it is still important, but guided by it, we can put it differently. The Gospel is for all—for the naturally religious and for the naturally irreligious.
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2. Editor’s Note: This is one of the latest sermons composed by CKB, in 2003 and one of the later ones to be preached as well. This is appropriate, for as Kingsley says, the first sermon he ever preached, as a teen, was on this text. This sermon is not a revision of that one, but rather a fresh take on that key text.
‘THE ADVANTAGE OF THE JEW”—Romans 3.1–2
[Preached fourteen times from 10/7/51 at Wesley Memorial Lowfell to 5/28/80 at Thornley]
Do not at once dismiss this text as an academic answer to an antiquated question. If you only take the trouble to transfer it into our own idiom you will find that the question is the most relevant one we could ask on a Sunday morning in the mid-twentieth century. “What advantage has the Jew?” asks St. Paul speaking of the elect and privileged people of God. In this year of our Lord we ask—What good is it to be a Church member? Well you are one; what good is it? Do you know? Do you care? Could you explain it to anyone else? I don’t think we can afford to despise St. Paul’s assistance in finding an answer. But we must first consider how and why the question came to be asked.
HOW AND WHY THE QUESTION CAME TO BE ASKED
You will not understand the question if you do not know what is contained in the first few chapters of this epistle. The first chapter must have given a good deal of pleasure to many of Paul’s Jewish friends. It was the kind of thing they liked. Look at the Gentile world says St. Paul. Take idolatry. Here are people living in a world God has made and instead of worshipping the Creator, they pass him by to worship his creation—humans, birds, four-footed beasts, creeping things. Can you wonder at the consequences that follow from this original offense? Wonder that they are filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness? That they turn to lying, murder, adultery and sodomy? Can you wonder that the whole of life goes wrong when its starting point is wrong? So far so good; but the Jew gets a bad shock in chapter 2.
Are you any better? With all your privileges and advantages are you ahead of the Gentiles? You who boast in the Law and suppose that in it you have the very truth of God himself visible before your eyes; do you not earn greater condemnation? I know you don’t worship a cat or a snake, but do you not do a far more dreadful thing? Do you not worship yourself? In other words, these things being so, and here we come to our question—What is the good of being a Jew?
Now just as Paul pleased the Jews so it is possible to please a Methodist congregation today. I say that in no critical spirit; every preacher knows that it is true. You can go the round of the things that Methodists do not like. Take drink. There is plenty to talk about there. Think of the colossal expenditure, the ruined health, the broken homes, men turned into beasts and some into devils, and children into frightened beaten urchins. Think of gambling. Think of the average weekly budget on the pools. Think of the perversion of thought that turns little words into a combination of providence and fairy godmother, of the demoralizing search for something for nothing. Take sex in all its twists and follies and perversions, from the divorce courts to the filthy words and pictures scribbled in the street and public lavatories.
Of course it is always easy and popular to talk about these things. But I wish Methodists would always read Romans 2 as well as Romans 1. Let us paraphrase it. But suppose you are called a Methodist, and rely upon Methodist law and discipline and are confident in the God who warmed John Wesley’s heart and are quite sure you are appointed by God to tell the world about drink and all the rest of it. Tell me, do you ever dishonor God yourself? As his self-appointed champion do you never let him down? Do you not find at the very heart of your religion a core of self-seeking? Do you never preen yourself on being a bit better than other people? “God I thank thee that I am not as other persons are—drunkards, gamblers, adulterers, or even as this my neighbor who is now in his garden while I am at Church.”
I am sure no one will misunderstand me. I am not defending drunkenness, gambling, and fornication. I am not saying the Church is full of hypocrites and knaves. I am only trying to take sin as seriously, and to see it as inwardly, as does St. Paul. Church membership, if it means no more than having your name in a book and one class ticket means no more than being born a Jew. Church-going, as far as it become mechanical, means no more than circumcision. The Church member is assailed by temptation as much as anyone else. His sins are not so gross, but they can be as devastating in their effects, witness the crass materialism of Methodists who will not for the sake of Christ and the Church part with so much bricks and mortar. Now if all this is true, what is the advantage of the Jew? What is the good of being a Church member? Why should we remain within the structure of organized religion? Paul’s answer is clear, and if he doesn’t get beyond his “firstly,” it is because the “firstly” is so important. The Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God. The Church is the place where the Bible is read and preached and where the sacraments of the Word are distributed. There now remain two further things to say.
THE NEGATIVE ADVANTAGE OF THE BIBLE
Given the Bible, you know where you are, and you know which roads are blind alleys. The Bible is the map of life, not in the sense that it gives you a ready-made commandment for every conceivable set of circumstances—that notoriously it does not do. For example, it does not tell you which way to vote on ballots. It is a map in the sense that you can check your position on the sea of life. The Jew is not necessarily a better person than a Gentile, indeed he may be worse, because his temptations are more subtle; the dutiful member is not necessarily a better person than the person outside the Church. His temptations are real and his sins more corrupting. But there are some things no one can say with a Bible in his hands, some excuses he can never make.
He cannot say “sin doesn’t matter, it makes no difference how I live.” Here is one of the vast dangers of the modern world, you can call it loosely the fallacy of puritanism. And the action itself matters. There is no absolute standard outside the action by which you can measure it or judge it. All that matters is whether you wish to do it and whether it serves your ends. It would be tedious to point out how motives of that kind prevail in the policies of great nations. It might be not uninstructive to estimate the weight of such motives in any general election. How much of what is said is said not because it is true and right but because it is advantageous to me and damaging to my opponent? It is in some respects most urgent to notice how this affects our personal decisions and actions.
I remember a high bank official speaking to me once in perplexity about a bank employee who had told him that he had no motive other than expediency for being honest, that is, the only reason why he didn’t take the bank’s money, or anyone else’s, was because the odds were he would be found out and would be worse off than he would have been on his salary. How can you trust such a person? The moment he sees his opportunity, he will act because he knows no absolute standard of right and wrong, which can say, “This you shall do, this you shall not do.” It seems to me beyond doubt that a continued drift away from religious convictions is bound to result in the dissemination of that attitude. But you can’t think and act like that if you have the Bible. It is not for nothing that the Bible goes into detail here. You shall have a just measure and a just weight, it says. That means that somewhere there, there is something that really is a pint or really is a pound. There are such things because God intends them to be. There is a difference between good and evil because God is one, and not the other. That is the first thing. You in the Church, however you may fail, cannot say sin doesn’t matter.
Nor can he say, “sin isn’t my fault.” Here is another very characteristic reaction of modern life. That evil exists is something only the blindest optimist can deny. But who can blame them? Here, if we care to use labels, are two more fallacies, the economic and the psychological. The world is apt to say today, “True, things are going badly wrong, but the fault lies with the economic system under which we live, the whole framework of life in which we have been brought up.” Or again, “the fault lies with our psychological makeup, for which we are not responsible.” “Because my parents were funny or neglectful or permissive