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Holy Week

Holy Week 1961 – Maundy Thursday

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A sermon by the Rt. Rev. Albert Rhett Stuart, Bishop of Georgia

In the beginning God in love created the world and man. It is His initiative. Man rejects the love of God and separates himself from God. God takes the initiative and seeks to restore man to the purpose of His creation. This is the long story of Moses and the prophets. Finally, God still with the initiative “Made Himself of no reputation and took upon Him the form of a servant and was made in the likeness of man: and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled Himself and became obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross.”

The work of our redemption which the Lord Christ accomplished on the Cross this week is made available to us through His church. He established the Church for this purpose. It is a divine organism established by His love directed toward us for our salvation.

It is from God to us. We seem to get confused about this and think of the Church as our creation directed toward God. We are so accustomed to forming clubs and societies that we confuse the Church with this sort of thing. When we do, we are really saying that we can save ourselves. We think and act toward the Church just as we do toward any human club that we contract to organize. We are prior to it, create it, control it just as we do a garden club or service club. We can then determine its standards and decide who can belong to it. The sacraments become customs and sentimental traditions. Baptism is a pretty service where we dedicate our children to Christian ideals, which seems desirable but not really essential. Communion is a memorial or reminder of the historic event of the Crucifixion and, like Memorial Day when we annually remember those who died for their country, it is proper and fitting to do this once a year.

The Church is the Body of Christ into which we are incorporated by Baptism—it is an organism like the family which is prior to us. We are born into it by Baptism in which we are given new life in Christ. It is a means for present identification of our lives with Jesus Christ and His Victory over sin.

Ever since man has been conscious of God, he has longed to identify himself with God, but he has also been conscious of his sinfulness and unworthiness which has separated him from God. He has tried every conceivable kind of gift and sacrifice, including the willingness to sacrifice his own life, to bridge the gap. But always he has realized that nothing he could give could ever really be acceptable because his gift was spoiled by the very sin for which he was trying to atone. A sinful creature could never hope to give a perfect sacrifice for sin. For countless ages man has known this. When Jesus, the perfect man, died on the Cross, the perfect sacrifice was offered. At last, the way was open for man to offer the perfect sacrifice. In the Holy Communion we participate in the perfect sacrifice and the way of atonement with God is open to us. We join our imperfect offerings to Christ’s perfect offering and ours are acceptable and sufficient because of His.

 

“There was no other good enough
To pay the price of sin.
He only could unlock the gate
Of Heaven to let us in.”

 

In our meditation on the sacrifice of Christ on our behalf we have noted that the essence of the sacrifice was the devotion of His will to God the Father manifested in the obedience of His life and the suffering of His death. From His first recorded words—“Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” to the high water mark on the Cross—“Father unto Thy hands I commend my spirit”—there was complete and perfect obedience of life to the will of God. If we are to participate in that victory, this sacrifice of obedience has to be reproduced in our lives. The task of the Christian is to learn to live in the service and love of God as Christ did.

The Christian life is a life of sacrifice or self-giving to God and of obedience to His will. This has been made possible by our incorporation in the body of Christ, the Church, and by the operation of His grace through the sacraments of the Church. The Holy Communion is an act of obedience. We offer to God ourselves—“Here we offer and present unto Thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls, and bodies to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice.” Humbly we lay down beside Christ’s perfect offering our own poor imperfect offering, ourselves, that it may be accepted in Him and made sufficient by His offering. Then we receive from Him the power of His resurrection that it may be possible for us in our own lives to fulfill the meaning and promise of our offering.

Here is the link between the Christian’s worship and the Christian’s life. Our worship and our life are not two different things—they are one and the same viewed from different aspects. A Christian life is a God-ward life. It is a life of faith in God and of self-offering to God. Our worship expresses the inward principle of our life. That which is expressed in our Eucharist, the attitude of prayer and faith, and self-oblation—that is to be the attitude of our life in the world. The meaning of the Eucharist is worked out in our daily life and the meaning of our daily life is focused and expressed in the Eucharist—it is all an offering to God. We lift up before God the one, true, pure sacrifice—the life and death of Jesus Christ, perfect obedience in the service of God and man. We lay down beside this spotless offering, the stained and impure offering of ourselves that it may be accepted in Him and then we go forth and spend our lives in the service of God and man.

Holy Week 1961 – Wednesday

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A sermon by the Rt. Rev. Albert Rhett Stuart, Bishop of Georgia

“There is a green hill far away
Without a city wall,
Where the dear Lord was crucified
Who died to save us all.”

 

How did He by dying save us all? The Cross is a symbol of victory. What is it in the death on the Cross that makes it a victory? What is meant by saying Christ on the Cross is “the power of God unto salvation?” The Cross, we have been saying this week, is the encounter of human sin and divine love. More than that, it is the greatest victory ever won. This is a great mystery and yet we must try once more to deepen our understanding of it. How did He by dying save us? How is the Cross a victory?

Jesus’ death on the Cross was neither accidental nor unfortunate. It was a divine necessity freely and willingly undertaken. Why the necessity? Why insist that there can be no forgiveness of the sins I commit apart from the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ? After all we ourselves treat those who do us wrong with an easy-going tolerance that we expect from God—“That’s all right,” we say, “I’ll forgive you—Let’s forget about it.” In the same way many people take divine forgiveness for granted.

Let’s think about that for a moment. Whenever I do anything wrong, others besides myself are involved—my family, my school, my profession, my country, my fellow Christians. If a bank clerk forges the books and embezzles funds, the bank must express its disapproval and disown the act at once by punishing the offender—otherwise it will lose its own good name. Here lies the primary necessity for all punishment. It is the means by which a community disowns certain acts done by its members in order to vindicate and maintain its standards. When we sin, God is implicated for we are all His children and His workmanship and depend on Him for every breath we draw. Whenever we use the power He gives us wrongly and commit sin with that power God Himself is involved in our sin and responsible for it unless He disowns it by some clear and definite act of disapproval. This means that sin must be punished. It cannot be ignored by a God of righteousness if He is to remain righteous. He who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity cannot just say, “That’s all right—I forgive you.” If God is to remain good, He must disown the bad we do and bad we are.

Whatever else forgiveness means it cannot mean failing to punish sin. The Cross is sin receiving its terrible punishment. There on the green hill far away we see the wrath of God against sin. It can never afterwards be said that God ignores sin or condones it. Nor can there ever afterwards be any excuse for us to ignore or make light of sin. When the last laugh about sin has died away and the last ounces of pleasure has been extracted from it, one fact still remains—the fact of Jesus hanging on the Cross.

Sin cannot be ignored by a God of righteousness. Sinners cannot be abandoned by a God of love. So, God solves the problem by coming to the rescue Himself. “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself.” In order to vindicate His righteousness and uphold the Standard of eternal Goodness, God wills that sin shall be punished. But He will also that He Himself shall bear the punishment. Punisher and Punished are one. We must constantly remember that the Father and the Son are one, acting with one mind and one will. He who knew no sin was “made to be sin on your behalf”. This is the bold way the New Testament expresses the trust that Jesus felt the burden of human sin as though it were His own. “Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows—He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities—and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.” Jesus deliberately accepts the suffering and the burden of human guilt, and He staggers beneath the weight of it.

There can be no forgiveness until God has been delivered from all complicity in the sin He forgives. But even then, forgiveness is impossible until the power of evil has been broken, and the poisonous infection it sets up has been cauterized and prevented from spreading. Left to itself evil breeds further evil. Whenever we do wrong, we create an evil infection which passes beyond our control. What has been the effect of my sins in other peoples’ lives? Some have been led to sin by my example. In others the wrong I did them has borne fruit in bitterness and resentment, in others it has led to cynicism and disillusionment. Suppose I have a friend who loves me very greatly and is truly good. When I do him some wrong, he will not pretend it does not matter. He hates the sinful thing in me. He accepts the pain of the injury and bears it without allowing it to embitter him or make any difference in his love to me. Then the power of evil I initiated is absorbed and neutralized and destroyed because it is brought up against something stronger than itself which it cannot overcome and on which it has no effect, and which takes away the power to do further evil.

All our sins whoever else may be involved are ultimately sins against God. Forgiveness is solely possible if we can be assured that our sins have failed to have any effect on the divine goodness by separating Him from us. This is exactly what Christ shows us on the Cross—“Forgive them, they know not what they do”. There He bears the injury we do Him in such a way that the power of evil is neutralized, absorbed, prevented from spreading further. Throughout His Passion there was never a trace of resentment, anger, or thought of revenge. “When he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not.” Love went on loving in spite of all the hatred. Goodness continued to be good in spite of all the assault of evil. That is the victory of the Cross. Evil was conquered when instead of cursing His enemies He prayed for their forgiveness.

For the first time since man first sinned, evil failed to find any response in man. Never for a split second did the power of evil move the Christ one hair’s breadth from the Father’s will. The Cross is the crowning act of a life of undefeated goodness. The Cross is not a defeat needing the Resurrection to reverse it. It is a victory so decisive and permanent that the Resurrection follows inevitably to seal and confirm it. The shout of triumph from the Cross is “It is accomplished”—man’s forgiveness, restoration, salvation—accomplished.

The Christian Faith unhesitatingly asserts that as a result of the mighty work accomplished by Christ on the Cross, the relationship in which we stand to God has been radically and permanently changed. On the Cross, God who was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself found the means of forgiving us completely. This is the incredibly Good News. A general pardon, free and complete is granted to all who have sinned—not for anything we have done or could do to deserve it but simply of God’s love and at His own cost. He paid the price, and His free pardon is waiting for all who will accept it.

 

“There was no other good enough
To pay the price of sin
He only could unlock the gate
Of heaven to let us in.”

 

Most ethical religions make righteousness the condition of any approach to God. There can be no divine welcome for the sinner until he has ceased to be a sinner. But the Lord Christ receives us and reconciles us first in order to reform us afterwards. He welcomes us as we are for “God commendeth his love towards us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us” to transform us from sinners into Sons.

 

Holy Week 1961 – Tuesday

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A sermon by the Rt. Rev. Albert Rhett Stuart, Bishop of Georgia

The Cross of Jesus Christ is a present reality and will be until human sin is no more.

 

“There is a green hill far away
Without a city wall
Where the dear Lord was crucified
Who died to save us all.”

 

Human sin and divine love come face to face not only once on a green hill far away. All through human history they are face to face because God is love and man is sinful.

We are fond of labelling ourselves and classifying our neighbors. We divide people into groups, classes, races, nations. The Church knows only one class – sinners by thought, word and deed. The Church takes us all in – the preacher in the pulpit, the worshipper in the pew, the man in the street 0 “there is no health in us.” If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.

We are set in a space age with fast changing horizons and social patterns. Our needs are tremendous but none is so great as the need to face the reality of our sinfulness. Unless we face this need the Cross of Jesus Christ is meaningless to us.

It is not fashionable or in good taste to many today, even in the Church, to talk about sin. We find defensive rationalizations and thought patterns in psychology to dull our sense of sin and insulate us from facing this grim reality.

One of these rationalizations has to do with the relation of sin to violation of conscience. It is far from true to say that sin means going contrary to one’s conscience.  Conscience is the product of training and social custom and cannot be an infallible guide. To be conscientious is not enough, for conscience depends upon the standard in which one has been trained. Phillip the Second was very conscientious when he introduced the Spanish Inquisition into the Netherlands. There is good reason to believe that Bloody Mary and other religious persecutors were likewise conscientious. I suppose that Hitler and his Master Race theory and his liquidation of the Jews or the fanatical prejudice that bombs a Negro home are examples of conscientiousness. To let your conscience be your guide and feel that you are living an exemplary life is dubious practice. We may be guilty of grievous sin by neglecting the plain duty of educating conscience, or we may disregard conscience so consistently that our standards may have change unconsciously, or we may have developed a selective conscience which conveniently starts and stops. A conscience to be trusted must be checked with reference to some infallible moral standard. That standard for the Christian is the mind of Jesus Christ which reveals the holy will and righteous character of Almighty God. Deliberately to do violence to the mind and spirit of Jesus Christ is sin, however we much we protest that our conscience is clear.

Another realization that blinds us to the fact of sin is the way we think of the Moral Code. The word Moral comes from a Latin root which means custom or tradition. Morals are customs which have come to be considered unbreakable. It is not necessarily sinful to defy or break custom or depart from tradition. Sometimes it may be sinful no to do. It is dangerous to identify sin with violation of the Moral Code which a particular society says ought to be obeyed. St. Paul long ago made clear that legalism alone cannot justify or condemn a man. A Moral Code is a trustworthy guide only when the principles which underlie it are based on Jesus Christ – when what it bids me to do or refrain from doing jelps me to become like Jesus Christ.

The Christian has but one means whereby he can determine beyond question whether lying, cheating, envy, malice, greed, sensuality, prejudice, and sinful. If we say they are sins because moral custom says they are, it is easy to reply that fashions in conduct are no more binding than fashions in food or dress. If we say they are sins because the conscience of man condemns them, it is easy to reply that the conscience of man once approved of human sacrifice and slavery. By means of one test only may I pass judgment – will these attitudes and practices make me such a personality as revealed in Jesus Christ. Sin is anything and every thing that prevents me or, thru me, any one else from realizing in life the holy and loving purpose of Almighty God revealed in Jesus Christ.

Another rationalization which dulls our sense of sin is the relation of sin to moral choice. I suppose all of us realize that we possess a measure of freedom and that deliberate misuse of freedom is son. But it is a mistake to confine sin to the region of free moral choice. The most fatal sins are those which lie deep in our souls to which we are not ordinarily sensitive and with which we are no longer struggling. A man may be scrupulous in what he believes to be his duty but that is not sufficient. He must believe to be his duty all that actually is his duty and that more basic question he may never have truly faced. It is sin to be disloyal to such truth as one possesses, but it is also sin to permit oneself to live in such a state of intellectual and spiritual smugness that one feels no desire to possess more and higher truth. It is sin to turn one’s back on God – it is sin also and a deeper one to live so content with the Standard of the world as to feel no need of God. To be conscious of the magnetism of goodness and to resist it is sin. It is far more subtle and greater sin to live in the presence of goodness, surrounded by goodness, undergirded by goodness and never recognize it.

You are I are sinners. This self-centeredness which is the essence of sin may not have put us in the headlines of the Press as it has some of our less fortunate brethren, but there is within each of us attitudes, habits, prejudices, antipathies, resentments, jealousies, fears which are utterly opposed to the will of holy God and the blessed mind of Christ, and there is no health in us.

Sometimes cause does not seem to produce effect. Sometimes the seed may not sprout, but the surest harvest in creation is the harvest of sin. “Sin when it has conceived bringest forth death.” We may think we are a special case but there are no special cases – “The wages of sin is death.”

The universal cry of the human heart is voice by St. Paul: “O, wretched man that I am – who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” The answer to this cry of humanity, of your heart and mind is the Cross of Jesus Christ –

 

“Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world.”
“he died that we might be forgiven
He died to make us good
That we might to at last to heaven
Save by his precious blood.”

 

Holy Week 1961 – Monday

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A sermon by the Rt. Rev. Albert Rhett Stuart, Bishop of Georgia

“There is a green hill far away
Without a city wall
Where the dear Lord was crucified
Who died to save us all.”

Ever since you learned to sing this hymn for children written over 100 years ago in Ireland to explain the Passion or Suffering of our Lord, you have wondered, I am sure, as I have about the meaning of the Cross of Jesus Christ. Every year in Passiontide the Church asks us to stop and think again upon the suffering and death of Jesus Christ, knowing that the full meaning of the Cross is beyond our reach, and yet knowing that the Cross means our salvation.

Did you ever read a biography of some famous man in which no less than a third of the space is devoted to a detailed narrative of his death? So far as I know there is only one such biography. It is the Gospel Story of Jesus Christ. In most cases we read pages of a man’s achievements and in the last chapter we have a few pages about the man’s death.

Not so with the Gospel. One third of the narrative is concerned with His death. It is obvious that from the very first Christians regarded the death of Christ as of utmost importance. In our day the world acknowledges Christ as the greatest and best teacher the world has ever known. But the early Christian writings – the Acts and the Epistles – have very little about His teaching, while there are references to His death on every page.

These references sound no note of sorrow or regret. There is no suggestion of how much was lost to the world by the early death of Jesus of Nazareth. Normally when a great personality dies we think of the loss to the world and of how much might have been accomplished if he lived longer. No New Testament writer ever implies “If Jesus had lived longer He would have transformed the world.” Instead the New Testament glories in His death – never doubts that He accomplished the work which He came to do and that His death was essential to His work. He came to save mankind and He accomplished it by dying on the Cross. His dying words “It is finished” do not mean “It is ended” but “It is accomplished”.

The whole Gospel Message centers on the Cross. St. Paul summed it up by saying “We preach Christ crucified.” Missionaries went out to the world proclaiming not Christ the teacher, but Christ the Crucified Savior. By His death He won for mankind salvation and redemption. What was it in Christ’s death that made it the power of God unto Salvation? The truth is that the full meaning of the death of Jesus cannot be explained any more than any of the great truths of the Christian religion can be completely understood or explained. We can do a lot of thinking about them and we can make some advance in grasping what they mean for us but we cannot understand them completely – How God became Man in Jesus, Son of Mary – how bread and wine becomes the Blessed Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ, how Christ dying on the Cross brought our redemption – these are blessed truths of the Christian religion. We can understand parts of these truths, but the whole truth us more than any human mind can grasp or express.

 

“We may not know, we cannot tell
What pains he had to bear
But we believe it was for us
He hung and suffered there.”

 

The crucifixion of Jesus Christ outside a city wall is a fact of history. It happened on a Friday some nineteen hundred and thirty years ago. It is a manifestation on earth of certain truths which are eternal. Chief among these truths are the nature of God and the nature of sin. God is love not only today but eternally. God’s love for His creatures is always poured forth as it was in the life and death of Jesus. The incarnate life was not a unique instance of Divine love. It was a unique showing forth of that love in history. When we see the love of God in Jesus we know what the love of God means always.

But the Cross reveals also the nature of sin. People talk lightly about sin as they talk lightly about the love of God. It is supposed that sin means doing evil things or at least things that cause harm and suffering. But sin is something much deeper than any outward action. It lies within ourselves. It is putting self before God. It means choosing our won way instead of God’s way. Sin is self-will. The Cross shows the real nature of sin. It shows what sun will do when brought face to face with God. Sin found Jesus standing right in its path. He would make no terms with it. So sin tried to destroy Him by nailing Him to the Cross. Sin, therefore, is something inherently hostile to God. In the Crucifixion, behind the particular sins of particular men, there was the underlying selfishness and self-will which is the essence of sin and which is rooted deep in the human heart. All the ordinary sins of ordinary men spring from this root – greed, hatred, malice, ill-will, unkindness, slander, lust, and all the rest have their source in self-will, self-pleasing, self-love. The sin that is in ordinary reputable human nature found itself face to face with the love of God in Jesus Christ and the result was the Cross.

Human sin and Divine love came face to face not once only on a green hill far away. All through human history they are face to face. And always something must happen of which the Cross is the symbol. The least part of the pain of the Cross was the physical suffering. The horror of the rejection of God’s love was the agony of the Cross. And this helps us to understand in a small way what men’s sins always mean to God. The historical fact of the Crucifixion is a symbol of what is eternally true. All men, when they sin, “crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh.” In a very real sense the Cross of Jesus Christ is a present reality and will be until human sin is no more.


“O dearly, dearly has he loved!
And we must love him too
And trust in his redeeming blood
And try His works to do.”