00:00:00.000 - 00:00:19.000

[Ambient noise] Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

00:00:19.000 - 00:00:37.000

[Ambient noise] It happened at about 35,000 feet. It was an old situation with something of a new twist. I was flying from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh by way of Chicago.

00:00:37.000 - 00:00:58.000

There was a young man seated beside me, and we were not too far from Chicago when he turned to me and introduced himself, and I of course responded, and then he asked me what I did for a living. I've entered into a kind of a game like this on other occasions, so I thought it might be fun to play it again,

00:00:58.000 - 00:01:19.000

and I said, "Well, let me describe the kind of work I'm in, and then you see if you can identify my vocation." "Fine," he said. I said, "All right, I work for an international organization which has offices in every country on the face of the earth." "Well," he said, "that narrows it down immediately. There are only a few companies that big."

00:01:19.000 - 00:01:49.000

I said, "Yes, and the particular division with which I work has no less than 9,900 branch offices." "We have recruiting sections on more than 60 different campuses, and last year we did business with more than 3 million people." "And our particular division is in 27 countries." "Well," he said, "the answer is obvious. You have to be either with ITT or Standard Oil."

00:01:49.000 - 00:02:06.000

I said, "No, I'm a minister in the Presbyterian Church." "Oh, the Church," he said. "No wonder I didn't guess it. I left the Church four years ago." I asked him why.

00:02:06.000 - 00:02:31.000

"Well," he said, "the Church has a serious credibility gap." "The fact of the matter is you're defending doctrines that people in the 20th century don't believe anymore." "I was an Episcopalian before I left the Church, and 25% of all Episcopalians don't believe that Jesus will return again," "and 10% don't believe in heaven, and 35% don't believe in hell."

00:02:31.000 - 00:02:50.000

"Your doctrinal statements are outworn, outmoded." "Isn't there some place where it says, 'having treasure in earthen vessels,'" "where your creeds and confessions are earthen vessels that should have been thrown away a long time ago?" "No, I'm afraid you have that confused," I said.

00:02:50.000 - 00:03:11.000

"The earthen vessels are men and women, and the treasure is that which God gives." "We're the pots and pans into which He pours it." "And the fact of the matter is it's rather presumptuous, isn't it, for a pot or a pan," "to set about changing the truth of God which He has revealed."

00:03:11.000 - 00:03:30.000

"My young friend, you're proposing that we establish our theology by taking a vote." "The fact of the matter is that truth is, by definition, dogmatic." "It must be sharp or it will not cut." "A knife with a broad blade will move through nothing at all."

00:03:30.000 - 00:03:52.000

"Two opposite things, for example, cannot both be true no matter how liberal you are." "The fact of the matter is that we cannot vote on the rightness or wrongness" "of things which are ultimately not discovered by us but revealed to us." "Let's face it, two plus two is four no matter how you feel about it."

00:03:52.000 - 00:04:13.000

"And besides that, wouldn't you agree with me that it's rather dangerous" "to seek ultimate truth by taking a vote?" "You know, there is a moral philosophy which suggests that what most people believe is right." "And if one adapts themselves to that kind of consensus morality,"

00:04:13.000 - 00:04:31.000

"one must agree with the Nazis when they attempted to murder all the Jews." "After all, in spite of what many Germans say today," "there were 720 concentration camps spread across Germany," "and the stink of burning flesh was all across the land."

00:04:31.000 - 00:04:50.000

"They knew what was going on and consciously or unconsciously they approved it." "Does that make it right?" "For a long time in this country, the majority was willing to accept the slavery of black people." "Does the fact that the majority supported the notion make it right?"

00:04:50.000 - 00:05:02.000

"You remember, I'm sure, from your days in the church," "that scripture passage in which Jesus said to his disciples," "Who do men say that I am?" "And then specifically to Peter, who do you say that I am?"

00:05:02.000 - 00:05:24.000

"And Peter responded, 'Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.'" "And Jesus did not say, 'I'm glad the vote came out in my favor.'" "He said, 'Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.'" "And don't be upset if some people find it difficult to accept that which God has revealed."

00:05:24.000 - 00:05:45.000

"Spiritual truth has never been exactly popular." "Faith from the very beginning has been a scandal to the Jews and a stumbling block to the Greeks." "What you're trying to do is to water faith down to make it fit the belief patterns of the 20th century." "But the Bible says we are not to be conformed to this world,"

00:05:45.000 - 00:06:05.000

"but rather transformed by the renewal of our spirits." "The church has never been afraid of unbelief." "I know there are people today who attempt to make belief more acceptable" "by wrapping it with polysyllabic doctrines and ideas, words and paragraphs."

00:06:05.000 - 00:06:21.000

"But I'm not sure that really helps." "I mean, I say I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth," "and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord." "And they say, 'I suggest the hypothesis that a relationship to the ultimate ground of our being"

00:06:21.000 - 00:06:45.000

"implies a possible existential relationship with Jesus of Nazareth, duly demythologized, of course.'" "I mean, really, is skepticism the mark of earnestness?" "Is the theme song we're to adopt for the church, 'Anything you can doubt, I can doubt better,'" "'I can doubt anything better than you'?"

00:06:45.000 - 00:07:00.000

"Now, I'm not saying that the church in its theology knows everything." "We've got a great deal to learn." "Kierkegaard said once that we're like cups into which God pours his truth," "and some of it splashes out because we're not very deep cups."

00:07:00.000 - 00:07:16.000

"But accepting the truth that comes from God," "no matter how unpopular it might be in the world," "seems to me a much better procedure than to vote on what we believe." "I have a nephew named Kurt who took his guinea pig to school one day for show-and-tell time,"

00:07:16.000 - 00:07:35.000

"and the teacher asked, 'Is it a boy guinea pig or a girl guinea pig?'" "And Kurt said he didn't know, and the teacher said, 'We'll decide right now. We'll take a vote on it.'" "Suppose they had all voted male. Would that have changed the female guinea pig into a male?" "Not at all."

00:07:35.000 - 00:08:02.000

"You're suggesting, my friend, that we discard old beliefs just because they're old." "Well, truth itself is not evolutionary," "but the way in which it has been revealed to us and the way in which we have discovered it is evolutionary." "There was a hint of the theory of relativity in the Pythagorean theorem."

00:08:02.000 - 00:08:14.000

"And when Pythagoras developed his theorem, we are told he sacrificed a hundred oxen." "He was so overjoyed with it." "And we're told in a biography of Einstein that when he worked out the theorem," "he jumped up and down like a delighted child."

00:08:14.000 - 00:08:35.000

"They were different men in different times responding in different ways." "But the truth implicit in what Pythagoras said was made more explicit in what Einstein said." "And that truth was the same." I don't know how well you know the Old Testament or not, my friend,

00:08:35.000 - 00:09:00.000

but there's a story there about a man named Elisha who admired a prophet named Elijah. And when Elijah died, he left to his disciple Elisha his mantle, his cloak. And Elisha one time went down to the edge of a stream, and he took that cloak, and he brought it down upon the surface of the water, and as he did so, he said,

00:09:00.000 - 00:09:15.000

"Where is the God of Elijah?" In other words, the same God that had empowered his spiritual father, that one of whom he had prayed, "Give me a double portion of your spirit," the same God that empowered Elijah, he wanted to empower him.

00:09:15.000 - 00:09:37.000

And the waters parted. What was old was good enough for him. Well, I won't lay claim to being an Elisha, but I know that what Elijah's God and Elisha's God and Paul's God did, he still does. This system of doctrine which you say is old and should be laid away

00:09:37.000 - 00:09:52.000

should be rejected by taking some kind of vote. Well, it's lifted empires, and it's turned the rivers of history, and it's saved cities and civilizations, and it's transformed lives, and it's taken a blasphemer like Paul and made him into an apostle.

00:09:52.000 - 00:10:17.000

It's taken a thief and made him into a preacher. It's made darkness into light. It's the total difference in my own life. And I'm not willing to throw it away for some 20th century garment that you propose, some 20th century mantle, which, when I use it to strike the waters, is of no effect.

00:10:17.000 - 00:10:42.000

Well, he said, let's get out of the theological realm. Look at it like this. The fact of the matter is the church has an incredible performance gap. I mean, it claims to belong to Christ, but it shows very little of Christ's concern. I mean, he climbed a cross, and what cross is the church climbing?

00:10:42.000 - 00:11:01.000

I was just at Disneyland, he said, and while I was there, I went through one of those industrial exhibits, and they showed a city of tomorrow. There it was, all built under a crystal globe. And I looked all over that city, and I could find no church. The church isn't going to be here tomorrow, and the reason it's not going to be here tomorrow

00:11:01.000 - 00:11:18.000

is because it's not doing anything today. Well, I said to him, there's a lot of truth in what you're suggesting about the fact that the church is not following its master. I think you can ask the question very profoundly, what is the church doing today?

00:11:18.000 - 00:11:41.000

Sometimes the most up-to-date thing in the church is its architecture, and nothing more than that. The church often does retreat into a kind of stained-glass cocoon. That's true, and I'm not going to deny it. I remember reading in the writings of W.E. Sangster a paragraph in which he described

00:11:41.000 - 00:12:01.000

participating in a worship service in which there was a bishop who was wearing a black robe with several golden chains around his neck and a golden cross at the center, and during the course of the service, Sangster happened to look over, and the bishop was using the corner of the golden cross to clean his fingernails.

00:12:01.000 - 00:12:24.000

Well, there are a lot of people in the church who try to use it as a kind of pocket tool, as a kind of theological Alka-Seltzer, plop, plop, oh, what a relief it is. We are called to carry and to climb and to die upon the cross, and many times we use the cross only to clean our fingernails.

00:12:24.000 - 00:12:37.000

Christ was a man who immersed himself in the very center of life. He ate food like we do. He drank drink like we do. He had body odor like we do. He excited women so that they reached out to touch him,

00:12:37.000 - 00:12:54.000

and he thrilled men so that they were ready to follow him. And he went with people that were not popular, like lepers and the giver of wild parties and people in prison and people of other races, and he sometimes had very angry speech and his actions were blunt,

00:12:54.000 - 00:13:19.000

and he was using a basin or a towel or upturned tables or some bread and some wine, and he led the blind to see and he turned the lives of thieves around, and in the end he was beaten and stripped and nailed on two wooden boards and died covered with flies. You can't be more into life than that.

00:13:19.000 - 00:13:42.000

And we are supposed to be his body into life like that. And what we do is we give money to rescue missions but get upset when a drunk vomits in the sanctuary. And we support a camp which takes kids off to green hills far away, some of those kids we wouldn't want in our own homes.

00:13:42.000 - 00:13:59.000

And we believe in teaching, but we are too busy when we are called upon to teach. And I will confess to you that many of us spend all of our time in the steeple while God is with his people down on the street. And that's where he is, you know.

00:13:59.000 - 00:14:08.000

He's with all of them. He's with the rich and the poor and the workers and the bosses. He's with the union men and the nonunion men. He's with the strikers and the strikebreakers.

00:14:08.000 - 00:14:20.000

He's with the left and he's with the right. He's with them all. Whenever men tear at other men, they're tearing at God. He's the one who steps on landmines and he's the one who fights in foxholes

00:14:20.000 - 00:14:41.000

and he's the one who's wounded with shrapnel and he's the one who bleeds on battlefields and he's the one who dies again and again. And we shout and sing and go to meetings and praise, and I think sometimes this must sound like nothing more than a burst of laughter at the foot of the cross.

00:14:41.000 - 00:15:02.000

I confess to you, my young friend, that as it took more than one blow to drive the nails and more than one thorn to make the crown, so we in our living contribute to the blows and contribute to the thorns and then stand back to watch.

00:15:02.000 - 00:15:22.000

Not watch what he wants us to watch. He says, "Could you not watch with me for one hour?" to his disciples, and he says the same thing to us, and like them, we fall asleep. So you see that in the church and you've left the church and you've given up all hope for the church.

00:15:22.000 - 00:15:40.000

You've come to resent a church which you see as ignoring God. You won't tolerate a fellowship in which people will cut their pledges when the church takes a stand they don't support. You've chosen to become a graduate, an alumnus.

00:15:40.000 - 00:15:58.000

You've moved up and out. Well, I've admitted everything of which you've charged the church in this degree, but I cannot go with you. I acknowledge the truth of what you've now said, but I cannot join you.

00:15:58.000 - 00:16:20.000

Because, you see, Christ promised victory to the church. He said that in the end the very gates of hell will not be able to stand against him. The church, you see, is built upon the rock of the confession of true Christians. "Thou art the Christ," Peter said, and he died saying it.

00:16:20.000 - 00:16:47.000

And there are Christians right now who are dying saying it. There are more Christians dying in this century for the sake of what they believe than in all the nineteen centuries which have preceded this one. And the church is also built upon the rock of the redeemed nature that comes by Christ through it.

00:16:47.000 - 00:17:12.000

And I refer now to the moral transformations which I've seen happen within the body of Christ. Take a man like Chuck Colson, brilliant, self-satisfied, individually and independently successful. Ties himself to the strings of a man like Richard Nixon. Lies, deceives, cheats.

00:17:12.000 - 00:17:30.000

Is caught, convicted, thrown in jail. But there is transformed by a living Christ. He comes out to become a flaming spokesman for the church, a disciple of his master, and gives himself to prison fellowships throughout the land.

00:17:30.000 - 00:17:53.000

Christ is still changing people in the church. And I stay also with the church because it's built on the rock of God's undefeated purpose. The church is two thousand years old. No other institution or organism in history has expanded as the church has expanded.

00:17:53.000 - 00:18:11.000

There have been many times in its life when it was sick unto death. In the fourteenth century it was simony and intrigue. In the fifteenth century it was Tetzel and his indulgences. As soon as the coin in the coffer clings the soul from purgatory, spring.

00:18:11.000 - 00:18:50.000

In the eighteenth century it was bishops who wore their miters and their crowns and who did not believe. But out of that church, that church with all those sufferings and weaknesses, has come Wesley and Elliot and Kagawa and Schweitzer and Teresa and Hammershul and Martin Luther King and David Livingston and Bob Pierce. You know as well as I do, don't you?

00:18:50.000 - 00:19:04.000

That down throughout the church's history there have been many times when it has cried out, "How long, O Lord, how long?" In the arena it cried out, "How long, O Lord, how long?" In the dark ages when it alone kept the light of civilization alive it cried out,

00:19:04.000 - 00:19:24.000

"How long, O Lord, how long?" In the Reformation and the counter-Reformation it cried out, "O Lord, how long?" Under the attack of liberalism it cried out, "O Lord, how long?" And now in the days of so much indifference and arrogance within the church, crowned with irrelevance,

00:19:24.000 - 00:19:50.000

many in the church cry out, "O Lord, how long?" But the church lives and the church is promised victory. I can only share with you the testimony, my friend, of a Presbyterian pastor from New York City. He was a British chaplain during World War II.

00:19:50.000 - 00:20:26.000

He was captured in 1940, interned in a concentration camp from then until the end of the war. One day a Nazi colonel in Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Panzer divisions came to this chaplain and looking at his identification tags and seeing that he was a chaplain said, "The day of the church is over. There's a new world coming and nothing can stop us."

00:20:26.000 - 00:20:50.000

Today, who thinks about Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and who thinks about his Panzer divisions? And the church still is. It reminds me of what Theodore Beezus said a long time ago at the time of the Reformation. It is given to the church to receive blows rather than to give them,

00:20:50.000 - 00:21:14.000

but I would remind you that a good anvil wears out many hammers. So you have left the church. I cannot leave with you because I believe what the church believes, and I see the church changing men and women for Jesus' sake.

00:21:14.000 - 00:21:39.000

It rests upon the rock of the confession of Peter. It rests upon the rock of redeemed human nature, and it rests upon the rock of God's indisputable and undefeatable purpose. And just as I said that, the little light came on which said, "Fasten seatbelts."

00:21:39.000 - 00:21:58.000

And in a few minutes, we were on the ground, and he got up to leave. I was going on. He walked down the aisle, but when he got to the end, just before you turn to go through the door off the plate,

00:21:58.000 - 00:22:31.000

he looked back at me and smiled. And I went. And he just waved and turned and was gone. Let us pray.

00:22:31.000 - 00:23:00.000

Our Father, this is a celebration of the life of the church. We thank thee for this one who tonight enlists in the ranks of her ordained. She knows it is a hard life. She knows it is by the world a rejected philosophy.

00:23:00.000 - 00:23:35.000

She knows these things, but she believes. We thank thee for her, O God. And we thank thee for the church that has nurtured her, now ordains her, and with whom she will live out her life, both in time and in eternity.

00:23:35.000 - 00:24:01.000

Glory be to God. Glory be to Christ. Glory be to the Holy Spirit in the church. Amen. ...as a brother in Christ. And here was a slave, Onesimus, who was a man of God.