5/27/51

Scripture: John 8: 12-32

Text: John 8: 32; “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

In the schools of the nation, this is the season of graduation. Each school boy and girl, from kindergarten up, has an expectation, or perhaps an anxiety, about passing from the grade in which he or she worked this year. Promotions are in order in the public schools and in the church school. A number of our families are happy over the prospect of graduation, from college or university, of someone of their household or acquaintance. More are looking forward to the graduation of someone from high school this week. Many who have been in the eighth grade are being promoted this week.

There is a sense in which graduation is a completion, and people look, with pride or regret, back over the accumulation of knowledge and experience represented at graduation time. There is a much more important sense in which graduation is a beginning - a commencement - of the living for which their study and experience thus far is a preparation.

The living of all of these young people -- and of all of us who have been graduated for some time --- is in a period of history which is important. Our times are not easy. For us who live in this part of the earth, there is a very fair amount of the materials of physical comfort. There is much of what might be called the tools of living. We here have what to many folk in the world would be marvelous abundance. And still, with the aid of these tools for making a living, we are yet faced with the problem of making a life.

Our age is filled with strange paradoxes. We have prosperity and we are aware of appalling want in much of the world -- even some in our own nation. We have peace and we have war. We have strength without security; advancement without true progress. We are powerful and we are fearful. We know the gratification of the senses, but we are not satisfied. We are skillful, and yet tragically ignorant. We are neighbors, and yet so often unneighborly. We can see through many things and we do not know enough about looking into life.

Into this kind of human experience thousands of young people begin the experience that lies beyond graduation. And it is the privilege of all of us to help write a most interesting and important chapter in the history of mankind.

“It is now half past 1900; the first year of a new half-century.” It is time to be wide awake and realistic. There was a time when the slogan, “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better” was the mental pattern by which many people tried to live. But we have learned the betrayal of false optimism. We know, I hope, that the world will never be made better by closing our eyes to the things that should not be.

I hope that no graduate of this season begins the new and grander era of his or her life with a sense of defeat. But at the same time the beginning of hope for all of us lies in as clear and calm an understanding as possible of the kind of world we have inherited.

You remember the story of the rooster that got in a way of crowing every morning at two o’clock. He didn’t make himself popular with his neighbors, nor with his owner who decided to wake up one morning before two o’clock and see what went on. The owner found that the last trolley from the city passed his country home at two each morning and the headlight shone, for a minute, into the chicken coop before the car reached a bend in the roadbed. The cock mistook that momentary headlight for the breaking of the day. In our anxiety for the dawning of a better day, it is just as well not to mistake every passing headlight for that dawn.

But there are frontiers ahead. One of the things that has made our nation great is that it has always had a frontier. When life has gotten too hard at some point, those who are willing to venture have been able to move ahead to some new and untested area. Hardy folk from the old world, who longed for freedom in religious expression and in political emancipation, came to the new world. Then for a long time there was always a geographical frontier beckoning those who became restless, or the victims of reversal in fortune. Little by little the frontier was pushed westward by people with the courage to go where life was hard, untested, often dangerous, and often rewarding.

There is a little hamlet of a few houses in Nebraska called Frontier’s End. There was doubtless a time when it was an outpost of civilization. But pioneers of the day of its naming soon pushed on until the population was established and growing all the way from the east coast to the west coast. Pioneering life was hard and vigorous. And very often those who put their belongings, and their families, into a covered wagon to go a few hundred miles west knew that they would never return to their friends and loved ones who stayed farther east.

Now those geographical frontiers are gone. And the wonders of travel and communication give little meaning to distance. But geographical frontiers were important chiefly in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries. In the 18th century the frontiers were in the area of government, when we were forging out the human rights which we, especially of this nation, so cherish today. In the 19th century, frontiers were industrial. The world economy was expanding with trade and manufacturing which changed the life of every nation.

In the first half of the 20th century, the frontiers have been in the realm of science. Secrets of the universe have been discovered, and unlocked, which have revolutionized our way of living and have made of the world a small, even crowded, neighborhood.

If all this be true in a measure, is it not further true that the frontiers of the last half of the 20th century are in the area of human relations? Can we human beings really live together in a world like this? This is a spiritual frontier; and it must be explored and settled if we are to live at all the masters of the physical power that now comes to hand. Whether we are to be the masters or the slaves of power depends on the moral and spiritual resources that will enable us to control ourselves.

An author died, leaving among his papers the plot for a play that was never written. The plot was about five widely separated members of a family who would inherit a house if they all lived in it together. That is essentially the plot of the great human drama for the next half century. Unless the world and its parts belong to all, it may belong to none.

A university dean used to say that in the days of the old one-room schoolhouse not much attention need be given to fire drills. In the country schoolhouse where I completed the first seven grades of my education, there were about two pupils to each window. In case of fire it would have been everybody for himself -- through the nearest window or in one swift push through the door. There was no panic at all on the day the floor got to smoldering under the overheated cast iron stove. We were simply sent outside while the nearest neighbor from a quarter mile away set the stove over and put out the fire in the floor with water the older boys carried all the way from his water trough to the school in buckets.

But in this day of large consolidated schools and city schools, the principle of every fellow for himself would not work. A rush by everybody at once to the nearest exit would mean disaster. In order for a large number of people to evacuate a building safely, there must be some order about it. Children are taught, by orderly fire drill, to cooperate for the safety of all. The safety of each life depends on the consideration given to the lives of others. So it is with the whole world of which we are now a part. The frontier of human relations must be settled if life is to be safe for anyone.

Frontier life is difficult. It is a hard, and even dangerous country to be explored if, for instance, we are to establish a world without war. The spiritual pioneering required may be pretty rugged. For the greatest enemy to world peace lies in human nature. And so the pioneering is of the spirit.

Man himself is the greatest problem of our time. Before the world can be controlled, we must control ourselves. Before there is brotherhood, we ourselves must be brotherly. It is not often institutions that succeed or fail; it is the people. The church or school are good or bad according to the character of the people in them.

Here I want to comment that the finest, freest all-round education can be had in the public schools of our land. Right here is our city high school, there are the facilities and faculty and program for some of the best learning and experience available. The success of this high school, and its lacks in the character of its graduates, are due to people themselves and the way they answer the question, “Do I really want an education?” “If I do, I can get it here in this free atmosphere of opportunity. If I do not really want it, no amount of the kind of training that could be given in an authoritarian institution, private or public, wherein I might be told what I must believe, would produce any better character in me, nor in itself save my soul.”

The public schools are sometimes labeled “godless” by those who feel a lack of insistence there on their own religious bias. But any person willing to think for himself can discover a multitude of the evidences of God and His handiwork in the order of lessons learned in a free school. It usually helps to go to one’s own church for further interpretation of those lessons. This is particularly true if one goes to a free church, adhering to belief in the “priesthood of all believers.”

I for one think that it is a spiritual duty to go, voluntarily and gladly, and regularly, to one’s own church; not because one has to do so in obedience to another’s dictum, but because one wants to worship God, to meditate in His presence and learn of His will. The church is a gathered company of believers. The school is a cooperative experience in learning. The two should supplement each other in our experience. But it is not spiritually healthy for the school to be controlled by a church. Neither is it healthy for the school, or any part of it, to scoff at, or ignore, the church.

Those who are going to pioneer in this day, in the area of human relations, need, as their first requisite, Christian character. I mean good character rooted in the Christian idea of what is right and wrong. Our free churches will be continued sources of Christian inspiration and information if we continue faithful in the exercise of a member’s duties and rights. Our American form of government will continue to uphold human rights if we citizens exercise the duties and rights of citizenship. The United Nations organization can be a success in the affairs of the world if it is undergirded with the character of trustworthy people and nations.

The Great Wall of China was an organized attempt to assure safety to the people inside its protection. Yet in the first few years of its existence, China was invaded, not by force, but simply because the guards of the gates could be bribed. The builders of the wall had provided for all contingencies then known, except human weakness. So the greatest frontiers of history are still before us -- in the human heart.

New spiritual trails will probably have to be blazed and perhaps some new social patterns. The first automobile my father bought had to travel much of the 4.5 miles to town following the wagon tracks that had become ruts on the strip of prairie roadway. When it became muddy one might better leave the car with its high pressure treadless tires in the shed and take a team of horses and a buggy instead. Over one of those much rutted early country roads was once posted a sign which read something like this: “Choose your rut well. You will be in it for the next twenty miles.” It was too true!

There are well-worn ruts across the face of the world -- ruts of narrow nationalism, unhappy prejudice, and selfishness. A new generation must avoid them, blaze new trails, or better yet fill in the old ruts with something more solid that will work better.

We made some attempts, not very successful, to fill in some of those old ruts after the First World War. Falling back into the old ruts of national self interest, we came again to disaster. Are we doing the same again after World War II? Now is the time for pioneering in faith and self-sacrifice. Patriotism is more than getting out the flags and making speeches of eulogy next Wednesday. It is that grateful remembrance, plus a look ahead with determination to live for our country’s good, as well as to stand ready to die in its defense.

Our American democracy is founded on the principle that every person should be accepted for what he is, and what he can be, regardless of race, position, or creed. We are painfully aware that our ideal is not always followed by our practice. It will take the courage of frontiersmen to make our American ideal work -- quickly, for great masses of humanity are impatient and insistent.

The great spiritual pioneer was Jesus, who expressed tremendous truths in simple words: “If you want to save your life (to really live) you must lose it (spend it).” [Matthew 16: 25] The ideals and the actions implied in those words are much nearer the real frontiers of this time, than any line that can be defended by force of arms. In a long, and sometimes heated, argument with educated, authoritarian leaders of his time, Jesus said to them bluntly, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” [John 8: 32].

Truth is more than information. It is more than accumulated knowledge. It is an ethical perception of right -- the kind of perception that comes from God and is found nowhere else.

My highest hope for every graduate of this season is that he or she may know the truth and, in the pursuit of that truth to new frontiers ahead, be really free.

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Dates and places delivered:

Wisconsin Rapids, May 27, 1951.

Wisconsin Rapids, May 29, 1956.