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Give attention now to the reading of God's Word as it is recorded in the first letter of Peter, the third chapter. I begin the reading at the verse numbered eight. Finally, all of you have unity of spirit, sympathy, love of the brethren, a tender heart, and a humble mind. Do not return evil for evil, or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary bless, for to this you have been called, that you may obtain a blessing.

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For he that would love life and seek good days, let him keep his tongue from evil and his lips from speaking guile. Let him turn away from evil and do right. Let him seek and pursue it. For the eyes of the Lord are upon the righteous, and his ears are open to their prayer.

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But the face of the Lord is against those who do evil. Now who is there to harm you if you are zealous for what is right? But even if you do suffer for righteousness' sake, you will be blessed. Have no fear of them, nor be troubled, but in your hearts reverence Christ as Lord.

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Always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you. Yet do it with gentleness and reverence, and keep your conscience clear, so that when you are abused, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame. For it is better to suffer for doing right, if that should be God's will, than for doing wrong. For Christ also died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit,

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in which he went and preached to the spirits in prison, who formerly did not obey, when God's patience waited in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water. Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a clear conscience through the resurrection of Jesus Christ,

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who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers subject to him. And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his work. Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

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Amen. We are living in a new world which challenges old ideas. A decade or three ago, when I started into the ministry, I found that most of the values of our society were largely dictated by the Christian faith, that the worldview of our culture was roughly commensurate with that which was mine as a believer,

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and the voice of the church was heard powerfully and significantly in the land. I was comfortable in an America that was concerned for the things of the faith. But now all of that has changed. America has become patently anti-Christian.

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There are social forces at work which I do not begin to understand. And the church has become weak and unimpressive. All the media demonstrate with regard to the church is contempt. Ten thousand good deeds by ten thousand good Christians are not noticed.

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But Jim and Tammy Baker make the front page night after night. So we live in a society today which largely rejects Christianity. And not only does it reject Christianity, but it has turned against conviction itself. Have you noticed in this day how certainty is almost viewed as a kind of weakness?

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That it's become almost indecent to make up your mind about something and then stay with your decision? A few months ago I got a letter from one of our radio listeners who pointed out to me a new book by Dr. Alan Bloom called "The Closing of the American Mind." The book was on the bestseller list then and now months later it is still on that list. And what Dr. Bloom, who is a noted philosopher at the University of Chicago, says is this.

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Education is largely failing today, at least on the university level, because it teaches as its fundamental doctrine that you never can be sure of anything. When I was a college professor for ten years, the one thing I could be sure of about every new class of youngsters that I encountered was this. They would believe that truth was relative. They would tolerate anything as being all right for those who practiced it.

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In fact, we live in a world today where the only thing which is not tolerated is intolerance. I think this has become a part and parcel of our American experience. To say to somebody, "I don't believe that. That is wrong," is somehow considered to be un-American today or almost un-Christian. The educational goal is to make everybody open-minded.

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And if you suggest that some things do not deserve attention or that some things are immoral or wrong or that one faith stands above another faith in terms of the beliefs of mankind, if you suggest that, you're seen as a bigot and as one who is narrow-minded. Our founding fathers established a society in which the majority ruled with respect for the minority. But today, the majority is seen as some kind of selfish interest group,

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and the minority, even though they have not succeeded in garnering the support that the majority has, are seen to be equally right. Everybody's right in terms of what they believe. Nobody's really wrong. If it suits you, do your thing.

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Now, lest you think that what I'm talking about only has relevance in what's being taught on our college campuses, let me bring it a little closer to home. A few years ago, a young American missionary by the name of Chester Bitterman went down to Columbia. He was engaged in Bible translation. He was kidnapped by a group there, and about a week after his being kidnapped, his body was found riddled with five bullets.

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Now, the story reported in the papers back here in the States was that this young man had been murdered by communist terrorists. In their zeal, they had slain him. But that's not the whole truth. The fact of the matter is that a group of British anthropologists wanted to make a movie about some primitive tribes in Columbia.

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So they went to Bitterman and some other missionaries and said, "Would you introduce us to these Indians?" They understood, you see, that these missionaries knew the Indians and were trusted by the Indians. So they asked these missionaries to give them entree, and the missionaries did so, and they took their pictures. And then they went back to England, and they edited those pictures in such a way that the missionaries were made to look very bad.

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The argument was, "What right do these people have to come here and tell these primitive people, living in fear and disease and poverty and ignorance, what right have they to say that the primitive animism which they have isn't as good as their Christian religion?" Missionaries are agents of religious and cultural imperialism. They issued the film under the title "The War of the Gods."

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Who can say that the tree or the stone worshipped by these primitive ones is in any way inferior to the god worshipped by these missionaries? That film, "The War of the Gods," was shown all over Columbia, and one of the groups that saw it, three days later, went out and kidnapped Chester Bitterman and took his life. And what was Chester Bitterman's sin? His sin, if you want to call it that, was this.

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He knew what he believed, and he was carrying it to others and announcing, "I have something for you which is better than what you have." And that goes against the grain of sophisticated 20th century thinking. When I started out in the ministry, conviction was honored. The world today condemns it as hopelessly narrow.

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You can believe anything you want to, as long as you keep your grass cut. Now, this difficulty is compounded by the fact that many Christians in our time really don't know what they believe or why. The Christians you see by inheritance, their religion has been passed down to them, and they've never really investigated it. Biblical illiteracy is just one expression of this.

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I had a woman tell me on one occasion that an epistle was the wife of an apostle. I announced to a group that I was going to speak to them out of the book of Jude, and someone said, "What chapter?" A friend of mine was speaking to a woman on one occasion, and he quoted Jude to her, and she said, "Where does that quotation come from?" And he said, "From the book of Jude." And she said, "Where is that?" And he said, "It's right before Revelation."

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And she replied, "Oh, we don't study the Old Testament." When a minister preaches, he cannot assume, if he alludes casually to some parable or some biblical story, that most of the people in the room will know what he's talking about. He has to take the time to explain it.

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I sat and listened to four very intelligent men one night carry on an extended discussion of Moses and the ark. Now, it's easy to see why this kind of biblical illiteracy is about. We don't have prayer meetings anymore, and we don't have Sunday evening services, and both of those acts were largely given over to teaching. Sunday schools are shrinking.

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In the last ten years, the average attendance at America's Sunday schools has dropped a little more than 25%. And the Bible is not honored and read and studied in homes. Television and slick magazines have taken its place. You know, it used to be that even the poor had a Bible and knew where it was and what it said.

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Abraham Lincoln taught himself to read and to be a cultured and erudite man by studying only three books, the Bible, the writings of Shakespeare, and Euclid. But you don't find the Bible or other books of this kind in most homes, at least being read in those homes and studied. So what we confront, you see, is not only the cynicism of the 20th century,

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which says you can't know anything for sure, and if you claim to, you're a bigot, and at the same time, the ignorance of many people who take the name of Christ. And the inevitable result of this is a retreat from the faith. In the first century, the church grew very rapidly. Why?

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There were a lot of coarse and rude and largely sterile, intellectually sterile people in the Roman Empire. But those people knew that their lives were not what they ought to be. They were looking for something that could give them something of life which they had never experienced before. And they saw these little companies of Christians in their midst,

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people who knew what they were living for and were willing to die for, people who loved and trusted one another, people who took care of the needy and looked upon dying as a kind of victory, people who served and loved even those who were not part of their own fellowship. And when these Romans, who recognized their own spiritual and intellectual poverty, saw this,

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they were attracted to these groups of Christians. And they became interested in them until they became caught up in the movement of them and became Christians themselves, ready to live and die for what they believe. And in those days, the church grew.

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But today, the church shrinks because it confronts an unbelieving world with an unconvincing gospel. So what is to be done? How do we learn to give an intelligent reason for the faith that is in us? Well, obviously, it means we're going to have to use our minds.

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If there were no God, and if we were not made by God, then we wouldn't have to think about theology. But the fact of the matter is there is a God, and he has created us, and that means we must think about him and what our creation means. If we believe that after this lifespan, which at its very longest is relatively short,

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after this lifespan we're going to appear before God and we're going to be judged by him on the basis of the faithfulness of our days, if we really believe that, doesn't that call us to the utilization of our minds and every other gift we have in the expressing of our faith today?

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Now, historically, we as Presbyterians have believed that. If you go into many of these small towns here in western Pennsylvania where our Presbyterian faith is so strong, you will many times find that right next to the Presbyterian church or directly across the street is the public school.

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Why? Because Presbyterians believed in the importance of education. It is no accident, you know, that Presbyterians right here in our little corner of the world established the University of Pittsburgh, Westminster College, Worcester College, Muskingum College, Washington and Jefferson College, Allegheny College, and Grove City College.

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You see, Presbyterians have been committed to Christ's commission where he says, "Go ye into all the world baptizing in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching all nations to observe all that I have commanded you." That's part of our tradition.

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So when we encounter a text like the text which is before us today, it should fit everything that's part of our history. Our text is out of that letter of Peter which I read a few minutes ago. There Peter says, "Always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who calls you to account

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for the faith that is in you, and do it with gentleness and with reverence." So how do we learn what we believe and how to describe what we believe in a reasonable, in a reverent, and in a responsible way? Well, first of all, and most obviously, we study the scriptures

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and other formative and informative material. I cannot name a single significant Christian who has not built her life upon the Word of God written. You know, John Wesley said in the founding days of Methodism that every Methodist should read. And someone responded to him, "But I have no taste for reading."

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Then Wesley said, "Go out and develop such a taste." If, he went on, Christians do not read, the faith will disappear in one generation, a reading Christian is a knowing Christian. You know, it really is, when you think about it, remarkably conceited for an individual to believe

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that she or he can go through life living as God would have them live without ever reading the directions which God has put into their hands. The scriptures are an inexhaustible source of inspiration from God. They widen our horizons, they deepen our commitment, they open us to new ideas.

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And we should not only be studying the scriptures, but other Christian literature as well. When our officers had their devotional retreat at the beginning of this church year, our speaker was Dr. Andrew Purvis from Pittsburgh Seminary, and he said he divided literature into two kinds, formative and informative.

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Formative literature is that which helps to form, to strengthen, to nourish the soul. This would be devotional reading of one kind or another. Informative literature was that which edified the mind. Christian biography, Christian history, the progress of world mission.

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My friends, when you do this kind of reading, well, loneliness disappears from your life. And boredom is chased away. And light comes where darkness was. And your consciousness expands.

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And you become not only more interested, but a more interesting person. Please don't say no to the study of scripture and other Christian literature. It is imperative that we do this. Turn the television set off.

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You can do without its violence and its inanity and its egomania. And use the church library. Or better, begin to build a Christian library of your own. And here's a second principle.

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We need to attend regularly some Christian education experience. You know, one of the oldest lies told is the lie that you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Now, it is true that a human being is at the peak of her or his learning capacity when they're 28 years old. And after that, you begin to slow down.

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But I would respectfully point out to you that older people bring to learning a dimension of experience and a motivating power which more than makes up for that loss of speed which might have become typical of them. Don't let yourself suffer from hardening of the categories. A mind is a terrible thing to waste.

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A young mind or an older mind. If you want your children to grow in the things of Christ, then you've got to grow in those things yourself. And that means getting involved in the discipline of discussion and debate which is part of any good adult Christian education class.

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We have seven adult education classes in this church. One is taught by a minister. One is taught by a homemaker. One is taught by a corporation president.

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One is taught by a university instructor. One is taught by a young entrepreneur. One is taught by a retired man who was an office manager. One is taught by an expert in corporate education.

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We have older teachers. We have younger teachers. There is a veritable smorgasbord of opportunity laid out for those who want to become involved in a growing Christian experience through discussion and the hearing of God's Word opened and explained.

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And if our classes do not attract you, then Pittsburgh Seminary out in East Liberty offers courses for adults all the time. Get involved in one of them. And let me make one last suggestion. Become a careful listener.

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Be discriminant in that which you attend to. When I was teaching on the college campus, one of the courses which I taught was persuasive speaking. And there were four goals in that course. One, what are the techniques of persuasion?

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Two, learn how to use those techniques. Three, measure those techniques as to which ones are ethically valid and which ones are ethically invalid. And four, learn to be a careful listener so that you can discover when persuasive techniques are being used on you. The trouble is today that so many Christians are so lazy that not only do they not read the Word of God and other good literature,

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not only do they not involve themselves in a class where they might learn and be confronted with truth, but because of this they go out and cheerfully buy any religious claptrap that happens to come their way. People opt for the crossless Christianity of a Robert Shuler, or the anti-intellectualism and fundamentalism of a Jerry Falwell,

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or the dead, theologically disreputable dispensationalism of Jimmy Swaggerton. My friends, it is one thing to be ignorant. That's just living in one dimension. It's a far worse thing to go from that to believing the errors of others.

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That is absolutely non-discriminating. Let me give you an example of what I mean. Let's take the abortion question. Now, you're not going to be able, from what I say, to know where I stand on abortion, and that's good.

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I don't want you to know where I stand on abortion right now. That's not what we're talking about. But listen to some of the things that are said so casually and so erroneously. Haven't you heard somebody say this?

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"I believe in the sanctity of human life." Now, that sentence says that they believe the important dictum in stopping abortions is the sanctity of human life. That means the measuring dimension, or that which makes it important that you don't abort a baby, is the sanctity of the baby's life. Now, there's a certain sense in which that is true.

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But Christians do not act on this question because of the sanctity of human life. That's a humanistic, secular idea, to measure all things by the worth and the capacity of a human being. Christians who stand against abortion stand against it, I hope, because they believe it is the will of God. It is the sanctity of God, and God says, "Don't do it!"

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Not because of the worth of the human being, no matter what that worth might be. Or you hear people say, "God forbids the taking of innocent life." Innocent life? Well, what about that word "life"?

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That's being questioned very seriously. No one pretends to know exactly when the life of a fetus begins. And innocent? Doesn't our Christian faith teach us that all of us are stained with sin?

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That we have, from the very womb, been caught up in the gone wrongness of the world? How can we speak about innocent life? Or what about this? And this is the most blasphemous one of all. The individual who says, "If you commit an abortion, you are playing God."

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Playing God. Now, I assume that means acting like God. If you're playing God, you're acting like God. So they're saying to us, "If you take a child's life, before that child is born, you're acting like God." Is that what God does? Does God go around zapping little babies in the womb?

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"I'll kill this one and I'll let that one live." God? Not my God. I don't know a God like that. I don't want to know a God like that. If you believe that, then you must believe that it's God's hand that directs the dagger in an act of murder.

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Or that it's God that makes it impossible for a person to give up smoking so they die of lung cancer. Or it's God who puts his hand on the wheel, with a drunk behind the wheel, and makes sure that the car hits just the person that God wants to hit. God doesn't act like that.

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How dare anyone say when someone commits an abortion that they are playing God? I confess to you that I can understand why a lot of people don't believe the gospel today. Because they've never heard it really presented to them in terms of the love of God. They've never heard wise witness.

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They hear a bunch of religious clap tracks. And they reject it. And much of that clap track, I reject right with them. Be a discriminator.

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Well, our time is gone. Let me just conclude with this. In 1825, this church started the first Sunday school in the city of Pittsburgh. And it went so well that we began other Sunday schools around the city. And eight years later, in 1833, when this church only had 389 members,

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this church had 19 Sunday school superintendents and 103 Sunday school teachers going out each week, involved in the Christian education experience. And in those days, a Sunday school class was three hours long. Well, we don't do that anymore.

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The ignorance of the world and the inability of many Christians makes it impossible. So the next time you're appalled by something you read in the newspaper, or shocked by something you see on television, or offended by what you read in the papers, or hear in your office,

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if you're dismayed by what happens within your own home, I invite you, and I say this out of my love for you, I invite you to ask yourself this question. Am I part of this problem?

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Or am I part of its answer? Let us pray. Thou hast told us through the lips of thine own Son, that we are to love thee, Lord, with all our hearts, souls, minds, and bodies.

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Well, we've given you our hearts, and we feed on you and nourish our souls, but we've been careless, many of us, with our minds. Help us to have the mind of Christ formed in us,

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so that we might offer ourselves totally, and be winning witnesses to a desperate and despairing world. We pray it in Jesus' name.

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Amen. [music]