Mary the Mother of Jesus (1)

Many years ago I was struggling to learn how to preach. It was around then that the elders of my home church in Altus, Oklahoma, invited me to deliver the Sunday-evening sermon.

I have no memory of what that sermon was about. That's probably good. The more I remember about my sermons back then, the more I feel a little embarrassed. There is a true sense in which ignorance is bliss.

What I do remember about that evening is not what I said, but what someone else said afterwards. After the final "Amen," after many of the people had left, I was talking with a woman who said something I haven't forgotten.

Before I tell you what she said, let me describe her to you. She was a widow, about seventy years old, in good health, very active for someone her age. She always looked nice, was soft-spoken, unassuming, kind-hearted, and just a fine person.

We were standing near the back of the auditorium, when she said to me, "I was so glad to hear you mention Mary tonight in your sermon. I don't think you know this about me, but before I became a member of the Church of Christ, I belonged to the Roman Catholic Church."

"No, I didn't know that."

She said, "After I became a member of the Church of Christ, one of the first things I noticed was, it was as if Mary had never lived. The preachers and teachers didn't talk about Mary, which was a shock because, in the Catholic Church, I heard about Mary all the time." 

Then she said, "I understand: the Catholic Church has made her out to be something she isn't. But, you know, there's quite a bit in the New Testament about her. And she was a great person. I sort of miss Mary, and wish I heard more about her."

As you would guess, the lady who said that to me isn't with us anymore. But I like to think of my posts about Mary as being partly for that good Christian woman. More later.

Meta Chestnutt Sager's Letter to Eva Heiliger, February 11, 1945 (8)

In her comments on Christian denominations and church membership, Sager repeated two lines of thought that by her time were commonplace among their heirs of the Stone-Campbell Movement. First, as Sager put it, the various Protestant denominations are "manmade churches" that "all came out of the Catholic Church." Along this line, she offered a brief history lesson on the origins of Heiliger's denomination: "The Methodist Church came out of the Episcopal and that church came from the Catholic church through Henry the VIII." And the Catholic Church did not come into its own until "three hundred years after the Church of Christ was set up on the Day of Pentecost." Therefore, any church established prior to the events recorded in Acts 2 would be too old. Conversely, all churches established since that time are "too young to be the church which Christ told Peter and the other apostles He would build."[1] Second, in keeping with the unity and undenominational character of the church in the New Testament, no one "gets saved" and subsequently joins the church of his choice. Instead, the Lord adds to His church each person who is truly saved, "for it is said in the 2nd of Acts, verse 47, 'And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved.'"[2] Church membership is not someone's choice upon becoming a Christian. The Bible speaks of church membership as the result of a divine act; the Lord adds those who are saved to the church that Christ established.

Notes

[1] This is a reference to Matthew 16:18.

[2] Meta Chestnutt Sager to Eva Heiliger, February 11, 1945.

Meta Chestnutt Sager's Letter to Eva Heiliger, February 11, 1945 (5)

It appears that much of what Sager wrote to Heiliger was in response to a Methodist pamphlet Heiliger had sent as a way of explaining and defending her beliefs and practices.[1] It is impossible to know which pamphlet Heiliger had sent, but it certainly taught the same things found in the 1944 edition of Doctrines and Discipline of the Methodist Church: "We hold that all children, by virtue of the unconditional benefits of the atonement, are members of the Kingdom of God, and therefore graciously entitled to Baptism."[2] The same manual begins its discussion of the administration of the sacrament by saying, "Let every adult person, and the parents of every child to be baptized, to have the choice of sprinkling, pouring, or immersion."[3]

Notes

[1] "Your little pamphlet is good in so far as it goes," wrote Sager, "but your Methodist friends always stay short of baptism." Meta Chestnutt Sager to Eva Heiliger, February 11, 1945.

[2] Doctrines and Discipline of the Methodist Church (New York: Methodist Publishing House, 1944), 40. See also Frank S. Mead, Handbook of Denominations in the United States (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1951), 131-32.

[3] Ibid., 448.