Hugh Anderson - "A Wistful Generation"; Carl Michalson - "What It Means to Be a Christian" (November 5, 1961) / Duke Chapel Recordings / Duke Digital Repository

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In the name of God the Father, God the Son,

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and God the Holy Ghost, amen.

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The epithet wistful,

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is not one which is usually applied to this generation.

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We are more familiar with other descriptions,

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the Beat Generation, for example.

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But is not beat-ness simply a wistfulness

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that has become totally introvert,

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or again, the generation of angry young men?

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But is not anger in this sense simply

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a wistfulness that has gone sour?

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The phenomena off the beatnik and the angry young man

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are but the present day marks of our deep haunting sense

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of loneliness and homelessness in the universe.

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Far from concealing man's ineradicable longing for meaning

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and for God, they reveal it perhaps as never before in

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all its sharpness and poignancy.

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For the truth about us is that man must,

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and will have some God,

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even against his own mind and judgment.

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Not all the rampant secularism,

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nor cynical boredom of our time,

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can of eradicate men's infinite yearnings

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for a higher power and a surer faith.

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Therefore, even today we have arrays of men

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still nursing the unconquerable hope,

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still clutching the inviolable shade.

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Why this cry from the last ramparts

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of the human soul for God?

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Why do we want and need the transcendent, the divine?

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Well, an old Hebrew thinker put it in a very concrete,

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and profound way when he said quite simply,

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that man is created in the image of God.

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A New Testament writer describes us merely

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as strangers and sojourners on the earth.

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A modern philosopher says in his own mode of thought

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and language, "Because of the structure

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of the universe and our position in it,

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we feel like cuckoos in a nest of swallows."

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Or listen to Pascal,

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"the miseries of man prove his grandeur.

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They are the miseries of a dethroned monarch."

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Or take Jung, who out of years of experience

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in psychoanalysis tells us

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that religious symbols rise quite unconsciously

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in the souls of men.

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Need we add anything more?

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However we try to describe or define it there

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is a restlessness and a disquietude

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of the human spirit that seems to be given to man

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as part of the charter of his existence.

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A longing for home, more acute than any exiles,

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a disturbing nostalgia for faith for the living God.

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These things are still deeply engraved in the minds

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and hearts of the men and women of our generation.

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Emile Bruneau described these things

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as difficulty of breathing, on gousty eye,

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the suffocating distress, which the soul of man feels

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in its separation from God.

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Suffocating distress, how many are experiencing that today?

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I, for my part do not believe for a moment

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that slander which is commonly held

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on every side in these days,

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that the people who fill the pews of the American churches

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as you fill these pews this morning,

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are hopelessly shallow and imperturbable,

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and could not be shaken out of your thoughts.

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I believe if I mistake not,

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that the people of our generation

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are shaken within already.

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I bet that if I could probe beneath

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the calm exterior of your existence this morning,

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I would find for sure, a wistfulness that knows

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the torment of fear and doubt.

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Fear about the cosmos, and fear about man himself.

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The Church today has to try to understand the modern temper,

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particularly among young people,

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with all their struggling uncertainty and tremulous hope.

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There are many young people here I'm perfectly sure

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who want to believe in God,

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who want to have faith,

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and are sad and despairing that they cannot find it.

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This wistful state of mind,

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which is so widely found today could be

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a great ally of the gospel

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of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen in all its fullness.

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But instead, what do you find?

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You find that the churches' leaders are often guilty

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of preaching a God who is far too small

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to meet the desperate longings of a distracted world.

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And you find that the pulpit is constantly irrelevant,

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because it will not try to understand the papers,

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and the / of men's burning desire for faith in God.

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Don't you think that the old smooth platitudes

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about the goodness of God,

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and the on the opposite nose of history look

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woefully anachronistic in the grim realities

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of our situation.

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For everywhere we look across this strict enough today,

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we find evidence not to support the possibility of faith

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in a good God and in a sure purpose for history.

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We find evidence rather, which denies it.

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For this world of ours seems

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to have gone quite lunatic and suicidal.

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Men are beginning to wonder

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whether Aldous Huxley wasn't right after all,

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when he said, "Do what you will.

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This world's a fiction, and is made up of contradiction."

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Contradiction, and absurdity.

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How absurd is the life of our time?

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Men on every side are speaking peace,

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and at the same time, rattling the sabers.

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Are piling up nuclear weapons of destruction

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and are foolish enough to trust in them

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as the surest and safest deterrent to war.

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The leading agency for international cooperation in our time

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we all the United Nations.

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And is not rather absurd that it should be split

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into two competing camps waging war

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in the cold sense, with each other?

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Is it not also a daunting thought

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that the Nazi myth of aryan racial purity

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blotted out at so great sacrifice and cost,

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should be succeeded

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by the no less implausible communist myth

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of the proletarian man.

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And what about the soft feet of good things enjoyed

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in our world by those who have,

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and the misery of millions of refugees who have nothing.

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I ask you how absurd can life on this planet get?

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That is why multitudes of people in our time have gone

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through a tremendous shattering of existence.

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They probably feel like Ivan Karamazov.

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"I can accept God," he says, "I cannot accept his world."

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I believe that young people have a right to expect

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in a world like this of ours,

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that the Church's ministers should try

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to understand their situation,

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should try to penetrate to the heart

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of their fears, dilemmas, and anxieties and predicaments.

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The agonizing wistfulness of our day and generation

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will not be met by any shallow preaching,

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but only by a gospel, which is able to confront men

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with the unspeakable agony of God in Jesus Christ,

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and in his cross.

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Now, there have been ages of human history

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when man's longing for God was

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a relatively cheerful and painless thing,

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when he could take it easy.

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When he didn't feel this sense

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that the modern man feels of suffocating distress.

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He didn't know the pain of alienation from God,

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from his world, from himself.

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In such epochs of human history man believed

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that God's ordering of the world was corroborated,

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and confirmed by the irresistible momentum

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of human progress towards the kingdom of God.

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This feeling in the latter 19th century produced

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a radiant optimism and a glowing hope.

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And men looked out in their world and believed

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it was just a matter of time

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before they tame the tiger in their heart,

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and the kingdom of God would be reached.

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Rhapsodizing on this theme, poets like Tennyson spread

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the conviction that people were standing

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as it were on a moving escalator,

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and the kingdom of God would soon be attained.

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The words of the poet Blake from the early years

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of that so hopeful century sum up the attitude

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of its latter part.

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"I will not cease from mental fight,

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nor should my sword sleep in my hand,

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'til we have built Jerusalem

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in England's green and pleasant land."

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Well, England's land is still very pleasant and very green,

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but no sign of the kingdom of God.

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In staggering contrast with all this,

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our own century has been pervaded

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by darkness and turbulence,

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by catastrophe and suffering on a lavish scale,

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by prison camps and gas chambers,

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and by the devilish accoutrements of nuclear destruction.

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One might imagine that the old belief

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in the inevitable process of history towards

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a glorious finale might have been annihilated

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by the acids of the history of the 20th century.

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But far from it, far from it.

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You know what we've witnessed?

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We've witnessed in the 20th century,

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how Bolshevism has taken over

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the semi-Christian utopianist ideal

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of a hither worldly kingdom of God,

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and has completely secularized it.

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So Bolshevism in our age has set man upon the high altar

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of its religious devotion,

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and worships man as its great God.

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The communists recite in their creed,

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I believe in man, the lord and creator of science.

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Communism is proclaiming today a kingdom of God without God.

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But what I want you to understand

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is that in the 20th century, communism has no monopoly

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of the worship of that most terrible

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of all human idols, man himself.

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For we in the West have participated

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in the worship of mine instead of God, in our own way.

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In the days of economic distress, and unrest,

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and unemployment in the 1920s,

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the minors of my boyhood home in the West of Scotland

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used their all too abundant leisure time

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to build what we Scots call a cairn.

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A cairn, or a monument of stone,

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on a commanding hill above the village.

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They carried the stone from a nearby quarry.

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The interesting thing was that into the stones,

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they inserted plaques.

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These plaques carried inscriptions or sayings,

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which were reminiscent of the class struggle,

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and redolent with the dream

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of the coming day of the working man.

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When brotherhood would be achieved

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at history's end by man and for man.

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Now for years, the old cairn

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was well-tended and much visited.

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But today, today, when you go there,

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it stands forgotten, crumbling, derelict,

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almost in total ruins.

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A ghostly monument to the futility of man's dream

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in the course of his own history.

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The futility of man's dream that it was only

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a matter of time before he could bring

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the kingdom of God upon earth.

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And countless more tragic monuments than that straddle

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the world in our day and generation.

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The futility of man's dream that he could do it himself.

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Is it not therefore one of the strange ironies of our age,

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that the accredited preachers and teachers

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of the churches here should always be talking

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about safeguarding the Christian truth

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against attack from without,

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against attack from communism, for example,

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while all the time we allow it to starve and die within.

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By preaching man instead of preaching Christ,

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by proclaiming the Church

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as an institution, instead of proclaiming God.

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The pulpit today in America, particularly,

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is still indulging in the old cult

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of reassurance about history.

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In many pulpits the Christian message is being ratified

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into a vague abstraction that has no gospel at all.

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It is too pale, and too human, and too puny

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to answer the plight of those who

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are yearning for a God who remains God,

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even when all the lights of history go out,

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And our dreamed off future is taken away from us.

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You know as well as I do

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that we really should face the fact honestly.

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And if you face the facts honestly,

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you cannot, I believe, take too much comfort

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from the current organizational success

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of the churches here, financially,

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numerically and institutionally.

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Much less can we be satisfied

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with the popular preaching of a God who

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is my minute enough to be contained within a few witticisms,

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and a few human interest stories.

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We cannot be satisfied with the preaching of a God who

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is the preserver of our way of life,

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the champion and the defendant of our national prosperity,

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the guardian of our poor human values.

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This preaching that we hear in many places,

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I am being frankly critical,

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is a perversion of the gospel of Jesus Christ,

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because it's a human message and not a divine one.

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As Reinhold Niebuhr has said again and again,

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"The gods of the 19th century, the gods of human progress,

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and history, and enlightenment,

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and the perfectability of man have suffered eclipse.

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They have died a thousand deaths, haven't they?

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In the carnage of the Pacific islands,

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in the North African deserts, in the battlefields of Europe,

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in the prison camps and gas chambers,

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in the nuclear fallout that drifts eerily across our skies,

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in the barbed wire at the Brandenburg gate of Berlin,

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the old gods are dead.

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If we would preach a relevant message to our time,

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we must preach a God who is bigger than

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all man's cultural pretensions.

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And on the other hand of God, who reveals himself

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in his agony in Christ

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to the agony of this wistful generation.

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Who reveals himself in his sacrificial failure and weakness

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to our sacrificial failure and weakness.

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For the old gods have failed us now.

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If we want to be relevant preachers,

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we would do well to harken to the message

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of that most searching and cathartic

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of all biblical documents, the book of Job,

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that poor old soul.

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A kind of Oriental beatnik of his own day.

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Out of his ash heap of suffering,

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he shakes his fist with promethian arrogance against heaven.

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There's something lovable about a rebel,

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and Job was one, an angry man.

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Anyhow, when his would be ministering friends try

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to comfort him with glib utterances

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about the little God of Orthodox Hebrew religiosity,

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he cannot endure their comfort,

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and violently rejects it.

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Job, you see, was living in that awful period,

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between the death of the old little gods of formal religion,

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and the coming of that other God,

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who is higher than all men's calculations and hopes,

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and deeper than all human anguish.

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And the situation of man in the 20th century

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is precisely like that of Job,

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we too, are living between the times.

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The old gods of dead for us,

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and we await the coming of that other God,

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who is higher than man.

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Where is God, where is God?

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Where is God, mean are asking

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in this critical interim of ours.

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And you can see yourself how no little god created

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in the image of man can satisfy the hunger

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of our young people, particularly today.

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No version of religion which merely equates it

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with human hopes and desires is adequate to their need.

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No hyped up psychological pep-talking from the pulpit

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that merely chastises doubt and anxiety,

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and tries to spread the cult

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of individual, happiness and success,

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can assuage the fierce hunger

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of our generation for a real god, who is God.

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Where is God?

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In the face of this question which you are asking,

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you cannot escape it, you here this morning

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in this congregation of the Duke Chapel,

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in the deep places of your individual existence

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you are asking this question

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with a sharpness and agony.

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You've never asked it before in

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a day and age like ours, where is God?

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And in the face of this question

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the Christian pulpit could become truly irrelevant

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and come into its own in our time.

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I believe that the word we have to preach

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is that the living God is only to be found

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through the jaws of death, anguish and hell.

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Translated into Christian terms,

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that means simply the cross of Jesus Christ.

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Our Lord himself made it plain enough when he said,

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"I, if I be lifted up from the earth

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would draw all men onto me."

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There is no way to a living God save through

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his own agony in the cross of Jesus Christ.

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There on Calvary, where all human hope is silenced,

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and all human dreams are annihilated,

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God speaks to this generation the word of light in death.

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The cost to God of speaking to us

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and rending the veil between himself and us

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is the sacrifice of his own Son.

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I know it isn't easy to formulate a philosophy

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of the cross of Christ.

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We can only speak stumblingly and falteringly

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before the mystery of it.

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But don't you think that the wistful ones of our generation

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could understand the passion and death of Jesus Christ

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far better than they can understand

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the fair weather, passionless preaching

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that is often given to them from our pulpits in this age.

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Luther sums the whole thing up

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about how any generation is to find God when he says,

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that God's word is always a word that slays.

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He must destroy what is in us

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before he can bestow upon us his gift.

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Let me try to put that in my own poor words.

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Before real faith lies the anguish of doubt.

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Before the song lies the sacrifice.

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Before the glory of resurrection life

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lies somehow a cross.

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Before God's help lies our own terrible helplessness.

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Hold thou thy cross before my closing eyes.

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Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies.

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Heaven's morning breaks, and Earth's vain shadows flee.

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Help of the helpless who abide with me.

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I'm not suggesting that if you as an individual

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had an isolated personal encounter with the God

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who stands behind the cross

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that this would be a panaseer

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for all our terrible, collective and international problems.

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But what I do feel is this.

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That those who have found God in the darkness of the cross

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will not be broken or defeated

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by anything that this mad and ruinous world can do to them.

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For they will have laid hold of an unseen reality,

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that at one and the same time transcends our world

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and remains in the bides through

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all its anguish and distress.

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If you have plumbed the depths of the cross

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of Jesus Christ and the agony of God,

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which is present there,

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you will be able to go back into your society

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as a bearer of light when the shadows gather.

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And as one who is able to give courage

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to the falling and faint-hearted,

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when the world and worldly things are failing them.

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Father Tidel once said,

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"Often and often I have been tempted to give up,

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but always the sight of that strange man hanging

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on his cross has sent me back to my task again

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with new heart."

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The duty of the pulpit in such

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a wistful generation as this is abundantly clear.

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It is to call your attention to

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that strange man hanging on his cross.

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For only he can meet can meet your wistful longings.

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We have to preach Christ crucified.

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We have to lift up the lamb of God,

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slain from the foundation of the world.

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This word of God that both slays and is slain.

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This alone has the power in this wistful age

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to give us songs for our sighing,

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to turn our darkness into light,

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and to bring light out of death.

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Amen, let us.

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Almighty and ever blessed God,

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hold thou thy cross in Jesus Christ before our eyes.

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That we may know that where we have lost all hope

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in history and in man, we can trust in thee,

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and become light bearers of real hope

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to this troubled day and this distracted world.

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And to thee, be the glory.

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And now, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ,

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and the love of God,

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and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost

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be upon you now henceforth, and forever more.

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I should like to speak to you

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about what it means to be a Christian.

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And I'd like you to regard what I have to say

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in a rather particular way,

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not as a definition to be memorized and repeated,

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not as a motto or a blueprint

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to be followed in mathematical detail,

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but as a threshold to be crossed.

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For as you know, the places we inhabit

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are pretty largely determined by the thresholds we crossed.

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The question about what it means to be a Christian

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is peculiarly relevant to a Protestant I would suppose.

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Protestants, as you know,

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are not those who protest against something.

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Protestare means to stand for.

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And when it comes to knowing what we stand for,

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we Christians in the Protestant form,

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while we may be all vogue on the outside,

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are often sometimes vague on the inside.

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What then does it mean to be a Christian?

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I would think in the first place a Christian

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is one who knows that God is his guardian.

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When the apostles stood in the presence

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of the rulers of Judaism,

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who tried to get them to stop their preaching

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in the streets, they said, "No.

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For we have gods to obey and not men."

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Judged by that criterion, there's only one thing worse

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than refusing the advice of others, and that's taking it.

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In ultimate matters, I mean, God has no proxy.

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He delivers his will.

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(audio skips) It was because the navigators failed

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to pay sufficient heed to their radar.

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Well, the Bible says society will be

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in a permanent state of collision

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if men adopt a radar type device

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for relating themselves to each other.

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Each man comporting himself in the light of the way,

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another man expects him to behave.

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For we have gods to obey and not men.

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And that understanding that God is our guardian cuts

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across every kind of radar tactic in social life,

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every kind of conformism,

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and opens our lives perpendicularly to God.

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To settle for life at any other level would seem to me

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to be to settle for life at the level

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of the conditioned reflex,

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which would turn life into a kind of ethical Pavlovism.

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You know who Pavlov is,

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Russian scientist who drew inferences for human behavior,

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from his experiments with animals, particularly dogs.

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Well, you feed a dog red meat and watch him salivate.

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Then you feed him red meat and ring a bell,

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and watch him salivate.

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Then one day just ring a bell,

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and the dog will salivate.

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One says his reflexes are conditioned.

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Henceforth, the hand that rocks the bell rules the dog.

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We have seen how an entire political system has brought

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to hold people under the domination

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to the system by the use of this method.

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We have seen it employed effectively

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in other areas of the world.

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But have we seen how prone we are as a society,

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and as individuals to adopt this

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Pavlovistic conditioned reflex basis

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for our own existence.

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But we have God to obey, and not men.

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I know I was at the University of Virginia once,

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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

Hugh Anderson - "A Wistful Generation"; Carl Michalson - "What It Means to Be a Christian" (November 5, 1961)

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