It Proves Itself 3/12/44
Scripture: Acts 10: 34-43
Text: Acts 10: 38; “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good and healing all that were oppressed with the devil; for God was with him.”
Perhaps some of you in this room, like the members of my family, enjoy listening to the radio broadcast each Saturday afternoon of one of the splendid operas. Or perhaps you enjoy the symphonic music which can be heard on a Sunday afternoon. Or possibly many of you have other favorite musical programs.
One way in which a considerable amount of the better type of music may become more interesting to those of us who are amateur listeners, is to look for the theme that often recurs in a composition in varying form.
A University professor, whose field is not music, but who likes to listen to it for recreation, points out that a great deal of living amounts, like a musical composition, to variations on a theme.
What variations there are among human folk, on the theme of religion!! From the splendor of a church built on the assumption of Apostolic succession from St. Peter, to the austere simplicity of certain Quaker meeting houses; from the deep basses in the choirs of the Eastern Orthodox church to a meeting in Chungking of some people who apparently call themselves “American Dutch Reformed Chinese Christians;” from congregations who worship in splendid gothic structures to the sailors drifting ashore in rubber life rafts to rescue by natives who sing simple gospel hymns and teach the sailors the religion they themselves had not learned in a Sunday School at home; all these variations are possible around a central theme of religion in the life of mankind.
Sometimes the variations become so intricate that the theme seems lost. This is especially possible in times when living is fired by the heat of struggle. Life was serious and hazardous in the time of the European Reformation, for instance. One of the theologies developed during that time was Calvinism. Its adherents became impressed, above all else, with the all-inclusive power of God, His majesty and inviolable greatness. In developing variations on this one theme, the Calvinists followed to their limits certain logical conclusions. They felt that, compared to the majesty of God, man is a shabby, perverse, corrupt sinner who deserves only punishment. God may graciously have mercy on man, but man doesn’t deserve it.
Since God is all-powerful and knows everything, man is “predestined” - that is he can not control his future, for that had already been mapped out in the mind of God. Very fortunately, Calvinists were altogether inconsistent from that point on. As though they wished to demonstrate to themselves, and others, that they were not among those foreordained to eternal damnation they tried to live exemplary lives, with the result that they were highly responsible citizens! I am not one to laugh off the severity of the Calvinist’s lives. Without that high degree of personal responsibility shown by them, true democratic living is scarcely possible on a permanent basis. But I do not think that it stems logically from the doctrine of predestination.
Now, under war stresses, we see another variation on the theme of religion. We are told that men living in constant jeopardy live in another kind of world from that which they longingly, and vigorously defend. When one of them remarks that “There are no atheists in the fox holes” of the battle fronts we are obligated to try to understand.
Perhaps there is the feeling that it makes no difference what you do; when your number is up, it’s up. You think of God as a sort of omnipotent fate which keeps you alive. You call on that fate. Before you go in, you pray that He will protect you. You thank Him when you come out safely. It is hard to think of anything else when bombs and shells are dropping, when flack and bullets are flying.
Those of us who live in the protection bought by their struggle at the front imagine what it is all like, and begin to think in comparable terms, until the fatalism of it gets too far from the moral point of our Christianity. If we are, for the time being, sheltered from what goes on at the battle fronts, we ought to be concerned with far more than the comfort of being alive and physically whole. Otherwise we are in danger of magic and superstition. If we confine ourselves to fatalistic dependence on a capricious deity we discount the moral factors in our religion. We must count more on God’s will than on what we hope may be his whim. If we assume that God doesn’t care what happens to man, unless God can be persuaded, we miss the best point of Christian faith! It ought to be the constant hope and effort of all of us in the home churches to find and do God’s will!
Then there is another variation on the theme of religion that might be pointed out. When under the weight of suffering, sorrow or terror in a world that we can not understand, perhaps we appeal to God’s love. We are shocked by what we are and what we can do to each other. Nothing can ease the shock except the belief that there is a love great enough to forgive us anything. Professor Schroeder remarks that some of “the most sentimental people in the world are those who are guilty of its greatest cruelties,” which they carry out just ahead of easy remorse.
Men in constant danger are inclined to accent the variation of God’s power. Men who are safe, and far from the terror, are inclined, with a sentimental note, to accent God’s love. Now there is no more characteristically Christian belief than the belief in the love of God. How else could man go on living in any sort of decency unless he knew the meaning of forgiveness? Yet it is so easy to accept God’s love as a matter of course. We can easily become like a spoiled child, who makes extravagant demands on the patience of the household and feels abused when he doesn’t get his own way. The love of God is to be received, not as a right, but as a gift; not with complacency, but with awe! You see there are deep religious values in this variation, as in the other variations of the theme.
Our thoughtful concern is that we allow no variation to obscure or lose the main theme! When, for instance, we are overwhelmed by the mystery and unavoidable necessity of things we have to go through, and we cannot see the way clear ahead of us, confidence and assurance may come to us as we put our trust in the love and strength of God, and wait patiently in the darkness until the light, from whatever direction, shines again! In this fashion many a person has weathered the storm incident to the death of a precious one. By such faith many a fine soul has been enabled to accept incurable disease, or handicap, with a smile that conquers complaining.
The time to do this kind of thinking about our religion is now when you and I have opportunity to consider it fully. When battle orders call for a parachutist to jump, he hasn’t time to meditate coolly on the “law of gravity” and to muse, while toying with his rip cord, “Hmm - I wonder whether bodies of substance attract each other in proportion to their masses, and inversely as the square of the distance between them.” Any such calm reflection belongs back in the training period. When the rip cord must be pulled, there are other matters to command the attention.
The time to do our soberest thinking about the love, the strength of God and about His will, is not when bereavement hits us a paralyzing blow in the solar plexus, but while we have time to prepare ourselves thoughtfully for the harvest of the grim reaper. The time to deal most effectively with the temptation to known evil is not when its saccharine sweetness dangles before desire-inflamed eyes, but when there is time for disciplined training against that day of soul-struggle.
Now all of the variations of our religious experience need to be kept under the control of both composer and performer; related to the central theme - to know and to do the will of God. It may be almost as though we trained ourselves to know and to do Good (spelled with a capital G).
Every bit of religious understanding proves itself in attitude and action. It is inescapable that an apple tree be judged by its apples and a man by his manhood. By our fruits we are known. Remember that description, in the book of Acts, of Jesus “who went about doing good and healing all that were oppressed with the devil; for God was with him.”
We don’t like to endure the proof of ourselves. We squirm and twist and evade and falter. We persuade ourselves that we can’t be sure what goodness is; so we might as well give up a useless attempt and just live as we think we want to. We reason that, after all, goodness is relative and what is good in one circumstance is not good in another. Within limits that is so. It is especially so if each act seems to stand on the merits of its own setting, apart from the motive that prompted it.
But it is also true that people everywhere understand courage, recognize kindness, respond to sacrifice when they see it. There isn’t much honest doubt in our own minds about the goodness of our own acts. We know when our work is honest, and when it is shoddy. We know what generosity is, what kindness and decency are, and whether we have shown much of them to a given person! We know what cruelty and cheapness and dishonesty are.
We recognize easily how specific Jesus’ goodness is. When a man asks, “Well, who is my neighbor?” Jesus points to one who is in need of the kind of help that man can give - a traveler on the same way, robbed, beaten and suffering. [Luke 10: 29-37]. When a woman is discovered in overt and undeniable sin, he makes a clear declaration as to who shall punish her - “he that is without sin among you.” [John 8: 3-7]. When, at a well where they seek water, Jesus meets a woman of another race than his, and of another creed, he talks with her as a person. [John
4: 7-26]. When callous, stubborn and cruel men nail him up on a cross beam, he says, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” [Luke 23: 34]. His goodness is so specific as to leave no doubt as to what it is.
His response to life was never a glossing over of the issue. He didn’t make it his business to forgive the hypocrite. He was not forgiving men the evils they did to others. He knew how to be fiery with effective anger over that. He didn’t even whitewash the evil cruelty of those who were doing him to death. He was pleading with God, somehow to take hold of men who would not be themselves, seek good!
Self-righteous people of his day had known what he thought of their arrogant self-esteem. Jesus knew how sharply severe can be the judgment of God on a world or a people which deserves His condemnation. He did not cheapen his goodness with expediency nor dilute his convictions with vague words. He knew how to say “yea” and he knew what it meant to say “nay.”
The theme of Christianity is that a man went about doing good, so that men who knew him knew what goodness is. In fact they were persuaded that through his goodness, they knew something of what the goodness of God is. They knew that his goodness was not sentiment, but that it was founded on his soberest, most carefully-thought-out beliefs. They knew that he was moved not by superstition nor by mere curiosity, but by moral earnestness. They knew the source of his convictions and that the convictions were clear. To go about doing good, so, is no easy matter. Yet it is clear that active goodness is the proof of our belief.
It is demonstrated in our neighborliness, in our giving to War Victims and Services, in our sincere efforts to make our world better, in our mercy on the despairing and needy.
“Come ye blessed of my father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger and ye took me in; naked and ye clothed me; I was sick and ye visited me; I was in prison and ye came unto me.”
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Places and dates delivered:
Wisconsin Rapids, March 12, 1944
Nekoosa, March 15, 1944