The Church does leave her mark on the nations wherein she resides but in many cases the Church survives and outlives the nation.
The Book of Hebrews which comes up in the three-year lectionary this August is addressed to “the wandering people of God”[1] who form a caravan through history, winding their way amongst dangers and disappointments to the place where all the promises of God find their perfect fulfillment. Attacked by enemies from without and temptations to apostasy and stagnation from within, the Lord’s people are not exempt from weariness and weak resignation to the evils God abhors.
In 1950, Hermann Sasse who was himself a recent immigrant from Germany to Australia authored a short essay, “Ecclesia Migrans.”[2] In this piece, Sasse draws on New Testament texts, especially Hebrews 4 and 11-13 to reflect on the reality of the Church as a sojourning congregation, on the march as pilgrims with a destination that is beyond this world and yet having responsibilities in this present age:
“How shall we explain the fact that this same Church, which senses that it is a foreign entity in this world, extends such deep roots here on earth” (202)?
Sasse writes that the Church which:
“(In) its essence the most foreign to this world, proves to be one of the forces which influences the world most deeply” (202).
The Church does not conform itself to the ethos of any one nation. Hence for Sasse, so-called “Christian Nationalism” would be a strange contradiction. The Church does leave her mark on the nations wherein she resides but in many cases the Church survives and outlives the nation.
The pilgrim church does not forsake the world in which she lives. But Sasse sees the stronger temptation is that the Church becomes more worldly:
“In fact, like the tendency to flee the world, it is an enduring temptation for the Church. But it must be noted that the strongest influence upon the world is never exerted by a church that has become worldly. That is the sad discovery of all epochs of secularized church life. The church in the days of Rationalism failed to exert even the slightest influence upon the world. Liberalism and modernism in the Church have made no impression upon the world. The Reformation, on the other hand, shook and transformed the world. When does the Church exert its greatest influence in the world? When the Church is wholly Church, and nothing else! When it brings its message, which is alien to the world, to a world that wants to know nothing of it! This does not imply that the Church will then be successful under all circumstances. But the Church will never exert any influence upon the world at all if it runs after the world and attempts to ignore the great gulf which separates it from the world. It is only the church that is alien to the world which shall inherit the earth” (202-203).
When does the Church exert its greatest influence in the world? When the Church is wholly Church, and nothing else!-Hermann Sasse
How, then, does Sasse see the Church as having an influence on the world? There is no harmony between the world and the Church because the truth of the Word of the cross is alien to them and they judge it as folly. The economy of this passing age cannot factor into the reality of a kingdom wherein to lose one’s life is to find it. It is only from the perspective of the Lord’s High Priestly Prayer that we are given to see the relationship of church and world as He intercedes for His own that they may be kept and guarded in oneness with the Father just as He is one with the Father:
“But now I am coming to thee; and these things I speak in the world, that they may have My joy fulfilled in themselves. I have given them Thy Word; and the world has hated them because they are not of the world even as I am not of the world. I do not pray that Thou shouldest take them out of the world but that Thou shouldest keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world” (John 17:13-16).
Sasse points especially to the paradox that Christ’s holy people are “in the world but not of the world.”
The High Priest who intercedes for His congregation is no earthly priest but the eternal and heavenly High Priest of our salvation that we see portrayed in Hebrews. His sacrificial work is finished and now as our Brother He sits at the right hand of His Father’s majesty. He lives and reigns as the untiring Shepherd of His sheep. Earthly empires will be forgotten, political powers come and go, but Christ is everlasting, and His Kingdom is not transient.
For Sasse, there is a paradox at work in the history of the Church. Christ’s Church is both a sojourning assembly and a congregation located in time and space:
“The uniqueness of the Church’s existence ‘in the world’ can be seen on the change of meaning which the word ‘paroikia’ has undergone. In 1 Peter 1:17, the word represents an existence of foreigners, as sojourners (see 1 Peter 2:11). In the first of the Clementine Epistles, the Roman congregation emphatically designates itself as ‘the Church of God which sojourns (paroikousai) at Rome.’ ‘Paroikia’ [1 Peter 1:17: strangers, sojourners] in the sense of a ‘sojourning’ now becomes ‘paroikia’ in the sense of a ‘parish.’ The local congregation is a colony of citizens of the heavenly city of God (see also Hebrews 11:10; 11:16; 12:22; 13:14; Revelation 21:2; 21:23; 22:14; Galatians 4:26), who are stopping off here only in passing. But the ‘paroikia’ in this sense now remains a particular locality until Christ comes to take it home” (204).
Sasse notes that this does not imply a “secularization” of the Church but, rather, that the prayer of Jesus in John 17 has been fulfilled as the Lord has not extracted His people from the world but sends them into the world guarded by His name and entrusted with His words which are spirit and life.
The Church of Jesus Christ is at one and the same time in the world but not of the world.
“So, we must have the courage to say farewell to that false view that identifies church and nation” (211).
The Book of Hebrews helps us understand, in the words of Sasse, that:
“The Christian is ‘homo viator’ (traveling man)” and “the people of God are ‘ecclesia migrans’ (a church on the move)” (204).
The traveling Church moves forward toward her final destination, a city whose builder and maker is God, prodded not by the Law which would return us to Mount Sinai, where there is only threat and condemnation, but by the promises of the Gospel, which draw us to Mount Zion (see Hebrews 12:18-24) where Jesus reigns as the meditator of a new testament that is as far superior to the old covenant as Christ is to Moses. Sasse’s essay is now seventy-five years old, but there is much in it that speaks directly to preachers who accompany God’s wandering people in the uncharted wilderness in which we find ourselves in 2025.
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[1] Here, see Schnelle, Udo. “The Wandering People of God” in Theology of the New Testament, trans. M. Eugene Boring. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009. 648-649.
[2] Sasse, Hermann. “Ecclesia Migrans” in Letters to Lutheran Pastors, Vol. 1: 1948-1951, ed. Matthew C. Harrison. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2013. 200-216. All remaining citations to this essay are noted in the body of the article.
