7/12/64

Scripture: Read Psalm 121.

“I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills.” How many times have you read those words at the beginning of the 121st Psalm? -- Or have heard them read? I have frequently repeated them in an effort to summon comfort and strength when these are needed. I have heard them repeated in circumstances of inspiration and renewal.

Twice, I have been enrolled in that summer school for ministers of our fellowship which meets at La Foret in the Black Forest of ponderosa pines near Colorado Springs. One of the splendid features of that summer conference ground is its unobstructed view of Pike’s Peak. The towering Peak can be seen from the main lodge, from the dining hall and --- most inspiringly --- from the gate of the chapel. The late Irvine Inglis who loved the Colorado Rockies as “God’s Country,” would urge the summer students to gather by the chapel gate; to lift our eyes, literally “unto the hills,” and there expose ourselves to the healing and inspiration that can come to those who will let themselves be awed by the beauty and wonder of the world.

One of the members of my family has an individualistic way of catching our attention as we ride along through Wisconsin countryside in the automobile. Suddenly, he will interrupt everything else to call out “view!” And usually he is right --- it is worth interrupting our conversation, or whatever else we are doing in the car, to see the wonder of the world that stretches out before us --- to see the “view.”

For the first eight years of my ordained ministry, our home was on the island of Maui in Hawaii. My parish was in the port town of Kahului. The parsonage fronted on a beach in the harbor where one could look out to the horizon at sea, or by turning 75 to 90 degrees, lift one’s eyes to the green West Maui mountains. But the really majestic view was from the back of the house where one could lift his eyes toward the 10,000 foot summit of Mauna Haleakala. The Hawaiians called the mighty mountain “House of the Sun.” It was a never-ending inspiration to see the great mountain in the afternoon sun, on a cloudless day, or to watch its summit rise above a cloud ring, or to sense its motionless steadiness during a storm.

Haleakala was a constant challenge. I wanted to climb it -- and did so more than once. One can drive a car to the summit now. But I knew the time when the last 4,000 feet had to be negotiated by miles and miles of strenuous hiking. If one were to start the hike in the middle of the night, he might hope to be rewarded by one of the loveliest sunrise views one can imagine as the light comes from darkness to dawn to sunrise over the vast ocean, painting the mountain crags with purple, then red, then orange, then the more brilliant colors of the emerging day. From that 10,000 foot height one could see miles across the 2,000 foot deep crater of the dormant volcano. Early in the morning, one might hear the bleat of a kid somewhere up on the cliffs with a herd of wild goats. Possibly one could see one of the rare silversword plants glistening in the early sunlight.

Looking back down the valley toward the harbor one could see the light green fields of sugar cane laid out upon the landscape like a quilt. Perhaps a darker green pineapple field could be detected on higher ground. If the northeast trade wind blew briskly, and great breakers rolled up on the harbor beaches, they looked from that height like tiny slow-moving white threads outlining the shore.

Those who stayed through the day, watching the changing colors, seeing the great crater fill with clouds, might hope for a possible, but very rare view called the “specter of the Brokken.” I saw it once in the late afternoon. When clouds filled the crater just to the edge of the rim where one stands, if the afternoon sun is getting low in the west behind one, you can see your shadow on the clouds enclosed in an unbroken, completely circular rainbow. The bottom part of this rainbow ring comes literally to your feet and the feet of your giant shadow within the ring.

The worries of the world fade away; the cares of a day disappear; the burden of responsibility becomes light; the foolish ant-like business of life down there in the fields and on the village streets become less urgent; the whole perspective of life changes up there at that height upon the mountain. You can see something whole as you never do down in the valley.

No wonder the three disciples with Jesus on his mount of transfiguration wanted to stay up there and perpetuate the vision! [Mark 9: 2-8]. It took a firm and understanding word from the Master to get them back down where they had to go to work again on the world’s woes and needs.

It is good for us to lift up our eyes to the hills for vision and inspiration. It is good to get off in the solitary wonder of the woods; to linger beside a lake or stream; to be where the majesty and simplicity of God’s creation in nature can relieve us of our old tensions and renew our strength for the new tensions.

Lift your eyes to the high places. Once in a while be on a place high enough so that life takes on a revised -- and usually improved -- perspective. The high place may literally be a mountain or a hill; or it may be only a figurative hill but nonetheless a spiritual point of vantage.

We need to get high enough to get the real view! Have you ever climbed in foothill country, or in territory like the Black Hills of South Dakota? You climb the first height thinking that presently you will be at a summit from which you will expect to see everything around. But you get to the crest only to find that a higher hill beckons you on; the real mountain peaks are still far above and beyond!

A lot of our life -- most of it in fact -- is lived in foothill country, or even valleys. Charles Gilkey once remarked that, though our lives are utterly unlike the slow-moving glacier, nevertheless we, like a glacier, carry along with our lives a steadily increasing mass of multitudinous detail. And it piles up along the glaciated sides of our lives like some lateral moraine beside the margins of our living. Unless we get out of the groove, now and then, we begin to suppose that our little moraines are the hills of life. Only when we climb over them can we see how small and “foot-hill-ish” they are beside the majestic mountains of living!

Part of our difficulty in keeping perspective arises from the steadily increasing tempo of modern life. I can remember when a horse race was something pretty fast. Then came the automobile with speeds of 25, 30, and 40 miles per hour --- even up to 60 on exceptionally smooth stretches of dirt road! One could hardly have imagined what hard-surfaced roads could do to our speed! Then came the plane that flew through the air! Its two wings and open cockpit gave way to the enclosed, streamlined, one wing, multimotored speedster. Then came jet travel. And now the almost unbelievable speeds of orbital flight. And it seems not idle imagination to think of interplanetary speeds now.

All of this is more than physical flight; more than symbolic motion. It is a characteristic of contemporary life. We live at higher and higher speeds, but we don’t necessarily see more of true living or perceive better what is its significance.

Some years ago, a lawyer came from downstate Illinois to live in Chicago. He became prominent and well recognized in his field --- but at a price to himself. One day he remarked to a friend that he believed that he had at last caught on to “being a Chicagoan.” He had jumped up from among the law books that encircled his desk, had rushed out of the office door and into an express elevator. When he reached the street level, he rushed some distance off down the street before he stopped to ask himself, “Just where was I going, anyway?”

As individuals and as a civilization we know less and less about where we are going, but we are on our way at high speed. Now and then we need to look to the hills; or to get up high enough to find out where we are, and where we may be going, with better perspective. Not only do we live with increasing speed, but life becomes steadily more complex in its relationships and interests. Some of our forefathers worked, as a rule, far longer hours than do many of their descendants. Farm and village life, for them, meant labor from sunrise until after sunset. At the end of long work days, they were too tired to leave their own fireside. But many of them, at family altar each morning, and especially at church each Sunday morning, made it a regular practice to “lift up their eyes unto the hills.” And so, even amidst lives that we might regard as filled with drudgery, they still found ways to climb above it for better perspective.

With us, their descendants, life presents differing problems. Many have, week in and week out, far more leisure from major responsibilities than the ancestors ever dreamed of. Improved methods of transportation and communication have put hundreds of friends and thousands of neighbors within easy reach. There are vast and attractive opportunities available and easily accessible. Printed material deluges our attention in its multiplicity. Not all of it deserves our attention. But we easily fill our time and our minds with a mass of mediocrity rather than turn our minds to the more excellent gems of literature and music that are still ours for the taking, and were the inspiration of those who had less time for turning their thoughts to higher things. We are much busied with the hum of activity around us. We even concentrate on the flower beds of the foothills without ever looking beyond them to Pike’s Peak, or Haleakala, or even to Rib Hill.

The situation becomes more serious for us when the tendency toward dead-level reoccupation with only the things close at hands dulls our distinction for depth and height. Some years ago, a professor of political science in a university located in a great city told a friend of a conversation he had had with one of his students. On the day of a primary election, the student had cut all his classes to work at the polls on behalf of the city’s most notorious and unscrupulous political machine. When the student had returned to classes the professor had asked him how he could square his political affiliation with what their course had revealed concerning conditions in the city. The student had fairly staggered the professor with his reply: “Well, there isn’t any difference between right and wrong any longer, is there? And I needed the twenty bucks. What difference does it make who gave them to me?”

The sense of moral distinction does not always flatten out so completely as that. But still there is too-widespread moral confusion and a dangerous breakdown of the moral codes and guideposts. The maintenance of moral sensitiveness and effective control over conduct depends upon frequent vision of the higher rangers of living. “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.” If our generation does not see the heights and depths of life clearly enough to care about climbing thither, or to fear a slip or a fall, we shall continue to live precariously in an ethically flattened world.

Not only do moral choices become complex, but intellectual demands are multiplied. It was a conscientious school executive who went back to university for further study in his field who found every day heaped high with new facts and points of view. His problem became one of struggling to keep from being intellectually buried alive, or at least escaping mental indigestion. He told a friend that he found it helpful to seek the quiet seclusion of certain neighborhood churches that remained open during the week. There he could lift up his eyes to a point of vantage from which he could sort out his ideas, readjust his attitudes, and evaluate the new facts with which his mind must deal. We are told that some of the people who live with the pressures of Wall Street do the same --- taking their tense lives and problems into the quiet of a city church for reevaluation and new perspective.

In the realm of religion and church life, the tendency toward preoccupation with the foreground is just as marked and just as disastrous as elsewhere. The slow-moving stream of organized religion can pick up an enormous mass of detail in ceremony, tradition and creed which can be deposited like glacial drift at the foothills. Those who live all the time in the organization and ceremony of denominational detail become the ones whom Jesus once described as tithing mint and anise and cumin. They may argue the validity of ceremonial rites while, like their spiritual predecessors, they neglect the weightier and loftier matters of justice and mercy and faithfulness.

It is too easy to lose perspective as to the great central verities of religion, to miss God Himself in the foothills of our dogmatisms and ecclesiasticisms. It is possible to speak almost arrogantly in God’s name without ever realizing how petty our presumptions look from the point of view available at the higher level where one can glimpse what the New Testament calls “The Majesty of God.”

It is also true in formal theology, where there is a constant effort to vindicate religion. Where finite minds try to define and explain that which extends upward toward the Infinite, in an area always within our outreach but never fully within our grasp, theorists have to remember that “religion comes forth in the majesty of silence, like a mountain amid the lifting mists.”

It is especially important that our religion should not lose its way in the foothills and lowlands. In the lives of its great masters, it is always quickly carried to the upper ranges of human experience. There it proves itself a sensitive and discriminating instrument for surveying the higher and highest summits.

See how frequently Jesus deals with perspectives among values that are lower and higher. Study his “firsts.” “Seek ye first --- and all these things shall be added unto you.” [Matthew 6: 33]. “This is the first and great commandment... And the second is like unto it.” [Mark 12: 28-31]. “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” [Matthew 16: 26]. The story of Martha and Mary focuses upon a “first” that the world can never forget. [Luke 10: 38-42]. Neither friend nor hostess can afford to neglect it, because it points up a perspective about which we get confused in our contemporary world.

We must notice that in none of these familiar cases did Jesus condemn or disparage the values that he explicitly rated as lower. He recognized well the need of food and shelter and rules and things and hospitable comforts. And he was no ascetic, denying these things in any scheme of life. But he was insistent that they are secondary to things more important. They gain their own significance from the contribution they make to what is more important.

Religion, at its best, never says that the detail and routine of life are unnecessary or unimportant. But it “lifts our eyes unto the hills” of greatness. And we need its help amidst our contemporary confusion amongst values that we must learn to recognize as more important, or less important -- each in its proper place and perspective.

What can be done when, as individuals or as a generation of people, we have stayed too long in the valley of mediocrity? For one thing, life itself has a way of coming unexpectedly to our deliverance when we have become shortsighted and lowhearted. Through some breathtaking experience, or even some tragedy, our eyes are lifted toward the heights above our foothills. And we are wise if we take the time to gaze and to aspire. It is foolish and disastrous to turn our back in cynicism when the vision is right there before our eyes!

In religion, we of this particular church heritage have our attention lifted by the pastor whom the Pilgrims left behind in Holland when he assured them that “God hath yet more light to break forth from His holy word.” Life often presents us with the experiences which can lift us out of our sophistication or complacency. If we look for it, we can usually see the good that shines around and through even the tragedies of living. What our salvation requires is that we be willing to see the vision, feel the aspiration, climb to a vantage point of clearer perspective.

But we can not rely solely on unexpected experiences, whether sublime or tragic, to clarify our perspectives. The surest and steadiest perspectives are gained by those who have disciplined themselves in the art and practice of spiritual mountaineering.

Public worship is such an art and practice. Those who “drop into church occasionally,” without finding or seeing much when they arrive, have forgotten that one does not drop into, nor slide onto, a mountain summit.

Just so surely is the attitude and practice of prayer. The conditions and distractions of modern living require great insights and incisive outlook to be sought and struggled for upon the challenging trail of meditation, spiritual communion, and consecration, where our religion has slowly learned to climb with upreached hand, and expectant heart.

Amen.

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, July 12, 1964.

Also at Wood County Infirmary, September 2 and 9, 1964.