Augustine - The Long Way Home

Augustine of Hippo | Cor Inquietum Most evangelicals act like church history started with the overhead projector. It did not. Before First Baptist on every corner there was an old Greek bishop named Polycarp standing on a pyre in Smyrna, refusing to curse the Christ he had walked with for eighty-six years. There was Ignatius writing letters from a Roman ship on his way to the lions. There was Irenaeus hunting heresy in Lyons, Athanasius outlasting five emperors, Augustine weeping in a Milan garden after a child's voice told him to pick up and read, Aquinas walking away from a thousand pages of theology because he had seen something better, Francis stripping naked in the Assisi piazza to follow a poor Christ, Luther nailing ninety-five lines to a Wittenberg door, Tyndale strangled and burned for the crime of giving England a Bible it could read, Wesley logging a quarter of a million miles on horseback because someone had to tell the miners about Jesus. We have a family. Most of us have never met them. Americans spend billions every year on Ancestry.com chasing names off ship manifests, and we have somehow decided the only Christians who matter are the ones in the room this morning. The dark side of Protestant individualism is that everyone gets to be their own pope. This sermon is the first entry in the family album, and it makes the case for opening the album at all. It asks the question every generation eventually has to answer: where did we come from, and does it matter? It argues that the saints of the past are not museum pieces but living relatives, that their faith fuels us, their failures warn us, their endurance preaches to us, and that the same Jesus they bled for is the same Jesus we gather to worship this morning. We are not the first ones here. We are not going to be the last. One family. One faith. One long line of broken people God refused to throw away. Scripture: Hebrews 12:1-2 | Psalm 78:1-7 | 1 Corinthians 10:11