Male Voice 1: Grace that whatever you have done, you are free from bondage to your past and from anxiety for your future. You are free to live fully and completely in the present. You are valued as you are. Your future is open. Again I say to you, be of good cheer, for God has redeemed His people. Arise from your past, pick up your life and walk in the praises of the Lord, Amen. (organ music) (choir singing) 

Male Voice 2: Hear the word of the Lord as it comes to us from John's gospel, the third chapter, the first through the ninth verses. "Now there was a man of the pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. This man came to Jesus by night and said to him, 'Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.' Jesus answered him, 'Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God.' Nicodemus said to him, 'How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?' Jesus answered, 'Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of the water and of the spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I have said to you you must be born anew. The wind blows where it wills and you hear the sound of it but you do not know whens it comes or whether it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the spirit.' Nicodemus said to him, 'How can this be?'" May Thy word be Thou word read, may Thy word read be Thou word heard, and may Thou word heard be Thou word come alive in our lives, Amen. (organ music) (congregation singing) 

Male Voice 1: The Lord be with you, let us pray. Almighty and eternal Father, we approached Thy throne with the spirit of thankfulness in our heart. The bread we eat, the roof which shelters us, the light of day which gives us sight, the darkness of the night which grants us rest, the work of our hands by which we serve the world, the dreams of our hearts which lure us to greater deeds. All of these we have by Thy grace. We remember before Thee oh Lord, the accustomed things we have grown to know and to love, and the bright invasion of new glory from unexpected sources. All these things and more beside, praise Thy name with thankfulness. Through Jesus Christ, the eternal gift of Thy goodness unto us. Almighty God, who has committed to Thy people the ministry of intersession, hear us now as we pray for others and grant that our hearts may be so filled with peace and charity, that we may be fit instruments of Thy will for our neighbors needs. Oh Lord, into Thy hands we remember before Thee, and commit the sick, the sorrowful, the lonely, and tempted. That they may know Thy healing and sanctifying power and obtain the victory of faith, which comes through Jesus Christ Thy son. Let us pray for peace in our world. Lord, in a time of war, we ask that Thou wouldst grand us peace. Yet even as we ask, we know that Thou will not impose peace upon us, smothering our minds, making robots out of reasoners and mannequins out of men. And so we ask Thee, who art light, to illumine the lane that leads to peace. We are lost oh God, in a labyrinth, fighting a war we are afraid to win, for a cause unclear. Committing our sons to peril and conflict, to which we ourselves are uncommitted. Omniscient Lord, banish our bewilder we ask, Thou who has promised freedom through truth, free us from fear of following truth on the path to peace, that Thy will maybe obeyed among the nations, in our own land and in our hearts. Oh God, our Heavenly Father, we asked that Thou wouldst look upon the human needs gathered before Thee in this Thy sanctuary. Oh Thou in Thee, all the ages are as one time, walk with us now as we face the future. If we are young, oh Lord, and all our hopes and dreams are snarled and tangled in the wild tempest of this world's absurdity, grant us, we ask, such wisdom and insight, that we may posses our souls with tenacity, for a destiny which is still beyond our present sight. If we are old, oh God, and our anxieties and fears are worse confounded by the fury of this age, keep us steady, we ask, with the strength of such remembrances as have Thee and Thy grace in days now gone. That we may confront the world and the future, with quiet minds and resourceful hearts, knowing the victory which comes from faith. Oh Lord, if we stand midway in life, having seen one world depart and waiting for another not yet born, with youth behind us and age before us, we pray Thee to teach us how to make all our years ascend to new levels of human fulfillment. Give us courage oh God, to continue to dream dreams and to seek the visions of our Father's faith. Help us to openly welcome the winds of change in church, in society that are seeking to turn our statutes into songs, our laws into grace, our legalism into love, our collectivities into communities and our constraints into communion. Teach us oh Lord so to lay hold on Christ, that we might have power to bring to fruition the potentialities of every human being we meet and every human institution to which we belong. And save us oh God, from that impatience that would destroy, from the religious evil that would spurn the efforts of those who wear a different label. Give us Thine own unmarried passion, to bring forth and to perfect what is good in all men. Give us, we ask oh God, deep sympathy with all who are depressed by unfulfilled hopes, all who despair of themselves, all who are attempted to give up the struggle for better things. May we live in their midst as followers of Him who came not to destroy, but to fulfill. We asked this oh Lord, through Jesus Christ, who dared to become involved in other people's problems, who suffered the consequences and through it all became the conqueror of sin and of death. Who taught us that we could be bold to pray together as Christians saying, "Our Father who art in heaven, halloweth 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 tresses. 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." 

Minister: Through the scripture lesson from John's gospel, I had a reading from Matthew, the 22nd chapter, beginning at the 34th verse. "But the pharisees when they heard that He had put the sadducees to silence, gathered themselves together. One of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question trying Him. 'Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?' He said unto him, 'Thou shall love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy might. This is the great and first command. And the second, like unto it is this. Thou shall love thy neighbor as thy self. On these two commandments, the whole law hangeth and the prophets.'" The sermon topic is not as it is announced in the bullet. It is different. The title is "Practical atheism, on some plain words, on the need of conversion". Or to paraphrase John Cotton or Roger Williams, or perhaps it was Thomas Boston, "Milk for babes drawn from the breasts of both testaments". Race and racism. These are the real problems of our day. These words are not mine. When they were spoken this past week in my hearing, I bridled a bit as a theologian and openly dissented. But they are the words of a earnest, younger leader of the black community here in Durham. The gentleman was speaking directly to me in my home. It was at the close of an evening discussion for the group of graduate students and their wives. The subject was, "The present situation". "The black and white situation in Durham and abroad". It was the situation seen against the background of the plight of the Negro as the Negro sees it over a long past. A past which in the view of the speaker that evening, has been degrading and dehumanizing to its race. It has been revolting and it is to be revolted the against. But as I listened, I was above all struck by the speaker's interpretation of black power. White power, I thought, ought to hear something of it. Essentially, it was this. Black power means the new time. The new coming of age. Black power means long, deferred self acceptance. It means the black man's espousal of his own dignity as a human person. Perhaps his God given dignity. The speaker mentioned being converted to this standpoint. He suggested more than once that it means a kind of rebirth. He used New Testament language, "Being born again" and applied it to a new unabashed acceptance by the black man of the God givenness, the dignity of blackness. In all this, he declared, he insisted, he spoke as a Christian. The speaker's words were a kind of testimony out of a personal agony. It was plain that this being reborn into self acceptance was not unattended by trauma. If it were to be liken to conversion, it was surely attended by the familiar concomitance of heightened struggle and release. The reasons are clear. For a long time, the black man himself has exceeded to the white society's primacy of whiteness. If conversion means above all self-acceptance, then on its other side, it a also means rejection of the entrenched superiority of whiteness. Such a rejection is traumatic, even to the black man. If it is accompanied by convulsion of spirit, it is nevertheless, the straight gate and the narrow way to a new life, to a new time. It is coming of age, and it is a time of promise of entrance into a new openness of heightened acceptance. But acceptance of the inherent worth and dignity of blackness is not a simple or painless accomplishment. I was being told you see, it is conversing. And this is what I got by just listening. It is not acceptance of the necessity of being black. That was the old posture. The one of resignation. Rather as I heard it, it is the acceptance of the creaturely privilege of being oneself and this without any apology whatsoever. And of course, from the Christian standpoint, this is just exactly the acceptance of God's gift. The greatest gift, that of sonship of God. It is a conversion of ethos. It is a revolution of perspective and whether it obtains for blacks, whites or yellows, this conversion to self-acceptance, is to become a man. It is to possess and enter into one's inheritance under God. And to espouse one's destiny. As I listened, there was something in all of this that made the words of Jesus, about new birth, piercingly appropriate. This entrance into the dignity of manhood as a personal realization, was strangely like the kingdom of God into which those enter Jesus said, who are born of the spirit, and only those. Here was our guest, testify to such a conversion of himself and of his fellows. A transition from self depreciation, to self acceptance. But it was a rough process. It was a transition hard to come by. If I mistake not the marks of ambivalence, might yet remain. As a whole like the children of Israel before them, the black people might still be in the crossing of the red sea, but the house of bondage was behind them. The years of servitude to Pharaoh were past, and an ampler land of promise opened out a larger prospect for the future. To those who still know enough scripture to catch the analogies, the wilderness sojourn might yet intervene. The longing for the flesh pots of Egypt with the security of the older paternalism, might divert some, but the main body of Israel, that is the people of God, was on the mark. for their due dignity, for a long differed dignity. Now, according to the printed program this morning, the topic of this sermon was "The opinion of the invincible". I had intended to point out some stereotypes, by which we contrive to blind our minds, too many of the realities about us and live on a miscellaneous of unexamined notions. With these, we preconceive and sometimes so distort our world, that we do not allow it to speak to us. Instead of depicting that blindness, I am prompted to deal this morning with its pure, hence the revised topic. "Practical atheist, some plain words, on the need of conversion." This morning then, I am conveying the substance of what I heard the other night, just by listening. What I heard or thought I heard, was a very up to date interpretation of the puzzling words of Jesus to Nicodemus. "Unless one is born anew, he cannot enter the kingdom of God." Nicodemus was puzzled and he has had many successors. But the other evening, I heard a black man insisting upon a new birth. He was insisting upon the indispensability of conversion, even of the trauma of passing through it to undeviating self accept. To Jesus, I think this would warrant His words to others. You are not far from the kingdom of God. For in Jesus view, self acceptance is acceptance of the dignity of sonship under God. Sonship is affirming one's being, as it comes to a man from the creator. It is consent to one status under God. That it is attended by privileges, so it carries also responsibility. Thus sonship to God, entails both rights and obligations. These belong inalienably to every son of God. That is, to every man without respect to any accident of birth or station whatsoever. This is the call of the message of Jesus and of the Christian faith concerning man. This is milk for babes. And in that absolute center, every man's dignity is guaranteed by the creator and can be neither conferred nor denied by man or nations. A point which Thomas Jefferson actually thought into the Declaration of Independence. And insofar as black power so called, means this and the affirm it. It is in fact a republication of the essential biblical faith. Insofar as it signifies the black man's determination to claim his inheritance under God It is not so much a revolution, as a traumatic conversion and rebirth. It must so far for, I think, be honored as such by the white society in so far as the latter owns allegiance to either the Jewish or Christian tradition. If however, I am led to put biblical construction upon the meaning of black power from the testimony of the other eve, something powerful. It is that true self acceptance, in the Christian view, pass out anger of alienation or the acceptance of sonship under God, as it matures, is attended by confident rejoicing in the new freedom to be oneself. This truth is the manifest destiny of the son of God. Something else came to me, the other evening, simply at the low cost of hearing. It was a word to me and to the others assembled that evening. Our guest called upon us to reinforce his conversion and rebirth by sharing. It was an appeal to us to accept rebirth too. It was perhaps a tactful invitation to all Christians, to square their deeds and attitudes with their professions. I was reminded of the words of the Psalmist. "My people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from it." I was reminded of St. Paul's words. "There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither bound nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one that is before God in Christ Jesus." Are Christians really committed to this or do they need to be converted? Was our guest really appealing over again to what my great and late teacher, H. Richard Niebuhr never tired of of urging? This namely, that the churches and professing Christians require to be converted to Christianity, every generation of them. On reflection, it seems to me that the answer to these questions is, yes. Our visitor was asking for acceptance as the neighbor, at the same time he was putting before us the Christian vocation of neighborliness. Not as something he or any man could require of us, but as something our own religious profession required. He was asking for the signs of genuine Christian commitment in the absence of which Christian profession is both hypocritical and decaying, vanity as well. It is hard to believe that any Christians are really innocent of what the signs and doctrines of genuine Christians commit to God. They're not confined with the New Testament. Jesus declared them to be the heart of the law Moses, upon them and he declared the whole law of the prophets. Perhaps their enactment and observance, however, does in fact, as Jesus declared Nicodemus require a new birth and conversion. The signs and marks of our better Christianity are given in that twofold command. "Hear, oh Israel, that is those of you, who desire to be regard as the children of God, hear oh Israel, thou shall love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all by might. This is the great and first commandment. The second life unto it is this, Thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commands, hang all the law of the prophets." There are no words in the Western world are better known nor more honored and none are more frequently dishonored in the breach than these. They summarized the common substance of both the old and the New Testaments. In plain language, what Jesus saw and lived by, was this. That the love of God is really empty, unless it includes love for what God love. That is the neighbor, of whatever station. He also proceeds that men have to be converted to that perspective and usually obtain it only through the trauma of new birth. A birth, not of the flesh, but of the spirit. And so committed was Jesus to this perspective that he was willing to become himself the vehicle, the medium, of that transformation of mind. And so I ask, why can't so-called Christians get it straight? Why can't we Christian so-called, get it straight? That acceptance of the role of neighborliness is the cynic more known of being Christian at all. The answer I know, is complex and I could give a semesters course to explain it. But in the end, it is, I believe, that we nominal Christians, stand in league of being converted to Christianity for our country. Let me put the matter at one or two levels. I do not know whether my fellow Methodist brethren in this city desire to attend my church, but I regard it as hypocrisy. No, virtual apostacy. That it is not publicly known that they are welcome. I do not know whether my Negro brethren desire to dwell in my part of town, but I regard it as a contrite injustice and hypocrisy. If desirous and able, they are prevented by subterfuge respecting either contract or finance. And until these things with others like them are assured, the white society deserves to be discomforted by the word yet. Our Lord once told a story. they call it a parable, to illustrate what it means to be a neighbor. This is part of our trouble. You have to inquire as to what it means to be a neighbor. The parable was calculated frankly, to scandalized the pharisees. For the true neighbor turned out to be an outcast Samaritan. It was this outcast, not the scribe and the priest, who assisted the man who fell among trees along the Jericho road, But there are many ways to rob people and there are commensurate ways to make restitution. Perhaps the most vicious form of robbery is that of robbing people of their dignity and self esteem. The long and dismaying story of this robbery, in American society, is today being painfully told. It is hardly strange that it is being told partly, in the form of militant reaction on the part the wrong. One thing is certain, at least for those who profess the name of Christian and are mindful of the twofold commandment, as the mark of authentic faith, there is immediate and prompt restitution. The restitution of neighborliness and its application to the hard realities of long tolerated and entrenched inequities. Some of it, remains sanctioned and lost. I mean, public housing needs reform in Durham, open housing needs implementation in Durham and elsewhere, equal employment opportunity on the basis of merit, demands an open door in Durham and elsewhere, and subsidy for industrial training should commend itself to wise industrialists, as well as to the mayor of Durham. Now, my final point is this. When our guest of the evening declared in party, that race and racism are the real problems of our day, I dissented. And possibly now you may guess why. I do not deny the urgency and weight of these problems, I have been acknowledging them. But from the christian standpoint, the standpoint which the speaker declared and retained, the really critical problem of our day is as old as man himself. The real and perennial problem is the conversion of men to acknowledgement of their common sonship under God and their consequent vocation to the neighbors. And it is my responsibility as a Christian minister in this place, to locate the real problem. The fact is, that the divisiveness of race, however grievous and destructive of human values and it is, is but one species of the divisiveness by which men who ignore their obligations under God, also ignore and even prostitute their relations with their neighbors. It is not race nor theoretical unbelief, but practical atheism. All purpose and illness, which is the plague of humankind. For this purpose, Jesus said to Nicodemus, "Truly I say to you, unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God." Amen. In the name of the Father and of The Son and The Holy Spirit. So be it. (organ music) (congregation singing) (organ music) (choir singing) (congregation singing) 

Male Voice 1: Oh God, who has called us to this community of faith, we thank Thy that we are also called to share with all men what has been made ours in Christ. Here we dedicate our gifts of stewardship, of conviction and experience for the good of the family of men, and to the triumph of Thy kingdom. In the name of Him who came to point us to our neighbors needs, Amen. (man speaking in the background) (choir singing) (church bell ringing) (organ music) (people chattering) 

Male Voice 3: Mind doing that again? I didn't catch all that.