7/19/64

Scripture: Read Psalm 61.

In my youth, when I was a resident of the state of South Dakota (where my family still lives) I thought that just about the finest vacation spot that I could imagine would be the Black Hills, at the western edge of the state. I had my first opportunity to visit those Hills while a member of a College Glee Club on early spring tour. Later, I returned more than once. For it is true that one can find a great deal of nature’s loveliness in that region. Man has not only discovered it, but has enhanced it, with massive art in outdoor sculpture, with man-made lakes, with roads and trails and park facilities that invite one to go there as well as to many other beautiful and inspiring regions of our nation.

It was something like a year and a half after our marriage that Mrs. Kingdon and I decided to re-visit the Black Hills, where she had also spent some relaxed and happy days with her family during earlier vacation times. Her father had chosen a site near a summer church camping ground, and had had a modest summer cottage erected on one side of a valley. Across the valley from the cottage there towered a great rock formation that the church campers had named “Calvin Rock.” The McCune summer cottage offered a superb view of that rock from the porch. We had enjoyed that view before, and we enjoyed it on this return visit, feasting our eyes on its grandeur and letting it suggest things like rugged strength as well as serenity to our spirits.

Presently it became something of a challenge. Two members of the party, my younger brother and my wife, decided to climb that rock one morning. I did not join them, because I wanted to hunt for berries in an area opposite the rock. So we went the way of our own choices -- I to find berries; they to find the top of that rock.

I think that they found it a rugged morning for them. The rock is very hard, but very steep. I winced in the berry patch, when I could hear a piece of rock falling. It proved each time I heard it to be something that the climbers had decided to throw down as they tested the footing for each step. As they neared the top they found that there was only one thing for them to do, and that was to get all the way up the face of the rock, for they could not get down the way they had ascended. At one point, they had to work their way up a kind of crevasse, helping each other, hoping for the right foothold, knowing that neither could afford any kind of slip or misstep. I was relieved when I could, at last, see them, standing on the summit. I think they were relieved, too. And I know that they experienced a sense of achievement; I know it from the way they described their experience later, and I know it from my own satisfaction at having climbed to high places on mountain regions elsewhere. Something about a high rock challenges one to put forth the effort of scaling it and viewing all that can be seen from the summit.

My wife and I observed this tendency again last Sunday afternoon when we visited Devil’s Lake park near Baraboo with some University young people. I was glad to relax near the beach of the lake after a very busy morning! But the six young folk were not content until they had set off on the trail to scale those massive, tumbled rocks -- partly to see what could be seen from the upper trail; partly just to scale the rocks! (Incidentally only one of those young people had heard the sermon here in the morning on “The View from up Here.”)

In the second verse of the Psalm that was read today as our Scripture lesson, the Psalmist bursts forth in prayer and song, “Lead me to the rock that is higher than I.”

Those who have traveled extensively in Palestine at several seasons of the year say that this sentence from the 61st Psalm brings vivid memories and a keen recognition of the fact that a great rock can mean more than one thing. In recent centuries, some of Palestine has been dry and desert-like; especially in the hot summer. Palestinian travelers who have roughed it there in March say that heat is not the only memory of its deserts. For the desert can be the home of cold as well as heat.

Arabs have called the high plateau of Hauran, northeast of the Sea of Galilee, “the home of the cold.” Those who have had occasion to ride across that region in March have described it as an experience challenging in its cold discomfort. One goes hour after hour across the wind-swept plateaus --- even day after day in the teeth of a driving northeast rain. Weary of it, and quite chilled, it is a welcome relief to stop for a few moments of respite in the lee of a great rock. The sudden quiet from piercing wind and the shelter from slanting rain are gratefully received and warmly remembered. To any who have had that experience there opens a facet of understanding at to what the poet had in mind when he wrote, “Lead me to the rock that is higher than I.” For a great rock can be a sure shelter.

And not only is it a shelter from driving cold. Anyone who has sought protection from the blazing sun in desert country knows something also about a great rock. When the desert is really the home of heat; the wind is a hot blast and the sand only stings, the shadow of a great rock is merciful relief and even refreshment. For that shelter is not only protecting shadow; it is often actually moist and cool. I have even known of a place where condensation and seepage afforded a tiny basin of water in the shadow of a rock.

When one has considered, or experienced these things, one has a new appreciation of what Isaiah meant: -- why he used this picture to describe what the friendship of a great and good man is like. “And a man shall be as a hiding-place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest --- as the shade of a great rock in a weary land.” [Isaiah 32: 2]. It is also very plain why the Psalmist used this same picture to describe his own longing for the presence and protection of God. “Lead me to the rock that is higher than I.”

But, just when memories and observations lead one to the conclusion that the main point of this text is religion’s promise of secure shelter from the storm and heat of living, one’s eye may fall on the marginal translations of this same verse --- and at once a very different picture rises before the mind’s eye. For this marginal reading is: “Lead me to a rock that is too high for me.”

When we consider this reading, the setting is no longer that of a driving storm or a burning sun from which the luckless traveler seeks shelter in shade beneath a great rock. The rock now becomes a commanding summit which the explorer of traveler is eager to climb. He wants the wider, farther view form its summit; he finds the steep slopes a challenge to adventure and conquest. The rock calls out to his adventure, his strength, his endurance. If he can not reach the highest point on the first try, he returns to seek another path to the top; or he develops more energy and endurance by discipline and training; and assembles better equipment for another try. If he finds that he is still not equal to the ascent and even if he surmises that his children may never succeed in reaching the top, nevertheless the rock, or mountain, still stands there as an age-long challenge and incentive. It may yet be that someone in future generations will surmount it! How many of the noblest vistas in human history, and the highest ranges of human capacity, come to view on the spiritual horizon when we see some steep rock rising as sheer as the Matterhorn beyond us. And at the foot of the rock we find a succession of courageous climbers saying: “Lead me to the rock that is too high for me.”

Now I am not prepared to say which rendering of the Hebrew text is the more accurate in our English Bible. One should be a really competent scholar in the Semitic languages to undertake that responsibility. It might or might not prove to be an important distinction. But the very fact that, apparently, the text can be translated either way may be significant. At any rate, it reminds us of the two-sided aspect of great rocks in relation to our human experience. They are both a refuge from storm and heat and a challenge to achievement. They shelter and they stimulate. And in this doubly significant function, they give us a true picture of the paradoxical picture of religion for human need.

One facet of our religious desire is the need for comfort and spiritual refreshment. We say, “I go to church and worship there in order to find peace of mind and strength of heart.” Religion, at one of its poles, is the search for, and the discovery of, an assurance about man’s place in the universe which gives him shelter and peace among the strains and vicissitudes and caprices of life. It can keep him from being overwhelmed by the storms that beat upon him. “Lead me to the rock that is higher than I.” But, at the other pole, religion is likewise a courageous and creative faith that urges man on and up in scaling heights which hitherto seemed impossible. And when these heights have been attained, it urges him still farther, to yet harder and higher summits, that then, for the first time, appear beyond. It has sometimes been said that our religion is the “pursuit of a flying goal” and we may say that “Man’s reach exceeds his grasp.” When we say that, we are putting into a figure of speech the Psalmist’s cry in answering religion’s challenge: “Lead me to a rock that is too high for me.”

There has been a good deal of this polarity, this “both-sided ness,” in religious thinking in the last 2 or 3 decades. In profound and vital religion, and noticeably in historic Christianity --- never fully reconciled, and relaxed only when its energies are reduced --- there is this notable tension between the kingdom of God as a present fact and the kingdom of God as a future expectation.

And this is true not only in the conscious realm of religion, but also in what we think of as other areas of human experience. Medical researchers continue to drive away at the effort to discover the causes and detect some cures, for cancer and for many other of the ills of the human body and mind.

It is true in the various fields of exploration. Forty years ago, George Mallory was telling American audiences about his experience with Mount Everest. He had already participated in two attempts to climb the highest mountain peak in the world. He was determined to make a third try at it. If anyone asked him “why,” he had an answer for the inquiry: “If you cannot understand that there is something in a man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it; that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go.” “Lead me to a rock that is too high for me.”

And yet the same man who felt so strongly the challenge of the highest mountain, had a deep and awed respect for its rugged majesty. Just before his last ascent in which he lost his life within 600 feet of the summit, he had said, “We expect no mercy from Everest.” If that highest peak in the Himalayas could call forth in the same heroic soul, now an ambition that stimulated him, and again an awe that humbled him, need we be surprised that religion discovers the same paradox in the presence of the Eternal?

Understanding minds have pointed out a similar duality that lies close to the center of another human experience. This experience is more familiar, and at its best is more profound than mountain climbing. Every true lover knows what shelter and security there is in the companionship and affection of his beloved. There, more surely than in the lee of any wilderness rock, he can take refuge, no matter how severe the storm without. He can find a love and understanding that becomes to him an assurance of the very love of God himself. And yet every true lover knows also that, no matter how hard he try --- no matter with what resolve he determines to show himself worthy of such love --- he never fully deserves it. Indeed, there is a sense, which only lovers know, in which his beloved is forever “beyond him.” That is why many a lover, though already married, has learned the paradoxical urge and necessity of continuing to woo the beloved with all of the arts and surprises that won attraction and loyalty in the first place.

There is some tendency to try to explain away this paradoxical polarity in life’s experiences. They can seldom be completely explained at all; let alone be explained away. It is true that one or the other pole of these antitheses is in the foreground of our consciousness at any given moment. And it is therefore dominant at that moment. It appears in our actions, like the swinging pendulum of a “grandfather’s clock.” But the pendulum is to be understood only in terms of forces that act upon it on both sides of its swing. The nature and value of religious experiences are never exhausted by the elements that seem, for the moment, to be uppermost in them.

I. We may be told, for instance, that pious people are weak souls who are always seeking shelter from the storms of life, finding compensation for its stern realities either in a vivid world of their own projection or in the hope of a happier world to come. But such an explanation moves only in one area of religious experience. And if it tries to stay there, it overlooks another area not less characteristic. This other area is the tremendous energy for action which religion releases in and through people. The ancient Hebrew warrior shouts: “By Thee, I run upon a troop; and by my God do I leap over a wall.” [Psalm 18: 29]. Upon far loftier spiritual levels, Paul sings, as he climbs higher: “Forgetting the things which are behind, and reaching forth unto the things which are before, I press on ---” [Philippians 3: 13-14].

II. If, on the other hand, we are told with equally one-sided assurance, that religion is simply man’s own personal and social idealism, unsupported by an indifferent universe, we do well to remember the ancient discernment of religious aspiration. It often comes most clearly when, like seeing the lifting of clouds from distant heights in the afternoon, one sees the prospect of shelter for another night. One writer has put it this way: “The highest peace comes to men when their life is centered not in what is best in them, but in that beyond them which is better than their best.”

This double provision of religion, affording stimulus for the day and then shelter for the night, carries with it consequences that are even more important for our living than for our thinking --- just because life has to be lived before it can be understood. It has profound and immediate consequences for our faith in God. Both of these elements were conspicuous in Jesus’ faith in God. They did not have to be reconciled by some logical or theological definition or argument. Jesus appeared content to love with and for God. He found that life so rich and dependable that he needed no further proof. God was to him the Father out of whose hand neither life nor death can pluck His children. There is permanent security. “Lead me to the rock that is higher than I.”

But, for Jesus, God was also the Incomparable Goodness, beside whom no man dare call himself good; yet whose goodness is pattern and standard for all. “Lead me to the rock that is too high for me.” Do you remember that saying of Jesus which he gave to his hearers in reverent humility and yet in limitless aspiration: “Why do you call me good? None is good save one, that is, God.” [Luke 18: 19]. And on another occasion: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” [Matthew 5: 48].

The pendulum of Christian faith in God, and Christian thought of God, swings from the assurance of personal security and comfort on one hand, to the sense of moral obligation on the other, with its urgent necessity to make ethical decisions. And so long as it is moving and alive it will include both.

So, if you like nautical terminology, let each Christian soul live like a sailing ship -- now seeking the quiet and safety and repair of the harbor; now putting out to sea, beating its way forward by tacking against the wind.

If you prefer the language of the solid land recall frequently the Psalmist’s prayer and testimony: “Lead me to the rock that is higher that I” or “Lead me to the rock that is too high for me.”

Amen.

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, July 19, 1964.