- Testing one, two, three, four. Testing, testing one, two, three, four. (faint orchestral music) 

- Let us offer the unity and collect for openness and for wisdom. Let us pray. Grant we beseech you Almighty God that the words which we hear this day with our outward ears may through your grace be so grafted inwardly in our hearts that we may bring forth in us the fruit of good living, to the honor, and praise of your name through Jesus Christ our Lord, amen. The lesson from holy scripture for this day is taken from the second letter to Corinthians chapter five, verse 14 to the sixth chapter verse two. Let's hear the word of the Lord. "For the love of Christ controls us, because we were convinced that one has died for all, therefore all have died. And he died for all that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for Him who for their sake died and was raised. From now on therefore we regard no one from a human point of view. Even though we once regarded Christ from a human point of view, we regard Him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ he is a new creation, the old has passed away, behold the new has come. All this is from God who through Christ reconciled us to Himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. That is, God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against Him and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. So we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God who for our sake, He made Him to the sin who knew no sin so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God. Working together with Him then, we intrigue you not to accept the grace of God in vain, for He says at the acceptable time, I listened to you and helped you on the day of salvation, behold now is the acceptable time, behold now is the day of salvation." Here ends the reading of the lesson for this day. (faint orchestral music) Let us affirm our faith together. We believe in God who has created and is creating, who has come in a true man Jesus to reconcile and make new. Who works in us and others by his spirit, we trust Him He calls us to be in His church, to celebrate His presence, to love and serve others, to seek justice and resist evil, to proclaim Jesus crucified and risen, our judge and our hope in life and death, in life beyond death God is with us, we are not alone. Thanks be to God. The Lord be with you. Let us pray. With this offering to God, the unison prayer of Thanksgiving. All mighty God, father of all mercies, we your unworthy servants to give you most humble and hearty thanks for all your goodness and loving kindness to us and to all men. We bless you for our creation, preservation and all the blessings of this life. But above all for you were inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace and for the hope of glory. And we beseech you give us that due sense of all your mercies, that our hearts may be unfailingly thankful, and that we may show forth your praise not only with our lips, but in our lives, by giving up ourselves to your service, and by walking before you in holiness and righteousness all our day through Jesus Christ, our Lord, to whom with you and the Holy Spirit, the all honor and glory, world without end, amen. God of mercy and of love who has commanded us to care for one another as you do care for us, hear our prayers of intercessions for our world, our brothers and our sisters, we ask. In you, oh great and mysterious God, the twisted things are straightened, the crippled are enlivened and made whole, blind men see, and the slain arise in resurrection. In you the tired one shall run, the angered ones speak peace, and those tangled in darkness shall declare the light. In you oh Lord shall every person know the time of their salvation and the time of their rejoice. To you be our praise, our cries of gladness, and our cries of health this day. God we placed before you such prayers out of our silence and shape the hearts of all persons every time. We cry for peace when there is no peace, we praise you oh God for the beginnings of peace wherever it is present, before the end of whatever of our warring that we have ceased. We praise you for hands honestly at work, love in the eyes of friends, forgiveness in the words of enemies and for a heart that listens. We intercede oh Lord for all to bring tithes of peace, the singer, the teacher, the carpenter and farmer, the dreamer, the priests and politician who in trust build up the waste places and turn the ashes of mourning into a garland of joy. We beseech you oh Lord for the hungry who are not death, for the naked who are not clothed, and for the prisoners who are not set free. We ask our father for justice where we have refused it, though the words come hard and painful we pray that our enemies both personal and political may receive overwhelmingly your love and your care. We ask that you would find in our prayer something more than the hypocrisy, that him, those and who we call enemies. Oh God our father, we live not so much in light or dark as in the grain middle, the meeger, the half felt, the half known and the half delighted in. We lift to you our prayers of partition for our own needs and concerns. As persons we have not wanted joy, but we have been unprepared for sorrow. Not accepting sorrow we are also unprepared for joy. Afraid of roots and depths, we have no tree and no hype in our life. Oh God our father shake down the paper houses that we hide in and spill us out onto the ground of your strength and your love. Unfastened us we asked from fear and set us free to trust in you and in our neighbors. Undwarf our souls that we may yet come alive and grow within your giant love. Through Jesus Christ our Lord we ask, amen. We are pleased to welcome to the university service of worship and to the chapel pulpit, the Reverend Dr. Raimundo Valenzuela former Bishop of the autonomous Methodist Church of Chile. 

- I consider the very great privilege to be with you again. I was here last year on Easter Sunday. Of course it was a very great day, perhaps the most glorious church service I have ever participated in. But this is a hot July summer. Most of the academic community is gone, and I think it's very wonderful, very commendable that this service is kept through the summer. And I feel just as privileged to be here today as I was on Easter Sunday a year ago. The scriptural passage for our meditation this morning is one of the best known passages in the Bible. I really wanted to bring you something which would seem entirely new. But I find these words of Paul so relevant to our present situation. So expressive of what God is trying to tell us today that I have been unable to focus my mind on any other passage. I am under its compulsion, Martin Luther would've said. In particularly verse 15. "And He died for all that those who live shall live no longer for themselves but for Him who for their sake died and was raised." You can see in this verse that Paul was under no illusions regarding the nature of man. And in Romans three he quotes from the Psalms, "None is righteous, no, not one." The theme runs through the entire Bible. Or we like sheep that's gone astray. We have turned every one of His own way, that's Isiah, to break courses of Messiah. Mans great problem is fatal flaw, is his predominant tendency to seek his own interest, the satisfaction of his own needs and desires, in indifference to or violation of the rights and needs of others. To want to do his or her thing regardless of what it does to others. Verse four expresses it in our text to live for himself. Notice not that the Bible denies our rightful needs. Ours is not the gospel of repression. Indeed, the Bible is full of assurance regarding God's deep and abiding concern for the wellbeing of all His children. I am calm but you might have life and have it more abundantly. Is Jesus word regarding the reason for His coming? God wants these strange two legged creatures He has formed to enjoy the fullness of human existence. Each human being has a right to it solely by a virtue of being a human being, of being a person. "God does not expect His children to go against the normal and legitimate needs and interests, but this pursuit of self-interest must always be counterbalanced by due consideration for the needs and rights of others that each of you look not only to his own interest, but also to the interests of others," says Paul in Philippians 2:4. But this is to go against the most natural human tendencies. "They all look after their own interests, not those of Jesus Christ," laments Paul in verse 21 of the same chapter of Philippians. Let's stop for a moment to reflect on the parallelism of those verses in the same chapter. In verse four the interest to be weighed equally with our own is the interest of others. In verse 21, it is Christ. Is this contradiction or lack of consistency? Not at all. For in relation to us regard for the interest of others, and in regard for the interest of Christ is one and the same thing. This is a characteristic of the Bible of the last judgment in Matthew 25 which we know so well. And this regard so consistently. "As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren you did it to me. As you did it not to one of the least of these, you did not to me." The words of the Lord, which under the judgment, by our sin of omission, the action of kindness or of justice we should have done and did not do even though it was not necessarily our specific responsibility just as surely as by what we actually do. Let's return to Paul. "They all look after their own interests, not those of Jesus Christ." It is as if somehow we were all imprisoned in chains of self-centeredness, but this is precisely why Jesus came to earth, gave His life for us and was raised from the dead. He came to break these chains to free us from ourselves. And He died for all of those who live shall live no longer for themselves, but for Him, which is to say for others, and especially for the least. Those in direst need, the powerless, the oppressed, He came to make us new transformed persons. If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation, the old has passed away behold, the new has come. In Christ we enter in a new dimension of existence. Or as the New English Bible puts it, "The old order is gone, a new order has already begun." God's new order. The old order of selfishness disappears, a new order in which love for God and for our neighbor as oneself prevails and becomes a dominant lifestyle, it becomes a pattern or all our relationships. This is the base, the primary freedom deliberations to which we are called in Christ. And this is also eternal life. Well, for God and man without limits of any kind precise with the meaning of life eternal. Check the story in Luke 10 beginning with verse 25, where the lawyer comes asking Jesus, "Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" To see how much it has to do with life here and now not (indistinct) And I find this tremendously inspiring, but also profoundly disturbing. If I use this understanding of what it means to be a Christian, and I become aware of how I fall short, how much I need God's mercy. If we don't inquire more deeply into the New Testament meaning of belief... Acts 16:31, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved." Or John 3:16 seems so much less demanding. If you were to ask me, "Do you believe in Christ?" I might quite easily answer, "Yes I do." If you ask me, "Have you ceased to live for yourself? Are you living for Christ or are you as mindful and responsive to the needs of others as you are of your own?" I couldn't answer so confidently. Could you? There is in us this coexistence of what Paul calls the old Adam, even after we have decided for Christ. How I can guard myself so complacently when there are millions dying of hunger in the drought regions of Africa at this moment. (indistinct) A saying we have in Chile. (indistinct) How we must transcend that. (indistinct) fundamental, the need to seek perfection in love, but he never claimed it or that it could be a thing in his fullness say perhaps in one's dying breath. But never must we seize to strive for it. But for that it's only the beginning of our dilemma. We have been thinking so far primarily about personal attitudes and relationships. Christian experience tells us that it's possible to grow in grace and reach a relatively high fulfillment of the ethic love in the immediate personal dimension. That mean forgiving in personal reference. I do not remember my mother, a single malicious or unloving action. She was very close to saying what Paul could say, "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me." Perhaps we can speak as the expression (indistinct) of moral men. But our mind for relationships extend beyond the circle of immediate personal context. We live in widening circles of relationships, beyond it human person is the clan, the tribe, the nation. These are needed structures of our life in the society. Yeah, most legitimate we could not do without them. But as these structures become dedicated to safeguard and advance the interest of the in-group to the detriment of other persons and groups, they can and do become tremendous forces of injustice. And in recent years, we have created new circles of relationships, new organizations and structures for the advancement of our interests. The political party, the trade union or the employer association, the business corporation. These are voluntary associations of persons who joined together to promote common names, economic or theological interests. Perhaps there was nothing wrong with any of these structures, per se. They can be highly positive factors in society, permitting economic activities, which serve the common good, which could never be realized by individuals acting alone as in the case of corporation or serving to curb abuse of an advanced justice and the general welfare as this proclaim the purpose of the nation state. To be sure there are structures, invisible and visible, like the patterns of agencies of race discrimination, and then force segregation designed to ensure supremacy not equality. And these can in no way be justified. But perhaps our most subtle problem is the perversion of useful structures. When these go beyond the legitimate protection of the interest of those associated in them and seek to promote the interest of those belong to it, regardless of what happens to other persons and groups. There is an almost an endless pressure in that direction. When we begin to consider that the more these structures advance the exclusive interest of their participants, the more successful they and their managers are considered to be. When the pressure of the competitive struggle with rival groups it creates the rationale for disregarding all ethical considerations. When the organizational structure permits individual ethical responsibility to receive of what is manifested is wrong to be condoned, since it presumably serves the common good of those associated, these structures can become monstrous forces of evil. What's the United States has done in Vietnam, supposedly defending freedom, more truly acting in the interest of it's own national security has no name. The clash of conflicting interests of tribes and national groups and even religious groups turn political as the story of the most cruel violence, hatred and destruction with untold suffering to millions upon millions in our own day. We think on behalf of Bangladesh or Ireland, perils of the near East. But there's one structure of self-interest in our day, which needs attention as perhaps never before. I refer to the transnational corporation not the corporate society. In Spanish would call it (indistinct) anonymous desire. An excellent name which indicates the dilution of individual responsibility. It's consciously organized for one purpose, to produce profits, the more the better. We have learned to regulate them somewhat. Within the United States we learn to trust the labor relations laws, strong labor union, corporate income taxes, et cetera. Their capacity to exploit people, or not necessarily to exploit the land has pretty well been curved by now. But they have gone abroad aided by the government, and corporations of other developing nation as the bricks bearing gifts to less developed nations, which have not had protective laws or have not known the dangers, or they have been filed for unscrupulous enough to subvert the processes which might have regulated them. They have bought up natural resources for so long what all the government officials who might've objected, unfortunately by their size and power the range of the operations. Certain American corporations have become the most linked. Not all, perhaps even fewer number have been deliberately exploited a bit. But in their aggregate operation, they have become in alliance with dominant political and economic groups within the countries of their operation, and benefiting from the unequal distribution of wealth within. A major force holding back justice and liberation for the undeveloped nations and within these nations. Some corporations have not felt any need for restraint whatsoever as they have sought to ensure their profits. Perhaps the most blaring documented for example, has been the procedure followed by the International Telegraph and Telephone Corporation in my own country. Fearful that it might be nationalized if the elected president were elected. ITT tried its best to prevent this election and then his access to power even after he had received the part of majority and before and after he had been confirmed by Congress, which had to decide between the first two of the three candidates. And they'd attempted to involve United States government in this effort. Let me quote from a March in New York Times report on testimony given before the Senate subcommittee headed by Senator Frank Church investigating the multinational corporations. "The Vice-President of the ITT said today that a top official of the CIA had agreed with the recommendations the corporation made, to try to prevent the election of Salvador Allende as President of Chile. The recommendations report that included steps to maneuver the departing president back into power to commend violence that might bring about a military takeover of the country. The testimony also revealed consultations in the toppling Allende's administration." According to the same New York Times report, both the ouster plans centered on ideas to bring about economic collapse in Chile. The World Division of the Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church made it possible for me to attend the Annual Meeting of the ITT Stakeholders in Kansas city on May, and the Disciples Church extended the proxy. They had the shares of stock, not our board, which made it possible for me to speak up in protest for this action as a citizen of Chile. After reading the statement I have just shared with you, I asked the meeting, "Do you not realize that the military uprising against the constitutionally elected government, especially once supported by the workers, would most likely have led to the loss of countless lives through civil war? Or that economic collapse can not take place without inflicting misery on great numbers of people? Is this example of the length management is willing to go for the sake of profits? I'm sure ladies and gentlemen, that you will be appalled if your corporation wanted to enter the drug traffic, given its blatantly unethical and illegal character. But is it legal and ethical to throw a nation into chaos in order to preserve a profitable venture?" Fortunately, the United States government did not accept the proposals of the high CIA official and ITT to create violence. We're not so sure in Chile, that the measures designed to bring about economic collapse are not being carried out. In any event the reaction of the chairman or the board of ITT to my statement was shocking to me. Instead of admitting a mistake had been made he brazenly told the stockholders, "Cool for verbatim, I am only sorry that we were not able to persuade our government to take a stronger stand in Chile." He justified the action saying, "I was only trying to protect the interest of the stockholders." And status part of all to me was that only the voice of both of us who were there representing the church, two Methodist and a representative from the National Council of Churches was raised in protest. Several stockholders congratulated Harold Geneen. Why? Because last year ITT made up $475 million profit. Now the success of these multinational corporations and the goods and the profits, which have been brought to the United States since the second World War is perhaps a or the leading factor in this increased prosperity of the United States in recent years. I'm not an economist, I do know that their success on pattern of operations has created the net flow of capital to the United States from Latin America in excess of $2 billion a year. That the gap between United States and the nations of Latin America has grown the last 10 years, from an increase of $50 per capita nullified by inflation in Latin America for more than $800 more in income per capita than 10 years ago. And this gap, this characteristic of the whole world where young developed nations are being locked in the structures of poverty. And we wonder why there's a growing tide of socialism? But dear brethren, what does it mean to live no longer for ourselves, but for Him who for our sake died and was raised? Does it not mean that we must extend our sensitivity to include our responsibility for sharing in structures of injustice and oppression? It's not the reality of our Christian love being tested just as much in our political and economic action and perhaps more so than in the respectability of our conduct in our immediate personal relationships. Wednesday night this past week and (indistinct) annual conference and missions had an incredible story of the race of the Appalachia region, another poverty and hopelessness of millions there. 3 million people with family incomes of less than $3,000. Two thirds of the whole area with incomes of less than $6. God holds us responsible for what happens to the distressed and the oppressed. He calls us to establish justice in the land, not only to individual acts of charity. The third world nations have far more at stake in the church subcommittee investigating the multinational corporations than in the water getting inquiries. Except in so far as the urban committee may uncover the corrupting influence of corporate self-interest on the processes of government and may help revive a much eroded national ethical sensitivity as the indispensable ingredient of our common life. It also helped us to rediscover the claims of justice and compassion as indispensable elements of our puppet life. To live no longer for ourselves, but for Him who for our sake died and was raised means to make the rule of our risen Lord Jesus, the rule of justice and love regnant over all the areas of life all over the world. It means not wanting to be nothing in our person relationships, but to work ceaselessly to change the societal structures of self-interest so that they will not operate to the benefit of someone to the detriment or destruction of other fellow human beings, or the struckers of exclusive self interest. And under God's powerful judgment included the unlimited sovereign nation state, and we cannot excuse ourselves for our own complicity in the corporate guilt. What we need is a greater love and the passion for justice, that will make us a vanguard force for a new world where all men can live together as brothers and no child need be hungry or afraid. We have the technology now that can manage hunger and poverty. Perhaps there has been a great deal of ignorance regarding the structural inequalities and injustices that prevent our doing so. We believe in myth of development day, then don't know that the net flow of capital from the third world to the developed nations is running at the rate of over 7 billion from the poor nations or the rich nations. Who is helping who? We've more than knowledge and certainly the academic community cannot be guilty of ignorance. We need the will, the readiness to profit and have less that others may have more. Until we are willing to let Christ have His way in our hearts so that we are willing to live no longer for ourselves, but for Him, through loving service and justice to our fellow man, we cannot really call ourselves Christians no matter what we say we believe. Many who do not claim to be such, but who live for others may be closer to Christ than we are. If we are blind to the claims of the oppressed, but Christ wants to be the transforming power in our lives to fill us with His love. God grant us that we may let Him have His way in us so that we may be His agents for justice and peace. Let us pray. Grant our father, that we may die to selfishness and greed, and be born anew to care and to love through the power of thy Jesus in our lives. For in His name we ask, amen. (faint orchestral music) (faint orchestral music) 

- Almighty God, our heavenly father, maker of all things, giver of all good gifts, receive and use these our gifts, the fruits of our labor and ourselves, our souls and bodies to be a reasonable, holy and living sacrifice unto you. Send this forth in peace from this place as servants of the gospel. You grant us grace that paradox of discipline and freedom, courage for all the struggles that lie ahead and always joy to fill the cup of all our celebration, amen. (faint orchestral music)