Mark Depp - "Living in Four Dimensions" (July 23, 1961)
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| (orchestral church music and singing) | 0:03 | |
| - | All things come of thee, O Lord, | 0:27 |
| and of thine own have we given thee. | 0:30 | |
| In Jesus' name. | 0:33 | |
| Amen. | 0:34 | |
| (faint church music) | 0:39 | |
| - | Personal word to say how good it is | 1:05 |
| to be back on the campus of this great university | 1:07 | |
| and once more in the pulpit of this chapel. | 1:09 | |
| Several years ago, Dr. Horne, of Columbia Teachers College, | 1:14 | |
| said that an educated man was one who had right relations | 1:19 | |
| on four levels or in four directions. | 1:22 | |
| Now it's quite possible, I know, | 1:27 | |
| that he meant that, the education, in its academic sense, | 1:28 | |
| although that's by no means a certainty. | 1:33 | |
| Indeed, from what follows, | 1:36 | |
| it's quite likely he did not mean it | 1:37 | |
| in so limited and a restricted a sense. | 1:39 | |
| In any case, education is a relative term. | 1:42 | |
| Daniel Boone couldn't spell the word "bear," | 1:46 | |
| but he could deal with one | 1:48 | |
| when he met him on a mountain path. | 1:49 | |
| And right then, a steady finger on the trigger | 1:52 | |
| and a clear eye sighting down the barrel of the gun | 1:57 | |
| was more important than an AP degree. | 1:59 | |
| A cum laude or any of the rest of the laude family. | 2:02 | |
| If I were drowning, | 2:06 | |
| I would far rather have a veritable ignoramus | 2:07 | |
| come down who could swim! | 2:10 | |
| Than a PhD who couldn't. | 2:11 | |
| The late Archbishop of Canterbury | 2:16 | |
| used to tell about coming down from Oxford for his holiday | 2:19 | |
| and trying out some of his new-found information | 2:22 | |
| on his mother, | 2:25 | |
| who didn't have the benefit of his education formally. | 2:26 | |
| And she was interested of course, but not much impressed. | 2:29 | |
| And she used to say, as he told it himself, | 2:32 | |
| said, oh, William, you know so much more than I do. | 2:35 | |
| And she was right. He did. | 2:38 | |
| But she said, William, I know so much better than you do. | 2:41 | |
| And she was still right, for she did. | 2:44 | |
| Knowledge, you know, is not always the equivalent of wisdom. | 2:47 | |
| That question, which T. S. Eliot asks | 2:52 | |
| in his pageant "The Rock," is still disturbing. | 2:55 | |
| Where, he said, is the wisdom | 2:59 | |
| that we've lost in knowledge? | 3:02 | |
| And the knowledge we've lost in education? | 3:04 | |
| Thomas Huxley said that a man was educated | 3:10 | |
| when he would do what he ought to do. | 3:14 | |
| And by that I suppose he meant | 3:17 | |
| a clear recognition of obligation | 3:18 | |
| and then some honest effort to respond to it in fidelity. | 3:22 | |
| And if he was right about that, and I think he was, | 3:27 | |
| then you know as well as I | 3:30 | |
| that there are people who never saw the outside, | 3:31 | |
| let alone the inside of a college who have it. | 3:34 | |
| And there are people with an impressive list of degrees | 3:38 | |
| after their names who've never got within sight of it. | 3:41 | |
| Educated when he would do what he ought to do. | 3:44 | |
| And lest that seem a kind of a lone voice, | 3:49 | |
| listen to what John Ruskin said. | 3:52 | |
| In the same connection he said, | 3:54 | |
| education does not mean | 3:56 | |
| teaching people what they do not know. | 3:58 | |
| It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave. | 4:00 | |
| But however Dr. Horne may have meant the use of education, | 4:07 | |
| I want to borrow that and in its wider sense, | 4:10 | |
| which it permits I think, | 4:13 | |
| and take his observations | 4:15 | |
| as pegs on which to hang a few thoughts of my own, | 4:18 | |
| which I hope may not be without some value to you. | 4:21 | |
| The first thing he said was this, | 4:25 | |
| that an educated man has right relations with nature. | 4:26 | |
| And I don't think he meant by that | 4:31 | |
| what we mean usually when we speak of a love of nature | 4:33 | |
| or some appreciation of this beautiful world | 4:38 | |
| that God has made, | 4:40 | |
| although something could be said for that, | 4:41 | |
| and indeed a good deal lot to be said for that. | 4:44 | |
| The mountains, for example, with their majestic strength. | 4:48 | |
| If anything could be everlasting in this world, | 4:52 | |
| certainly the mountains would be such. | 4:54 | |
| Or the vastness of the sea | 4:56 | |
| speaking to some of us of the wideness in God's mercy. | 4:59 | |
| Or the heavens which declare so eloquently | 5:03 | |
| the glory of God their creator. | 5:06 | |
| Something can be said for that. | 5:10 | |
| A year or two ago, | 5:13 | |
| in one of his columns Dr. Luccock | 5:14 | |
| told about the custom of the English | 5:18 | |
| in their British "Who's Who" of listing | 5:19 | |
| in that brief biography | 5:22 | |
| a man's favorite recreation. | 5:25 | |
| And that would be interesting it seems to me. | 5:27 | |
| At least as interesting as when he was born | 5:29 | |
| or where or what school he attended. | 5:31 | |
| His favorite recreation. | 5:33 | |
| And one novelist and writer of short stories | 5:36 | |
| listed his as watching. | 5:39 | |
| And when you might be tempted to say, | 5:42 | |
| well, what's unusual about that? | 5:44 | |
| Don't we all do it? | 5:45 | |
| Luccock said, do we? | 5:46 | |
| Do we? | 5:48 | |
| And he went on to say that it sometimes seems | 5:51 | |
| as if we were playing a tremendous game | 5:53 | |
| of blind man's bluff, | 5:55 | |
| the idea being to see how little of God's world we could see | 5:57 | |
| as we went through it. | 6:00 | |
| What a very distinguished man | 6:04 | |
| once said is a very sobering thought for all of us. | 6:07 | |
| He said the thing he feared in the Judgment, | 6:09 | |
| when he stood before the throne of God, | 6:11 | |
| would be for God to say, | 6:14 | |
| Well, what did you think of my world? | 6:15 | |
| And he would have no answer. | 6:18 | |
| Well, I can't rightly say. I never really thought. | 6:19 | |
| I was too busy on the telephone. | 6:23 | |
| And Henry Thoreau is old and used to be disgusted with him | 6:27 | |
| because he wouldn't read the biography of Thomas Chalmers, | 6:30 | |
| then in his heyday as the great Scotch preacher, | 6:33 | |
| but he would stand for half an hour down by the pond, | 6:36 | |
| listening to the croaking of a bullfrog. | 6:39 | |
| And it was Roy Burkhart, I think, | 6:43 | |
| who told about a young fellow | 6:44 | |
| who just about missed being bid for the college fraternity, | 6:46 | |
| on the ground he was peculiar. | 6:50 | |
| And the evidence of his peculiarity was this. | 6:53 | |
| He liked to go out and take long walks by himself | 6:55 | |
| in the fields and woods, | 6:59 | |
| when he might've gone to the movies | 7:01 | |
| like any sensible person. | 7:03 | |
| Or at least turned on the television set. | 7:05 | |
| I can't help but tell you at this point | 7:09 | |
| what the gifted and brilliant, | 7:10 | |
| although unconventional architect, | 7:13 | |
| Frank Lloyd Wright said about the television. | 7:14 | |
| He said that a good deal of it was just so much chewing gum | 7:16 | |
| for the eyeballs. | 7:20 | |
| And something could be said for that too. | 7:22 | |
| I think that what Professor Horne meant was probably | 7:26 | |
| an appreciation of the orderly processes | 7:29 | |
| of this natural world, | 7:32 | |
| this law-abiding world, | 7:34 | |
| for it is that kind of a world, really. | 7:35 | |
| When we speak about the confusion | 7:38 | |
| and the disorder of the world, | 7:39 | |
| we don't mean God's world. | 7:41 | |
| We mean man's world. | 7:43 | |
| That's where the confusion and the disorder lie. | 7:45 | |
| I don't know just when the sun came up this morning. | 7:49 | |
| I wasn't waiting for it, | 7:51 | |
| but I assume it got here on schedule. | 7:52 | |
| And I don't know when it's going down this evening, | 7:55 | |
| but it'll make it without any help from me. | 7:57 | |
| But I would cheerfully wager | 8:00 | |
| if I weren't a Methodist preacher | 8:02 | |
| in more or less good standing, | 8:03 | |
| I would cheerfully wager all that I have | 8:04 | |
| or ever hoped to have | 8:07 | |
| that the first event was exactly on schedule | 8:08 | |
| and the second will be. | 8:11 | |
| And that's something when you think about it. | 8:13 | |
| This old globe turning on its axis once in 24 hours | 8:16 | |
| and moving at an incredible speed | 8:19 | |
| of 60,000 miles an hour around the sun | 8:22 | |
| and all of it sweeping through this universe in space. | 8:25 | |
| And yet so on schedule that astronomers can and do | 8:29 | |
| predict eclipses of the sun and moon to the split minute. | 8:33 | |
| Of course, there's a rather a sobering aspect of this, | 8:40 | |
| this idea of a law-abiding and orderly world. | 8:46 | |
| For when some calamity comes and some disaster, | 8:53 | |
| if we once begin to have this idea | 8:57 | |
| that we can't beat our breasts and wail, | 8:59 | |
| as though it were some bolt out of the blue, | 9:03 | |
| utterly unpredictable, | 9:05 | |
| we'll have to set to work to ask why? | 9:08 | |
| And how it came? | 9:11 | |
| And what therefore we can do to prevent its recurrence? | 9:12 | |
| Among other things, | 9:16 | |
| when we speak about our scientific approach to life, | 9:17 | |
| surely we mean this? | 9:19 | |
| A respect for this matter of causes and their effects. | 9:22 | |
| This kind of a world where certain things | 9:27 | |
| move on to consequences | 9:29 | |
| which are inevitable and inescapable. | 9:30 | |
| I sometimes have the uneasy suspicion | 9:34 | |
| and it may be an unworthy suspicion, | 9:36 | |
| and if so, may God forgive me, | 9:39 | |
| but I have the suspicion that a good deal of our praying | 9:40 | |
| roots back in an hope that God would save us | 9:44 | |
| from the results of our own deeds. | 9:46 | |
| And that I don't think even God will do. | 9:49 | |
| I don't know who set the idea going, | 9:54 | |
| but so far as I'm concerned, it was Henry Drummond, | 9:56 | |
| making a clear distinction | 10:00 | |
| between what he called the guilt of sin and the stain of it. | 10:01 | |
| The guilt of it, of course, being the alienation, | 10:06 | |
| the estrangement that it lifts between us and God, | 10:09 | |
| the holy God. | 10:12 | |
| And of course, when a man is penitent and confesses his sin | 10:14 | |
| and better still forsakes it, | 10:17 | |
| that alienation ends and that barrier is removed. | 10:19 | |
| The mercy of God deals effectively with its guilt. | 10:25 | |
| But the stain of it, | 10:28 | |
| the consequences of it, | 10:30 | |
| the effects of it, | 10:32 | |
| even the eternal mercy of God does not change that. | 10:33 | |
| Well, that was the first. | 10:40 | |
| Right relations with nature. | 10:41 | |
| And the second was | 10:44 | |
| that an educated man would have right relations | 10:45 | |
| with his fellows. | 10:48 | |
| We're not alone in the world, | 10:51 | |
| although there is a certain inevitable loneliness | 10:52 | |
| about life. | 10:55 | |
| It's the price we pay for being an individual I think. | 10:56 | |
| I suspect that there's nobody | 11:00 | |
| that could come to the age of 30 or 35 | 11:02 | |
| and maybe a good deal less than that, | 11:05 | |
| and not have moments when he thought that no one, | 11:07 | |
| not even the one who loved him best and knew him most | 11:10 | |
| ever fully understood him. | 11:13 | |
| We're not alone. | 11:17 | |
| We're a part of the continent. | 11:19 | |
| John Donne was right. | 11:21 | |
| Each man is involved in mankind. | 11:22 | |
| But that's an area | 11:27 | |
| in which we're least conspicuously successful. | 11:28 | |
| The physical science has far outstripped the social sciences | 11:34 | |
| until they have made, | 11:37 | |
| from the standpoint of its size, | 11:39 | |
| made our world a neighborhood. | 11:40 | |
| Whereas the second have not succeeded yet | 11:43 | |
| in making it neighborly in spirit. | 11:45 | |
| Conspicuous and monumental our failures in this area. | 11:49 | |
| Someone has put it rather graphically. | 11:53 | |
| He said from the standpoint of technological achievements, | 11:55 | |
| we're super men. | 11:57 | |
| But from the standpoint of human relations, | 11:59 | |
| we're only barbarians in dinner jackets. | 12:01 | |
| This whole matter of human relations, | 12:06 | |
| how tremendously significant that is. | 12:09 | |
| Among the papers left by Scott Fitzgerald, | 12:13 | |
| there were some on suggestions for future stories. | 12:16 | |
| And one of them was this. | 12:19 | |
| A widely-scattered family have inherited a house | 12:21 | |
| in which they have to live together. | 12:25 | |
| Well, that's not a subject for a short story | 12:28 | |
| or even for a full-length book. | 12:31 | |
| That is an exact and precise description | 12:33 | |
| of the human situation. | 12:36 | |
| A widely-scattered family. Yes, we're that. | 12:39 | |
| Americans and English and Russians and Chinese. | 12:43 | |
| And Jew and Arab and white and black. | 12:47 | |
| And communist and non-communist. | 12:51 | |
| A widely-scattered family | 12:53 | |
| but inheriting a house in which we have to live. | 12:55 | |
| For whatever may be the conquest of space, | 13:00 | |
| it isn't likely that in your lifetime, | 13:02 | |
| this race of ours will have much of a home | 13:05 | |
| on any other planet than this. | 13:07 | |
| I think that's why the great teacher that day | 13:10 | |
| in the long ago, when the lawyer asked him the question, | 13:12 | |
| which is the great commandment? | 13:15 | |
| He went back like any devout Jew would have gone | 13:17 | |
| to the famous Shema of his people and began to recite it. | 13:19 | |
| Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, | 13:22 | |
| and thou shalt love the Lord thy God | 13:26 | |
| with all thy heart and with all thy mind | 13:28 | |
| and with all thy soul | 13:30 | |
| and with all thy strength. | 13:33 | |
| This is the first, and the second like it. | 13:34 | |
| Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. | 13:36 | |
| Now these weren't found together in the Old Testament. | 13:40 | |
| You understand that they weren't side by side back there. | 13:43 | |
| They weren't in the same chapter. | 13:46 | |
| They weren't in the same book. | 13:47 | |
| But by real spiritual insight and genius, | 13:50 | |
| Jesus, our Lord, took those two, | 13:53 | |
| which were not together there, | 13:55 | |
| and put them where they belong, | 13:56 | |
| side by side in some blessed spiritual affinity. | 13:58 | |
| Until we say what God has joined together, | 14:02 | |
| let no man put asunder. | 14:04 | |
| Love for God first. Love for a man second. | 14:06 | |
| And he didn't mean by that any special affection or romance. | 14:09 | |
| He meant a clear recognition of the fact | 14:14 | |
| that for good or ill, | 14:16 | |
| we're tied up in the bundle of life together. | 14:17 | |
| And that nothing in the long run | 14:22 | |
| can be very good for any of us | 14:24 | |
| that isn't good for all of us. | 14:25 | |
| I like to spend some part of a summer | 14:30 | |
| when I can in New England. | 14:32 | |
| I was here before. | 14:34 | |
| I've had to go up in the summer when I was on vacation. | 14:36 | |
| But now having come to my venerable age | 14:38 | |
| when the bishop no longer gives me assignments, | 14:40 | |
| I'm going up in the fall to enjoy the vivid coloring | 14:43 | |
| of New England in September and October. | 14:47 | |
| But whenever I'd drive up to New England, | 14:49 | |
| I'm always amazed by the highways, | 14:51 | |
| the bypasses of the cities, | 14:53 | |
| the limited-access highways, | 14:55 | |
| the Cloverleaf intersections, and all the rest. | 14:58 | |
| And of course, the bridge is the marvelous bridge | 15:01 | |
| over the Potomac and the Delaware and the Hudson. | 15:04 | |
| But not until about two or three years ago, | 15:08 | |
| did I go through the tunnel under the harbor at Baltimore. | 15:10 | |
| Before that, you had two choices. | 15:14 | |
| You could give it a wide bypass and add to your mileage, | 15:16 | |
| or you could fight your way | 15:19 | |
| through the traffic of those rather narrow streets | 15:21 | |
| in the old city. | 15:23 | |
| So I was approaching it from the south-west | 15:26 | |
| and the skyline was in the background. | 15:27 | |
| In the foreground, the ships riding at anchor there | 15:30 | |
| in the upper part of the Chesapeake Bay. | 15:33 | |
| And then suddenly, we dipped down into this tunnel | 15:34 | |
| and then four or five minutes came out on the other side | 15:39 | |
| on the road to Philadelphia. | 15:42 | |
| And I found myself amazed and saddened and a little provoked | 15:43 | |
| that men who can do that sort of thing | 15:49 | |
| should be at the same time so awkward | 15:53 | |
| and so bungling and so inept | 15:55 | |
| in this whole matter of human relations. | 15:58 | |
| This ridding the world, for example, | 16:01 | |
| of bitter and degrading poverty, | 16:03 | |
| we have the resources to do it. | 16:05 | |
| Or putting an end once for all | 16:08 | |
| to this monstrous folly of war. | 16:10 | |
| I read about a cartoon once which I did not see. | 16:15 | |
| But according to the writer, in this cartoon, | 16:18 | |
| Gabriel and a fellow angel were sitting on a cloud, | 16:21 | |
| contemplating the doings | 16:24 | |
| and of course the misdoings of the people on this earth. | 16:25 | |
| And both of them were rather disgusted with it. | 16:30 | |
| And finally Gabriel reached for his horn | 16:32 | |
| and set it to his lips | 16:34 | |
| and was about to end the whole thing once for all, | 16:35 | |
| when suddenly his fellow angel grabbed him by the arm. | 16:38 | |
| He said, hold it, Gabe, hold it! | 16:41 | |
| I see they're going to have another summit conference. | 16:43 | |
| Well, I can't leave it that far away from you | 16:50 | |
| on a Sunday morning in this lovely chapel. | 16:52 | |
| That's far too remote. | 16:54 | |
| As interested as we are | 16:57 | |
| in the outcome of summit conferences, | 16:58 | |
| not one of us, I take it, | 17:00 | |
| not many of us certainly have any influence on it. | 17:01 | |
| Won't be consulted about it. | 17:04 | |
| That's something else. | 17:07 | |
| But Mary Ellen Chase said, | 17:10 | |
| it tells about a woman | 17:11 | |
| when she was disturbed by the confusion of the world, | 17:13 | |
| would go out into the kitchen | 17:15 | |
| and straighten up the cupboard. | 17:16 | |
| Now it's a far cry, I grant you, | 17:19 | |
| from the disorder of the world | 17:21 | |
| and the longing for order in it to the disarray | 17:23 | |
| and then the order brought out of a kitchen cupboard. | 17:26 | |
| But that's where she took hold of it. | 17:29 | |
| That's where she came in. | 17:31 | |
| And it's pretty important after all | 17:34 | |
| to get on with this business of the kitchen cupboards. | 17:36 | |
| But there's something rather ludicrous it seems to me | 17:40 | |
| about people who are concerned mightily | 17:43 | |
| for a brotherhood among the nations | 17:45 | |
| and then hardly on speaking terms | 17:47 | |
| with people in the same city and sometimes on the street. | 17:48 | |
| And sometimes, God forgive us, | 17:53 | |
| on the same campus or in the same church. | 17:55 | |
| Brotherhood to the ends of the earth | 17:58 | |
| and peace among the nations. | 18:00 | |
| Oh yes, all of that and more. | 18:01 | |
| But in the meantime, the kitchen cupboard, you see. | 18:04 | |
| Your neighborhood. Your community. | 18:07 | |
| Your church. | 18:10 | |
| I was in St. Louis some time ago | 18:13 | |
| at one of our church conclaves. | 18:14 | |
| And in the lobby one day, | 18:16 | |
| one of the bishops told me a story about a little fellow | 18:17 | |
| who came home from school on Monday with his report card. | 18:19 | |
| And for reasons of his own, | 18:22 | |
| he wasn't anxious to show it to his father. | 18:24 | |
| But fathers can be persistent | 18:26 | |
| under some circumstances and he was. | 18:28 | |
| And finally he handed it over with this explanation. | 18:31 | |
| He said, Dad, I failed in my algebra, | 18:33 | |
| but I got A-plus in post-war planning. | 18:36 | |
| Well, I'm all for the post-war planning, | 18:40 | |
| and that was during the war a year or two would conclude. | 18:43 | |
| But what about our algebra? | 18:45 | |
| What about getting on with that? | 18:48 | |
| One of the famous satires of Hogarth | 18:52 | |
| was of a poor devil who was flung into prison in England | 18:54 | |
| because he couldn't meet a few pounds of debt. | 18:58 | |
| And while he was there, | 19:00 | |
| he was working on a grand scheme | 19:01 | |
| to pay the debt of the British Empire. | 19:04 | |
| That's it. | 19:06 | |
| He couldn't meet his own obligations, or didn't at least, | 19:08 | |
| but he knew how that England | 19:11 | |
| could meet the debts of the Empire. | 19:13 | |
| Right relations with his fellows. | 19:17 | |
| And then he will have, said Professor Horne, | 19:19 | |
| right relations with himself. | 19:22 | |
| And that isn't as simple as it sounds. | 19:25 | |
| Supreme Court Justice Jackson | 19:29 | |
| was saying at one of our commencements some while ago | 19:31 | |
| that man now had conquered just about all of his enemies | 19:33 | |
| except himself. | 19:37 | |
| Except himself. | 19:39 | |
| And that I suppose is a rather a modern version | 19:41 | |
| of an ancient word to the effect | 19:44 | |
| that he that ruineth his own spirit | 19:45 | |
| is better than he that taketh the city. | 19:48 | |
| Moffat Chopins out of Bidid seems to me, | 19:51 | |
| he said he who controls himself | 19:53 | |
| is more than a conqueror. | 19:56 | |
| Indeed, he is a conqueror. | 19:57 | |
| It's always seemed to me a bit strange that the subject | 20:01 | |
| which concerns man most directly and most intimately | 20:05 | |
| has been about the last to engage his study. | 20:09 | |
| Anthropology and zoology and biology | 20:14 | |
| and sociology and a good many more. | 20:18 | |
| And at long long, psychology. | 20:21 | |
| Coming really within the memory | 20:24 | |
| of some who are listening to me this morning, | 20:26 | |
| as recent as that. | 20:27 | |
| A friend of mine who taught psychology | 20:32 | |
| in a neighboring university not far from here incidentally | 20:34 | |
| told me once of the difference | 20:38 | |
| between psychotics and neurotics. | 20:39 | |
| He said a neurotic builds castles in the air | 20:41 | |
| and a psychotic lives in, | 20:44 | |
| but a psychiatrist collects rent on them. | 20:46 | |
| However that may be, | 20:51 | |
| this thing that concerns him most directly | 20:53 | |
| was his own inner life | 20:55 | |
| and the last really to engage his attention. | 20:56 | |
| Strange, isn't it? | 21:00 | |
| That only within about the last 300 years, | 21:02 | |
| ancient history long since gone and medieval history ended | 21:05 | |
| and Europe having made contact with this Western world | 21:09 | |
| before Harvey announced | 21:13 | |
| the circulation of blood in a man's body. | 21:15 | |
| Now I know that it could be maintained | 21:19 | |
| and if you were willing to wait for it, | 21:21 | |
| I could argue what I think | 21:23 | |
| that these other things had to come first. | 21:24 | |
| They had to lay the foundation. | 21:27 | |
| They did the necessary spade work | 21:28 | |
| for the coming of psychology. | 21:32 | |
| But still, it's strange. | 21:33 | |
| I think one reason for it is the complexity | 21:37 | |
| of these lives of ours. | 21:40 | |
| What a bundle of contradictions we are. | 21:43 | |
| Any one of us. | 21:46 | |
| Once when Walt Whitman was accused of being inconsistent, | 21:50 | |
| he shrugged it off. | 21:53 | |
| He said, very well, then, I contradict myself. | 21:54 | |
| I am large and contain multitudes. | 21:57 | |
| And it was Robert Louis Stevenson | 22:01 | |
| who rather wistfully wished once | 22:03 | |
| that he might be twins because he said | 22:05 | |
| there was quite enough material for a gentlemen and a rogue. | 22:07 | |
| Well, yes. | 22:12 | |
| Within the temple of my soul, there is a crowd. | 22:13 | |
| There's one of me that's humble. One that's proud. | 22:17 | |
| There's one who's broken-hearted for his sins. | 22:20 | |
| And one who, unrepentant, sits and grins. | 22:23 | |
| There's one who loves his neighbor as himself. | 22:27 | |
| And one who cares for naught but fame and pelf. | 22:29 | |
| From much corroding care, | 22:33 | |
| I would be free if I could once decide which one is me | 22:35 | |
| exactly. | 22:39 | |
| Sometimes I think we're like a bus | 22:41 | |
| that's hurtling down the road. | 22:43 | |
| Dozen, 15, 20 passengers aboard | 22:45 | |
| and never too sure which one's the wheel. | 22:47 | |
| Have you ever thought about | 22:53 | |
| the relation of the word integral and integrity? | 22:54 | |
| Each speaks of completeness or wholeness. | 22:58 | |
| Each is the opposite of brokenness and fragmentation. | 23:01 | |
| Until eventually, | 23:06 | |
| integral as wholeness becomes integrity as rightness. | 23:08 | |
| And long before the present use of the word integration, | 23:13 | |
| we sometimes talk rather hopefully | 23:16 | |
| about achieving an integrated personality. | 23:18 | |
| A man who was successfully dealing with the conflicts | 23:22 | |
| and the tensions in his own life, | 23:25 | |
| and by so much, finding something of serenity | 23:26 | |
| and of steadfastness. | 23:30 | |
| And if this is a difficult job, my friends, | 23:31 | |
| and believe me it is, | 23:34 | |
| it's an extremely important one, | 23:35 | |
| this right relations with ourselves. | 23:38 | |
| But the fourth thing, said Dr. Horne, | 23:42 | |
| the educated man will have right relations with God. | 23:45 | |
| In all creation, of only man was it said | 23:52 | |
| that he bears the image of his maker. | 23:54 | |
| And whether you take the first creation story | 23:57 | |
| or the second as recorded for us in Genesis, | 24:00 | |
| they say the same thing substantially in this particular. | 24:02 | |
| In the one case you read that God made man in his own image. | 24:06 | |
| And in the other that having made man, | 24:10 | |
| he breathed into me his own breath | 24:11 | |
| that man became a living soul. | 24:14 | |
| There's a spiritual reality | 24:19 | |
| above man and beyond him yet within him, | 24:21 | |
| with which he has to reckon. | 24:24 | |
| And when he does and comes into right relations with it, | 24:26 | |
| he finds a freedom | 24:29 | |
| and a joy and a peace | 24:31 | |
| to which otherwise he remains strangers. | 24:32 | |
| Bishop Kennedy | 24:38 | |
| said that he never met a man who was an atheist. | 24:39 | |
| He said he had met several who thought they were. | 24:42 | |
| But on closer examination, | 24:45 | |
| it became evident that they were objecting to | 24:47 | |
| wasn't the idea of God | 24:49 | |
| but somebody's particular conception of God, | 24:51 | |
| which is a very different matter. | 24:54 | |
| And he told a story about a convention of these men | 24:57 | |
| who were atheist or thought they were, | 24:59 | |
| and the tone of it was rather conciliatory. | 25:01 | |
| And one of them was impatient about it. | 25:03 | |
| He objected to this attitude, | 25:06 | |
| and finally in a rather an impassioned speech | 25:08 | |
| he appealed for a more belligerent atheism. | 25:10 | |
| And he ended by saying, I am a real atheist, thank God. | 25:13 | |
| Are we an atheist? Thank God. | 25:18 | |
| One of the greatest things ever said about God | 25:22 | |
| was said by Jesus, God is spirit. | 25:24 | |
| But man, too, is spirit. | 25:27 | |
| And spirit with spirit can meet. | 25:29 | |
| I don't think that anybody would have put H. G. Wells | 25:35 | |
| among the evangelicals in religion. | 25:37 | |
| Hardly. | 25:39 | |
| But about the outbreak of the First World War, | 25:41 | |
| he wrote his "Mr. Britling Sees It Through." | 25:43 | |
| And in that book, he says something like this one | 25:47 | |
| where he said, religion | 25:49 | |
| is the first thing and the last thing. | 25:51 | |
| And until a man finds God or until he is found by God, | 25:54 | |
| he begins at no beginning and he works to no end. | 25:59 | |
| Ah, that's it. Religion the first thing and the last. | 26:04 | |
| And until he finds God or is found by God, | 26:08 | |
| he begins at no beginning and he works to no end. | 26:12 | |
| The truth is that there's about life a divine discontent. | 26:18 | |
| There's something about us which soars above the world, | 26:23 | |
| as you would expect of those who bear the likeness of God, | 26:26 | |
| the infinite God. | 26:28 | |
| We're never quite satisfied, | 26:31 | |
| whoever we may be or whatever we may have. | 26:33 | |
| This divine discontent is to reckon with | 26:37 | |
| this something that whispers to us not here, | 26:40 | |
| but there. | 26:44 | |
| And for that, at our best, I think we devoutly thank God. | 26:47 | |
| The deep within ourselves | 26:52 | |
| which hears and answers to the deep of the spirit of God, | 26:53 | |
| calling from without. | 26:57 | |
| Gilbert Chesterton said it in his own fashion. | 27:00 | |
| Men are homesick in their homes and strangers under the sun | 27:03 | |
| and they lay their head in a foreign land | 27:08 | |
| whenever the day is done. | 27:11 | |
| Homesick in their homes and strangers under the sun. | 27:13 | |
| That's an echo, isn't it? | 27:18 | |
| If the New Testament weren't about people | 27:19 | |
| who confessed that they were pilgrims | 27:21 | |
| and strangers in the earth | 27:24 | |
| and who sought a better country, | 27:25 | |
| even a heavenly, | 27:28 | |
| wherefore God was not ashamed to be called their God. | 27:29 | |
| He had prepared for them a city. | 27:34 | |
| A few months ago, one of the church periodicals | 27:37 | |
| carried a sermon by Dr. George Buttrick. | 27:40 | |
| The sermon was entitled, "Man's Exiled Heart." | 27:46 | |
| And the scripture background of it | 27:50 | |
| was the story of Hadad. | 27:52 | |
| It was back in those wild and turbulent years, | 27:53 | |
| and David had sent Joab, his captain of war, | 27:56 | |
| to subdue Moab. | 28:00 | |
| And he did, | 28:02 | |
| with fury and relentlessness. | 28:04 | |
| And after the custom of the time, neither better nor worse, | 28:06 | |
| he was putting to death members of the royal family, | 28:08 | |
| but a faithful retainer escaped with the young prince Hadad. | 28:11 | |
| They made their way to Egypt, | 28:16 | |
| where they were received with every honor. | 28:17 | |
| Hadad was given his own palace and servants, | 28:20 | |
| and eventually for a wife, a sister of Pharaoh's queen. | 28:23 | |
| About everything that a person could desire. | 28:28 | |
| Whatever the luxury, whatever the culture of Egypt afforded, | 28:30 | |
| they were his. | 28:33 | |
| And then one day, the word came blown across the sands | 28:35 | |
| or brought in by caravan | 28:38 | |
| that David had been gathered to his fathers | 28:40 | |
| and Joab was no longer. | 28:42 | |
| And then something stirred in Hadad, | 28:44 | |
| longing for a land which he could barely remember | 28:48 | |
| as a little child and hadn't seen for many years | 28:51 | |
| and yet his own country. | 28:53 | |
| And the record is that he went to Pharaoh with the request, | 28:55 | |
| Let me go | 28:58 | |
| that I may go to my own country. | 29:01 | |
| And Pharaoh was amazed. | 29:03 | |
| Why, he said, what do you lack here? | 29:05 | |
| What do you lack amid the luxury here of Egypt | 29:07 | |
| that you want to go back to those windswept rocks? | 29:10 | |
| And Hadad could only answer nothing. | 29:14 | |
| He had no complaint to make about Egypt's treatment. | 29:16 | |
| But Egypt wasn't his home. | 29:18 | |
| And he could only repeat his request. | 29:21 | |
| Nothing. Only, let me go. | 29:22 | |
| And that, said Buttrick, | 29:26 | |
| is the spiritual history of every man. | 29:28 | |
| It's God who is our help in ages past. | 29:31 | |
| Our hope for years to come. | 29:35 | |
| Our shelter from the stormy blast. | 29:38 | |
| And our old eternal home. | 29:41 | |
| Let us pray. | 29:44 | |
| Speak, we beseech the old spirit of God, | 29:49 | |
| some authentic and direct word | 29:52 | |
| to each one of us here this morning. | 29:54 | |
| The word that we need most to hear, | 29:56 | |
| and bring to us the gift that we need most to receive | 29:58 | |
| as we wait before thee. | 30:03 | |
| The Lord bless you and keep you. | 30:06 | |
| The Lord make his face to shine upon you. | 30:07 | |
| The Lord lift up his countenance upon you | 30:11 | |
| and give you peace. | 30:14 | |
| (church music) | 30:21 | |
| (churchbell ringing) | 31:06 | |
| (churchbell ringing) | 31:09 | |
| (churchbell ringing) | 31:14 | |
| (bright church organ music) | 31:19 | |
| (background singing) | 31:53 | |
| (congregation walking and chatting) | 32:10 | |
| (walking and chatting) | 32:19 | |
| (chatting and murmuring) | 32:23 | |
| (chatting) | 32:29 | |
| (chatting) | 32:35 | |
| (many voices murmuring) | 32:42 |