Which Way Shall We Look? 8/4/46
Scripture: Isaiah 51: 1-8
Text: Isaiah 51: 1b; “Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and the quarry from which you were dug.”
How many times have you good people of these Congregations listened to a sermon based on the text: “Speak to the children of Israel that they go forward”? I don’t know whether Mr. Triggs has ever used that text in Wisconsin Rapids or not. But I have preached from it.
There are a number of texts that are used in challenges to the people of a congregation to look forward and move forward - words like “Let the dead bury their dead;” [Matthew 8: 22]; “No man having put his hand to the plow and looking back is fit for the kingdom of God;” [Luke 9: 62]; “Forgetting those which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God.” [Philippians 3: 14].
A generation ago, we used to hear a sermon, now and again, which mentioned Lot’s wife. How could you ever forget her, after the description of how she was turned to a pillar of salt in that moment when she turned to look back at the doomed city from which her family was fleeing? The implication seems clear, as a Canadian preacher once said: “Look ahead, not back; life is ahead of you, death is behind you.” And then there is Jesus’ saying that one who, having put his hand to the plow, yet looks back, is not worthy of him.
Some of us are given to jesting over those who live in the past; over those who seem devotees of ancestor worship or of rosy reminiscence. A great preacher of New York City, Dr. George Buttrick, writes a splendid book on Prayer. Now and then he has a little fun in it, as when he writes that: “Some irreverent mind claims to have discovered a rare duck which flies backward because it cares nothing about where it is going but must know whence it came.” We are constantly, urgently, challenged to do new things, to be forward-looking, venturesome. And that is well -- I suspect it is even inescapably necessary.
And yet in spite of all this, it is also perilous not to look back. We need, and must have, some of the experiences and assurances of the past in order to find a fixed point by which to steer.
Remember that man Isaiah. His people were on the eve of returning to Judea from exile in Babylon. Yet they were apprehensive. They wished they could be sure what the future held for them. They had no sense of destiny or of mission. The lamp of their lives burned dimly. Some were even content to remain in Babylon -- and did!
To these dispirited people, did Isaiah, say, “Chins up, let’s go!”? He did not. He did something far more majestic; he asked all of them to remember Abraham: “Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and the quarry from which you were dug.” (American translation.) It was as if he reminded them that they were no faltering, mediocre folk. They were descendants of Abraham, sons and daughters of Israel, inheritors of a grand tradition! Remember it!
Last month I did a little “remembering.” I was invited to preach at the Methodist Church of Huron, South Dakota, where we were visiting my parents. It happens that that church is one where I grew up, as a boy, a high school lad and a college youth. From that church I was given my first local preacher’s license under which I preached my first sermons in a little inland town 20 miles from the railway. It was from that church that I “graduated” into the Congregational ministry. I haven’t heard the people there say whether or not they felt responsible for my graduation or not, but it is good for me to remember once in while where I came from! A good Christian home; an earnest congregation of Christian folk, in a great fellowship - these I cherish as I do certainly the Congregational fellowship into which I have grown.
While I was a student in Chicago, Norris L. Tibbetts was associated with Charles Gilkey in the ministry at Hyde Park Baptist Church. When Dr. Gilkey became dean of the University of Chicago Chapel, Tibbetts became minister of the Hyde Park Church. After more than 15 years of service to that church, he resigned in 1942 to become one of the ministers at Riverside Church in New York City - the church headed for many years by Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick. There was a farewell reception for Dr. Tibbetts at the Hyde Park Church. Among those attending was Dr. Charles Clayton Morrison, editor of the Christian Century magazine. As Dr. Morrison walked into the church for that Sunday evening reception, he noticed on the bulletin board that the Sunday morning sermon had been on the subject: “Which Way is Progress?” At the refreshment table, Dr. Morrison was introduced to a gentleman to whom he immediately put some questions: “Are you a member of this church?” “Yes,” replied the gentleman. “And were you here this morning?” “Yes,” came the answer. “Tell me, then,” persisted Dr. Morrison, “Which way is progress?” The question was abrupt, but the gentleman’s answer was whipped right back: “Sometimes it is backwards.” Morrison pressed one more question: “When is progress backwards?” The answer was profound: “It is backwards,” said the gentleman, “When you have wandered away from home.”
Progress is a good word, isn’t it? But it is often used loosely and dangerously. It is sometimes used to suggest inevitable improvement, as though life always lay ahead in a straight line. But true life does not always lie ahead in a straight line. Life revolves about a center. From the smallest electron to the greatest planet, life rotates around a center. If anything happens to that rotating relationship there is an appalling explosion.
You have heard and sung it in the hymn: “Lord of all being, throned afar,” when you come to the words:
Center and soul of every sphere,
Yet to each loving heart how near!
God must be central. The Hebrews knew it, and Isaiah reminded them of it when he reminded them, saying, “Look back to the rock from which you were hewn, and the quarry from which you were dug.” Remember that you are chosen of God from the days of Abraham your father.
Someone has said that our world is like the prodigal son who got tired of the care of his father’s house and went out on his own, quickly spending his inheritance in riotous living. The world seems to have wearied of paternal care and to have gone out on its own. It has spent its resources and well-nigh spent itself in the most riotous war of human history. Which way is progress now? The prodigal son found that, for him, it was toward his father.
Someone has written: “We have learned in airplanes to fly through the air like birds, and in submarines to swim under the sea like fish. All that remains is for us to learn to walk the earth like men.” If we ever learn to do that, it will be in losing our hatred, and melting our differences in the complete and understanding love and care of God.
Today there is a great deal of nervous restlessness everywhere - not enough confidence, too many suspicions. Yet there is a great human longing for help. We know that human cleverness and culture alone can not save us. Let us look for strength to the rock from which we were hewn. As surely as God lives, and people are willing to learn, great and wonderful things can happen.
There is a great future, because there is a great God. God has not given up. The world is never so badly wrecked but that God can mend it through people, it people will become his menders. Look to God!
And look to Jesus Christ!
For three or four years of the six that we have now lived in Wisconsin Rapids, our family has rested for part of the summer vacation month at a cottage on Waupaca’s Chain of Lakes, about 40 miles from here. We’ve enjoyed getting on the lake, and into the lake, as some of you have. On the lake, we’ve used both canoe and row boat. There is a smooth sense of getting ahead in a canoe, especially with a skilled paddle in the stern, wielded by one who keeps his eye on the destination ahead. We like a canoe for pleasure.
But for fishing, and for the personal safety of those who are not expert at swimming, a row boat is more dependable. One by one, we have learned to row a boat, and each of us has learned what everyone must know about it - that to avoid constantly straining your neck, looking around to see where you are going, one needs to look back of the boat to a fixed point and then pull on the oars with that point held steadily over the stern.
The Christ of history and of living reality is our fixed point. Looking back to him we hold our course. He is like the mariner’s north star. If we steer by his life and teaching we are headed for the harbor of understanding among the peoples of the world. Without him we head only for confusion and storms.
Someone has written about him: “Here is a man who was born in an obscure village, the child of a peasant woman ---- He worked in a carpenter shop until he was thirty, and then for three years he was an itinerant preacher. He never wrote a book. He never held an office. He never owned a home. He never had a family. He never went to college. He never put his feet inside a big city. He never traveled two hundred miles from the place where he was born. He never did one of the things that usually accompanies greatness. He had no credentials but himself ---- While still a young man, the tide of popular opinion turned against him. He was turned over to his enemies. He went through the mockery of a trial. He was nailed upon a cross between two thieves. His executioners gambled for the only piece of property he had on earth - and that was his coat. When he was dead he was taken down and laid in a borrowed grave through the pity of a friend.”
In some ways that is an extreme statement. But it is vivid. And what is more vivid is the fact that, after all these centuries have come and gone, Christ is still the center around which true progress is made!
Said Edward Sheffield Brightman, and rightly, “A being who, nineteen hundred years after his death, can cause a civilization to question its own foundations, is no insignificant Jewish carpenter. He is a figure of world importance.” That puts it mildly. We cannot pass him by if we would live on this planet. We must not carry atomic power around in this world unless the spirit of Christ is in us!
I like to hear Paul Robeson sing. Once or twice I have enjoyed seeing him act in the motion picture theater. It seems that Paul Robeson has traveled in Russia and that he believes in Russia. In the course of his tours he speaks about Russia, and perhaps makes many friends for the Soviet Union. And the reason he is all for Russia, he says, is that in Russia there is no race prejudice, and poverty is being abolished.
Now I don’t suppose that prejudice against other races is any great consuming fire among the people here in this room this morning. As a matter of fact there is very little racial variety for us to be prejudiced about here in this particular community! We just don’t know from daily experience how vastly different is the lot of people in communities where no man of Negro appearance, be he janitor, physician or college president, may go into one side of a railroad station; and where no white person may eat in a restaurant for colored people on pain of arrest and fine in the courts. We just don’t know how it feels to a man of the Mongolian race to see signs posted in a park in the foreign concession in his own country reading: “Dogs and Chinamen stay out!”
Those things are vague and unreal to us here. But they are like salt on a sore to millions of human beings. If Russia can truthfully boast of no race prejudice (and I think probably she can), is it particularly surprising that Russia looks good, for a while, to those who never for a day of their lives escape the limitations and humiliations of that prejudice?
Abject poverty is not known to most of the people in this room. Most of us feel, I suppose, that we could do with a few dollars worth of commodities, services, necessities and personal pleasures more than we actually have. But the fact is that we live in a prosperous community and most of us prosper in it, and with it. With hundreds of millions of human beings, it is not as it is with us. The hopeless, constant, never-to-be-escaped poverty that dogs the steps of great, unimaginable masses of people is almost beyond our imagination. Yet it is one of the grim realities of earth’s human picture. Do you wonder that Russia’s claim that poverty is being abolished in the Soviet countries sounds pretty good in the ears of a lot of people who can think of nothing much else?
Now I don’t happen to believe that things are all so sweet in Russia. It seems to me that the gains bought at the expense of millions violently purged, millions more enslaved in concentration camps, whole nations regimented under one, unquestioned, party-dictated, political philosophy and action are bought too dearly. And yet those things must be bought! And it can be done on better -- far better -- terms!
Long before the Soviet government came into being, there was one who championed the cause of common people, who spoke their language, and preached a revolutionary gospel. To men’s skins, he was color blind. To their material possessions, he was oblivious. Their prejudices, he brushed aside. He walked through Samaria -- did not detour around it crossing the Jordan twice, as did pious and prejudiced Jews to avoid all dealing with Samaritans.
All that is basically good in Russia, or anywhere else, is Christian. The only way to excel Russia is to outdo Russia in giving life to people - not just living existence, but life! Christ came to give life and to give it abundantly. Until we are more Christian, personally and as a people in our human relationships, we are not in good enough position to talk about the godlessness of Russia. It is terribly important that there be no beam in our own eye and that our own house be in order.
Which way shall we look? There is only one way to look if we want salvation, peace, opportunity, true satisfaction. Look to God! Look to Christ! There is the sun around which our lives must rotate.
And look to the cross. Christ’s sacrificial cross was redemptive. So must ours be. We have been bought with a great price.
Thousands of lives of the finest lads in our country have recently been given. The place whereon we stand today is holy. These sacrifices must lead to the dawning of a new day. If this be the hour of greatest opportunity in our history - and many believe it is - it is because so many have paid dearly for this opportunity.
A new day will come if, as in Christ, our love never turns to hate, nor our faith to despair.
Look unto God, sole giver and sustainer of life.
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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids (Summer Union Service), August 4, 1946.