The Spiritual Eclipse

W. Carl Ketcherside

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     A few days ago I was reading from the translation of apostolic letters made by that versatile Anglican, J. B. Phillips. I suspect I am favorably influenced toward his version to some extent by the fact that when Phillips had finished his rendering of the letter to Colossae he mailed a copy of it to C. S. Lewis. That literary worthy not only encouraged him to persevere but supplied the title "Letters to Young Churches" which Phillips adopted for his compilation of the epistles.

     I am somewhat moved by the final statement in the "Translator's Foreword" written in 1958, when the new covenant scriptures had been collected into a single

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volume bearing the title The New Testament in Modern English. Phillips writes, "Not the least of my gratitude is evoked by the assurance that has grown within me that here in the New Testament, at the very heart and core of our Faith, Christians are far more at one than their outward divisions would imply. From this unquestionable evidence of fundamental unity I derive not only great comfort but a great hope for the future."

     I like to read the letter to the Christians at Ephesus as Phillips translates it. It is especially good in dealing with "the divine secret" which had been "hidden to past generations of mankind." As Phillips puts it, "The purpose is that all the angelic powers should now see the complex wisdom of God's plan being worked out through the Church in conformity to that timeless purpose which he centered in Christ Jesus, our Lord" (3:10, 11). Even the most unemotional reader cannot escape being stirred by such poignant terms as complex wisdom, timeless purpose and centered in Christ.

     Really, there are few of us who think of the church today in any such categories. Most of the brethren have no consciousness of angels looking over the ramparts of glory and observing what we do in working out the complex wisdom of God's plan. The way we act it will take the angels a long time to get even an elementary education, and they need to be careful and selective because a lot of what we do is not at all a part of the wisdom of God's plan. I'm not so sure that a lot of us think of ourselves as proceeding in conformity with a timeless purpose. We are too caught up with all of the nitty-gritty and trivia which belong to the things that are seen and which will pass away! What has happened to us?

     I did a lot of preaching in the dust bowl area of the midwest during the days when cruel driving winds relentlessly eroded away the topsoil from fields which should never have been put to the plow. One day I stepped from the train "away out west in Kansas," when the dust in the air was so thick that visibility was not even a hundred feet. As I stood on the station platform and the train began to move away, a figure appeared out of the gloom and introduced himself. It was the brother with whom I was to stay. He proved to be quite a wag, and when we got in the old Jalopy and headed out into the haze, he said, "What do you think of the eclipse?" "Eclipse?" I asked, wondering if I had overlooked some planetary phenomenon. "Yeh," he replied, "the earth is coming between herself and the sun."

     That is what I think has happened to us. The church has come between herself and Christ. We have obscured the sun of righteousness, and reversed the prophecy so that "they which sat in light have seen great darkness." In many places God's purpose is no longer conceived of as centered in Christ, except in sermonic platitudes. It is centered in the organization we have contrived and pass off as the church for which Jesus died.

     All of you have no doubt heard of the man who formed a company to probe for oil. The company spent a million dollars and drilled one hole to prodigious depth, but when they installed a shiny modern pump they got just enough fuel to keep the machinery operating. We have programmed, planned and promoted the church until now we have a sophisticated institution selling salvation at a pretty high financial rate, and most of the finance is spent keeping the machinery running. In many places the church exists chiefly to keep itself in existence. It is the perpetuator of tradition, the promulgator of the status quo.

     We do not know what heaven has going for us. We are unaware of "the magnificence and splendor of the inheritance promised to Christians, and how tremendous is the power available to us who trust in God" (Ephesians 1:18, 19). A couple of years ago the news media carried a story about the discovery of the corpse of a woman in a dingy tenement in New York. The people in the community knew her as a recluse. She was always attired in rags which she apparently never changed. They saw her, dirty and unkempt, salvaging items of food from garbage cans in the rear alleys behind stores

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and restaurants. When they did not see her for several days they reported her absence to the authorities.

     When the police broke down the door they were greeted with an almost unbelievable sight. Old newspapers, dusty and musty, and yellow with age, were piled in rows as high as one could reach. Only a narrow passageway led to the back of the room where the pitiable figure lay dead upon an old army cot. The mortician who prepared the body for a cheap casket found concealed in the tattered clothing, bank deposit books with more than a half million dollars recorded. Search of the premises revealed fifty dollar bills stuffed at random between the newspapers with no apparent order or system. The woman was an heiress whose developing sense of greed and fear had driven her to a lonely death.

     The church today is surrounded by the news. The glad tidings of heaven, the triumphs of yesterday, the demands of the present, these are all piled about us. And we are heirs. "Here is the staggering thing, that in all which will one day belong to him we have been promised a share" (Ephesians 1:11). But we can withdraw from the teeming world about us, and we can die in our loneliness, subsisting upon scraps, and dreaming of what it once was, what it used to be like.

     Certainly we had no idea that in our huge building programs and in our devising of promotional apparatus we were going to chain ourselves to places and things until we could not move even though where we were and what we were doing no longer had any relevance to life. And the very upkeep would throttle us when changing patterns of life left us stranded, cast up on the beach and deserted by the very patrons who once went along, apparently just for the ride.

     Recently I read of a man who acquired a baby leopard. The cub was so cute and playful that neighbors brought their children over to pet and fondle it. But it grew larger and had to be restrained inside an expensive enclosure. The cost of meat made it almost prohibitive to feed it, but the zoo would not take it. One day when the owner went inside the pen, the big cat went berserk. He was barely able to fight it off after claws and fangs had cruelly lacerated his flesh. Of course, the church is not like that, but what started out to be a harmless experiment has sometimes become an organizational giant which it is difficult to feed and nourish.

     I think we become victims of our own traditions. We confuse these with God's will and stubbornly resist change, fearing that to alter our way of doing things would be to forsake the will of God and walk in the path of perverseness. This causes us always to treat symptoms and not the disease, to pick out pimples and neglect the cause. The story is told of an elder, who announced one Sunday morning, "There's been a lot of grumbling lately that we are in a rut and ought to change things. All right, today we are going to change. Instead of having three songs before prayer and one after, we are going to have two songs before prayer and two after. I hope that will stop the complaining that we always do everything the same way."

     I know of a body of men who spent thirty minutes in a sober hassle over whether they should start at the back of the auditorium, or the front, in passing the plates to collect the offering. In attempting to settle that momentous question they took almost as much time as the president did to deliver his state of the union message to the joint houses of Congress. It is possible that most of us cannot realize how inconsequential some of our "major decisions" seem in the ripped-off world where our lot has been cast.

     I was listening to my car radio not long ago and tuned in to a daily program sponsored by a local Church of Christ. The speaker began in a vivacious manner. "Welcome to a program that is different! It may be the only program to which you will listen today that is truly distinctive. Do you know what makes it unique? Undoubtedly you would discover it for yourself, but let me tell you in advance. The gospel songs to which you will listen will be sung without the use of instru-

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mental music. You will admit that this makes the program different, really different from any other. And that makes it scriptural!"

     I had just listened to a speaker from a Baptist background who had taken the words of 1 Peter 1:18-21 and expounded them with compassion mixed with deep conviction. With a sense of directness which spoke to my heart he conversed about the redemption achieved not by material wealth, and about the resurrection of Jesus from the dead that our hope and faith might be in God. I felt a real sense of relationship to the one "who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifested in these last times for us."

     As I listened to my brother talk about the tremendous distinctiveness of singing a cappella, I wondered what hope would be conveyed to those in the ward of the cancer hospital from which I had just come. It is possible that we are concerned with defending our distinctiveness and proclaiming our peculiarities, until we have no time for, and little interest in sharing the grace of God. Perhaps we are in an eclipse and the church has come between the new creation and the One who created us unto good works that we should continue in them!