Hugh Anderson - "Faith and Its Fruit" (February 23, 1964)
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
- | Jesus Christ our Lord. | 0:22 |
Amen. | 0:24 | |
(bright organ music) | 0:26 | |
(loud scraping) | 0:35 | |
- | I regret that I am having some little difficulty | 0:53 |
with the clip on the microphone, | 0:55 | |
which has, at this moment broken. | 0:57 | |
So if you will bear with me for two or three seconds, | 0:59 | |
while I try to repair it. | 1:02 | |
(loud scraping) | 1:08 | |
Let us pray. | 1:20 | |
Almighty and ever blessed God, | 1:25 | |
who has spoken thy Word once and for all unto men, | 1:28 | |
in and through thy son, Jesus Christ, | 1:33 | |
speak now thy Word in our hearts, | 1:36 | |
that it might become for us sanctification and life | 1:40 | |
through this same Jesus Christ, our Lord. | 1:45 | |
Amen. | 1:48 | |
Some two weeks ago, | 1:58 | |
in the York Chapel of the Divinity School here, | 2:00 | |
I offered a meditation on the Biblical theme of faith, | 2:05 | |
faith defined as waiting upon God. | 2:11 | |
And today, I craved the leave of our divinity students | 2:17 | |
to repeat at the outset of this sermon, | 2:21 | |
the gist of what I said on that occasion. | 2:24 | |
And we turn first to the prophet | 2:29 | |
Isaiah's words about waiting upon God. | 2:31 | |
"They that wait upon the Lord," declares the prophet, | 2:38 | |
"Shall renew their strength. | 2:42 | |
"They shall mount up with wings as eagles. | 2:45 | |
"They shall run and not be weary, | 2:48 | |
"and they shall walk and not faint." | 2:51 | |
What is this waiting upon God that enables men | 2:57 | |
in the first bright morning of newfound faith | 3:02 | |
to scale the shining height, like the golden eagles | 3:07 | |
once soar amid the Scottish mountains | 3:12 | |
of Glencoe last summer? | 3:15 | |
And then laterally, what is more significant, | 3:18 | |
enables them to endure the frets and frustrations | 3:22 | |
of the common dusty day with steadiness and sanity, | 3:27 | |
with balance and self control? | 3:32 | |
Beyond question, the prophet Isaiah is not alluding | 3:37 | |
to the beneficence effect in a man's life | 3:42 | |
of participation in the practice of the cultists, | 3:47 | |
nor of the regular dutiful performance | 3:52 | |
of prescribed religious rights. | 3:56 | |
Rather, this waiting upon God concerns | 4:00 | |
men's fundamental attitude towards the future. | 4:04 | |
Our lives happen to be far more profoundly conditioned | 4:10 | |
than we realize by the manner in which we regard the future. | 4:14 | |
To be sure, the future for most of us may be defined | 4:22 | |
as the time in which justice will, at length, be done, | 4:27 | |
in which our own ambitions and wishes will come to fruition | 4:32 | |
and our own seeming merits be recognized on every hand. | 4:37 | |
Consequently, the present moment of our life | 4:44 | |
is characterized for most of us by a very tense | 4:48 | |
and nervous striving to win applause, either by achievement, | 4:53 | |
or by affectation, by apoplectic and convulsive efforts | 4:59 | |
to impress other people. | 5:05 | |
Now to wait upon God means to be delivered | 5:10 | |
from the tyrannous grip of a great, | 5:14 | |
dreamed of future for ourselves. | 5:17 | |
It means the recognition that the future | 5:22 | |
cannot be forced by any one of us, | 5:25 | |
that tomorrow is God's tomorrow and not our own. | 5:29 | |
For tonight, we may die, | 5:35 | |
and all our worldly expectations die with us. | 5:38 | |
It is precisely this meaning of waiting upon God | 5:45 | |
that is marvelously filled out and perfected | 5:49 | |
by Jesus of Nazareth in the Beatitudes. | 5:51 | |
Here, the Christian, the man of faith is portrayed | 5:56 | |
as he essentially the one who waits, | 6:01 | |
who is moving toward the future which God alone will bring. | 6:05 | |
"Blessed are the poor in spirit," says Jesus, | 6:12 | |
and the poor in spirit are those who are so freed | 6:18 | |
from the shackles of the world's glittering prizes | 6:23 | |
that their eyes are turned toward the future, | 6:28 | |
which God alone will grant. | 6:31 | |
"Blessed are they that mourn," says Jesus, | 6:35 | |
and the mourners are those who, with compassion | 6:40 | |
and a broken heart are awaiting the consolation | 6:45 | |
of our world from the sight of God. | 6:50 | |
And similarly, those who hunger and thirst | 6:54 | |
after righteousness are the men and women who live | 6:58 | |
in ardent hope of God's intervention to rescue | 7:02 | |
or redeem this benighted world from sin | 7:07 | |
and corruption and death. | 7:12 | |
But you will ask me, are not all men given | 7:17 | |
with their existence an innate discontentment | 7:22 | |
with the present, and the hope for a better future? | 7:27 | |
Yes, of course. | 7:32 | |
We are all given that hope, but the differentiating factor | 7:34 | |
among us lies in the way we picture the future. | 7:40 | |
Now we have witnessed in our day and age, | 7:47 | |
the rise to universal prominence of a philosophy | 7:49 | |
that is no less concerned about the future | 7:55 | |
than is Christianity. | 7:57 | |
Marxist teaching or Bolshevism is motivated | 8:01 | |
by a secular doctrine of the future. | 8:07 | |
It is motivated by its dream | 8:11 | |
of the kingdom of God without God | 8:14 | |
and it fuels itself irresistibly impelled | 8:18 | |
towards the future of coming classless society. | 8:22 | |
Ironically enough, in the course of her history, | 8:29 | |
the church has raised up not a few men | 8:34 | |
who have made unwitting concessions | 8:37 | |
to the Marxist way of looking at things | 8:41 | |
by claiming Jesus, first and foremost, | 8:44 | |
as an ally in the social revolutionary struggle | 8:48 | |
for a new world order, planned and engineered by man. | 8:53 | |
But in fact, Jesus' view of the future | 9:01 | |
is radically different from the secular ideal | 9:06 | |
of a coming socialist utopia in our earth and in our time. | 9:11 | |
For the man who waits upon God as Jesus intends it, | 9:19 | |
is found still waiting upon God in confidence | 9:25 | |
and faith and trust even when the acid realities | 9:30 | |
of our history have destroyed all hope | 9:35 | |
of our paradise upon earth. | 9:40 | |
Rudolph Bultmann expressed it very well | 9:46 | |
in one of his Marburg sermons. | 9:49 | |
"To move towards the future does not mean," | 9:52 | |
he says, "to desire to mold it | 9:56 | |
"by our human planning and carefulness." | 10:00 | |
"Equally little does it mean to expect | 10:04 | |
"from the future the fulfillment of all our selfish desires. | 10:08 | |
"But it does mean that we travel toward this unknown, | 10:14 | |
"this darkness, with our heart and mind open | 10:20 | |
"for what God wills to make of us." | 10:25 | |
Now, at that point ended our York Chapel exercise | 10:32 | |
on the theme of faith defined as waiting upon God. | 10:36 | |
And the immediate sequel to it was that several students | 10:44 | |
came around like hornets in a sense, | 10:48 | |
protesting vigorously that to define Christianity | 10:53 | |
as no more than waiting on God, | 10:58 | |
waiting on the future as God's future is merely to advise | 11:02 | |
an inward attitude of passivity before God, | 11:09 | |
and sort of cut the narrative | 11:15 | |
of all responsible social good works and endeavor. | 11:17 | |
It is precisely because I would not have so important | 11:24 | |
a matter thus misunderstood, that I am taking | 11:28 | |
this opportunity of pressing it further. | 11:31 | |
I, too, happen to believe that any faith | 11:36 | |
or any waiting upon God that does not bear immediate fruit | 11:42 | |
in redemptive social action and righteous conduct | 11:48 | |
is a spurious, profitless, and dead thing, | 11:53 | |
a merely false religiosity. | 11:59 | |
Let us turn, for a moment, seeking illumination | 12:03 | |
of this point through Christ's parable | 12:06 | |
of the rich man and Lazarus. | 12:09 | |
In that parable, we may presume that the rich man | 12:14 | |
was a person of broad cultural and spiritual horizons, | 12:20 | |
of discerning taste and with both the knack and the leisure | 12:26 | |
for the contemplative life. | 12:31 | |
An expert judge, perhaps, | 12:34 | |
of objets d'art and ripe old vintages. | 12:37 | |
But poor Lazarus, he never noticed. | 12:43 | |
He may have thought to himself that if you start | 12:49 | |
to take account of beggars and dogs and flies, | 12:52 | |
where could you ever stop? | 12:57 | |
But surely, there is something very seriously wrong | 13:01 | |
with the man who cannot understand that a dying beggar | 13:06 | |
has more claim on his attention than the higher | 13:12 | |
and more cherished objects of his cultural | 13:17 | |
and spiritual aspirations. | 13:21 | |
So it is, I believe in the realm of faith. | 13:26 | |
If a self-professed religious man can shut his eyes | 13:29 | |
at Lazarus, then we can only conclude | 13:35 | |
that he is not really religious at all, | 13:39 | |
certainly not in any authentic Christian sense. | 13:42 | |
For wherever God is given room in the life | 13:50 | |
of any man who waits for him, love for beggars | 13:54 | |
and renovation is never very far away. | 13:59 | |
"Faith is the doer and love the deed," | 14:04 | |
as Martin Luther once said. | 14:08 | |
Will you allow me a personal reminiscence at this point? | 14:13 | |
My own early years were spent against a background | 14:18 | |
of social unrest and economic distress | 14:23 | |
in Scotland in the late 1920s and '30s. | 14:28 | |
I first came to the church in the conviction | 14:34 | |
that Christianity was synonymous | 14:38 | |
with every honest movement for reform | 14:41 | |
of the social or economic or political system. | 14:46 | |
And so, boys as we were, with all the enthusiasm of youth, | 14:51 | |
we gave ourselves, some of us, | 14:56 | |
to trying to tidy up in a small enough way, | 14:58 | |
no doubt, some of the slums of Glasgow, | 15:02 | |
and we felt that in doing this, | 15:07 | |
all the rest would follow, | 15:09 | |
and the kingdom of heaven wouldn't be too long. | 15:11 | |
But back in Glasgow recently, one didn't see any real signs | 15:14 | |
of the kingdom of heaven. | 15:19 | |
Now, of course I do still believe with all my heart | 15:22 | |
beyond all doubt, the sinister fact of one-roomed houses, | 15:28 | |
of poverty and class discrimination, | 15:35 | |
all that is the queerest kind of commentary | 15:40 | |
on the so-called Christianity among us, | 15:44 | |
and it's also a direct insult to God. | 15:48 | |
If we were even halfway Christian, | 15:52 | |
we must be up and doing about things like that. | 15:56 | |
I, too, share that belief with you. | 16:00 | |
But nowadays, in the light of what I sincerely hope | 16:04 | |
is a greater maturity, I can recognize | 16:10 | |
that it's all a question in the last analysis | 16:15 | |
of emphasis and of method. | 16:18 | |
How can we help things best? | 16:23 | |
Whence do we derive our inspiration? | 16:26 | |
What is to be the order of our priorities? | 16:31 | |
Since those days of the 1920s, | 16:37 | |
there has been abundant social effort in our land, | 16:40 | |
laudable social effort and well conceived. | 16:45 | |
Yet for all that, our societies still lie stricken | 16:50 | |
and scarred from the same old diseases. | 16:57 | |
Our societies remain unredeemed. | 17:01 | |
As I said, the kingdom of heaven | 17:06 | |
has not drawn conspicuously nearer to our earth. | 17:09 | |
When I was back in Britain recently, I chanced to see | 17:16 | |
dear old Bertrand Russell in a television program. | 17:21 | |
I trust I did him no injustice in reading | 17:26 | |
from the lines on his face his own disenchantment | 17:31 | |
with this, our world, and his own chagrin at the failure | 17:36 | |
of men to live out the ethic of human kindness | 17:42 | |
and benevolence he has so long advocated | 17:46 | |
as the surest key to society's reformation. | 17:50 | |
You know, perhaps we ourselves, | 17:57 | |
though calling ourselves Christian, | 18:02 | |
are really not so very different after all | 18:05 | |
from the humanitarian philosopher. | 18:09 | |
Perhaps our own daydreams have been all too earthy. | 18:12 | |
Perhaps also our biggest hopes have been placed in man, | 18:19 | |
and in man's ability, unaided and alone, | 18:25 | |
to bring in the day of brotherhood, | 18:30 | |
and end the night of wrong. | 18:33 | |
Perhaps we, too, have thought to renew | 18:37 | |
our decaying social structures by powers | 18:41 | |
drawn from within these structures themselves. | 18:45 | |
And perhaps, if you have moods like me, | 18:51 | |
you may be feeling, as I often feel, | 18:54 | |
thwarted and tired, because even our best social endeavors | 18:57 | |
have apparently proven quite incapable | 19:04 | |
of dragging out the tangled roots | 19:08 | |
of evil from our midst. | 19:11 | |
And that is why I have no fear of saying in the end, | 19:16 | |
that we are driven back upon the point | 19:22 | |
from which we started. | 19:25 | |
We must begin with God. | 19:28 | |
We must begin with God, | 19:33 | |
despite the popular humanistic teaching of our day, | 19:36 | |
which alleges confidently that we are really not much helped | 19:41 | |
by those who are bothering about the future, | 19:46 | |
least of all God's future. | 19:49 | |
The humanist says that we are rather helped most | 19:52 | |
by those who are throwing themselves | 19:56 | |
busily and energetically into the present. | 19:58 | |
I would venture to affirm, with every voice | 20:06 | |
in the New Testament behind me, | 20:10 | |
and the sober facts of history to support me, | 20:13 | |
that on the contrary, it is only those who have stood | 20:18 | |
where the world and its possibilities end, | 20:22 | |
and whose minds are filled with the unseen future of God, | 20:26 | |
it is only those who are nothing daunted | 20:31 | |
when all earthly expectations fade away. | 20:35 | |
It is only those who really are going to retain | 20:40 | |
the strength and valor to dare | 20:44 | |
the best things for us here and now. | 20:47 | |
In this, as in other things, I suggest, | 20:54 | |
Jesus the Christ himself is our great exemplar. | 20:57 | |
The gospels portray Jesus as the one who flings himself | 21:03 | |
entirely on the mercy of God and who is prepared | 21:08 | |
to leave the future to God. | 21:13 | |
Even so, and only so, freed as he is from all illusory hopes | 21:18 | |
of a great earthly, manmade future, | 21:27 | |
is he sustained by a vision of God's coming order of things | 21:32 | |
high enough to constrain in him those repeated acts | 21:38 | |
of love and of compassion which strike at the heart | 21:44 | |
of the most intractable social problems. | 21:50 | |
The essence of a Christian life we may fairly say | 21:56 | |
is to be united with this Jesus Christ. | 21:59 | |
And if so, we shall be united with him, | 22:04 | |
primarily in turning our eyes in faith like him, | 22:09 | |
towards the future that God alone can bring. | 22:15 | |
When we have learned thus to wait | 22:20 | |
upon the future as God's future, | 22:22 | |
it instantly becomes for us a unique inspiration, | 22:26 | |
an inspiration that the world cannot give | 22:32 | |
and that worldly men do not possess, | 22:35 | |
an inspiration driving us like him | 22:39 | |
into the field of service. | 22:45 | |
"Blessed are they that mourn," says Jesus. | 22:50 | |
The mourners are those among us who are awaiting | 22:56 | |
the consolation of this tormented world | 23:01 | |
from the sight of God. | 23:04 | |
And as the rest of the Sermon on the Mount, | 23:07 | |
following the Beatitudes very clearly shows, | 23:10 | |
the mourners are, at the same time those | 23:15 | |
whose impregnable hope in God and in God's future | 23:20 | |
challenges and empowers them for refashioning | 23:25 | |
the world here and now in accordance | 23:30 | |
with God's own holy will and purpose, | 23:34 | |
and unto this God be the glory. | 23:40 | |
Let us pray. | 23:42 | |
Almighty and ever blessed God, | 23:52 | |
before whose face the generations rise and fall away, | 23:55 | |
grant us that in this, our generation, | 24:01 | |
we may catch a glimpse of thine eternal city, | 24:05 | |
not made with hands, that this vision of faith, | 24:09 | |
of a higher order of things than the earthly order, | 24:15 | |
may sustain us and lay an irresistible constraint upon us, | 24:19 | |
to love our fellow men in repeated acts of compassion, | 24:26 | |
and redemptive concern, that through our faith, | 24:31 | |
the fruits of loving kindness may be born, | 24:36 | |
and our society lifted up towards God's holy will | 24:40 | |
and purpose for it. | 24:45 | |
And unto God the Father, God the Son, | 24:47 | |
and God the Holy Ghost do we now ascribe | 24:51 | |
all honor and glory, majesty, dominion and power, | 24:54 | |
world without end. | 24:59 | |
♪ Amen ♪ | 25:05 | |
♪ Amen ♪ | 25:12 | |
♪ Ah, ah, ah, ah ♪ | 25:19 | |
♪ Ah, ah, ah, ah ♪ | 25:24 | |
♪ Ah, amen ♪ | 25:29 | |
♪ Ah, ah, ah, amen ♪ | 25:36 | |
♪ Ah, ah, amen ♪ | 25:45 | |
♪ Ah, amen ♪ | 25:59 |