5/5/63

Scripture: Matthew 6: 19-24.

We have heard, for some time now, that the deepest problems of our time are spiritual. The stability of the home is a matter of spirit. The matter of abiding by the law, or of defying it, is a matter of spirit. It is the spirit of people in the nations of the world that decides whether atomic energy is to be used for man’s destruction or for a multitude of benefits for the peoples of the earth.

Men with widely differing backgrounds have addressed themselves to this subject. A general of the armies, a professor of history, an economist, a President of the United States, a university chancellor, spokesmen of every religion in the Western world, and others are agreed in this simple conclusion: underlying our serious racial, economic, political, and international problems is one that produces them or aggravates them in such a manner that they can not be solved until that underlying problem is solved. And they call this underlying, primary problem, by the name, “spiritual.”

When we hear that kind of talk, we greet it with mixed emotions. Some of us are pleased because it looks as if, at long last, some folks are going to pay more attention to religion than they have hitherto. Maybe we will actually find it true that religion is at the center of our lives rather than out near the circumference of our conscious circle. Others have wondered how it can be so bad. They are a little like the passenger on a storm-lashed ocean liner. She asked the pious captain whether he thought the ship would survive. “Have no fear, madam!” he replied, “I have just lifted a prayer to the Almighty, asking Him to take care of us.” “Oh,” cried the lady, “is it as bad as that?”

Probably we have no reason to be either pleased or frightened until we have thought some more about what we mean by the word “spiritual.” What is a spiritual problem, anyway? And what do we mean when we say that today our primary problem is, or problems are, spiritual? It is essential for us to get as clear a picture in our mind as possible, if we are to know the nature of this basic problem with which we deal, and if we are to understand our responsibility for meeting it. For the problem must be met deep within the soul of every person here as well as in the common life of mankind.

Some time ago there were two books published which contrasted sharply. Both attempted to define the nature of a spiritual problem and to take the reader to the heart of today’s concern. One was by a competent psychologist who had written a list of noteworthy publications. This writer had an interesting thesis. His thesis was that man has given God credit for the great and good things that he, man, has accomplished. By so doing, man has glorified God (reasons this psychologist) but has debased himself. And the conclusion seems to be that the idea which man has of God is a dangerous fiction, because it locates the responsibility for human deeds, whether good or evil, outside human life, thus engendering a sense of ethical irresponsibility in man himself.

Only a short time later, a Christian theologian published a book which is a study of man’s dependence on God, and of God’s gifts to man --- especially the gift of Jesus Christ. The thesis of this book is that man must seek to understand and follow the will of God if he is to understand any of the meaning of life. The discovery of God, and obedience to God --- these are the foundation stones of the good life, contends this theologian. And there, in the theses of these two books, you have alternatives between which we, and our civilization, must choose --- or perhaps we have already chosen!

A spiritual problem is one which deals with man’s relationship to God. And the spiritual problem of our time grows out of the fact that we have had the wrong relationship to Him, and have not yet made up our minds whether to seek another and a better relationship!

A. The psychologist to whom we have referred is, in a sense, the spokesman for the modern world --- the world since the Renaissance --- the world that has often said “God or man” and then proceeded to reject God. A contemporary French philosopher has reduced the spiritual history of our civilization to two cryptic and over-simplified sentences: “From the first to the 15th century, Western civilization grew stronger and stronger on the Christian formula, ‘God made man.’ From the 16th century to the present day it has weakened more and more on the formula ‘Man made God.’”

There is a good deal in this statement that could be debated, but it does point up some of the glory and the tragedy of the Renaissance and the modern world. There was real glory there! The Renaissance rolled back the long night of the Dark Ages and the medieval world in which man felt that he had God, but had lost himself.

One of the hard things to confess about the church is that in that pre-Renaissance time, it was the church that took the lead in stripping man of the elements of personal worth. Leaving only the tenuous thing called man’s soul, the church mocked mankind’s reason, scorned his body, depreciated his normal social relationships, rejected his world as being the abode of evil, and recommended that the best thing to do was to forsake the world as completely as possible. Consequently, mankind’s normal ways of dealing with life --- art, science, philosophy, humanitarianism ---- while not wholly absent, were made to fit a rigid pattern of religious orthodoxy. They didn’t prosper much!

Then came the Renaissance. Under the guidance of the classics man discovered himself. He discovered that his reason was a reliable instrument for investigating the world --- and with that discovery, the sciences were under way. He discovered the essential goodness of the social relationships in marriage, family and home. He discovered his interdependence with other people, and the ancient dream of making a paradise here on earth grew upon him. He found that the good earth is a home and he was encouraged to believe it could be made a good home for all people. If the Renaissance had stopped there, it would have been well. Up to that point it was clear gain for the people emerging from the medieval world. But it did not stop there. It gathered its own “lunatic fringe” that tended to cancel out its virtues.

When man discovered himself -- that may have been good. But when man deified himself --- that was evil. And that is what an increasing number of the Renaissance intellectual leaders proceeded to do. Some of them celebrated what they referred to as “the dead God.” They even cooked up a religious form that found its later expression in Swinburne’s line: “Glory to man in the highest, for man is the master of things.”

They weren’t just playing with words. Unfortunately they meant it! Scoffing at the notion that there is any moral law, any “right,” outside of man to which he must conform, they invited him to make up his own rules of right and wrong, truth and falsehood, good and evil. It is a grim and tragic fact in history that an increasing number of men believed their leaders and tried to build a civilization upon as selfish, and as socially irresponsible, a set of ethical moral principles as has ever come down the turnpike of human history.

The Greeks had a myth that fits this situation perfectly: the myth of Narcissus. You may recall that, in this Greek myth, Narcissus was the most handsome boy in all ancient Greece. One day, quite by accident, he saw his own reflection in a pool of water. He was so transfixed by the beauty of what he saw that he was unable to leave. There he stayed, adoring his own image, pining away and finally perishing. The psychologists have reached into this pathetic myth and have pulled out one of the most awesomely ugly words in the English language --- narcissism. And the meaning is just as ugly as the word --- self-love, self-adoration, refusal to find creative mutual relationships with others --- all of this leading to self-impoverishment through separation of life from life, and finally and certainly to the death of the self.

It was a discerning American student of history, living in the 1920s, who put what he believed to be the fate of our day in this kind of metaphor: “The world is taking a joyride; it has thrown overboard its Pilot; it is an accident going somewhere to happen.” Well, a good deal of it has happened! Inside us and outside us and all over the world. We’ve seen the devastation of several wars, two of them world-wide; we’ve been ashamed to see a serious attempt at complete genocide; we are aware of the possibility of self extinction on a world-wide scale; we have seen the challenging and the casting aside of much of the ethical idealism of the earth; we have seen the exposing of racial and class and national animosities that grip and frighten us.

The end result of the effort to cancel out God and elevate man to the position of deity has been to poise the pencil of history for the canceling of man. It is God, and not man, who survives. Set up man in God’s place, and you surely sign the death warrant of man and all his works.

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B. But what if the deepest truth about life be not the opposition of man to God, but the fulfillment of man’s life in God? What then follows for us in thought and deed, individually and collectively? The answer to these probing questions turns largely on what we mean by God. When we say “God,” do we mean the figure that Michelangelo painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican in Rome? -- a figure that looks like a Great Man reaching out to put life into the lesser man he has just created? Or do we say “God is a spirit,” and the artist’s painting is “picture language?” Do we say “God is a figure like my grandfather, or like Moses.” Or do we say, “God is not body; God is Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.” And when we have said, “God is Spirit,” what do we understand by that? Even when we feel sure of God; when we believe with assurance; and when we testify from an experience with Him; it is difficult to put in words what we mean.

Although it is not easy, I suggest that it is worth the attempt, faltering and incomplete though we may find our describing words. Harold Bosley has made an attempt that I think we would do well to examine. Passing up some of the hallowed, and essentially true, ways of stating our ideas of God, he looks for some way; in which we must be desperately sure that we are talking about facts when defining our idea of God. And the all-important fact in the idea of God, he says, is also the fundamental fact about the world. This fact we indicate by the simple word “order.”

We are living in a world which has a foundation of order underlying almost every part of it that we know anything about. Obviously, we do not know all there is to know about it; there are uncounted and we suppose unanticipated problems remaining for students to study. But there is an observable basis of order in the world that we see and comprehend to which the law of gravitation, and a host of other such laws call attention. We do not make up the rules; they are already present as an essential part of the world. But we can, and do, discover many of the rules. And, if we are wise, we conform to these rules --- we live by them. Not many of us think that we can defy such laws for long and live. We accept them so unconsciously that we usually fail to do anything like full justice to their meaning for our lives.

When I was a youth, there was a rash of stunt men who would scale the face of a wall --- sometimes as an advertising stunt; sometimes for sheer publicity. I saw one such performer work his way up the brick wall of a three story hotel that had been recently built in the town. How any man could command his nerves and muscles so well, I do not know. But I saw him scale the wall as an advertising stunt. One such stunt man was billed as “The Human Fly.” He came to a small county seat town and offered to climb the wall of the courthouse --- for a consideration, of course. A bargain was reached; a crowd gathered at the appointed (and well-advertised) time, to see the “human fly” go up that wall. Before he started up, the mayor of the town introduced him to the assembled throng as “the man who defies the law of gravitation.” But the “human fly” would not climb until he had corrected the mayor. And this was his word: “I don’t defy the law of gravitation. I just come to an unusually careful understanding with it.”

This fact of order does not stop with the relationship of physical objects to each other; it undergirds health of body and mind. Here again, we do not make the rules of health. They are implanted deep within the essential nature of our life. Health is an achievement in conformity with them --- not an accident in defiance of them. Not many of us believe otherwise. Suppose I should go to the medicine cabinet and find there an unlabeled bottle of white pills. I could reason, “I’m going to take several of these and they will be good for me.” But you would ask, “What are they?” And I might say, “O, that doesn’t matter! I make up my own rules, and I’ve decided that these will be good for me.” Well, if they are sodium bicarbonate, all may be well. But if they are strychnine, there had better be a doctor right there with a stomach pump in his hand, or that will be the last time I shall ever have a chance to write my own rules of health. There is surely something in the order of our makeup that does not like strychnine taken that way -- and any decision of mine taken to the contrary is dangerous nonsense.

Many of us are willing to go along with this concept of order in physical and chemical and health realms. But some of us want to probe further into the concept of moral order in the world. There are rules, that we do not make, that underlie our relationships in friendship, love, home and family. We discover them, and conform to them, if we desire these creative relationships. Or we ignore the rules, and miss, or lose, the relationships. What this moral order means for people as persons, it means for groups: nations, churches, races, classes. They can no more make up the rules for stable interrelationships than I can make up the rules of health. But they can discover them, live by them, lifting humanity to new levels of security and stability. This is the kind of fact that the Christian religion has in mind when it says that there is a divine order in the world that speaks the last word on all our definitions, and all that we try to do. This is the order of God. Its meaning is intense, and it means good for all who will seek, find, and cooperate with it. But defy it, and you lose every time. For it is not an optional matter.

We play too fast and loose with the realities of religious truth. And that creates the very danger in which we live. A popular magazine reported one young man as saying, “I’m not interested in religion for the same reason that I’m not interested in stamp-collecting, in bird-stalking or in chicken raising.” There, in one man’s vivid sentence, is the spiritual problem of our day. We take it that the recognition of the moral order of our world is as optional as a hobby! We suppose that history is what we make it, rather than what God’s order permits us to make it. We think life is a private possession rather than a divine gift, that the way we live is our own affair rather than an adventure in stewardship. This is our deepest spiritual problem, and we must get a better answer to it than any we have ever found before! For if we serve any deity (mammon, self, or whatever) other than the God of order in things as they are, we cancel ourselves out. If we seek His way in the will of God, we walk with the strength and confidence of a good son with his good father.

Amen.

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, May 5, 1963.