Antioch, Apostolic Sending and Setting - Part 2

alternative but to call upon his name and did. And then live for 10 days to give evidence that something very authentic had taken place because the very next day she said the way is extremely narrow, what about the others? And then the next day she said to me, do you know how much you're loved by God? And then when I had to make my overseas trip, eight weeks in Europe, Russia and those places, I went with my mother's blessing for a first time. So I know something personally, I've been a missionary to the Jews. That's how the Lord brought me out of teaching and into full-time ministry at the age of 39, was to be trained as a missionary to the Jews and became in my fourth year the director of this Baptist mission to the Jews in New York City, today called the Chosen People Ministry. So in my own home city, I knew what it means to be near and yet far. I knew what it meant to be in the midst of two and a half million Jews and that New York City is the effectual Jerusalem of world Jewry and yet not have access, yet to be stopped at the door by the doormen and that the Jewish community is well insulated, well protected. It's not like the days of old where an apostle Paul could come into a synagogue and be invited to share. If ever I had occasion to speak to Jews, it's at universities and I've been to many of them, including my own, where Jews are always to be found out of proportion to their number in institutions of learning because we are motivated, if not driven for success and know that that's the route. And so when they see a speaker advertised by the name of Katz, one of the honored names indicating Levitical origin, priesthood, speaking on the gospel as an ex-Marxist radical, it brings them out. And so I've had a history with my own people. Do I ever know them? And I have been one and am one. My first 37 years was the classic prototype of the modern Jew, antagonistic to Christ, not just mildly indifferent but actively antagonistic. I thought as an atheist I ought to be doing something to rid the world of these old wives tales and fables and myths so that they can face the reality and know that this is a world in which we have to make it for ourselves and by ourselves. So praise God that one of my former students and her mother prayed for this servant with tears knowing the mother said you're an atheist and a radical and my daughter came home every afternoon from school weeping over you. So a woman who had never met me nor seen me prayed in such a way that the hound of heaven pursued me for 14 months with a pack on my back when I had come to a final crisis of a moral and ideological kind where my gods with a small g have failed. Marxism had failed. The Soviet Union was not what's the word utopia but a prison house and numbers had been slaughtered in the programs of a Stalin and all the revelations that came out of the horror of that system in the early 50s and 60s led to the disillusionment of men like myself ideologically and then the Lord knows how to bring us Jews down. He gives you for example a German wife who was a member of the Hitler Youth that I met while a GI in Germany who was also schizophrenic living on the other side of the moon and completely outside the realm of what is rational what is ordered what that has to do with common sense goodwill it was an entirely new phenomenon for me as intractable as the Islamic world is for Israel so was my German wife for me. Goodwill and intelligence was not going to save us. It was a horror of unbelievable conflict because in the frenzy of her schizophrenic disorder occasioned by World War II itself the way in which he expressed that frustration was against me in the one place I was hot as a rock in the one place where I was vulnerable my Jewishness. So I had enacted under my own roof something of the anti-Semitic thing through which my people have been recent victim of Germans now taking place under my own roof with a German wife and I was not able to respond kindly. There's where my confidence in man and goodwill and reason was destroyed. So here I'm asking all of these students ultimate questions of meaning and I'm unable myself to answer any. And in that crisis to which world Jewry is being progressively brought I was brought 37 years ago and forced up and out from California my profession my place of comfort and security and thrust out into the nations with a pack on my back living for 14 months with what I could carry and that opened up a whole dimension of reality that would otherwise have been lost to me. It's one thing to travel first or second or even third class it's another thing to travel by the side of the road as a beggar waiting to be picked up by whomsoever will and carrying with you the last traces of your humanistic assumption about human brotherhood but where is it when you need it and waiting in the drizzle in the rain forlorn angry at a world that has failed and is not only not going anywhere but going toward its doom and its destruction because you knew that the atomic annihilation the breakdown of values the corruption collapse of society was inevitable and you had no answer your ideologies your philosophies were valueless because if you couldn't solve the paradox of your own marriage how are you going to save the world see how far God will go with us jews but I was picked up by you know who remarkable saints and I'm trying to find one in particular now for 37 years from Switzerland and I've never been able to find anybody who ever heard of him and knows of him and I gave them all the information that I had whose address I carried in my wallet which wallet I lost when I got to Egypt and was pickpocketed my first day on a bus I've never been able to find Edwin remarkable man who knew about the artist Dure who's an architect artist he knew about the psychologist who was the son of a minister a protestant minister whose name now escapes me he was that is to say he was not a narrow cardboard cut out christian he had an expanse of knowledge and breadth of understanding of art of literature of the world remarkable man and in conversation with me at a crisis moment after he had drawn out my entire heart of frustration futility and hopelessness and I and I looked at this gentile who was not in any way impressive to look at with my arms folded over my chest coming to a final end of myself thinking what can this man say and he and he said auntie said do you know what it is that the world needs that well at least he knows how to ask the questions but what can he answer that I have not already seen or dealt with at universities or Marxist institutes there's nothing new under the sun so I'm waiting to hear some conventional reply that I would walk away from completely untouched and die and he said in that one moment of time when time stops and a word comes art what the world needs is for men to wash one another's feet and down I went did you literally fall out of your chair no I continue to sit there like this giving no impression that I was in any way affected