Builder of Men                                                                                   8/7/49

 

Scripture:  Isaiah 59: 19, to 60: 3.

 

Text:  Isaiah 60: 1;  “Arise, shine; for thy light is come.”

 

Four or five years ago, I heard a member of this church say of the University of Wisconsin that it is a “man-builder.”  That is what any educational institution, whether a great university or a modest college, ought to be.  Those who graduate therefrom should be not only four years older, but inestimably deepened and broadened in intellect, markedly matured in mind and spirit over what they were when they were matriculated.

 

There are other forces which build men and women.  Sometimes an unusual experience of inspiration or of hardship matures a man or woman into something much better than before.  Often a single personality serves as the inspiring force for growth in others.  Sometimes it may even be an unseen spirit.

 

The mind of Christ is such a stimulator.  To come into contact with his spirit is to grow into something new and better.  As you doubtless know, I spent my vacation month this year in attendance at the Western Pastor’s School at La Foret, near Colorado Springs.  The school is sponsored annually by the Congregational Christian Board of Home Missions, as a mental and spiritual refresher for a limited number of pastors each year.  One of the men I met there told me that he had been, for many years, a lumberjack in the northwest.  I would guess that he could have been a very good lumberjack, for he was broad and solid in build, and he handled tools, during craft period, with skill and precision.

 

Virgil Hicks told me that he had really come in contact with the spirit of Christ wile working as a lumberjack.  He said that he had been “converted” - that he had become a changed man.  And not only did he become a follower of the Christ whom he had found, but he felt an urge to preach this Christ.  A mature man, without the means to finish a college and seminary course, with a family to support, he nevertheless sought opportunity to tell others of his discovery.    At length he was licensed to preach among the Congregational Churches, and now serves as licensed preacher to the Congregations of Letcher and Laomis, South Dakota.  He devoured the lectures at this school.  He volunteered for services about the grounds of the school camp.  He was assigned to care for the chapel for four weeks and kept it lovely, broom and duster, with loving attention to its hymnals, candles, and other equipment; got up well before others in order to have everything ready there and to ring the bell calling us all to matins which were held for a half hour daily before breakfast.  He sang a lusty bass in the chorus choir.  He spent his daily recreation hour and spare moments in the craft shop, fashioning a beautiful cross and candle sticks of alabaster to be carried home for the church at Letcher.  Every time he opened his mouth or smiled he was a living testimony that Christ had built something good and useful of him, and had promoted him from one useful vocation to another useful and more far reaching vocation where he could introduce others to the man-building Christ.

 

A far more erudite man was Dr. Allen Weholi, who taught the course in Old Testament in the school.  Allen Weholi is a minister of the Evangelical and Reformed church and is a professor in Eden Seminary, maintained by that church in St. Louis, Missouri.  He is as human and common as salt, has a wicked love of the ludicrous which he puts to good use,  and an uncanny ability to see incidents in Old Testament literature as clearly as a modern newspaperman might report them, while being at the same time vividly aware of their great spiritual significance.  Time after time, he would point out the human frailties of some well-known Old Testament character or writer, laughing at the ridiculous, analyzing the imaginings of some writer, peering over the mysteries of some passage to the essential experience of God which those men had, which we too have in startlingly similar ways.

 

Stanley North, Dean of the school, remarked that he understood the Congregational churches of St. Louis, no matter what might be their opinions on the merger with the Evangelical and Reformed Church were all in favor of merging with Allen Weholi!  The spirit of God and the mind of Christ have laid hold upon that man and built him into a person of mighty stature.

 

But the mind of Christ is not a rigid mold in which all are cast in the same form and manner.  Virgil Hicks and Allen Weholi are vastly different people.  Hicks works like a beaver damming a stream, and with all the persevering business of an ant.  He sees the obvious and gropes for the intangible.  He will use some expressions of speech which are pious-sounding.  He is a devoted, dependable, lovable human being.  Weholi works, too, but without showing the effort in a manner which the unastute might mistake as off-hand or careless.  He ignores the obvious, or laughs at it, and he puts his finger on the intangible, making it vibrate with reality.  The word “pious” is one of the last adjectives in the dictionary I would apply to him.  You can love him or leave him, as you like.  But you cannot ignore his penetrating spiritual discernment.  He is an enormously effective man, built from an unnoticed lad in a little Illinois village (who never dreamed of advanced education, or the ministry, until his pastor inspired his hope) into a man of erudite learning and broad spiritual vision.

 

The same Christ built these two men, Hicks and Weholi, so different and each so useful where he serves.  One is startled that among 60 or 70 folk in such a school camp, all interested vocationally in the cause of Christ, they could be so different.  Christ does build men and women, but each differently according to his talents, capacities, interest and probably also according to the Lord’s intent for his service.  Let each of us “Arise and shine,” for our “light is come” upon us and we are to be built each in our several persons, vocations, and destinies by the one mind of Christ.

 

When one examines paintings in some art gallery, one occasionally comes across a self-portrait in which an artist has tried painting his own picture as he conceives himself to look.  Early in his career, the artist Albrecht Durer painted such a self-portrait.  When it was finished, people looked at it with appreciative and critical eye.  For it was seen at once to bear a remarkable resemblance to pictures of the Christ.  Some were offended at this resemblance on canvass, deeming it a sacrilege and an act of arrogance.  But at least one famous art critic made this observation: “It was not an act of sacrilege or arrogance, for he had created his own image in the light of what he aspired to be.”

 

This, then, is the vocation of all Christians - to be reformed, or conformed, to the spiritual likeness of Christ.  But even in so doing, the features remain ours.  No two paintings of Jesus make him appear exactly the same.  One artist will portray him with a Germanic face, another with an Italian face.  An African artist may paint him with dark skin; most Caucasian painters picture his skin in lighter shades.  A Japanese or Chinese artist may give his face Mongoloid eyes.  Once in a while, Jesus is pictured with features that seem recognizably Jewish; most of the time the artists seem quite unaware that our Lord was reared in a Hebrew home, born of a Hebrew mother, and with a proud Hebrew lineage which some traced back to the Hebrew King David.  Just as the artists’ pictures of our Lord Himself vary according to what the artists see upon that face, so the Christ’s shaping of our lives differs by his design and our appearance.  Yet He is the same Christ!  And we are built in his single spiritual image.

 

Now what does it do to one to be builded of Christ?  Well, for one thing, it transforms one from the person who is preoccupied with his own concerns to one who in concerned with much more than himself.  Peter is an effective symbol of what happens in Christian development.  To him we can look for an illustration of the theme that Christ is a builder of men.  One of the most attractive things about Peter’s character lies in the fact that, to begin with, he was a fairly average sort of fellow.  He was an obscure fisherman on a little-noticed lake.  Left to his own devices he would doubtless have prospered well enough to get along, perhaps better than some men less skilled in the fishing trade.  He might have lived and died a mediocre sort of fellow, a passably good neighbor while he lived, and soon forgotten when he died.  Like countless multitudes, unrecorded in any history book, he might have worked, rejoiced, sorrowed, eaten, slept and reared offspring all in due course.

 

But some tremendous force joined him to high adventure so that he did turn his back on mediocrity.  He achieved no prominence of wealth or social prominence.  In fact his transformation led to real poverty, to persecution and probably to a martyr’s death.  Christ’s call to him led him from his fishing boat to almost absolute insecurity and to what people generally think of as harm or evil.  We who worship, in our century, at the shrine of security would understand any hesitation he may have had (as others have had) in following the Nazarene.

 

Peter knew Peter.  He must have had an inkling of some of his own faults and weaknesses.  He had no giant intellect; he was fond of hasty action; he tended to waver in decisive moments.  The brethren checked up on him early and late on his ideas.  He tried to dissuade Jesus from the courageous, but dangerous, decision to go to Jerusalem.  He cravenly denied his friendship with Jesus within a few hours after he had sworn his loyalty and life to the Master. 

 

But there is that about Jesus which reassured him, made him measure up to the vigorous demands of apostleship, and brought him into light.  Peter, like countless others, was built into the stature of godly man by the power of Christ.  (2)  And that is the type of person needed in our world of today, as it was then.

 

[Verbatim text in pen and ink ends here.  The rest is notes in pencil].

 

Technological - yes.  But more than technological --- moral.

 

            In our time -- mass murder -- cannibalism.

 

A physicist -- “In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”

 

Sin of the physical -- the common sin which besets us - implied in Cain’s question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

 

(3)  A man or woman builded of Christ will have a concern for the rights, the hopes, the lives of others.

 

William Wilberforce - Englishman - independently wealthy, love of gambling and the whimsicalities of his day.  While very young, elected to Parliament.  Early years - went his old gay way.  Converted to evangelical Christianity while on trip to Nice, France, by reading and the persuasion of his teacher, Dr. Isaac Milner.  From then on, the heart of Christ was the heart of William Wilberforce as far as a follower could emulate the Master’s spirit.

 

Slavery in England.  He set himself against it.  Would have gone eventually, but he helped dispose of it in his day.  He caused the British line to move in obedience to the voice of the Galilean.

 

Christ’s spirit today, experience in the lives of many in different ways, brings hope, through the lives he builds, to abused children, the unlettered, the sick, the bruised, the captive.  Subdues the honor of the vain to the honor of God’s purpose.

 

For man was not created for ignorance, superstition, hatred, greed, lust and arrogance - but for light and for love and for life abundant.  Christ is the builder of men for his true destiny.

 

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, August 7, 1949 (Union Service).