SUNDAY, MARCH 9, 2008

THE FIFTH SUNDAY IN LENT

________________________________________________

Dear Friends in Our Lord Jesus:

The Battle of Britain was raging with relentless ferocity. German bombs were exploding throughout London with nightmarish regularity. And the English people were fighting for their lives with heroic desperation. The year was 1940.

At the peak of the war’s turbulence, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. William Temple, journeyed to Oxford to conduct a teaching mission. On the last evening of the archbishop’s mission, a crowded congregation of students and faculty swelled into St. Mary’s Church. All were desperate for words of hope, words of inspiration, words of confidence. And, yet, the scholarly archbishop spoke in simple terms about the love of Jesus.

At the close of the evening, the church was filled with the strains of Isaac Watts’ timeless hymn “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.” But before the final verse began, Dr. Temple stopped the singing and said to the hushed crowd: “I want you to read over this verse before you sing it. They are tremendous words. If you don’t mean them at all, keep silent. If you mean them even a little, and want them to mean more, then sing them very, very softly.” The words are: “Were the whole realm of nature mine/ That were an offering far too small/ Love so amazing, so divine/ Demands my soul, my life, my all.”

The archbishop believed completely that the greatest act of love, hope, courage, inspiration, confidence, and righteousness happened in the year 30 AD on a hard Roman cross on a hillside outside the city of Jerusalem. The love that God poured out from the cross was, quite simply, the single most important event in all of human history. And there was nothing more important that the English people could do during the World War than to surrender their lives to God.

The same is true today. There is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- more important for us to do.

-- The Very Rev. Dr. Steve Sellers +