faith, I hope, however, I have shown that in my thinking and
study I have pointed out that the direction we must go is not to some fine idea held
in the past, some past obedience upon which we can rely, Upon the past we must
build, to be sure, but that is only the root that gives us nourishment that we might
grow and bear fruit and be established in a new and unfolding world, new creatures
in Christ, As a boy 1 delighted in singing Loud and vigorously, "Onward Christian
soldiers, marching as to war, With the cross of Jesus going on before," I still
delight in it though not in the militaristic note that is sounded, but in the note
of confidence, and that the cross is still before us and calls for advance,

Only now do I come to my text: (as expressed in the New English Bible transla-
tion) "And what of ourselves?" ‘This verse from Hebrews comes after the writer has
given us the list of the faithful in the llth chapter, "With all these witnesses
of faith around us like a cloud, we must throw off every encumbrance, every sin to
which we cling, and run with resolution the race for which we are entered, our eyes
fixed on Jesus, on whom faith depends from start to finish,

The Resurrection was the theme of the early church, not anything that had
previously been experienced, What kept the early Christians strong in the face of
persecution was the promise of a new creation, not the stability of the old creation;
a new humanity, not the old or existing community of people; a new dream of peace
and well-being, not the pattern of the old peace by the power of arms, Before them
lay a new world of love and obedience, a new world of freedom and life, a new dream
of God's living with them and directing them into all truth and goodness because
the fundamental of faith was the love for and obedience te a God like Jesus Christ,
who rose from the dead to bring hope and salvation to a dying world, The Holy Spirit
Was With them, in them, guiding them, constantly leading them forward with courage
to a new day, Forward then to the fundamentals of our faith, not glorying in the
past with all its greatness, but glorying in the prospects of new life, new faith,
new strength as we follow the Christ who is ever before us,

=~ 5S.

I cannot close without sharing with you a poem that has meant much to me, It
was written by John Oxenham, a liberal theologian of the 20th century: "Where
Are Your Going, Greatheart?"

"Where are you going, Greatheart,
With your eager face and your fiery grace?
Where are you going, Greatheart?"

"To fight a fight with all my might,

For Truth and Justice, God and Right,
To grace all life with His fair Light."
"Then God go with you, Greatheart!"......

"To lift Today above the Past;

To make Tomorrow sure and fast;

To nail God's colors to the mast,"
"Then God go with you, Greatheart!",...,

"To break down old dividing Lines;
To carry out my Lord's designs;
To build again His broken shrines."....

"Where are you going, Greatheart?"
"To sat all burdened peoples free;

To win for all God's liberty;

To 'stablish His sweet sovereignty."
"God goeth with you, Greatheart!"

It is indeed a new humanity Jesus came to establish, a new community of love
and brotherhood, a new discipleship of obedience and service, all under the
guidance of the Living God whom we know as the Holy Spirit, He is leading us
into all truth, He is leading us to a day of peace and fulfillment, The faith
of direction? It is always to go forward with confidence, "In the world you wiil
have tribulation", to be sure, but Jesus went on to add, “but be of good cheer,
for I have avercome the world," We live ~ the day of resurrection ~ God is alive,

We praise Thee for leading us to new truth in our pilgrimage, Now may we
follow Thee unafraid to new solutions in our search for Thy Kingdom in our day,
Amen,