INFECTED MEN

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25848, 19 May 1945, Page 4

INFECTED MEN

Written for the Otago Daily Times, By the Rev. Gardner Miller.

I am sometimes terribly afraid of saying the Lord’s Prayer. And when my audiences repeat the prayer. I catch myself saying to myself, “ I wonder if they realise what they are saying! ” There’s something so revolutionary in the Lord’s Prayer, but the constant repetition has nearly flattened it out. It’s like pouring water on gunpowder. And it’s that revolutionary statement that often makes me afraid—and ashamed. lam afraid of its inference, and I am ashamed that I have so often shied away frem it. This is one statement that catches my breath, that is chokeful of revolutionary power, that condemns and outdates every blue print for. the New World Order that leaves it out; “Thy Kingdom come.. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.” (Matthew vi: 10). Go over it slowly and prayerfully, and keep out of your mind that it has any reference to the “Sweet By and By,” and there will dawn upon your mind and soul the beginnings of the most revolutionary idea that the world has ever known. That earth should be like heaven, that the will of God should be as natural here on earth as it is in the “ Sweet By and By surely nothing more challenging has ever been said, no greater hope ever put before men —and no greater failure ever recorded!

I would not detract in the slightest the amazing, the , wonderful, the miraculous things that have been done for the betterment of the world in the name of God. nor would I slight in the slightest the names of the-men and women who have given their lives for the ideal of the Kingdom of God, but no man in His sane senses would ever claim that this. revolutionary truth has been accomplished. It. is still in the future, for the simple reasen that it has not yet been made actual. Yet, until it is a fact and not only a hope and an ideal, the work of Christ remains unfinished. Jesus meant these words. What’s more, He expects us to put them into our way of life. He knew —and we know, too—that the world as it is constituted is very far from acknowledging the Will of God, but it is the task of all who call themselves Christian to bring it about. A Strange Sight It would indeed be a strange sight to see a Christian world. Listen to this preacher. He preaches Christianity as “beginning to exist in individuals,” next, as “ spreading from one to another,” and finally “as covering the earth.” Then, dramatically, he asks his congregation to pause “and survey this strange sight, a Christian world!” It would be a world from which injustice, inequality, hatred, vice, and war were forever banished: a world illumined by the spirit of Christ and guarded by the Golden Rule. “ Where does this Christianity now exist?” Where, I pray, do the Christians live? . . .. it is utterly needful that someone should use great plainness of speech toward you. ... Let us confess we have never yet seen a Christian country upon the earth.” The sure hope of a better age,. he pleads, was a better man. Only Christ s new men could herald , Christ’s new world. “A scheme to reconstruct society which ignored the redemption of the individual was unthinkable; a doctrine to save sinning men, with no aim to transform them into crusaders against social sin was equally unthinkable.” Who spoke these words? They are intensely modern. Dees it surprise you when I tell you that they were spoken two hundred years ago? They are excerpts from a sermon preached in St. Mary’s, Oxford, in 1744 by John Wesley. But they could be preached to-day. Wesley puts his finger on the spot when he reminds us. that it needs new men for Christ’s new order and that these new men will have a social conscience. lam not so stupid as to think that God has np prophet, no preacher to speak for our dav as He raised up Wesley for the eighteenth century. But he has not arrived yet. Where is he? God knows we need one. Get this strange sight or “Christian World” ,so pictured in your mind and soul that it will obsess you. Jesus did not complete His work of establishing the Kingdom. He taught us to pray , for it, to work for it, and He came back to enable us, with Himself, to make it ah actuality. This thing must come true, a Kingdom of God on earth where the Will of God rules in the hearts and lives of men, or else Christianity is nothing but a foolish tale. But Jesus was A Realist.

He did not indulge in whims and fancies. He kept His feet on solid earth while His spirit encompassed the heavens. He knew that men had to eat and work, live and die. But He knew something else: He knew that to give man something to live for, something to die for was to invest his living with high intentions and attach wings to his soul. Jesus did not despise learning and specialised knowledge. What He wished was that men should enter into every realm of the life of a world infected by the love of God which would naturally give birth to a passion for brotherhood. He saw a vision of men infected with the passion of building a new world, with God at its centre and on its throne, and out of that passion a fellowship being bom that would spread the truth everywhere over the broad earth. People have often called Jesus a dreamer; yes, but the true dreamer is the world’s greatest worker. Nothing can be done without dreams, visions, hopes, and inspirations. Here is a hope, a vision, a challenge beyond anything the world can create: A Kingdom of God on earth—on earth, not in heaven, but on earth. Be an infected man and infect others.