[AI translation] Dear Brothers and Sisters! There is assurance and commission, promise and mandate in this Word, in this word of God, which the Lord spoke to a man named Isaac some 3,000 years ago. And the power of the Bible is precisely that the words of God, which were once spoken to very definite, very real people, are just as valid today as they were then. They do not pass away with the people who have since long since died, but the word of God is an immortal, living word, a living Word, a speech in which God always speaks again, speaks, speaks! That is the secret of this Word, and that is why the encouragement and the task, the promise and the commission in this Word are still valid and true today: 'Abide on this earth, and I will be with you and bless you.' I would almost dare to say that there is nothing this world, and modern man in it, needs more than this very encouragement and commission. This Word speaks into two of the greatest problems of modern humanity.One of the great, great problems of modern man is loneliness, that the more he is crowded, the more he is orphaned, the more he is left to himself. I read somewhere the other day that the answering clerk, who answers all sorts of questions, one evening, when his bell rang again for the umpteenth time that day, he shouted into the receiver, as he always does: 'Good evening, this is the answering clerk. "Oh, thank you very much," a sad voice answered on the other end, "I just wanted to hear one human voice before I went to sleep. In talking to people, I always notice how many people suffer from a sense of loneliness, how much difficulty older and younger people have in not having anyone who really cares about their existence, who really thinks about their questions, who really cares about their innermost concerns, who they can open up to. The young girl feels that her diary is a more intimate friend than her mother. There is a woman who trusts her cat more than any man trusts his son. There is a man who trusts his cigarette more than his wife... In this great crowd, we live side by side without ever really getting close to each other. Some people are pained by their orphanhood in society, others no longer realise how profoundly lonely they are, wandering among so many people.
This loneliness is in some ways an ancient human fate. It is the consequence of sin. It results from the fact that man has lost God, and therefore feels essentially self-absorbed, left to himself, without any deeper contact, without any inner contact. And the further mankind is separated from God, the greater the problem of the process of orphanhood becomes. That is why the Word that Isaac received from God as an encouragement is so important for us today: 'I will be with you and bless you'. I would like to encourage everyone here to dare to take this Word of God literally.
God says to you, "I will be with you." What this means is that every day of the year that is just beginning - in the happy, upbeat hours as well as in the dark anxieties - you should always remember: you began this year with someone standing beside you and saying, "I will be with you!" Maybe there are others around you, loved ones, who are also saying to you at home, "I will be with you. Maybe you are not yet a spiritually alone person. Maybe your life partner is holding your hand and encouraging you on the threshold of this year: "I will be with you, I will not leave you! Perhaps parents say this to their child, or a grown-up son to his doting mother, or good friends, neighbours to each other: We won't leave each other, we'll stay together! Very well, you are doing the right thing, but then another Someone comes between you and says: I will be with you! And even if you had no one else in the whole world, this one Someone will come to you now and whisper in your ear: I will be with you!
And this one Someone says it in a different way, with a different power than we can say it to each other. Because no matter how much we love someone and how much we want to be with them, our possibilities are limited, we cannot always be there for them, to protect them, to protect them, to help them in every situation. And, even if we live in the most extreme community with someone, every person has those lonely hours when even the closest person cannot help. There are moments, times of pain, of grief, of shock, when, despite the most loving human compassion, the desire to help, the soul is left alone with its misery. This one Someone can then enter into the most closed solitude and say so: I will be with you there! Let this be written on the gate through which we are entering this new year: 'I will be with you! And so let us always remember this, perhaps when something is weighing on our lives, when no one can help us, when we think we are all alone: let us remember that at the beginning of this year He encouraged us, He promised us for every hour of the year ahead: 'I will be with you!
But how do we know with such certainty that this promise, spoken to Isaac of old, is also for us? That this ancient Word is still valid today? Because the miracle of Christmas, which we have just celebrated a week ago today, almost seals this Word. Because Christmas was the fulfilment of the ancient Old Testament prophecy, written in Isaiah: 'Behold, the virgin shall conceive in her womb and bear a son, and his name shall be called Immanuel, which means God with us'. Listen: the Old Testament name of Jesus Christ, Immanuel, means in English exactly what God says in this Word: "God is with us - I will be with you!" The miracle of Christmas is precisely that the One who made the universe, who is greater than all, who is more powerful than the forces of nature, who is above fate, who holds all things in His hands: this One unites Himself with us, unites Himself with us and says: I will be with you. I no longer want to be without you. It is almost as if it were saying that God can no longer be happy, at rest, without me and without you - or at least He does not want to be, and that we can believe this incredible thing, He descends among us, He wants to be where we are: in our miserable bodies, right in our human lives! That is the miracle of Christmas. We celebrated it just a week ago, so now it is: let us dare to believe what we have celebrated, let us dare to believe that now our dear divine brother and Lord, from whose manger we come, comes with us and, in the meantime, he encourages us: 'I will be with you! And I will bless you! I bless you by being with you! That is the greatest blessing of all, that I am with you! He does not say that I will make all your aspirations succeed, that I will fulfil all your desires. In fact, most certainly, many of our wishes will remain unfulfilled, and we will often find that He does not give us what we have asked Him for. There will be pain, there will be disappointment, there will be sickness, there will be sadness in the new year. Jesus does not deceive you! He says: I will be with you in all these things and bless you! Trust in Me, count on Me, My blessing will not depart from you, and in all your troubles and trials you will not be an orphaned, abandoned man: you will be a blessed man! I will be with you, blessing you, so that you yourself will be a blessing!
But apart from orphanhood, there is another great problem of modern humanity, even more acute than the first: the mortal threat which is keeping the world in growing terror. We hear a lot about it all the time, and I do not waste much time on it. It is without doubt the biggest problem facing the world today. At the III World Evangelical Assembly in America in the autumn, the well-known Bishop Lilje summed up this problem in moving words. Let me say here, as I have already said in one of our Bible studies, that I read a very interesting article in a German engineering journal which tries to draw conclusions about what the world will be like in the year 2000 by looking at the forces of technical and economic development today. This engineer describes how, on the basis of the most sober scientific investigation, it can be concluded that humanity faces two possibilities: either a prosperity never dreamed of or the possibility of total destruction never imagined. It is possible that a world era will dawn in which there will be no more hunger, unemployment or poverty, but it is equally possible that everything will be destroyed, that humanity will commit suicide. But whether the path leads to an earthly paradise or to ultimate catastrophe depends, writes the engineer, not on material forces but on spiritual and, above all, moral forces. And so he continues: If there is to be a world worth living in in the year 2000, a continent worth living on, then this can only be achieved if the part of humanity that calls itself Christian lives its Christianity in deadly earnest. The man of today should apply the teachings and doctrines of Christ to his daily life in a much more serious way, and take them much more literally than we usually do. This part of our Word, "Abide on this earth," is a mandate to do so. Or, as the modern Hungarian translation gives a better sense of the original expression used here, "As a stranger, as a stranger, sojourn in this land.
There is a strange dichotomy in this Word: one is that we Christians are strangers, foreigners in this land! We walk among people with the knowledge, I would say the self-consciousness, that our true home is elsewhere, that we are not meant to stay on this earth forever. We do not live as people who have all their hopes, all their aspirations, all their lives tied to this earth. Above and beyond all earthly concerns, we have a higher concern: we are always, while we live on this earth, just on our way somewhere, like a tourist in transit to our final home. We live as if we know that real life is still ahead of us. So on the one hand we are on this earth as strangers, let us never forget that, but on the other hand we are not strangers on this earth. So everything that is on this earth, living, moving, is very important, not meaningless and not indifferent to us.
It would be a very serious misunderstanding to think that because we are looking to the future, we do not have to take this earthly stage of our journey seriously. In fact, our very journey into the future is in itself a great commitment, a huge responsibility. It obliges us to live on this earth as citizens of the eternal world. It obliges us to realise on this earth as much as possible of the values of heaven, of the powers of love, goodness, kindness, joy and peace. To be able to inform and inform others on this earth in the perspective of eternity. Christians, true Christians, are strangers on this earth because they proclaim with their whole being, with all their actions, a great message of victory. That there is a Saviour of this world, in Whom, by faith, the power of sin is simply lost in them and another power is made manifest: the power of God. Those who represent the Christ in this world, who has already triumphed over the forces of destruction and death - demonic terror - once by the power of life. Do you sense the global significance of this task, this mandate: to live on this earth as a stranger, as a foreigner, as a citizen of heaven?!
I often wonder, on a weekday, when the church door is closed, where is the congregation that used to come here on Sunday to hear the Word, to pray, to sing - what are they doing now? How do they live? Can they be counted on in the outside world? Or is he lying dead until next Sunday, when he will wake up again for a short time? Will he not deny himself out in the world? Can we notice on a weekday that there are people of Christ in this world, in factories, offices, family homes, streets, cinemas, concert halls? I believe that in this new year the question of what the congregation does after worship will become increasingly important?
It is becoming increasingly clear that worship does not end at the church door. Christ's people remain Christ's people when the service is over. And that is when it is needed in this world. In this orphaned world threatened with total destruction, Jesus Christ is truly the only hope, the Jesus Christ whom His people can bring into this world, can live into this world. This is what the Lord is encouraging us to do now and sending us to do when He says to us on the threshold of 1958.
Amen
Date: 1 January 1958 (New Year)
Lesson
Mk 9,35-38