It is not widely remembered today in our enlightened and, truth be told, spiritually impoverished age, that this book was much read and written about in the 19th century by teachers of the church who were most interested in missions and revival. Hudson Taylor, the great missionary to China, wrote commentaries on the book in his columns in the China Missionary, as did many other witnesses to the Gospel who were covering the globe with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, in an urgent mission to get the Gospel of Jesus Christ out to everyone in the world so that they might hasten the day of the Lord's return, something we long for much less today than they did.

Maybe they yearned to meet their Lord again because they had a picture of a young, vigorous God, a lover, radiant and ruddy, who cared about his beloved, the church, and who lived in passionate relationship with her. Oh, yes, the images are dangerous today, and fraught with complications. Not everyone, male or female, wants to be the kind of bride we have in the book of Ephesians, where the writer gets off some rather politically incorrect images about submission and headship for women that don't pass muster. But the bride and this groom in the Song of Songs are not quite as religious as the writer of Ephesians would have. They are both voluble and in love. They speak passionately of each other. They long for each other. They want to be with each other for every good reason.

The 19th century exegetes understood, also, the picture in Revelation 3:20 which we have just heard, to be the one in the Old Testament Song of Songs, or Song of Solomon, where the lover is knocking at the door. "I slept, but my heart was awake. Hark! my beloved is knocking. Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my perfect one; for my head is wet with dew, my locks with the drops of the night."

It was a good image of Christ to bring to the peoples of the world who had not yet heard the name of Jesus, because it spoke of the great drama of salvation in which a young God gives all so that the world might be reconciled unto himself. Jesus stands at the door, eager to be united with his love.

Aimee Semple MacPherson, the powerful woman evangelist of the early part of this century, also used this image of the bride and groom to tell the story of Jesus during her preaching. Donning a white bridal dress, she would preach dramatically from the Song of Solomon about the marriage feast to come, a feast her second husband, Harold MacPherson, soon came to understand was not about them. Her preaching and healing drew thousands of people to her theater in Los Angeles. The magazine she wrote and edited was The Bridal Call, and she used it to further her ministry to great effect. Aimee and her God were young and in love. Evangelism was a natural consequence of her love. She wanted to tell people about her love and she did with passion, theatrical smarts and conviction. Like the Samaritan woman at the well, she had met a man who knew all about her and yet loved her. It seemed like more than good news, it was life!

We, of course, so much more sophisticated than our 19th century grandparents, know this is not about Christ and the church, it is about sex, pure and simple, so we have lost this rich and wonderful image of the love between God and human beings. We modern Christians have a much more sedate and middle-aged view of our relationship with Christ and settle back into the same kind of hopeless state we find the Laodiceans in our lesson. If you remember your Bible history, the book of Revelation begins with seven letters to seven congregations in Asia Minor, most scholars think written during the severe persecution of Christians by the Roman Emperor Domitian during the years 81-96. Among the congregations, there is one in Laodicea that is neither hot nor cold, whom Christ says, in the lesson, he would as soon spew out of his mouth for its lack of ardor. They are quite comfortable with their God and their faith and have long since lost their first love. One could say as well today that a lot of our church life seems rather like that. If God is not dead, he just sits there, like a forgetful old man in the old people's home who knows all the hymns by heart but can't remember where the church is. He is as good as dead. At least that is the way it looks when we look around at the apathy in many of our main-line churches.

The Laodiceans are, according to John in the Revelation, like those in a dead marriage, living without hope, in a kind of despair that cannot even think to imagine what could be the matter. They have grown so self-sufficient that they even refused the help of the Roman empire when their city was destroyed by an earthquake some years before this letter was written. They had grown rich from the selling of eye medicine; they exported at great profit lovely soft black wool, and their bankers were highly successful. But that isn't why the Lord rebukes them, it is that they don't know the state of their own lives. They think they are rich, but they are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind and naked, needy in precisely what they thought themselves rich. Soul take your ease, they say. They haven't been in love for years. For them, God is dead.

The comparison begs to be made. Could it be said that we are living without hope, that we are sunk into a despair so deep we do not even know enough to rouse ourselves from it? We see all around us in the world despair, and seem to have accepted it. Rape, murder, pillage, adultery, untold kinds of cruelty abound in the streets. Daniel Moynihan, in a remarkable study recently published, noted that we have simply decided to accept intolerable levels of chaos and violence because we cannot see what chance there is of making a change. Despair, hopelessness seem to abound as much for the rich as the poor. There seems to be nothing much we can do, so we go numbly on with our lives.

The church acts as though it's brain dead about these findings. We dumbly watch the children playing in traffic and don't tell them not to, for fear of being legalistic or judgmental. We fail to teach them the simplest things of the law, and preach to them an old, boring God. And wallow in sentimental excess of emotion over everybody's pain and suffering, but do little to help prevent it. We weep over the death of an animal, yet are able to tolerate untold cruelty to human beings with nary a tear. A wag remarked this last Easter that today there would have been more uproar over the mistreatment of the ass Jesus rode into Jerusalem than over the crucifixion of three men.

We have started to preach that God, whose very essence is holy, and cannot by definition tolerate unrighteousness, doesn't mind sin and accepts it as much as the sinner. The fact that we might be sinners for whom Christ had to die is simply not mentioned. It's too embarrassing and really a bit gauche. Martin Luther, the great church reformer of the 16th century and the man for whom my Lutheran tradition is named, who once wrote that people thought being a Christian meant they no longer had to worry about keeping God's laws, remarked that the chief work of the devil is to make people feel secure so they heed neither law nor sin. It is to the devil's benefit, Luther says, that we hear nothing in the message of Christ but that we are sweetly secure.

In the letter to the Laodiceans, Christ says that whom he loves he chastens, not makes secure or comfortable. That sounds a bit too much today. Chastening is not thought of as a good thing these days, but we are coming to understand it is important to say no, to set limits, to urge our children to do better, because we love them. The unconditional love of a parent for his or her child is not a bad model to think of here. As a daughter I knew, and am fortunate even now at this late date in my life to know, that my mother's love for me is unconditional and without reserve. But I also can tell you without hesitation that she has sought with all her heart to get me to live in the way that will be best for me, that will lead me into the paths of righteousness, that will bring the least amount of tears. She does this because she loves me and about that there is no dispute. Even now in her old age she frets about how I am doing, whether I am getting my rest, or doing my work well, or writing enough thank you letters. I know that I am incredibly rich because she is there always working to bring the best out of me. Because of that constant pressure, I have been changed as many of you in the audience can realize as you think of the person in your own life who took such care for you. So it is also of your relationship with Christ. It is a relationship that will change you. About this there is not doubt. It will take you where you had not thought to go, teach you what you thought you did not need to know. The Christian life, as we have it in the traditions we have all inherited, is vigorous and challenging, and our only hope when up against the evil one who still roams the earth seeking whom he may devour.

Horace Spafford, a Chicago business man of the last century, learned that lesson in the hardest way. A good friend of Dwight L. Moody, Spafford was a successful business man in Chicago who lost most of his real estate investment in the 1871 fire. Just before that his only son died suddenly. Yet Spafford felt the call to follow Moody and his singer, Ira Sankey, to Europe to help them in their revival meetings there. His wife and four daughters went on ahead while he finished some business. However, the ship carrying his loved ones went down in a storm and only his wife was saved. To lose one child is like a needle in the heart, but all five! What his suffering must have been like we can only imagine. But we do have a rather strong statement of his faith and the strength it brought him. On his way over to meet his grieving wife, as the ship passed over the spot where his dear ones had perished, he wrote the famous hymn, "When peace like a river, attendeth my way, and sorrow like sea billows roll, whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say, it is well, it is well with my soul." Here was a man whose God was alive and all powerful, who gave him life, and whom Spafford longed to see, as he had been promised in the Word. "And, Lord, haste the day, when my faith shall be sight, the clouds be rolled up like a scroll: The trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend: -- Even so, it is well with my soul. It is well, it is well with my soul."

This good news can still be preached, revival can still change individuals, cities like Chicago, even nations, can repent and come to believe that God is alive. It has happened before that people's love for God, who loved them first, has been rekindled by faithful preaching of the Word, which has inspired the renewal of entire cities, or nations. We can, like nations of old, rise up and repent and run to tell others about this God who would have us live holy lives of service to the neighbor, eager to tell about him to any who will hear. We are called to daily repentance, daily examination of our lives so that we see how indeed we have fallen short, and thus deserved nothing but the wrath of God. So be zealous and repent, our Lord says, and tell others about him. I am speaking to each of you out there, you have someone who loves you passionately, who gave himself for you so that you might have life. Christ says to the Laodiceans that he can make them truly rich, he will clothe them with true righteousness and give them sight, so they can see. And now he stands at the door knocking, like the lover in the Song of Songs, calling you to arise and repent, to run to the door where he who gives hope is standing, ready to take your sins on himself, and forgive you, to come in to you and dine, a wedding feast so extravagant not even we in all our riches can imagine it.

Orley Herron: Gracia, you have an interesting position. You teach preaching and you teach hymns and how to write hymns. In my lifetime, I have visited about a thousand churches and I have noticed over my lifetime that there is a difference in the hymns today. I don't hear the majesty of the music coming out worshipping God, and the preaching seems to have gotten away from the scriptures. What do you think about that? Am I incorrect?

Gracia Grindal: Yes, I think you are exactly right. One of the efforts that I am making in my work at the seminary in St. Paul is to get students once again to believe that these words are true and that the words they write and the words they sing have to be biblical. Out of my tradition, we call the hymnal the Experienced Bible. If that Bible hasn't been experienced, people can't sing out of it in a deep way about what has occurred to them and how they have claimed Jesus Christ during that. I think we are sort of dead; God is dead; we're dead. That is not the truth of the scripture, but that is the way we act.

Herron: Do you have favorite hymns?

Grindal: Oh yes, I've got many. It depends on what day, what time.

Herron: Tell me the ones you like most.

Grindal: I am very fond of "When Peace Like a River." That strikes deep into my heart. I am a Lutheran so I like "A Mighty Fortress is Our God." I like Lina Sandell's "Day By Day." I don't know if that is very well known. It's an old Swedish text and tune.

Herron: Yes, I know it well.

Grindal: A wonderful song about the way we live our lives knowing that God is, indeed, with us.

Herron: If we could only know three hymns, are those three of the ones we should know?

Grindal: Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness, no. Out of Chicago you have got the great hymn, "Near to the Heart of God" written by the pastor at Fourth Presbyterian Church. That would be one I would like for some days and I would love to have "O God, Our Help in Ages Past" for another day.

Herron: What is the favorite hymn you have written?

Grindal: I like the one I have written called, "I Will Rest in the Promise of God to be With Me. I Will Rest in the Promise God Cares."