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[Music] Reflections on the Big Five-O by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. [Music] Let us continue in worship by giving attention to the reading of God's Word

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as it is recorded in the Gospel according to John, the eighth chapter, beginning the reading at the verse which is numbered 48. The Jews answered Jesus, "Aren't we right in saying that you are a Samaritan and demon-possessed?" "I am not possessed by a demon," said Jesus, "but I honor my Father, and you dishonor me."

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"I am not seeking glory for myself, but there is one who seeks it, and he is the judge." "I tell you the truth, if a man keeps my word, he will never see death." At this the Jews exclaimed, "Now we know that you are demon-possessed." "Abraham died, and so did the prophets."

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"Yet you say that if a man keeps your word, he will never taste death." "Are you greater than our father Abraham? He died, and so did the prophets." "Who do you think you are?" Jesus replied, "If I glorify myself, my glory means nothing."

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"My Father, whom you claim as your God, is the one who glorifies me." "Though you do not know him, I know him." "If I said I did not, I would be a liar like you." "But I do know him, and keep his word."

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"Your father Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day." "He saw it, and was glad." "You are not yet fifty years old," the Jews said to him. "And you have seen Abraham?"

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"I tell you the truth," Jesus answered, "before Abraham was born, I am." "And at this, they picked up stones to stone him." "But Jesus hid himself, slipping away from the temple ground." "And may God bless to us, and to our understanding, this reading from his word."

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"Will you pray with me?" "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit." "Amen." It is remarkable, when you come to think about it,

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how little is said in the New Testament about the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ. One would think that every one of the Gospels would tell the story, and that all the epistles would comment on it. But as a matter of fact, the New Testament is much more concerned with the throne of Jesus

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than it is with the manger in which he was born. "O Bethlehem" is acknowledged, it certainly is not denied, but the emphasis in the New Testament is upon the foreverness of Jesus Christ. The New Testament sees the life of Jesus, as it were, in the form of two mountains with a valley in between.

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The first mountain is the pre-existence of Christ, that he always has been. The second mountain is his going to be with his Father in glory, and sitting at the right hand of God for all eternity. The short valley between the two peaks is his earthly experience.

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The New Testament speaks pre-eminently of the eternal Christ, and there's no place where it speaks more eloquently of that than the passage that I have just read in your hearing. Jesus says to the Jews who are assembled before him that his teachings will bring a man to the place where he need never know death.

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The Jews say to him in response, "Are you greater than our father Abraham? Who do you think you are?" Jesus replied, "Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day." And the Jews immediately answered, "Why, you're not yet fifty years old, and you have seen Abraham?"

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Then comes one of the most glorious affirmations of Jesus in all of the Bible, "Before Abraham was, I am." Now as great as that sentence is, and as magnificent as its claim, it's not the word in this pericope which particularly takes my attention this morning.

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You see, just a few months ago I became fifty years old, and I never noticed this question of the Jews to Jesus until I had become fifty years old. They say to him, "You are not yet fifty years old, and you have seen Abraham?" Why didn't they say thirty years old? Or forty? Or sixty?

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Well the answer is to be found in the book of Numbers, the fourth chapter, it's the third verse, where it explains that a Levite priest regularly retired at the age of fifty. He was considered at that time to have rendered sufficient service to have arrived at certain profound certainties and conclusions,

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and on these he could retire and muse and meditate for the rest of his life. Discovering that about the passage, I was led to think, "Well what conclusions and certainties have I come to now that I'm fifty years old?" I'm on the down side of my life,

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I'm already checking the last block to the right on the insurance form, and I notice consistently how much older my friends appear. In the light of that, what are some certainties and profundities on which I can meditate for the rest of my day?

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Homecoming is, above all other things, a time of remembering, so perhaps you will forgive me if on this Homecoming Sunday I reflect a bit on what it means to have reached the big five-oh. My first certitude or reflection is this.

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I am sure of my own death as Christ's servant. I despise digital watches. They're big and square and ugly, and beside that they don't give you any sense of time.

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I like an hourglass that you can turn over and you see how much is left and you see how much is gone. Or I like a dial on a watch that moves about and you know how far it's gone and you know how far it has to go.

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On a digital watch all you get is numbers, numbers, numbers. I've reached a place in my life where I want to see what there's been behind me and what there is still ahead. I've come to that place which Gail Sheehy describes in passages

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as the place where you begin to notice the dark at the end of the tunnel. You see, in the end we are all cleaning women in that we come to dust. You may have heard about the small town that had a cemetery in its very middle, and the cemetery was at the top of a hill.

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And on one occasion a hearse was pulling into the cemetery and the back door on the hearse opened and the casket rolled out on a wheeled beer. It rolled the whole way down the hill, right down the main street of the town, crashed through the plate glass window of a drugstore,

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went the length of the store, smashed up against the counter at the back, and when it hit there the top of the casket popped open and the corpse sat up and said to the druggist, "Do you have anything to stop this coffin?"

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Well, the fact is nothing stops our coffin. Each one of us will know eventually the hearse and the hole and our friends going out to lunch afterwards to remember us. Don't think that I'm joking about death.

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I really take it very seriously. I find myself very disturbed by those of a liberal bent who try to laugh death away, to cover it up with happy reminiscences, to act as if somehow when you die you get a round-trip ticket to return again.

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And I do not find myself very comfortable with my conservative brethren who try to make death into a good thing. I remember a few years ago when the whole homecoming court of Houghton College was killed in a terrible automobile accident.

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And I read a sermon which a minister in that town preached the next Sunday, and he preached about what a wonderful homecoming it was for those girls. They didn't have home here. They were in the great home in heaven. And they wouldn't have to do it late to be graduated on earth.

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They had already commenced to the kingdom that was and is eternal. God is not the kind of God that goes around slaughtering college girls. It's a blasphemy to talk like that. The Bible says that death is an enemy, that it's a dread enemy,

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that in fact it is such an enemy that Jesus Christ himself had to die to rip out its sting. Oh, I know to those of you who are young, it is so distant and remote that you can't think much about it. But when you get older, well, it's rather like the cipher on an organ.

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I don't know if you know what a cipher on an organ is. That's when one pipe sticks and the note just keeps on coming. It may be a very soft note, but as the time goes on, even though it does not increase in volume,

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the thing becomes progressively more irritating. I went to a recital once where the organ ciphered on the second piece. You could hardly hear the cipher, but by the time the concert was over, the constant sound of that note had me so much on edge,

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I was ready to run up and rip the pipe out so that it would never play again. But death is like that. It's that faint note in the background which we hear even when we're very young. But as you get older, the sound of it becomes more evident, more commanding.

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Of course, when I think about the certitude of my own death, I also think this, that to live eternally on this earth would be far worse than death. There's a place in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels which Gulliver comes to the land of the Lugnagians.

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And he learns there that occasionally a child is born with a red spot on his forehead, and any such child never dies. And Gulliver is very anxious to meet one of these people, thinking they must be fortunate above all others to be able to live forever.

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When he does meet one, he discovers that he is very old and miserable and pitiable, that all of his friends have long since passed away. His possessions were taken away from him when he was 80 years old, else his children would never have received any inheritance.

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Grudges have been carried for centuries. It's a sad spectacle to see. I mean, endless life on this plundered planet of ours would be like working hour after hour after hour and never hearing the quitting whistle.

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It would be like being in the fields hour after hour and never seeing the sunset and never knowing the cool release of the evening. And think of this, too. If everyone born were to live forever, then our earth would be impossibly crowded.

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A long time ago they would have passed a rule that no more children could be born. Indeed, if everyone lived forever, then it is very likely that none of us would be here. So as I think on the one hand of the certitude of my death and on the other hand of the awfulness of an endless existence in this life,

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I find myself very much drawn to that ancient Buddhist tone about a priest who was being chased by a hungry bear, and he came to the edge of a cliff and jumped over and grabbed a branch that was sticking out of the cliff.

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As he looked down, he saw below him a starving tiger. So now he has the bear above and the tiger below, and he hangs on to the bush, and as he's hanging on to it, he sees two little gophers come out and begin to nibble on the roots of the bush.

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And there in that state, he happens to notice that on the most distant branch of that bush there hangs a red, ripe strawberry. And he reaches out and he plucks the strawberry, and he eats it, and he says, "How delicious."

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That's what I've decided to do, to live as long as I can and to die as young as I can. That is, to climb out on the end of the limb, because that's always where the best fruit is.

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After death, there'll be strawberries with whipped cream, but here I'm going to eat all the fruit I can. And then I've decided I'll move on. I wouldn't want to deprive anybody else of having their chance at the strawberries.

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My second certainty, having reached 50 years of age, is this, the certainty of the immeasurable nature of God's glory. 25 years ago, when I was in seminary, my seminary classmates and myself delighted most in those professors who answered our questions,

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who gave us theological formulas, philosophical constructs, by which the difficulties we were facing in our young lives could be explained. We had one professor who told us that theology was nothing more than pagan Greek logic mixed with personal prejudice,

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and that we ought to try to experience God rather than theologize God. We found that professor amusing, but little more. Now, 25 years later, whenever my college and seminary friends and I get together, the professor we talk about the most and the one whose words meant the most to us

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are the words of the professor we laughed at a quarter of a century ago. See, it was Dr. Kelso who taught us that you can't put God in a box, that you can't encapsulate the Almighty, and that theology is inferior to experience.

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Dr. Kelso used to say that in Webster's Dictionary there are 550,000 words and no word that's there, and no group of words that's there, and not all of the words that are there, no matter how they are arranged, can begin to explain God.

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That's the reason he said we need to have in our lives the ability to just say, "Oh." A primitive explanation. "Oh." When your heart falls flat on its knees before the presence of God,

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all you can really say is, "Oh." When your inner ear is hearing things that the world wouldn't begin to understand, all you can say is, "Oh." When your mind falls flat on its face before the presence of the Divine,

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all you can do is say, "Oh." God is too great for our understanding. When we do try to understand Him, it's like taking a piece of clay in our hand. When we put it down, the clay is still clay,

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but now the marks of our hand are upon it. Our minds are like prisms, and when the light of God's truth hits them, our mind tends to break that truth down, and we break that truth down in terms of our own sin,

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and in terms of our own culture, and in terms of our own time, and in terms of our own educational background. That's the reason no theology is an arrival. All theology is only a journey.

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And I speak of the greatest theologies that have been written, those of Calvin and Luther and Augustine and Aquinas. None of these are authoritative, for they are written by men who have passed away, and their thoughts too pass away.

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I've come to the place where I believe that all theology is heresy, in that it's incomplete, it's inadequate, and it's possibly very dangerous. [Bell rings] Please turn your cassette to the other side.

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[Silence] ... in part, and therefore we prophesy in part. It's when the perfect comes that the imperfect shall be done away with. So you'll excuse me if I don't take too seriously your questions about where Eden was,

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or who wrote the book of Genesis, or will the Jews be saved in the end, or is Mount Ararat in Turkey or in Russia, or does this verse prove predestination and this verse not prove it? I find most of that conversation very glib and very shallow.

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And when I don't answer, and you're inclined to say, "Well, I guess he's not Christian, but I'll pray for him, that's good, I need all the prayers that I can get." But I'd like you to know that though I hate and despise profanity, I really think that profanity is in the end of more value

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than the way the name of God is often taken in what I can only describe as endless theological prattle. I don't care where Cain got his wife. I'm not particularly interested in where we'll be five minutes after our eyelids close and death.

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I will not be frustrated by the nature of inspiration, or whether the Bible is inerrant, or whether the Antichrist will become the General Secretary of the United Nations, or how Christ is present in the Lord's Supper.

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That's a good one, you know. Have you ever stopped to think about the fact that in the upper room, Jesus washed the disciples' feet, and he also served them bread and wine, and we have made the service of the bread and wine the central act of worship of the Christian faith.

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But just suppose for a minute that we had made that other act, the washing of the disciples' feet, the central act of worship. Can't you imagine some of the questions we'd be debating? Which foot do you wash first, the right or the left?

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Should the foot be totally immersed or only sprinkled? Can a person who's had his legs amputated receive the grace of God? And the most profound question of all, of course, would be, may a woman wash somebody's feet?

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I've had enough of that. A husband and a wife take weeks and months and years to come to know each other. Where does anyone get off thinking they can understand God before their parking meter has expired? The only way we know God is through the purification and the transformation of our own consciousness,

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and everything else is idolatry. I like the story of the old man who had a dog that he loved very much, and the dog became sick, so he carried it very tenderly to his car and took it to a vet. And he carried the dog again very lovingly into the vet's waiting room,

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put the dog on the table, and the vet said, "What can I do for you?" And the man said, "Well, before you do anything, I want to ask you a question. Do you love animals more than anything else?" And the veterinarian looked at him and said, "Oh, no, no.

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You must remember that Jesus said in Mark 12, verse 30, that we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind, with all our strength. And then, of course, we are to love our neighbors as we love ourselves, and then, of course, after that, we can get to the animals.

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Now, what can I do for your dog?" The old man picked up the dog and said, "I'm sorry. I can't leave him with you. You see, I love him very much,

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and I won't leave him with any veterinarian who's not a Christian." My old professor would understand that. And now that I'm 50, I understand it, too. I have one last certitude to share,

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and that is this, the certainty of the victory of cooperation over competition in the building of the kingdom of God on earth. You know, we're taught very early to learn how to compete,

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and that goes along nicely with our selfish natures. We learn to compete, you know, who washes the blackboards, who gets to take the notes to the principal's office. We start in grade school.

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We start in competition to see who's going to get on the safety patrol and wear the white belt and say, "Stop" and "Go" to other people. By the time we get to junior high, we've really become veterans in the competitive wars.

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We've already learned to equate people, not in terms of what they are, but only in terms of what they have done. I went on to seminary.

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I thought seminary would be a community of grace. It isn't. Seminary is a community of grades. You very quickly learn that those ministers-to-be

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who are sitting about you will be your competition in the church, and you've got to learn to get beyond them. Whenever I think of that, I remember how Christ shamed His disciples

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and how the Scripture never teaches us to compete with one another except to outdo one another in showing love. And the nature of love is not competition. The nature of love is cooperation.

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Of course, those who advocate rampant competition, they justify their position in part by referring to Darwin, you know, the survival of the fittest idea moved over into sociology. But at the end of 50 years of life,

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I'd like to announce that I've observed that we get ahead more in this world by cooperation than we do by competition. I think that's what Jesus taught.

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A man or a woman is a hundred billion cells not in competition with each other, but cooperating with each other. And those societies move in the greatest way

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and to the most significant advance where people are genuinely concerned for each other. And if you want a biological foundation for that, there is one. Lamarck taught that the evolutionary process goes forward

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by cooperation and not competition, and the historians of that period say that the reason Darwinianism was accepted over Lamarckianism was principally because of the capitalist mentality

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which was very present in that day and hour. Competition suited the mood of the time. There are great thinkers in our own time who speak of cooperation

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as the way in which the evolutionary process continues. I think of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He argued that God is present in everything and that if God moves, he moves things forward,

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and the power of that movement is love and cooperation. He called it harmonization, and he says you move eventually to the biosphere and then the newosphere and finally to the Christosphere

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where we become like Christ himself whom he describes as the omega point, the end toward which we're all moving. There are a lot of questions we could ask de Chardin.

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But I'm simply saying this morning that I've become convinced of what more and more people in our society are becoming convinced about. One of the most important books that came out this last year

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is Nesbitt's Megatrends, and he points out in that book how competitive, pyramidal, hierarchical forms of management in business and industry and the military and education,

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all of these things are passing away like dinosaurs. American businesses are learning from Japanese businesses where they have quality circles, and the president sits down with a drill press operator,

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and in these quality circles where all cooperate together, the success of Japanese business is to be found. One half of the workers in our marketplace today are products of the baby boom,

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and people who come out of that baby boom want to be as free on their work to express their opinion as they are free to express their opinions outside their work. They want to be able to give their ideas and be heard,

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so 200 of America's top 500 companies today have that kind of sharing and cooperating process. They're doing away with executive suites, with reserved parking places.

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They have parties for their employees where everybody shares their ideas. I remember years ago, going on Friday afternoons to the Disney Studios in California.

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In the Disney organization, one of America's most stable companies, everybody, including Walt and Roy, everyone referred to by their first name,

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all in casual dress, part of the California lifestyle. And there in the room where everybody was partying together, there would be around the room pictures of the next movie that was being made by the Disney Studios,

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and they'd discuss it, all of them, the janitors and the secretaries and the custodians. There was a cooperative effort, and businesses discovering in America

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that when they move into this, there's less absenteeism, there's more production, and there's also less turnover in employees. More and more companies are bringing in outside directors.

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They want to hear new views. They're allowing consumers onto their board of directors. They're listening to their active and aggressive stockholders. And this is true not only in business

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that's waking up in a remarkable way and doing marvelously progressive things in this field. It's true in politics. It's true in scientific research.

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It's even true in the military and certainly in the field of education. More and more you find students involved in the direction of the affairs of the school of which they are a part.

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This is all part of an understanding that it is as people work together, not in competition, that progress comes, that the tide of this kind of thinking--

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Alvin Toffler calls it the third wave-- is moving across our society. And to me, it's the greatest thing that I see in this, my 50th year, that more and more people are not thinking about me and mine,

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but about ours. I believe there's a Holy Spirit-led solidarity movement covering this earth, that we're moving toward a world fellowship,

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that we're coming to the place where the one we call highest is the one who helps the most, and the leader who truly leads is the one who listens to everything the people say.

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So I close with this. Two weeks ago, a young lady who's sitting right out here this morning walked up to me to the Gee Dunce, and she said, "Doc, if I were to think of you 30 years from now,

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what would you like me to think?" That's a tough question when it comes right out of the blue like that. So I begged off. I said, "Sometime I'd answer."

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Well, she's here today. I won't look right at her because I wouldn't want to embarrass her. But here's my answer. If 30 years from now,

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when you will be, incidentally, just about the age that I am now, if in that time, in some bit of whimsy, you happen to remember me, I would like you to think.

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He was not a great man, though he did know some great men and women. And he lived in a time when mighty movements were afloat, a mid-sea kind of time.

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But the thing I remember that he taught us, more than anything else, the note he hit the hardest and the most often, was this.

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"The world passes away, and the lusts, the competitions thereof, but he that doeth the will of God abides forever."

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You are not yet 50 years old. Have you seen our father Abraham? Well, I am 50 years old. And these things I am sure,

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because they have been taught to me by that one who was before Abraham ever came to be. Let us pray. Dear God, I don't know if this was a text or a pretext.

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It feels good to look back, to try to come to some conclusions. Grant that we might never be so satisfied with our conclusions that we close our minds.

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Oh, God forbid that. But it is good to pause, whether we're 20 or 30 or 50 or more, and try to peddle some things,

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and to say them in love and cooperation with those who are good enough to hear. We thank Thee, Father, that we are part of a family where there can be divergence and still love,

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where there can be difference and still love. If we forget everything else, help us remember the love in the sharing and the responding always.

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Help us to remember the love. For we pray it in the name of the Prince of Love, our Lord Jesus Christ. And the Lord bless you and keep you.

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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.

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And to all those whom nobody loves. Give to him. (inaudible) [BLANK_AUDIO]