1/15/67

Scripture: II Corinthians 4

Text: II Corinthians 4: 13;

“We having the same spirit of faith -- believe, and therefore speak.”

Late one afternoon in the spring of 1932 I stood on the deck of the Canadian-Australasian steamship “Niagara” watching land take shape on the horizon after seeing nothing, for nearly a week, except the limitless ocean. Our ship was nearing Victoria, British Columbia. A chubby, good-natured young Canadian man, who had been the life of the part at the captain’s table in the dining salon, was also on deck, looking at the coastline with the eye of one nearing home after months abroad. Turning to another fellow who also stood by the ship’s rail he laughed and said: “My it’s great to get back to God’s country.” And I think he said it more than once!

I wonder how many thousands of Americans have said the same thing upon returning to these United States -- and not without a certain conviction that it is God’s country. We have a way of taking it for granted that God must be peculiarly present in our own land. Sometimes we give thanks that it is a “Christian country.” Well, there is a measure of the Christian religion known, experienced and practiced in the lives of a great many Americans. Probably more people belong to America’s churches today than ever before in our nation’s history -- something over half the population. There are numerous active churches in almost every community of any size. And there is sincere, active Christian devotion to be found in many lives.

But there is much about our life in America that flows against a Christian spirit. Many of the forces that go into the making of the contemporary mind are without reference to God. And people are de-Christianized by all sorts of pagan pressures. Christian principles in regard to the conduct of the sexes in and out of marriage, in regard to war and peace, work and wealth, lose their hold and fade from the consciousness of our population. And “Super Sunday” refers to you-know-what -- it isn’t Sunday morning attendance at the services of Protestant and Catholic churches!

It is perfectly, distressingly apparent to Americans that the government of the Soviet Union is atheistic. For that government openly, frankly avows itself to believe in no deity. Ought we not, however, to ask ourselves in what realistic and significant sense can we apply the term, “God-fearing” and the name “Christian” to our national life? Certainly the Christian element is not deliberately nor wholly abandoned in our tradition. But does it count enough as the spiritual force that should underlie our national life? Is the tone of the nation’s politics, business life, literature, theater, its radio and television programs ---- Christian?

Our social standards contain much that is directly variant from basic Christian principle. God is father of all mankind, and we are brethren in that spiritual relationship. (1) But do our discriminations, based on our narrow prejudices, bear out this belief? (2) Do attitudes on sexual standards, attaching no particular significance to pre-marital and extra-marital sexual intimacy, reflect the Christian virtue of complete mating-loyalty of one man and one woman to each other in marriage? (3) Are our master-motives Christian? Or do we proceed upon many of the values that are as materialistic as those of the atheist? (4) Are we concerned for comfort, convenience, and affluence first, or for honesty and integrity first? There are great patches in our national existence where the Christian tradition as a cultural fact has worn awfully thin.

Now Christianity is far from being a spent force in America today. There is an operative Christianity that is by no means exhausted. It is too deeply embedded in our national existence to be wiped out. It has been accepted, believed, taught, and practiced over a long term of years. The Bible has been circulated, read and pondered, by successive generations of devoted people. There is ground for supposing that Christian faith is still “an anvil which has worn out many hammers.” But our situation is critical. We never needed a renewal of spirit more than we need it in our generation. It is impossible to be alive to our real condition and to remain complacent about the way the currents of life flow in our country and the world today.

Now one’s religion is a very personal affair. But we can no longer think of a person’s religion as his own “private” affair. For one’s religion guides his choice of position on crucial issues of the day. Shall we accept a pagan society, or work to form a new, or renewed, Christian society? Each one of us has to make an answer to these questions for himself. For there will be no transformation of society without personal impact. Our faith must be built again into something triumphant, something to make us hopeful and sure, something that makes us willing to stand up and be counted. We spend too much time in what one writer called “The Twilight of Honor.” We are attacked by anxiety, uncertainty, insecurity, frustration, fear and even despair.

In times of warfare, we have bolstered our courage by the conviction that peace would come again. We have done some talking and dreaming of a better world ahead. And then the “Tomorrow” which arrives was not at all what we thought it would be. We do not trust other nations, we do not trust our own political leadership, we suspect the motives of others, and are often unsure of ourselves.

Several years ago, the Saturday Evening Post [April, 1948] carried a biographical story of Chick Young, the cartoonist who draws the comic strip “Dagwood and Blondie.” Mr. Young was said to have an abounding interest in his garden -- with avocados, pecans and olives growing in it. But one tree was said to interest Mr. Young more than all the others. It was a hybrid, a cross of banana and pear. Its more notable feature was that it produced a fruit that was not edible until it fell off the tree. Yet when it fell it was squashed beyond recovery like the well-known Humpty-Dumpty. The cartoonist called it his “frustration tree.” I’m not any more convinced than you are that any such horticultural specimen exists! But many of us do grow a similar sort of tree in our spiritual orchard.

We spend energy in an effort to produce fruit that is inedible when it ripens. If we could just get a war over then we’d have peace .... but then the sober threat of Communist China expansion darkens our horizon. If we could just get out of debt and save a few thousand dollars, or even a few hundred, we’d feel secure -- and then what we struggled and skimped for is threatened by the worm of inflation. Many of us get pretty well convinced that being born white and American gave us a status superior to other people .... and then our confidence faces something like a storm of protest that this status is not something inherent, but is merely privilege which the non-Caucasian majority of the earth’s population is not going willingly to concede. Perhaps we need less “peace of mind,” less paregoric for our souls, and more solid anchorage to the evidence of things not seen, eternal in the heavens --- what the good book calls the “substance of things hoped for.” [Hebrews 11: 1].

One of the glories of Holy Scripture is that it contains a vital word for every age, every generation, every condition of mankind. Paul was one of God’s great spokesmen. One of his greatest messages to a troubled, confused, and blundering people it to be read in what we know as the second letter to the Corinthians. The fourth chapter of that letter, especially from verse 5 to the end, is penetrating. The men and women of that church in Corinth were folks about like us. The moral and spiritual climate of the year 56 AD had its similarities to that of America in the year 1967 AD. Paul was anxious over the tendency of Christians to return to pagan practices and attitudes. This was shown in partisan spirit, skeptical questionings, in attitudes of indifference to worship. After Paul’s first letter there had been some moral improvement, but party dissension and distrust continued. Paul was writing to them again -- not as a theorist, but out of hard and rewarding experience. A growing reality had filled his soul ever since the day on the road to Damascus, when he had felt the overpowering presence of the Lord.

His words are sincere. They strike not one “phony” note. They are less an argument than a testimony. “We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed.” That’s our man! For a few minutes, let him forget the people of Corinth and talk to us! And Paul seems to say to us as he said to Corinthian folk: that any poise, any confidence that we have, stems first from an awareness of the exceeding greatness of the power of God!

We’ve lost a lot of pride, and may lose more -- pride of the sort that sometimes benefits by life’s chastenings. But that kind of pride was never important to those who laid hold on the fact that they lived in God’s world. How we need to remember that!

Perhaps you recall the story of Elijah. He had great success in getting his people to hear his word and his warning. He absolutely routed the prophets of Baal in what appeared to be a direct answer from Jehovah as to who was God in truth. [I Kings 18: 1-40]. But he had his troubles. For the government did not care about losing all the nice system of pagan worship that had been so carefully built up. And so Elijah found himself fleeing for his life. He put as much distance as possible between himself and the king’s man-hunters. Hiding out, with a price on his head, he felt pretty sorry for himself. Tired and discouraged and depressed, he talked back to God: “It’s no use; the enemy has the upper hand. The cause of righteousness is lost. I only am left, and they seek my life.”

Most of us get into that mood once in a while. We feel sorely disappointed, misunderstood, perhaps betrayed. We feel sorry for ourselves, and we give over to despair. But the Lord had a word for Elijah. It was a kind of rebuke and challenge. “Elijah, why are you talking that way? Don’t you know that there are least 7000 who, like you, have not bowed the knee to Baal? Come now; get on with it! There is still a lot of work for you to be doing in God’s name.” [I Kings 19: 1-18].

Well, that is usually the good word of the Lord for us in our moods of despair. We have the solid ground for a spirit of faith when we lay hold on the greatness of God and look around for what He does in the lives of uncounted people. We are a part of God’s great creation. Your faith in yourself may sometime fade. Your faith in others may waver. But faith in the great goodness of God will never fail you. God alone is able to make the things we most deeply hope for come clearly and brilliantly to pass -- often appearing in ways that we would not have supposed possible or desirable.

I recall with gratitude the life of one of my own teachers who discovered, in a medical checkup, that he was suffering from a malady that had no cure and that, therefore, he had not many months to live. But he still had a lot to give! The prayers of himself and his friends and family for his health were not to be answered with a cure. But he continued to be a source of joy and confidence to others. He was scheduled to preside at an important meeting. He kept the appointment. And he opened the meeting with a testimony that he had no more fear of his impending death than he had of walking into the next room. He had, indeed, given some thought to what we would like to do on the other side of the door! His faith lifted the hearts of a lot of people and sent them out to try to make more of the kind of world in which the teacher believed.

I heard of another fellow who was asked how he could accomplish so much of good, and bring so much confidence to others, when he himself lived with more crippling ailments than most flesh is called on to bear. His answer was couched in a bit of verse:

Here comes a man who lost his leg;

He needs compassion much.

But that man lost his faith in God;

For him there is no crutch.

God was the fellow’s sole support, and God was abundantly sufficient for him.

Paul’s greatest reality was Jesus Christ, whom he had never seen in the flesh, but through whom had come power from God into his life. It can come into our life the same way. Most of us believe in Jesus Christ. But we do not let him invade our lives completely. Paul gave everything in commitment to Christ. He had to witness to his belief, and he had to live it in his relation to other people. There is strength of soul for those who, having found Christ at church, go out to live in his spirit through the work, and among the people, of the week.

The world’s sickness is a spiritual sickness. The cure is God’s cure, for we do not, ourselves, have the power to heal. It has been observed that the best care of a physician, for body or mind, is essentially that of creating the conditions that will make it possible for God’s nature to heal. The cure for our souls is in allowing Christ to make ready our lives for God’s healing. And then to go out to try to prepare His healing in others ---- all sorts of “others.” Paul’s word was, and is: “We, having the same spirit of faith --- believe and therefore speak.”

A poet of a century ago put his faith this way:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men, then, now not wreck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and share man’s smell; the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness, deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

` (Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844-1889).

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

Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, January 15, 1967.

Part of this was used in Wisconsin Rapids Jan. 21, 1951.

Also at Wood County Infirmary, February 8, 1967.

Kalahikiola Church, February 9, 1969.

Marshfield UCC, August 15, 1971.

Stratford UCC, August 15, 1971.

St. Paul’s, Delta, UCC, August 22, 1971.

Waioli Hiu’ia Church, April 16, 1972.