“Be ye separate.”

(II Corinthians 6:17)

“Ye are the salt of the earth.”

(Matthew 5:13)

No greater disservice can be done the Christian faith than to pretend that it is easy to be a Christian. The editor of a church paper once viewed with alarm the success of large scale evangelistic campaigns in our times because, as he said: “The repetitious emphasis is upon how exceedingly simple it is to enjoy the forgiveness of God by registering one’s repentance in the signing of a card. It would be like playing a child’s game,” wrote this discerning journalist, “if it were not done under such solemn pretense.”

Once I was talking with a man about his church membership. He fairly rocked me back on my heels with his frank question in response to my explanation of how simple it was to make a profession of Christian faith. He asked me: “Don’t you think you make church membership too easy?” Then he told me of how meaningless the Christian faith had become to people of the established church in the European country whence he had come, largely because membership was a perfunctory or almost automatic thing. He said: “We called them four wheel Christians because the only times they ever came to church was once in a perambulator to be baptized, next time in a wedding limousine to be married, and finally in a hearse to be buried.” Four wheel Christians! That is not a variety of the Christian species indigenous to Europe alone. We’ve got them here, haven’t we?

But contrary to popular notions abroad in the land today, it is not easy to be a Christian, but hard, excruciatingly hard.

Certainly Jesus did not call people to His side with promises of the ease and comfort in store for them if they became His disciples. Rather, He sternly cautioned them to count the arduous cost of taking their stand with Him lest they be unable or unwilling to pay the price in material gains sacrificed, in human relations disrupted, or in selfish ambitions relinquished. John, in his gospel, tells us that the multitudes of Galilee finally became offended at the hard sayings of Jesus and left off following Him. What offended them in His teaching? Why, His insistence that the way to life with God was through faith and trust in God rather than by cleverness, wisdom, and trust in self.

And St. Paul, after he had embraced the faith of the Nazarene, filled all his letters to those early Christians full of expressions of the strenuous difficulties he encountered in living the Christian life: how there were repeated wrestlings with spiritual forces from the very headquarters of evil, how there was buffeting of his body against the fleshly lusts that never ceased their downward tuggings, how there was the persistent anxiety that even though he had preached the gospel of salvation, he himself might be a castaway.

And John Bunyan, in his day, wrote of the Christian life as a Pilgrim’s Progress from the city of destruction to the celestial city, through untold dangers along a hazardous road, with such calamitous surprises that it was mandatory for the Christian soul to be constantly vigilant and brave.

And a sainted Scottish preacher of the last century repeatedly told his faithful congregation: “Oh, you may be saved, but the hell hounds of remorse and temptation will follow you all the way of your earthly life and chase you up to the gates of heaven itself and leave the bloody slaver of their ugly jaws upon the golden bars.”

But the hardest part of being a Christian, I find both for the individual believer and for the church of Jesus Christ, is living in this tension our Lord insisted we must continually keep between being in the world and yet not of it; in being separate from, yet sent to, a lost and sinful humanity; in withdrawing from a corrupt and evil generation and yet identifying ourselves with it for its salvation and redemption.

Tension is what everybody nowadays wants to escape. Tension is what plagues our days and spoils our rest at night. Tension is the bane of our existence. But the call to be a Christian is to enter into and accept voluntarily the most devastating tension of all: to live always without any let-up in the high frequency current that flashes between the poles of time and eternity, to accept the standards of God’s heavenly kingdom and live by them in an antagonistic world. It is this tension that makes Christian discipleship so hard.

There are two apparently contradictory responsibilities Jesus lays upon us: on the one hand the call to forsake and come away from an evil and lost world: “Come after me,” He says, “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth … Be not anxious for the things of this earth … Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven and its righteousness.” Or, as St. Paul put it: “Come apart and be ye separate. Touch not the unclean thing … What fellowship hath light with darkness or righteousness with unrighteousness?”

Then on the other hand, there is this clear word of Jesus to His disciples: “Ye are the salt of the earth … Ye are the light of the world … Go ye therefore into all the world … As the Father hath sent me, so send I you.”

It is this tension which must be preserved if Christian discipleship is to be real; if the church is to be the church. Suzanne de Dietrich in her book, The Witnessing Community, wrote: “The tension between these two has to be constantly kept: The church has to rediscover again and again its vocation as the witnessing community taken out of the world, set apart for God, but set apart in order to be sent again to the world. ‘Set apart’ … ‘Sent to’ … these two aspects of the church’s call: separation and mission are the two poles of Christianity, and both the church and the individual must ever live and move and have their being in the excruciating tension.”

Consequently, there are two temptations which ever threaten us in our personal discipleship and in our corporate life in the church as the body of Christ. On the one hand there is the temptation to draw toward the pole of individual piety and slacken the line of responsibility for others. This is to consider the separate life as an end in itself; to think of religion as Whitehead defined it: “What the individual does with his solitariness.” This produces a ghetto religion, the self-righteousness of the Pharisee, the exclusiveness of those who can talk of themselves as “the saved,” and of others outside the church as “the lost,” and live as if their religious life can reach its fulfillment in association with “my kind of folks.”

The other temptation is to move too far toward the identifying of ourselves with our own day and generation, slackening the line which tugs at us to keep us apart and separate from all that pollutes and destroys. This is the temptation to succumb to the slow process of assimilation of God’s people by a pagan world, so that we lose our identity and adopt the way of life of the secular civilization which surrounds us.

Israel conquered Canaan but the Baals conquered Israel. The church conquered the Roman Empire but the pagan practices of the people infiltrated, corrupted, and secularized the church. A minister I knew described one of his church members who was also very ambitious socially by saying of her: “She is the most spiritual, worldly woman I’ve ever known.”

This then is the tension in which the Christian life must be lived. These are the temptations we are never freed from, on one side and on the other. This is what makes it so hard to live the Christian life. How soon before we realize it we can become either the cold, aloof, self-concerned, pious prig, protecting our own purity, or, the accommodating, thoroughly denatured worldling, either of which is a travesty on Christianity — a withered, misshapen fruit on the Lord’s vine. Salt which loses its savor is worthless and there is a friendliness with the world that is enmity with God.

But preserving this tension which is the very essence of the hardness of Christian discipleship is not only fraught with temptation, but also with opportunity. Salt can purify and season only that with which it is mixed. Jesus Christ could save our doomed race only because God so loved the lost world that He sent His own Son to be completely identified with us.

Yes, it is hard to be a Christian. We cannot and we must not seek to escape the tension which is both our salvation and the world’s hope of salvation. But there are two or three things to be said on the positive side before we are done.

One is this: Hard though it is to be a Christian, who, that is worth His salt, is looking for the easiest berth anyway? The human soul is never satisfied with a push-over. Hilary and Tensing spurned the little hills and the smoothly ascending plateaus, but staked their lives to scale the icy, jagged peaks of Mt. Everest.

And then there is this: Hard though it is to be a Christian, Christian discipleship is humanity’s best and divinely intended state. Look at the trim athlete in the pink of physical condition. See the rippling muscles, the deep chest, the fire of fight and competition in the eyes. How did the athlete get that way? In sleep? In lazy lounging? No. The athlete comes to the peak of physical fitness through grueling, sweaty work-outs. So also, it is this strenuous living in the high tension of Christian discipleship — of remaining in the world but not being of it, that produces human beings at their best in time and eternity. (cf. St. Francis, Albert Schweitzer, Mother Teresa.)

And finally, there’s this: Hard though it may be, the Christian has a secret resource for this life of discipleship in permanent tension. Once a man met a friend who had battled long with an uncommonly fierce temper. “I see,” he said, “that you have succeeded in conquering your temper.” “No,” said the man. “I did not conquer it. Christ conquered it for me.”

For every man and woman who will take their stand beside Christ’s side, this day and every day, though we will ever experience complete relief from tension and strife that comes of following the Son of God through the devious ways of a lost world, we will know an inner strength more than our own, and an exhilaration, an enthusiastic radiance in the midst of the struggle that is far better than rest, or peace, or composure. It is to that life Christ calls us today. Will we come?

PASTORAL PRAYER

O Lord our God, we greatly rejoice in Thee; our souls are joyful before Thee in this sacred hour, in this holy place; for Thou has comforted us while we have mourned, giving us beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, and the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness;

And Thou hast renewed hope for our disconsolate and despairing hearts;

And turned the way of our transgressing upside down;

And Thou hast converted our rebellious and unbelieving heart;

And brought peace, Thy peace and calm, to our tumultuous, stormy souls, a peace the world cannot give nor take away.

And now in this hour of our meeting with Thee in the company of these Thy servants, we pray, each one, that Thou wouldst deliver us from that nagging spirit of self-pity which tugs us back from approaching Thy glory. Oh, save us from lingering in that dark valley of destructive thought which dwells on the notion that we are not properly appreciated by our family, our friends, our fellow citizens and church members. Oh, who are we to think, Lord, that others should always be grateful to us and loud in their praise and gratitude? Mercifully deliver us from that heaviness of spirit which turns our professional services and our business activities, and our home and church duties into an onerous labor and robs them of that free, spontaneous service that makes life buoyant and a blessing when each service is grasped as the eternal opportunity Thou hast given us. Oh, strip our souls from self-centeredness, from thirsting after glory, preferment, success. Let Thy servants rejoice to do Thy bidding and leave to Thy pleasure the rewards. Then in Thy Spirit may we rejoice in this world’s triumphs and its defeats, knowing that all our labors are not in vain in the Lord, our Father, etc.