This week we saw a strange miracle take place. A small nation was surrounded by 5 strong hostile nations that were out to get it and actually push it into the Mediterranean Sea and symbolically into the sea of oblivion. This small state nation pushed the enemy back, and pulled off what has been called the greatest military victory of the 20th century. What was the reason for this fantastic victory? The details of the story give many clues. 

There was one clue in the newscast that showed many soldiers standing in reverence, before the last remaining wall of their ancient temple called the Wailing Wall. Again, there were pictures of soldiers standing at the ancient tomb of Sarah, the wife of Abraham. They were taking time out of their warfare, risking the sniper bullets, to give thanks to God and to render their praise and petition to the God of their fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. When they sought a means to interpret their victory, they turned to an old hero story in their Old Testament, when God delivered the giant Goliath into the hands of the lad David. This was prophetic as the young lad Israel had again been led by Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to push back the giant forces of Nasser, Hussein and company, and to destroy them completely. This nation Israel, with the deep dedication to God, created their own destiny. 

The second clue that became clear was this was a people of great discipline. Back in Ezra’s day, as the people of rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem, they went to their work with a spear in one hand and a spade in the other. It is evident that the new Israel had done the same. In a few hours they were able to mobilize almost every man who could walk for a year. They had been carrying guns and training for battle even as they worked in their kibbutz and offices, in whatever vocation they had. They had a discipline that could not be broken. 

The third clue was that here were people, who were willing to die for their country, believing they were engaged in a holy war. There were many times they were even foolhardy. Men went into the thick of battle with sports shirts and without helmets. They seemed almost oblivious to danger. I’m sure most of us say that the UN did not act strongly and quickly enough to prevent all the bloodshed. All the world must indeed pause and take off their hats to the Israeli people, who had deep dedication to God and devotion to their destiny in history. They had a discipline that showed many hours of sacrificial preparation, and a willingness to die, giving their life for Israel and the people of God, in which they believed. The interesting thing was to listen to their ambassador as he talked in the UN or to their leaders as they celebrated their victory. There was the feeling that they were a people of destiny. It felt like we were watching Joshua and his people, after the walls of Jericho had fallen down. 

Now why have I said all this in introduction? 

Because this is the kind of spirit and esprit des corp that Jesus sought to instill in his followers. Listen to his words to his disciples: “Whoever therefore will confess me before men, him will I confess before my father who is in heaven. But whoever will deny me before men, him will I deny before my father who is in heaven.” (Mathew 10:32)

Or again, “Think not that I have come to send peace on the earth. I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against his mother, and a daughter in the law against her mother in law.” (Matthew 10:34-35) Or again, “He that loveth father and mother more than me is not worthy of me. And he that loveth son and daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” (Matthew 10:37) And again, “He who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.” (Matthew 10:38) And again, “He who finds a life with will lose it and he who loses his life for my sake will find it.” (Matthew 10:39)

These were hard words. Jesus was calling his followers to have great dedication to God and to himself as Lord. He’s also calling them too a discipleship of discipline that called them to put Kingdom of God above family above father and mother, but more than this, he called forth from the them a willingness to give their lives for him. He who does not take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. But why all this? 

Remember everyone in Israel this week knew their destiny and very existence as a nation rested on their shoulders. If they did not come through, Israel would be driven into the sea and be no more. That is why they went out like that, dedicated to God with a discipline to the last inch of their life. Dedicated to die if need be to create destiny for their people. 

Jesus was saying this to his disciples. It all depends on you now. I have done all I can. Soon I will be crucified. But from the bloody spot at the foot of my cross, there must spring forth a people of God. You are that people of God. You must be dedicated to God by the blood of my cross. You must be disciplined to the last inch of your life. We must take up your cross and be dedicated to die if need be. You must build my church and create a people of destiny. It all depends on you. If you are pushed into the sea this is the end. The New Testament is the story of how these disciples took him seriously. Peter preached until he was crucified. Paul preached until he was beaten, stoned, imprisoned and finally beheaded. The beloved John died an old man in lonely exile, but in the end served his Lord. These were the people of God who found themselves in Jesus and ended up giving their lives. 

Today we stand on the verge of the New Day. It’s called the day of Secularism. The day when we can get along without God. Man feels he’s come of age in “come of age world.” Writers proclaim the death of God to the world in their books that are best sellers. Today the people of God have their backs to the wall. 

In Oregon on any given Sunday only one in 10 go to church. The Christian is a minority as has never been since the 1st century. Now Jesus lining his church up against the wall and is saying to you and to me. “It all depends on you. You must carry the good news beginning in Portland, right here in your own community. Then throughout Oregon and to outermost parts of the earth.”

Now how are we responding? Let us look at a few facts in our own church. The vacation church school, when our church had 70 members, used to staff a full school with classes from the three-year olds through junior high. This year we set out to run a church school for those from five years old to those completing 3rd grade. First, we thought we would have to close the school entirely because we could not recruit teachers. Finally, recruited enough teachers to staff classes for those entering first grade through fourth grad, but we had to cut out most the most important classes for the five year olds, because we could not get teachers. 

Today we have an open house at Snowcap, our community outreach organization. The amazing thing about Snowcap is that we are discovering all kinds of human needs in our community with no one to respond to that need. Last year for the first time our denomination gave less to the world mission than the previous year. Last month we had a sunshiny month. We went into the hole in our church by $1280 in May compared to last year. Next year we could conceivably have close to close our church school for the 11:15 service for lack of staff. 

Our church is not unique. This this is happening across the church in America. A strange thing is I have seen people literally find themselves by teaching the church school class. I can name people who have blossomed like he rose by becoming a teacher of the word of God. I know families whose budget becomes exciting in having the tithe. I know a couple who adopted an orphan in Korea, which turned their retirement in Golden years. I know a family in the church who fills their church envelope around the breakfast table on Sunday morning each putting in tithes from their income. They have said many times that it brought their family together like nothing else. 

For the wonder of it is just as Jesus said, “He who loses his life for my sake shall find it.” My life and yours is like the silver coin I have in my hand. I can hoard it and lose it, or squander it and lose it, or spend it selfishly and let it mortify me with guilt. I can also invest it in something of value that will bring back dividends and bring joy. 

What are you doing with your life? Hoarding it and losing it? Squandering it and losing it? Spending it selfishly and feeling guilty? 

Christ is calling you to a life of dedication to God through. Calling you to the rigorous discipline of discipleship. To the rigorous sacrifice of being willing to give over your life. Take up your cross and follow him. Today the people of God are about to be pushed into the sea. Jesus is saying, “It all depends on you!” 

But the wonder is that this is the promise, “He that loses his life for my sake will find it.”

In a conversation with Bill Griffis of our church last night, we were talking about what difference is really made by going to church. Suppose I was able to follow you as a church goer around for a whole month with a camera and a tape recorder. Then, I would follow a non-church member around for the same period. What would the difference be? To put it another way, what do I want from you as a Christian or better what does Christ want from you? 

Some rather interesting answers come forth. “I am as good as anybody who goes to church.” “I don’t get a peaceful feeling when I go to church.” 

What’s really wrong with modern man?

“Is not this the great Babylon I have built as the royal residence, by my mighty power and for the glory of my majesty?”(Daniel 4:30) 

Why did Nebuchadnezzar build the garden?

What is man’s anxiety about their self? When Cain killed Abel it was an act that was a symbol of human relationships. With the building of the Tower of Babel, we ask the the question: “Where do we do the things we do?” So much of our politics and daily life is that we must prove ourself to be better or we will be rejected.  We are lost in the wilderness in search of a name. What is the primary motivator of our life?

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.”  (Matthew 13 44:45) 

The treasure is hidden in the field. The merchant is in search of a fine pearl. In farming, we can find a great treasure. In salesmanship, we go after the pearl of the great price. What is the pearl of great price? Be not anxious for your life. You don’t have to go around proving yourself all the time. Be about your father’s business.  There’s something big enough for you to do. Don’t be anxious about losing your family. “If you don’t hate your father and mother, you can’t come after man after me.”

What is the Pearl then? The treasure God has entrusted with us is the Kingdom of heaven. I must share with you and the world the good news of the Kingdom of God. The eye has not seen, nor has it entered into the heart of man what God has prepared for those who love him. What lifts us above the animal? Not the creative arts. Someone once showed me the nest of a hummingbird with its intricacy. What lifts us is the ability to love. We can forgive oneself without anxiety to others. Love says: “I have enough to give so that I will never run dry.” 

John Anderson said, “There is no individual salvation in the Bible. Self-concern is not biblical.” We are called to be the servant of people. So far, too much of our energy is spent in church. If we did our work at home, our church school would be almost unnecessary. 

What is our strategy as Christians in the world? Christians must get out of the ghetto. The danger of building new churches is creating new ghettos, where only Christians live. We need conflict in our church. We currently face conflict over wrong things. The present job is not another church building but a “New Church” with new possibilities to encounter God. 

The healing of the church will not begin until Christ’s prayer “that we all are one” is answered. We, as Christians, must get over the idea that we are going to take over the world and that Christ is the Lord of history. That we all have to get on the bandwagon, because Christ is taking over the world.

The anthem, “I Walked Today Where Jesus Walked,” tells us of walking to Calvary, where Jesus walked. Where else did Jesus walk? He walked in the dirty field of finance where Zacchaeus was. He walked in the slums with the blind Bartimaeus. He walked with the outcasts and with Mary Magdalene. He was with the thief on the cross, and with the revolutionary Judas Iscariot. 

Where do we walk today? We walk with the unwed mother and the foster child from a broken home. We walk with the poor, who are unskilled and have no jobs. We have encounters with the black and latino communities. We have summer camp with the youth. We encounter the poor and provide access to vocations and new opportunities. We pour new wine in new bottles.

“Greater love has no man than that a man puts down his life above his friends.” 

The great Quaker historian Arnold Toynbee has pointed out that whenever a great leader has arisen in the world, he creates an almost intolerable tension in society. You can never be neutral to a great creative genius. You either oppose him at great cost, or you commit yourself too him with fanatical dedication.

This is certainly descriptive of Jesus. Men were never neutral to him. He would not be ignored. In his followers, he inspired fanatical zeal and dedication. Ten of his original twelve were martyred for their faith. The eleventh died in sad exile. The twelfth committed suicide. On the other side of the ledger, he inspired those who opposed him to fanatically to dedicate themselves and surrender everything to a life of plotting and intrigue, trying to find some way to rid themselves of him, without destroying themselves in doing so.

Have you ever read carefully the instructions that he gave to his disciples as he sent them out for the first time to minister in his name? I am sure this was the most remarkable commissioning services of all time. Here were these neophytes, who were going out for the first time. They would compare in training and experience to our newly ordained elders and deacons, who were going out calling for the first time. They were wondering just how they would be received.

Listen to what he tells them:

I give you authority to cast out demons and to cure every kind of ailment and disease. Here I am sending you out like sheep with wolves all around you: So be wise as serpents and as harmless as doves. Be on your guard against men. For they will take you to the courts and flog you in their synagogues. You will be brought into the presence of governors and kings because of me —to give your witness to them.

But when they arrest you, never worry about what you are going to say. You will be told at that time what you are going to say. For it will not be really you who are speaking, but the spirit of your father speaking through you.

Brothers are going to betray their brothers to death, and fathers their children. Children are going to betray their parents and have them execute). You yourselves are going to be universally hated because of my name. But the man who endures to the very end will be safe and sound.

But when they persecute you in one town, make your escape to the next. Tie disciple is not greater than his teacher any more than the servant is superior to his master. If they call the master of the household the “prince of evil” what sort of names will they give the servants.

Never be afraid of those who can kill the body, because they are powerless to kill the soul. It is far better to stand in awe of the one who has power to destroy body and soul in the fires of destruction.

Here is the text of the morning:

Do not think that I came to cast peace on the earth! I came not to bring peace but a sword For I came to set a man against his own father, a daughter against her own mother, and a daughter-in-law against her own mother-in-law. A man’s enemies will be those who live in his own house.

Anyone who put his love for father or mother above his love for me does not deserve to be mine, and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me, and neither is the man who refuses to take up his cross and follow my way. The man who has found own life will lose it, but the man who has lost it for my sake will find it. (Mathew 10 verse 34.)

Suppose you had been in that commissioning service? How do you think you would have reacted? I am sure with pale and watered-down version of the Christian religion to which most of us have been subjected, we would have dropped our bibles and ran for cover. Not so for the disciples. They went out and tried their wings at witnessing to their new-found faith in Jesus as Messiah. The amazing thing is that none of them chickened out, although they did find that casting out demons took more than a stern human rebuke or command.

But now let us lift out our text of the morning from this context. Do you think that I came the cast peace on earth? I came not to bring peace, but a sword. The disciples never forgot this word. In fact, years later when John was describing how he remembered the lord walking in the midst of the church, he says :  “His eyes blazed like fire, his voice was like the sound of a great waterfall, a share two-edged sword came out of his mouth, and his face was ablaze like the sun at its height.” You talk about unidentified flying objects. Where have you read a description in recent days of these UFOs that matches these descriptive words of John.

Now what Jesus was really saying. Well for one thing, he was not giving them a pallid, milky, Maalox-like tranquilizing Christianity that would serve as an antidote for an upset stomach. He was sending them out as blazing revolutionaries to set fire to the earth. In fact, Luke puts it this way:

I came to cast fire upon tie earth, and I wish it were already kindled.

Now he says:

I came not to cast peace upon the earth but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her own mother-in-law. A man’s enemies will be those of his own household.

First, I have a deep feeling there was a biographical note here. If you read between the lines, I think you can make a case that he had very little support in his own family. When he was twelve years old, he was berated for staying and discussing theology with the teachers in the temple, when he should have been on the road home with the family. Later when his mother and brothers came to see him during his ministry, and someone told him they were there, he answered by stretching out his hands to his disciples and saying:

Here are my mother and brothers. For whoever does the will of my father who is in heaven, the sake is my brother and my sister and my mother.

Have you ever thought about it? You never hear another word about Joseph after the birth of Jesus. There is no indication that any of Jesus’s brothers supported him during his ministry. Mary appears for the first time in the narrative as the sorrowing mother by the cross. It seems apparent that Jesus did not have the support of his family until after the crucifixion. He had brought a sword to his own household.

I know these are some here this morning who know what this verse means. You are looked upon as religious fanatics in your own family, because you participate in the life of the church. You feel the deep tension of family, because you have committed your life to Christ. There are some husbands and wives who feel they stand alone in seeking to bring their child up as a Christian. In fact, they constantly fight the road-blocks of inertia thrown in their way as they try to follow through on their vows when they had their children baptized and they promised to bring these children up in the discipline and instruction of their Christian faith. Later these parents often find their children turning on their faith too, until they feel surrounded and alone. They know of the sword that Christ cast on the earth, that cuts families asunder.

Some years ago, I visited with deeply discouraged family. They had a new baby in their home, and his wife refused to have anything to do with having the baby baptized. For a long time, the man brought the children to church by himself. He had them in choir. Finally, he apparently succumbed in the struggle for the peace of the family.

Jesus was a realist. He knew that the demands he made on his followers could not help but bring opposition. And he knew that this opposition would come from every direction. He antagonized the religious leaders of his day, because he preached the kind of a gospel that undermined the whole power structure that gave them their prestige and position. It is very evident that he even antagonized his own supporter who wanted to make him Messiah and set him on his throne. 

That is the real meaning of the Palm Sunday story. There were those who shouted hosannah on the road that day that thought they were cheering the great king, who would be enthroned on the throne of David and free them from Rome. Even James and John believed so much that just before his crucifixion they were arguing who was going to sit on his right hand who and who would sit on the left, when he came to power. When he would not give in to them, because his kingdom was not that kind of kingdom, there were those where ready to shout, “Crucify him, crucify him.”

In fact, it was strange how he could not really please them. When he did miracles, they said he did them in the power of the devil. When he refused to perform a miracle and come down from the cross, they mocked him and said now who has miracle power? When he talked intimately of his relationship with God, the called him a blasphemer. When he ate with publicans and sinners, they called him a winebibber and a profligate.

The central fact was that out of his mouth there came a two-edged sword, and when he spoke, he cut through to the vested interests of all men. Some retreated and cowered in anger and hatred because he touched the very center of their festering sores. Others felt the pain, as of a physician’s knife, and they felt that through his words they were made whole.

When Zacchaeus the thief and the cheat felt him put the finger on his sin and he said “Master, I am going to take my goods and restore to those whom I have defrauded sevenfold… and come follow you.” When he spoke to the Samaritan woman at the well and told her of her sordid marital tangle, she ran to the city and said, “Come see a man who told me everything I did. Is he not the Messiah?”

Now what does this text say to us today? To the young people who are contemplating confirming your faith next Sunday, Christian commitment is not just a nice thing you do when you become a Seventh grader. You are responding to the call of the same Christ who said to others: “I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves.” But when they persecute you in one town, escape to the next. Because you accept Christ, it does not mean that life will be just a bowl of cherries. 

There was a boy who sat in those same church school chairs where you have sat, whose name was Charles Klunder. A few years ago, his faith made him throw himself in front of a bulldozer that was digging a hole in the heart of Philadelphia, which he believed was to be a building that would be another monument to segregation, and which would relegate so many of his Christian friends to being second class citizens, just because their faces were black. That tractor backed off him that day —accidentally it is true —but it meant giving his life. Most of the world thought he was a fool for doing it.

This winter we heard an attorney from Portland who felt that his commitment meant that he must go to the heart of the South and defend those whose civil rights were being violated —and in the course of this, he was spit upon and stoned, and at all times his life was in actual danger of being destroyed.

There is one of your friends who said to me just the other day: “If I join the church, I will have to do it without my parents’ consent. “They are against me doing it, and they said they will have nothing to do with it or have any part in it.” What would you do in a case like that?

This is a great age of revolution. It is a day when you must stand up and be counted. You will be asked to join a fraternity where your negro Christian brother cannot join. You will be tempted to join and thus crucify your own brother on a cross of discrimination. But, because you are a disciple of Christ, you will bear witness to your faith by refusing the invitation and telling the reason for it. Thus, your faith will divide you from some of your friend

Some day you will be asked to take a position of authority in a business, where so many things you will have to do will cut right across the grain of your Christian commitment. Each day you work, you will find that step-by-step and inch-by-inch you are destroying your very soul. And you will be called upon to witness by sacrificing your job because you must render unto god the thing that are God’s. This is the kind of Christian commitment Christ required of his disciples. This is the kind of commitment he lived himself. The servant is not greater than his lord. This is the kind of commitment to which he calls you.

For he says:

I came not to cast peace on the earth. I came not to bring peace but a sword. This is the rigorous discipline I demand. If you are not willing to accept this, you cannot be my disciple.

But if you accept these demands: when you get into court, I will give you words to say. When they seek to destroy you, they may hurt your body, but I will see to it they will never destroy your soul. If you confess me before men in this daring way, I will confess you before my father who is in heaven. I will tell him all about you. When you think you are losing your life, you will really find it.

“Just then a woman who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak.  She said to herself, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be healed.” Matthew 9:20

A strange transformation takes place in those who meet Jesus. They seem to come out of the darkness into the spotlight of the center stage of history. They seem suddenly to be transfixed by history. They strangely share the master’s immortality. It makes no difference whether they are rich or poor, educated or illiterate, Jew or Samaritan. Once they encounter Christ, they never return to the obscurity again.

The woman in the story is one of those he transformed. Her story is made of the stuff of rich drama. Her worry long ailment, the hemorrhage, is slowly sapping her life. Her own cleanliness in the eyes of the religious law, her hopes and doctors are raised, then dashed. Then, she resolves to steal the blessing of Christ. The story is ideally etched. For her: “If I can but touch the holy tassel on his robe and instantly be healed, no one would ever need to know.”

New psychology calls it the power of autosuggestion or crowd emotion. To the modern theologian, her faith may be looked at as spiritually poor. Does it not smack up magic? “If I can but touch the tassel of his robe be, the holy charm?”

Henry Martin saw an old crone kissing the feet of the statue and wondered if his more intellectual faith could command it. Jesus honored this woman’s faith and said: “Somebody touched me.” She came out of the crowd as a nobody. To Jesus she was somebody. She had her faith touched him. Her faith however poor counted more than intellectual pride that robs life of its wonder: “Take heart daughter. Your faith has made you well.” And instantly the woman was made well.

Once more, we see the compassion of Jesus. He is not too busy despite the crowd or the press of the centurions’ command. Come to heal my daughter. Jesus dealt with her as though she were the only one. All she needed was enough courage and strength to reach out and touch his tassel.

This week one of the members of our Monday prayer group in the face of pending surgery said : “Prayer has taught me not to be anxious, but to put my life in God’s hands.” The faith the size of a grain of mustard seed is enough to touch the tassel of his robe. That’s enough. To know there’s something in the touch of a person that communicates more than anything else. The wonderful sense of touch. Even a little baby can feel that love of the mother through her touch. She can feel anxiety, too. The woman said if I can but touch the tassel of his robe that will be enough “I will be healed.”

It was the night of the Last Supper. Christ on his last full night with his spiritual shock troops. He must inspire them to be his witness in the world. What could he do? What tassel could he leave with them to touch. Aha. This would do it. He took the bread about to be broken and the wine about to be poured. This would be the tassel they would touch. He held the bread up as he broke it. “This is my body broken for you.” Then he took the wine. “This is my life outpoured.” “As often as you eat this bread and drink this cup you will remember me. You will partake of my life and power. This do in remembrance of me.”

This morning you and I have come out of the darkness. Out of the obscurity of our lives. Some of us have lingering hemorrhages and physical illnesses. Take the tassel take and take the bread and the cup in faith and be healed. Some of us are anxious and disturbed, distraught and nervous and unspun. Take this tassel. Take bread and the cup and be healed. Some of us are spiritually sick. They heavens seem close to our prayers. Christ seems so far away. Take the tassel. Take the bread and the cup. Encounter Christ. He gives himself to you in this sacrament. This is the Worldwide Communion Sunday in the world torn by war. There are the bamboo curtains that divide us. Our ideology separates us. Christ says to our world take this tassel. Take this bread and wine drink it for the healing of the nations. When all the people, every man who I have created, black and white, capitalists and communists, rich and poor, every man, be made whole.

When she came out of the crowd, this woman was “nobody.” When she touched him, he called her “somebody.” Her faith embraces “everybody,” until every knee should bow, and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, take this sacrament. Touch the tassel of the garment. Hear him say: “Take heart son daughter your faith has made you well.”

“For ho! Thy touch brought life and health. Gave me speech and strength in life and youth renewed in frenzy calmed. Owned thee, the Lord of the light.”

“Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled.” Matthew 5:6

Someone has said: “Man is merely the sum total or his appetites.” I admit that this is a very superficial definition of man, but it does emphasize a very great truth, namely that, “Man is being of many appetites, and these appetitesbecome basic drives that motivate his whole life. In fact, man’s appetite, his inward longing for something he does not now possess, this I say is one of the great blessings of his life. For in the longings of man lies the fertile seed of progress. He who longs for nothing, never does much. It is the man who dreams up a new idea, a new invention, a new experience, a new accomplish­ment, and then longs to accomplish that dream is the forward mover, the inventive genius, the prophetic seer, the one who moves forward in life, and carries others along with the momentum.

In our day, we have had man’s freedom classically rephrased in the words of President Franklin Roosevelt. Central in these four freedoms is the expression: “Freedom from want.” Now, from the standpoint of our common life, there is a real frame of reference where this phrase is applicable, we certainly are saddened when we hear of the destitution and starvation that is abroad in our world today. We want to be freed from such destitution and want. However, to make the unqualified statement of our longing: “Freedom from want,” is a paradoxical expression. If we were complete­ly free from “want”, we could not even “want” “Freedom from want.” For such freedom would be the death knell of aspiration. Life would be sheer boredom.It would be moral and intellectual suicide.

The other day I heard a story over too radio. Two proud and very wealthy parents welcomed a little daughter into their home. That little girl became their idol.       The parents showered her with everything they had. They bought a whole island of the coast of New York state, near Long island, and they built a virtual paradise for their little girl. She lacked nothing. She had a doll house as big as the house of many poor folks. Servants waited on her hand and foot. She had a thousand dolls, a dozen ponies, all the cats and dogs and pets you could possibly imagine. They even imported pets from Asia, Africa and other parts of the world, until she had a veritable zoo. She got whatever she asked for and a thousand times more. But the little girl was not happy. She got tired of her toys and her pets and in fact she even got tired of her own parents. She became listless. She could not sleep. She became pale and wan, until her parents despaired of her life. They called in a score of specialists to examine her out they found nothing wrong with her. They thought perhaps she needed friends, so they brought all the school children from a large New fork School to the island to play with her. She was still not helped. These children wanted to ride the ponies, play with the dolls, take the dogs on a walk. She had been doing these things so long it bored her. The experiment was a failure. Our little lady grew more listless and unhappy.

Now for a long time the winds and rain and the hurricanes had been jealous they had not been able to budge the great castle, in which this little girl lived with her parents on this island. So, one night the rain, the wind, the tidal waves, the thunder and lightning and all the forces of nature got together and planned a united effort to assault the castle. They were to strike at midnight. At the stroke of twelve the wind rose in its fury. The rain came down in torrents, the thunder roared in answer to the flash of the lightening. A great tidal wave came up with its great assault waves. This was too much. The castle shook and shivered and reeled and finally the foundation was swept away, and the castle was driven to shore and battered on the rocks. Fortunately, the little girl and her parents escaped with their lives, but they were ruined. They were wet and cold and finally found refuge in a cave. That night they had to scour the countryside for food and dry clothes. When darkness come, they had to sleep in a deep cold crevice in the rocks.

That night, for the first time, our little friend slept as peacefully as a babe. In the morning she was up with the dawn, with a new rosebud on her cheek ready to go find wood for a fire and food to eat. At last she had something to life for. The blessing of want that had inspired her life was no longer boredom. Oh yes, her parents still had their fortune, but they had learned their lesson. They built a little house on a moderate avenue and helped their little girl to live with the nature, longing and the wants that make every child’s life interesting.

The biographies of great men are generally about men, who had strong appetites, longings and wants. In our day, we read of the barefoot and ragged paper boy who became England’s first Labor Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald. We read about Franklin Roosevelt, who had the terrible disease of infantile paralysis, and fought himself back to health to the great aspiration to be President of the United States. We read of a man born in slavery, inspired with the want to make his people free. He become the great scientist and humanitarian George Washington Carver.

Freedom from want, in its real sense, would already a tragedy. Our culture would become stagnant and our civilization decadent. We would become rotten psychologically speaking, and in this frame of reference, the words of Jesus come with a new freshness and fullness of meaning.

“Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled.”

Some of us have become appalled at the moral destitution and spiritual depravity that exists in our generation. But we need not look far for the cause. We have it right here in this terse statement of feet of Jesus:

“Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled.”

The great trouble in our world is that we are fast losing our spiritual appetites. To find a reason for this, we must analyze man as he is. For man is indeed a wonderful but strange creature. Perhaps we should reverse the old saying and put it man is “wonderfully but fearfully made.”

The present emphasis in Human Science today is on Dynamic Psychology. This branch of Psychology works on the basic premise that man has a series of drives or appetites that motivate his life and cause him to grow. Incidentally, this Idea is as old as the New Testament. Modern psychology is just finding this out. Modem psychology has also discovered the Biblical Idea that man today has a flare for madness. That one or the other of these basic drives is always getting out of control, and man’s whole personality is warped in the direction of that over-accentuated drive.

Now, in our generation, the emphasis has been on the material world. The central drives, or should I say over-accentuated drives, have become lustful cravings. These cravings are materialistic drives. We have a hunger and thirst for material things. Some want luxury. Others want financial security. Still others want pleasure. Some are ambitious to make a name themselves. Regardless of the materialistic drives that motivate our lives, these cravings have their end in the brief span between the cradle and the grave. The man who neglects spiritual things to work in his garden or go joyriding in his car; the women who cannot go to church because she must prepare the big Sunday dinner; the Joy lover who kids himself into believing he can worship on a golf course; these people are satisfying material wants. We live in that kind of a civilization. Our hunger and our thirst are for earthly things. We are earthly, or perhaps to put it in good Biblical language, we are carnal and of the flesh, fleshly.

Such thinking on the part of many individuals has fit into a picture of the masses. We are fast becoming secularized. We are becoming a culture very attentive to the material drives of life, and one that wholly disregards the spiritual drives.

The world today is in a terrible mess. There is no getting around it. What is the reason behind it? It is very simple. We are like the educated fool of who it was said: “He was educated beyond his intelligence.” Our material drives, interests and advancements have been so over-emphasized that the spiritual side of our life has been outstripped. The spiritual side of our lives has grown weak and feeble by lack of use. Our spiritual muscles have become soft and flabby. If you do not believe me, try to teach a Sunday school class today.

From 75% to 85% of the children in Sunday school come from homes devoid of religious training. Youngsters come to Sunday school because they enjoy the company, or because they are driven to it by their parents who are not interested themselves. As a result, it is as hard to interest and enthuse the average Sunday school child with the things of God, as it is to make a stone soak up water. We have lost the “blessed and the hunger” that Jesus forcefully spoke of.

“Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled.”

We have neglected our spiritual appetite to such an extent that we have reached the blissful stage of “freedom from want,” the freedom from the want to desire after God.

You may well ask why is there this spiritual destitution in the world? Let me answer by a very simple illustration. This month in the Readers Digest, there is a very interesting article on the greatest killer of all tines, the Black Death. The Black Death killed a greater proportion of all the people in the large cities Europe and Asia than the atomic noob did at Hiroshima. The reason that the Black Death spread was that the people of the middle ages lived in squalor and filth. They never bathed. They seldom washed their clothes. They threw their garbage into the city streets. Rats and mice roamed the garbage piles unmolested. No one batted an eye or furrowed a brow or raised the least protest. They had been raised in squalor and they did not know anything else. It was something that had gradually grown upon them over time and they didn’t know any different. It took the Black Death and other epidemics for great men like Pasteur and Lister to go to work and find the cause. Now every large city has a board or health, a sanitation department and e garbage collecting department to clean up the mess that caused disease.

We in our generation have been slowly lulled into a spiritual sleep of self-sufficiency. We have been great producers and inventers. We use high-sounding phrases about the dignity of man and the divinity that is in a man. We have finally weaned ourselves from our spiritual appetites. We no longer nurse ourselves from the breast of God and the sincere milk of the word.

We have changed to the strong meat of self-sufficiency. We have lost our hunger and thirst after righteousness. We have become spiritually empty and destitute.

And now we are beset by fears on every hand. The potency of the atomic bomb as a killer has frightened us. The price of a barrel of oil need only drop ten cents and the whole financial world is in a turmoil, and we have a gigantic bear market on Wall street. In our generation, we have seen one nation after another fall from freedom. We have seen two mad holocausts of world-wide war. We have seen starvation in the world and many other things that recall the fast depleting of our natural resources.

As we cut through a cross section of human nature and see man as he is: drunken, selfish, greedy, eager to enslave his fellow man, and prejudiced of men of different colors. What a depraved creature man is. Look at man today. Where is the exalted dignity? Where is the lordship of the universe? Truly, with one our own great philosophers, we must say: “Man’s story is not a success story but a tragedy.

Man has dignity only when he finds his place in the will of God. He is only of infinite worth, as he fulfills the purpose for which he was created. Man must be reborn and reoriented to the will of God. He must be redeemed from his destitution. Within his heart, he must be once more renewed with that hunger and thirst after righteousness, that hunger for fellowship with God, that love for the will of God. Man must be restored not only to speaking terms with God, but to terms of friendship, kinship, and worshipful reverence with the eternal God.

In Christ, God came down in human flesh to give us an example of how man as he should be. Only in Christ do we see truly the dignity of one who hungers and thirsts after righteousness. He shows us how to hunger and thirst to be Christ-like. The world has produced many men who can became goals. It has produced its Beau Brummells with their love for show. It produced Lord Byrons with goals of love for pleasure. It produced Hitlers and Stalins with their love for power. It has produced corporate CEOs with only their love for money. These men have been multiple people. Only once in this world has there been a man who walked across the pages you and I ought to be. That man was Jesus Christ the son of God. And, we can never be free until we are like him. We can never fulfill our purpose in life until we are Christ-like. We can never find happiness, peace end satisfaction, until we have Christ-like submission to the whole will of God regardless of the consequences. Christ is the only goal in life that is worthwhile.  Being Christ-like is the only “want” and “only appetite” that brings satisfaction.

“Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled.”

However, you say what can I do about this myself? The answer is plain. “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness.” God is calling you and me to a new dedication to the life of reaching out towards righteousness. If you must choose between physical food and spiritual food, give up a meal a day in order to have time to read the Bible. If you must choose between church and your garden, let your garden go to weeds. If you must choose between God and mammon, choose God and let mammon be forgotten. If you must choose between your duty to the church the kingdom of God and your own ease, your comfort, your own physical welfare, choose to satisfy your spiritual hunger, for there is no substitute.

Have you ever thought how many excuses we can dig up to shirk the spiri­tual responsibilities that have been placed upon our shoulders? How many things are there that keep us away from our spiritual responsibility, and that do not keep us away from work or from pleasure?

God calls us to a new dedication to the life of the spirit. We have ne­glected our spiritual appetite long enough. So, with a fresh forcefulness, he says to you and to me this morning this one important word:

“Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled.”

Acts 20:35. Remember the words of the Lord Jesus who said: “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”

It is intriguing to me that after the four Gospels, Jesus is only directly quoted once in the rest of the New Testament. I do not know why this is. You would think that the words and teachings of Jesus would have left more of an impression on the early Church that they would quote him constantly. 

Some suggest that the remainder of the New Testament, apart from the Gospels, was written by men like Paul. These men were a second-generation Christians. They had no first­hand witness to the ministry of Jesus. They were reticent to quote the Master directly. They left that task to those who had lived with him in the years of his ministry. It is interesting that the one direct quote of Jesus in the later texts led for his words to disappear in the remainder of the New Testament. 

The Apostle Paul was leaving Ephesus for the last time. He did not expect to see his dear friends again. He is finishing his farewell address. Having commended the followers into the hand of God, Paul leaves them with one unforgettable sentence of Jesus: “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35). In these few words of the Master, Paul crystallized the whole life of Jesus and his teaching. Happier indeed is the man, who like Paul, spends his days and nights giving all he has to others. 

What of the man who is fearful of what the future may bring? What of the man who spends his days hoarding what few things he can gather together in anticipation of a disaster? This happens often and exemplifies the message of Jesus in a half dozen words, and by them set forth the wisdom of God.

 Since next Sunday is commitment day in our stewardship program, I am sure most of you interpret this text to mean: “I guess our pocketbooks are going to get a going over today.” Well, I am sorry I must disappoint you. If I were to use this text in this way, you would be missing the point that Jesus and Paul were driving at when they used these words: “It is more blessed to give than to receive”.

Jesus was speaking of the giving of a more fundamental coin than money. He was talking about the giving of one’s self, of which the giving of money is only a token. This puts our text suddenly right in the mainstream of the person-to-person encounter. It comes right to the heart of the Biblical message. The central concern of the Bible is man^’s personal relationship with God and how one relates to God and his brother. 

The biblical story of man begins with a central theme. In Genesis, we read about the saga of man. Man comes from the hand of his creator, who has fashioned him for fellowship with him. The ancient Biblical writer begins the story of man this way, and God said: “Let us make man in our image and after our likeness”.

After the creation, God’s first act is to come down and relate himself to this wonderful new creature he made. He creates a beautiful garden for this wonderful man, who is to be the center of his love. In the cool of the evening, he comes down into that garden to commune with man, so that each could become the trusted confident and companion of the other.

The story of man progresses. God suddenly sees it is not good for man to be alone. He needs companionship. God creates woman as a helper. For man, at that very moment, both the family and society were born in the story. This was to be the source of great joy and a blessing for man. Is it not strange that both were soon to become the source of his greatest frustration and disappointment? However, we are getting ahead of the story. Suddenly man begins to freeze up. Something happens to that very happy relationship with God. Adam begins to draw away and become suspicious of God. God has forbidden him to eat of the fruit of a certain tree. Adam thinks God is trying to keep something from him.  He thinks God is not really interested in his fulfillment. Why? Is it that man has the potential of being like God and is God afraid and jealous, and so he is withholding from man? Before long, man begins to withhold himself from God. First, it is in anger, then in guilt and then shame. We see him hiding behind a tree afraid God might come down into the garden that evening and find him and reject him for what he has done.

But that is not all. Man does not stop there. Before long there is rift in family life and in society. Adam starts blaming his wife. Isn’t that where most wars start? As you might expect, the next chapter in the history of man is a sordid one. Cain goes out and slays Abel. Strange to say, he does it because he feels God is playing favorites between him and his brother.

It is not enough to break off his relationship with God and his fellow man, Adam does not only blame Eve, but Eve blames the serpent. The world becomes a threatening thing to them. That which was to be a blessing has become a curse. And the Biblical writer puts it so pointedly, “In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread”.

We may have a trouble accepting the historical accuracy of the narratives in the early part of Genesis, but we cannot argue with the theology or psychology portrayed. This indeed is the saga of man’s internal history. Through the years, man has withheld himself from God and from his brother. This is the sickness of modern man.

For many years, anthropologists have known they can learn much about a primitive tribe or a developed society from their dances and their games. Many times, these become a sort of pantomime or a sacramental representation of the basic struggle of our lives. Perhaps it is a way that man sublimates his basic anxieties, so he can cope with anxieties in an acceptable form.

Have you ever thought what anthropologists would learn about us? From our modern games and dances. Last Friday night I sat in the stands, while eleven young men glared across an imaginary line at eleven other young men as though they were mortal enemies. One team has possession of an oval piece of inflated pigskin. It has very little value or worth, but the other team wants it more than anything else on earth at that moment. Eleven men want to break through the line of the other team and carry that pigskin over another imaginary line to show that they are the stronger. If necessary, they are willing to risk concussion, brain damage, limb damage and yes sometimes their lives to do this. In this game, the greatest crime is to give an inch to the other. Isn’t it ghastly how one can see a sort of sacramental enactment of the many struggles that go on in our world all around us? A nation holding an imaginary line against another nation. A husband holding an imaginary line against a wife. A businessman trying to break through a competitor’s line to outsell him in the field marketing a product of just as questionable value as the blown-up pig skin.

Think of the dances in the last twenty years. What would the anthropologist say about them? Let me name a few of them: The big apple, the jitterbug, mash potatoes, the twist or the surfers stomp. Add them all up and what do they spell out about our society. It seems to me they all say: “Don’t get involved with the other person.” One could go on dancing all night without being able to even hear a word the partner is saying. Well enough of that. 

Is it any wonder Karl Menninger has said: “Most of us spend a lifetime trying to find out what love really is”? It is surely little wonder that from the start what we receive in childhood and adolescence that many people reach adult life without the faintest conception of what it love is, or of what it might be for them. That is why our lives are so shallow. We do not know the meaning of love.

Just recently I saw a dramatic illustration of this lack of any concept of the meaning of love. A minister friend, called me and said: “I have been trying to work with a couple who have some deep problems, and I wonder if you would help me. I have been trying to get to the bottom of their troubles, and I seem to be beating my head against a stone. I am not getting anywhere.”

When they came in to see me, I sat there for an hour and a half and watched and listened. Here were two of the best quarterbacks I have ever seem. Coach Hebert of our football team ought to get a line on these two. They had an end run, plunges and a superb belly series. In fact, they had every play that was ever invented, and they were playing the game to the hilt. The object of their game was not to get involved with each other, because the other was too big a threat to them.

I have found church people are like that too. They want to go to church. It’s kind of nice to be with a whole lot of nice people, especially in this lonely world of noninvolvement. But in religion, we play games too. We get into a game with God. In fact, I think I have identified the game. It is akin to professional wrestling, and the object of the game is not to let God get ahold of you. You ought to hear the excuses when the Christian education committee goes out to recruit teachers.

Have you ever chaired the nominating committee of the woman ‘s association? Ask the stewardship committee how difficult it is to recruit 100 church members to do the every member canvas.

In fact, a modern poet put it this way:

I got the gimme God blues. 
I got the gimme God blues 
Cause God won’t gimme 
What I want him to gimme 
I got the gimme god blues.

Or to put it in the words of another modern poet:

I’d rather be dead, I’d rather be dead
Than to come to grips with relationships
I’d rather be dead
Than to face up to me and reality
I’d rather be dead.
As long as there is something holding me back, 
I can tell myself how it’s not something I lack 
So, bury em deep or hang me up high 
But don’t ask me to live when I want to die.
I’d rather be dead.

Into this setting, I hear the intrusion of the words of Jesus remembered by the Apostle Paul: “It is more blessed to give than to receive”. What do these words really mean? What Jesus was really saying to his disciples is what he is really saying to you and to me. Stop withholding yourself from life. Stop being a human sponge soaking everything in if you can, but never giving out.

To put it in modern parlance he is saying: “Give out, man, give out”.

Why do we really withhold ourselves from those around us? You may say the answer is very simple. I am afraid of being rejected. In his book, “The Art of Loving”, Erich Fromm has made an interesting observation to this point. He says: “While one is consciously afraid of not being loved, the reality is  usually the unconscious fear of loving”. To love means to commit oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. This is the same commitment of faith that is needed. We must have faith that trustful love will in turn invoke a response of love.

Now everyone of us has faith. It takes faith to get up in the morning. It takes faith to sit, when we sit down on a chair. We must have faith the chair won’t collapse. You must have faith that the cook won’t poison you when you eat your lunch—and sometimes that cook is your wife. What we need to do is channel this faith in the cause of self-giving—in loving.

This takes courage. We all have courage. In fact, it seems to me that it takes a lot of courage to play the rough game that the husband and wife were playing that I referred to earlier. What we need to do is channel our courage in the cause of love. We must exercise what Paul Tillich called “the courage to be”.

When I looked at that football game the other night, I became aware we are not lacking in courage. What we need to do is to channel of our courage into the cause of love. In this regard I like what Carl Menninger said: “The world’s great lovers have not been Don Juan and Casanova, but Schweitzer, Ghandi, Helen Keller, and saints such as Francis of Assisi”. He goes on to say: “True love is more concerned about the welfare of the one loved than with its own immediate satisfactions. It demands nothing but to be patient, kind and modest: that it is free from jealousy, boastfulness, arrogance, and rudeness: that it can bear all things, hope and endure, so said St. Paul and so said Freud”.

This bring us to another point. This courage and this faith can lead us to involvement with God, too. Why do you feel suspicious of him? We look over our noses at Adam and Eve. When God wanted to get involved with them, they were suspicious of him and thought in holding back the forbidden fruit. They thought he had malicious intent, and he really did not want them to fulfill themselves.

When Jesus says, “It is more blessed to give than to receive”, you and I feel like Adam at times. You feel God wants to use us to his own ends without your welfare at hear. God says: “Become involved with me. I want to share with you of my life, but I can^’t do it unless you’re willing to become involved with me. You must give something of yourself to me if I am to give something of yourself to me”.

Now I said I wasn’t going to talk about stewardship more than I had to, but if I did not talk about it, I would miss the point. 

There is a challenging exchange in the book of Malachi. Malachi hears god saying: “Return to me, and I will return to you, says the Lord of hosts. But you say: how shall we return?” Then, Malachi hears God give this answer to the question: “Will man rob God? Yet you are robbing me. But you say, ‘How have we robbed you?’ In your tithes and contributions.You are cursed with a curse, for you are robbing me, the whole nation of you. Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need”.

I used to think that this was a very selfish reason to give a tithe. If I give, God will give back to me. But don’t you see that is the reward of being involved. If we get involved in God’s work and life, he gets involved in ours. It takes courage and faith to be a Church school teacher. It takes courage and faith to be a women’s association president. It takes courage and faith to become a missionary. It takes courage and faith to become a tither. It takes courage and faith to be a true Christian. It takes courage and faith to become involved with God, not just as it does with our fellow men. But God has made available in each of us that courage and faith. All we need to do is to direct that courage and faith to the right end.

Jesus says to us: “Let’s stop playing at religion — let’s stop playing in our interpersonal relations —Give man give.”

As Paul says, “Remember the words of the lord Jesus how he said: It is more blessed to give than to receive.”

Here’s how St. Francis prayed:

Lord make me an instrument of thy peace,
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is doubt, let me sow faith.
Where there is despair, hope.
Where there is darkness, let me sow light.
Where there is sadness, let me sow joy.
0 divine master,
Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, 
As to console to be understood, as to understand
To be loved, as to love.
For it is in giving, that we receive.
It is in pardoning, that we are pardoned.
And it is in dying, that we are born to eternal life.

We live in a world, where we are put in a strange double bind by words. On the one hand, we are literally being talked to death. Where can we escape from words? The average house has no soundproof room, where you can escape the bombardment of words. Whether it be the constant, incessant chatter of the radio or television, or the personal intrusion of others in this highly concentrated, urbanized, city life of ours, words are everywhere. To protect ourselves, we have learned to turn off words, as though we have listened on earphones. Sometimes our filters do not work, and we turn off important words along with the trivial.

Sometimes, I wish you could look at the faces of a congregation, as I preach on any given Sunday morning. There is a disease called narcolepsy—which is a disorder that causes one to escape from the irritants of life through sleep. There are generally several people in every congregation who have narcolepsy. Then, there are those whose far-away-smile shows that they are way off on a lake landing a fish or reliving some humorous experience in their lives, while the minister is trying to preach to them. In fact, I often feel we use the same technique with the minister as we do with our television set: “If it’s not a good show we turn it off”. Unless the preacher puts on a good show, turn him off.

Now, there is another side to this dilemma of words that is our double bind. Words are a necessary part of living. For example, there is the husband who feels his wife is constantly nagging him, but when she was gone, he misses her tremendously. Recently, there was a story of a man who crossed the Atlantic alone in a small boat. However, after some time at sea, the solitude got to him, and he began hallucinating. Erich Fromm, in his book: “Escape from Freedom,” suggests the one thing a human cannot stand is too much freedom or too much solitude. From the moment a child is born, the child begins to put down social roots. The child cries when the mother leaves, and the child cries when put in the crib and is left alone. Much of our lives is spent escaping from freedom—the kind of freedom that isolates us from our fellow humans.

We dare not underestimate the power of words. A good example is Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. The address is just 272 words and was given in under 5 minutes. You will remember Lincoln said: “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here”. The strange thing is the opposite is true. Very few in the world remember the real significance of the battle of Gettysburg. However, who is there in this room or in America who does not know most of the words of from the “Gettysburg Address”?

If we go back further in American history, we can trace the power of the words of Tom Payne, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and the rest founding fathers. Many of the words that framed the American Constitution were more decisive, than the War of the Revolution. When the history of the Civil War was written, there were many writers who felt that the pulpit of Henry Ward Beecher, the pen of his sister Harriett Beecher Stowe, the poetry of John Greenleaf Whittier and the speeches of Abe Lincoln were more decisive than the war fought. When the history of the twentieth century is written, who knows if perchance the great dreams for world peace and unity spoken by Woodrow Wilson may not be looked on as more decisive than our world wars in shaping the history of the world.

When installing a minister in a congregation, we place upon the new minister many responsibilities, and a prime responsibilities is making and speaking of many words. This responsibility is an underestimated facet of what a minister does. The apostle Paul put it this way: “It pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save those that believe”.

In our text of the day from Acts 8:26-40, the Apostle Philip was walking down a road that you cannot walk today. It was the little road that leads from Jerusalem to Gaza. Today, the road has a blockade across it, and no one has permission to travel that road. While on that road, he met a high official of the Ethiopian government riding along in his chariot. To his amazement, he found the Ethiopian was reading a copy of the scriptures. Philip felt impelled by God to go up to him and say, “Do you understand what you are reading?” The Ethiopian answered: “How can I understand, unless someone will give me the clue?”

The story is to me the parable for our times. Many years ago, there lived a strange and wonderful man called Jesus. Those who knew him, believed he was the incarnation of God. Those who followed him were dynamically changed by him. After he left this world, they wrote down many of his words and their experiences with him. The world has never been able to forget those words or that man. We still have the words of his followers with us—we call it the Bible. People are wistfully trying to read the book as the Ethiopian was trying to do that day. People find his words hard to comprehend. So, they come to the church and ask their minister: “Will you give me a clue, so that I can understand it?”Strange to say, in the church, some people find the clue to the book through the preaching of the word, and their lives are dynamically changed.

I would like to share an answer to two important questions I was asked recently. A young man asked, “I lived abroad in a very wonderful home in Thailand with a family. The family deeply loved each other and had a deep religious belief that meant much to them. Why should we send missionaries to them?”

I met a young student from India who was a Hindi graduate student at the University of California. He asked, “I am thinking of embracing Christianity. Why do I have to give up all my Hinduism to become a Christian?”

I again hear the words of the Ethiopian resounding in my ears “How can I understand, unless someone gives me a clue”? 

My answer is that in Jesus Christ I find the answers to the needs of my life. I am reminded of the words of John 1:14: “And the word became flesh and dwelt among us. We beheld his glory as of the only begotten of the faith full of grace and truth.”

My answer to this young Hindu is as I remembered Paul on Mars Hill (Acts 17:22-31). All in Hinduism is not wrong. However, when I came to Jesus, I saw the kind of person I ought to be. Particularly I see how I ought to relate to all people including the woman on the temple steps, the man Zacchaeus, Peter after his denial, and the forgiveness from the cross. 

He is indeed Lord of all life. In Philippians 2, the passage says that he is Lord because he walked in our shoes so perfectly in obediently: “And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!”

He is exalted because he is the second Adam and the true man. In the face of Jesus, I saw God as in no other place. As a child, I made my pilgrimage to the manger, and I believed I saw God there. How easy it is to turn the picture off. My experience in a church as boy in Canada, where someone said to me, “Art you have turned off Jesus”. How easy it is to do this. In our church membership class, we ask what picture comes to mind when I say: “God is love”. All I really know of God I see in the face of Jesus Christ. 

I remember seeing the glory of skies coming down from Mount Hood bringing a group of young skiers down from Mount Hood. The beauty of the scarlet mountain. Who could deny God in the light of the such beauty? But if I had not known Jesus would I have said this? Then, there is the power of his love for us to say, “I love you so much that I gave my life for you on the cross that you might see and believe”. 

He was called “teacher”, and there was no one ever taught like him. Men who sat under the teacher began to think like him pray like him act like him and ultimately were willing to die like him. He called forth humanity as no one ever had before. Jesus was the teacher of Nicodemus, as we know he was the teacher come from God. 

He was the master of the parable. The message he left was the message of love. He loved people and left a dream in their hearts of a Kingdom they were willing to give their lives to build. It was a Kingdom where one could live in obedience to God and have forgiveness for others. He called forth the humanity in his followers. 

Finally, they call him Lord not because he was God, and indeed he was truly God, but because he was also truly man. When the early disciples wanted to know how forgiving they must be, they remembered his forgiveness on the day of the cross. When they wanted to know how dedicated they should be, they looked to the one obedient until death. He was God’s true humanity. He showed what men could be like, man in fellowship with God, man a son of God. 

I find he stands supremely alone in my life. I could not go on, if I did not know his forgiveness, “thy sins be forgiven”. When I am in closest touch with him, I find the most power in my life. His giving me a dream big enough to live for. His giving me an intimacy with my heavenly father to which I can give my life. 

He stands as a rebuke to weakness, but he never leaves me in weakness. As I reach out my hand to him, I find myself accepted by him. My hand is made strong. Christ is supreme! 

The Christian theologian, Leslie Weatherhead, believed in the divinity of Christ, in that Jesus had a special relationship to God, indeed an incarnation of God. Preaching in India to a congregation, who had never heard about Christ, a Hindu man said to him, “Sir I have known him all my life, but now you have given me a name”. Helen Keller when she finally learned to receive messages, she was told about Jesus. She replied, “I knew there must be someone like that”. A member of our church recently said, “What would I do without Christ?” 

Christ stands supremely alone. There is no Salvation in anyone else at all, for there is no other name under heaven granted to us by which we may receive Salvation. 

Have you really received him? Have you let him in? 

He wakes desires in you will never forget! He shows you stars you have never seen before. He makes you share with him for evermore, the burden of the world’s divine regret. 

How wise were you were to open not, and yet how poor you are if you should answer not and turn him from the door? 

Much of our love is conditional: 

Parents: “I will love you if you obey!” 
Lovers: “I will love you if you fulfill my need!” 

Where, Agapao is a Greek for love in its purest form. It is love with no strings attached. It means to love unconditionally, and sacrificially to love as God loves sinners and the way he loves his Son. Agapao is a verb. It means love that is an action by choice, not emotion.

Chapter 8 of Romans is perhaps the most theological in the New Testament, where Paul discusses God’s love in Christ.

Beginning at Verse 18 

“I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.”

The earth here is endowed with consciousness. The whole of creation is waiting for its liberation. The Jewish thought of the time was that the present age of sin’s dominion would change in the age to come. The day of the Lord will be the coming of the New Age, where a there will be a new and renovated earth. 

From ancient Jewish writing, the earth is a universal mother. She shall give to the mortals her best fruit and countless store of corn, wine and oil. Yea, from heaven shall come a sweet draught of luscious honey. The trees shall yield their proper fruits, and there will be rich flocks of cattle, lambs and sheep. He will cause sweet foundations of white milk to burst forth. And, the cities shall be full of good things and the earth’s fields rich. Neither shall there be any sword throughout the land or battle din. Nor shall the earth be convulsed anymore with deep drawn groans. No wars shall be anymore, nor shall there be any more drought throughout the land, nor famine, nor hail, nor havoc among the crops. 

Verse 19 – Eager Expectation

“For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God;”

The ancient Greek word apokaradokia means eager expectation. The word refers to the attitude of the person who scans the horizon with his head eagerly thrust forward, eagerly searching the distance for the first signs of the dawn break, for the glorious future of God for the world. For Paul, life not is not weary nor defeated waiting. Life is a throbbing with vivid expectation. The keynote of life is hope, not despair. 

Verse 22

“We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now;”

This verse refers to the birth pangs of the Mother. Mother earth is groaning in birth pangs to give birth to the new day. We too are groaning for our bodies to be set free. 

Verse 26 

“Likewise, the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.”

When we do not even know the future for which we groan, the spirit comes to our help in our weakness. The spirit groans through our dreams and hopes that will bring in the new day, with a God who is in the tune with us and who recognizes the new day. 

Verse 28 to 30 

“We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew, he is also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the first-born among many brethren. And those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified.”

In every painful experience, God is working on our side to bring about the Shalom, the good future. God is still on schedule to bring in his and our new future. The God who works on our side is the one who did not spare his own son. 

Verse 31

“What then shall we say to this? If God is for us, who is against us?  He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, will he not also give us all things with him?”

This is a reference to to Genesis 22 verse 16:

^“And the angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time from heaven, and said, “By myself I have sworn, says the Lord, because you have done this, and have not withheld your son, your only son.”

It is the Yahweh God who speaks. Because you have done this, because you have not refused me your son, I will shower blessings on you and make your descendants as the stars of the heavens and the grains of the sands on the seashore. You always love, and loyalty is shown by his not refusing his son but giving him for the life of the world. 

Verse 35

“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?” 

Nothing therefore can come between us and the love of Christ: Neither death nor life. In life we live with him. In death we die with him and are resurrected. Death is not the end, because of Gods loving act in Christ. It becomes God’s door to the fullness of eternal life. 

Verses 38 and 39 – No Angels

“For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers.”

Angels for Jews and Paul are grudgingly hostile to humans, because the Angels feel angry that God created us. They did not want to share God with anyone, and they begrudged humanity for its creation and our share in God. 

When God appeared on Sinai to cut his covenant with Israel, the Angels were there. They felt their nose is pushed in. They were even supposed to have assaulted Moses as he went up to the mountain to meet God. But no grudging Angel can separate us from the love of God: Not any power, nor height nor depth. 

Verse 39 – Hupsoma and Bathos

“Nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

The concept of Hupsoma and Bathos come from Greek. Hupsoma means to elevate a thing. In Astrology, Hupsoma is a time when the star is at its highest influence.  Bathos means an extreme depth. In Astrology, Bathos is when a star was at its lowest and waiting to rise and to put its influence on a person. For the Wisemen, “We have seen his star in the rising sky!” No fates, no star influence, no height or depth can separate us from the love of God.

Jeremiah 31 verse 3

This verse is also a reference to Jeremiah 31 verse 3:

Thus says the Lord:
“The people who survived the sword
    found grace in the wilderness;
when Israel sought for rest,
     the Lord appeared to him from afar.
I have loved you with an everlasting love;
    therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.

The Yahweh God appeared to him (Israel) and says, “I have loved you with an everlasting love. So, I am constant in my love for you.”

Sacre – To Make Holy

We must reclaim the theory of God, from the angry God of the Middle Ages, who is waiting at the least provocation to cast his humanity into Hell, to a God of everlasting love. Can we be God’s loving people in the world? Can we bring some constancy to love spelled out in our time? We who have been baptized in our time, can we be baptized in love? To our families and our children, I will love you with an everlasting love? 

Let the beauty of Jesus be seen in me. All his wonderful passion and purity. “O thou spirit divine and all my nature refine. Till the beauty of Jesus be seen in me.” 

Teilhard de Chardin – The Last Word 

“Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”

Matthias Grunewald’s Paintings of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection are among the greatest portrayals of this theme Among all the masterpieces hanging in the galleries of the world. Yet there has always been a mystery about these paintings. He seems to use such a different figure for the crucified and the resurrected Christ.

His portrayal of the crucified Christ is heart-rending. After you have looked at the picture, you can never forget the destitution and dereliction of the crucified. His whole body is covered with sores and welts. His fingers are gnarled, and pain racked. His feet are twisted and bent by the heavy nails. His muscles are pulled tight with agony and suffering. His head hangs limp, and his face is deprived of any marks of life. Here is humanity crushed into the inhumanity of cruel death.

How different is the Christ of resurrection portrayed on the other side of the panel? This is a strong and handsome Christ, altogether different from the body upon the cross. The nail-print in the center of his hands seems to add to their beauty. His feet too bear the marks of the nails, but they seem to radiate with an iridescent light as they seem to carry him on the wings of victory.

His robe of death has been turned into a mantle of majesty and regal splendor. His eyes seem to flash with power mingled with love. The stone is rolled away, and the tomb is empty. Guards are prostrate with fear — dazzled into blindness by the glory of his splendor. The background seems to be Golgotha — a mere shadow paling in the splendor of the aura of divine light that surrounds him like a gigantic halo. Underneath this picture is the inscription: “I am he that liveth and was dead; and, behold, I am alive forevermore.”

Just recently scholars and researchers discovered the meaning of this great contrast between the figures of the Christ. Grunewald had been commissioned by Guido Guersi, the precept of the Monastery of the Anionites, to paint these two pictures for the altar in the chapel of the monastery hospital. The Hospital specialized in treating epileptics and those with blood and skin diseases. Before beginning their medical treatment, the patients were brought to the altar to contemplate the possibility of partaking in a miracle as they saw the body of the Christ covered with sores, and then transformed into the shining risen Christ. 

Has not Grunwald caught the heart of the drama of the story of Good Friday and Easter? Have you ever stood for a long moment at the foot of the cross on Golgotha’s hill? You look up into the face of a man who was done to death by his fellow men, because they could not stand his goodness. Pontius Pilate seemed to sum it up so well when he said: “I find no fault in him. Take him out and crucify him.” All the hostility of mankind seemed to be directed towards him. Greed and envy seemed to be the hammers that drove the nails. Lust and avarice were the nails that held him to that tree. Perverted authority drove the spear into his side, as if to further repudiate his lordship. When he died, sin had done to him more than it had done to any other man. Never has lust, greed, or any other tool of Satan ever done such a good job in destroying man.

All Hell was let loose on him. He steed in the sinner’s place— condemned and punished as no other man has ever been. “The chastise­ment of our peace was upon him,” said the prophet. He was despised and rejected by men. Ultimately, he drank that cup to such bitter dregs that he felt as though even his God and Father had forsaken him. We could never be so bad, but we could feel he tasted all this and more for us.

But the drama does not end with the darkness that covered the earth at high noon on that first Good Friday. Oh, I suppose there was light the next day. I am sure the disciples and the beloved women never knew that the sun shone. The darkness of bereavement and the memory of his deep agony had shut out the light. How dark it must have been when Mary started out for the tomb that morning. 

Isn’t it strange that Christianity should center in a cemetery?

Perhaps it is not so strange. It was Sigmund Freud who talked about two basic drives that dominate man’s whole life: Eros the will to live and Thanatos the will to die. When a child is born, he is all Eros — he wants to live – he fights to live. Soon, however, Thanatos, the will to die, comes in to challenge the will to live. Then, these two drives struggle for power. Finally, Eros, the will to live gives way to Thanatos the will to die — man is born ultimately for this. Man, ultimately ends in a cemetery. 

This is the part of the meaning of Good Friday. But the story does not end there. Have you ever walked with Mary as she walked down the dark and lonely lane that led to the sepulcher? Her mind was filled with thoughts of his death and her bereavement. What about the Heavy stone? Who would take it away that she could anoint his body for the last time as a symbol of her love and devotion to him? She certainly was not prepared to find things any different than she had left them the day before.

The first rays of light from the rising sun burst through the darkness to reveal the stone rolled away from the mouth of the sepulcher. As the dawn dispelled the darkness of the interior of the tomb, she was amazed to see the slab empty and the grave clothes folded neatly where he had lain. It seemed so incredible — first she could only think they had taken him away. Was not the crucifixion enough? Must they be even be so cruel, so hatefully and spitefully cruel to steal even the body of their loved one away? It was then that she heard the soft step by her side. She thought it was the gardener. “If you have taken him away, tell me where you have laid him.”

Then it was he who spoke to her: “Mary.” For the moment, the sun seemed to burst in upon her blinding her eyes. Then, she saw him. “Raboni” – “Master!” It was only for a moment, then he was gone. It was enough.

Rushing up the path she met Peter and John. They too were coming to mourn at his sepulcher. But now their mourning is turned into triumphant joy. “He is risen! He is risen!” come see the place where the Lord lay.

This is the Gospel in a nutshell. Paul could say: “If Christ be not risen, then our preaching is in vain, and we are still in our sins.” If Christ had not risen, Good Friday would be Bad Friday — indeed it would be Black Friday. Sin would have reigned unto death at Golgotha. Hell would have been in central. The battle of mankind would have been lost. Man’s story would end in a graveyard — as the ground slowly closes in upon his body. “From dust he came, and to dust he would return.” But here is the Good news from the graveyard. “He is Risen – Christ is Risen!” The whole witness is set aflame on that Easter morning by the assurance that he is alive again — and reigning.

Oscar Cullman has so well pointed up the difference between the Greek idea of immortality and the Christian idea of eternal life, when he compares the death of Socrates with the death of Jesus. You remember Socrates drank the poisonous hemlock, because he felt it would release him from the fetters of the body. Death was his great friend freeing his soul from the prison house of the body. How different with Jesus Christ. On Golgotha he came into mortal conflict with man’s great enemy death. He defanged him and took out his sting. The venom of death poured out its strength upon the ground. Death was defeated, vanquished and destroyed. He became the Lord of life. Because he lives, we too shall live.

This is the good news. Shout it from the housetops this Easter day. He is risen. Death is vanquished. Life has triumphed. And that life is for us. “And I give unto them eternal life and they shall never perish.”

This is the way Mildred N. Hoyer put it in her poem:

The Risen Christ

How silently the Easter dawn unfurls 
Upon the earth — soundless 
As his hand, Omnipotent, foiling 
Away the stone before the tomb.

See Christ steep forth, embodiment 
Of all that cannot be destroyed,
The Lord of Life, Light, Truth, and Love
Restorer of man’s faith and hope.

Now is Christ risen from the dead!
Rejoice! Let those who worship 
At an empty tomb, bestir themselves;
Today He lives – He loves.

The drama of the Prodigal Son is called the greatest short story in the world. Under Jewish law, the father was not free to leave his property as he liked. The elder son received two-thirds of the father’s property, and the younger son received one-third. It was by no means unusual for a father to distribute his estate before he died, if he wished to retire from the management of his affairs. 

There is a certain heartlessness about the request of the younger son. The younger son is in effect saying, “Give me now the part of the estate that I will get anyway when you die and let me get out of this place.” The father did not argue. He knew if the younger son was ever to learn, he must learn the hard way. He gave him his request. Without delay, the younger son got his share of the property and left home. He soon ran through the money and finished up feeding pigs, a job forbidden to a Jew because the law said, “Cursed be he who feeds swine.”

At this point, the son sees the error of his ways, and the biblical story says, “He came to himself.” This realization indicates that one who is estranged from his father is estranged from himself. He decides that his father’s hired servants have a better shake in the world than he has. He decides it is time to repent from the error of his ways, go back home and ask his father to give him a job as a servant. 

When he comes down the road, his father spots him and runs out to meet him. The prodigal son begins his planned speech, when the father breaks in before he gets out the first sentence. The father calls his servants to get his world-worn son some new clothes, put new shoes on his feet, put a ring on his finger, and prepare a great feast to welcome the son back to the family.

While the party is going on, the older brother returns from the field. He hears the music and the sound of festivities and suspects what is going on. He asks his servants “what goes”? They tell him his wayward brother has returned, and his father has thrown a big wingding for him. The older brother says: “Son of a gun father, you never gave me a party. This bum of a brother of mine returns and you throw him a big party.” When the father hears the elder brother’s complaint, he says to him: “Now don’t be silly. Everything I have is yours. But your brother was dead and is alive again. Isn’t that worth celebrating?”

Now this story has an obvious interpretation. The fifteenth chapter of Luke where this story appears begins in this way: One day when many tax collectors and other outcasts came to listen to Jesus, the Pharisees and the teachers of the law started grumbling. “This man welcomes outcasts and even eats with sinners.” It is in response to this grumbling and criticism that the Gospel writer Luke has, Jesus tell the three parable-stories of the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin and the Lost Son. 

The traditional interpretation of this story traditionally has the younger son dubbed the Prodigal. The story represents all of us who have strayed away from God. The Loving Father goes down to the mailbox every day looking for letter from his son and then peers down the road to see if he is perchance coming home. This loving Father is God. In this setting, the elder brother is the church member who becomes jealous when the Father makes a big fuss over the returning prodigal.

We can look at this story in a different setting. Luke is a Gentile. He is writing this letter to make the Gospel story respectable to the Gentile world. At the time he is writing the letter, there are many Gentiles who are coming into the church. In fact, they are coming in with such numbers they are gradually outnumbering the Jewish Christians. The balance of power is shifting to them the new members. The Jewish Christians are getting vary upset that these heathen Gentiles are coming into the Church and taking control. The older brother represents the Jewish Christian, who is angry at all the attention given to these prodigal Gentiles, who are getting all the rave notices from the Heavenly Father.

Recently, I attended the Earl Lectures at Berkeley. The main lecturer was Dr. James Breech, who has centered his whole life on the study of the parables and stories that Jesus told. He compared these stories with over five thousand stories told by others in the ancient world. He concluded that the stories Jesus told are different from those told by all others in the ancient world. Jesus does not interpret his stories and they are open ended, so they can fit many life situations. The reader is left to make his or her own interpretation of the story in their own life setting.

James Breech teaches at York University in Toronto, where was greatly influenced another Canadian, Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan was one of the “in” writers of the 1960’s, writing in his book “The Medium is the Message.” McLuhan asserts that all great literature is open-ended, and the writer leaves the reader to participate in the creation of the story by fleshing out the story and making his or her interpretation.

With this in mind, I would like to suggest another interpretation of this Prodigal story in another setting. Think of the characters as they if were portrayed by everyday people. Think first of the Father. Was he really “too good” to his younger son? Should he have given the son his inheritance, when he knew that the younger son could not handle so much power? Should we call this story the story of the Prodigal Father? Was he too good to his younger son? Did he create a spoiled brat who was totally selfish and totally ego-centered?

However, as you look at the story, we must conclude that the younger son was not as stupid as he seemed to be. When he hit bottom, he had enough sense to analyze his situation, face the alternatives and make the right decision for his future. It is self-evident from the story that he made the right decision and he read his father well.

It is easy to overlook the older brother. He had a right to be teed off. His father had made such a fuss over his vagrant brother, when he returned after squandering all his inheritance. Was the father justified saying his son was dead and is alive again? From the story, it looks like the younger son was very much alive and very much in control of the situation all along. He seems to have called all the shots along the way.

Here is another interpretation of this story that fits our modern time. Look at the scenario where the Father is God the Creator. Think of the family farm the father owned, as the world that God gave to us. Think of the two sons as those who inherit the earth — that is “us” as its inhabitants. Looking at the attitude of the two boys, there are two different attitudes towards our world of things.

The older brother’s attitude is that the family farm is his inheritance to hold for himself. His greatest pride is to produce and make a profit, and to use the goods the father has entrusted to him for his own ends and aggrandizement. Today, he would be looked at as the successful businessperson, who keeps his or her nose to the grindstone, works hard and is very successful. He is completely teed off at both his father for giving his younger brother his inheritance and for his young brother for squandering his inheritance. The younger brother represents so much of our world that uses their inheritance given by God to their own ends and for their own pleasure. The younger son represents so many in our world who live by the old Epicurean adage: “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”

Let’s look at another story in our New Testament lesson, the story of the Lost Sheep. The shepherd has brought his or her sheep to the fold for the evening. I learned while in the Sinai Desert that the shepherd knows each of the sheep by name. He normally stands at the gate of the sheepfold and holds his staff across the gate about eighteen inches from the ground. In this way, each sheep must jump over the stick to enter the fold. This enables the shepherd to discover the lame or the sick lamb or sheep. When all the sheep are in, the shepherd notices one of the sheep is missing. The shepherd locks the door of the sheepfold with the ninety-nine safely inside.

The shepherd goes out into the night in the dangerous desert seeking the lost sheep. He hears the tragic call of the lost sheep. He follows the sound, until he finds the sheep, perhaps hurt or imprisoned in a crevasse in the mountainous desert. He puts the sheep on his shoulder and comes home rejoicing.

Now, think of this story in the same netting as that of the story about the Prodigal Son. Here the lost sheep is the person or persons in our society who have fallen between the cracks. They are the ones who are injured or lost and left in the empty desert world to die.

Now, look at these two stories as parables for our time. We are living in a time when we have been entrusted by God with a family farm, whose resources have never been equaled in all the history of humankind. We have been part of a generation that has unlocked many of the secrets of our world for our own enrichment and aggrandizement. We are probably the wealthiest generation the world has ever known. Our father has handed us a farm, whose production capabilities that are almost beyond comprehension. 

In a real sense, the bulk of the farm has fallen into the hands of the elder brother. The elder brother represents the highly competitive entrepreneur who kept his nose to the grindstone and is a great success. He has done everything our society has demanded of him or her. However, by being a success, the elder brother has used up much more of the world’s goods than his rightful lot. We can liken our nation to the elder brother. We have been the most industrious nation the world has ever known. We have amassed more wealth and power than any other nation. In fact, we have become drunk with power and feel we should be the power brokers for the world.

There is also a part of us that is prodigal. We have spent much of our inheritance on riotous living. At times, there seems to be no middle road between the industrial tycoon, the successful businessman or woman, or the worker who is all work and no play, who smugly sits in judgment on the rest of the world and looks at it as a prodigal brother. Then, there are those who spend their inheritance in riotous living — the “play-people” who live totally for pleasure. We see this in the entertainment industry that has become the greatest industry in our nation.

Then, there are the lost sheep — those who fall between the cracks and got lost. I have been very aware of this, since reading Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. She tells how as a three-year-old, her father and mother split up. The father took her and her four-year-old brother to the train station and shipped them off to his mother, herself a single mother in Stamps, Arkansas. Maya’s only identification on the train was a wristband that had on it “To whom it may concern?” She was raised by the grandmother in a tragic setting of rejection that was almost slavery. She called the grandmother “mother”. The grandmother cared but was too poor and too busy to do much about it. Maya was continually put down by those around her and called the ugly duckling. She had her ego and self-image constantly crushed. She became pregnant as a girl. It was only after her child was born and she looked at the beautiful baby that was her flesh and bones she really realized she was somebody.

These stories are the parables of our time.