Lester Start’s Works

1Sermon preached by Dr. Lester Start

on September 30, 1979

at First Baptist Church

315 W. Michigan Ave.

Kalamazoo, Michigan

“SYMPATHY”

Surely one of the most poignant verses in all the Bible is our text for today, Job’s plaint: “Have mercy upon me, have pity upon me, 0 ye my friends; for the hand of God hath touched me” (Job 19:21). Here is Job, a righteous man, a good man, suffering all kinds of terrible afflictions; and here are his friends giving him cold comfort when he is reaching out for sympathy and understanding. No wonder his misery comes out in his anguished cry, “Have pity on me, have pity on me!”. “Why do you persecute me as God, and are not satisfied with my flesh?”

Why, indeed, is Job comfortless? Why are his friends notorious as Job’s comforters, those who give not comfort, but judgement? It is not that they are cold or indifferent. They came to Job when they heard of his affliction; they wept and rent their garments when they saw his dreadful state; and then they sat with him in silence for seven days and seven nights, and as the text goes, “none spake a word unto him; for they saw that his grief was very great.”

This is hardly the action of unfeeling friends. And, incidentally, when a friend’s grief is very great, sometimes the best thing we can do is to sit in silence with him, to show support. Job’s friends showed support, but then they tried to understand his afflictions and they tried to help Job to understand his afflictions, too — and, of course, they came right up against the old Jewish dogma: all suffering is the result of sin.

Thus their procedure of comforting was to try to see what Job must have done to incur such misery. Somehow, somewhere Job must have sinned, and sinned dreadfully, to suffer so. And so the book develops, the friends one by one saying in effect, “Job, you must have sinned — you must repent,” and Job proclaiming, maintaining his innocence. Job is even willing to take his case to court — to challenge God himself to show where ho has sinned, to maintain his innocence. Of course, this itself borders on the presumptuous sin of questioning God - - and this is when the Lord answers Job from the whirlwind, and asks him where he was when he, God, set the world in order. And Job, then covers his mouth with his hand and realizes he has gone too far.

There is so much in this marvelous story of Job. It is clearly raising a question about the old dogma — that suffering is the result of sin. Job is introduced as a righteous man, yet he is afflicted. The dogma is challenged. But there is some evidence to show that Job may not be absolutely guiltless. And this is pretty good dogma. Sin results in suffering.

And if it is the case that some suffering cannot be accounted for this way, I am sure we’d agree that if we could eliminate all the suffering caused by human sin, whatever was left wouldn’t be so much to worry about.

I don’t propose to argue this dogma, however. I don’t think it accounts for all suffering; it is clear Jesus didn’t think so either, if we consider the story in John of the man born blind. Remember the question? It was, “Who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind?” And Jesus’ answer, “Neither sinned, neither this man nor his parents: but that the works of God should be manifest in him”. Jesus’ concern was not to account for suffering but to do something about it.

The real problem is not so much accounting for suffering. The real problem is doing something about it. An oriental teaching says when one is struck by an arrow, it is not necessary to learn who shot it, or from what direction, etc. It is necessary to pull it out. We can ponder why there is evil and suffering in the world. And we can find many answers. Human sin caused by human freedom accounts for much. Free moral choice can be misused to choose the evil side. Suffering comes from that. Then, too, life is a process of growth and growing can be painful. We begin life in ignorance, weakness, and have to grow with some pain to maturity. We are given an unfinished world and must struggle to make it better. Moreover, the world is run by law. There are laws of nature, and sometimes we try to break them, and break ourselves against them instead. Suffering comes from that. Finally, our lives are intermeshed. We don’t exist like bottles set in the rain - we flow into one another. Our actions mutually affect each other. We are members one of another. We do suffer because of the sins of others — and innocently.

All of these factors help account for suffering — and the interesting thing is, we probably wouldn’t want to change any one of then, if we could. Moral freedom can be misused, cause evil, but it is the glory of man. Growth can be painful, but it is the only way to mastery and achievement. We couldn’t live in a world without law abidingness. And if we suffer from the sins of others, we benefit from the good that good people do as well.

But again, the real problem is not — how to account for suffering but what to do about suffering when we must face it. What can we do about it? One thing we can do is to realize we are not alone. We are in a community of shared suffering. There is a story in the Buddhist tradition that illustrates this poignantly.¹ It’s called the parable of the mustard seed. A young woman called Krisha had an only child, an infant boy, and he died. In her grief she carried the dead child to all her neighbors, asking them for medicine to cure her child, and the people said, “She has lost her senses. The boy is dead”. But one good neighbor took pity on her and said, “I cannot give you any medicine, but I know a physician who might help. Go to Shakyamuni, the Buddha.” So Krisha went to Buddha, and cried, “Lord and Master, give me medicine that will cure my baby!” And Buddha answered: “I need a handful of mustard seed.” And the young woman, in joy, promised to get it right away. But Buddha added: “The mustard seed must be taken from a house where no one has lost a child, a husband, a parent, or a friend.

Krisha now went from house to house, and the people pitied her and said, “Here is mustard seed; take it!” But when she asked, “Did a son or daughter, father or mother die in your family?” they answered and said, “Alas, the living are few, but the dead are many. Do not remind us of our deepest grief.”

And so Krisha became weary and hopeless, and sat down by the wayside and watched the lights of the city as they flickered up and were extinguished. At last darkness of night reigned everywhere. And she considered the fate of mankind, that their lives flicker up and are extinguished. And she thought, “How selfish I am in my grief! Death is common to all. Yet, even in this valley of desolation there is a path that leads one who has surrendered all selfishness to immortality.”

We are not alone. In a very literal and basic way we express sympathy - in the sense that we suffer with others. And this is what sympathy means - suffering together. Buddhism is called the religion of infinite compassion, because it teaches that all men are caught in a world of suffering, and that we should do nothing to add to the suffering of others and compassion means to suffer together - as Job’s friends did at the beginning. Our suffering is unbearable when we are alone — but, this is caused by our affirmation of our ego-selves over the awareness of others. As Krisha came to see — her grief was not the only grief in the world. Others suffered, too.

John Donne has said this so beautifully in his line, “No man is an island, entire of itself”. We are intimately involved with one another. Says Donne, “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind and therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.”

And yet, how hard it is for us really to sense this. How dearly we want to believe we are immune. And there is a common experience we should all confess that shows this, and that is an inner stab of pleasure or relief when we hear of the misfortune of another, misfortune that for the moment we have escaped. The old Latin poet, Lucretius, writes, “It is a pleasure to stand on shore, when stormy winds whip up the sea, and to behold the struggles another is enduring. Not that it pleases us to watch another suffer, but it is a joy to observe evils from which we, ourselves, are free,” We know we are wrong when we feel this way. We are not immune. We are involved in mankind.

We are involved with one another. And sympathy is enjoined because we all ultimately share in a community of suffering — we suffer together –we should be, therefore, compassionate. This is the Buddhist view.

But, this is not the Christian view. There is more to life than fellow suffering and simply enduring suffering together. And the Buddhist does not meditate entirely on the sufferings of life, either. No matter how fragile life is; how precarious our happiness might be, there is joy in the living of the present moment. Another Buddhist parable shows this wonderfully.²

A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine, and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him.

Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away at the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!

A pretty parable, and an important teaching. How important it is to seize the joy of the moment when it is offered — how important it is to savor life every moment we can, lest when we come to die we find we have not lived, And the Buddhists teach this –But; still their basic view seems to be that man is united in suffering in a common doom.

The Christian view is different. Man is united in a common redemption. Suffering is not something to be endured –suffering is something to be transformed by the redemptive power of God. Consider again the Gospel story of the man born blind. This suffering is not something to be accounted for by citing his sin, or his parents’. No, this blindness is the occasion, says Jesus, of the works of God being manifest in him. And Jesus proceeds to heal him to the marvel of all. And all the man could say when questioned how it was he came to be healed, was: ‘I know not. One thing I know: that whereas I was blind, now I see.”

What does this mean for us? When we see the suffering of another this is not the occasion to feel a glow of satisfaction that it is he and not we that has this misery. When a Job cries out, “Have pity on me, have pity on me, 0 ye my friends,” we are called upon to express true sympathy. This is not the occasion for judgment — but for sympathy, fellow-feeling. On one level this means recognition of our common humanity, our common suffering, and so enjoy compassion, fellow suffering, as with Job’s friends at. first.

But, the Christian love expressed in sympathy has a higher purpose than this. The Christian is committed to a God who, through His Son, suffered on a cross, -sharing the suffering of man, suffering with man, for man’s redemption. This is the deepest meaning of sympathy — literally to suffer the agonies of another, to bear the burden of suffering. And the Christian conviction is that this suffering on the cross is transformed into victory, peace, and a new life in the spirit which we share as we take up the cross of Christ.

This is the mystery of God’s redemptive love through Christ: love redeems, transforms, liberates by suffering with another. When we express Christian sympathy in the spirit and manner of Christ, we are sharing in Christ’s redemptive love, His suffering and creative power. And this is how we respond to God’s love to us, His gift to salvation. We love because He first loved us.

Sympathy, then, is no casual reminder to be nice. It touches on the highest mystery of God’s redemptive love, a love, as Christians, we are called upon to express creatively in the lives our lives must touch. In sympathy we share in expressing the power of the Cross and live in the Spirit of Christ. May the works of God be manifest through us.

PRAYER:

Eternal God, Creator of this great and awesome universe, with its wonder and beauty and mystery — 0 Thou Creator and Sustainer of our spirits with all their promise of good — or evil, we pause in the midst of our busy lives, to render Thee the tribute of our praise. For Thou, 0 God, are to be praised for the Goodness, the Truth, the Beauty and Love that surround us in spite of what we so often do that is evil, false, ugly or mean-spirited. We earnestly pray, 0 God, that by the inspiration of Thy spirit, we may live by the highest vision we know, and not by an understanding of our world that is limited by our fears.

We confess, 0 God, failures and shortcomings before Thee. We have found those hungry and thirsting for the milk of human kindness and understanding - and we fed them not. There have been those imprisoned in walls of loneliness and suffering, and we did little or naught to set then free. We have seen those injured by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and we made no effort to bind their wounds. And we have seen those naked before the winds of fear and anxiety, and we did not clothe them with a blanket of love. We have sought first the kingdom of this earth, and its unrighteousness, instead of seeking first things first, Thy Kingdom and its righteousness. We have been indifferent to Thy church. Help us to realize that we cannot have the fruits of faith unless we cultivate its roots in Thy law of love, unless we are faithful to Thee.

Reveal to us our true nature in Thee. Inspire us by the love of Christ that we may see in Him the true character of those created to be children of God. Above all, give us the vision to believe in Thy redemptive love and the spirit to express it in the lives our lives must touch, making us sensitive to the cry for love and understanding and mercy, so we may be worthy to be called the children of God. We pray in the Spirit of Thy Son.

1The Gospel of Buddha, by Paul Carus, Chicago, Open Court p. 186-7

2Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, a collection of Zen writings by Paul Reps, Doubleday p 22

1Sermon Preached by Dr. Lester Start

at First Baptist Church, Kalamazoo, Michigan

September 23, 1979

At Cooper Congregational, August 21, 1994

FREEDOM OF THE SPIRIT Romans 7:14 - end

The text is a famous one: “For the good I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.” This is the problem of morality according to Paul. We often talk as if the moral problem is not knowing what is right or wrong, good or evil. The real problem, though, as Paul says, and as we realize, is that we know what is good, but we don’t do it and we know what is evil and wrong and all too often we do it. Now why?

Paul’s answer seems to be this: if I do what I don’t want to do, then something is in the way of my will, and this is sin in me. Thus, not I but human personality, a split between the spirit (pneuma) and the flesh (sarx) so that, as the next verses clearly indicate, there are two principles or laws at work within us: - delight in God by the inner spirit of man, but warring against this is a principle at work in myself which brings me into subjection to sin.

Paul is credited with making this split between the spirit and the flesh, the mind and the body which has influenced all our later thought on the nature of the self. The result has been a suspicion of the body and its desires and a tendency to separate the spirit from the tomb of the body, the mind from the machinery of the body.

In all fairness to Paul this is going too far. Usually when he speaks of the flesh as in the phrase “according to the flesh”, he is referring to the human reality, the human point of view. When he speaks of living “in the flesh”, as when he says that “those in the flesh cannot please God”, he is referring to human nature made vulnerable to sin. Man’s nature is sinful because sin invades it and directs it. But the very recognition of this moral struggle acknowledges a law of God by the mind or spirit which is separate from that of the flesh, so that one can say, “not I, but sin in me.”

This is all according to Jewish belief, incidentally. Jews believed man had both good impulses and evil impulses. But man need not submit to evil impulses. God created the law of Moses so that men could know what was good and follow it and not fall into the power of evil impulses. Knowledge of the law would save men, and Judaism was built on this belief.

But what Paul is telling us here is that it doesn’t work. Knowledge is not enough. The law is powerless to save; it simply points out my sin when the good I would do I do not and that which I would not, I do. It is an ancient problem. Other cultures recognized it. Said the Roman Stoic Epictetus of man: ” What he wants he does not do and what he does not want he does.” And Ovid, the Roman poet: “I see and approve the better but I follow the worse.”

Some find it a problem that Paul is saying this. The passage seems autobiographical. But how could Paul say this after his saving experience of Christ? Clearly it must refer to long ago. But the passage is too vivid to be put aside this way. And, besides, this attitude reflects a misunderstanding about those who live by faith. It is not the case that they are always serene. Faith is a dynamic affirmation over doubts, dread, and the voices of evil assailing us. Even Jesus struggled against temptation said “Get thee behind me, Satan,” and experienced a sense of desertion in the Garden. Augustine speaks of struggling against temptation. In a very human prayer, he said, “0 Lord, make me pure and chaste, but not yet.” Pascal speaks of the heart of faith fighting the sense of meaninglessness that surrounds life. St. John of the Cross, the great mystic, speaks of the dark night of the soul. And Martin Luther is said to have thrown his inkpot at the devil — however we interpret it, this is not the act of a serene, unchallenged spirit. And Paul had his thorn in the flesh. No, the only ones who pretend everything is sweetness and light once Jesus is encountered are those commercial evangelists on TV with their slick pitch and unctuous plastic smiles. The Christian, Paul knew, struggles with sin.

Paul struggled, I am sure, as do we all. Sin need not take a crude form as in the gross sexual sins usually stressed. There are the sins of enmity, and division, and malice, as well, which can take respectable appearing forms, as we know.

But I suspect Paul did not have to struggle against these kinds of sin, although he clearly saw them in his churches. One senses another kind of problem when one reads between the lines of his letters. Here is Paul with this great vision for the Church of Christ, and here are the people misunderstanding, misbehaving, developing divisions and heresies and what all. How must he have felt? Even the Jerusalem church was alienated. Despair, disillusionment, depressions, a sense of lack of appreciation, inadequacy, black despondency must have assailed him.

Now we don’t usually look at these as sins. They aren’t directed at others. But they are directed against the person. They are destructive of the human spirit in oneself. They work to diminish the sense of human worth. They try to destroy the spirit Christ came to save. It is just as bad to judge oneself as no good as to judge another — perhaps worse, because we feel more sure of the nearer judgment.

What I am saying is that these black moods are destructive of the creative human spirit and they are sin, no less worse because they are directed at the human spirit in oneself rather than in others. And this sin of discouragement and defeat may well be the thorn in the flesh Paul complains of.

But how are we to be free of the law of sin? Specifically, how do we free ourselves from the black moods of depression and defeat, as well as the sins of anger, enmity, malice, etc. that positively assail us? How do we achieve a freedom of the spirit?

The answer is so obvious it is overlooked - - we must simply assert our freedom. We need to be reminded of the teaching of Genesis, that man is made in the image and likeness of God, and as such, shares in the creative power of God which is precisely the freedom of the spirit. Perhaps we simply need to recognize the obvious fact that in a certain sense we are already free in that we are responsible for our moods and our actions.

Man is freedom and “We are condemned to be free,” says Sartre, the contemporary French thinker. This is not something to be argued but something to be faced. We like to say that we are the product of our environment, our heredity, our genes; we have all kinds of sciences pretending to explain how man’s actions are determined; biological determinism, sociological determinism, economic determinism, psychological determinism, political determinism. But all of these are excuses. We believe them because we want an excuse for what we are, but we are without excuse. So we blame society, our upbringing, our nature, anything –”Everyone has some weakness,” says a character in one of Thurber’s stories, “Wickedness is mine.” — because we want to flee our freedom, flee our responsibility. And this applies to our moods, our attitudes.

We often talk as if moods just come, like a cloud, or dusk at the end of the day — they just happen. “I got angry,” we say; or, “I became terribly depressed,” — or “This awful sense of inadequacy came over me, ” or “This dreadful sense of hopelessness and loneliness hit me.”

But this isn’t what happens, says Sartre. Anger doesn’t just appear. We make ourselves angry — we see red, we talk loudly, shout, whip up a real rage — but we do it. And we make ourse1ves sad, too, in a similar way. We meditate on the mournful until we develop the mood. And we can focus on all the reasons why we should feel inadequate and find it so; we cultivate depressing thoughts and make ourselves depressed. We do it. Believing makes it so –. There is nothing out there, says Sartre, that can determine the human spirit except our freedom. Blaming events is a cop-out. No matter how terrible the situation, how great the pressure and a typical theme in Sartre is the situation of a man in the underground in France being tortured by the Gestapo to give up vital information –no matter how extreme the situation, one can always say no. If one says he cannot stand the torture another moment, he must realize he is the one that determines this, that he couldn’t hold out another minute, ten seconds. Negation is the fundamental form of freedom. The child who throws his cereal is expressing his first awareness of freedom of saying no. One can always say no.

Strong stuff, this, and hard doctrine in a secular philosophy. But it bears a curious relation to the theological principle of guilt. Both insist on our responsibility. And responsibility implies freedom. There is the claim we are free from external determinism, definition — we can always say no, whatever the temptation, coercion — we are responsible –guilty-. But there is here no sense of the freedom for which our lives might find a sense of direction or fulfillment. Dostoevski says somewhere, “If there were no God everything would be permitted.” Sartre says there is no God and everything is permitted. There is no guide and his liberty is no liberation.

A similar teaching is found in the ancient Stoics who flourished in Rome before and during the early days of Christianity. The Stoics taught that it is not the event, but our judgement on the event that spells the difference between serenity and misery, peace and anguish, happiness and despair. Failure happens to all of us — but not everyone needs to be defeated by it. It can be the occasion for a new beginning. That’s up to you. Sickness comes to all. Loss and bereavement come to all, but one need not be destroyed by it. One can convince oneself that all joy is gone forever. Or cherished golden memories can be woven into the fabric of on-going life. That’s up to you. Here is how our freedom is expressed.

Again, the Stoics taught wherever a man lives, he can live well. Paul expresses this, too, when he says, “I have learned in whatsoever state I am, to be content.” Life is like a stage, as Shakespeare later said. We are called upon to play many different roles. If a long one, then long. If short, then short. Illustrious or humble, noble or ordinary, our job is to play the role to the hilt. The choice of the role is up to the Playwright, God. This is Stoic teaching.

The Stoics were an impressive group. They taught that the world was ordered by a power they called logos, which means “reason or word”. This is the word found in the Gospel of John –”In the beginning was the Word.”

They said all men are fellow-citizens in one world under Zeus. Some taught that human slavery was wrong when Paul was saying that Christians should be kind to their slaves. Christianity embraced much of Stoic wisdom and ethics - but there was something it lacked. It taught responsibility and freedom, but not hope and creative affirmation. Its freedom, again, is best seen as assessing. guilt, responsibility. It is not yet an affirmation of liberation. It is not positive, creative. It is the wisdom of a world grown weary.

This is why Christianity triumphed over Stoicism. Triumph, not simple endurance, is the promise of Christianity. Not just responsibility and guilt, but a way to victory over the lower impulses is promised. And a new birth in the creative spirit of Christianity. Romans 8 continues: “There is, therefore, no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” There is a higher level of freedom than that suggested by our responsibility and guilt. By an identification with Christ we can assert the power of the spirit over the flesh and live in the spirit rather than by the weakness of the flesh. This means we can call upon the creative power of God in which we share to free us from our destructive moods and create a new spirit within us. This means we can be assured of the creative love of God to work with us, in us, in all things to bring about that which is good. No matter what the situation, there is the love of God through Christ to point the way. Not only then do we find the freedom of the spirit to mean we are responsible for what we are — but further that the Spirit of God, through the love of Christ, lifts us to an ever more creative mode of life. As Paul said, “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.”

Therefore, let us not sin against the human spirit in us by falling prey to dark moods. Let us see the wisdom of saying, when we feel down, “I’m not myself today,” — and look up to assert the true self. As Paul said, “Let us lay aside every weight and the sin which so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and perfector of our faith.”

“Finally, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honorable, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if there be any virtue, if there be any praise, think on these things, ” - and live in the freedom of the spirit.

PRAYER: Almighty God, Who makest the stars to move in their courses and yet, dost watch over the tiniest creature so that not one sparrow can fall without Thee, we praise Thee and give Thee thanks for the power which flows into our lives from Thee and for Thy protecting care which covers us in a blanket of love. We thank Thee for Thy gifts of truth, beauty, and goodness which can never die, even when men would drag Thy priceless gifts in the dust. We thank Thee for the inner voice of faith which assures us of Thy presence and power when we feel alone and powerless. And for the light of conscience which gives us a pencil-gleam guide through the confused darkness of human actions, we do give Thee thanks.

As we praise Thee for Thy gifts to the children of men, 0 God, help us to be worthy to receive these gifts. Teach us to follow the guide of the highest that is in us, and live a quality of life a little lower than the angels, rather than a little higher than the beasts, and so live as true children of God. Help us to follow the spirit that springs from the serenity of feeling the tidal pull of Thy love, and as we receive love from Thee, teach us to express this love to others, seeing in every life our lives touch another expression of Thy creative love. And help us, 0 God, to deal with our moods. Sober and humble us if we are filled with pride or indifference. But lift us if we are low in spirit. Above all, save us from the dark sins of despair and despondency. Teach us to measure ourselves by the highest we know and express. May we trust in our higher selves.

Teach us, 0 God, to consider others; make us slow to judge, ready to understand. When we feel annoyed with another, may we consider the burdens he may be laboring under, and sympathize. Heal us from the near-sightedness which keeps us interested only in our own well-being. Teach us to help and pray for our fellowmen, suffering because of the sins of mankind, sins in which we share. May we remember those in sickness, sorrow, doubt or despair and support them with our prayers and deeds, and so share in the light of Thy love and truth.

As we thus light candles in witness of Thy Presence in our lives, may we not be weary in well-doing because the light seems small, for its beams will travel far in the darkness. And as more and more lights are lighted, small though they be, may they merge to form a halo of light over all the world to dispel its darkness and illumine the very face of God.

We pray in the spirit of Thy Son.

Amen.

1What Can We Hope

Lester Start

September 16, 1979

First Baptist, Kalamazoo

Text: Romans 8: 24 “For we are saved by hope”

We read in that famous 13^th chapter of First Corinthians: “Now abideth faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love.” Faith, hope, and love are the three theological virtues. In the last two weeks we have talked about love and faith. Today I want to speak to you of hope - the most neglected of the three virtues. Somehow hope seems, then, without foundation, perhaps just wishful thinking, at least wish-projection. It seems to me, however, on reflection, that hope is intimately bound up with faith and love, that it is just as fundamental, and that in some sense it is a shining light that directs our faith and gives strength to love. As Paul says in Romans 8:24, “We are saved by hope.” or “We are saved in hope.” The text is ambiguous, but either reading indicates the priority of hope in the life of the Christian.

Immanuel Kant, the great 18^th century German philosopher, brought his great intellect to bear on three basic questions. They are: what can I know? What ought I to do? And what can I hope? In some way, I think these questions and his answers adumbrate or typify the theological virtues and their interrelationships. I don’t propose a philosophy lesson this morning. Kant’s answers involve three large books, but an outline of his answers is relevant to what I want to say.

Briefly, it is this. We can know the world of sense experience because our minds have active powers to organize our world of sense experience into scientific knowledge. But we cannot know what transcends our sense experience. “I have found it necessary,” said Kant, “to deny knowledge of God, freedom and immortality to make room for faith.” It is not knowledge in the moral sense, the sense of duty, which brings us to God. Religion is the recognition of duty as divine command. Its basic rule is love - to treat humanity always as an end and never as a means. God is a necessary presupposition of the moral sense, reached by a moral faith in a kingdom of ends that are the purposes of God to which the sense of duty relates.

His answers to the first two questions, “What can I know?”, and “What ought I to do?” leave us with a world of physical fact we can know and a world of moral purpose we can reach only by moral faith. But what of hope? Kant suggests there is a way of sensing purpose directly in the world, thus bringing the two worlds together, and giving us the basis of hope. Our first experience of this is in the sense of beauty, the aesthetic sense. For consider what we mean when we call something beautiful. We call attention to some meaning, some significance that transcends the sense experience itself. The beautiful sunset is more than an arrangement of colors - it suggests a glory, majesty, harmony, that gives a sense of a higher meaning. The beauty of a symphony is more than a sense of sound; the glorious music from this pipe organ suggests meanings, images, dreams, purposes that far transcend the physical sound. The beautiful and the sublime represent then the noumenal realm of God in the phenomenal world of sense and this is the basis of hope. We sense God in the world directly. No particular purposes of our own making are to be found in the beauty of the world - but a general sense of significance, a purposiveness without a specific purpose. In the same way, no personal desire is involved in the aesthetic appreciation. It is disinterested in the sense of not involving self-interest. That is why it calls out to be shared - and we all know the urgency of saying, “Oh come and look at the moon - it’s really beautiful tonight.” And the curious thing about aesthetic satisfaction is that we feel satisfied without being aware of a particular desire to be satisfied. This is evidence of a transcendent value sensed, a deeper meaning felt, awareness of a higher purpose; this is a way to begin to sense the purposes of God, and have hope that God is in the world with us. We have direct evidence of his purposes.

This suggests then, how we might be saved by hope, how hope brings together the world of knowledge that leads to faith, and the world of moral duty, the law of love, the kingdom of ends that express the purposes of God. The purposes of God are already visible.

Hope rests then on a conviction of the purposes of God in the world. It is thus related to faith. The Scripture lesson from Romans indicates very clearly the world view on which this hope was based. Quite simply put, it was this. There is the present age which is corrupt and an age to come to be ushered in by the Messiah when all our hopes will be fulfilled.

The present age is pictured as sharing in the original sin of man. Paul suggests that involuntarily nature is subjected to sin because of man. After Adam’s fall, God said to him, “Cursed is the ground because of you.” Instead of rich fruits, the niggardly earth will give forth thorns and thistles. This is a very oriental idea, incidentally. Ancient Chinese religion taught that there was a way of heaven, a moral order, a way of earth, a natural order, and a way of human affairs. When man follows heaven, nature is bountiful and peace and plenty reign. But when man violates the way of heaven, then naturae is subject to plagues, drought, or floods and misery prevails. Nature, then, is affected by human affairs and sin.

But the renovation of the earth, the revitalization of the world was a favorite Old Testament theme also. “Behold, I create new heavens and a new earth,” said Isaiah in the name of the Lord. The new world of Old Testament prophecy is one in which the wilderness will blossom as the rose, where rough places are made plain, where the lion shall lie down with the lamb, men forge their swords into pruning hooks and all shall proclaim the authority of God. Thus the shining hope of a new world fed their faith.

In the intertestimental period when the Jewish people were oppressed and persecuted and enslaved they dreamed the dream of a new world in especially vivid ways. As one of those pseudepigrapha puts it. (The Syballine Oracle):

“The trees shall yield proper fruits and there will be rich flocks, and kine, and lambs of sheep and kids of goats. God will cause sweet fountains of milk to burst forth. And the cities shall be full of good things, and the fields rich; neither shall there be any sword throughout the land or battle-din; neither shall the earth be convulsed anymore with deep-drawn groans. No war shall be any more, nor shall there be any more drought, or famine, or hail to wreak havoc on the crops.”

The hope of a renovated world so dear to the Jews, Paul is now proclaiming as a result of the redemptive work of God through Christ. And he imaginatively portrays nature as waiting expectantly for the new order and already expressing the creative power of God in working toward that new heaven and new earth.

And this of course is still true of man. Man has caught a sense of the redemptive power of God in Christ. In the experience of the Holy Spirit man has a foretaste of the world that might be, a kingdom ruled by the love of God. Now he longs for the realization of the promise revealed by God through His Son.

The hope is an old one - but nonetheless valid for all that. Perhaps it began with Noah. When God saved Noah and the ark from destruction He made a covenant with him that there would never be that kind of total destruction - and He set His seal with a rainbow in the clouds. And ever since the rainbow symbolizes the promise of God to bring sunlight out of darkness, creativity out of destruction, and hope out of despair.

The Christian hope that Paul reflects ties in with this ancient Biblical conviction, that there is God at work in the world, that His purposes are worked out in history, that there is the rainbow of promise and hope to illumine the darkest storms of life when we seem overwhelmed by a flood of troubles. But now, says Paul, with the revelation of Christ, there is a new hope, an exciting expectation of imminent fulfillment. What we have learned of the love of God makes us confident and hopeful of His purposes in the unknown events to come. So the believer can truly say all things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to His purposes.

We are saved by hope. By hope we believe in, share in, commit ourselves to the creative power of the love of God as revealed in Christ, knowing that no matter what, nothing can separate us from that spirit once we are committed to it, and called to follow His purpose.

We are saved by hope, says Paul. At least now we can see what hope is not. It is not a placid expectation that something will happen. The common practice of misusing the term “hopefully” suggests this. Hopefully the weather will be nice, we say; - and, of course, the weather can’t be nice in a hopeful way. Hopefully, I’ll see you tomorrow. I’ll be hopeful when I see you? Hopefully this, hopefully that - it’s like the phrase “you know.” Indiscriminately used, it becomes meaningless. “You know!” “Hopefully” simply stands for a blank expression for the future, not even a clear expression of what you hope or whether you hope.

Hope does not mean, either, a detached expectation that somehow something better will turn up or happen. If we are saved by hope, we must be actively involved. Hope is not simply wishing for something better, and hoping it will happen. Hope involves our active participation in the purposes of God. Hope is not a bland form of “wishing makes it so”- hope is willingness to act on the belief in a future eventuality.

There is a famous modern play called “Waiting for Godot.” The action or inaction centers around the expectation that everything depends on the appearance of Godot. Godot may be God. The playwright suggests this. The point of the play however is that nothing happens because they are waiting for Godot, and as the play ends the characters clearly do nothing. We cannot just wait for Godot, wait for God to change things. Hope is not detached, placid, expectation that somehow the future will be different, better.

Hope is actively associated with the other virtues of faith and love. Faith can be seen as believing what one desires to believe - but faith is not actual until it is a willingness to act on one’s belief. Love is not nurturing tender emotions in one’s heart; it is not actual until it spills over in acts of redemptive love and concern. So hope is not nourishing genial visions of future blessings. Hope is active participation in the creative purposes of God, based on the experience of that redemptive purpose we have already shared in our lives.

The lesson of our text is really simple. We are saved by hope. But our hope must be lived and attested to by our action. We cannot just hope that the future will be better than the past - we must work to create that future. We cannot just hope to overcome a failure or a fear - we cannot just hope to attain a higher quality of life - we must affirm the creative powers we have and under the compelling example of Christ and with His spirit, work with the creative power of God to find all things work together for good. We cannot just hope that this church will flourish without our sharing in its creative life and doing what needs to be done as called by God. And above all, if we are saved by hope, we must never fall prey to the sin of hopelessness or despair. For there is always hope, no matter what. And what can we hope? Always God’s love, no matter what. Always the power of faith and the hope of God’s ultimate triumph in us and through us

Now abide faith, hope, and love. The greatest is love. But love must be undergirded by faith and hope is that which illumines and gives the promise of the fruits of love.

Eternal God, Thou who hast created this world in beauty and us in Thy love, make us sensitive to the beauty of the earth, the glory of the skies, and the love that from our birth over and around us lies.

Make us sensitive to Thy purpose for our lives. So may we catch a vision of Thy kingdom and become co-builders of it with Thee, undergirded by faith and inspirited by hope.

1GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD

09/02/79

L. J. Start

First Baptist Kalamazoo

The love of God is a basic theme in the Bible and is the heart of our religion. “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” For the Christian this is probably the most popular of all texts, because the whole message of the Gospel is contained within it.

God so loved the world. This is the wonder. God is love. His power is expressed not in angry judgment but in creative love. He does not smash men into submission but draws them with cords of love. And this love is wide — it includes us all. God so loved the world. Not just one group, not just the righteous, but His love goes to all. As a good parent loves all of his or her children equally, however different they may be, whatever their merit, so God loves all of us.

We sometimes talk as if the God of love is uniquely a New Testament God. But the God of the Old Testament showed His love for His people in the Exodus from Egypt, in sustaining them in the wilderness, in making His covenant with them. Hosea perhaps expresses best of all the faithfulness of God’s love. Hosea is the prophet who struggled with the bitter personal tragedy of a faithless wife. He knew the bitter mixture of injured love and hurt anger, but he found he could not stop loving her in spite of her infidelities. He sees God in the light of this experience as the one whose love for Israel is abiding in spite of Israel’s unfaithfulness and broken promises. When Israel was a child, God brought him out of Egypt, carried him in His arms through the wilderness, drawing His people with bands of love only to see them turn away and follow strange gods. His anger and disappointment do not destroy His love. “How can I give thee up?” asks the Lord. “I will not execute the fierceness of my anger, for I am God, not man, the Holy One in the midst of thee.” God’s love abides. For God so loved the world.

And yet we live so often as if this were not true, as if we were aliens in a strange and hostile world, lonely and afraid. Why is this? “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not His Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.” Why do we feel condemned? Our text suggests it is because we do not believe in Jesus as the redemptive love of God incarnate. To experience that quality of life everlasting, we must believe, have faith in Jesus as the Son. As the writer of Hebrews says, “He who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him.”

And why don’t we believe? Some of us perhaps all of the time, and all of us some of the time are unable to believe; we can’t understand how a God of love can fit in with the very real evils we find in the world. Nor can we see how the ethics of love of an earnest Jesus can be an effective world force. God so loved the world that — but look at the holocaust! How could a loving God allow that! Not love, but conflict, terrorism, rumors of war abound. Not peace, but strife, and privation, hunger, homelessness on the one hand and greed, over-indulgence, and abuse of power on the other. And plenty seem to perish. We need not focus on the larger scene only, but look closer to home at the personal tragedies — the suffering, the inner battles, the sickness, the fears with which so many we know must struggle. How can we believe in a good God in an evil world?

The problem of evil is not something to solve intellectually. Jesus showed this when He saw a man blind from birth and was asked, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” And Jesus said, “Neither this man sinned, nor his parents, but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.” And He proceeded to show this precisely by healing him.

It is easy to say that all evil and suffering is the result of sin. And probably most of it is. But the important practical meaning of evil is that it exists so that we with God’s help and motivated by the love of God do something about it — that the works of God be made manifest. And through the healing power of the love of Christ reflected in His followers, God shows His love even in the midst of evils. As Augustine said, “God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to have any evil at all.”

So it is the very presence of evil that provides an occasion to show the redemptive love of God. In our troubles and especially in the sickness, sadness, or struggle of those about us we know, it is better to show through ourselves God’s love and concern than to bemoan the evils. As a Chinese proverb puts it so well, “It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.”

But, again, all of us sometimes and perhaps some of us all the time find the love of God through Christ not something we are unable to believe, but something we are somehow unwilling to believe. And we stand condemned, judged. The Greek word means to separate, discriminate. “And this is the judgment, that light is come into the world and men loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.” Perhaps for many it is not so much the evil of their deeds as reluctance to face the bright challenge of the light of Christ, that gets in the way, so we are unwilling to respond. We are asked, in believing, to be a part of that creative spirit of God’s love, and it seems too much. So we stand condemned, not by the Son of God who came to save, not to judge — but by our own selves. We are judged already by our own response.

It is possible to offer something great, to offer love, and have it turn out a judgment. An American tourist leaving the Tate Art Gallery in London said to one of the guides, “I don’t much care for your old paintings.” “Sir,” came the polite but pointed reply, “I would remind you that those pictures are no longer on trial, but those who look at them are.” So it is with Jesus — He is no longer on trial, but we are in our relation to Him, and if we act with hostility or indifference we stand condemned.

But there is another sense in which a good person has an unconscious element of condemnation in him — when we compare ourselves with Him and see ourselves as we are. One of Socrates’ favorite and famous students was Alcibiades, the brilliant but erratic young Athenian general. He loved Socrates, but Plato reports on one occasion that he said, “Socrates, I hate you, for every time I meet you, you let me see what I am.” One is reminded of the Samaritan woman at the well who, after her conversation with Jesus, ran to town and said, “Come see a man which told me all things that ever I did. Is not this the Christ?”

Is not this what Christ does with each of us? But we need not stand condemned. God’s love in Christ evokes our love in return. The light attracts us from the darkness, and love changes things. And it is the very revelation of our being before Christ that shows the difference between what we are and what we might become with God’s grace that inspires us to want to become children of God.

Love changes things by changing itself. God so loved the world that He became flesh and dwelt among us full of grace and truth. Kierkegaard, the religious philosopher, tells a parable to account for this. A prince fell in love with a beautiful peasant girl. What could he do? Choose her, of course, elevate her to the throne, and have a happy Cinderella ending. But the prince knew if he did this, his beloved would never know whether he loved her as she was, or whether he loved the someone else he changed her to be. And so he put on the rags of a beggar and wooed her as a lowly man. Love changes the lover, not the beloved. That is why it is a mistake to think you can change someone directly by loving or marrying him or her.

What love can do is to inspire a response of love in the beloved, and this initiates changes. We love because God loved us. We respond to God’s love through Christ. And as God reaches us through His Son, we reach toward God through that same Son — and this is what Communion is all about. All true communion is of this sort. Think of two people — I and one of you. There is a separation: I and you, mine and yours. But when we come together as a we, and can speak of ours (instead of mine and yours), a higher unity is reached. There is a mutual alteration of the I and the you so that the we subject emerges. There is a mutual alteration of God through Christ and us through Christ so that the Communion of the Holy Spirit results — and we can say with Paul, “Not I, but Christ in me.” This is what reconciliation is all about. We are united to God through Christ, and reconciled to Him, in the experience of Communion.

But this is possible because God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him — responds with commitment of love — shall not perish but have everlasting life.

In this Communion service, in the silent moments, let us think on these things, the wonder of God’s love, and our opportunity to share that love in the lives our lives must touch. And let us be reconciled, one to another, in the love of God, through Jesus Christ. Amen.