Church in America

Hard Times...Hard Lines

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Rev. R. J. Rooney
Senior Pastor, Verona (MS) UMC
May 25, 2001

"Sin will be rampant everywhere, and the love of many will grow cold" (Matthew 24:12).

I see things differently than many of my peers in ministry. I was not raised in the household of faith. I never went to Sunday School or Vacation Bible School when I was a child. Those I grew up around fluctuated between agnosticism, existentialism, and atheism. The great
hymns of the Church were alien to me. "Stairway to Heaven" was my hymn and I never heard of "A Mighty Fortress." I saw more drugs and violence before I was thirteen than most of my peers will ever see or imagine (mercifully) in a lifetime.

I have seen knives drip with blood, dead bodies unnaturally contorted, and handguns placed against person's heads with the hammer cocked. I have heard screams of terror and pain. It was the same whether it was the inner city of Memphis, Tennessee or the sparsely populated rural
countryside of southwest Ohio. I know what it means to be abandoned and reviled. My mother left my father and me without a word or a goodbye when I was only seven. My father demanded that I help fund his drug habit or get out when I was seventeen and so I left home. I turned to alcohol for the next five years and was fast becoming a replica of my father.

But God saved me. He saved me by the hand of some people who loved me enough to tell me I was wrong to live in sin and would pay a terrible price for it if I continued unabated. Then they told me about Jesus and invited me to their church. And they persisted...in their rejection of my riotous lifestyle and their evangelistic presentation of the gospel of grace. How I thank God for both.

I have experienced on a small and personal scale what Jesus said would be a prevalent characteristic of the last days. Sin was rampant and unchecked in my childhood and youth and love was not only cold but meaningless. That is why I am so angry about the direction some of my peers are trying to take Christianity and so disappointed in many leaders of the Church who prefer to cowtow to every uncomfortable issue rather than stand firm and fast against those issues that are clearly repudiated by Scripture.

Love is not blanket and thoughtless acceptance. It is not an act of love to give a wino enough money to buy a cheap bottle of wine just because he asks you to with a quiver in his voice and a tear in his eye. It is just as thoughtless and wrong for the Church to endorse homosexuality by calling it an "orientation" just because homosexuals are demanding recognition. Likewise, for schools of theology to frown upon and even prohibit masculine references to God by their faculty and students just because the radical feminists are offended by calling God "Father" or "He" is not only cowardly but silly. How true it is that when sin is flagrant and rampant, love is indeed cold and indifferent. People living in sin do not need thoughtless affirmation any more than they deserve mindless condemnation.

What they need is what I received and that which changed my life: sincere instruction. But that takes time and sacrifice. Time is a precious commoditity to anyone in a spiritual leadership position. So precious is time that for many it has become an idol. Lives are planned and lived around appointment books and calendars. Sacrifice has become what Christ did for us rather than what is expected of us. Anything that could be perceived as bucking the hierarchy or a stand in opposition to something can get in the way of advancement. Robert Bork makes a very perceptive albeit sad observation in his book "Slouching Towards Gomorrah" about this very issue when he says, "Clergy and church bureaucrats are members of the intellectual class and look to that class for approval, an approval they cannot win through their merits as religionists, but only through their political attitudes and poltical usefulness" (p. 282).

I submit that the abundance of sin in our culture and the acquiescence of much of the Church to it is truly evidence that the love of many has grown cold. I would still be enslaved as a citizen of the kingdom of darkness had I not been told that a life without Christ was an affront to God and my behavior and lifestyle were evidence that I was immersed in sin and that I would pay a terrible price for continued rebellion. I was not yelled at. I was not ridiculed. I was not intentionally embarrassed. I was instructed.

Hard times do not necessitate blanket acceptance masquerading as love. Hard times require hard lines. Let it be ridiculed as "religious fundamentalism." Let it be scorned as "right-wing extremism." Let the accusations of "Intolerance!" fly. I do not care any more because I am
certain that in the throne room of the Heavenly Temple it is called "sacrificial love."

"Neither do I condemn you; go your way. From now on sin no more" (John 8:11).