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Today's message is delivered by Reverend Dr. Bruce Wheeler Thielman. Today's sermon is entitled, "Outside the Gates." We shall continue in worship by focusing our attention on the letter to the Hebrews, chapter 13.

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I begin the reading at verse 8. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. Do not be led away by diverse and strange teachings, for it is well that the heart be strengthened by grace, not by foods which have not benefited their adherents.

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We have an altar from which those who serve the tent have no right to eat. For the bodies of those animals whose blood is brought into the sanctuary by the high priest as a sacrifice for sin are burned outside the camp. So Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own

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blood. Therefore let us go forth to him outside the camp and bear the abuse which he endured. For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city which is to come. Through him then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is,

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the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name. Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God. And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his word.

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Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. A few hours before I stepped into this pulpit to preach my first sermon as the minister of this Church, I drove to the top of Mount Washington, and looking out over this city,

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I prayed this prayer, "O God, give me this city for Jesus' sake." That prayer has not been answered, at least insofar as I can presently see and understand it. And I was talking to a friend about this, and he said, "Well, never forget that Jesus

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didn't like cities very much. He spent very little time in them. When he wanted to talk to people, he drew them out of the city before he addressed them, and even at the end of his life when he was ministering principally to Jerusalem, he insisted

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every evening on going out to the country town of Bethany to spend his evening's rest." Well, all of that is true. But it's also true that Jesus wept over Jerusalem, and it's also true that our faith grew as it moved from city to city.

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Paul carried the gospel to places like Corinth and Ephesus and Philippi and Rome and Athens. Indeed, after the Sermon on the Mount, the greatest sermon in the New Testament is the sermon which Paul preached at Athens. Now, it may be that Paul did not expect to win these cities, but there is no doubt that

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he at least made an effort in that direction. Now since New Testament times, of course, cities have continued to grow not only in size but also in importance. Cities are today the centers of art, education, business, industry, and entertainment.

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But cities are also places of dirt, noise, traffic, isolation, greed, violence, and crime. It's interesting to notice that 75 percent of the citizens of this country today live in cities in spite of what cities have become. And if the prophets of the future are correct, then by the year 2000, fully 95 percent of

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our citizens will live in cities. And surely Jesus will be concerned for all of these people. I think then that Christ cares about the city, even though the city does not care about Christ. And make no mistake about that.

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Jesus wept over Jerusalem, but there is no evidence of any city ever weeping over Jesus. The city rejects Christ, for the city is essentially a godless place, and I know of no contradiction to that from the first century until this very day. Understand then that the city rejects our Savior.

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Now the author of the book of Hebrews captures this thought in the words which I read to you this morning. He says that Jesus was crucified outside the gates of the city. Now this phrase "outside the gates" immediately takes us back into the world of Old Testament

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sacrifice. Peter taught in the book of Leviticus that the people of that day would place their hands upon the head of some animal, thereby symbolically transferring to the animal their sins. The animal then was slain in an act of sacrifice, and its body was carried outside the camp

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or outside the city, somewhere beyond the walls, to be burned. The author of Hebrews sees this as a kind of parallel of the experience of Jesus, for Jesus takes upon himself the sins of the whole world. He is the sin-bearer beyond all sin-bearers, and he is put to death outside the gates.

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These cities, which are places of corruption, bad schools, street people, pornography, vice, and violence, want nothing to do with Christ. They still want to put him outside the gates, and we must never forget that. Sometimes the city's actions are very overt and very evident.

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For example, some years ago, as most of you know, Hollywood regularly produced films which focused on what one might call sandstorms and sandals, biblical epics, they were called, and pictures like The Robe, King of Kings, Quo Vadis, and the like. And people went to see these pictures, great numbers of people.

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And there were also many films made in which actors like Bing Crosby or Pat O'Brien or Spencer Tracy or Richard Todd played the parts of clergymen who were admirable and respected, and those pictures too were seen and enjoyed by millions. But what kind of films are coming out of Hollywood today?

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Well, we have the film King David, in which David is described as a psychotic who does not become mentally healthy until he rids himself of his religious delusions. Then of course we have The Last Temptation of Christ, which appeared a few years ago, in which Jesus is pictured as a simpering, whimpering idiot with no inner strength or

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courage whatsoever. Then there's the film Monsignor, which talks about a Catholic priest who seduces a nun and then invests the money of his church in mafia enterprises. Or there's the film Agnes of God, which is about a nun who gets pregnant and then murders

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her baby and tries to dispose of the body in a wastebasket. There are films like True Confessions or Mass Appeal or The Mission, which look upon the Church as being nothing other than an instrument of cynicism and hypocrisy. Or there are films like Pass the Ammo or Salvations or Riders of the Storm, which with savage

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satire picture Protestant evangelists whose real goals in life are nothing other than sex and cash. There's the movie Malone, about a Christian fascistic cult. Or the film Crimes of Passion, about a minister who works on Skid Row during the day and murders

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prostitutes at night. And we must not omit The Blob, which features a minister who in a drunken orgy seeks to loose the terrible blob upon the people of the earth. And more recently than that, there's Poltergeist II, in which a group of people rise from their

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graves led by a Bible-beating preacher and chase the living, trying to suck them down to similar death. Now if you ask Hollywood why it depicts the Christian religion as it does today, they will reply that they do what they do because these are the kinds of films that people want

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to see. But the fact of the matter is, every single one of the films which I have named has been a financial failure. Every single one of them has lost money, some a great deal of money.

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In other words, these pictures are not being made because multitudes are expected to come and see them. People stay away from these films in droves. These pictures show an overt and aggressive anti-Christian bias.

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They are efforts to keep Christ outside the gates. Of course, most of the time, the city's criticism of Christ is more subtle. It is not so naked and mean-spirited. Look at our own city.

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Pittsburgh establishes a committee on ethics in government. It places no clergypersons on that committee. The Post-Gazette puts out a special edition celebrating its 200th anniversary, and in that edition, it describes significant events in the 200-year history of this city.

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Not a single religious event is noted. A church writes a letter to the Three Rivers Arts Festival and says that it would like to have a display of art in which the artists seek to uplift the spirits of the people, and they will pay for the pavilion to display these pictures, and they will offer cash awards

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to those who do the best work, whose pictures win the prizes. The letter is never answered. The University of Pittsburgh celebrates its 100th anniversary and goes through a whole year of celebration without ever mentioning even once that it was begun by a church.

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We have a marathon in this city, and we have it on Sunday mornings, and at the meeting where the clergy confronted the leaders of the marathon to ask them to put it at some other time to make it easier for worshipers to get to their churches, the reply made by the leader of the marathon effort was this.

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No one could concern us less than the churches. The churches are now being warned that they may lose their tax-exempt status in spite of the fact that across the years they have made some of the most significant contributions which this city knows, and alone hold up the banner of moral purity in this place.

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We spend millions of dollars on Grant Street or to remodel Mellon Square, but not a dime to improve conditions in the Hill District, where small Christian congregations with very little money and practically no professional personnel try to carry on a task with which the whole city should be concerned.

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Twenty-five percent of the young black men in America today between the ages of 18 and 27 are either in jail or on parole. That's a greater percentage than those who are in college, and yet we as a city are doing nothing to try to reach those young men in the name of Christ or on the basis of any

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other moral philosophy or ethic. It's taken us years to get a black on city council. It might interest you to know that a few weeks ago the city rearranged its schedule so that the street cleaner would go by the front of this church during the Sunday morning worship

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service. I'm sure you've heard it. He has passed four times this morning. I got in touch with the city street department and suggested that they go back to their other

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schedule because the sound of the street cleaner is picked up on the television and radio. Oh, they assured me it would be taken care of, but it continued just as it had before. So I called again and I talked to the chief assistant of the member of city council who is in charge of things like the street cleaning.

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He assured me that he would call me back, but he never did. And this morning we exceeded all records with four passages in front of the church instead of the usual two. Now that seems, of course, a very small thing, and I don't want to make anything out of it

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except to say that again and again this city has shown contempt for the things of worship, for the things of God, for the things of Christ. It hasn't been an open rejection. It has been something far more subtle and therefore, I would suggest, far more insulting.

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There is some honor in being fought, but there's no honor in simply being ignored. The city overtly or subtly rejects Christ. And the city also rejects those who follow Christ. Lovers enjoy being together.

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That's one of the marks of those who are in love. And because Christians love their Lord and their Lord loves him, there is a desire on the part of Christians to be with their Savior. And the author of Hebrews picks this up when he says in the very next verse, "Therefore,

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let us, let Christians, go forth to Christ outside the camp, outside the gates. Let us go and be with him, bearing abuse for him." The church, you see, is to be outside the gates too, taking some of the sufferings of Jesus upon itself.

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Indeed, the very word for church in the New Testament, ecclesia, means "the called out, the separated one." Now in the 15th and the 16th verses of this passage, the author of Hebrews tells us what the church's witness is to be.

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It is, first of all, to be loyal to the name of God, and it is, secondly, to do good things for others in the name of God. Now we will not go into a study of these things in detail this morning, but I ask you to notice that, even as Hebrews calls us to do this, it says that those who go outside the gates

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in the name of Christ and to be with Christ will be rejected. They will suffer abuse as he was rejected. This would be a much happier world if, when you did a good thing, you got some applause for it.

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But that is not most often the case. Christ challenged the evil and the prejudice and the greed and the hypocrisy of the city, and because of that, he was put outside the gates. Because the city, you see, cannot stand that which is different, especially when that which

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is different makes the conscience of the city uncomfortable. Morally superior people are despised in this world. I would respectfully remind you that there were three crosses outside Jerusalem on that Friday.

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Two of them bore men who had not lived up to the moral level of the society. They were criminals. But one of them, the one in the middle, bore a man who was crucified because he lived above the moral level of the community.

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Whether one lives below it or above it, the reward is the same, a cross. Now this has led the Church many times to become very defensive. I don't think it's an accident that most churches in our cities are built to look like forts and that they have stained glass so that nobody can see in and nobody can see out.

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We've developed a kind of catacombs mentality. Even with the most holy moments of the faith, we have done this. Take one of the sacraments, the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. The sacrament of the Lord's Supper was a very simple meal in which simple people reached

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out for bread and wine. But the Church has made it something of silver and of white linen, something of precise order, something of theological intricacy and debate. And in doing this, you see, it has made that supper something remote from the world.

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The Church even meets in the city when the city is largely empty, when those who live and work here are not here. One can say that the Church avoids contact with the city. And I know there are 50 different arguments that can be advanced against that suggestion,

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but I think there is still some truth in saying that the Church does not like to confront those who will hurl hurt at it. And the Church has also had a tendency to become very selective in its ministry. If you've ever taken a course in moral philosophy or in ethics, you've heard a question like

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this. A ship sinks. Twelve people manage to make it to the single lifeboat. The lifeboat will only hold eleven.

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So one person on board the boat must be pushed overboard to certain death. Which one of the twelve people in the boat will you choose to throw over the side? The captain of the ship, which has just sunk? A ten-year-old little girl whose parents were drowned in the ship's sinking?

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A young pregnant mother? A drunken sailor? A deck boy? A member of the mafia?

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The ship's cook? An old man who is terminally ill? A wealthy playboy? A minister, an idiot, or a nurse?

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Which one are you going to throw over the side when you have to make a choice? Well, just so the Church confronts all the opportunities for service that it has in the city. And it doesn't have the resources to do all of these things, so it has to make some choices.

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Some things have to be thrown overboard. And what kind of choices does the Church make? Most often, it chooses the ministries which are the easiest. Ministering to pleasant people in pleasant places.

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Avoiding confrontation with hard-core evil, with those who will never say thank you no matter what you do to or for them. Keeping its distance from those. Christ calls out through the writer of Hebrews, and he says, "Come outside the gates and bear

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my reproach with me." Remember please, he was not crucified on some green hill far away. It was the city dump. It was strewn with dead men's bones.

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It was a place of injury and pain and agony. And it's not very far away either. It's just outside the gates of the city. He was not put to death between two candles on an altar.

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He was put to death between two thieves in a dump. And he calls to the Church and he says, "Come, come beyond the city's limits in morality. Come beyond the city's limits in sacrifice. Come beyond the city's limits in patience.

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There you will know only the cross, but come unto me." Now some people, of course, when they hear that kind of word, reject it. They say the Church cannot possibly have impact, even if it is willing to go outside the gates. There are always those, of course, of negative spirit, those who prophesy defeat and doom.

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And I would suggest to you that Christian counsel is never to listen to them, but to always listen instead to the Word of God. Just the other evening I was reading again of Tom Dempsey. You remember Tom Dempsey, the professional football player?

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He had half a right foot. And in addition to having half a right foot, he had a crippled right arm. Now he managed to play football during high school and college, but no professional team wanted him.

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Yet he wanted to play. So he prayed about this, and he pushed hard toward his goal, and he persevered. He didn't believe in those who prognosticated about his inevitable failure. He instead gave himself to profound belief in those who said that the promises of God

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come true. And what professional football fan will ever forget that game in which the New Orleans Saints were playing the Detroit Lions, and the score was 17 to 16 with the Lions leading, and there were only 12 seconds left, and New Orleans managed to bring the ball to its own

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45-yard line. But they knew that their only chance at winning the game was to kick a field goal from that position. And to do that, the field goal would have to be 63 yards long, and that was eight yards

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beyond the longest field goal ever kicked. And Tom Dempsey was sent in with his half a right foot and his crippled right arm. He was sent in to kick the ball, and he split the uprights, and he scored the winning point. He said no to those who said it couldn't be done, and he invested himself in pain and

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in effort, and thus in victory. John Burroughs, the naturalist, says that on occasion hawks are attacked by crows or by king birds. And when they are so attacked, they begin to fly higher and higher and higher until

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these lesser birds become afraid of the heights and so give up the chase. Well, just so, the Church has in it many spiritual sparrows who want safe ministries in safe places. These are weak Christians who are only ready for weak service.

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But vigorous believers are those who will climb higher and higher and higher unafraid. And why are they unafraid? Because, and this is the way the writer to the Hebrews closes this passage, it's because the city they are looking forward to is the city that is eternal.

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It doesn't finally matter what happens to the cities on earth. What matters is that the city of God in the kingdom of heaven welcomes all those who are disciples of Christ. Here's what the writer of Hebrews writes.

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Here he says, "We have no lasting city. We seek that city which is to come." Do you remember that scene in Uncle Tom's cabin where Uncle Tom and his wife Chloe are going to be separated forever?

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They are slaves and their owner has sold them one to one slaver and one to another slaver. They will be pulled apart, never to see each other again. And they're in their little shack and Chloe is ironing and folding Tom's shirts for the last time.

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And Tom is sitting reading his Bible, trying to get up the strength and the courage to go into the next room and kiss his sleeping children goodbye, knowing that he will never see them again. And after the heart-wrenching scene in which he is separated from his wife and his babies,

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as he's being carried off in the wagon of his new owner, he thinks of the Bible verses he had been reading minutes before. And the words are these words from Hebrews. "Here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city which is to come, and therefore God

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is not ashamed to be our God." And commenting on this, Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, says, "Those words have promise, have come across time, so that they have a strange power over the minds of people like Tom.

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They stir the soul, they reach down to the depths of being, they rouse as with a trumpet call courage and energy and enthusiasm, where before there was only the blackness of despair." This is the promise which belongs to those who believe. To those who go outside the gates with their Savior who was slain in that place.

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Though crucified on the crosses of the city, we'll know the city that is eternal. So their eyes finally are not on any earthly place, but rather upon that city which is resplendent in glory. That city which has twelve gates, each gate of which is made of a single pearl.

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And Christians have the promise of God that regardless of what the cities of the earth say or do, and regardless of whether the cities of the earth are won or lost, the eternal city still belongs to believers. And the vision of it rouses as a trumpet call and brings forth courage and energy and enthusiasm.

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It defeats despair. We may be outside the gates of this city, but we will not be outside the gates of that city. Those gates will be thrown wide, and when we enter, we will sing the songs that all

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the saints of God who've gone before us have sung. We will sing with them, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

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Let us pray. O God, at the very moment when we are closest to surrender, so fill us with thy Spirit that we cannot but succeed to win forever that city which is eternal in the heavens. To the honor and glory of Jesus Christ, who is the Lord of that city and the Lord of all

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the universe, including all the cities of the universe, as well. Amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]