7/9/50

Scripture: (Read Luke 12: 1-15)

1) Who do you think you are? First of all, you and I should remember steadily that we are the children of God, the creatures of incomparable Goodness. We are neither animal nor angel, though we partake of the nature of each. We are born with a princely relationship to the King Eternal that can never be set aside. And we must live up to that royal relationship. Always, and forever, we are children of God.

2) Who do you think you are? You and I are persons in need. Self-deceit is endless, and self-sufficiency is the sin into which we all fall in varying degrees, with results that are most appalling in our present day in the world. There come times in the lives of each of us when we know that of ourselves we are beaten and helpless. We are beings whose very nature demands the grace of God.

3) Further, we are beings whom God has trusted, and will go on trusting, to carry on His work of truth and right in the world. Some are perhaps over-confident, and unduly assured, of their place in the world. Probably most of us underestimate the place of usefulness we ought to fill on the earth. For God trusts all of us with the tasks of His kingdom.

4) Who do you think you are? You and I are persons with an immortal destiny. This life span on earth is but a particle of the whole. Our immortality matters - and it matters supremely. We are on an immortal pilgrimage and must act accordingly.

There is current a widely-noticed dramatic portrayal of a man who never really knew who he was - a man of fiction and yet of considerable reality. I refer to the salesman, Willy Loman, in the Broadway drama “Death of a Salesman.” I have not seen the play nor read its script. But I have seen a review of its content. It seems to lay bare one of the real problems of modern life -- the frustration and emptiness experienced by hosts of people who want to be important but have not adequate notion of how to lead lives that really matter. It evidently touches a real sore spot in our human nature, and that is perhaps why it attracts the attention it does, quite apart from its dramatic artistry.

The play is a skillful portrayal of the death of a salesman -- not alone the abrupt termination of his physical existence, but the dying of a spirit that never found its reason for being. It is a tragedy, calling for an answer - an affirmation of life for the modern man and woman. According to one of his sons, who was called Biff, the tragedy of the salesman is that “he had the wrong dreams.”

At the time the action takes place, Willy Loman is in his sixties. He has been driven all his life by the desire, above all else, to make a lot of money. He was intent on cracking the world open, life an oyster, for himself. He vainly dreamed of a big business for himself. He bragged that his son would one day be a “25-thousand-dollar-a-year man.” When one of his sons came home after a long absence, the salesman’s first question was, “Are you making any money?” The older son, catching the dreams of his father, once said of his boss entering the room, “That’s 52 thousand a year coming through the revolving door.” Willy Loman regarded, with a kind of awe and reverence, his brother Ben, who when he was 17 walked into the African jungle and at 21, “came out rich.”

Along with dreams of wealth, the salesman was obsessed with dreams of being a big shot, popular and with prestige. He wanted people to believe that he was very popular where he went all up and down New England, among “the finest people.” And this he wanted also for his two sons. He lived constantly in a dream world, at a level really achieved by very few in this highly competitive world. He failed, pitifully, of such achievement, but couldn’t admit it.

His little house, hemmed in by towering apartment buildings, symbolized his lack of any preeminent significance. The tiny garden where he raised a few beets, was as near the spacious suburban grounds he wanted as he was ever to get. His wife once observed that he was “only a little boat looking for a harbor.” He himself, refusing to face facts, would bluff others and kid himself about his successes on a selling trip, until his wife would ask him exactly how much he had received in commissions. In one honest moment, he did admit that he was not well liked, was not noticed by many, and worse yet, was ridiculed and called a “walrus” by some. Still he kept up his bluff.

Gradually his soul deteriorated. He taught his sons to pilfer sand from a construction job so they could fix their own front stoop; to lie when it seemed expedient to do so. He grossly exaggerated the success he, and they, were making of one thing or another. To bolster his ego, and to fight off his loneliness, he sought the companionship of a woman, not his wife, on his trips to Boston, and paid her off with silk stockings. His sense of the guilt he would not admit was symbolized in his violent reaction whenever he saw his wife mending her own stockings.

Finally, he lost his job; admitted to himself that his sons were not measuring up to the kind of success dreams he had for them, and committed suicide. He stayed in character as he rationalized this last act by saying that his $20,000 insurance money would enable his sons to start in business and make their own pile. The pitiful finale shows the scene of his burial, attended not by people whose cars bore the license plates of dozens of states, but by his wife, 2 sons, and 3 or 4 sympathetic neighbors. His wife, utterly crushed, having just managed the last payment on their house, which now becomes a place of loneliness, asks, “Why must everybody conquer the world?”

His son, Biff, whose whole world had collapsed when he found his father in a hotel room with the other woman, commented bitterly: “He had the wrong dreams. He never knew who he was.” The other son, Hap, had absorbed the spirit of their father. “It’s the only dream you can have,” he said, “to come out number-one man. He fought it out here and this is where I’m gonna win it for him. I’m gonna beat this racket!” And so the drama ends with the conflict unresolved and a piteous continuation of the tragedy in the life of one of the sons.

Now what are the alternatives to this kind of frustration and death of spirit that besets the lives of so many, and which tempts and taints most of us? There are alternatives and we do well to focus our attention upon them.

1) First, “success” is much more than an accumulation of money and prestige. Jesus of Nazareth declared to his listeners, “A man’s life consists not in the abundance of the things which he possesses.” [Luke 12: 15]. “Man does not live by bread alone” said Jesus further. [Luke 4: 4]. And we might add with further understanding, “Nor by bread and cake, by a new boat or more sugar.”

Last July I spent in a summer school with sixty or so other ministers, of varying degrees of renown or anonymity, all intent on learning how to pursue better their chosen calling. One who seemed most successful in the eyes of most of us was Fred Wangelin, who is still going strong in a life-long pastorate in the Ozarks of Missouri. Now white-haired, with means so meager that he regarded that 4-weeks summer session as one of the big events of his life, humble and eager, Fred left the school with profound regret after the first week, called home by the sudden critical illness of a loved one. We found that, after reading a life of John Frederick Oberlin, he had deliberately sought such a field as there was in that backward Ozarks community. He had been hated by some whose ways of life were challenged by his preaching and his acts. His first parsonage was set afire one night, and only the quick alarm of a neighbor enabled him and his family to escape in their night clothes.

But others had already come to believe in his life and work. He says that, before the ruins of his home had quit smoking, there was delivered to the yard by a neighbor the first load of lumber for a new house.

Irvine Inglis of the Webster Groves church, says that one of the most significant pieces of work in the Missouri Conference is being done by the humble, consecrated, patient and exceedingly persistent daily efforts of Fred Wangelin. He doesn’t “ooze” any evident prosperity. But he radiates a spirit that must be credited a success in the eyes of God and a grateful little community. A lot of his work is done in overalls, not only on his own place, but with his parishioners in their fields.

Another Ozarks minister didn’t want to be a preacher at first. He wanted to be a farmer, raise crops and make money for the things he wanted. But a wise old country doctor told him, in words and in deeds: “Success isn’t things, it’s a feeling.” Guy Howard got the idea. He became a preacher to needy people and he got that “feeling” himself. For him, that is success.

Charles Steinmetz suggests that, “To succeed is to make a living at work which interests you” --- whether it makes you rich or not. “The wise man learns to live. The shrewd man, in the struggle for material goals, learns to make money. Look around you and you will find that the man who has learned to live is the happier of the two. He may be poor in the world’s goods, but he has the key to happiness in his heart.” There is considerable wisdom in these words of Steinmetz.

2) In the second place, integrity and truth are the very ground of our existence. Unless we are honest with ourselves and others, we can have no peace or happiness. A way of living - based on expediency - now makes a vigorous bid for world supremacy. Truth and integrity have no part in it, except or if and when, they serve the power purpose of the party. This is purposeful and evil.

The salesman never found “integrity.” He kidded himself all his life in the light of a false standard. He might have found freedom and release if he had been able first to respect his true worth.

3) In the third place, -- devotion to a cause. Nehru -- most significant period of his life were his imprisonment and struggle for freedom of his nation. Life for Moses came when he left the security and self-indulgent life of his foster-mother’s Egyptian palace and threw himself into the struggle of his people for justice. The salesman had nothing to live for beyond his job and “his boys.”

4) Finally. Our lives become significant when we realize that we are sons and daughters of God. Willy Loman evidently thought he was just a walking automaton, needing food, self expression, money and recognition. Actually he was a child of God --- and never found it out. It helps tremendously to remember that God is beyond our human achievements and that we belong to His purposes. This religious recognition puts us in a place of satisfying perspective and potential usefulness.

(Roland Hayes to Norman Vincent Peale -- in a railroad Pullman out of NYC. curfew. police. “O God make these men Christian. Give them the love of God.” “I am Christian.” “O God, give them tolerance and love.” “You are Hayes.” Apologizes and puts him up in hotel. Hayes sang before the King and Queen of England, the son of ex-slaves before royalty. He got a telegram from his mother: “Remember, Roland, who you are.” Hayes explained, “My mother simply meant that I should remember that I am a vessel of God through whom God’s voice of joy and victory and the struggle of a race might sing its song of victory and its song of spiritual power.”)

Remember who you are!

------------------------

Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, July 9, 1950.