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The first from John chapter 1 beginning at the 43rd verse. The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee and he found Philip and said to him follow me. Now Philip was from Bethsaida the city of Andrew and Peter. Philip found Nathanael and said to him we have found him of whom Moses in the law and also the

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prophets wrote Jesus of Nazareth the son of Joseph. Nathanael said to him can any good thing come out of Nazareth? Philip said to him come and see. The second reading is from the gospel according to John the seventh chapter and in this chapter I begin the reading at the first numbered 45. The officers then went back

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to the chief priests and the Pharisees who said to them why did you not bring him? The officers answered no man ever spoke like this man. The Pharisees answered them are you led astray you also have any of the authorities or of the Pharisees believed in him but this crowd who do not know the law are

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accursed. Nicodemus who had gone to him before and who was one of them said to them does our law judge a man without first giving him a hearing and learning what he does? They replied are you from Galilee too? Search and you will see that no prophet is to rise from Galilee. And may God bless to us and to our

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understanding these two readings from his word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. The point of both passages is of course the same. Both passages say that there are certain places from which no person of skill or talent or particular gift or

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grace can be expected to come. Nathaniel who was from a small town near Nazareth and no doubt jealous of it replies to Philip when Philip tells him about Jesus can any good thing come from Nazareth? It was true there was no prophecy in Scripture that said anyone of note would come from Nazareth. The reference of

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course was to Bethlehem where Jesus was born. Nothing about Nazareth. So Nathaniel quoted the Scriptures accurately but spoke of that which he did not know. In John 7 the Pharisees say essentially the same thing to Nicodemus. They say search the Scriptures. Is there any word there about a prophet coming out of Galilee?

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This man is one of the ignorant people and no more. But of course Nathaniel and the Pharisees were colossally wrong. For Jesus came out of Bethlehem and Nazareth and Galilee and he is the dominant figure of human history and today more than ever in the past his is the most honored name on the face of the earth

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and the greatest music and art and literature and drama and poetry and social legislation and the greatest lives have been lived in obedience to his life. All of which goes to prove that sometimes the extraordinary comes out of the ordinary. That remarkable treasures are to be found where no one expects

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them. It's possible to find heroes in unexpected places. Let me give you an example of that first from history. I wish we as Christians knew more about the history of the church. A few years ago when the television show Roots was first shown I happened to be in Australia but even in Australia it was

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in the newspapers how people were responding to that television show back here in the States. The fact was a lot of people became more serious about their ancestry than they had ever been before. I wish that would happen to the church for we have great names in our history. I think this morning of Aurelius Augustine.

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Now Augustine was born in November of the year 374 in Tagast, North Africa. Now when we think of North Africa today we think of it exclusively as Muslim or Islamic territory. I've been there on many occasions and no matter where you go in North Africa you hear the cry of the museum "La ila la ila hum dala la"

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calling the Mohammedan to prayer. It is today an Islamic area but in the day of Augustine it was a thoroughly Christian place. He grew up there though he was not a Christian. His father was a nominal Christian though he never practiced the faith. His mother on the other hand, a woman by the name of Monica, was a deeply

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devoted Christian and prayed all of her life for her son. Augustine was very brilliant. He won academic scholarships first to the school of Tagast and later to the University of Carthage. He matriculated at the University of Carthage when he was 15 years old and while he was there according to his

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later writings he became involved in what he described as a horrible and deadly sin. Scholars differ over what it was. Some people say it was robbery, some say it was some kind of sexual perversion. In any case we do know that when he was 17 years of age and attending the University of Carthage he

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became the father of an illegitimate son. He never married the child's mother. He also regularly attended lewd theatrical performances. He dabbled in sorcery and he hungered after fame. He entered into a popular religion at that time called Manichaeism which had come from Babylonia and the principal purpose of

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this religion was to argue matters of faith and because he was quite expert at oratory and rhetoric Augustine moved into this religion somewhat naturally. Not because he had any religious zeal but because he enjoyed the intellectual by play which was part of this faith and he himself wrote that during these days

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he was seduced and seducing he was deceived and deceiving and he gave himself to a life of lust. He was going with a prostitute when one of his dear friends died and caught up with grief he walked out into a garden and while he was in that garden he heard a voice. He recorded later that it was the voice of

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a child saying "take up and read, take up and read" and on a bench there was a Bible and he picked it up and he read these words "not in drunkenness and rioting, not in clamoring and wantonness, not in strife and enjoying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh." Those words struck home in his

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heart and he became a Christian. He was baptized, he gave up his teaching and study responsibilities and returned to North Africa to a place called Hippo. He had no desire to enter the priesthood but other Christians were so impressed with his learning and dedication that they forced him to be ordained and later

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against his will made him a bishop. He spent the whole remainder of his life in a small town there as the leader of a very small monastic community. He gave himself to administrative responsibilities, to correspondence, to preaching, and praise God to writing. He wrote some of the greatest works in all

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of Christian history. His book on the Trinity is still the definitive study on that difficult doctrine. His book on the City of God is the greatest testimony to the vitality of the kingdom of God on earth that has ever been put on paper. His book, The Confessions, is the greatest record of the inward journey of a soul

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that has ever been written down. In the last year of his life he wrote a book called Retractions in which he corrected things he thought he might have said before which were wrong. And then he wrote on the walls of his small room seven penitential psalms so that everywhere he looked he would be

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addressing God. He cut himself off from other people seeing only his doctor and a servant who assisted him and devoted the last ten days of his life to nothing but prayer and meditation. And then he died. He left behind him the greatest theology on evil, the greatest theology on the nature of sin, and the greatest

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theology on the nature of grace that had ever been written. He is recognized today as the greatest evangelical since the Apostle Paul. Mind you, he came out of remote and primitive North Africa, out of a home where there was no strong influence from the Father who was the dominant figure in the home in those days.

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He had a brilliant mind but he gave it over to totally sensual and worldly pursuits. He was a devotee of a false religion who spent himself in lust and possibly in thievery. And yet from this unexpected person in this unexpected place, God brought forth the greatest evangelical since the Apostle Paul. He

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rose in unexpected places. That from history. How about an example from today? The World Council of Churches has just published an interesting collection of testimonies from China, testimonies of Christians who are living there, and I was reading one last week of a woman, an older woman. She ties her testimony of

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her faith to crosses. The first cross that she ever had was a small silver cross. She says that she gave that cross to the Chinese government to help to pay for the war against America in Korea. We must never forget that there are Christians around the world, true believers in Jesus Christ, who are

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militantly opposed to American politics and ideas. Still Christian, but they don't agree with us. She gave her first cross to fight this country. She got a second cross, it was a silver cross also. Those days of course religion was prohibited in China. She gave her cross to her pastor because he didn't have one, and

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they would hold that little cross up and the little company of 14 Christians with whom she met, and they met in secret in her home on Thursday afternoons so that they would have some object about which to center their worship. But gradually the pressure of the society cut back on the group till they only had three

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coming, and it was at that time that this small silver cross, the second one, was stolen. She managed to come to the ownership of an ivory cross. By this time the pastor serving the church was too old to preach. All he would do would be stand there and hold the cross. He died and not a single member of his family,

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well that's not quite correct, only his youngest daughter came to the funeral. They did not want to be known as having a Christian in their families, but she went, representing the small company of believers. Now in the 60s things got really bad, so bad they could have no meetings. As a matter of fact she and

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other Christians could only meet by standing in line in the meat market. The meat market lines were very very long and she could stand there with other Christians and talk with them and nobody would notice because everybody was gathered together in such a place. Then the cultural revolution came and at that

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time she was warned that a group of the so-called Red Guards were coming to investigate her home. Forty came. She hid her little ivory cross in a charcoal pile, but they found it and crushed it into dust before her eyes. They also took her Bible and some hymns she had copied out by hand. They took all of the

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furniture out of her home except one table and one chair and they moved two communist families into the home so that there could be no more religious activities in that place. But she continued meeting with other Christians privately. In the 1980s it became alright to worship in public again. She went to

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her first public church service in many years. It thrilled her so much. Well she puts it this way, "I was so happy I got a headache and when we sang the hymns my heart beat so fast I was afraid." As a matter of fact her doctor would not allow her to go to those worship services afterwards because she was so

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thrilled he thought it might injure her health. At that time she made her fifth cross, a wooden cross covered over with wool. She gave that later to her daughter and then made another one in the same fashion. Today she is part of a worshiping fellowship of 40 Christians. She notes in her testimony that they

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have six Bibles. They also have a hand-carved cross which is carried into their worship services by what she calls an imitation pastor. That means a pastor who has not been ordained but he is recognized as the leader of the church. And she says in her testimony how grateful she is for all the good that

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God has done to her. Now we think sometimes as Christians that we have it difficult. Here's the testimony of a woman spread across 50 years who counted a blessing to be able to make a little wooden cross covered with wool and who stays faithful in persecution and ridicule and abuse and governmental

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robbery and all the rest of it. A hero in Red China, an unexpected place. My friends we must never let the place where we are rob us of the heroic within us. Our situation and the views of those about us are not to be the primary influences in our lives. The key to Christian living is inner attitude.

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Longfellow put it this way, "It's not in the clamor of the crowded streets and it's not in the plaudits and the shouts of the throng but in ourselves that our triumph and defeat is to be found." There's a desire in all of us to be applauded of course and that's perfectly natural.

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Abraham Lincoln had a general who really liked pomp and circumstance. The man wasn't much as a general but he was great on pomp and circumstance. When he died they had a magnificent funeral. Lincoln said of him that he was sure that if the man had known what a nice funeral he was going to have he would

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have died sooner. Well we like pomp and circumstance and we like to be the center of it. We like to get those ads in the mail which say we're starting a new magazine. It's for the intellectual, the sophisticated, the active, and the alert, and the attractive. That's the reason we're inviting you to subscribe.

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Well we have met appeals to it. There's a little bit of the drum major instinct in all of us but applause really means very little. How many of you know the name of Edward Everett? Edward Everett was the president of Harvard University. He was a governor of Massachusetts. He was a senator from Massachusetts. That's not

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the reason he's known. Edward Everett is a kind of footnote in history because one day they dedicated a battlefield in Gettysburg and he was the principal speaker and he got up and spoke for two hours and everybody applauded but nobody remembers him today except for the fact that there was another fellow

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who spoke there named Abraham Lincoln. He talked for two and a half minutes and children have memorized his words for generations. He got all the applause but today he's a footnote. William Jennings Bryan, the great commoner as he was called, the great populist, he was speaking on one occasion. There was a man

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in the fourth row who just kept his eyes on him the whole time and clapped and applauded with vigor and Bryan thought to himself, "If I haven't converted one person in this room I've certainly converted that man to my political views." And as soon as the speech was over, Bryan went down to shake his hand and the man

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got up and said, "Mr. Bryan, I would like you to know that I'm a dentist and you have the finest set of teeth that I've ever seen in a public speaker." Applause really doesn't mean very much. What is important is inner conviction. Gustav Mahler, the greatest German composer since Wagner, never heard much

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of his music performed while he lived but he said, "Mein Zeit ist noch kommen. My time has not yet come." And his music is heard in all the concert halls of the world today. There was a time when Benjamin Disraeli stood up in the House of Commons in England to speak and the crowd booed him down. So finally he just

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stood silently and when they became still said, "The time will come when you will hear me." And he went on to be elected Prime Minister and one of the great Prime Ministers of British history. Abraham Lincoln said, "I would rather fail in a cause that will someday succeed than succeed in a cause which

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will inevitably fail." See, it's not the applause, it's not the response of the moment, it's the inner conviction. It's the dimension of certitude that you have in yourself and the way you give yourself to that regardless of your place or your circumstance or the response of others. Marshall Ney was one

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of the military leaders under the little Corsican, under Napoleon, and he lost the battle and he came to report on it to Napoleon and Napoleon said, "Did you do all that you could?" And Marshall Ney said, "I did all that I could." And Napoleon said, "Did you do all that you could?" And Marshall Ney said, "Sire, I stand before

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you unashamed for I did all that I could do." That is the heroic perspective, just to do all that you can do. And that's the reason out of Nazareth and Galilee there came one who moved in the power of God and who did all that he could do and turned the whole world upside down. So how about us, wherever we are? All God

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asks of us is that in his power we do all that we can. If that is true of us, then we will be heroines or heroes in unexpected places. Let us pray. Oh Lord, we don't want to be drum majors. Just help us to play our piccolos as well as we can for Jesus' sake. And the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love

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of God the Father, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, be with you now and forevermore. Amen. you [ Silence ]