McMurry S. Richey - "On Being More and Less Religious Than We Think" (November 8, 1959)
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Transcript
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- | Hi Judy. | 0:16 |
- | "Men of Athens," so the Apostle Paul | 0:21 |
as he looked around at idols and altars, | 0:25 | |
"I perceive that in every way you are very religious." | 0:29 | |
They were both more and less religious than they thought. | 0:37 | |
Some of my best friends are idol worshipers, | 0:49 | |
and so am I, and so are you at times. | 0:54 | |
And I'd like to say a good word today | 0:59 | |
for idolatry and for idols. | 1:02 | |
For idolatry, surely there is a right instinct, | 1:09 | |
the expression of a real need, | 1:17 | |
the effort to become an organized integrated person, | 1:23 | |
in the giving of loyalty and devotion | 1:29 | |
to that which is beyond us, outside us, | 1:32 | |
and to seeking and finding those objects of devotion, | 1:38 | |
which seem worthy of such allegiance. | 1:43 | |
The discovery of sacredness, the ascription of ultimacy, | 1:50 | |
and worth, and power, and relevance to daily round. | 2:01 | |
The commitment to these relative objects of devotion. | 2:12 | |
Surely there is in the human heart some hunger, | 2:23 | |
some need for such expression. | 2:28 | |
And there's something fine | 2:36 | |
about the person who in such commitment, | 2:37 | |
gives his loyalty and allegiance to a great cause | 2:40 | |
or a team or school or a dream. | 2:47 | |
Perhaps we lack the ancient sense | 2:54 | |
of a pervasive moaner spirit. | 2:56 | |
Through everything symbolized especially | 3:03 | |
in some particular trees or stones | 3:09 | |
or idols made by human hands. | 3:13 | |
But we too sense | 3:17 | |
that we are dependent upon more than we are. | 3:19 | |
We sense forces operative in our existence. | 3:24 | |
We throw in with some | 3:28 | |
and give them our high and costly devotion. | 3:30 | |
"Men of Athens," said Paul, "looking at some such objects, | 3:34 | |
I perceive that in every way, you are very religious." | 3:40 | |
And so are we, we too are more religious than we think. | 3:45 | |
There's a truly religious quality | 3:52 | |
about much of our everyday dealing, | 3:54 | |
with persons, and things, and ideas, causes, institutions, | 3:58 | |
even when we think we're not religious. | 4:05 | |
Such idolatry would seem to vary, | 4:10 | |
to grow From a tentative kind | 4:12 | |
still testing for what is really worthy of devotion. | 4:17 | |
Still keeping the freedom to withdraw from entanglement | 4:22 | |
to extricate from this arms length involvement. | 4:28 | |
You can supply the illustrations, | 4:34 | |
you know exactly what I mean. | 4:37 | |
To a more seriously devoted kind. | 4:41 | |
A really involving devotion or allegiance. | 4:45 | |
A Marine to the core, a Yale man, | 4:50 | |
or more exhaustively to wife or to husband, | 4:56 | |
child or friend or democratic party or labor union. | 5:01 | |
What I like about such idolatries | 5:08 | |
is their open, honest recognition | 5:11 | |
of value laying hold of persons, | 5:16 | |
and their self-giving devotion. | 5:21 | |
Their surrender of self to more than self. | 5:24 | |
Their underlying affirmation that life belongs | 5:28 | |
to more than just ourselves within our skin. | 5:31 | |
Their effort to relate ultimacy to the here and now. | 5:35 | |
Now, a clean idolatry like this, | 5:42 | |
if there is such a clean idolatry | 5:45 | |
perhaps they are sinners as idolaters too. | 5:47 | |
But a clean, honest worship of idols like this | 5:53 | |
would tend to test and rank its gods, | 5:59 | |
until a sort of pantheon emerged, | 6:04 | |
with some given priority over most of life and other idols. | 6:07 | |
Some conflicting idols eliminated or subordinated. | 6:12 | |
It's a good thing, isn't it? | 6:17 | |
To discover what matters more and most, | 6:20 | |
what is better and what is best. | 6:25 | |
This brings us to say a good thing for the idols themselves. | 6:30 | |
There's nothing like a good, honest idol, | 6:36 | |
without any devices to make it look more than it really is. | 6:40 | |
I've always had misgivings about the placing of food | 6:48 | |
before some statue, which when the worshiper was gone | 6:52 | |
could be sneakily taken | 6:56 | |
by the priests for their own sustenance. | 6:58 | |
But giving the worshiper the impression | 7:02 | |
that this was alive and active being before which he bowed. | 7:04 | |
Let idols be out in the open. | 7:11 | |
Big juggernauts going down the street | 7:14 | |
in a homecoming parade. | 7:18 | |
The good thing in such cases is that you can look them over | 7:23 | |
and see how much they really amount to. | 7:28 | |
And if they're just tissue on chicken wire floats, | 7:32 | |
they're gone with the wind and the rain | 7:37 | |
and such a limited idolatry is not very risky. | 7:40 | |
But if it is something real stable | 7:46 | |
and worth devotion, that's different. | 7:51 | |
Perhaps a nation state, it's there, | 7:58 | |
we can give our devotion to it. | 8:03 | |
We can see what is the outcome of such devotion, | 8:07 | |
and measure the worth of such an idol. | 8:12 | |
Or let us say the white race, here is something you can see, | 8:16 | |
and test and try if it really be worthy | 8:24 | |
of a man's ultimate devotion, and discover that it is not, | 8:31 | |
or the god is success. | 8:37 | |
Look her over, try her out, | 8:42 | |
an honest idol like this, not a concealed one, | 8:47 | |
and see if he really is what you want | 8:52 | |
for the surrender of all your being. | 8:57 | |
The good thing about these honest idols out in the open | 9:01 | |
is that they can be examined and superseded, | 9:05 | |
more of that later. | 9:10 | |
Yes, there's much to be said for idolatry and for idols, | 9:13 | |
when they're honest and open and clean. | 9:18 | |
But there's another kind of idolatry that bothers me, | 9:23 | |
where it is not a true devotion | 9:29 | |
but a dodge of responsibility, | 9:31 | |
or a reduction of ultimate claims upon us. | 9:34 | |
For example, you take the audience St. Paul addressed | 9:39 | |
in Athens, not the Jews and the devout persons | 9:43 | |
with whom he argued in the synagogue, | 9:46 | |
they had some commitments. | 9:48 | |
Perhaps not the Epicurean and stoic philosophers | 9:51 | |
who were curious about his deliverances. | 9:54 | |
They too had a view of reality and belonged to it, | 9:59 | |
but at least some of the people in the marketplace | 10:04 | |
including foreigners visiting there, | 10:08 | |
spent their time according to the author of Acts, | 10:11 | |
in nothing except telling or hearing something new. | 10:15 | |
A sort of sermon tasters, | 10:18 | |
purveyors of philosophical tidbits, | 10:21 | |
boasters running to hear and tell the latest. | 10:24 | |
Having a semblance of the seeking of truth, | 10:28 | |
but not really an ultimate commitment, | 10:32 | |
a dallying with ideas, | 10:36 | |
but not an honest surrender to those worth claiming them. | 10:39 | |
One has the feeling | 10:45 | |
that these were not really good, honest idol worshipers. | 10:46 | |
They probably didn't put up the idols or the altars. | 10:52 | |
Probably they superciliously made fun of those who had. | 10:55 | |
Rather, they worshiped themselves. | 11:00 | |
They enjoyed their own inflated egos, | 11:05 | |
spilled with the latest, seeming the brightest. | 11:07 | |
They played the intellectual games of one upmanship, | 11:11 | |
gamesmanship, with refined devastating ways | 11:15 | |
of contemptuously or patronizingly | 11:19 | |
reducing others to humiliation. | 11:23 | |
This kind of idolatry, this self worship, | 11:26 | |
this projection of self out beyond | 11:30 | |
and then bowing down to this, | 11:34 | |
this is a bogus kind. | 11:37 | |
And it's a worse for its semblance of devotion to truth. | 11:40 | |
Deceptive, dishonest, a problem not only | 11:46 | |
of Ancient Athens, but of much of our intellectual life. | 11:50 | |
And perhaps you and I sometimes enter into such idolatry. | 11:56 | |
"They exchange the truth about God for a lie | 12:02 | |
and worship then serve the creature | 12:05 | |
rather than the creator." | 12:07 | |
Said Paul in another connection. | 12:10 | |
The trouble with this kind of idolatry | 12:13 | |
is partly in its self deception | 12:15 | |
and deception of others. | 12:17 | |
In its protection against the discovery | 12:20 | |
of what is really true and worthy of devotion. | 12:22 | |
Another dangerous idolatry results | 12:28 | |
when an idol exerts a total, | 12:30 | |
a disproportionate claim successfully upon us. | 12:35 | |
Paul Tillich, that other St. Paul | 12:42 | |
of our intellectual Athens of today, | 12:47 | |
has spoken of the ultimate concern with success | 12:51 | |
and with social standing and economic power. | 12:55 | |
He writes, "It is a God of many people | 12:59 | |
in the highly competitive Western culture, | 13:02 | |
and it does what every ultimate concern must do. | 13:05 | |
It demands unconditional surrender to its laws, | 13:08 | |
even if the price is a sacrifice | 13:11 | |
of genuine human relations, | 13:13 | |
personal conviction and creative (indistinct). | 13:15 | |
Its threat is social and economic defeat | 13:19 | |
and its promise indefinite as all such promises, | 13:22 | |
the fulfillment of one's being. | 13:26 | |
It is a breakdown of this kind of faith," | 13:28 | |
says Tillich, "which characterizes | 13:31 | |
and makes religiously important | 13:33 | |
most contemporary literature. | 13:35 | |
When fulfilled the promise proves to be empty." | 13:38 | |
Still another perilous idolatry occurs over and over | 13:45 | |
in organized religion itself. | 13:50 | |
When we sneak our little gods into the Holy of Holies, | 13:53 | |
when we make of our little values ultimate values, | 13:59 | |
when creeds and codes and cults, | 14:06 | |
these necessities as media are the expression of God | 14:09 | |
to man and of man responding to God, | 14:13 | |
these needed elements in religion. | 14:16 | |
When these are given intrinsic | 14:21 | |
rather than extrinsic meaning. | 14:23 | |
Worship, liturgical worship, | 14:28 | |
the beauty of music, all the way over on the other extreme, | 14:33 | |
for those who criticize this precious informality. | 14:37 | |
Either of these can become, need not, idolatry. | 14:44 | |
Or our sermons, making, delivering or submitting to them. | 14:51 | |
When we worship, not the eternal God | 15:00 | |
but a lesser good meant for His glory, not our own. | 15:03 | |
The institution of religion, another necessary means | 15:07 | |
or medium of the expression of God to man, and man to God, | 15:13 | |
becomes a dangerous end in itself, | 15:19 | |
with its perennial tendency to exalt itself. | 15:24 | |
Let's be honest about it. | 15:28 | |
Our own perennial tendencies as individuals | 15:31 | |
and as leaders to give ultimacy | 15:34 | |
to whatever institutions express our length and shadows. | 15:37 | |
Its tendency then, our tendency, | 15:45 | |
for this kind of corporate self exultation, | 15:48 | |
the promotion and protection | 15:52 | |
of the institution taking precedent over truth, | 15:54 | |
and love, and service, idolatry. | 15:59 | |
Where you may have your forms and I have mine. | 16:06 | |
Religious experience can become another idol | 16:09 | |
rather than confrontation by God | 16:14 | |
or religious nurture or theology itself. | 16:17 | |
We may slowly solve our own particular ways | 16:23 | |
of interpreting the reality of God in our experience. | 16:26 | |
That conformity to this, rather than correction | 16:30 | |
of our ideas by what the eternal God really is | 16:34 | |
and says to us, becomes our idol. | 16:37 | |
In various ways we succeed in reducing the meaning | 16:42 | |
and demand of the eternal God | 16:46 | |
and of projecting our own exalted egos. | 16:48 | |
We like manageable, domesticated deities. | 16:53 | |
I do, it's a fearful thing to fall into the hands | 16:59 | |
of the eternal God. | 17:04 | |
It's much nicer to have a friendly, helpful, | 17:07 | |
cosmic bellhop. | 17:13 | |
And to criticize or to expose seems sacrilege. | 17:17 | |
The norm is obscured, criticism is rejected, | 17:23 | |
loyalty demanded, and oftentimes coercively secured. | 17:27 | |
The point seems clear though, we may be more religious | 17:33 | |
than we think when we are honestly serving idols. | 17:37 | |
And less religious than we think when covertly serving self | 17:42 | |
and little gods of self undercover of high religion, | 17:46 | |
and all of us are so involved. | 17:52 | |
While we're at it let's just say | 17:58 | |
just one passing good word for atheism too, | 17:59 | |
and agnosticism with it. | 18:04 | |
The early Christians and the Jews before them | 18:08 | |
were often accused of atheism, | 18:11 | |
because they would not worship the little idols around. | 18:15 | |
They had an eternal principle of criticism | 18:19 | |
which showed that not these things of every day | 18:22 | |
and all around but the eternal God himself | 18:26 | |
was alone worthy of their devotion. | 18:30 | |
And so there may be among us many good, honest atheists, | 18:35 | |
who want the truth so much that they are willing | 18:43 | |
to sacrifice these little idols of various kinds | 18:48 | |
of intellectual conformity, and all the superstitions | 18:52 | |
which may involve us. | 18:57 | |
In other words, sacrificing idolatrous religion | 18:59 | |
in search for real truth. | 19:05 | |
Wasn't it Tennyson who's struggling over the sorrow | 19:09 | |
when his friend Arthur Hallam died, | 19:14 | |
and facing the breakup of much traditional religious thought | 19:17 | |
in the Darwinian century, | 19:22 | |
who affirmed that there lived more faith in honest doubt, | 19:25 | |
than in half the creeds. | 19:33 | |
But then of course there are other kinds of atheism too, | 19:37 | |
and maybe we don't always have the clean, honest, | 19:40 | |
open kind of atheism either. | 19:45 | |
There are atheisms, which are again | 19:47 | |
simply a hidden idolatry of self, | 19:50 | |
a rejection of the claims of the eternal God, | 19:54 | |
because we prefer our own ways. | 19:58 | |
And we reduce Him to what we see as supposed manifestation | 20:02 | |
of Him around us and this we can easily sweep aside. | 20:06 | |
And so we claim in a sort of intellectual arrogance | 20:10 | |
that we don't believe those silly superstitions. | 20:14 | |
There can be a good atheism, | 20:18 | |
a sort of tentative provisional seeking of the real truth, | 20:22 | |
and a sweeping away of much to the shallow and insignificant | 20:27 | |
or and we have amazing talent for using such possibilities, | 20:34 | |
or a dishonest idolatrous kind of atheism itself. | 20:41 | |
Well, I've spoken well of idolatry, and of atheism. | 20:51 | |
Insofar as these represent a real devotion of the self | 20:58 | |
to that which seems at least provisionally | 21:06 | |
to be worth one's ultimate devotion, but we can't rest here. | 21:09 | |
In the words of Emerson. "When the gods arrive, | 21:15 | |
the half gods go." | 21:20 | |
And the real test of honest idolatry | 21:23 | |
is its response to what actually proves itself | 21:27 | |
finally worthy of all our devotion. | 21:31 | |
Comes a time when the unknown God who is behind our worship, | 21:36 | |
who has evoked this seeking of Himself, says to us | 21:42 | |
through one or other of His spokesmen, | 21:47 | |
"The God who made the world and everything in it, | 21:52 | |
being Lord of heaven and earth does not live | 21:55 | |
in shrines made by man, | 21:57 | |
nor is He served by human hand as though he needed anything. | 22:00 | |
Since He Himself gives to all man life and breath | 22:04 | |
and everything, being then God's offspring, | 22:08 | |
we ought not to think that the deities like gold or silver | 22:13 | |
or stone, a representation | 22:17 | |
of the art and imagination of man. | 22:19 | |
The times of ignorance God overlooked, | 22:23 | |
but now He commands all men everywhere to repent. | 22:26 | |
Because He has fixed a day on which He will judge the world | 22:32 | |
in righteousness by a man whom He has appointed. | 22:35 | |
And of this He has given assurance to all men | 22:39 | |
by raising him from the dead." | 22:42 | |
The great and glorious thing | 22:47 | |
about our Jewish and Christian heritage, | 22:49 | |
is that a stringent searching prophetic principle | 22:54 | |
which says to us in all our idolatries, | 23:02 | |
"Beyond these is reality itself. | 23:06 | |
Search and try and prove that which is good, | 23:11 | |
but be ready to discover | 23:16 | |
that your idols are simply provisional." | 23:17 | |
Sometimes high religion | 23:22 | |
has completely eliminated such idols. | 23:27 | |
And one of the problems in our Protestantism | 23:31 | |
arises from the fact that having swept aside so drastically | 23:35 | |
the ways in which men perceive and represent | 23:41 | |
the eternal God who speaks through symbols | 23:44 | |
to the human heart. | 23:47 | |
We have oftentimes substituted ourselves, and our utterances | 23:49 | |
and our ideas as a new kind of intellectual idol, | 23:54 | |
taking the place of visual ones. | 23:59 | |
On the other hand, other kinds of Christianity | 24:03 | |
have tried to convert the idols rather than eliminate them. | 24:08 | |
Have taken over from the cultures | 24:14 | |
which they're converting many of the little gods | 24:16 | |
and practices, and festivals and representations | 24:20 | |
with the hope that, and this is a good hope, | 24:26 | |
these would not become finalities, but media, | 24:29 | |
symbols that God could use | 24:35 | |
and speak through these things, and times, | 24:39 | |
and persons of the visible institution of the great church. | 24:46 | |
But here again, just as in Protestant radicalism | 24:52 | |
we have found our other idolatries, | 24:57 | |
soul in Catholic inclusivism. | 25:01 | |
We have found ourselves lapsing also over and over again | 25:05 | |
into giving finality to that | 25:10 | |
which is only provisional, temporal representative | 25:12 | |
of what is good and what is ultimate. | 25:17 | |
Yet, there is a testing tendency | 25:23 | |
in human nature and a disclosing power in ultimate reality, | 25:26 | |
which will not leave us content with these idolatries, | 25:33 | |
these within our churches or within our secular life. | 25:37 | |
I like that story of Arthur Compton | 25:43 | |
the great physicist in his earlier days | 25:46 | |
when he was commissioned to run an experiment | 25:48 | |
to test and hypothesis, given a grant for his exploration. | 25:52 | |
And after months of patient work | 25:58 | |
setting up his equipment and running as many tests | 26:00 | |
he was walking across the campus one day | 26:03 | |
and met an older physicist who said, | 26:05 | |
"Arthur how are things going?' | 26:09 | |
And he confessed with some discomfiture | 26:13 | |
that they weren't proving what he had hoped to prove. | 26:15 | |
Said the older physicist, "Well, Arthur, the way things are | 26:20 | |
is tremendously more exciting | 26:26 | |
than the way we thought they were." | 26:28 | |
And this is a perennial discovery. | 26:32 | |
The discovery, not so much bias as to us | 26:37 | |
of what is finally worth all we are. | 26:43 | |
What does all this mean for us, for the church | 26:48 | |
what is needed for myself and you? | 26:52 | |
First such openness to prophetic criticism | 26:57 | |
such penitence for our own limited idolatries, | 27:02 | |
such concern for what is really true and good, | 27:07 | |
such recognition in short of the rightful norm of Christ | 27:11 | |
over the church, over us, | 27:15 | |
that we may hear and heal, | 27:17 | |
having our faith and our life corrected by what is. | 27:21 | |
And second such on anxious trust, faith, | 27:28 | |
in the real ultimacy of God | 27:34 | |
and His Lordship overall our other gods. | 27:37 | |
That we need not coercively, manipulatively, | 27:42 | |
control others to bolster our little faith | 27:46 | |
or serve our ecclesiastic, theological or moral idols. | 27:50 | |
Third, such recognition and experience of God in our lives | 27:57 | |
such perception of Him in our history, | 28:02 | |
that we can and confidently take the indicative | 28:06 | |
rather than the imperative mood, | 28:09 | |
that we can point to what really is | 28:12 | |
rather than putting the pressure on others' super egos | 28:16 | |
as to what they ought to do and believe and practice. | 28:20 | |
And fourth, such love for God and men | 28:27 | |
that we demonstrate or mediate His accepting love | 28:32 | |
and claim to others with integrity and winsomeness | 28:37 | |
and unfailing concern, ready to go the second mile. | 28:43 | |
Who is sufficient for these things? | 28:49 | |
"Thine oh Lord, is the greatness and the power | 29:06 | |
and the glory and the victory and the majesty, | 29:09 | |
for all that is in the heaven and in the earth is thine. | 29:13 | |
Thine is the kingdom oh Lord | 29:18 | |
and thou art exalted as head above all. | 29:20 | |
Now may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, | 29:25 | |
the love of God, | 29:29 | |
the communion of His Holy Spirit be with us all." | 29:30 |