Earl G. Hunt, Jr. - "The Cloud over the Tabernacle" (October 26, 1975)

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	(orchestral music begins)	0:10
	(choir music)	4:29
Speaker 1	Let us offer our confession of sin	10:11
	to Almighty God.	10:14
	All Holy and merciful, God.	10:17
	We confess that we have not always	10:21
	taken upon ourselves with joy, the yoke of obedience,	10:23
	nor been willing to seek and do your perfect will.	10:29
	We have not loved you with all our heart,	10:33
	and mind and soul and strength.	10:36
	Neither have we loved our neighbors as ourselves.	10:40
	You have called us to respond	10:44
	to the need of our brothers and sisters,	10:46
	and we have passed on heeding on our way.	10:49
	In the pride of our hearts	10:53
	and our unwillingness to repent.	10:55
	We have turned away from the cross of Christ	10:59
	and have grieved your Holy Spirit.	11:02
	Forgive us we pray, Amen.	11:06
	Let us continue in our personal confession, to Almighty God.	11:11
	The Lord is near to the brokenhearted	11:39
	and saves the crushed in spirit.	11:42
	Therefore wait for the Lord.	11:47
	Be strong and let your heart take courage. Amen.	11:49
	(orchestral music)	12:07
	(choir music)	13:00
Speaker 2	The Old Testament lesson is from	20:43
	the ninth chapter of Numbers.	20:45
	"On the day that the tabernacle was set up,	20:49
	the cloud covered the tabernacle, the Tent of the Testimony.	20:52
	And at evening it was over the tabernacle,	20:56
	like the appearance of fire until morning.	20:58
	So it was continually.	21:01
	The cloud covered it by day,	21:03
	and the appearance of fire by night.	21:05
	And whenever the cloud was taken up from over the tent.	21:08
	After that, the people of Israel set out	21:12
	and in the place where the cloud settled down,	21:15
	there, the people of Israel encamped.	21:18
	At the command of the Lord,	21:20
	the people of Israel set out,	21:22
	and at the command of the Lord, they encamped.	21:24
	As long as the cloud rested over the tabernacle,	21:27
	they remained in camp.	21:30
	Even when the cloud continued	21:32
	after the tabernacle, many days,	21:33
	the people of Israel kept the charge of the Lord	21:35
	and did not set out.	21:38
	Sometimes the cloud was a few days over the tabernacle	21:40
	and according to the command of the Lord,	21:44
	they remained in camp.	21:46
	Then, according to the command of the Lord, they set out."	21:48
	The New Testament lesson	22:04
	is from the 10th chapter of Hebrews.	22:05
	"It is a fearful thing to fall into	22:09
	the hands of the living God."	22:12
	Here ends the reading of the morning lessons.	22:16
	(choir music)	22:19
-	Let us join in one voice in the affirmation of faith.	23:02
	We are not alone. We live in God's world.	23:07
	We believe in God who has created and is creating,	23:11
	who has come and the truly human Jesus,	23:17
	to reconcile and make new.	23:20
	Who works in us and others through the Spirit.	23:23
	We trust God who calls us to be the Church,	23:27
	to celebrate life and its fullness,	23:32
	to love and serve others,	23:35
	to seek justice and resist evil,	23:38
	to proclaim Jesus crucified and risen,	23:41
	our judge and our hope in life, in death,	23:45
	in life beyond death, God is with us.	23:50
	We are not alone. Thanks be to God.	23:55
	The Lord be with you.	23:59
	Let us pray.	24:03
	Oh God, our help in ages past	24:19
	our hope for years to come.	24:23
	Our shelter from the stormy blast, and our eternal home.	24:26
	Support us in your matchless love, oh God.	24:34
	And guide us by your infinite wisdom.	24:38
	Save us from violence,	24:44
	discord and confusion from pride and arrogance.	24:46
	And from every evil way.	24:53
	Grant that we may be at peace with ourselves	24:56
	and teach us to live in love and charity with our neighbors.	25:01
	Since we do not know what a day may bring forth,	25:09
	but the tower for serving you is always present,	25:13
	may we wake to the instant claims of your Holy well,	25:18
	not waiting for tomorrow, but yielding today.	25:22
	Consecrate with your presence the way our feet may go	25:31
	and the humblest work will shine	25:37
	and the roughest places be made plain.	25:40
	Lift us above unrighteous, anger, and mistrust	25:44
	into faith and hope and love	25:49
	by a simple and steadfast reliance on your sure will.	25:54
	In all things, draw us to the mind of Christ	26:00
	and hear us, as together we pray the prayer,	26:06
	which our savior taught us.	26:11
	Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name,	26:14
	thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth	26:20
	as it is in heaven.	26:25
	Give us this day,	26:27
	our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses.	26:28
	As we forgive those who trespass against us.	26:33
	And lead us, not into temptation,	26:37
	but deliver us from evil.	26:40
	For thine is the kingdom	26:42
	and the power and the glory forever, Amen.	26:44
	I've been asked to announce that the Reverend Peggy Way,	26:54
	professor at the Jesuit School of Theology in Chicago,	26:57
	who was scheduled to preach at Duke Chapel on September 7th	27:01
	will lead the service of worship	27:06
	this Thursday at five 15 in Duke Chapel.	27:07
	You are invited to worship with us at that time.	27:12
	We're honored indeed today to have as our preacher,	27:18
	Bishop Earl G Hunt Jr.	27:23
	Elected a Bishop in 1964 in the United Methodist church	27:27
	and assigned to the Western North Carolina area.	27:32
	We are delighted indeed Bishop Hunt, to have you with us	27:37
	and we hear your gladly, Bishop Hunt.	27:42
Bishop Hunt	My dear friends.	28:04
	I read again from the ninth chapter of	28:06
	the book of Numbers, the 17th verse.	28:11
	"And when the cloud was taken up from the tabernacle,	28:15
	then after that the children of Israel journeyed.	28:20
	And in the place where the cloud abode,	28:25
	there, the children of Israel pitched their tents."	28:28
	And from the 10th chapter of	28:35
	the book of Hebrews, the 31st verse.	28:37
	"It is a fearful thing to fall	28:42
	into the hands of the living God."	28:46
	This dramatic passage from the book of Numbers,	28:56
	in vivid imagery, tells the profound	29:03
	and deep conviction of the Hebrew people.	29:08
	In their desert experience,	29:13
	that God Himself was leading them.	29:16
	The cloud over the tabernacle	29:25
	is a picturesque testimony of clear, indisputable,	29:30
	compelling divine guidance.	29:39
	And the mood of the entire narrative	29:44
	establishes with certainty that God's people	29:48
	followed His leading with fidelity and gladness.	29:53
	The author of Hebrews centuries later	30:01
	celebrating the terror of the Lord for the unsaved	30:05
	and the wonder and glory of the Lord for the redeemed.	30:13
	Said, it is a fearful thing to fall	30:18
	into the hands of the living God.	30:23
	Against the backdrop of these two passages,	30:28
	I would lift this morning, a very simple query.	30:32
	What does it mean to be led by God?	30:37
	What does it mean to fall into the hands of the living God?	30:46
	What is the significance of the cloud over the tabernacle?	30:53
	The picture of a guiding God in the life of the church.	31:00
	What does it mean to be faithful	31:08
	in the Christian community in the 1970s?	31:11
	I should like to begin with two pictures,	31:16
	one from yesterday, and the second from today.	31:21
	In one of his essays,	31:27
	Dr. Carlyle Marney attempts to describe	31:28
	the traditional Protestant respectability and piety	31:34
	in terms of grandfather,	31:40
	fraught coated with gold watch chain,	31:43
	Phi Beta Kappa key,	31:48
	cane and gloves, strolling by the first national bank,	31:51
	where he is the president,	31:57
	on his way to the first Presbyterian church,	32:00
	where he is the ruling elder.	32:05
	That is yesterday.	32:10
	Professor James S. Stewart in one of his recent books	32:14
	has this sentence about today.	32:19
	"The church is not an introverted fellowship	32:25
	or a static camp.	32:29
	It is a host on pilgrimage	32:32
	with the glorious humbling assurance	32:38
	that we are only on the edge and outskirts	32:41
	of God's immeasurable grace."	32:46
	Now somewhere between yesterday and today,	32:52
	as these quotations describe them, lies the tension	32:58
	in the grip of which the contemporary church finds itself.	33:05
	What does the cloud over the tabernacle,	33:13
	the leading of God imply for us?	33:16
	First of all, I suggest that it must mean we shall know	33:23
	the sovereign will of God.	33:29
	Now to a people whose religious faith	33:37
	is based solidly up on the Bible,	33:40
	the only thing that really matters	33:44
	is the central regnant absolute ultimate	33:48
	will of Almighty God, nothing else.	33:55
	There is a lovely story about	34:02
	the famous Italian Maestro Toscanini,	34:03
	which says that he had conducted his orchestra one day	34:08
	and a splendid rendition of Beethoven's ninth symphony.	34:10
	He stepped away from the podium	34:16
	and those near him heard him murmur to himself.	34:17
	"Who am I?	34:21
	Who is Toscanini?	34:22
	I am nobody. Toscanini is nobody, Beethoven,	34:24
	Beethoven is everything!"	34:29
	So to the Christian man or woman,	34:33
	Almighty God is everything.	34:37
	In January of 1975, 18 theologians sat down	34:44
	in the city of Hartford, Connecticut	34:49
	to hammer out up on the anvil	34:52
	of their own conviction and experience.	34:53
	What may well prove to be one of the monumental doctrines	34:56
	and documents of the Christian community in this century.	35:00
	They called it the Hartford Appeal	35:06
	for Theological Affirmation.	35:08
	It had two principle propositions.	35:12
	The first was this, it is wrong for the world to seek	35:15
	to compose the agenda of the church.	35:20
	The second was an insistence upon the transcendence of God.	35:26
	What a shift.	35:35
	What a switch, what a metamorphosis.	35:37
	For decades the leaders in the thinking of the church	35:43
	have been telling us that	35:47
	the Biblical Revelation of God must be made to fit	35:48
	into the thinking and the doing of human society.	35:55
	Now suddenly, precisely those same leaders	36:02
	or their successors are telling us that	36:06
	the moment has come when the thinking	36:11
	and the doing of human society	36:14
	must be treated in terms of the Biblical Revelation of God.	36:16
	The only thing that really matters	36:27
	is the sovereign will of Almighty God.	36:31
	And if this should lead us away	36:38
	from those sacrosanct caretaker cures of the church,	36:42
	so precious to us, so be it.	36:46
	If it should lead us back	36:53
	to the dangerous simplicities of	36:55
	the New Testament, so be it.	36:57
	If it should lead us away from the episcopacy,	37:02
	bureaucracy, politics and structure,	37:07
	as we know them, so be it.	37:12
	The only thing that really matters is to find and to do	37:18
	in our day, the will of God.	37:26
	The cloud over the tabernacle,	37:31
	it is a fearful thing to fall	37:36
	into the hands of the living God.	37:40
	My second proposition is a simple one.	37:44
	If we are to be faithful	37:50
	in the Christian community in the 1970s,	37:52
	we must have a sensitivity to the major issues.	37:56
	A great change has come in life in our day.	38:05
	The biographer of Henry James,	38:12
	speaks of him as strolling across college lawns	38:15
	in the simple belief that the world is all an English garden	38:20
	and time is a fine old afternoon.	38:29
	Matthew Arnold in his poem, "Scholar Gypsy" has this line,	38:37
	"life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames".	38:43
	There are some among us who are still living as though	38:51
	these descriptions were true and accurate.	38:54
	I remember last spring	38:59
	as I was waited upon by pastor parish committees	39:00
	in preparation for the coming session	39:02
	of our annual conference,	39:05
	the amazing cluster of problems	39:07
	that they revealed to me as we talked.	39:09
	Here was one situation where the people had	39:13
	reached a point of infinite confusion	39:18
	and of incredible complexity	39:21
	over the matter of purchasing new pew cushions	39:27
	for their church.	39:34
	And the color of the parsonage drapery issue.	39:36
	Here was another situation where one church on a charge	39:43
	wanted preaching at 11 o'clock on Sunday morning	39:46
	and the other church wanted it at precisely the same hour.	39:49
	Here was another situation where	39:53
	the church was asking for a new preacher	39:55
	because the preacher there had taken the wrong position	39:59
	on certain policies related to the care of the buildings,	40:02
	belonging to the trustees of the church.	40:08
	How long will it take us to realize that	40:13
	the world is not all an English garden	40:17
	and time is not a fine old afternoon.	40:22
	Life if it ever did, no longer runs gaily	40:26
	as the sparkling waters of any river.	40:30
	The basic issues are issues that have to do	40:35
	with the disease of our times.	40:40
	And if you, and I don't think that our times are diseased,	40:46
	we need to have our television sets examined.	40:49
	The great fundamental major basic issues, are hunger,	40:56
	world famine, the struggle for human rights,	41:03
	including the rights of women.	41:09
	War, the grim specter of thermo-nuclear catastrophe.	41:13
	And the need to know God,	41:21
	I pause here parenthetically because,	41:27
	so often, we say with a kind of pious wording	41:31
	that we believe both in social and personal religion.	41:39
	But when we actually go to express our faith,	41:45
	we get the one out of balance with the other.	41:50
	And in recent years, I think the leaders of the church	41:56
	may have led us to place our major emphasis	42:00
	upon social religion,	42:03
	because of the critical need of the times	42:06
	until we need now to reevaluate that emphasis.	42:10
	And to hear it again, what Dr. Lyman Beecher,	42:17
	one of the great social prophets	42:20
	of the 19th century said years ago,	42:21
	"The greatest thing is not to be a scientist or a statesman	42:25
	or a theologian,	42:28
	the greatest thing, is to be a person who can introduce	42:29
	another person to Christ Jesus, the Savior."	42:34
	The governing board of	42:39
	the National Council of Churches in New York,	42:40
	two weeks ago, evidence was upon every hand	42:44
	that the Protestant churches of this nation	42:49
	are going to make a bold new thrust,	42:51
	in the leading of men and women	42:56
	into a knowledge of Jesus Christ.	42:58
	The basic issues, the major issues.	43:04
	We cannot understand the meaning of	43:09
	the cloud over the tabernacle, unless we understand	43:13
	what those major issues are.	43:17
	You'll remember in Jonathan Swift's mortal satire	43:20
	the story of the war of the little people, the Lilliputians.	43:23
	And that that war, resulting in the deaths of thousands of	43:28
	those little people, was fought over whether a boiled egg	43:32
	should be open from one end or the other end.	43:39
	Peter Marshall used to have a way of putting it	43:46
	that fastened itself in my memory.	43:51
	He said, "we are dressed in our time	43:54
	in all of the elaborate paraphernalia of deep sea divers,	43:57
	marching bravely to pull out plugs in bathtubs."	44:01
	The major issues.	44:07
	And something else needs to be said.	44:11
	The Christian community is a various community.	44:14
	The people in it will never have	44:19
	the same theological perspectives any more than	44:20
	they will have the same intellectual persuasions.	44:25
	Years ago when I was a guest in the home	44:30
	of one of my fellow preachers in Holston Conference,	44:32
	on a certain afternoon, I had attired myself	44:36
	in a rather articulate pair of slacks,	44:39
	and allowed sports church.	44:45
	I had a sort of an unordained look.	44:48
	My friend came into the room and said that	44:53
	"tomorrow is our wedding anniversary, would you go	44:55
	with me to the record shop	44:58
	so that I may buy a gift for my wife?"	44:59
	When we got there, he wandered over	45:03
	into the long hair section of the shop,	45:05
	while I lingered in the more plebeian portion	45:11
	of the establishment.	45:14
	I was going through the titles when I came up on one	45:17
	that fascinated me, songs of the gay nineties,	45:19
	by the Gaslight Orchestra.	45:22
	I decided I wanted to hear it,	45:25
	so I put it on the turntable and played it.	45:26
	Across the room from me,	45:30
	there was a lovely little sales lady	45:31
	who noticed what I was doing.	45:33
	She came tripping over to where I stood	45:35
	and with a look of ecstasy in her eyes,	45:38
	she gazed up into my face and said,	45:40
	"oh sir, it's easy to see that you are a soft shoe artist."	45:42
	And then she said,	45:51
	"it's the most beautiful music in the world."	45:52
	Well, clearly it wasn't.	45:57
	But what she said reminded me of a time years before,	46:01
	when I had shared the pulpit with Peter Marshall,	46:04
	the organist was playing	46:08
	the Pilgrim's Chorus from Tannhauser.	46:09
	Dr. Marshall reached over and touched me on the shoulder,	46:13
	I turned around and saw that his cheeks were moistened	46:16
	with tears of joy.	46:19
	As he said to me, in his delightful Scottish accent,	46:22
	"it's the most beautiful music in the world."	46:27
	Well, now human society has always had to make room	46:34
	both for those who think songs of the gay nineties,	46:37
	by the Gaslight Orchestra,	46:42
	is the most beautiful music in the world.	46:44
	And for those who think the Pilgrim's Chorus from Tannhauser	46:46
	is the most beautiful music in the world.	46:51
	They both belong.	46:55
	The Christian Church doesn't belong to the social activist.	46:59
	The Christian Church doesn't belong to the charismatic.	47:04
	The Christian Church doesn't belong to the liberal.	47:08
	It doesn't belong to the conservative.	47:11
	The Christian Church belongs to Jesus Christ,	47:15
	and in him all valid interpretations of His Gospel	47:19
	and of its implementation,	47:24
	find their safe and honorable logic.	47:26
	If we're going to be faithful today,	47:32
	we must have a sensitivity to the major issues	47:34
	and must be certain that the church	47:40
	fights its battles along those lines.	47:43
	It's a fearful thing,	47:47
	to fall into the hands of the living God.	47:50
	Finally, and very briefly,	47:57
	if we are to pay attention to the cloud over the tabernacle,	48:01
	the leading of God, if we're to be faithful in our time,	48:06
	I am persuaded that we must make	48:11
	an offering of ourselves to God.	48:15
	I'm calling us back to the fundamentals of religion.	48:22
	At this point,	48:27
	the impact of the Christian Church	48:29
	will never be substantial upon our generation, our world,	48:33
	until something revolutionary	48:39
	and important happens in our lives.	48:42
	It is still a magnificent truth of our religion	48:50
	that a person's selfish, soiled, frightened, fragmented life	48:54
	can be changed, remade, revolutionized, transformed	49:03
	through the love and the power that are in Jesus Christ.	49:15
	If I had a single sign that I would hang out	49:23
	over every church in this nation today,	49:27
	this is what it would say.	49:31
	"Broken lives repaired here.	49:34
	Motivation for living and serving supplied here."	49:43
	This is what religion is all about,	49:54
	or to be sure sometimes we're afraid of the power	49:58
	that is in that kind of religion.	50:02
	Darrell Howell of Yale University	50:05
	used to say that the Catholics and the Episcopalians	50:08
	placed crosses on the tops of their steeples	50:11
	to celebrate their faith in a crucified Christ.	50:14
	He went on to say that the congregation lists	50:18
	put weather vanes in their steeples	50:20
	to celebrate their democratic procedures.	50:25
	And then he observed that most of the Methodist churches,	50:29
	he knew anything about had lightning rods on them.	50:33
	To celebrate the fact	50:40
	that once they were struck by religion,	50:42
	but to make absolutely sure it would never,	50:47
	never happen again.	50:50
	(congregation laughing)	50:52
	But what I am saying dear friends is that	50:54
	it has to happen again.	50:56
	Something transforming, something revolutionary,	50:59
	has to take place in you and me,	51:05
	before we can be faithful members	51:09
	of the Christian community in the 1970s.	51:12
	Bernard of Clairvaux wrote it centuries ago.	51:17
	"Ah, this no tongue nor pen can show the love of Jesus,	51:22
	what it is, none but his loved ones know."	51:27
	But they know,	51:33
	they know it's a fearful thing,	51:35
	to fall into the hands of the living God.	51:40
	The gospel is no dialectic of logic,	51:46
	no system of ethics, no musty set of morals,	51:51
	no book of platitudes.	51:55
	The gospel is love's aching arms when life	51:59
	has been barreling and dismal and tormented and shattered.	52:03
	The gospel is inconceivable forgiveness when sin	52:09
	has been bleak and persistent.	52:13
	The gospel is hope, when hope is long gone,	52:18
	dawnings bright fingers clutching at the throat of midnight.	52:21
	The gospel is life when death has done his hideous worse.	52:30
	And when we take the cloud over the tabernacle serious.	52:38
	And the leading of God becomes	52:45
	the paramount backdoor in our experiences.	52:47
	We are dealing with the explosive niche of this gospel.	52:52
	The call of the eternal must ring	53:00
	through the rooms of our souls.	53:03
	As clearly as the sound of the morning peels through	53:08
	the valleys of Switzerland,	53:13
	to call the people to prayer and praise.	53:16
	John Henry (indistinct) said that years ago.	53:20
	This is what has to happen now.	53:27
	For this is the glory of the Christian.	53:33
	And this is the meaning of the church.	53:38
	In the name of the Father,	53:52
	and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.	53:53
	(orchestral music begins)	54:06
	(choir singing)	57:23
Speaker 3	All things come of thee oh Lord,	1:04:38
	and of thine own have we given thee. Amen	1:04:40
	(orchestral music)	1:04:48
	(choir singing)	1:05:20
	Now may the grace of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.	1:08:07
	The love of God,	1:08:11
	the fellowship of the Holy Spirit,	1:08:13
	abide with you each one, now and forever.	1:08:16
	(choir singing)	1:08:23
	(bell chimes)	1:09:38
	(orchestral music)	1:09:56

Item Info

Title:

Earl G. Hunt, Jr. - "The Cloud over the Tabernacle" (October 26, 1975)

Description:

Young discusses the inevitability of failure in human life and the importance of forgiveness in mitigating failure. He says we must accept forgiveness through God, forgive others, and forgive ourselves in order to truly live life freely. (Abstract created by Duke Divinity School staff.)
Key quotation: "We are to accept our humanness, which means recognize and accept our failures - forgive ourselves, by the Grace of God - and move on."

Permalink:

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4445nd76

Date:

October 26, 1975

Speaker:

Hunt, Earl G., Jr., 1918-2005

Liturgical Calendar:

Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Biblical Book:

Chapter and Verse:

Subject:

Contributor:

Duke University. Chapel

Identifier:

UA.17.01.0003 RR-0797
ref6794_cgn
uachapelsermaud
duke:628493
dcrau002760
ark:/87924/r4445nd76
77d83f0d-899d-42aa-80c6-ad381366f879

Digital Collection:

Duke Chapel Recordings

Source Collection:

Duke University Chapel recordings

Related Resources:

See below

Language:

English

Location:

United States
North Carolina
Durham (N.C.)

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The Duke University Chapel Recordings were transferred to the Duke University Archives beginning in 1970.

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Earl G. Hunt, Jr. - "The Cloud over the Tabernacle" (October 26, 1975)

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Duke University Archives