Hebrews #51 - 6:4-6
Speaker Notes The Paradox of Difficult Scripture.
The Collect for the First Sunday of Advent
Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious Majesty, to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
Hebrews 6:4-6
4 It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, 5 who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age 6 and who have fallen away, to be brought back to repentance. To their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace.
Thomas Merton “Seasons of celebration” Chapter 6 The Nativity Kerygma (page 101, 1986 edition) quote:
Christianity is not so much a body of doctrine as the revelation of a mystery. A mystery is a divine action, something which God does in time in order to introduce men into the sanctuary of eternity. Being a religion of mysteries, Christianity is a religion of facts – divine facts, divine actions.
In celebrating the mysteries of Christ as they recur in time, the Church first of all announces these events: “Christ is born!” “Christ is risen!” She proclaims them, as a herald proclaims the triumphal entrance of a victorious King into a city. Her announcement, her proclamation of the divine event, is a work which she entrusts to her “heralds,” her apostles, her preachers. Christianity is thus essentially kerygmatic: the priest is a herald, kerux, an angel of the Lord of Hosts, a voice crying out in the desert: “Make straight the ways of the Lord.”
C.S. Lewis – The Screwtape Letters, Chapter 12
Obviously, you are making excellent progress. My only fear is lest, in attempting to hurry the patient, you awaken him to a sense of his real position. … He must not be allowed to suspect that he is now, however slowly, heading right away from the sun on a line which will carry him into the cold and dark of utmost space.
For this reason, I am almost glad to hear that he is still a churchgoer and a communicant. I know there are dangers in this; but anything is better than that he should realize the break he has made with the first months of his Christian life. As long as he retains externally the habits of a Christian, he can still be made to think of himself as one who has adopted a few new friends and amusements but whose spiritual state is much the same as it was six weeks ago. And while he thinks that, we do not have to contend with the explicit repentance of a definite, fully recognized sin, but only with his vague, though uneasy, feeling that he hasn't been doing very well lately.
This dim uneasiness needs careful handling. If it gets too strong, it may wake him up and spoil the whole game. … If such a feeling is allowed to live, but not allowed to become irresistible and flower into real repentance, it has one invaluable tendency. It increases the patient's reluctance to think about the Enemy. …
As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations. … You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday's paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited, and nothing given in return, …
You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,
Your affectionate uncle SCREWTAPE