- Duke University Chapel Service of Worship. February 3rd, 1980. (muffled speaking) (church organ plays) (muffled speaking) (church organ plays) ♪ I will greatly rejoice in the Lord ♪ ♪ For my soul shall exalt in my God ♪ ♪ For he has clothed me in the garments of salvation ♪ ♪ He has covered me with the robe of righteousness ♪ ♪ As a bridegroom decks himself with a garland ♪ ♪ And as a bride adorns herself with her jewels ♪ ♪ Adorns herself with her jewels ♪ ♪ With her jewels ♪ ♪ For as the earth brings forth its shoots ♪ ♪ And as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up ♪ ♪ To spring up ♪ ♪ To spring up ♪ ♪ So the Lord God ♪ ♪ Will cause righteousness and praise ♪ ♪ Will cause righteousness and praise to spring up ♪ ♪ To spring up, to spring up ♪ ♪ Before ♪ ♪ all the nations ♪ (church organ plays) ♪ Immortal, invisible, God only wise ♪ ♪ In light inaccessible hid from our eyes ♪ ♪ Most blessed, most glorious, the Ancient of Days ♪ ♪ Almighty, victorious, Thy great name we praise ♪ ♪ Unresting, unhasting, and silent as light ♪ ♪ Nor wanting, nor wasting, Thou rulest in might ♪ ♪ Thy justice like mountains high soaring above ♪ ♪ Thy clouds which are fountains of goodness and love ♪ ♪ To all life Thou givest, to both great and small ♪ (organ drowns out congregation) 

- I greet you in the name of almighty God who creates and sustains us, who saves us and who is present with us. So that we may prepare ourselves to worship God, let us with penitent and obedient hearts confess our sin and accept the forgiveness lovingly offered to us. You may be seated. (congregation stirs) Let us pray. O, God, early in the morning do we cry unto Thee. Help us to pray and to think only of Thee. We cannot pray alone. In us there is darkness, but with Thee there is light. We are lonely, but thou leavest us not. We are feeble in heart, but thou leavest us not. We are restless, but with Thee there is peace. In us there is bitterness, but with Thee there is patience. Thy ways are past understanding, but thou knowest the way for us. O, Lord, our God, we praise and thank Thee for the peace of the night. We praise and thank Thee for this new day. We praise and thank Thee for all Thy goodness and faithfulness throughout our lives. Thou hast granted us many blessings. Now let us accept tribulation from Thy hand. Surely thou wilt not lay on us more than we can bear. Thou makest all things work together for good for Thy children. Hear us, O God, as we pray in the name of Christ our Lord. Let us in silence confess our personal sins. Friends, hear and believe the good news of the gospel. In Jesus Christ we are forgiven. Let us accept that forgiveness and let us forgive one another. Let us give thanks for God is good and God's love is everlasting. 

- Thanks be to God, whose love has made us. Thanks be to God, whose mercy forgives us. Thanks be to God, whose promise secures us. 

- Amen. I extend a special word of welcome to those students and family members here at Duke University for Black Students' Weekend. We are especially glad to have any of you here in the service of worship today. Welcome, also, to Michael and Karen Laub Novak, theologians in residence at Duke for this coming week, and to their three children, Richard, Tanya, and Jana. There is an exhibit of Karen's work and a lecture and reception scheduled for this afternoon in 104 Flowers. Michael will deliver an address tomorrow night at 7:30 in Page Auditorium, to which you are all invited. You will find on the back page of the bulletin for today a schedule of the public events as they are for the next week. We welcome Michael Novak to the pulpit today and look forward to the message he will bring to us. 

- Let us pray. Prepare our hearts, O Lord, to accept your word. Silence in us any voice but your own, that, hearing, we may also obey your will. Through Jesus Christ, our Lord, Amen. The Old Testament lesson is from the first chapter of Jeremiah, verses 4 through 5 and verses 17 through 19. Now the word of the Lord came to me saying, before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you. I appointed you a prophet to the nations. But you gird up your loins, arise, and say to them everything that I command you. Do not be dismayed by them, lest I dismay you before them. And I, behold, I make you this day a fortified city, an iron pillar and bronze walls against the whole land, against the kings of Judah, its princes, its priests, and the people of the land. They will fight against you, but they shall not prevail against you. For I am with you, says the Lord, to deliver you. The epistle lesson is from the 13th chapter of First Corinthians, verses 4 through 13. Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful. It is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way. It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away. As for tongues, they will cease. As for knowledge, it will pass away. For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect. But when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part. Then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. So faith, hope, love abide, these three, but the greatest of these is love. Here ends the reading from the epistle. Amen. (church organ plays) (choir sings) 

- Will the congregation please stand for the reading of the gospel lesson. The gospel lesson is from the fourth chapter of Luke, verses 21 through 30. And he began to say to them, today the scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. And all spoke well of him and wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of his mouth. And they said, "Is not this Joseph's son?" And he said to them, "Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb. "Physician, heal yourself. "What we have heard you did at Capernaum, "do here also in your own country." And he said, "Truly I say to you, "no prophet is acceptable in his own country, "but in truth I tell you, "there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, "when the Heaven was shut up three years and six months, "when there came a great famine over all the land, "and Elijah was sent to none of them, "but only to Zarephath in the Land of Sidon, "to a woman who was a widow. "And there were many lepers in Israel "in the time of the prophet Elijah, "and none of them was cleansed, "but only Naaman the Syrian." When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath. And they rose up and put him out of the city, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their city was built that they might throw him down headlong. But passing through the midst of them, he went away. Here ends the reading of the gospel. All praise and glory be to God. (church organ plays) ♪ Glory be to our creator ♪ ♪ Praise to our redeemer Lord ♪ ♪ Glory be to our sustainer ♪ ♪ Ever three and ever one ♪ ♪ As it was in the beginning ♪ ♪ World without end ♪ ♪ Amen ♪ 

- I am very happy to be among you this morning, although I must confess to just a little anxiety about the gospel text, read to us, which recounts the reaction of one congregation to one preacher many years ago and is calculated to strike terror into the heart of a new preacher lest some other congregation take that example as something they must follow. I'd like to talk about an experience that is, and must be, common in any free society, in any free and mobile society of the modern sort, which we, in the United States, are the chief model of. I call this experience by the name of the experience of nothingness, but it isn't the name that is so significant. It's rather the experience itself. And I feel quite confident that many of you, either in your own lives or in the lives of those who are close to you, have already known or will know this experience. Call it by whatever name. It is an experience which is as old as the human race in some forms, but quite different, I think, in the contemporary period. It is an experience that may be generated in us in a traditional way simply by the contemplation of a building, a great building such as this, unique in style, in its height, in its power, built around an architectural idea or set of ideas that are now 1000 or 1100 years old, an architectural idea that has seen so many generations come and go, shed from this earth like the skin of a snake. Imagine being married, having children in one's early twenties, and then one's children beginning to have children. A generation therefore being 20 to 30 years, how many generations there have been in buildings such as this. St. Augustine reports his awareness of this experience by saying how overcome by it he was when he stood on the beaches of Oran and looked at the multitude of stars and thought how small and how fleeting was human life. In our day and in our sort of society, these old ways of arriving at the experience of nothingness still occur, and with just as much power as ever. But, in addition, there are experiences which come from within. These experiences come in many ways. I only want to take a moment to suggest one or two of the ways and allow you to relate it more directly to examples from your own life. You may, on a winter afternoon, have looked out a window, late in the day, from a second or third floor, say, and been thinking nothing in particular. It may even be that, late in the autumn, one heard the caw of a crow over the wintry field. Or it may be that one saw people pass in the street under an early light. Whatever. But suddenly there may have come before one's mind, as it were, the story of one's life, the story one was living out with one's life. And instantly, as it were, one loathed it. And you can then imagine thinking of a different way you might be living, reinforcing in yourself all those things which you're now inhibiting, and inhibiting in yourself all those things which you're now doing. Seeing that many others around us or in different parts of our society do very differently. And then, these alternative stories that one may be living out with one's life, one may also loathe. And then there comes the perception, which is at the heart of the experience I am trying to describe. It might be described as the perception of our own liberty, but it feels like, rather, the perception of the formlessness at the heart of our lives. We can be living in any of the multiple ways that human beings have lived. We could be living so very differently from the way we are living. And there are so many different ways in which we might live. Not one of those ways imposes itself upon us. Not one of these ways can assure us that it is the way we ought to live. And we recognize a kind of emptiness, if you wish, but more exactly, more to the point, a formlessness. If life is meant to be a narrative, a story, then its initial form must be like dough, shapeless, ready to be made a story, but of itself formless, into which, through which we can write a story. But which one? It is the perception of this thorough and quite total formlessness at the heart of life that many among us experience as a kind of nihilism. Nietzsche, the German philosopher, was the first to write at some length about nihilism. And he tried again and again to define the kind of experience that lay at the heart of it. One of his short, succinct statements of its meaning, he spoke about nihilism, for in the European style one is more likely to refer to the "ism", and, in the American style, more likely to speak of the experience. "What is nihilism?" he wrote. The question "Why?" has no meaning. Or, again, the meaning and the unity and the purpose which we had put into our lives we suddenly withdraw. It was one thing for Nietzsche, towards the end of his life, after years of inquiry and searching to speak and write of the joyous wisdom of encountering the nothingness at the heart of human consciousness. It's a little different to be 13 years old and, through no particular inquiry at all, to have come upon the experience. Or it's another to be 55, 63, whatever years old, and looking back on all the energies spent in one's life, to wonder at the form one had given time, at the value of the narrative one had chosen, and to see how relatively empty it stands, still against the void. It's the task, I want to argue, of a free society and a mobile society, a pluralistic society, to generate among us the experience of nothingness, to make it common, to make it the inheritance, the normal inheritance, the daily bread of the 13-year-old or of any of us, at any decade of our lives. It is the sign of a healthy society that this experience should be multiplied, even though it be reported as alienation or malaise or confusion or whatever. If you ask yourself what led Nietzsche, Turgenev, who was the first to mention the experience, Dostoevsky, Freud, Sartre, Camus, and others to write about the experience of nothingness, you are led to reflections like these. It's odd that they should write about it. Writing being such a demanding action. Sitting on one's bottom, moving one's hand across a piece of paper, endlessly. If life is short and without meaning, it's hard to imagine a more pointless act than writing. Yet what impelled them to write? Something they didn't write about was their own motive, their own impulsion. If one reflects on it, one begins to discover at the heart of the experience of nothingness several preconditions, several impulsions, without which it will not occur. The fingers tap at the windowpane, as T.S. Eliot says. But one doesn't have to reply. There are many in America and elsewhere, who, when the experience of nothingness begins to make itself felt in their lives, get up and look for something to do. Something useful and important, like starting a committee. Or they pick up the car keys, look for somewhere to go or turn on the radio or the television, look for somebody to hug. Nothing is more common than evading the experience of nothingness so it doesn't arise in consciousness. There are some who have said that the whole secret of life is to forget, to keep busy or to keep moving. If the experience of nothingness is to arise in consciousness, several conditions must be met. I've been describing one of them, in fact: liberty. We are free to direct our consciousness, it is our radical and fundamental freedom. The freedom to direct the light of our own conscious attention. This morning, some cough, you must all feel the chairs on your bottoms, you know whether or not you've had breakfast, whether you expect to. There's a day of activities yet to be done and activities to be remembered. Reality is so multiple and so manifold, that though we are in one another's presence, we may not be in one another's presence in reality. It depends on where we focus our attention. And so one of the preconditions of the experience of nothingness is this liberty over our own consciousness. The liberty to attend to it, the liberty to notice it. It doesn't seem, as Albert Camus said, that trees or cats or birds experience the absurd. It is free creatures who do. Second, there is required a certain honesty. Now, honesty is a very complicated quality of human life and it changes in every decade of our lives, it's one of those qualities of human behavior, characteristics of human behavior, that doesn't stay the same, that can't be defined in a way that applies through all the ages of one's life. It grows with us, and our understanding of the demands of honesty grows with each decade of our lives. It's one of the reasons why, looking back on our lives, we are so often embarrassed and ashamed of the person we were even a short while ago. And so I can't attempt to define honesty exactly. I only want to point to the fact that there are so many things about us, of whose existence we are aware, but we don't really want to draw our attention to. It's not so much that we deny them as that we don't attend to them. And by honesty I mean that drive of attention, that light, as it were, which we allow to rest on a certain part of our nature, on a certain part of our existence. And in this particular case upon that formlessness that lies at the heart of our liberty. That dizziness, that confusion that accompanies the sense that we can do with our lives what we will. And that what we have been doing with our lives, we need not continue to do with them. Again, without the directing of our attention, without allowing this experience, so enervating and incapacitating as it often seems, to arise, it won't arise. We will simply evade it. It is true that life sometimes so overcomes us that suddenly we can't escape it. But for most of us, most of the time, it's off the back of consciousness. We block it with what Norman Mailer calls the everlasting, endless nihilism of the muzak at O'Hare Terminal. We play music all the time. We don't allow ourselves to be alone. We don't allow ourselves to live with our own consciousness. And it won't, the experience of nothingness won't become apparent to us without, thirdly, courage: the kind of courage required to make honesty appear or effective. Honesty and courage are the other side of each other. For there are lots of things we can see, but we don't really want to see. Your wife tells you you're conceited: she never did understand you. You're not prepared to admit you're wrong, in the circumstance in question. But later, a month later, two months later, whatever, you see exactly what she meant. And you could have seen it earlier. But you wouldn't let yourself. You can only take so much self-criticism at a time. And when too much comes, we shut the door and refuse to see. It takes a certain amount of courage to see what we already know is there. And consequently courage is required to see the formlessness at the heart of our lives and to begin to take responsibility for it. And, finally, community. We wouldn't come to concentrate our attention on liberty and on honesty and on courage unless we belonged to a culture in which such values were celebrated, in which books and indeed religions had not called our attention to these qualities. Human beings have lived in every imaginable sort of way and distributed their energy in an endless series of patterns. It isn't in every culture that the experiences of the individual at the root of the individual consciousness are valued as the place in which the highest concentration of energy should be made. It is true in our culture. Perhaps it's true to a fault. The point is that the experience of nothingness, although it tends to overwhelm us, one by one, and to seem to make us alone, unable to decide how to act or what to become or what to do because everything begins to seem equal in importance or in unimportance. The experience of nothingness won't arise without these acts of honesty, courage, liberty, and the sort of community that teaches us to perform these acts frequently, encourages us to. The experience of nothingness often seems to isolate us, but in fact it joins us to the community. It joins us to the community of those in our culture who have come to the heart of our culture and indeed the heart of every culture, for beneath the forms of every culture there is the formlessness possible to the human being. It's not an accident, I think, that the God of Judaism and Islam and Christianity should have chosen so often for himself the images of light and imposed demands that are demands of liberty, and called upon courage. That is, there is a radical darkness, a trial, undercutting, emptying in the transformations we must undergo in order to come closer to an understanding of God as he reveals himself to us in buildings like the present one. Christianity is not an attempt to cover over the experience of nothingness, to take away the nihilism, to cause us to forget it. Christianity is an attempt to encourage us to increase the frequency of those acts of honesty and of courage, of the exercise of our liberty, and of the joining of that community which has shared this experience, which constitute over and over again the perception of how insecure are the structures we build, how rapidly dissolved may be the cultures and institutions in which we live, how terrible and collapsing the times may be, how without form, how without bedrock individual human existence or the existence of an entire society can be. I thought it important to speak on this theme today because I have been thinking that the end of the 1970s were so like the end of the 1930s, and that the 1980s have about them already the smell of the 1940s. It seems to me so clear that we may be entering into a very dark period, one of the darkest of our entire civilization. And it seems to me therefore worthwhile recalling that the God who did not spare his son the experience of nothingness is not liable or likely to spare his people that experience. (church organ plays) ♪ God of love and God of power ♪ ♪ Grant us in this burning hour ♪ ♪ Grace to ask these gifts of Thee ♪ ♪ Daring hearts and spirits free ♪ ♪ God of love and God of power ♪ ♪ Thou hast called us for this hour ♪ ♪ We are not the first to be ♪ ♪ Banished by our fears from Thee ♪ ♪ Give us courage, let us hear ♪ ♪ Heaven's trumpets ringing clear ♪ ♪ God of love and God of power ♪ ♪ Thou hast called us for this hour ♪ ♪ All our lives belong to Thee ♪ ♪ Thou our final loyalty ♪ ♪ Slaves are we whene'er we share ♪ ♪ That devotion anywhere ♪ ♪ God of love and God of power ♪ ♪ Thou hast called us for this hour ♪ ♪ God of love and God of power ♪ ♪ Make us worThy of this hour ♪ ♪ Offering lives if it's Thy will ♪ ♪ Keeping free our spirits still ♪ ♪ God of love and God of power ♪ ♪ Thou hast called us for this hour ♪ ♪ Amen ♪ 

- Let us affirm what we believe. We believe in God, who has created and is creating, who has come in the truly human Jesus to reconcile and make new, who works in us and others by the spirit. We trust God, who calls us to be the church, to celebrate life and its fullness, to love and serve others, to seek justice and resist evil, to proclaim Jesus, crucified and risen, our judge and our hope in life, in death, in life beyond death, God is with us, we are not alone. Thanks be to God. The Lord be with you. 

- And with your spirit. 

- Let us pray. (congregation stirs) Mighty God, we are thankful that the world as you have created it is not a puppet stage, and that we, unlike marionettes, have both the ability and the responsibility to make choices, to reach decisions as individuals and in groups. We thank you, God, that people throughout the world have great latitude in shaping customs, languages, and societies, so that our earth knows the sound of joyful surprise as we discover one another and our differences. And, God, we are grateful that we can say yes and that we can say no, even though we are sometimes confused about our yeses and nos and vacillate between the two, wanting to say neither or to say both at the same time. We are thankful for those times because it makes us think about the decisions we must make. Mostly, O God, we are thankful for your love, which is always there, just as strong when we make wise decisions or when we make foolish ones, a love just as strong when we frown or when we laugh. For your love we are indeed thankful, even though we stand before you today as a people who find it difficult to accept your love, and to realize its importance for us and for others. We get confronted by all kinds of ideologies and even by accusations of who we are and are not, and we are mindful of our need for healing, and we know we do not stand alone in our need. We look at your world and we see its hurts and its divisions, and we remember those persons who have power to govern, and we ask for wisdom to be theirs. We pray for those who do not have power to order their lives, and we pray for those who must learn to use their power justly. We pray especially today for those who seek to be peacemakers. May they have understanding and courage to be merciful. We especially remember the assistance Canada rendered to free persons in Iran this past week, and we pray for all those this day who are subjected to the pain and death of war. We ask for your wisdom and healing presence in Afghanistan and in Iran. We ask for your presence with all those who are political prisoners, not only in Iran, but in Chile, in Argentina, in all those other prisons in the world. We remember those today who live and die hungry and we pray for right judgment in the use of our material wealth. We look at our church today and we recognize that it, too, stands in need of your healing touch. We see its divisions and we hear its arguments. We recognize that it is guilty, even as we are guilty, of trying to withhold your love from those we do not feel to be deserving of it, and we ask for healing for the church. For the lonely, the dying, the sick, the mistreated, all whose need is greater than ours, may they know that your love moves among them and that our love moves there as well. Lord, we have this life, and we want to live it to the full. Don't let us miss that which is good or scorn those who seem to find what we have missed. Lord, give us freedom, freedom to rejoice in your gifts of life and love. Give us faith. Faith to be happy and serving and to praise you with all our strength. For we pray in the name of Jesus, our Lord, who teaches us to pray together, saying: Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever. Amen. (church organ plays) (choir sings "Gloria in excelsis Deo") 

- Mighty God, send down Thy holy spirit upon us to cleanse our hearts, to hallow our gifts, and to perfect the offering of ourselves unto you. In the name of the one who gave all, amen. (church organ plays) And now may the God of peace bless us and make us perfect in every good work to do God's will, working in us that which is well pleasing in God's sight. Through Jesus Christ, our Lord. ♪ Amen ♪ ♪ Amen ♪ ♪ Amen ♪ ♪ Amen ♪ ♪ Amen ♪ ♪ Amen ♪ ♪ Amen ♪ (church organ plays) (muffled voices)