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[Music] Speaking from Grove City College Chapel, Grove City, Pennsylvania, Dr. Bruce W. Thielman brings you a message, "The Threefold Chord." The scripture reading of the evening is from the book of Ecclesiastes, chapter 4.

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The reading begins at the verse which is numbered 9. "Two are better than one because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up.

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Again, if two lie together, they are warm. But how can one be warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him. A threefold chord is not quickly broken."

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May God bless this reading from his holy word. Let us pray. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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Our United States Navy has almost 500 vessels, each of which carries fewer than 500 men. It is the custom of the Navy that when a vessel carries less than 500 personnel, no chaplain is assigned to that ship. On Sundays, the worship services are led by Christian laymen on board,

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Christian seamen on board, and they are usually sent to the ship in mimeographed form and then used by these men in leading other men in worship. In an effort to upgrade that program, the Navy has decided that they now are going to send a variety of different services to the ships, and also that they are going to send a sermon each week

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on cassette tape, which can be played as part of the act of worship. This program will begin in the Navy in about two weeks. In November of last year, I was asked by the Navy if I would like to prepare the first eight sermons to be so taped and used.

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Seeing this as a real opportunity to bear witness to what I believe, I accepted the invitation. I asked them what they would like me to talk about. They said they would like me to talk about human relationships, because they said you can put men together on a ship, but that does not make them friends.

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Two weeks ago I recorded these messages in California. This last week I was in Minnesota, and while I was there I was participating through a preaching ministry to the annual conference of the General Conference Baptist Church. Their theme this year was proclamation.

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I asked them what they wanted me to talk about, and they said, "We want you to talk about human relationships within the congregation, for a congregation's life, the love which it demonstrates, is the most splendid proclamation that there is."

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I mentioned both of these instances, one on many ships at sea and one, a conference in the middle of the United States, both seeking to explore the same theme. Because human relationships are becoming more and more important in our thinking.

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We live in an age in which a multitude of gimmicks have been designed to aid us in our relationships with others. Everything from nude group counseling, which I understand they call group groping, to all other kinds of sensitivity devices and relational devices created by men like Lyman Coleman.

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It's an age when gurus are popular, and gurus have as their principal function enabling us to get in touch with ourselves in order that we might be better able to get in touch with others. And we're all aware that especially in the youth culture of our time, there is a great interest in relationships.

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And the whole expression is seen in the communes, which now dot our country from east to west and north to south, is testimony to this. We've come to understand that it's a great and a glorious thing to be in a loving relationship with other people.

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I had one person explain it to me this way. They said that they had discovered that friendship was much more satisfying than booze or drugs. It got you to the same place, it got you there permanently, and it got you there beautifully. A great number of studies have testified to the fact that many who resort to excessive alcoholism

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and to narcotics addiction are those who have no friends. And in their loneliness, they reach out for a dream world. But friendship, when it exists, brings us into such a relationship with others, a relationship which is at one and the same time exciting and serene,

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into such a oneness, into a kind of psychosphere which changes the whole way that we live. It's so beautiful that more and more seeing its beauty are reaching out for it. Now as in just about everything, the Bible has anticipated what we have now discovered. For as long ago as the writing of the book of Ecclesiastes, we are told what a beautiful thing friendship is.

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Ecclesiastes is actually a rather despairing book. It is a book that is testimony to the vanity and the boredom and the despair which is in much of life. But occasionally there comes into the text a scintillating moment, a beam of light that drives away the shadows. And one of those moments, one of those places is here in the fourth chapter,

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where the preacher who is writing Ecclesiastes says that two are better than one. If one falls and is alone, he falls alone. But if there is another, he will lift the one who has fallen. One cannot be warm alone, but if there are two, they can warm each other. One can be defeated, but if he has at his side a friend, the two of them will not so easily be defeated.

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And the passage concludes with this interesting suggestion, that friendship is in fact a three-fold cord which is not quickly broken. One plus one equals three. Now the suggestion which is being made to us here is this, that when two individuals come together,

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they not only have what each one of them brings to the relationship, but they also have that which they enkindle in each other which was not there before their friendship, or before the act of love which unites them. May I illustrate that in a very simple way?

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When I was a youngster, I was out in the backyard one day, had been given a chore by my father to move a rock. And I tried as hard as I could to move it and was having no success. My father said, "Have you done everything you can?" I said, "Yes." He said, "Are you sure that you have done everything you can?" I said, "Yes."

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He said, "Are you absolutely sure that you have done everything that you can?" I said, "Yes." He said, "No, you haven't. You have not asked me to help." Now in the moment that he said that, he was offering to me not only the added strength which his muscle would bring to the task, but he thrilled me with the knowledge that whenever I needed help, I could call on my dad.

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And as the two of us attacked the task, there was not only the strength which was mine and the strength which was his, there was also welling up within me now a new strength that came about because of his expression of faithfulness and love. It was suddenly a three-fold cord. And those kinds of cords are not quickly broken. Now I want to analyze for a few minutes tonight what this friendship that we're talking about really is and what it does to us.

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It seems to me that basically what it does to us is set us free. When you are loved by a friend, you are set free. Jean-Paul Sartre said that hell was other people, but it's also true that heaven is other people. Last February, I visited the island of Alcatraz, and while there, I was taken to the solitary confinement section.

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Those of us who were in the group were put into separate cells. Each cell was eight feet wide, nine feet deep, and seven feet tall. When you were in your cell, you could not see the person to the right or the person to the left. You could see no one below you and no one above you. There was an electric light bulb in the ceiling of the cell because federal law requires that there be an electric light bulb in every prison cell.

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But in the 46 years in which Alcatraz was operated, those lights were never turned on. There is no law, you see, which requires that the lights be turned on. So we stood there in the dimness, and the great iron gates of these cells closed. And there was a feeling, even though we were only there for a moment, of awesome isolation.

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A moment later, when the cells were opened and we stepped out, the girl who was taking us on this tour said to me, "The cell in which you were standing, sir," speaking to me, "was the cell in which Robert Stroud served so many years of his confinement." Now, Robert Stroud was the bird man of Alcatraz. He was a man who twice in his life took the life of another. He seemed, in point of fact, to despise others. Yet even within him, whatever the twisted nature of his mind was,

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even within him there was a desire to be in relationship with something that was alive, with something that could feel back to him, with something over against which he could react, with something that he could tie himself to and feel the strengthening of a threefold cord, even if it was only a little bird, a trembling little bird. We are strangely and wonderfully made. We start life as a kind of a "we" group, Mother and ourselves.

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And for a while we are so attached to Mother that we think of ourselves as one. And then one day, when we cry out, Mother isn't there. Maybe she's gone to the kitchen or to the bathroom or across the street, but for a moment or two she isn't there. And for the first time we doubt our relationship with the other.

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And since, of course, nothing can be wrong with Mother, something must be wrong with us. And she has drawn apart from us for this time because there is something wrong with us. And so we become no longer part of a "we" group, but actually hedonistic utilitarians. We decide that from now on we will do nice things for others so that they will do nice things for us.

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And we enter into that kind of relationship with others, and then one day somebody hits us over the head with our wagon, or the toy that we offer is not returned. And one day we discover that all those to whom we are doing good will not necessarily do good to us. And the moment we discover that, trust begins to die in us.

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There are some, in fact, in whom trust dies altogether at that moment. And they spend the rest of their lives hiding. It's a very interesting thing to notice that one of the best adjusted people in the world are the Zulus of Africa. When a Zulu baby comes into the world, it spends two years being carried by its mother, naked skin to naked skin.

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At the end of two years, the child is put down, but only for a few minutes because everybody else picks it up. If you've ever seen any pictures of African children, you will always notice that the larger children are carrying the smaller children. And there is also in the Zulu society individuals called mammoos and daddoos, whose task it is to minister to these children all the time, to teach them how to hunt, to use the bow, to love them, to care for them,

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and especially to impress upon them the fact that they are beautiful. To a Zulu, there is no relationship between physical appearance and beauty. You are beautiful because you are a Zulu. The mere fact that you have been born into this tribe makes you beautiful, and they are told always that they are beautiful.

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And as a result of all this physical contact, all of this love, all of these individuals carrying them about, literally showering them with love, the Zulu people grow free and in relationship with others to a degree which no other people on the earth seem to know. We don't grow like that in the United States. We have not experienced that kind of love in our homes.

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Oh, I know that if I said to you tonight, "Did you know love in your home?" that you would probably respond, "Yes, I came from a very loving home." I would not want to dispute that, but I'd like you to tell me about it. I ask people to tell me about the love that was in their home, and they say things like,

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"Oh, we did a lot of things together," and I say, "What things did you do together?" And they're able to make a few suggestions, but very quickly they run out of ideas. And then I say, "And isn't it true that much of the time the love which you experienced in your home was a kind of conditional love, that is, if you do this, everything will be fine, if you don't do this, everything will not be fine,

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if you do this, mother won't love you anymore?" It's not that our homes have deliberately conspired against us, it's that individuals who have not known the showering, uplifting power of love in their lives are not able to give it to others. And most of our parents have not known that, and consequently have not known how to pass it on.

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So what do we do? Well, we twist ourselves and bend ourselves and try to make ourselves into something which people will love, or we reject them altogether, we go the pot route, we go the rebel route, and say we don't care whether they love us or not. In either instance, whether we're bending and contorting ourselves, or rejecting the relationships which have been primary in our lives,

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in either instance, we're putting in front of ourselves a kind of black veil, a mask. Did you ever read Nathaniel Hawthorne's little short story, "The Minister's Black Veil?" About the preacher who came to church one morning wearing a black veil. Nobody could understand why, they thought it was going to be as an illustration in the sermon or something of that kind,

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yet he never mentioned it. He wore it the rest of the day. Some thought that he had some illness, something which was disfiguring him, and eventually he would remove it, but day after day, week after week, month after month, went along and the black veil was never removed,

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until he became a kind of object of fear. Why is it that this man does this thing? Finally, he was upon his deathbed, and they gathered round him, hoping that even at this moment, there would be some explanation of the black veil that he always wore, and he offered none.

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He only said this, "As I look through my veil, I see on the face of every one of you, a black veil. We all wear them. We're scared that people are going to see, and seeing reject.

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We don't trust people anymore, and it's very hard for us to love." And then along comes a friend. Somebody who in one way or another manages to lift up a corner of the veil. And we're terrified when they do it, but for some reason, we let them.

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And when we let them, we discover that they call us beautiful. Now at first we don't believe that, of course. They couldn't possibly be right. Yet it feels good, so we let them do it again.

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And they lift up a little more of the veil. And we reach out and begin to lift up a corner of theirs. And we begin to discover in them beauty, because they're finding in us beauty. You know, the Plains Indians of America taught their children that if you killed an animal,

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that which was natural to the animal became a part of you. If you killed a bear, the strength of the bear entered into you. If you killed a fox, the craftiness of the fox entered into you. If you killed a deer, the speed of the deer entered into you.

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That's not very sophisticated, yet there's a great deal of truth in it, at least to this degree, that when we enter into relationships with others, that which we discover in them and that which they announce that they find in us, we begin to accept. We begin to believe in ourselves.

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We are freed of our fear. We are freed of our distrust. We are, never altogether it seems to me in this life, but more and more freed of the necessity of wearing our black veil.

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And when that happens between two people, when you know what it is to be so loved that you can begin to reveal, that's the forging of the threefold cord. The cord of friendship, which is not quickly broken.

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Now I think it's interesting to notice that as we permit ourselves to be loved and thus are set free, we ought also to observe that when we love others, we begin to set them free. Rupert Brooke, the great Englishman, was traveling on a ship one day. The ship was about to pull out of the port, and there was no one on the dock waving goodbye to him.

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Nobody seemed to have somebody waving goodbye except him, and it bothered him very much. So he went down the dock, and he found a little boy, a dirty little boy who was working there, and he said, "If I give you sixpence, will you stand on the dock and wave to me?" And the boy said, "Yes."

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And so he took out his handkerchief, which was far from white, but he stood there in the dock when Rupert Brooke went up on deck and leaned out. The little boy stood there and waved at him, and Rupert Brooke waved at him, and as the ship pulled out, he kept his eye on that handkerchief,

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and he wrote later that the last thing he saw was that not-so-white handkerchief going up and down in the distance. Well, we're all like that. We all want people to wave to us, and the beautiful thing that happens when we wave at someone

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must not be overlooked by us in our desire to have people waving at us. Duke Ellington, the great jazz musician, was being interviewed on the Mike Douglas Show, and Mike Douglas said, "You know, all musicians suffer a great deal when they start out. Did you suffer, Duke?" He said, "Not at all."

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He said, "There was no starvation, no attic rooms, none of that kind of difficulty?" He said, "Oh, no." He said, "I started out writing music, and I had great confidence in myself in the very beginning." "You see, Mike," he said, "I was loved so much when I was a kid,

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I don't think my feet touched the floor until I was seven years old." "Well, you see, when you love people like that, you release the music that is in them." I was on vacation with another minister and his wife and their little children. I have no children.

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And you know, when you don't have any children, and all of a sudden you're in the midst of a family that has them, and you're trying to rest, you discover things about children you didn't know before.

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And one of the things I discovered was that their two little boys wanted to be loved. And they would come, and you know, we would play for a moment, but I kind of was uncomfortable about the thing, and it seemed to me that they never really got full of it, full of this love.

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So I decided that what I would do was each morning when they came in, I would love them and love them and love them until they seemed satisfied. So I would. We played, we threw the ball, we threw the--what do you call that thing?

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Frisbee? We talked about, you know, what was going to go on the rest of the day, climbed all over one another, all the rest of it. Well, it really didn't take too long.

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I found that if I would give myself to them like that for about 15 or 20 minutes, somehow their cups were filled up enough that they could go off for a while and entertain themselves with other things. They had been loved enough to be set free for at least a little while.

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Now later they would come back, and we would go through the whole thing again. But the loving, you see, was sufficient to fill them enough to be free. That only happens with children. I think of an old Czechoslovakian lady who lived on our street in Pittsburgh.

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She was a grand lady, but being of the old school, she was somewhat severe and strict. She spoke very broken English. She'd lost her husband. Her son was very successful and had gone on to a distant place to work.

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She was known as the meanie on the street. Now it so happened that I used to sell Christmas cards during the summer, and I went to sell cards whether you were a meanie or not. And I went up on her porch to sell her cards,

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and she greeted me, "Va'at do you want?" like she greeted everybody, kind of a stern-faced, great big woman. And I went in with my Wallace Brown cards, $1.19, $1.59, $1.89, for the whole box, of course, with envelopes.

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And she had pictures on the wall. I really felt I was in the lion's den when I was in her house, but the pictures interested me, beautiful pictures. She brought most of them from the old country.

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And I showed an interest in them, and she told me about them. And when she saw that I liked her pictures and liked her telling me about them, she got out some milk and some marvelous cookies, Anus cookies. I've never tasted any cookie.

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The Czechoslovakians really know how to make cookies. Well, of course, I told everybody in the neighborhood about those cookies and about those pictures, and it wasn't long until every kid in the block was in to see them.

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And slowly but surely, as we loved that lady and loved what she did for us, in her 70s, she blossomed into something that was very beautiful. And we were able to get, for a little while, you see, behind the black veil. What I'm talking about is not easy.

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It involves the initiation of friendship. It involves care and language. It involves mutual demands. It involves patience.

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It involves, well, that which sometimes terrifies you. It's not like television where at the end of 30 minutes everything turns out all right. It's not a circumstance in which you live happily ever after. It's of the warp and woof of love, and that's not easy.

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A little boy whose parents had been killed in Burma was being sent home in a ship at the end of World War II. There was only one other American on the ship, a lady whose doctor husband had died two weeks before.

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The youngster went to the lady, and while she was somewhat kind to him, she basically rebuffed him. A few days later, the ship was torpedoed and sunk, and in the lifeboat on which some of the passengers managed to escape

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were both the boy and the lady. The boy went to the lady again, this time shivering with the cold. She put her arms about him and brought him into her life, and as she brought him into her life, she entered into his.

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And when the voyage was over and they were at last rescued, there were many who said they didn't know whether the boy saved the woman or the woman saved the boy. They both, you see, in the moment of need, reached out,

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lifted the veil a little, and began to discover something intimate about each other. And out of that they forged that which saved them both, a threefold cord.

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When you are loved, you are freed. When you love another, you free the other. That kind of relationship is not quickly broken. So what am I saying?

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Only that we need friends, because we need to be set free. So next week I want to talk about how you make a friend, and the next week after that I want to talk about what friends do for one another very specifically,

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and the next week after that I want to talk about what you do when friendships falter. And in the meantime, if you will forgive my boldness, I'd like to give you an assignment.

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I'd like to ask you before next Sunday night, or if you are listening to this sermon on tape, before you listen to the next sermon in the series, to say to five people, "I love you."

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I'm asking you to privately and personally say to five people, "I love you." To lift the veil at least enough to risk saying that to another, and to watch what happens to their veil when you do it.

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You may want to call home. "Dad, I love you." "What's wrong?" Or, "To your best friend."

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"Or the one you'd like to be your friend." "I love you." "Well, are you going to the game?" Please turn your cassette to the other side.

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It's just the beginning. And when you do it, if you're willing to lift the veil enough to try, you'll feel the cord. You'll feel it begin to tighten.

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It may hurt a bit. But it will be good. For you see, two are better than one. For when one falls, he falls alone.

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But if there is another, he can lift him with his love. One is cold, but two can be warm. Where one is defeated, two will conquer. One plus one does equal three.

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For it brings the gift of freedom. And once we have that gift, that which binds us is not quickly broken. Let us pray. Our Father, give us courage enough to risk loving.

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And freedom enough to risk being loved. And the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give to you

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and to all those whom you love and to all those whom nobody loves his peace. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]