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[Music] Speaking from Pasadena, California, Presbyterian Church, Dr. Bruce W. Thielman brings you a message on being a whole person. [Music]

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Let us continue in our worship by giving attention to the reading of God's Word as it is recorded in portions of the first and second chapters of the book of Genesis. "Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air,

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and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.' So God created man in his own image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. The Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.

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Then the Lord God said, 'It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.' So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs, and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman, and brought her to the man.

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Then the man said, 'This at last is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man.' Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother, and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh. And may the same Spirit that inspired these words incline our hearts that we might understand them.

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Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. I would like to begin our thinking together this evening by asking you a question. And I would like to assure you at the outset that I do not pose this question as any kind of homiletic device.

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This is no preacher's ploy designed to gain attention. It's a very serious question with very serious implications, and I put it to you in the most serious of ways. The question is this. What is the essential difference between a man and a woman? Now for generations people would have been very quick to answer that question.

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All kinds of suggestions would have been readily and almost immediately suggested. But as we have become more sophisticated in the areas of physiology and psychology, we have discovered that man and woman are not as obviously different as we earlier thought. It was assumed, for example, that sexual differentiation occurred by the structure and interaction of chromosomes

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when the egg was penetrated by the sperm. That is undoubtedly true, but there's more to the difference than that. We have discovered that the hormones provided to the fetus during the time it is developing in the womb have a great deal to do with sexual differentiation. That is unquestionably true, but there's more to it than that. We have discovered, and perhaps this is the most significant thing we have learned,

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that culture has a great deal to do with sexual differentiation. That is, whether you treat a baby as a male or a female will determine to a very large degree whether that infant will in fact behave as a male or female throughout the rest of its life. Let me be very specific and illustrate that.

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There are every year born in this country thousands of babies with anomalous sex organs. That is, you cannot tell by examining their organs whether they are male or female. Now for generations it has been the practice when such a child was born for the medical doctor to give as thorough examination as possible and then,

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on the basis of whatever evidence he had, and sometimes there was no more than that which could give an enlightened guess, to literally guess what the sex of the child was, to assign a sex to the infant. Now sometimes, some years later, usually in puberty when the organs became more developed, it was discovered that the doctor had made a wrong guess,

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that the child treated as a little girl was in fact a little boy, or vice versa. When that was discovered, it was usually the practice to begin treating that child in accordance with its actual sex, not in accordance with the mistake made earlier. But what was discovered was that in such an instance,

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it was almost impossible to change the behavior of the infant. This was so much the case that it has been shown quite indisputably that if you treat a child as a boy for one year, just one year, nothing that you do after that year will ever successfully cement into the mind of that infant

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that in fact it's not a boy but a girl. It's quite amazing to me because as I think of the way I've treated little boy babies and little girl babies that I've had in my arms, it seems to me I don't treat them any differently, whether they're boys or girls. But something unconsciously is transmitted here

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which has such an impact upon that child that if you treat a child, even though that child is in fact female, unbeknownst to you, if you treat that child as a little boy for a year, you will never after that be able to convert that child utterly to the new sex,

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which is actually the sex of the infant. In instances where this has been tried, terrible mental depressive results have come and an exceedingly high rate of suicide. This is so much the case that now doctors no longer guess.

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They actually perform an operation on the child because by means of internal examination they can determine the sex precisely. They don't guess anymore because the results were too horrible. Culture, you see, the way you treat a child, determines to a very significant degree

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what the sex of that child will be. Now it's in the light of this that I ask my question. What is the essential difference between a man and a woman? Yes, intuitively we all know there is a difference. We all understand that.

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But which one of us is able to define it precisely? When I think of this, I'm reminded of the scene which I shared with you from Scripture a few moments ago. You will remember that in the story in Genesis, when God fashions Eve from the body of Adam, he causes a deep sleep first to fall upon Adam.

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It is almost as if God does not want man to fully understand. He draws the blinds, he pulls a curtain in order that man might always, when he approaches the subject of sexual differentiation, be in a place where he cannot see clearly, a place of mystery, a place of enigma.

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Perhaps we are never to understand this question fully. I don't advance that as an anti-intellectual act, but rather as an act of humility. Maybe this is something which the Almighty has ordained that we are not to fully understand. Yes, men and women are different, but the essence of that difference, well, it escapes us.

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One thing we can know for sure, when the Bible says in the first chapter of Genesis, "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them," when the Bible says that, it stands as utterly unique in the history of the world's literature.

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There is no other book from the ancient world, no other book in any other faith, that has a sentence in it like that sentence. For in the compass of that single sentence, three important truths are announced. First, that both male and female are made in God's image.

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Second, that male and female are different. And third, that there is, in spite of that difference, a basic unity, a oneness, an equality between the sexes. Here, in the space of a very few Hebrew words, we are taught that all men and women are the same, that all men and women are different, and that all men and women are made in the image of God.

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And it's because this is the teaching of Scripture and the teaching of our holy faith, and it's because this is what I deeply believe, that I come into this pulpit with a very great concern upon my heart tonight. Because I believe our culture today is crippling our understanding of what a man and woman are to be.

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We've already noted, just a moment ago, that culture does have great emphasis on sexual differentiation. Let's look at that more precisely. How does our culture cripple the nature of women? Well, if television is any valid expression of our culture, and they say that it is,

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then I certainly think that women are being crippled by television. On television, it seems the most significant battles that women ever win are managing to get their floors from yellow to clear, or successfully chasing away the ring around the collar, or learning a new way to clean the toilet bowl, or equally impressive victories.

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Men, on the other hand, are described on television in terms of being lumberjacks, or climbing up and down oil refineries, or doing all kinds of sophisticated things in mysterious-looking laboratories. Great victories for men, insignificant victories for women. Is treating the sexes equally, as equally honored by God, as the capacities of both being present in both?

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A television commercial for your examination. A woman is walking into a very imposing building. A man is walking out. He looks directly at her breasts, and he says, "Mary, is that you?" And she looks at him and says, "Yes, John. Cross my heart."

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And then we've got a commercial about made-in-form brassieres. Now let's reverse that commercial. A man is walking into a very imposing building. A woman is walking out. She looks directly at his crotch and says, "John, is that you?"

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And he looks at her and says, "Yes, Mary. Cross my jockey shorts. It's me." Now some of you are laughing, and some of you are looking at me in absolute dismay, and I submit that whether you are astonished, dismayed, or amused, the point is still identically the same. You have recognized in your own way that our society treats women as sexual objects

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and never does the same thing when it looks at men. Is that treating the sexes equally? Is that holding them before God as Scripture and science hold them up before us? A recent study has shown that in the children's stories, children's stories read by little kids,

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the cornerstones of our culture of tomorrow, that in those stories, only 4% of the time are significant leadership roles given to women. In one book, there was the story of Madam Curie, and in even that book, she was described principally as being her husband's assistant.

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And this is not only true with children, it's true on higher levels. Let me give you some examples of quotations which I take from institutions of higher education, our own and other schools as well. Here's a girl who is very neat and orderly in her work. She is described as being tidy.

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Here is a boy who is very neat and careful in his work. He is described as someday he'll make a good controller for a company. Here's a girl that's rather careless about her work. Comment. Kind of sloppy for a woman, don't you think?

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Here's a fellow who's rather careless about his work. Doesn't always color inside the lines. Comment. He has a creative bent, doesn't he? Here's a girl who, well, she has real grace in dealing with people. She's described as charming, which has to do with magic spells and amulets and things of that kind.

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Cunning, clever acts. Here's a fellow who is skilled in dealing with people. Real diplomatic genius, isn't he? Here's a girl who speaks up and says what's on her mind.

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Here's a fellow who does the same thing. The fellow is described as having a mind like a steel track. I was told by one of our faculty, on the other hand, that the girl was a pushy broad. Now, you see, is there really an equal treatment of male and female when we differentiate so clearly,

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doing what neither science nor scripture is willing to do? And this doesn't only happen to the women. This also happens to the men. I'm indebted to Dr. Anthony Campolo, the chairman of the Department of Sociology at Eastern College, for pointing out an episode that happened very early in the primaries for the last presidential election.

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They were conducted, as you know, the earliest primary is always in the state of New Hampshire. And the leader of the pack of Democrat hopefuls at that time was Senator Edmund Muskie. Now, it was during that campaign that the Manchester Gazette came out with a particularly foul and scurrilous attack upon Mrs. Muskie, who was campaigning with her husband.

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The charges were altogether untrue, but they were bandied and publicized about. When Senator Muskie heard this, he returned to the hotel and sought to comfort his wife, who was very upset about the ugly things that were said about her. The next morning, at 6 o'clock in the morning, he was out involved in the campaign again,

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first shaking hands at a factory, and then in that cold winter morning, conducting a press conference from the back of a truck. The first question that was put to him in the press conference was this, "What do you think about the article in the paper about your wife?" Now, Muskie could have brushed it aside. He could have simply turned it away.

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But he didn't. He tried to be responsible. He tried to answer the question. He began to talk about how he loved his wife and how his wife loved him, how she had worked with him, how they had sacrificed for each other, how their goals were the same. And as he began to spell this out, caught up in the exhaustion of the political campaign,

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caught up in the emotion of his own caring, he shed a few tears. Within hours, the news of his weeping was spread from the East Coast to the West, and political analysts say that that weeping, more than anything else, defeated Edmund Muskie in New Hampshire. And after losing New Hampshire, he lost other primaries as well.

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It perhaps cost him those primaries and the nomination and maybe even the election. All because the man wept a bit. We don't want, you see, a man who has any characteristics that might manifest themselves in weeping. We don't want a president who cries, which of course automatically means

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that Jesus of Nazareth could never have been president of the United States. I don't know how you feel about it, but I would be mightily refreshed and would praise God if we got a few people in Washington, D.C. who were sensitive enough and compassionate enough and caring enough to weep openly about some of the desperately tragic situations in this world.

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But you see, in our society, a man is to deny one half of himself. He is to deny those emotions which are part of him by his very created being, under the influence of John Locke and John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith. We have been taught that the essence of moral and intellectual and economic progress

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is in the clash of self-interest. Competition is the way we get ahead. The law of the marketplace is the law for all men. And so we teach men in the marketplace, and they have their experience in the marketplace,

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and they become great competitors. They go out every day and try to win great victories, because in winning great victories, they assert their masculinity, and they have to do that over and over and over again,

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their masculinity being some kind of holy grail which they pursue all of their lives. And the tragedy is that they become great competitors in the marketplace and utterly incompetent in personal relationships. They deny half of themselves.

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And the cost is husbands who can't communicate and fathers who don't know how to love their children and men who are severely crippled even in their businesses. Christopher Ardress recently completed a survey for the Harvard Business Review.

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He examined the lifestyles and the occupational practices of 165 American executives. These executives employed from as few as 150 to as many as 40,000 employees. He discovered in this survey that these men as a group were utterly unprepared to deal with emotional questions.

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This was so much the case that within their companies, whenever an emotional conflict would arise, when two department heads, for example, were unable to get along personally, rather than face the reality of that personal difficulty,

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they would instead try to blame the difficulty on some purely procedural or technical matter. Utterly unwilling to even approach an emotional question. So incompetent were they to deal with it. Most of these executives said that they believed in leading their companies

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by unilateral and coercive action. Unable, you see, to enter in to a compassionate, cooperative relationship with their employees. These executives filled out forms in which they said that their employees knew them and they knew their employees.

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But in private interviews, it was shown that these men, in fact, didn't know anything about those who worked for them, and those who worked for them knew very little about those who were their bosses. And the cost of this was terrible.

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It was shown in tape recordings of 265 business meetings conducted on all levels that the average American businessman, when he's sitting in such a meeting, will not share his best ideas. Why?

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Because he's in competition even with the people who are working for the same company. He's afraid to bring forth an idea for fear the guy next to him will chop it down and so advance a little more than he will on the corporate ladder. And as a result, in the whole area of objectives and strategies,

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the most important area in any significant institutional venture, men hold back and do not advance their ideas, and the result is lost time, lost ideas, lost confidence, lost days, lost weeks, lost dollars. [bell rings]

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Please turn your cassette to the other side. Now the truth is the Bible says that men and women are essentially the same. The same emotions exist within men that are within women and vice versa. And science confirms this as being true.

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But in our culture, we try to say that a woman is only fit to battle ring around the collar and a man must always be in competition, denying the characteristics of the other. A brilliant chemist, PhD, polymer expert, a woman, comes to me and says she resents it. Every time she succeeds in her business and someone says to her,

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"You're more man than you are a woman," that's no compliment. Or I think of the businessman who comes to me and says that he never admits to the fellows at work that he likes to read poetry and that he makes pottery because he knows if he says that, some of them may think he was a little bit queer.

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And there's no threat, of course, you can make to an American male which will upset him more than to suggest that in any way, shape, or form there is any of the feminine in him. Our culture, you see, is crippling us. It's forcing us to be just one half of what we are by our very created natures to be.

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Now set this over against the example of our Lord Jesus Christ who was genuinely and magnificently a whole person. Look at the strength and the courage that were in the man. He confronts 300 businessmen in the temple, knocks over their tables,

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sends their coins into the cracks in the sidewalk, and sends them hurrying into the holes in the walls. Here he is in Capernaum, opposed by his enemies. They plan to grab him and throw him over a cliff. What does he do?

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He walks through there very midst with so much macho that no one even dares to lay a hand on him. Now that's the kind of strength and courage that are in Jesus. Yet, at the same time, a beautiful gentleness and openness. A young man comes to him one day, and youth is attractive.

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This young man has been financially successful either by inheritance or his own efforts. He's rich. He's also prominent. He's a ruler amongst his people, and he comes with a very serious question. What must I do to inherit eternal life?

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So this rich young ruler comes to Jesus with this question, and Jesus loves him. We know that Jesus loved him because, well, he must have said so, because it's written right there in Scripture. And Jesus, looking on him, loved him. The writer would not have known that had Jesus not advised him that that was the case.

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Jesus sees this attractive, personable, successful young man come to him, and he looks at him, and he loves him. Now imagine what would happen if some salesman walked into the business office of some big executive, and he's young and attractive and personable and successful, and the business executive talks to him for a while and then turns to his secretary and says, "You know, I really love him."

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Can you imagine the result? In a society where men just aren't supposed to say, "I love you," to other men, men have developed a code, you know. They communicate with each other without saying that.

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They'll say things like this, for example, "Hi, you old blankety-blank! How on the blank are you?" That's the way, in the midst of the 20th century, an American man is supposed to say that he really cares. Jesus put it more simply.

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He put it more gently. He put it more tenderly. He said, of another man, "I love you." And what about with children?

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In our society, men are supposed to sire children, but they're not really expected to father them. Mark Bastow, who's written, I think, the best book on male liberation, a book called The Male Machine, one you ought to read, says that he was talking to a truck driver who was asked to come to his little son's nursery school for an hour one day.

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He came and had a great time, but when he left, he said to the teacher, "I hope the guys at work never hear about this." I know a doctor who will push his child's baby carriage, but never near the hospital where he works,

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because he doesn't want anybody in the hospital to see him doing it. Or here's a young attorney who seriously says that he can't spend as much time with his family as he wants to, because he's afraid that the leaders of the firm will not think him sufficiently ambitious, and so will not move him up the organizational ladder.

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He doesn't know what he would say to them. Well, Mr. Truck Driver and Mr. Doctor and Mr. Attorney, here's what you might say to those people. You might say to them exactly what Jesus said.

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"Let the little children come to me. Don't keep them away. Why, when I'm holding them, I feel like I have heaven in my lap." Strengths and compassion, courage and tenderness. But in our society, we don't let people be like that.

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And as a result, we see individuals who discover only 10% of the loveliness in others, who find only 10% of the music and the poetry in different personalities, who smell only 10% of the fragrance of human relationships, who taste only 10% of the deliciousness of other lives,

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who have only 10% of the emotion and the tenderness and the wonder that is supposed to be part of the human experience, who are alive only 10% of the way with love. One half of what they ought to be.

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Men missing so much of life because they refuse to accept the so-called feminine graces that have been built into them by God, and women missing out on half of life because they refuse, oft times, or are deprived of the opportunity to display the gifts,

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the so-called masculine characteristics that God has put into them. Jesus, you know, did not hesitate to advance women in ways that we think of today as masculine. He had women followers in a world that only permitted men to follow religious teachers. He announced his resurrection, first of all, to women in a world that said only men could bear witness.

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He had his first identifying session as the Messiah with a woman, letting her be his first witness, not a man, in a world that said that only men should be allowed to bear witness. In the home of Mary and Martha, Martha does the things we usually associate with the woman's role,

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Mary does the things that we associate with the man's role, and Jesus says of Mary, "She has done the better thing. Don't take her away from it." Jesus, in two of his parables, pictured God as a woman. He wanted women to assert their full-orbed personalities,

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just as he wanted men to do the same thing. A man is to be able to love, and a woman is to be able to argue. A man is not to be ashamed to weep. A woman is not to be hesitating and asking for a raise.

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A man is to be tender. A woman is to be able to be tough, equal, both with dignity, both fashioned in the image of God. Jesus is the perfect example. Did you ever think of how we represent him in the hymns we sing about him?

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We sing, "A mighty fortress is our God, Lord Sabaoth his name." And then we turn around and sing, "Jesus is the sweetest name I know." We sang a few minutes ago, "Come thou, almighty King." And next week we'll sing, "Fairest Lord Jesus."

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We'll carol, "All glory, laud, and honor to thee, Redeemer King." And then we'll sing softly, "And he walks with me, and he talks with me, and he tells me that I am his own." Jesus, who could say to Pharisees, "You vipers!" And could say to his disciples, "Consider the lilies of the field.

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They neither toil nor spin, but Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." Wholeness, you see. And that is the way we are to be. What are the steps to that wholeness?

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There are five. I'm going to spend less than a minute on each one, and then I'm done. Step one. Never surrender to our crippling culture.

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You do not have to surrender to culture. Carl Menninger, in his latest book, "Whatever Became of Sin," points out that environmental determinism is significant, but individual determinism is more significant. Your character is more important than your circumstances.

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Your faith is stronger than your fate. You do not have to surrender to the culture. Second point. Seek to change the culture.

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Culture is in flux. Culture can be altered. Culture can be transformed. We as Christians should be engaged in doing exactly that,

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and we can do it most significantly through our children. And that means when you have children, or if you already have children, if your little boy wants to play with dolls, let him. Studies have repeatedly shown that little boys who play with dolls end up being better fathers than those that never did.

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And if your little girl wants to play with steamrollers, let her. Maybe she'll grow up to be a road builder. And God knows the women can't foul up the roads any more than the men already have. So in training our children, let's change the culture.

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Third. If you are in college now, or if you have children who are in college now, encourage those children to be involved in the arts. If not through major studies, then at least through electives.

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One of the major sweeping movements across the leading educational institutions in this land is more and more young people moving into the arts. Why? Because when you become involved in the arts, you are in touch with your deepest emotions and feelings,

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the creative genius which God has placed within you. Thomas Mann says in his brief novel, "Tony O. Kruger," "One may not pluck a single leaf from the laurel tree of art without paying for it with one's life." To become involved in art is to discover new depths in yourself,

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and those new depths are what we need for a healthier society. Fourth. Especially in the church, we have a great opportunity to move women into positions of leadership. This was so in the early church.

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This was so for a thousand years after the early church. It's only in the last five or six hundred years that the church has become so narrowly chauvinist. Throughout the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages, up to the time of the Reformation, there were great abbeys that were run by abbesses.

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Joan Morris of the University of London, a woman with four Ph.D. degrees, has done an extensive study on the leadership of women in the church historically. These abbesses ordained priests, served the sacrament, opened colleges and universities, started hospitals and orphanages, fought wars, ruled over hundreds of cities,

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heard judicial trials, battled with kings and popes and defeated them. All this kind of thing was done by women. Women have traditionally led in the church, put them back into positions of leadership again, that they might stand side by side with men in the leadership role.

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And fifth, finally, in everything, let Jesus Christ be your example. Jesus Christ, you see, will not be satisfied with our being only half of what we're intended to be. He will emphasize always the androgynous nature of our personalities, the fact that there is within us so much that is the same,

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so much that is masculine or feminine in every one of us. A man named Richard Awe saw an incident not too long ago of a mother and a little boy who went up to a popcorn machine to try to get some popcorn, but the machine wouldn't work. And they walked away from the machine. The boy was very disappointed.

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And as Richard Awe saw this, it moved him to write these lines. "You can't get any popcorn, child. The machine is out of order. See, there's a sign on the machine." But the child didn't understand.

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After all, he had the desire and he had the money and he could see the popcorn in the machine. And yet somehow, somewhere, something was wrong because he couldn't get the popcorn. And the boy walked away with his mother and he wanted to cry. And Lord, Richard Awe goes on, "Lord, I too felt like weeping.

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Weeping for people who have become locked in, jammed, broken machines, filled with goodness that other people need and want and yet will never come to enjoy because somehow, somewhere, something has gone wrong inside." Well, Jesus is the one who fixes what's gone wrong inside.

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He saves the crippled. He heals the broken. He teaches the ignorant. He frees those bound in heresies, those heresies which debase women or debase men. Jesus Christ, who with the Holy Spirit and God the Father forms the blessed Trinity. That Trinity was present before the creation of the world.

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He was there at the moment when Adam was put to sleep and that rib was brought forth. Woman made out of man, both of the same bone, both of the same flesh. He was there when it happened. It was at His hand that it was done. And this same Jesus Christ still goes before us.

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The mirror of perfect humanity, wholeness. He is what we are to be. We are to be living imitations of Christ. And He will not be finished with us until He has brought that miracle to pass in our lives. He will not desist from ministering to us until we have become what He would have us be.

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And what is that? Hear the testimony of Scripture. Beloved, we are God's children. It does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like Him. For we shall see Him as He truly is.

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Even so, come, Lord Jesus, and make us whole. Let us pray. Our Father, Thou hast made us so mysterious that we do not even begin to understand ourselves, but we know that down in the depths of ourselves Thou hast hidden that which is strong and that which is tender.

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That which we associate with the feminine, that which we associate with the masculine. You have mixed it magnificently in us. It's beyond our understanding, but, oh God, it's not beyond our living. So help us to be whole people.

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Send Thy Holy Spirit upon us to lift us up to the full capacity of all that we can be. Give us the thrill of compassion and the joy of courage. Teach us to be tender. Mold us so that we're strong. Let us never discriminate against one another, but always honor each other, male and female, made in Your image.

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This is our prayer. We don't just pray it with our words. We offer to Thee this night in solemn pledge our very lives. Do it, Lord. Do it in us.

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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 and to all those whom you love and to all those whom nobody loves His peace.

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Axelrod