Is the Harvest Ripe or Rotten?

The following words are harsh and carry a biting candor. They are not my words; they are the words of our Lord, Jesus Christ. They are, thereby, the very word of God.

Matthew 7:6 (NKJV)
⁶ Do not give what is holy to the dogs; nor cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you in pieces.

If we take this as an absolute prohibition to every ministry to sinners, we make its meaning absurd. Jesus, was a friend of sinners and attached himself to them. In fact, every Christian was first a dog or a swine that had a Gospel pearl thrown to him or her by a faithful witness.

I remember a man named Ira, who I met while working in a walk-in Christian coffee house in the central business district of my home town. He was one of the finest Christian men I ever knew. Ira had an intriguing conversion testimony. He readily admitted that for the first twenty years of his marriage he would drink himself to a point of unconsciousness every weekend night. His wife would make him sleep on a cot in the basement. Ira had a neighbor who was a fine Christian man and one who had a compassion for the lost and spiritually perishing sinner. This neighbor persistently endeavored to reach him with the life changing truth of Jesus Christ – that is, his perfect life, atoning death, victory over the grave, his place at God's mighty right hand, and the certainty of his promise to return one day to restore his Kingdom in it full glory. Ira said they would talk way into the night, all the while Ira kept drinking, and to the wee hours of the morning. By his own admission, Ira was a mean drunk and would call his Christian friend every foul name he could. Still this Christian man would answer his abuse with kindness. One night just before Ira passed out; the man did something that finally reached Ira. He sat on the floor, with his back supported by the edge of Ira’s cot and he sang to him every gospel song he knew. Ira reported that he began to weaken and his heart began to soften as he realized that this Christian fool would humiliate himself by singing (badly) just to reach him with the Gospel.

While our Lord admonishes us to not labor too long with the stubborn sinner there is surely a place for persistence. Two challenges. Are you persistent in your aim to bring a lost friend or liberal colleague to the Savior? Perhaps, you are the dog or pig Jesus had in mind? Maybe your heart has grown cold to the saving power of the Gospel? Maybe you have turned on the messenger of Divine grace and torn such a one to pieces because you have so long resisted the call of the Spirit and persistently failed to turn away from your sin and toward the Savior?

Much of the energy that persecutes faithful witnesses to the Gospel within the Presbyterian Church (USA) are wild dogs and ravenous swine whose hearts are cold to the work of the Spirit. We can throw pearl after pearl after pearl to those who are ashamed of the Gospel. We can speak the truth in love to those who have replaced it with the latest political cause or with some form of shallow “spiritual” exercises. We can even try to win a hearing for the saving truth from those who have replaced the truth for a lie.

 

While this is a noble cause that has been advanced and blessed by thousands of missionaries in far more hostile environs than a middle class liberal dominated churchly setting; while we can wait for the movement of the Spirit to bring a sweeping revival in the PC(USA); while we can attach our love for the tens of thousands lost hell-bound sinners in its pews and pulpits, we can also shake the dust from our sandals and labor to gather the harvest in more promising fields.

Nicolas Cop Out

The gorgeous solemnities of the day wound up with a horrible autodafé of six Protestants: they were suspended by a rope to a machine, let down into burning flames, again drawn up, and at last precipitated into the fire. They died like heroes. The more educated among them had their tongues slit. Twenty-four innocent Protestants were burned alive in public places of the city from Nov. 10, 1534, till May 5, 1535. Among them was Etienne de la Forge (Stephanus Forgeus), an intimate friend of Calvin. Many more were fined, imprisoned, and tortured, and a considerable number, among them Calvin and Du Tillet, fled to Strassburg.

This is how one historian summarizes the context under which John Calvin wrote the first edition of this cool calm three hundred page exposition of the Gospel. He is in exile from his own country and in danger of losing his life because he helped write an inflammatory speech delivered by his friend and professor, Nicolas Cop. As is often stated by scholars, Calvin did not leave with Cop right after he delivered this inaugural lecture to the University faculty. Calvin got out of town the night before. (Smart man!) In the speech Cop presented a case for the Protestant reforms. You might say that Calvin, choosing the best side of valor, Copped out.

As for me, I just learned last week that an angry mob of twenty or so again middle-class, middle aged men and women are meeting secretly in comfortable living rooms to talk about others in the congregations who desire to change from one Presbyterian denomination to another. While they are strategizing to keep control of the future, they are only incidentally criticizing me for stirring up discontent and writing about their particular sin the congregation's weekly newsletter that has a circulation of around 200 readers.

 

They have become in league with a committee in my presbytery who had the authority to remove me from this pastorate if they can find evidence that I am fanning the flames of discontent and thereby fomenting schism.  This process can also take away my ordination as a minister of the Gospel. Worse than that, they can blame me for the congregation splitting in two. I trust the reader will draw the clear analogy between the mobs in Paris and my harrowing battle with the forces of complacency and petty bickering.

This morning, while standing in the shower, I took a quick but thorough inventory of all my limbs; they remained attached to my body. My back was free from the wounds associated with flogging. My neck had no rope burns. My head was affixed to neck, which was attached to the rest of my aging body. I checked the church calendar for the forseeable future and a torturous death at the hands of an angry is not mentioned.

I stand to lose my chosen career after more than three relatively peaceful decades pursuing it. Instead of leaving with a few books, little money in my purse, and only one change of clothing, as many of the refugees in Calvin’s day did, I might lose a few thousand dollars a year from my otherwise modestly generous pension and will be barred from ever being a Presbyterian pastor again. It is not the gallows I face. It is a reasonably comfortable retirement taken a couple years before I had planned to take it. It is a future in a hostile denomination that no longer wants my services or a reasonable faithful denomination that does not need my services. 

Being the petty little narcissist I am, fit only to be called a Christian by God’s mercy and finished work of Jesus who purchased my full pardon, I am anxious about my prospects and depressed by the state of my suffering. OOOOOh, people are meeting in secret saying unflattering and mostly untrue things about me. OOOOh, scary, scary, they are hoping to blame me for dividing of a lack luster congregation that has been in a carnal power struggle between a number of egotists for decades before I even knew the congregation existed. Even when they were under no stress, they ate up and spit out the past seven pastors who tried to lead them into deep spiritual waters.

John Knox of Scotland was arrested, banished, and sentences to a prison ship where he rowed while chained to a bench, deep in the bottom of a ship. I stand with him in his persecution. (Reader, please note that this is scarcasm.) I am not able to show physical wounds but my self esteem been under constant assault and I have lost many a sleepless night worrying about my career and my pension.

What do I learn from Nicolas Cop? Very little, I’m afraid. Like me his heart was right but he settled for a comfortable life over against a life of richer meaning and faithful witness for the truth. At forty, while serving the royal family as their personal doctor, he dies too young, but not as one who had his life taken at the hands of angry wicked men. His life had a season of courage sandwiched between years of mundane accomplishments.

This imbalanced proportionality of perceived sacrifice for the entire “Renewal Movement” with the Presbyterian Church (USA) needs to be recognized by congregations who lost their property and ministers who lost their jobs. Suffering Christians throughout the world today, are testifying for Christ. This is costing them their lives, their family, and their possessions; but, it is not costing them their faithful witness. No one or nothing can take that from us, we must willing remain silent for our Christian witness to end. Even given the coward I am, "For Zions sake, I cannot be silent; for Jerusalem's sake I cannot be still."

Presbyterian Feudalism

The property policies of the Presbyterian Church (USA) are not based on biblical standards, or sound doctrine, there is no mention of property in any of the Reformed Confessions, but a form of ecclesiastical feudalism.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, its holdings fell into the hands of those who had the military power to claim it. That included ecclesiastical structures. This power vacuum  gave rise of certain Collectors of privilege, royal families and noblemen. How did they gain the authority to claim vast areas of lands formerly owned by families? Well, they just took it by force or intimidation. Sometimes this intimidation came in the form of theological claims to the land. When you believed the Church controlled your soul's eternal destiny, you dare not question its authority to claim your land. If you couple that with a gang of armed men, it is easy to see how land owners submitted to the property claims of the Church and the State.

Historians have labeled this system of land ownership, feudalism. From a functionalist perspective, it proved to create an orderly society. The farmers and herdsmen were free to work the land and gain the benefits of its bounty. The true owners merely wanted their fair share of the "wealth" produced by the land the supposedly owned.

After several generations any farmer would say, "I work this land but it is not mine, I have been entrusted this land for use and benefit of my lord." That is a system that is mutually satisfying.

One of the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation was the eventual end of feudalism. The priesthood of all believers became basis for the human rights of every person to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. No government, civil or churchly, could take property owned by another without a due process of law. Governments existed of and for the people of the society. Under feudalism, governments kept the powerful in power and protected their "lords" right to take the wealth produced by the labor of others.

We find remnants of this antiquated mindset in various places. In the system of "strong men" found in Latin America a single leader will hold claim to the land through an oligarchy of families who may have economic ties to international corporations. If you ask any tyrant or benevolent dictator if they favor democracy they would say, “Naturally.” If you press him further he would say I do everything with the interests of my people in mind.” Should anyone demand autonomy and self-sufficiency or truly free markets and unfettered private ownership of land and property, they would be considered “traitors of the people” not traitors of the dictator or its oligarchy.

The property clause of the Presbyterian Church (USA) states that all property (both real and personal), paid for and maintained by congregations, is, in fact only held “it trust” for “the use and benefit” of the collective “Presbyterian Church (USA).” Here is how it is described. Notice how it negates freedom in its first line. The “organic body” is the artificial self servicing construct to justify the denial of the human right of a group of Christians to determine how they can best be faithful to God. This through the stewardship of property own solely by God.

The church is not a voluntary association of those who share the same opinions and experiences, but is an organic body called into existence by God that celebrates and transmits through the ages the name and knowledge of Jesus Christ. The constitutional provisions under which congregations hold property for the benefit of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) arise out of and reflect our theological conviction that this denomination constitutes one indivisible body, which itself is part of the body of Christ, and which encompasses not only the visible church today but our forebears and heirs in the one holy, catholic, and apostolic church (F-1.0302). (This is from the office of the General Assembly's Advisory Opinion 19 at opa.pcusa.org)

Defenders of this form of feudalism will claim that this system of collective ownership creates and maintains the unity of the Church. As you read above, they will use theological and religious terms to justify their confiscation of lands they never owned and the wealth they never worked a single day to earn. If you carry out the logic of this paragraph, all Property is held in trust for God's Church - that is, "one holy, catholic, and apostolic church." So the Presbyterian Church (USA) does not own our property, God does.