Eyes Front!                                                                            6/7/42

 

Scripture:  Philippians 3: 1-14  (Moffatt)

 

Text:  Philippians 3: 13b-14  --- “My one thought is, by forgetting what lies before me, to press on to the goal for the prize of God’s high call in Christ Jesus.”

 

These are days for looking ahead.  Eyes front!

 

William L. Stidger calls attention to a bronze statue outside the Hall of Archives in Washington, D.C.  It is a statue of a young girl leafing through a book.  She has nearly finished it; is turning the last pages in fact.  And the interesting, dramatic inscription beneath the statue reads:  “All that is past is prologue.”

 

Harold C. Case, a Pennsylvania pastor says something that should catch the attention and interest of people everywhere.  “In such an hour as this,” he says, “the church has its responsibility.  High religion is charged with the obligation of reminding people that ‘the things which matter most are not at the mercy of the things which matter least.’  These dangerous days are not the final moments of civilization.  The sky has not fallen!  The world has not come to an end!  There will be a tomorrow!”

 

There never was a better time to remind the world and ourselves that the end of civilization has not come.  A few resigned and dismal souls are convinced of the immanent coming of the end of the world.  An inspector on a Honolulu dock in 1936 had less interest in finding out whether my baggage contained forbidden fruit, seeds, or cuttings, than he had in pointing out the signs that convinced him the world was, literally, about to end.  With all due respect to his sincerity, I thought he was a bit of a crank on his subject - and I still think so.

 

To wait around for the end of things is to miss the mark for which Paul was striving when he wrote this letter to his Philippian friends.  “My one thought is  ---  to press on,” said he.

 

“All that is past is prologue” to something else which may be greater, finer.  Let us be reminded that God is still in his heaven, even if all is not right with the world!

 

Of course there are always crises of one sort or another.  We might as well remind ourselves that this nation of ours has passed through days as dark as these; and more bewildering.  When we speak of the “present crisis” let us remember those who spoke of the “present crisis” during the American revolution.  There was a period during that Revolution when a good many people felt that the end of the young nation had come.  But Washington had the spirit of that “statuary” theme in him.  “All that is past is prologue.”  “We go on from here.”  There was no mourning over “ifs.”  “If” they had had better provisions.  “If” the weather were not so bitter.  “If” the enemy were not reinforced.  “If” the people’s government had supported the army better.  “If” there were not those who actually favored a victory by the British forces.  Washington, and those who stood by him, knew that from Valley Forge they would go on!

 

It was so in the midst of our Civil War between the States.  The setbacks in the conflict, and the temper of the people were enough to drive Abraham Lincoln to despair.  Soon after the second inaugural, he found himself in this situation:  Maine, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois - six of the states that were normally of his party had gone against him.  In his own home town, Springfield, only two, out of 22 ministers, had voted for him.

 

It was as though the skies had become brass, as though the people had repudiated him and God deserted him.  And now, in the midst of the blackness, his own party met in caucus and demanded his resignation.  He was so near the end of his rope that he was about to grant their request.  But he asked them for 24 hours to think it over.

 

What should he do if the nation were unwilling to follow his leadership?  He dismissed his party representatives and went into seclusion for meditation and prayer and the guidance of God.

 

We may assume that he prayed, earnestly, fervently - prayed for help, prayed for assurance, prayed for triumph of the right.  Though it was long believed that he never formally joined a church, he was a man who believed profoundly in God and prayed with genuine faith.  He had prayed before and during the battle of Gettysburg.  One day, when he went into a hospital, a general had asked him if he were not afraid.  “No,” said Lincoln, “I was afraid for a while, but I soon got over that.  Everybody about me was afraid and they wanted me to move the government away from Washington, but I knew that it would be all right.”  “Why were you not afraid?” asked the general.  After a moment of silence, Lincoln replied, “Why, General, I went to my room and got down on my knees and prayed that God would save the Republic.  I asked God to give me Gettysburg.  I asked God to save Gettysburg for the nation.  I asked him to give me Gettysburg and, General, God said to me, ‘I will give you Gettysburg, Abraham, don’t worry about it.  Just trust in me; I will give you Gettysburg, and freedom for generations yet to be!’”

 

Lincoln must have prayed in that same mood, with the same desperate trust, on that night when his own party had asked for his resignation.  And something definite, and reassuring, happened to him.  For, when the committee came to get his decision, he didn’t even wait for them to get into his office.  He went out to meet them, and said, “You men go back and tell that Republican caucus that I know more about this situation than all of them put together, and that I’m master now!”

 

Even at his tragic death, Lincoln only began to live.  Stanton put the truth into rare words when he said, “Now he belongs to the ages.”  For Lincoln belongs not alone to the history of the past, but to the history of the future.

 

We may say, and ought to say, of this contemporary crisis of our time, “All that is past is prologue.  We go on from here!”

 

The world has seen horrible things done during the rise and in the might of Fascist and Nazi and Japanese militarist tyrannies.  Much of the war against these monstrous evils has gone badly.  Our own entry into the conflict has seen our nation shaken by reverses which, despite warnings that they would come, shook us from stem to stern. 

 

But, so long as we have leaders, and soldiers and sailors and marines, and citizens who have the determined faith that “All the past is prologue; we go on from here.”  We believe that the tide will be turned.  The “things that matter most are not (forever) at the mercy of the things that matter least.”

 

Even the ruthless martyring of heroes and saints has failed to stop the things that matter most.  After Joan of Arc had been burned at the stake, the executioner went to the Earl of Warwick and said:  “You have ordered me to burn the girl of Orleans.  I did as I was told.  Her heart would not burn.  What was left of her ashes we have thrown into the river.  Sir, my lord, you have heard the last of her!”  And the Earl of Warwick replied, “Heard the last of her? I wonder.  I wonder.”  Well may he have wondered!

 

Woodrow Wilson, trying to put his dream of some kind of federation of mankind into actual political expression, found his League of Nations attacked; nullified by his own people.  He broke his health and went to his death because of that struggle for a better, more workable scheme for the cooperation of the peoples of the world.  During his last illness, he was visited by Ray Stannard Baker who went to see him in Washington.  When Baker spoke pessimistically about the League of Nations, the broken man half rose on one elbow and said, “Don’t worry, Baker!  They can’t stop God!”

 

Well, he was right in that at least.  “They can’t stop God.”  The dream of a better world still lives in the hearts of millions, who have been wading through blood toward the vision.

 

When the Chinese Exclusion Act went into force in California over a half century ago, feeling ran high, and there was danger of mob violence.  At the height of the danger, two men with long gray hair and beards drove to the Chinese section of Los Angeles in an old buckboard and hired two Chinese coolies to work in their Pasadena gardens.  Putting them in the back of the buckboard, they started through the streets back to Pasadena.  One sat grimly driving the horse.  The other sat, just as grimly, with his finger on the trigger of a shotgun that lay across his knees.

 

In a few minutes the news spread, like a wild prairie fire, that two old men had hired two Chinese and were driving through the city.  A mob gathered and followed the four.  The old men drove as though they did not see the menace.  The crowd grew to a thousand furious citizens.  They began to yell for a lynching.

 

Ropes appeared in a few seconds.  The horses were stopped through sheer force of numbers.  And men were about to climb the wheels with the ropes, when a man in clerical garb jumped on the buggy and yelled, “Stop!  Just a minute, please!  I don’t think you would harm these two old men if you knew who they are.”   “Who are they?” snarled a hundred voices.  “Why, these gray-haired men are the sons of old John Brown.”

 

For a moment the crowd quieted.  Then someone on the outskirts of the crowd started singing, “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave, but his soul goes marching on.”

 

Others took up the song - it was a popular song then - and as the crowd began to sing they fell into parade before the buckboard and escorted the old men, with the Chinese coolies, out of town toward Pasadena.  John Brown just began to live when the anti-abolitionists hanged him at Harper’s Ferry.  His life had been “only prologue” up to that point.

 

It was so with another Immortal.  Once in the late afternoon, centuries ago, there was darkness of the earth; and a lonely, dying man cried out to the dull sky and breathed, “It is finished,” from a cross of shameful agony.  Possibly the centurion reported later to Pilate, “Sir, we have crucified him as you ordered.  You have heard the last of that man.”  And Pilate, and probably Pilate’s wife, must have mused uneasily, “I wonder.”

 

The eternal verities are not wiped out during black hours of personal or national or world crisis.  God still inhabits the heavens.  His Kingdom is bound to come.  Wrong will one day be broken on the rocks of what is eternally right.

 

Never mind brooding over the past.  The best it offers is experience for the future.  Forget the useless “ifs.”  Take life as it is and go ahead!

 

There is everything to live for; to struggle and plan and fight for.  And righteousness shall live forever.

 

“My one thought,” said Paul, “is, by forgetting what lies behind me, and straining to what lies before me, to press on to the goal for the prize of God’s high call in Christ Jesus.”

 

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dates and places delivered:

 

            Wisconsin Rapids, June 7, 1942

            Faith Reformed Church, September 19, 1952

            Wisconsin Rapids, September 19, 1954