Hugh Anderson - "A Wistful Generation"; Carl Michalson - "What It Means to Be a Christian" (November 5, 1961)
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
- | In the name of God the Father, God the Son, | 0:14 |
and God the Holy Ghost, amen. | 0:17 | |
The epithet wistful, | 0:26 | |
is not one which is usually applied to this generation. | 0:29 | |
We are more familiar with other descriptions, | 0:35 | |
the Beat Generation, for example. | 0:39 | |
But is not beat-ness simply a wistfulness | 0:43 | |
that has become totally introvert, | 0:48 | |
or again, the generation of angry young men? | 0:53 | |
But is not anger in this sense simply | 0:58 | |
a wistfulness that has gone sour? | 1:03 | |
The phenomena off the beatnik and the angry young man | 1:09 | |
are but the present day marks of our deep haunting sense | 1:15 | |
of loneliness and homelessness in the universe. | 1:21 | |
Far from concealing man's ineradicable longing for meaning | 1:28 | |
and for God, they reveal it perhaps as never before in | 1:34 | |
all its sharpness and poignancy. | 1:39 | |
For the truth about us is that man must, | 1:44 | |
and will have some God, | 1:48 | |
even against his own mind and judgment. | 1:51 | |
Not all the rampant secularism, | 1:56 | |
nor cynical boredom of our time, | 1:59 | |
can of eradicate men's infinite yearnings | 2:03 | |
for a higher power and a surer faith. | 2:07 | |
Therefore, even today we have arrays of men | 2:12 | |
still nursing the unconquerable hope, | 2:16 | |
still clutching the inviolable shade. | 2:20 | |
Why this cry from the last ramparts | 2:25 | |
of the human soul for God? | 2:28 | |
Why do we want and need the transcendent, the divine? | 2:31 | |
Well, an old Hebrew thinker put it in a very concrete, | 2:37 | |
and profound way when he said quite simply, | 2:41 | |
that man is created in the image of God. | 2:44 | |
A New Testament writer describes us merely | 2:50 | |
as strangers and sojourners on the earth. | 2:54 | |
A modern philosopher says in his own mode of thought | 2:59 | |
and language, "Because of the structure | 3:03 | |
of the universe and our position in it, | 3:06 | |
we feel like cuckoos in a nest of swallows." | 3:10 | |
Or listen to Pascal, | 3:16 | |
"the miseries of man prove his grandeur. | 3:18 | |
They are the miseries of a dethroned monarch." | 3:23 | |
Or take Jung, who out of years of experience | 3:28 | |
in psychoanalysis tells us | 3:31 | |
that religious symbols rise quite unconsciously | 3:34 | |
in the souls of men. | 3:38 | |
Need we add anything more? | 3:41 | |
However we try to describe or define it there | 3:44 | |
is a restlessness and a disquietude | 3:48 | |
of the human spirit that seems to be given to man | 3:51 | |
as part of the charter of his existence. | 3:55 | |
A longing for home, more acute than any exiles, | 4:00 | |
a disturbing nostalgia for faith for the living God. | 4:05 | |
These things are still deeply engraved in the minds | 4:11 | |
and hearts of the men and women of our generation. | 4:14 | |
Emile Bruneau described these things | 4:19 | |
as difficulty of breathing, on gousty eye, | 4:24 | |
the suffocating distress, which the soul of man feels | 4:29 | |
in its separation from God. | 4:33 | |
Suffocating distress, how many are experiencing that today? | 4:37 | |
I, for my part do not believe for a moment | 4:45 | |
that slander which is commonly held | 4:49 | |
on every side in these days, | 4:51 | |
that the people who fill the pews of the American churches | 4:53 | |
as you fill these pews this morning, | 4:57 | |
are hopelessly shallow and imperturbable, | 4:59 | |
and could not be shaken out of your thoughts. | 5:03 | |
I believe if I mistake not, | 5:08 | |
that the people of our generation | 5:10 | |
are shaken within already. | 5:13 | |
I bet that if I could probe beneath | 5:16 | |
the calm exterior of your existence this morning, | 5:19 | |
I would find for sure, a wistfulness that knows | 5:23 | |
the torment of fear and doubt. | 5:27 | |
Fear about the cosmos, and fear about man himself. | 5:30 | |
The Church today has to try to understand the modern temper, | 5:38 | |
particularly among young people, | 5:44 | |
with all their struggling uncertainty and tremulous hope. | 5:47 | |
There are many young people here I'm perfectly sure | 5:53 | |
who want to believe in God, | 5:56 | |
who want to have faith, | 5:59 | |
and are sad and despairing that they cannot find it. | 6:00 | |
This wistful state of mind, | 6:05 | |
which is so widely found today could be | 6:08 | |
a great ally of the gospel | 6:10 | |
of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen in all its fullness. | 6:12 | |
But instead, what do you find? | 6:17 | |
You find that the churches' leaders are often guilty | 6:20 | |
of preaching a God who is far too small | 6:24 | |
to meet the desperate longings of a distracted world. | 6:26 | |
And you find that the pulpit is constantly irrelevant, | 6:31 | |
because it will not try to understand the papers, | 6:34 | |
and the / of men's burning desire for faith in God. | 6:37 | |
Don't you think that the old smooth platitudes | 6:43 | |
about the goodness of God, | 6:47 | |
and the on the opposite nose of history look | 6:50 | |
woefully anachronistic in the grim realities | 6:53 | |
of our situation. | 6:57 | |
For everywhere we look across this strict enough today, | 6:59 | |
we find evidence not to support the possibility of faith | 7:04 | |
in a good God and in a sure purpose for history. | 7:09 | |
We find evidence rather, which denies it. | 7:13 | |
For this world of ours seems | 7:17 | |
to have gone quite lunatic and suicidal. | 7:19 | |
Men are beginning to wonder | 7:26 | |
whether Aldous Huxley wasn't right after all, | 7:27 | |
when he said, "Do what you will. | 7:30 | |
This world's a fiction, and is made up of contradiction." | 7:33 | |
Contradiction, and absurdity. | 7:39 | |
How absurd is the life of our time? | 7:42 | |
Men on every side are speaking peace, | 7:46 | |
and at the same time, rattling the sabers. | 7:50 | |
Are piling up nuclear weapons of destruction | 7:54 | |
and are foolish enough to trust in them | 7:57 | |
as the surest and safest deterrent to war. | 8:00 | |
The leading agency for international cooperation in our time | 8:04 | |
we all the United Nations. | 8:09 | |
And is not rather absurd that it should be split | 8:11 | |
into two competing camps waging war | 8:14 | |
in the cold sense, with each other? | 8:18 | |
Is it not also a daunting thought | 8:22 | |
that the Nazi myth of aryan racial purity | 8:25 | |
blotted out at so great sacrifice and cost, | 8:29 | |
should be succeeded | 8:33 | |
by the no less implausible communist myth | 8:34 | |
of the proletarian man. | 8:37 | |
And what about the soft feet of good things enjoyed | 8:40 | |
in our world by those who have, | 8:44 | |
and the misery of millions of refugees who have nothing. | 8:47 | |
I ask you how absurd can life on this planet get? | 8:51 | |
That is why multitudes of people in our time have gone | 8:59 | |
through a tremendous shattering of existence. | 9:03 | |
They probably feel like Ivan Karamazov. | 9:08 | |
"I can accept God," he says, "I cannot accept his world." | 9:12 | |
I believe that young people have a right to expect | 9:20 | |
in a world like this of ours, | 9:24 | |
that the Church's ministers should try | 9:26 | |
to understand their situation, | 9:28 | |
should try to penetrate to the heart | 9:31 | |
of their fears, dilemmas, and anxieties and predicaments. | 9:33 | |
The agonizing wistfulness of our day and generation | 9:38 | |
will not be met by any shallow preaching, | 9:43 | |
but only by a gospel, which is able to confront men | 9:46 | |
with the unspeakable agony of God in Jesus Christ, | 9:50 | |
and in his cross. | 9:56 | |
Now, there have been ages of human history | 9:59 | |
when man's longing for God was | 10:05 | |
a relatively cheerful and painless thing, | 10:08 | |
when he could take it easy. | 10:11 | |
When he didn't feel this sense | 10:13 | |
that the modern man feels of suffocating distress. | 10:15 | |
He didn't know the pain of alienation from God, | 10:20 | |
from his world, from himself. | 10:23 | |
In such epochs of human history man believed | 10:27 | |
that God's ordering of the world was corroborated, | 10:31 | |
and confirmed by the irresistible momentum | 10:35 | |
of human progress towards the kingdom of God. | 10:39 | |
This feeling in the latter 19th century produced | 10:45 | |
a radiant optimism and a glowing hope. | 10:48 | |
And men looked out in their world and believed | 10:52 | |
it was just a matter of time | 10:54 | |
before they tame the tiger in their heart, | 10:56 | |
and the kingdom of God would be reached. | 10:58 | |
Rhapsodizing on this theme, poets like Tennyson spread | 11:02 | |
the conviction that people were standing | 11:07 | |
as it were on a moving escalator, | 11:10 | |
and the kingdom of God would soon be attained. | 11:12 | |
The words of the poet Blake from the early years | 11:17 | |
of that so hopeful century sum up the attitude | 11:19 | |
of its latter part. | 11:23 | |
"I will not cease from mental fight, | 11:25 | |
nor should my sword sleep in my hand, | 11:28 | |
'til we have built Jerusalem | 11:32 | |
in England's green and pleasant land." | 11:34 | |
Well, England's land is still very pleasant and very green, | 11:38 | |
but no sign of the kingdom of God. | 11:43 | |
In staggering contrast with all this, | 11:48 | |
our own century has been pervaded | 11:51 | |
by darkness and turbulence, | 11:54 | |
by catastrophe and suffering on a lavish scale, | 11:57 | |
by prison camps and gas chambers, | 12:02 | |
and by the devilish accoutrements of nuclear destruction. | 12:06 | |
One might imagine that the old belief | 12:11 | |
in the inevitable process of history towards | 12:15 | |
a glorious finale might have been annihilated | 12:18 | |
by the acids of the history of the 20th century. | 12:22 | |
But far from it, far from it. | 12:26 | |
You know what we've witnessed? | 12:31 | |
We've witnessed in the 20th century, | 12:33 | |
how Bolshevism has taken over | 12:36 | |
the semi-Christian utopianist ideal | 12:39 | |
of a hither worldly kingdom of God, | 12:44 | |
and has completely secularized it. | 12:47 | |
So Bolshevism in our age has set man upon the high altar | 12:50 | |
of its religious devotion, | 12:55 | |
and worships man as its great God. | 12:57 | |
The communists recite in their creed, | 13:01 | |
I believe in man, the lord and creator of science. | 13:03 | |
Communism is proclaiming today a kingdom of God without God. | 13:09 | |
But what I want you to understand | 13:17 | |
is that in the 20th century, communism has no monopoly | 13:20 | |
of the worship of that most terrible | 13:24 | |
of all human idols, man himself. | 13:26 | |
For we in the West have participated | 13:31 | |
in the worship of mine instead of God, in our own way. | 13:33 | |
In the days of economic distress, and unrest, | 13:39 | |
and unemployment in the 1920s, | 13:43 | |
the minors of my boyhood home in the West of Scotland | 13:46 | |
used their all too abundant leisure time | 13:50 | |
to build what we Scots call a cairn. | 13:54 | |
A cairn, or a monument of stone, | 13:58 | |
on a commanding hill above the village. | 14:01 | |
They carried the stone from a nearby quarry. | 14:04 | |
The interesting thing was that into the stones, | 14:07 | |
they inserted plaques. | 14:10 | |
These plaques carried inscriptions or sayings, | 14:14 | |
which were reminiscent of the class struggle, | 14:18 | |
and redolent with the dream | 14:22 | |
of the coming day of the working man. | 14:24 | |
When brotherhood would be achieved | 14:28 | |
at history's end by man and for man. | 14:30 | |
Now for years, the old cairn | 14:34 | |
was well-tended and much visited. | 14:37 | |
But today, today, when you go there, | 14:41 | |
it stands forgotten, crumbling, derelict, | 14:44 | |
almost in total ruins. | 14:51 | |
A ghostly monument to the futility of man's dream | 14:54 | |
in the course of his own history. | 14:59 | |
The futility of man's dream that it was only | 15:01 | |
a matter of time before he could bring | 15:03 | |
the kingdom of God upon earth. | 15:05 | |
And countless more tragic monuments than that straddle | 15:07 | |
the world in our day and generation. | 15:11 | |
The futility of man's dream that he could do it himself. | 15:14 | |
Is it not therefore one of the strange ironies of our age, | 15:19 | |
that the accredited preachers and teachers | 15:24 | |
of the churches here should always be talking | 15:27 | |
about safeguarding the Christian truth | 15:30 | |
against attack from without, | 15:33 | |
against attack from communism, for example, | 15:35 | |
while all the time we allow it to starve and die within. | 15:39 | |
By preaching man instead of preaching Christ, | 15:44 | |
by proclaiming the Church | 15:47 | |
as an institution, instead of proclaiming God. | 15:49 | |
The pulpit today in America, particularly, | 15:52 | |
is still indulging in the old cult | 15:55 | |
of reassurance about history. | 15:57 | |
In many pulpits the Christian message is being ratified | 16:00 | |
into a vague abstraction that has no gospel at all. | 16:04 | |
It is too pale, and too human, and too puny | 16:08 | |
to answer the plight of those who | 16:12 | |
are yearning for a God who remains God, | 16:14 | |
even when all the lights of history go out, | 16:18 | |
And our dreamed off future is taken away from us. | 16:21 | |
You know as well as I do | 16:27 | |
that we really should face the fact honestly. | 16:29 | |
And if you face the facts honestly, | 16:32 | |
you cannot, I believe, take too much comfort | 16:34 | |
from the current organizational success | 16:37 | |
of the churches here, financially, | 16:40 | |
numerically and institutionally. | 16:43 | |
Much less can we be satisfied | 16:46 | |
with the popular preaching of a God who | 16:49 | |
is my minute enough to be contained within a few witticisms, | 16:52 | |
and a few human interest stories. | 16:57 | |
We cannot be satisfied with the preaching of a God who | 17:00 | |
is the preserver of our way of life, | 17:04 | |
the champion and the defendant of our national prosperity, | 17:07 | |
the guardian of our poor human values. | 17:11 | |
This preaching that we hear in many places, | 17:16 | |
I am being frankly critical, | 17:20 | |
is a perversion of the gospel of Jesus Christ, | 17:22 | |
because it's a human message and not a divine one. | 17:25 | |
As Reinhold Niebuhr has said again and again, | 17:29 | |
"The gods of the 19th century, the gods of human progress, | 17:33 | |
and history, and enlightenment, | 17:37 | |
and the perfectability of man have suffered eclipse. | 17:39 | |
They have died a thousand deaths, haven't they? | 17:43 | |
In the carnage of the Pacific islands, | 17:46 | |
in the North African deserts, in the battlefields of Europe, | 17:48 | |
in the prison camps and gas chambers, | 17:53 | |
in the nuclear fallout that drifts eerily across our skies, | 17:55 | |
in the barbed wire at the Brandenburg gate of Berlin, | 18:00 | |
the old gods are dead. | 18:03 | |
If we would preach a relevant message to our time, | 18:09 | |
we must preach a God who is bigger than | 18:13 | |
all man's cultural pretensions. | 18:16 | |
And on the other hand of God, who reveals himself | 18:19 | |
in his agony in Christ | 18:23 | |
to the agony of this wistful generation. | 18:25 | |
Who reveals himself in his sacrificial failure and weakness | 18:28 | |
to our sacrificial failure and weakness. | 18:32 | |
For the old gods have failed us now. | 18:36 | |
If we want to be relevant preachers, | 18:41 | |
we would do well to harken to the message | 18:44 | |
of that most searching and cathartic | 18:46 | |
of all biblical documents, the book of Job, | 18:48 | |
that poor old soul. | 18:52 | |
A kind of Oriental beatnik of his own day. | 18:55 | |
Out of his ash heap of suffering, | 18:59 | |
he shakes his fist with promethian arrogance against heaven. | 19:01 | |
There's something lovable about a rebel, | 19:05 | |
and Job was one, an angry man. | 19:07 | |
Anyhow, when his would be ministering friends try | 19:11 | |
to comfort him with glib utterances | 19:15 | |
about the little God of Orthodox Hebrew religiosity, | 19:18 | |
he cannot endure their comfort, | 19:22 | |
and violently rejects it. | 19:25 | |
Job, you see, was living in that awful period, | 19:27 | |
between the death of the old little gods of formal religion, | 19:32 | |
and the coming of that other God, | 19:37 | |
who is higher than all men's calculations and hopes, | 19:39 | |
and deeper than all human anguish. | 19:43 | |
And the situation of man in the 20th century | 19:48 | |
is precisely like that of Job, | 19:51 | |
we too, are living between the times. | 19:53 | |
The old gods of dead for us, | 19:58 | |
and we await the coming of that other God, | 20:00 | |
who is higher than man. | 20:05 | |
Where is God, where is God? | 20:07 | |
Where is God, mean are asking | 20:10 | |
in this critical interim of ours. | 20:13 | |
And you can see yourself how no little god created | 20:16 | |
in the image of man can satisfy the hunger | 20:21 | |
of our young people, particularly today. | 20:24 | |
No version of religion which merely equates it | 20:27 | |
with human hopes and desires is adequate to their need. | 20:30 | |
No hyped up psychological pep-talking from the pulpit | 20:35 | |
that merely chastises doubt and anxiety, | 20:39 | |
and tries to spread the cult | 20:42 | |
of individual, happiness and success, | 20:44 | |
can assuage the fierce hunger | 20:48 | |
of our generation for a real god, who is God. | 20:50 | |
Where is God? | 20:57 | |
In the face of this question which you are asking, | 20:58 | |
you cannot escape it, you here this morning | 21:01 | |
in this congregation of the Duke Chapel, | 21:04 | |
in the deep places of your individual existence | 21:06 | |
you are asking this question | 21:09 | |
with a sharpness and agony. | 21:10 | |
You've never asked it before in | 21:13 | |
a day and age like ours, where is God? | 21:15 | |
And in the face of this question | 21:19 | |
the Christian pulpit could become truly irrelevant | 21:21 | |
and come into its own in our time. | 21:24 | |
I believe that the word we have to preach | 21:28 | |
is that the living God is only to be found | 21:31 | |
through the jaws of death, anguish and hell. | 21:35 | |
Translated into Christian terms, | 21:40 | |
that means simply the cross of Jesus Christ. | 21:43 | |
Our Lord himself made it plain enough when he said, | 21:47 | |
"I, if I be lifted up from the earth | 21:50 | |
would draw all men onto me." | 21:54 | |
There is no way to a living God save through | 21:57 | |
his own agony in the cross of Jesus Christ. | 22:00 | |
There on Calvary, where all human hope is silenced, | 22:04 | |
and all human dreams are annihilated, | 22:08 | |
God speaks to this generation the word of light in death. | 22:11 | |
The cost to God of speaking to us | 22:17 | |
and rending the veil between himself and us | 22:20 | |
is the sacrifice of his own Son. | 22:23 | |
I know it isn't easy to formulate a philosophy | 22:27 | |
of the cross of Christ. | 22:30 | |
We can only speak stumblingly and falteringly | 22:31 | |
before the mystery of it. | 22:34 | |
But don't you think that the wistful ones of our generation | 22:37 | |
could understand the passion and death of Jesus Christ | 22:42 | |
far better than they can understand | 22:46 | |
the fair weather, passionless preaching | 22:49 | |
that is often given to them from our pulpits in this age. | 22:51 | |
Luther sums the whole thing up | 22:57 | |
about how any generation is to find God when he says, | 22:59 | |
that God's word is always a word that slays. | 23:06 | |
He must destroy what is in us | 23:11 | |
before he can bestow upon us his gift. | 23:14 | |
Let me try to put that in my own poor words. | 23:18 | |
Before real faith lies the anguish of doubt. | 23:22 | |
Before the song lies the sacrifice. | 23:27 | |
Before the glory of resurrection life | 23:31 | |
lies somehow a cross. | 23:34 | |
Before God's help lies our own terrible helplessness. | 23:37 | |
Hold thou thy cross before my closing eyes. | 23:44 | |
Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies. | 23:49 | |
Heaven's morning breaks, and Earth's vain shadows flee. | 23:54 | |
Help of the helpless who abide with me. | 24:00 | |
I'm not suggesting that if you as an individual | 24:07 | |
had an isolated personal encounter with the God | 24:10 | |
who stands behind the cross | 24:13 | |
that this would be a panaseer | 24:15 | |
for all our terrible, collective and international problems. | 24:17 | |
But what I do feel is this. | 24:22 | |
That those who have found God in the darkness of the cross | 24:24 | |
will not be broken or defeated | 24:28 | |
by anything that this mad and ruinous world can do to them. | 24:31 | |
For they will have laid hold of an unseen reality, | 24:35 | |
that at one and the same time transcends our world | 24:39 | |
and remains in the bides through | 24:43 | |
all its anguish and distress. | 24:45 | |
If you have plumbed the depths of the cross | 24:49 | |
of Jesus Christ and the agony of God, | 24:51 | |
which is present there, | 24:54 | |
you will be able to go back into your society | 24:56 | |
as a bearer of light when the shadows gather. | 24:59 | |
And as one who is able to give courage | 25:03 | |
to the falling and faint-hearted, | 25:06 | |
when the world and worldly things are failing them. | 25:08 | |
Father Tidel once said, | 25:13 | |
"Often and often I have been tempted to give up, | 25:16 | |
but always the sight of that strange man hanging | 25:21 | |
on his cross has sent me back to my task again | 25:25 | |
with new heart." | 25:30 | |
The duty of the pulpit in such | 25:32 | |
a wistful generation as this is abundantly clear. | 25:34 | |
It is to call your attention to | 25:39 | |
that strange man hanging on his cross. | 25:42 | |
For only he can meet can meet your wistful longings. | 25:46 | |
We have to preach Christ crucified. | 25:49 | |
We have to lift up the lamb of God, | 25:52 | |
slain from the foundation of the world. | 25:55 | |
This word of God that both slays and is slain. | 25:59 | |
This alone has the power in this wistful age | 26:04 | |
to give us songs for our sighing, | 26:09 | |
to turn our darkness into light, | 26:12 | |
and to bring light out of death. | 26:16 | |
Amen, let us. | 26:20 | |
Almighty and ever blessed God, | 26:23 | |
hold thou thy cross in Jesus Christ before our eyes. | 26:26 | |
That we may know that where we have lost all hope | 26:31 | |
in history and in man, we can trust in thee, | 26:34 | |
and become light bearers of real hope | 26:38 | |
to this troubled day and this distracted world. | 26:41 | |
And to thee, be the glory. | 26:44 | |
And now, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, | 26:47 | |
and the love of God, | 26:50 | |
and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost | 26:51 | |
be upon you now henceforth, and forever more. | 26:53 | |
- | I should like to speak to you | 28:13 |
about what it means to be a Christian. | 28:15 | |
And I'd like you to regard what I have to say | 28:20 | |
in a rather particular way, | 28:24 | |
not as a definition to be memorized and repeated, | 28:27 | |
not as a motto or a blueprint | 28:33 | |
to be followed in mathematical detail, | 28:37 | |
but as a threshold to be crossed. | 28:42 | |
For as you know, the places we inhabit | 28:47 | |
are pretty largely determined by the thresholds we crossed. | 28:50 | |
The question about what it means to be a Christian | 28:56 | |
is peculiarly relevant to a Protestant I would suppose. | 28:59 | |
Protestants, as you know, | 29:06 | |
are not those who protest against something. | 29:07 | |
Protestare means to stand for. | 29:12 | |
And when it comes to knowing what we stand for, | 29:17 | |
we Christians in the Protestant form, | 29:21 | |
while we may be all vogue on the outside, | 29:23 | |
are often sometimes vague on the inside. | 29:29 | |
What then does it mean to be a Christian? | 29:33 | |
I would think in the first place a Christian | 29:40 | |
is one who knows that God is his guardian. | 29:42 | |
When the apostles stood in the presence | 29:49 | |
of the rulers of Judaism, | 29:53 | |
who tried to get them to stop their preaching | 29:55 | |
in the streets, they said, "No. | 29:58 | |
For we have gods to obey and not men." | 30:02 | |
Judged by that criterion, there's only one thing worse | 30:08 | |
than refusing the advice of others, and that's taking it. | 30:11 | |
In ultimate matters, I mean, God has no proxy. | 30:16 | |
He delivers his will. | 30:21 | |
(audio skips) It was because the navigators failed | 30:24 | |
to pay sufficient heed to their radar. | 30:26 | |
Well, the Bible says society will be | 30:31 | |
in a permanent state of collision | 30:34 | |
if men adopt a radar type device | 30:36 | |
for relating themselves to each other. | 30:39 | |
Each man comporting himself in the light of the way, | 30:41 | |
another man expects him to behave. | 30:45 | |
For we have gods to obey and not men. | 30:49 | |
And that understanding that God is our guardian cuts | 30:53 | |
across every kind of radar tactic in social life, | 30:57 | |
every kind of conformism, | 31:01 | |
and opens our lives perpendicularly to God. | 31:03 | |
To settle for life at any other level would seem to me | 31:09 | |
to be to settle for life at the level | 31:13 | |
of the conditioned reflex, | 31:16 | |
which would turn life into a kind of ethical Pavlovism. | 31:18 | |
You know who Pavlov is, | 31:24 | |
Russian scientist who drew inferences for human behavior, | 31:26 | |
from his experiments with animals, particularly dogs. | 31:30 | |
Well, you feed a dog red meat and watch him salivate. | 31:34 | |
Then you feed him red meat and ring a bell, | 31:41 | |
and watch him salivate. | 31:43 | |
Then one day just ring a bell, | 31:46 | |
and the dog will salivate. | 31:50 | |
One says his reflexes are conditioned. | 31:51 | |
Henceforth, the hand that rocks the bell rules the dog. | 31:54 | |
We have seen how an entire political system has brought | 31:59 | |
to hold people under the domination | 32:03 | |
to the system by the use of this method. | 32:07 | |
We have seen it employed effectively | 32:11 | |
in other areas of the world. | 32:14 | |
But have we seen how prone we are as a society, | 32:17 | |
and as individuals to adopt this | 32:22 | |
Pavlovistic conditioned reflex basis | 32:27 | |
for our own existence. | 32:30 | |
But we have God to obey, and not men. | 32:33 | |
I know I was at the University of Virginia once, | 32:40 | |
scarcely a parallel to Duke University, | 32:44 | |
but you'll pardon, it's just an illustration. | 32:47 | |
And one of the main problems I confronted | 32:50 | |
among Christian students on the campus there | 32:54 | |
was what policy they should take toward | 32:56 | |
the use of alcoholic beverages. | 32:58 | |
And as we surveyed campus opinion, | 33:02 | |
we discovered there were four points of view. | 33:04 | |
One, boycott all parties where alcohol is used. | 33:07 | |
Two, go to the parties, but don't drink. | 33:12 | |
Three, go to the parties and drink. | 33:16 | |
Four, go to the parties, drink and get drunk. | 33:20 | |
Now among the Christian students we discovered there | 33:24 | |
were two prevailing opinions, one might say live options. | 33:27 | |
One was go to the parties, but don't drink. | 33:31 | |
The other was go to the parties and drink. | 33:34 | |
Hasten to add they weren't all Methodists. | 33:36 | |
(congregation laughs) | 33:39 | |
But the interesting thing about this investigation was | 33:41 | |
that when we pried into the sources beneath | 33:44 | |
the behavior of both these groups, | 33:48 | |
we discovered they were identical. | 33:51 | |
Their different behavior was identically motivated. | 33:54 | |
We asked the boys who went to the parties and didn't drink | 33:57 | |
why they didn't drink? | 34:00 | |
They said, "Well, our mothers and fathers taught us | 34:01 | |
it was wrong to drink." | 34:03 | |
We asked the boys who went and did drink, they said, | 34:05 | |
"Our mothers and fathers taught us | 34:07 | |
it was all right to drink." | 34:09 | |
I submit to you both groups of boys had settled | 34:11 | |
for life at the level of the conditioned reflex. | 34:14 | |
But we have God to obey and not men. | 34:19 | |
Well, you may ask me, "Michelson, | 34:25 | |
is there more than one way of staying sober?" | 34:26 | |
That's just the point, there is! | 34:29 | |
You may stay sober because under God, | 34:33 | |
you Know your body is his living temple. | 34:36 | |
Or you may stay sober because your mothers | 34:39 | |
and fathers don't want you to drink; | 34:41 | |
two completely different ways of life. | 34:43 | |
You can extend this to other modes of behavior. | 34:47 | |
You ask, "Is there more than one way | 34:49 | |
of being chaste, sexually clean?" | 34:51 | |
Of course, that's just the point. | 34:55 | |
You may stay sexually clean | 34:59 | |
because your mothers and fathers don't want you involved | 35:00 | |
in a pregnancy before you graduate from college. | 35:03 | |
Or you may stay sexually clean | 35:07 | |
because you know you have no right to give yourself | 35:10 | |
to someone to whom you have not been given, | 35:13 | |
as in an act of marriage. | 35:16 | |
Christians know that God is their guardian. | 35:20 | |
Now I'm sure the chaplain hasn't brought me | 35:27 | |
all the way from New Jersey just to come here | 35:29 | |
and cut across adult authority | 35:33 | |
in the life of this campus population. | 35:36 | |
As a matter of fact, I have a fond respect | 35:39 | |
for adult authority, being an adult. | 35:41 | |
(congregation laughs) | 35:44 | |
I even know of a freshman girl at Duke who was invited | 35:47 | |
to go to her first fraternity house party. | 35:52 | |
And she wrote to her mother asking permission. | 35:55 | |
I will expect my daughter to do the same with her mother. | 35:58 | |
And the mother wrote back in this case and said, | 36:02 | |
"Which of the 18 fraternities?" | 36:04 | |
And the girl wrote back specifying. | 36:07 | |
And the mother wrote back again, | 36:09 | |
you can waste a lot of postage this way. | 36:11 | |
The mother wrote back again saying, | 36:13 | |
"Well, what do they do with those house parties?" | 36:15 | |
And the girl wrote back, very wisely I think, | 36:17 | |
and said, "Well, they do just about what you used to do." | 36:21 | |
(congregation laughs) | 36:24 | |
She got a telegram saying, "No, you'd better not go." | 36:26 | |
(congregation laughs loudly) | 36:30 | |
I mean, adults have a rich store of experience | 36:34 | |
that ought to be, rich store of experience | 36:37 | |
that ought to be tapped. | 36:39 | |
But in the last analysis, every adult should know | 36:42 | |
that everybody else, including himself, | 36:45 | |
has God to obey and not some other man. | 36:47 | |
The point of what I'm saying is not | 36:54 | |
to cut across any kind of authority, | 36:55 | |
but try to estimate what the role of other people may be | 36:57 | |
in our lives in the world in which we have gods to obey. | 37:02 | |
I think a very interesting analogy | 37:07 | |
was developed out in Oregon a few years ago | 37:09 | |
in the medical school. | 37:13 | |
Before this time in the medical school, | 37:16 | |
the students have to take the professor's word for it | 37:18 | |
as to the heartbeat of the patient when he performed | 37:22 | |
the operation in the amphitheater in the classroom. | 37:26 | |
But recently, in this particular medical school, | 37:29 | |
they created a system whereby every chair | 37:34 | |
in the classroom was wired for sound, | 37:38 | |
so that these students had only | 37:41 | |
to plug in their stethoscopes right at their seat, | 37:43 | |
and hear the heartbeat of the patient for themselves. | 37:47 | |
This didn't do away with the professor. | 37:51 | |
The professor had to help them locate the heartbeat, | 37:55 | |
but they had the privilege of hearing it for themselves. | 37:58 | |
I submit to you, this is the structure of the universe. | 38:03 | |
Others may help us locate the heartbeat of the universe, | 38:06 | |
but we have the responsibility and the privilege | 38:11 | |
of hearing it for ourselves. | 38:14 | |
When my father was dying, I felt very remorseful | 38:19 | |
that I had never really expressed myself | 38:23 | |
about my appreciation for his handling of his family. | 38:25 | |
So I said to him, just this one sentence, | 38:32 | |
he was very weak it had to be brief. | 38:35 | |
I want to tell you what I said, | 38:38 | |
and then tell you why I think I said it. | 38:39 | |
I said, "Dad, the thing that I have appreciated about you | 38:41 | |
is that you never came between your children and God." | 38:45 | |
Now this is what I think I meant. | 38:51 | |
Every time I had a really crucial decision to make, | 38:53 | |
I took it to my dad, but persistently, he refused to answer. | 38:57 | |
He simply said, "Well, Carl, have you prayed about it?" | 39:02 | |
Now, he was not a sticky, pious, sentimental fellow. | 39:07 | |
He was a modern man. | 39:09 | |
And yet he would say, "Have you prayed about it?" | 39:12 | |
I think I knew then, as I know now, what prayer is. | 39:16 | |
Prayer is a kind of cerebral x-ray | 39:21 | |
that penetrates to our very thought processes. | 39:26 | |
And when our thought processes | 39:30 | |
are exposed to the eyes of God, | 39:32 | |
we are fairly certain what we must do. | 39:35 | |
Last night, I flew into our nation's Capitol. | 39:40 | |
I saw that great dome, all lighted up, | 39:43 | |
my heart leapt within me. | 39:44 | |
Possibly you think it's because I'm patriotic. | 39:46 | |
Actually, this is where I took my wife on our honeymoon. | 39:49 | |
And while we were there, we visited | 39:53 | |
the old chamber of the House of Representatives, | 39:56 | |
and you've probably been there yourself. | 40:00 | |
The little old guy took our whole crowd, | 40:03 | |
and put us around a spot in the floor. | 40:05 | |
Then he went off to the other side of the room | 40:08 | |
and he talked down at the floor, | 40:10 | |
but we could hear his voice coming up in the midst of us. | 40:13 | |
"Can you hear me? Can you hear me?" | 40:17 | |
And we could, but at first we thought we were being tricked. | 40:20 | |
This place was surely wired for sound. | 40:24 | |
But no, as he explained, and it seemed quite plausible, | 40:26 | |
this room was made to be acoustically perfect at one point, | 40:30 | |
the point on which we had been placed. | 40:35 | |
Now, is this not the character of the universe? | 40:39 | |
It has been made acoustically perfect, at one point, | 40:43 | |
the point on which we place our lives when we say, | 40:46 | |
"What will thou have me to do?" | 40:50 | |
For God is our guardian. | 40:53 | |
I don't mean to say you'll hear voices. | 40:57 | |
But they didn't complain that Joan of arc heard voices, | 41:01 | |
they complained that she heard them | 41:04 | |
in French instead of in Latin. | 41:05 | |
I would complain if you heard voices. | 41:07 | |
And I don't mean you would know | 41:11 | |
for certain what you must do. | 41:13 | |
The most important thing is not to know God's will, | 41:16 | |
but to know that God's will is the most important thing. | 41:20 | |
But that's the way a Christian negotiates his life. | 41:26 | |
He puts his life on that acoustically perfect spot, | 41:31 | |
and it takes on the aspect of a heavily leaved branch. | 41:34 | |
One by one, these leaves become stripped away, | 41:38 | |
selfishness, envy, pride, greed, defensiveness. | 41:41 | |
Until at last his life is a branch bare, supple, | 41:47 | |
to be bent to the purposes of God. | 41:51 | |
This is what it means fundamentally to be a Christian, | 41:55 | |
to know that God is your guardian. | 41:59 | |
Now, one might add to this and say a second thing. | 42:07 | |
A Christian is one who knows that the gospel is our guide. | 42:10 | |
When Martin Luther stood in the presence | 42:15 | |
of the Cardinals and bishops of the Medieval church | 42:17 | |
who were trying to get him to recant some of his beliefs, | 42:20 | |
he said, "No, my conscience is in captivity to the gospel, | 42:24 | |
and a man cannot go against conscience." | 42:30 | |
It is true that Christianity is fundamentally | 42:35 | |
a religion of a book, the Bible, the gospel. | 42:39 | |
Well that's makes us peculiarly vulnerable then. | 42:46 | |
For what if our faith were based upon a book, | 42:50 | |
and we Christians were illiterate? | 42:54 | |
I'm told that there are some ministers who scarcely dare | 42:59 | |
to allude to biblical stories these days, | 43:02 | |
because the people don't recognize them, | 43:05 | |
and then fail to get the point. | 43:08 | |
I even ran across a man recently who believes | 43:10 | |
that the epistles are the wives of the apostles. | 43:13 | |
(congregation laughs) | 43:16 | |
But then there would be only one thing worse | 43:21 | |
than being illiterate if our religion | 43:23 | |
were a religion of the book. | 43:25 | |
And that would be two to read it in the wrong way. | 43:27 | |
Like literalism, | 43:31 | |
some people read the Bible as if it were printed in braille. | 43:34 | |
They moved their fingers along every word, | 43:39 | |
and treat every word as if it were | 43:42 | |
as important as every other word. | 43:43 | |
Of course, it's one of my friend's retorts, | 43:46 | |
"How else can you read the Bible if you're blind?" | 43:48 | |
But that aside, | 43:53 | |
one must have a way of reading the Bible. | 43:56 | |
One must learn to read the Bible intelligently | 43:58 | |
the way he reads any other book. | 44:01 | |
And how is that? | 44:03 | |
I have a book on my shelves at home entitled, | 44:05 | |
"How to Read a Book," by Mortimer Adler. | 44:07 | |
It's just come out in a paperback. | 44:09 | |
I have a brother-in-law the graduate school | 44:12 | |
at the University of Wisconsin. | 44:13 | |
He comes, he lies on my couch, | 44:15 | |
and looks up at that shelf back and he's paralyzed. | 44:17 | |
He says, "How can I read that book | 44:20 | |
until I've read the book?" | 44:22 | |
Well, there's something to that, it's like the Bible. | 44:24 | |
(congregation laughs) | 44:27 | |
How can you read the Bible, | 44:29 | |
except from the Bible's point of view?!" | 44:31 | |
That means you can't read it in any detail | 44:35 | |
until you read it from the standpoint of the book itself, | 44:38 | |
as you would be expected to read any other book. | 44:42 | |
And when you do that, it emerges as the kind of book it is. | 44:45 | |
For instance, it is not a book of science. | 44:49 | |
If you want to know how the world began, | 44:54 | |
do you go to Genesis? | 44:56 | |
You do not, you go to the astrophysicists. | 44:57 | |
If you want to know why the world began, | 45:01 | |
then you may want to go to Genesis. | 45:05 | |
If you want to know how the world will end | 45:08 | |
do you go to the Bible? | 45:11 | |
You do not. You go to the politicians. | 45:12 | |
(congregation laughs) | 45:16 | |
But if you want to know the meanings | 45:19 | |
that will prevail at the end of time, | 45:22 | |
then go to the book of the Revelation. | 45:24 | |
There you will find that Jesus will come riding | 45:27 | |
on a cloud at the end of time. | 45:30 | |
Well, this is not a meteorological judgment. | 45:33 | |
Any semitic mentality knows that in the Bible cloud | 45:37 | |
is a symbol for God's guidance. | 45:42 | |
God led his people in the wilderness by a cloud. | 45:45 | |
And at the end of time, God, | 45:48 | |
whatever men do with the world, | 45:50 | |
God will be leading his people. | 45:52 | |
And the content of that leadership has been manifested | 45:56 | |
in his son, Jesus of Nazareth. | 46:00 | |
I don't mean to say there is no science in the Bible. | 46:04 | |
I heard of an Israeli businessman who read the Old Testament | 46:08 | |
about the story of smoke curling out of the ground, | 46:11 | |
around Sodom and Gomorrah, | 46:14 | |
and he immediately concluded there must be oil there. | 46:16 | |
And he went and he bought up a plot of ground, | 46:19 | |
and he dug and he struck oil, and he struck it rich. | 46:21 | |
But the riches, the Bible talks about | 46:27 | |
are not the riches we customarily associate | 46:29 | |
with Iran and Texas. | 46:31 | |
No, they are the riches of the knowledge, | 46:34 | |
and love of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord. | 46:36 | |
The Bible is not science. | 46:40 | |
It's this fundamental kind of wisdom by which men can live. | 46:44 | |
But then at the same time, | 46:50 | |
if you read the Bible and let it emerge | 46:52 | |
as the kind of book it is, | 46:54 | |
you will discover, it isn't even Revelation. | 46:55 | |
It is witness to the Revelation. | 46:58 | |
The Bible is a very modest kind of book. | 47:02 | |
It never points to itself. | 47:04 | |
It is always pointing away from itself, but where? | 47:06 | |
In the direction of our Lord, Jesus Christ. | 47:09 | |
The Old Testament points forward, prophetically, | 47:12 | |
the New Testament points backward episodically, | 47:16 | |
and Jesus Christ emerges as the gospel | 47:20 | |
in whom God reveals his word. | 47:23 | |
That is to say, this is a book that is like a sign pointing. | 47:27 | |
But you know some people don't know how to read signs. | 47:32 | |
Say we get bored with things | 47:36 | |
on the campus here this afternoon, | 47:38 | |
and we decided to go to the great metropolis Raleigh. | 47:39 | |
And we get in a car and we drive to the edge of the campus, | 47:42 | |
and we see a sign pointing, Raleigh, and we stop. | 47:46 | |
And we get out and sit around the sign. | 47:49 | |
Well, it says Raleigh, doesn't it? | 47:53 | |
(congregation laughs) | 47:54 | |
That's the way some people treat the Bible. | 47:56 | |
They sit by it as if it's a destination, | 47:59 | |
whereas it's a sign pointing to a reality beyond it. | 48:01 | |
I don't want to be too critical of that point of view, | 48:06 | |
because surely it's preferable to the situation | 48:08 | |
where one finds the sign and he pulls it up, | 48:11 | |
and he carries it around on his shoulder. | 48:14 | |
And the sign thereafter loses any capacity | 48:16 | |
to give him direction. | 48:18 | |
He reserves the right to dictate | 48:20 | |
in which way the sign will point. | 48:22 | |
But the point about a sign is to follow it where it leads, | 48:25 | |
leave it there, follow it where it points. | 48:30 | |
The person who has made this most clear to me | 48:34 | |
is the 16th century Protestant reformer, Martin Bucer, | 48:36 | |
who had a pedagogical device with his students. | 48:43 | |
He would tell them this story about | 48:47 | |
a prince who called together his counselors, | 48:50 | |
his men of state, and gave them a message | 48:53 | |
for the outlying provinces. | 48:56 | |
And while the prince was giving the message, | 48:57 | |
these ministers took notes to keep their memory fresh. | 48:59 | |
Then he dismissed them. | 49:04 | |
And the ministers went off to the provinces, | 49:05 | |
and called the people together, | 49:07 | |
and gave them the message of the prince, | 49:09 | |
all the time, referring to their printed notes. | 49:11 | |
Now, the pedagogical question that Bucer asked was this. | 49:15 | |
Whom did the people esteem most highly? | 49:20 | |
The ministers or their printed notes? | 49:24 | |
The truth is they esteemed only the prince. | 49:30 | |
Well, this is what it means to be a Christian, | 49:36 | |
to know that the gospel is our guide | 49:38 | |
to the guardianship of God. | 49:43 | |
We can and probably ought to add one more dimension to this. | 49:48 | |
A Christian is one who knows that grace is a gift. | 49:52 | |
Do you realize that Cecil B. DeMille paid | 50:00 | |
at the rate $1 million per commandment, | 50:03 | |
to produce the "The Ten Commandments?" | 50:06 | |
But the question facing us is, | 50:10 | |
how much do we pay when we break a commandment? | 50:12 | |
And the Christian answer seems unequivocal. | 50:17 | |
We pay nothing. | 50:20 | |
Nothing in our hands we bring, | 50:23 | |
simply to the cross we cling. | 50:26 | |
Now, I'm not talking about a cheap grace. | 50:31 | |
Just because we pay nothing | 50:35 | |
doesn't mean someone does not pay. | 50:36 | |
As the gospel song goes, Jesus paid it all. | 50:40 | |
Therefore, I would not say what | 50:45 | |
the Frenchman Voltaire has said. | 50:47 | |
"Forgiveness is God's business. | 50:52 | |
He will forgive." | 50:58 | |
Forgiveness is not God's business. | 51:01 | |
God's business is to control the universe. | 51:03 | |
If he happens to choose a gracious way in which to do it, | 51:07 | |
so much the better for us. | 51:10 | |
And I would not say what George Bernard Shaw has said, | 51:14 | |
"Forgiveness is a beggar's refuge. | 51:17 | |
A man must pay his debts. | 51:19 | |
Because you see, what of the debts no man can pay?" | 51:23 | |
Say I come among you and you get some ugly rumor about me, | 51:28 | |
and you whisper it from lip to ear, | 51:31 | |
lip to ear all across the campus | 51:33 | |
until even freshmen avoid me on the paths. | 51:35 | |
Then you find out how wrong you were, | 51:39 | |
and you come to me and apologize, | 51:41 | |
"Forgive me," you say. | 51:43 | |
And I do, I must, 70 times seven, | 51:45 | |
but can your being sorry, restore my injured reputation? | 51:47 | |
I forgive you, but at this cost to myself. | 51:52 | |
Why, I have my little boy on the streets of Durham, | 51:57 | |
and some wild driver strikes him down, | 51:59 | |
and he comes to me and he's sorry, | 52:02 | |
he's penitent, he'll do anything. | 52:05 | |
Well, I forgive him, but at this cost. | 52:08 | |
God comes among us in the person | 52:15 | |
of his Son, Jesus of Nazareth. | 52:17 | |
We strike him down, | 52:20 | |
while he says, "Thy sins be forgiven thee." | 52:24 | |
That's grace. It is the gift of God's forgiveness. | 52:30 | |
My father taught me this in a way. | 52:38 | |
I used to borrow his car while I was in college for dates. | 52:40 | |
I borrowed at one Sunday to take two girls to church, | 52:44 | |
two girls, mind you not just one. | 52:47 | |
And they weren't very nice girls, I think. | 52:50 | |
That's probably why I was taking them to church. | 52:52 | |
And on the way I smashed that car beyond repair, | 52:55 | |
all my father's worldly goods were tied up in that car, | 52:59 | |
these were depression years. | 53:02 | |
And when my father came to the scene of the accident, | 53:05 | |
he strolled right up to me, | 53:07 | |
and put his arm across my shoulder, embraced me to him, | 53:09 | |
and he said, "Carl, thank God, no one was hurt." | 53:12 | |
In one act I had wiped him out. | 53:17 | |
In one word he saved my life. | 53:21 | |
God says, "Thy sins be forgiven thee." | 53:27 | |
That word makes a new creation out of us. | 53:32 | |
This is what it means to be a Christian. | 53:38 | |
To know that grace is a gift, | 53:41 | |
and that the gospel is our guide, | 53:44 | |
and that God is our guardian. | 53:45 | |
As Martin Luther once said, "We intend to die by this faith. | 53:48 | |
Why should we not live by it?" | 53:54 | |
Amen. Let us stand. | 54:02 | |
Eternal God who has surrounded us | 54:09 | |
with so great a cloud of witnesses, | 54:11 | |
grant that thy eyes may penetrate to our very souls, | 54:16 | |
that our vision may be made clear, | 54:21 | |
and that our hearts may be mobilized in courage | 54:24 | |
for the path that lies ahead. | 54:30 | |
And now, may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, | 54:33 | |
the love of God the Father, | 54:36 | |
and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, | 54:38 | |
be upon you and abide with you always. | 54:40 |