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The evening is from the book of Exodus, the 32nd chapter. I begin the reading at the verse which is number 21. This is the conversation which occurs immediately after Moses has come down from the mount and discovers that Aaron and the Israelites had made for themselves a golden cat and are worshiping it. And

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Moses said to Aaron, "What did this people do to you that you have brought a great sin upon them?" And Aaron said, "Let not the anger of my Lord burn hot. You know the people that they are set on evil. For they said to me, 'Make us gods who shall go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of

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Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.' And I said to them, 'Let any who have gold take it off.' So they gave it to me and I threw it into the fire and there came out this cat." And when Moses saw that the people had broken loose, for Aaron had let them break loose to their shame among their enemies, then Moses

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stood in the gate of the camp and said, "Who is on the Lord's side? Come to me." And all the sons of Lebi gathered themselves together to him. And he said to them, "Thus says the Lord God of Israel, 'Put every man his sword on his side and go to and fro from gate to gate throughout the camp. And slay every man

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his brother and every man his companion and every man his neighbor.' And the sons of Levi did according to the word of Moses. And there fell of the people that day about three thousand men." And Moses said, "Today you have ordained yourselves for the service of the Lord, each one at the cost of his son and of his

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brother, that he may bestow a blessing upon you this day." And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. I suppose there is no greater tragedy than to lose one's purpose, than to lose

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the meaning for one's life, than to become one who is without direction. Viktor Frankl, the great Viennese psychiatrist, was imprisoned by the Nazis in the 1940s. For three years he was not known as Viktor Frankl, but rather as 119-104. Out of his experiences in the concentration camp, he

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developed a psychiatric approach called logotherapy. The seminal book concerning this is his book, "Man's Search for Meaning." And the thesis which Frankl develops is this, that as long as one has a purpose, a meaning, a direction, one can endure almost anything. But when you lose these things, you will not last. He puts

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it this way in terms of the concentration camp, "The prisoner who lost faith in the future was doomed." In one particularly poignant passage, he talks about an old Jewish gentleman whose great love was his wife. Now they were separated in the concentration camp, seeing each other only every so often.

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But he spoke of his wife every day, and he thought of his wife almost constantly, and he did little things for his wife whenever that opportunity presented itself. Then one day he received word that his wife had been gassed by the Nazis. Within ten days, the old man was dead. Viktor Frankl, being a physician, was

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given the task of performing the autopsy. He found the old man to be full of cancer. He should have died, according to Frankl, long before. But what kept him going was a purpose and a direction and a meaning. But when he lost that, when he lost his wife, he very soon lost his life. Nietzsche puts it very succinctly, "He who

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has a why to live for can bear with almost any how." Now the sadness of our own time is, of course, that there are many who are going through life today without meaning. Carl Gustav Jung has said that the central neurosis of our time is emptiness, meaninglessness, purposelessness. Roll O'Mea, the great

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American student of human behavior, has said that the chief problem of the mind in the 20th century is the problem of emptiness. It's all about us. Visit a high school or a college campus and ask the students. Go to any office, speak to businessmen, speak to those who are working in the home, speak to tradesmen,

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wherever you will, and most of them will be unable to articulate for you their purpose, their reason, their direction in living. So the question we think about tonight is how to fill up the emptiness in you. And it would be well, I think, to begin by noting what the causes of this emptiness are. I would suggest that the

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first is the pace of technological change. We are advancing so rapidly on so many fronts. Alvin Toffler, writing about this, describes us as being in future shock. You know, years ago when you were born, you could pretty well assume that when you died things would be much the same as they were when you were born, but

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that's no longer the case. You cannot even be sure of what things will be even five years from now. Old ideas, old styles, old habits, old standards, all of these things are passed away. There is an absence of stability. There is a kind of emptiness of definition. Do you remember, some of you older ones, that poem we had

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to learn when we were in high school? "The boy stood on the burning deck, whence all but he had fled." I always thought that was a rather silly poem. For the benefit of you younger people, it was about a boy who didn't realize that the nature of naval warfare had changed. They no longer were shooting cannonballs.

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They now shot shells that exploded, and he was standing on the deck right above the powder magazine. It was a kind of nitwit, actually, to be doing what he did, but he was altogether out of touch with the reality that was going on about him. And so he stood there, and the poem ends, "There came a burst of thunder sound. The

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boy, oh where was he? Ask of the four winds that far around with fragments strewed the sea." A lot of people implode or explode, show their emptiness in one way or another, because they just can't keep pace with the change in our time. Another problem is the growing abundance of leisure which is ours. Our ancestors

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were shocked when someone proposed that folks should only work six days a week and only 11 hours a day. One man wrote that a 66-hour workweek was as close to utopia as we would ever get. Of course, today we have paid holidays, and we have vacations, and we have retirement plans, and we have sick leave. Some, of course,

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still manage to keep very busy. The workaholics among us go, go, go. But most of us, I think, understand that we're rather like bows, and you can't have a bow be strung all the time and still remain, retain that spring in the string. You've got to relax that bow from time to time. The difficulty is that most

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folks don't know how to relax. We have earlier retirement programs and better financing for them, but the fact is that a lot of people, when they get into that circumstance, find themselves to be altogether empty because they don't know what to do. I am myself of the opinion that those whom I would describe as

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church slaves, who are here every time the door is open and who involve themselves in an endless round of churchly activities, especially on weekends, crowding themselves with ecclesiastical doings, I think many of these people do what they do because they don't know how to spend their

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leisure in any other way. A lot of people feel empty because they don't know what to do with the time which is theirs. And another reason for emptiness, of course, and this is the most profound of all, is the growth of unbelief in our time. If you take the crutches away from a cripple or if you take the oars away

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from a boatsman, that cripple or that boatsman are in real trouble. And just so when you take away the foundations of belief from a society, that society is in trouble. And we see that about us. Fewer people going to church, fewer people studying the Scriptures, fewer people knowing what they believe and seeking to

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live that way. When was the last time you saw a television show or a motion picture in which, if there was any Christian at all presented, he was not presented as a stuff shirt, a hypocrite, or a wimp? Two weeks ago, the People's Choice television show indicated that Madonna is the most popular young singer

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in America. Madonna wears crucifixes all over her. Someone asked her why. She said she liked to be surrounded by naked men on crosses. The most popular male vocalist amongst the young people today is Prince. Prince now schedules his performances for 11 o'clock on Sunday morning to show that he is bigger than

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Jesus. Our city organizes a marathon and takes no thought whatever as to what the churches may feel about the question. After all, churches are crowded with children and old fuddy-duddies, and what they do doesn't really make any difference. The church is the taillight of the vehicle of society, never the

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headlight. The people who used to go home to be with the family at Easter into worship now go to Fort Lauderdale for skin and sun and sex and suds. And the result is an accelerated rate of suicide and addiction and alcoholism. It all reminds us, doesn't it, of this scene of Moses and Aaron back there in the book

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of Exodus when Moses goes off to the mount and there he counsels with God, gains God's directions for his people, and while he is gone the people who are not ready for any change, the people who are impatient and are not willing to sit in peace and quiet and wait for Moses' return, the people enter very quickly

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into unbelief and they make for themselves a golden calf which they worship. You see, the causes of emptiness are always filled by the idols of emptiness. Nature abhors a vacuum and so when there is emptiness in a life you can be sure very quickly some treacherous deity will come there to

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occupy that space. Look at the idols of emptiness about us today. Many people seek to replace God by success in terms of money, prosperity, power, and prestige. I remember in the decade I spent on the campus how many times I was struck by young people who were learning to do what they didn't want to do because they

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thought they'd make more money at it. I remember a young man who was very gifted in the field of history. He could not only master it but he could interpret it and write of it well and effectively, but the young man is studying to be a dentist and I asked him why when he made A's in history and only

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C's in the sciences, why he was going to be a dentist and he said because as a dentist he could make more money. That shouldn't surprise us that our young people feel that way. We're in a society which honors principally those who have money and power. We still hang the pictures on the wall and talk about the

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robber barons who many times were very ignoble personalities. Leo de Rocher said that in America nice guys finish last. In America you don't really care about niceness, you care about success and success is spelled with dollar signs. I generally feel very sorry for those who have a great amount of this world's good

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because it seems to me they are forever condemned to living with people like themselves. Enriched people generally as a class seem to be to be more bored, more sad, and more arrogant than anybody else I know. We've seen an interesting thing in our own city with the unemployment which has been on every hand. The blue

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collar worker unemployed still has his friends in the union, still has his friends in the bowling alley, still has his friends in the other associations which are his, but the man who has been lifted up to a position of great prestige who has a key to the executive washroom and has two acres of lawn

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between himself and his nearest neighbor, that man, when he loses that key, suddenly finds himself with no one at all. I had to read a suicide note. Suicide note, first of all disposed of things like houses and dogs and three Mercedes and then these sentences. "Just do me a favor so my death won't be for nothing. Don't

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let the pursuit of money and success interfere in your lives. Hold on to one another with a strong faith in God and you will want for nothing else." Wise words, but the man who took his life didn't really believe them. Some people worship the golden idol of power and health and use it to fill their

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emptiness. Others try to fill emptiness with education. There's a conviction on the part of many that if they can just advance academically, they can make of their learning some God fit to worship. You remember that Jesus was not listened to by some people because they said he did not have the right academic

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background. The tragedy with that is that it doesn't make any difference how bright your mind is if your heart is still dark. I mean, whom do we most fear? Do we fear the savage with a bow and arrow or do we fear the educated man who with his wisdom is able to develop a nuclear weapon to use against us? Who

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troubles us the most? The mom-and-pop store that sell day-old bread calling it fresh or the big company that hires the most sophisticated psychologists and advertising agents to lie to us on television and deceive us into buying their products. You see, education, if there is no change in the heart, becomes

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more dangerous than it is good. Education, you see, leads to a kind of pride which convinces one that one has all the answers and that one is altogether invulnerable. It's this that Proverbs speaks when it says that pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall. Our great advance in

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education in the 20th century has brought us closer to planetary destruction than we have ever been before. And I shall never forget that sick cartoon in which one prisoner says to his cellmate, "I'm going to class at night. I'm learning things so that when you are a common thief, I will be an

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embezzler." If you make a god of your mind, it means nothing if your heart is still in a sewer. Other people try to put at the center of their lives experience. Their golden calf, you see, is sex or alcohol or drugs. There are too many things to talk about, so let's just take one drug. Let's just take cocaine. Did you

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know that people are making cocaine into a god? I define God as this. God is that one who most frequently occupies your mind. It's like that old game. You remember the wooden paddle with the rubber string and the ball on the end and you hit the ball? Well, we have thoughts and we throw them out during

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the day. Now the thought that springs back to the center of your mind most often during the day, the thought that comes to you when your mind is otherwise at ease, the thought on which you focus most intensely, that is your God. And for some people in this country, that's cocaine. A million dollars a day is spent

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for cocaine in this city. A young man working in an office not more than four blocks from here tells me how all of those who work with him spend all their time going back and forth to the men's room and the women's room and when they return their eyes are red and their nose are running. Why? Cocaine. And then the sad

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spectacle of our star athletes who have money, who have success, who are smarter at the game they play than anybody else, seeking a new God in the sick dreams given to them by a weed. Money, success, education, experience, my friends, there is nothing new under the sun. These are empty idols for empty hearts. They are

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deceitful deities. So what then is the answer to emptiness? Well, look at our story of Moses again. When he comes down from the mount, he smashes the golden calf into nothingness. And then he calls the children of Israel before him and he says, "Who is on the Lord's side?" And then he takes those who say they are on the

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Lord's side and sets them to a dreadfully costly exercise. And when they completed, then he says to them, "You have set yourselves apart to the service of the Lord." That was a call to utter commitment, to know God and to believe God and to offer everything you are to God. Paul sums it when he says, "I beseech

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you therefore, brethren, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewal of your mind that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect." Now in

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those words of Paul, there are three key words. The first one is that word "body." To present your body. The body is the temple of the soul. Paul is not speaking about offering your soul only, not of offering the mind only. He is speaking of the body which contains all of the rest. This is a total self-offering. And he

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says this is our reasonable worship. And the word he uses for worship is not an exercise such as this, where we gather in the house of God's people to enter into one of the sacraments of the church. No, the word for worship which he uses is the tasks of daily experience. Paul is saying we are to give our whole selves

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in all the experiences of our everyday lives. We are to be, third word, transformed. No longer chameleons who model themselves by coloring themselves as everything about them, but transformed. And the word he uses means literally to be changed from the inside out. Paul calls us to an active centering of our

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lives in God. Nothing casual about that. You know when David Hume, the great Scots philosopher, met a certain Dr. Hill one day. Hill asked him what he did, and Hume said, "I'm a philosopher." And Hill said, "I tried philosophy once, found it worthless." And Hume said to him, "What branch of philosophy did you study? Where

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did you do your research? What books did you read?" "Books," said Hill. "I read no books. I simply sat by my hearth all day and tried to think long thoughts and occasionally stirred up the fire." There are some people who think that religion is to sit comfortably all day and think long thoughts and occasionally stir up

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the fire. But what Paul says is we are to be full of God so that the plans of God are our plans, and the purposes of God are our purposes, and the will of God is our will, and the goals of God are our goal, and the glories of God are our glories. We are to become the glove on the hand of God. I offer one illustration

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of this and then I'm done. From the pages of British history, I select a man whom I very much admire, General Charles George Gordon. He was called, as most of you remember, "Chinese Gordon." Oh yes, he made mistakes. He was part of the historical deceit of his time, just like we're part of the deceit of our own time. But here

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was a man who gave himself totally and utterly to God as best he could understand him. There are three monuments to Chinese Gordon. The first one is in Trafalgar Square. This is a very sad monument. You see, young people, Gordon was sent to Khartoum, there to fight the infidels who were led by the Mahdi. He

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was promised reinforcements, but the reinforcements never came, and he and all of his forces were killed. And this statue in Trafalgar is of him looking in the directions from which the reinforcements that never came were to come. It's a sad monument. The second monument is in Khartoum itself. Now this

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is a representation of Chinese Gordon sitting on a camel, but he's not looking toward Egypt from which the reinforcements were to come, and he's not looking toward the headwaters of the Nile, which if he'd wanted to, he could have used as a way of escape. Instead of that, he is looking out at the desert, and

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there's a look upon his face as if he is hearing something which comes to him in some...well, the poet puts it best. The poet puts it this way, "For this man was not great by gold or royal state, by sharp sword or knowledge of earth's wonder, but more than all his race, he saw life face to face and heard the still

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small voice of God above its thunder." In this statue you see him listening to the voice of God. And the last monument is in St. Paul's Cathedral in London, where it says this of him, "Major General Charles George Gordon, CB, who at all times and everywhere gave his strength to the weak, his substance to the poor, his sympathy

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to the suffering, and his heart to God." The glove on the hand of God. That's the way to fill up your emptiness, to give your strength to the weak and your substance to the poor and your sympathy to the suffering and your heart to God. So tonight this table is spread and the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit

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invite us here and we will come and we will eat and we will drink. But those who come hungering and thirsting at righteousness, those who come hungering and thirsting after living in, for, and by God, those who so come will not go from this place empty. For the scriptures say, "Blessed

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are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled." Let us pray. Oh God, as we now draw close to thee, draw close to us. Drive out of us any false deities that hold sway. Claim us utterly, totally, and forever for thyself

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that we might be filled. We pray it in Jesus' name, amen. (crickets chirping)