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[silence] Welcome to Message for the Moment, a cassette series containing the messages of Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. The message on this cassette is entitled "Fly United." And now, here's Dr. Thielman.

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Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. On the Sunday mornings of Advent this year, we are thinking together of Mary. And it is inevitable, in such a series of considerations,

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that we would come to a point where we must acknowledge a difference between ourselves and our brother and sister Christians in the Roman Catholic Church. Not too long ago, a cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church, preaching in South America, told the congregation that he had dreamed a dream. And in that dream, he had seen a soul come to the gates of heaven and ask to be admitted,

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and God denied admittance to that soul. And as the soul was turning away, according to this cardinal, Mary said, "If that soul does not come in, then I go out." And immediately, God ordered the gates of heaven opened, and the soul entered.

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The scriptures describe Mary as the handmaid of God, but the dream, or the vision, or the preaching of this prince of the Roman Catholic Church suggests not so much that she is a handmaid, as she is one who can intimidate God himself. Now this is a view which we as Protestants do not share.

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I suppose the finest study of the development of the cult of Mary in the Roman Catholic Church is that of Giovanni Miegi. And he points out that the worship of Mary within the Roman Catholic Church has five basic roots. It first began to develop during the days of the monasteries, when every monk, in a sense, looked upon Mary as the girl of his dreams.

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There was added to this a great amount of legendary material, which has no historical evidence to support it. At that time, there were also many pagan religions that had goddesses as well as gods, and some primitive Christians thought that Christianity ought to have a goddess also. Then in the fifth century, certain Christological pronouncements were made by the Church,

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which were misunderstood by some. They were designed to emphasize the humanity of Jesus, but some took these as asserting instead the divinity of Mary. And finally, in the 1800s, the Roman Catholic Church promulgated the doctrine of the infallibility of the Pope.

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And the test cases for that doctrine rested exclusively on the place of Mary in the life of the Church. It was out of the testing and the demonstration of the authority of the Pope that the immaculate conception of Mary, which was celebrated by the Roman Catholic Church just yesterday, the assumption of Mary, and the concept of Mary as being a redeemer like Jesus Christ, arose.

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Within the Roman Church, a whole theology, a whole dogma, a whole devotional practice has grown up about the person of Mary. But none of this is revealed to us in God's Word. There, Mary is shown as a humble girl, not the queen of heaven or of earth, but the vessel of the Lord, yielded, not ready to undertake her important work until God himself, by an angel visitant, made her ready.

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And Mary's humanity is emphasized again to us in the thing that she did first after getting the message from the angel of the Annunciation that she would bear God's Son. The first thing that Mary did was to look for help. Luke suggests that on the very day she received the announcement of her coming pregnancy

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that she hurried off to a small town nearby, a town so small that it is not named in the Scriptures, there to talk with her kinswoman, Elizabeth. Elizabeth, you see, had already been prepared by God and was carrying in her womb that one we would call John the Baptist. So the first thing that Mary does on getting her assignment is to go to another one whom she hopes will understand

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and say, "We need help." Caught up, you see, in the lofty heights of her spiritual assignment, in this high calling which was hers, Mary did not want to travel alone. She wanted to fly united.

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So she went to Elizabeth and said, "We need each other." Now that's a very solemn lesson for all Christians to learn. The flight of faith is not intended to be a solo experience. And it is sad that so many who bear the Lord's name mistake that.

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John Galloway, the fine pastor of the Fox Chapel Presbyterian Church near here, has a little book he wrote some years ago called "The Gospel According to Superman." And in that book he talks about the origin of Superman, how two young students at Yale University sat down one day and began to compare their notes on how they would like to live, what their heroic figures would be like,

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and they found that their views were rather the same. So they thought it might be interesting to create a character and to try to market him, a character who would represent the aspirations of all of us. And Superman was born.

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He first appeared in action comics in 1938. He had his own comic book by 1939. He was on the radio in 1940. And Clark Kent has never turned around to look back.

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And everyone knows who you're talking about when you say, "Look up in the sky. Is it a bird? Is it a plane?" No, it's Superman. He has become a part of our culture, and the recent films lift him to an even higher pinnacle. Now why is it that people are fascinated by a character like this?

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Well, the psychologists tell us it's because it's a kind of wish projection. We all wish we were like Superman. We all wish that we could overcome every obstacle that confronts us. We all wish that great strength and X-ray vision and all the rest of it was ours.

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We all wish that we were able to assist everyone who needed help. We'd like to be super people. But the fact of the matter is that we are not. It's sad, then, that so many Christians don't recognize that they're not super people

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and go to others for help. And what is even sadder is some of these people, who refuse to seek the help of others, justify their behavior on this basis. "I get sufficient strength from God to live my life alone."

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They almost suggest that if you go to others for help, that indicates a spiritual weakness in you. You're somehow short of faith. But the affirmation they're making is contrary to the whole sense of Scripture. Look, for example, at the Apostle Paul.

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Paul was having a very difficult time with the Corinthian church. And what do we find him writing? We find him writing this. "We are afflicted at every turn, fighting without and fear within.

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But God, who comforts the downcast, comforted us." How? By the coming of Titus. By someone, you see, to help in a time of need.

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Or think what Paul wrote to the Galatians. "Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ." In other words, assisting one another, the meeting of needs, is an expression of the law of Christ. It is not an option in the Christian experience.

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And before us this morning is the testimony of Mary. She is called to this special ministry of hers. And the first thing that she does is to rush to someone else for help. This last Monday night, I finished up here at the church and went home with a letter in my hand

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that I'd received from a young man who, as far as I can remember, always wanted to be a veterinarian. Well, he flunked chemical analysis at school this year, and that eliminated him from the possibilities of ever being a veterinarian. And he wrote me a letter that was full of discouragement.

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Not despair, he was not all the way out, but he was very disheartened that this goal he'd had so long had now been taken away from him. My original intention was to write him, but the letter was so sad that I decided to call him instead. His voice cracked a bit when he heard me on the phone.

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He said, "God has been strengthening me. I'm realigning things. I know I'm going to be able to get through this, but I wanted you to know that of all the things God has done to help me through this, the nicest thing he's done has been to lead you to call."

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What was he saying? He was simply saying that as brothers in Jesus Christ, we need each other. We need to reach out in our times of sadness and to say, "I need some help." Now, it may very well be that when you so reach out, you will be rebuffed.

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There are not those who are always ready to give help. But you will never receive a yes if you are not willing to tolerate a no. Had Mary not gone for help from Elizabeth, she never would have received that help. There was the possibility of negative response,

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but you've got to run the risk of that if you're going to know what it is to be lifted. Paul says, "If possible, insofar as it depends upon you," not the other guy, "but insofar as it depends upon you, reach out and say, 'I need help. We need each other.'"

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And look how Elizabeth responds. The Scriptures say that she responded with an irrepressible joy. There's a little phrase we use to describe words that appear in the Bible only once. It's the phrase "hapax lagamana."

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The word that's used to describe what happens to Elizabeth when Mary comes saying, "I need your help," is the "hapax lagamana." It is at only this point in the Scripture where this word, it says a kind of like an inner welling up of enthusiasm,

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an uncontrollable, uncontainable joy bubbles up within Elizabeth, surges up from down deep inside of her. And what we're seeing here is, and what's being said to us is, that not only does Mary get help by saying, "We need each other,"

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but Elizabeth gets help because she is the one whose worth is being underscored when she's asked to help. In other words, you bless someone when you say, "I need you." You underscore their worth and their value and what they can contribute to your experience. You know, whenever I think of Halloween, I have three memories.

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Two of them are happy and one of them is sad. The sad one happened when I was only 11 years old. A young friend of mine who lived in the very next block to where we live died. You remember how terrible the polio scourge was in those days.

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Well, Larry lost his life to polio and was right at Halloween. It was the first time most of us had ever experienced death with any closeness. We were just a bunch of little neighborhood kids. And I can remember how we stood outside of Larry's home wondering what to do.

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Our parents were going in and out taking food and ministering in one way or another, but there didn't seem anything for us to do. It's important to remember the feelings of children at a time of bereavement, to give them things to do. And then, Larry's father came to the door.

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We were glad to see him because we liked him very much. He was a little league coach and he was a cub pack leader and he was quite a woodworker, made things for us. But we were also afraid to see him and moved very deeply when we saw that he'd been weeping. It's a hard thing for children to see grown-ups cry.

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But he touched each one of us. I can remember that very vividly. There was something important about his touching each one of us. And then he did a wonderful thing. He said, "I'd like you all to go to the store and to buy a pumpkin and to cut it and bring it back to Doug and Sue."

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That was Larry's younger brother and sister. I want you to know that no pumpkin in the history of the world was ever so carefully selected or so lovingly cut or so tenderly presented. Here was something we could do.

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Suddenly, we were brought into the midst of the experience and we had value and worth because we could contribute. Somebody said, "We need you." And we responded. Now, I know there are those who say that the best kind of life is a life where no one ever says they need you. Remember that song that Doolittle sings in "My Fair Lady"?

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"The Lord above made man to help his neighbor no matter where on land or sea or foam. The Lord above made man to help his neighbor, but with a little bit of luck, with a little bit of luck, when your neighbor comes around, you won't be home." Well, I suppose there are some people who feel that way, but not many.

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People who feel like that, it seems to me, hermits, recluses, eccentrics, the unbalanced, they're individuals whose sense of worth is somehow less than it ought to be because they never allow any other person to underscore their worth by needing them. The testimony to this is on every hand.

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You know how it is when you're on vacation and toward the end of the vacation, you're anxious to get back to work again. Why? Because it's your work that gives you a sense of your importance. Remember some years ago when the United Steelworkers worked so hard to get 12 weeks vacation

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for a man who'd been with the company for a certain length of time and how many men never took that vacation, never took the 12 weeks? It was too long to be unneeded. You're reading the paper about a football coach that gets fired and he has a three-year contract,

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so that means he doesn't have to go back to work for three years and he'll be paid all the time. And three weeks later, you find he's coaching another team. Why? Because his sense of value and worth is wrapped up in that. I used to have a dog named Rufus.

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This great big black creature, when he laid on the floor, he looked like a rug. He was a wonderful dog. I named him Rufus because in Romans 16, the word Rufus appears and it means "eminent in the Lord," and Rufus was an eminent dog. He weighed 160 pounds.

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He was beautiful without any vanity. He was courageous without any ferocity. And he was strong with great gentleness. I could never say those things about most people I know, but I could say it about him.

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And you know the thing that I loved about him the most was the fact that he so much needed me. Even when he was eight years old, I'd come home and he'd act like a puppy. It's quite a spectacle to see a 160-pound dog turn around in midair. And what it did was, you see, it made me feel it was so important to Rufus for me to be there.

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And that made me feel important as well. When we can respond to an expression of need, that underscores our value. Now I know there is a gift to meeting needs. Paul says there is a special gift of helpfulness. It takes time and it takes the willingness to identify with the person who needs you.

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You must be willing to change the size of your feet so that you can fit into her shoes. I know that. But our goal must be in all of life, mustn't it? And this was the pledge and promise made by you new members this morning. That we will be like God. That we will seek to be like Christ.

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Paul writes, "We are asking God that you may see things from His point of view by being given spiritual insight and understanding." That's what it is to be a helper, to be one who responds to need, to see things like God, to see things like Jesus, who was open in expressing His own needs, remember Gethsemane,

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and who was also open to the meeting of the needs of others, whether it be a rich man whose daughter had died, or a young ruler, or a foreign lady, or a whole world. You see, what we're called to in the meeting of the needy and those who are ready to help the needy, what we are called to is being like Christ.

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That's the beautiful thing about what happened to Mary and Elizabeth. What drew them together was not the fact that they were from the same family. Not the fact that they hadn't seen each other for a while. It wasn't even the fact that they had these needs, one for the other.

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It was the fact that they shared a secret, and the secret was the coming of the Savior. John leaped in Elizabeth's womb, and Elizabeth burst forth into song. "Blessed are you among women, blessed is the fruit of your womb." And Mary responds with another song, the Magnificat, that we'll be thinking about together next Sunday morning.

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"My soul doth magnify the Lord." These ladies begin to sing together because Christ and His presence is made known in them. They were open to each other, they responded to one another's needs, and that's what it means when it says where two or three are gathered together in my name.

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There I am in the midst of them. It's Jesus who tied this loving and this caring into the beautiful thing we see it to be. I don't very often quote theologians to you. Theologians have the ability of taking a red-hot truth and turning it into an ice-cold proposition.

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But Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who was murdered by the Nazis about 40 years ago, wrote these words in some unpublished lectures on Christiology, just three sentences. "Christ is among us as we are together. Man exists only through being together, which brings him into Christ.

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When a man is in Christ, he is in a community. He is still an individual, but a full member of the community, and the continuity of his existence is preserved in Christ." What Bonhoeffer is saying is this, that we never discover fully who we are

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until we're in a caring and a sharing and a bearing relationship with other people. And if the words of a theologian are chocolate and you like vanilla, well, let me put it to you in another way. There came a time in the last world war in France, on a desolate battlefield,

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when all the houses and the trees were blackened and broken, and all about was nothing but yellow mud and the dead. The dead of a month before and the dead of weeks before and the dead of that day. The night was falling, and over the no-man's land,

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the allied forces and the forces of the enemy, there was an awful calm. And out of the darkness came the sound of a voice calling, "Help! Help!" The voice was speaking in English, it was one of our boys. "Help! Help!"

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He evidently had been wounded, knocked unconscious in the battle, and then the coolness of the night refreshed him and he came to consciousness again, but he didn't know where he was, he didn't know which way to go, and he was so wounded that he could not move.

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And the forces on both sides heard this voice crying out in agony and in pain, "Help! Help!" And suddenly a light shined in the German lines. It was a bright light.

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And it shined upon a German soldier who stood up holding a white flag. He was a great big man. And taking the light in one hand and holding the flag in the other, he walked out into that no-man's land, a perfect target.

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And he looked until he found the wounded soldier. And he bent down and picked him up and carried him to the Allied lines. And there put him into the arms of one of his military brothers. The German did not say a word.

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He simply looked at the Americans waiting there, made the sign of the cross, and turned and went back to his lines again. Now where is the reality in that?

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Is the reality in the mud and the broken houses and the twisted trees? No. Is the mud to be found in the hail of hateful bullets that shot from one side to the other during that day? No. No. Is the reality to be found in a wounded person,

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some place out there crying, "Help! Help!" Yes, that's part of the world's reality. But the deepest and most profound reality in that is this. That a man given over to the use of arms, that a man given over to killing, suddenly was called to his highest self.

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Suddenly discovered something in that moment of recognized need that he'd never seen before. And he got up at the risk of his own life, and he walked out, and he picked up a wounded boy, and he carried him back to the lines of his enemies. And he didn't have to say anything.

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All he had to do was to remind them of what called him to the noblest thing that was in him, to the greatest reality which was part of his heart and his soul and his spirit. It was the sign of the cross. It was the reality of Jesus who meets us in that moment when we hear need and when we respond to it.

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This is our highest calling. So we have before us today two great ladies, Mary and Elizabeth, and they stand and they sing. And how should we describe them? We don't have to enter into grandiose theologies.

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We don't have to clutter the tales with legends. These ladies are like satellites. They're not like the sun which burns with its own flame. They're like the moon which reflects the glory of the sun.

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They reflected the glory of the Christ who was coming into the world through them. And it's in the moment that we so reflect the glory of Christ. It's in the moment that we respond by saying we need or that we respond by saying I'll help when I'm needed. It's in that time that we show Jesus and the joy and the reality of him is seen in us.

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So a minister friend of mine met a teenager and he said, "Do you believe that Jesus was God?" And the teenager said, "No." And he said, "Why don't you believe it?" He said, "I don't believe it because if God made Jesus, then Jesus would be able to make other Jesuses.

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God made roses and roses can make other roses. And God made elephants and elephants can make other elephants. But Jesus doesn't seem to be able to make other Jesuses. If Jesus could make other Jesuses, then I would believe he was God."

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"Oh, surely you must know someone who is Jesus to you. Your mother, she ran away from our house 20 years ago before I was even old enough to remember. Your father is an alcoholic. Well, somebody's been nice to you.

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No one's been nice to me. What about your minister?" "No, not my minister." So the next time my friend saw the boy's minister, he told him about this kid.

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And the minister said, "Oh, him. That kid's crazy." I will never, ever say that about any of you because I need you. And because a hope in my heart is that you need me and that we need each other. See, it's when somebody goes looking for Jesuses that we discover each other.

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And it's as we respond in the moment of need that we become Jesuses for each other. This is what the joy of the Christian faith is. It's the same for us as it was for them, for Mary and Elizabeth. Flying united with Him and flying united with one another.

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Let us pray. Oh God, use these words in great mercy to testify to the wishes of your spirit. For Jesus sake, amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]