Robert E. Cushman - "Soul, Thou Hast Much Goods" (November 11, 1962)
Loading the media player...
Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
(gentle music) | 0:04 | |
Speaker | "And when Jesus drew nigh, | 0:36 |
he saw the city and wept over it. | 0:39 | |
saying, If thou hadst known in this day, | 0:45 | |
even thou, the things which belong unto peace! | 0:50 | |
but now they are hid from thine eyes." | 0:57 | |
What I am prompted to say this morning, | 1:06 | |
may turn out to be neither a sermon nor the lecture. | 1:09 | |
And if you arrive at that conclusion, | 1:15 | |
I shall have no quarrel with it. | 1:17 | |
Perhaps it may prove to be, | 1:23 | |
to steal a phrase from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, | 1:26 | |
simply an aid to reflection. | 1:33 | |
I hope also, and they took Christian reflection. | 1:36 | |
Surely it is the business of intelligence | 1:41 | |
to reflect upon experience to the end of guiding it | 1:44 | |
rather than being driven by it and let engulfed in it. | 1:49 | |
Likewise, it is the business of Christian intelligence | 1:56 | |
to do the same thing, | 2:00 | |
with a view to illuminating the dark places of life, | 2:01 | |
we must traverse, we are the light of the Christian faith. | 2:06 | |
Recently, we have had quite an experience, | 2:12 | |
for some, it was a challenge of faith and to faith. | 2:18 | |
For some it took the form of an encounter with nothingness. | 2:24 | |
Two weeks ago, this morning, | 2:30 | |
we called the university to prayer, | 2:33 | |
in a moment of grave human crisis. | 2:36 | |
It was a crisis not only of our own nation, | 2:41 | |
but some believe for the whole of mankind. | 2:45 | |
That is if we are to accredit the experts regarding | 2:50 | |
the potentials of Thermo nuclear warfare. | 2:54 | |
And that same Sunday evening, | 2:59 | |
the crisis had eased in the succeeding days that receded, | 3:02 | |
but who even yet can say it has passed. | 3:08 | |
Some fear it will not pass in our time. | 3:13 | |
There are some who believe that during | 3:19 | |
those few critical days, | 3:21 | |
all of us stood as it were on a brink of doom, | 3:24 | |
looking however, incredulously into an indescribable abes. | 3:29 | |
Imagination, fortunately was incompetent for the task | 3:35 | |
and therefore perhaps saved us from panic. | 3:41 | |
Nevertheless, perhaps no previous moment in human history | 3:47 | |
ever presented to so many, | 3:54 | |
so playing a prospect of so great a loss. | 3:57 | |
Whether we were men and women of faith, or of little faith, | 4:03 | |
or of no faith, for some hours and days, | 4:06 | |
we all looked intermittently, | 4:12 | |
I believe into the face of the ultimate. | 4:14 | |
To say so now with candor is part of what I mean by | 4:19 | |
reflection upon experience. | 4:25 | |
If we looked into the face of the ultimate, | 4:29 | |
it is also a part of reflection to ask ourselves, | 4:33 | |
what did we see there? | 4:38 | |
This of course is everyone's own secrets. | 4:41 | |
Some perhaps found themselves asking the question | 4:47 | |
of our scripture of the morning, | 4:51 | |
and the things which thou has prepared, whose shall they be? | 4:55 | |
But this perhaps only gives us away, | 5:01 | |
but I suspect that what we had clearest glimpse of | 5:06 | |
in confronting the ultimate was ourselves. | 5:10 | |
The kind of people we are, as gauged by the things | 5:15 | |
we were in danger of losing. | 5:21 | |
What came to focus were the things we have lived for and by, | 5:25 | |
the things which we have allowed to confer | 5:33 | |
our customary sense of identity and well-being | 5:37 | |
and the loss of which threatened to annihilate boat. | 5:41 | |
Who, for example, would we be without institutional | 5:49 | |
and legal structures? | 5:55 | |
Our businesses, the social arrangements | 5:58 | |
in which we find our place, social security, family life, | 6:02 | |
home, school, books, records, TV, automobile, | 6:08 | |
scooters, boats, horses, dogs, bird, gun, stocks, | 6:17 | |
yes, even in their present declined bonds, | 6:26 | |
bank accounts and out on name clubs, | 6:31 | |
who would we be without these | 6:36 | |
and the prospect of a summer vacation? | 6:38 | |
So thou has much good, | 6:43 | |
but who and what would we be without them? | 6:48 | |
Were we to have any being left in their absence? | 6:53 | |
This was one of the questions. | 6:58 | |
Now, on reflection, I suspect that the measure | 7:03 | |
in which our identity and sense of wellbeing | 7:06 | |
is in fact manifest to us in association with these things, | 7:10 | |
the more the ultimate confronting us in those days | 7:15 | |
took on the aspect of total loss. | 7:18 | |
On further reflection, I suspect also | 7:22 | |
that the more we find our identity through association | 7:26 | |
with these things, the more we are prone as individuals | 7:29 | |
or as a nation to understand our defense against total loss | 7:34 | |
as a defense of these things. | 7:39 | |
For it is in terms of these visible and tangible structures | 7:44 | |
and their continuing availability that we tend to apprehend | 7:49 | |
our identity and measure our wellbeing | 7:54 | |
and to retain our assurance of both. | 7:58 | |
But in the extremity of those days, | 8:03 | |
the material structures that give assurance of our identity | 8:06 | |
were seemingly quite defenseless. | 8:11 | |
Unto that extend in this plain | 8:16 | |
that we in those days were also quite defenseless. | 8:18 | |
And so I could not help recalling again and again | 8:24 | |
in those days and since the lament of Jesus over Jerusalem. | 8:28 | |
"If thou hadst known in this day, | 8:32 | |
even thou, the things which belong unto peace! | 8:37 | |
but now they are hid from thine eyes." | 8:42 | |
And what shall we say to these things? | 8:47 | |
Shall we say, I will say to my soul, | 8:48 | |
so they'll hast much goods. | 8:51 | |
Yes. | 8:55 | |
But in the hour of defenselessness, | 8:57 | |
there is no assurance in it. | 8:59 | |
And hence we are ones to concede. | 9:02 | |
And so as he, lay it up treasure for himself, | 9:07 | |
and this is not rich toward God. | 9:12 | |
Jesus laments over Jerusalem, was the compassion | 9:17 | |
of infinite regret for the blindness of his own people. | 9:22 | |
If his history was to show, it was too late for Jerusalem. | 9:28 | |
then further in reflection, urge the question, | 9:35 | |
was it also too late for us? | 9:42 | |
If after two millennia, we did not yet know | 9:45 | |
the things that belong on to peace. | 9:49 | |
Was there now to be no more reprieve, | 9:53 | |
no chance for further learning. | 9:58 | |
And the crisis was ample proof of our little learning, | 10:02 | |
ever learning and never coming to a knowledge of the truth, | 10:07 | |
in the words of the collect, this dispute. | 10:11 | |
This despite the generality of our education, | 10:17 | |
the multiplication of our many knowledges, | 10:24 | |
the vast resources of our libraries | 10:28 | |
and our monumental universities. | 10:32 | |
We're not even these, especially the universities, | 10:37 | |
the servants of governments in the business of something | 10:41 | |
called national defense. | 10:44 | |
If these two, along with everything else, | 10:48 | |
slithered towards the brink of ruin | 10:50 | |
with no sure grasp upon the things that belong on the peace | 10:51 | |
then was visible elsewhere. | 10:55 | |
Let's admit it. | 10:58 | |
In some, reflection strongly suggests that the crisis | 11:03 | |
through which mankind recently passed, | 11:10 | |
proclaimed rather conspicuously the bankruptcy | 11:16 | |
of human resourcefulness. | 11:19 | |
And this, we better understand if we are to learn anything | 11:24 | |
from civilizations, recent brush with death on a scaffold, | 11:28 | |
the trapdoor of which was somehow, somehow not sprung. | 11:35 | |
And the bankruptcy was this, | 11:41 | |
that there was no way less to peace except | 11:45 | |
by incurring the jeopardy of total war. | 11:50 | |
The fearful ordeal was premised upon the supposition | 11:55 | |
that no way remain to preserve the material | 11:59 | |
and institutional structures, upon which our identity | 12:03 | |
and well-being as a people depend, | 12:07 | |
save at the calculated risk of their extermination. | 12:10 | |
Reflection suggests in retrospect, | 12:16 | |
that Bertrand Russell, the Mad Hatter of modern philosophy, | 12:21 | |
was not all together wrong, in this course was madness | 12:28 | |
because in the interest of civilizations defense, | 12:36 | |
it took it as its means what must become if you used, | 12:40 | |
man's final self reputation. | 12:45 | |
Employing the ultimate threat, | 12:49 | |
it risked the total destruction | 12:53 | |
of a good it aim to conserve. | 12:55 | |
And pursuing the preservation of some good, | 12:58 | |
it the risked, I think, the annihilation | 13:02 | |
of the general good. | 13:05 | |
Russell calls this madness. | 13:08 | |
As a logician, he does rightly, it is in principle, | 13:11 | |
self reputation or a kind of existential self contradiction. | 13:16 | |
Now, despite the Bravos of all the party liners | 13:25 | |
at that time seeking election, | 13:29 | |
reflection suggests that human affairs has reached the point | 13:33 | |
of ultimate absurdity. | 13:37 | |
When sincere but helpless governmental leaders, | 13:40 | |
are endorsed to the genocidal expedient | 13:44 | |
of defending their people's existence | 13:47 | |
by means which it's actually employed, | 13:50 | |
seem to assure the destruction of that existence | 13:54 | |
and that wellbeing. | 13:57 | |
But this friends is where we are. | 14:00 | |
It is helpless self computation. | 14:05 | |
It is bankruptcy of human resourcefulness | 14:09 | |
and a governmental order. | 14:12 | |
All further discussion, it seems to me begins here. | 14:16 | |
Now political orders, commonly called governments | 14:22 | |
are legitimate, as every political theorist might know, | 14:27 | |
only if the order they enforce is not imperiled | 14:33 | |
by the means through which they enforce it. | 14:36 | |
Or again, a government can justify its right of rule | 14:40 | |
only if the good it secures by the exercise | 14:46 | |
of its lawful power is greater than the limitations | 14:49 | |
it imposes in restraint of disorder. | 14:53 | |
Or once more, a government is legitimized, | 14:57 | |
if the sacrifices it exacts of its citizen ray | 15:02 | |
for the common good do not exceed the benefits, | 15:06 | |
it'd be stolen. | 15:10 | |
But in our recent brush with that, you know, | 15:13 | |
our recent crisis there is disclosed, | 15:18 | |
what for a long time has been evident in an atomic age, | 15:21 | |
this, that in atomic power, a world power | 15:26 | |
can now guarantee the material structures of the nation | 15:33 | |
only at the risk of destroying all of them. | 15:38 | |
The part from some mysterious divine overruling, | 15:42 | |
it cannot venture the risk without accepting | 15:47 | |
the eventuality. | 15:51 | |
This does not take courage, I think, | 15:54 | |
but something more nearly like the resolution | 15:58 | |
of desperation and bankruptcy. | 16:01 | |
Reflection suggests that the new political fact of our time | 16:06 | |
is that sovereign nations | 16:12 | |
with the power of total destruction have outlived | 16:15 | |
both their utility and their justification. | 16:18 | |
They point beyond themselves to an imperative necessity, | 16:22 | |
no longer Tennyson's dream but a desperate need | 16:27 | |
of a parliament of nations in the Federation of the world. | 16:33 | |
Now, there is such a thing as Christian reflection | 16:39 | |
in addition to just playing reflection. | 16:43 | |
So then we asked, what can we say about | 16:48 | |
these annihilating absurdities of modern man's predicament | 16:53 | |
from the standpoint of the Christian faith? | 16:56 | |
What can we say? | 16:58 | |
Perhaps this in the first place, | 17:01 | |
when sovereign states, | 17:06 | |
in the interest of human good. | 17:11 | |
Yes, in the interest of human good, | 17:15 | |
calculating the risk the annihilation of human good. | 17:18 | |
They have not only attained to bankruptcy of their powers | 17:23 | |
for good and to absurdity of self contradiction, | 17:27 | |
they do something worse in the Christian view of the matter. | 17:30 | |
They've adventure to become as God knowing good and evil. | 17:34 | |
For no government can risk the wellbeing of its people | 17:42 | |
at the jeopardy of the existence of its people, | 17:46 | |
without pretending to know what it is not given | 17:50 | |
to man to know, | 17:53 | |
namely that non-existence is preferable to limitation | 17:55 | |
of existence. | 18:01 | |
But as this is the presumption of the suicide, | 18:04 | |
it is also the presumption of the genocide. | 18:09 | |
Russell May call it madness. | 18:13 | |
The Greeks called it hebras, | 18:17 | |
more presumption to deity, | 18:20 | |
For Christians, I am obliged to say, | 18:23 | |
most call it the sin of blasphemy. | 18:25 | |
It is no excuse to say that some governments | 18:31 | |
find themselves in this horrible dilemma, | 18:34 | |
they do indeed. | 18:37 | |
And this because of an utterly new fact in human history, | 18:39 | |
that wasn't the fact, the decade ago. | 18:43 | |
That is the fact of national sovereignty, | 18:48 | |
and it's in compatibility with another fact, | 18:53 | |
man's new technological capacity for total destruction. | 18:57 | |
Our recent encounter with nothing is powerfully illumines, | 19:03 | |
the defenselessness of mankind against | 19:08 | |
these two facts in combination. | 19:10 | |
However, well intentioned the governmental power | 19:14 | |
that combines them, regardingly. | 19:17 | |
The time is now overdue, for the Christian conscience | 19:22 | |
to inform itself on three questions. | 19:27 | |
First, what are the exercise of such dual power | 19:31 | |
as I have described and the decision to do so, | 19:36 | |
is really courage or the hopeless resolution | 19:41 | |
of governmental desperation. | 19:47 | |
Two: whether this exercise of power | 19:50 | |
is the just rule of the governed | 19:56 | |
or something that approximates tyranny? | 19:59 | |
Three: whether it is defense of the right, | 20:05 | |
or from the Christian standpoint, | 20:11 | |
something approaching the user patient of God's power | 20:13 | |
of our human life and destiny? | 20:16 | |
On these questions, the Christian conscience | 20:20 | |
needs to become informed. | 20:24 | |
Those to be sure who do not believe in God, | 20:28 | |
do not mind playing God. | 20:31 | |
Indeed they have no God to stop them | 20:35 | |
and possibly no alternative. | 20:36 | |
But it is almost as bad and certainly justice dangerous | 20:40 | |
to play God unintentionally and unwittingly | 20:45 | |
despite our protestations. | 20:49 | |
And this brings me to a second point in Christian reflection | 20:54 | |
upon our recent and continuing encounter with nothingness, | 20:57 | |
whatever the forthcoming symposium on dimensions of defense | 21:02 | |
may disclose this week for our edification, | 21:06 | |
it would do well to begin by recognizing | 21:11 | |
that this is not a dangerous world merely because in it, | 21:15 | |
there are bad guys who endanger good guys, | 21:19 | |
that is true. | 21:26 | |
The problem, however, is somewhat more subtle | 21:28 | |
from the Christian standpoint. | 21:32 | |
And from this standpoint, the world is hideous | 21:34 | |
is in a hideously dangerous position, | 21:38 | |
because there are no guys at all good enough | 21:43 | |
to exercise at one and the same time, | 21:48 | |
the power of national sovereignty | 21:52 | |
and the power of thermonuclear destruction. | 21:55 | |
I said that 16 years ago in this pulpit. | 21:59 | |
I think it may be appropriate to say it again. | 22:04 | |
A new fact of our time is that with the present level | 22:10 | |
of so-called technological achievements, | 22:16 | |
the price tag plan lay, the price tag | 22:20 | |
of unrestricted national sovereignty | 22:23 | |
seems to be the perpetual risk | 22:26 | |
of both self-annihilation and genocide. | 22:29 | |
In such a world, the experts who take it for granted. | 22:34 | |
And simply the highly informed bookies, | 22:40 | |
who hope they know how to read and play the odd. | 22:43 | |
But those who do not understand the new fact of our time | 22:49 | |
cannot hope to begin to learn for our time, | 22:54 | |
the things that belong on to peace. | 22:59 | |
Finally, from our recent encounter with nothingness, | 23:05 | |
there is a third reflection that is assisted | 23:09 | |
by our Christian faith. | 23:14 | |
It is indeed the hard core of the gospel, | 23:17 | |
it has come to pass in our time that not suicide, | 23:21 | |
but genocide is the likely option before us. | 23:25 | |
So if we, as a nation and the people are reduced | 23:30 | |
to the absurdity of destroying ourselves | 23:35 | |
in defense of ourselves, then it might be, | 23:37 | |
we are in great need of a new concept of defense. | 23:39 | |
And point of fact, we might be in the world might be | 23:46 | |
just right for serious attention | 23:50 | |
to the paradox of the Christian faith. | 23:53 | |
The paradox was long ago offered | 23:56 | |
in our Lord's familiar words, that were not very well | 23:59 | |
understood by Jerusalem. | 24:03 | |
"He that strives to save his own life shall lose it." | 24:07 | |
That's the first part. | 24:14 | |
And the second is, the absurdity or apparent absurdity | 24:17 | |
that "he who is prepared to lose his own life | 24:23 | |
for God's sake shall keep it." | 24:26 | |
The new fact of our time is, that mere self defensiveness | 24:31 | |
is with diabolic logic the surest way to self-destruction. | 24:36 | |
Never before in history was it so plainly evident that he, | 24:41 | |
that takes to the sword shall perish by the sword. | 24:45 | |
Never before it wasn't so manifest that in this course | 24:50 | |
do not lie the things that belong on the peace. | 24:54 | |
I may have not be on full and deep reflection, | 25:00 | |
that the way out of this perpetual existence | 25:05 | |
under the sword of Damocles is the other way, | 25:08 | |
not the way of self reputation and contradiction, | 25:12 | |
but the way of paradox. | 25:16 | |
The way that was hid from the eyes of Jesus' contemporaries | 25:19 | |
and is still largely hid from ours. | 25:23 | |
Paradox is the way of seeming contradiction, | 25:27 | |
that is however, actually self confirmation. | 25:30 | |
It is the way of hidden wisdom and apparent losing | 25:36 | |
of the life as the only way to find and keep it. | 25:39 | |
This can be translated into the political realities | 25:43 | |
of our world. | 25:47 | |
It is not restricted to the sacrifice of the cross | 25:49 | |
on Calvary, though the cross is it's everlasting sign | 25:52 | |
and Sentinel in terms of the political realities | 25:56 | |
of our time. | 26:00 | |
This losing the life is not primarily | 26:02 | |
our first of all world disarmament, | 26:04 | |
disarmament will be its consequence. | 26:08 | |
Losing the life means for our time and history, | 26:11 | |
I think the limitation of national sovereignty, | 26:14 | |
in a real Federation of national states | 26:19 | |
under the rule of world law. | 26:22 | |
As a nation, right now, we have our opportunity | 26:25 | |
as well as recognize our desperate need | 26:30 | |
and clear a directive to enhance the power and authority | 26:33 | |
of the United nations, | 26:38 | |
to assist in every way we are able to assist it, | 26:40 | |
to transcend its limited sovereignty | 26:45 | |
and to advance into a real Federation of people. | 26:49 | |
This is the only answer to the threat of Cuba. | 26:53 | |
It is impossible, consider the alternative. | 26:57 | |
This I believe is what it means today as a nation, | 27:03 | |
in terms of political realities, | 27:08 | |
to lose our life in order to find it, | 27:11 | |
this or something like it is the will of God for our time. | 27:14 | |
And all of that will, I do not hesitate to say | 27:19 | |
that the lady who died in New York | 27:22 | |
this past week was a prop. | 27:23 | |
This is that which truly come parts | 27:29 | |
with the paradox of the gospel | 27:33 | |
and must replace the imperiling, | 27:36 | |
and self-destructive contradiction | 27:38 | |
within mankind, present international political existence. | 27:42 | |
We do not learn these things, | 27:49 | |
the things which belong onto peace and our true defense, | 27:52 | |
then they shall forever be hid from our eyes. | 27:59 | |
In such a case, Jesus laments over Jerusalem | 28:03 | |
will be repeated over the Gothams of the 20th century. | 28:07 | |
James Russell has it about right here in, | 28:14 | |
once to every man with nation comes the moment to decide | 28:19 | |
in the strife of proof with fault sword, | 28:25 | |
for the good or evil side, | 28:30 | |
by the light of burning martyrs. | 28:33 | |
Christ by bleeding feet we track, | 28:36 | |
toiling up new Calvary's ever | 28:40 | |
with a cross that turns not back. | 28:44 | |
New occasion, teach new duty. | 28:50 | |
Time makes ancient good on coop. | 28:55 | |
They must upward still and onward who would keep | 28:58 | |
abreast of proof. | 29:04 | |
Oh man, let us pray. | 29:09 | |
Now, the peace of God, which passeth all understanding. | 29:18 | |
(background noise drowns out other sounds) | 29:23 |