“Let us go then to him outside the camp bearing the stigma that he bore.”

(Hebrews 13:13)

The observance of the Witness Season in our church calls us all to focus our thoughts on God and His plans for the world.

Most of the time we are too busy to give much thought to God’s plans — thinking about our own problems, which are not inconsiderable, of how to teach our children manners and to be honest and to get them to do their school lessons so they can become self-reliant and successful in the world. We are forced to think a great deal about our business problems; how to buy and sell at a profit, meet our payrolls, pay our bills on time, and make some arrangements for a comfortable retirement. Of course, we have our social commitments, too. We must remember those to whom we are in debt and ought to reciprocate.

But now and then, we do lift up our eyes to the far horizon and begin to think some about world problems. Right now we are being forced to think about world problems because so many of our national problems and personal problems are locked in with unsolved world problems. The high cost of energy in our homes and for our automobiles and our airplane travel originates in the Middle East. And that is tied in with the unsolved political problems of the Israeli and Arab nations. And the growing unemployment that is gnawing at the vitals of more and more American families is tied into the world trade imbalance — all, as yet, unsolved.

The long look at the world in our time is very disturbing for us — not only when we look at those trouble spots whose problems defy the solutions of the experts, but also when we listen to those calamity cliches which are so often bandied about, such as:

“Two-thirds of the world goes to bed every night, hungry.”

“Christianity and Communism are on a collision course and the issue will be decided in our lifetime.”

Then there are those horrifying statistics emanating from the recent World Food Conference in Rome, like: “Ours is a world in which, unless something is done very quickly, something like 300 to 500 million children will be so undernourished that even if they survive death, they will never be fully grown in their bodies and brains.”

And, of course, as everybody knows, the population explosion is upon us: world population stood at a quarter of a billion people at the year one of the Christian era; at a half a billion in 1600; at one billion in 1850; at 3 billion in 1950; expected to double again to 6 billion by 2000; and 650 years from now, at the present rate, there will be so many people on earth that each person will have only one square foot of earth on which to stand.

Meditations on world conditions are calculated to give us the cold shivers. But the church’s call to observe a season of Christian witness is not just an invitation to assess the world situation, but rather to look to God in Christ and ask two questions:

1. What is God doing in His world today?
2. What is our role as Christians in God’s world today?

First, then, let us do all we can to find an answer to this: What is God doing in His world today? We need to read our Bibles about the purposes and plans of God as revealed in the scriptures. We need to assemble all we have learned in the past and can learn about current world affairs, tracing trends, making judgments about the moral and ethical actions of our own nation and others, assessing the progress of currents and cross-currents of social and political movements. We need to meditate upon what God seems to be saying through scripture and history and His servants in our time.

We believe that this world is His world, do we not? We believe He has the world in His hands, don’t we? Well, if we do, isn’t the shaking of the foundations of our world, His shaking? Certainly we can discern not only a few trouble spots like Viet Nam, Bangladesh, the Middle East, but the whole world in upheaval, and everywhere the same problems seem to be at the focus of the ferment.

Ten years ago, Charles C. West was saying: “The revolution in the world today is basically man’s awakening to his freedom and his rights. It is the demand of masses of people, who have lived for centuries on the margin of existence, for a share in the power and wealth which modern technology can produce, and for a political fellowship in which they will be taken seriously as persons. This revolution, this moving from the old world to the new, is therefore in the eyes of these people, a movement full of hope. Communism may capture this movement, but it need not.” (C.C. West – Outside the Camp)

For as John Mackay, that wise old Christian missionary statesman has said: “Jesus Christ, and not Karl Marx, will have the last word in history. For Marxism . . . with whatever realism it faces, the problem of the world’s disinherited masses has no answer for the ultimate striving of the human spirit. That striving, for which Christianity does have an answer, is man’s hunger for spiritual freedom and eternal God.” (John Mackay — Cuba Revisited — The Christian Century — February 12, 1964)

Let us each one on this day, in our own way, seek our answer to the question: “What is God doing in His world?”

Then in the light of whatever answer we honestly find, let us each one put to ourselves this question: “What is my role as a Christian in God’s world today?”

For a beginning, to pick up some trustworthy guidelines, I suggest we turn to the text in the Epistle to the Hebrews 13:13, which reads: “Let us then go to Him outside the camp, bearing the stigma He bore.” The pictorial imagery the writer of the epistle is using here for “the camp” is that camp that the ancient Hebrews set up for rest between the stages of their march journeying through the wilderness from Egypt to their promised land. The sick and the sinful of the traveling Hebrew people were thrust outside the camp of the healthy and obedient till they became well or lived through their period of probationary suffering.

Then, when the time came that they were ready to be readmitted, a priest went outside the camp to the exile, killed an animal, made a sacrifice for the offender’s cleansing to remove the curse of God, and then reinstated the rejected one to the fellowship with the rest of the community.

To thrust outside the camp was the ancient, accepted, primitive way of dealing with problems of all sorts — personal, social, political, religious. Whenever any among the people were diseased, lawless, ceremonially unclean, culturally uncouth, all were dealt with the same way — they were shut out, locked up, isolated, segregated.

The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews says that it was this old primitive method of dealing with personal, social, religious, world problems, that God repudiated in the incarnation. In Jesus Christ, the Eternal God became man. He entered our sinful race. Yes, He not only came into close proximity with our foul condition, but the tainted blood of sick and sinful generations flowed through His veins. In the historic fact that Jesus Christ suffered on a cross outside the city wall at Jerusalem between two thieves, the Christians early discerned that Jesus, the God-Man, died for all men, the outcast and the under-classed — to make reconciliation possible for men estranged from God and from one another. He went outside the camp to bring back the outsider and make him an insider.

So these first Christians discovered that this was God’s way of dealing with the problem of the outsider — the sick, the suffering, the culturally inferior, the sinning offender. Not thrust him out until he became well, or repentant, or worthy of community life again, but to go to him in love and say: “You are wanted and needed. Come to Him and into our fellowship of all those who love and serve God inside the camp.”

And the role of the Christian in the world today, what is it? Is there a better than that of following the Epistle to the Hebrews injunction: “Let us go then to Him, our God in Christ, outside the camp, bearing the stigma He bore”?

Can we as Christians today believe the scriptures’ teaching that wherever people are now shut out of the good, abundant life, wherever they are made to feel they do not belong, or do not have a right to the benefits and privileges of the Creator’s world, whether physical or temporal or spiritual benefits, there with them already is Jesus Christ? Can we believe that He has made their problem His eternal concern? If we could so believe, then we would see most clearly that Christ not only carried His cross to that hill outside the city wall, and died there upon it, but that He, the resurrected and living Lord is still there among His own outside the camp, and that our role as His disciples is to go to Him there.

The early Christians found Him outside the camp at Antioch with the Gentiles. And when Barnabas came and saw the work of the Holy Spirit, he said: “How can we refuse baptism and acceptance to those whom the Lord has chosen?”

And when Paul and Barnabas went as the first missionaries to the first land outside the Holy Land, to the Island of Cyprus, they found Him there with those outsiders and they took them into Christ’s church.

This is the great missionary motive for the church in all time: not to go to men and reform them and civilize them and make them worthy of associating with respectable people, and then take them in; but rather to go to them and tell them: “We are here because Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is already here to redeem you. Accept His reconciliation.” Then watch and wait and help the redeeming love of God complete the reformation and sanctification.

Suppose a curtain were stretched across this sanctuary — mid way — separating those in the back from those in the front. Then those in the back could not see those in the front, and vice versa. But there is a way that we could all see each other. If a mirror were placed in the ceiling, we could look up into that mirror and see down into all the places of this sanctuary.

This is what we try to do when we come into our churches or get on our knees in prayer with our world problems. We look up to God who is the Father of all men and it is like looking into a mirror of compassionate love and thereby we can see into the places of those whose creed and culture and color may be different from our own.

Robert McAfee Brown has compared those well-loved twin verses from John’s gospel — John 3:16 and 17 — to an invisible hand that draws aside the curtain separating time from eternity, permitting the eye of mortal man to behold the very thoughts and intents and purposes of our Creator-Father-God for His whole world and all His creatures here: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes on Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world — the whole suffering, sinning world — through Him might be saved.”

So, “We must recognize that the ministry of reconciliation does not flow between nations or races or persons like a stream from a higher to a lower level, but moves like the tides of the ocean on the level drawn by the attraction of a heavenly body.” (Ralph Sockman – Roots of the Reconciling Message — Union Theological Seminary Review)

Shall we go to Him outside the camp bearing the stigma that He bore? Unfortunately, for a number of years those who were willing to go for Christ and the church outside the camp were a dwindling stream of fewer and fewer people. Charles West could write in 1959: “The missionary vocation has largely lost its urgency and appeal for students.” But there is change now. Something has been happening. God is doing a wonderful thing in His world. Now, in increasing numbers, some of our most gifted young people, motivated by the appalling need of our troubled world, are finding the Living Christ out there outside the camp and are going to Him, bearing His stigmata, becoming His man or His woman. More choice young people have offered themselves for foreign service to our denominational board than our church has funds in hand to send them.

How will they go to Him who calls them outside the camp, bearing the stigma He bore? They cannot go, unless the church, you and I, underwrite their expenses by our increased gifts. This is the way our young, dedicated new missionaries and you and I can go together to our Lord outside the camp bearing the stigma He bore.