William H. Willimon - "Flag and Cross, Cross and Flag" (July 1, 2001)
MP3
Loading the media player...
Transcript
- Download transcript as:
-
Text
-
PDF
-
WebVTT (includes timecodes)
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
| - | When the days drew near for Him to be taken up, | 0:04 |
| He set His face to go to Jerusalem. | 0:07 | |
| And He sent His messengers ahead of Him. | 0:11 | |
| On their way, | 0:14 | |
| they entered a village of the Samaritans, | 0:15 | |
| to make ready for Him. | 0:17 | |
| But they did not receive Him because His face | 0:19 | |
| was set toward Jerusalem. | 0:22 | |
| When His disciples, James and John, saw it, | 0:25 | |
| they said, "Lord, do you want us to command | 0:29 | |
| "fire to come down from heaven and consume them?" | 0:33 | |
| But He turned and rebuked them. | 0:38 | |
| Then, He went on to another village. | 0:40 | |
| As they were going along the road, | 0:43 | |
| someone said to Him, "I will follow you wherever you go." | 0:44 | |
| And Jesus said to Him, | 0:49 | |
| "Foxes have holes | 0:53 | |
| "and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man | 0:55 | |
| "has nowhere to lay His head." | 0:59 | |
| To another He said, "Follow Me." | 1:02 | |
| But He said, "Lord, first let me go and bury my father." | 1:05 | |
| But Jesus said to him, "Let the dead bury their own dead. | 1:09 | |
| "But as for you, go and proclaim the Kingdom of God." | 1:13 | |
| Another said, "I will follow you, Lord. | 1:18 | |
| "But first, let me say farewell to those at my home." | 1:20 | |
| Jesus said to him, "No one who puts a hand to the plow | 1:24 | |
| "and looks back, is fit for the Kingdom of God." | 1:27 | |
| This is the Word of the Lord. | 1:32 | |
| Thanks be to God. | 1:34 | |
| - | Well, you've heard that in today's gospel, | 1:43 |
| Jesus is | 1:45 | |
| on the way. | 1:48 | |
| He has, in Luke's words, | 1:49 | |
| set His face to Jerusalem. | 1:52 | |
| Which is a kind of a short-hand way of saying | 1:56 | |
| that He is now on His way | 2:00 | |
| to the cross. | 2:03 | |
| Just a little earlier, Luke has noted | 2:06 | |
| that great crowds were now following Jesus. | 2:09 | |
| Jesus is becoming popular. | 2:13 | |
| He's becoming well-received. | 2:15 | |
| But at this point, | 2:18 | |
| He sets His face to Jerusalem. | 2:19 | |
| And you can almost feel the crowds dissipate, | 2:24 | |
| particularly, with Jesus in the mood | 2:29 | |
| in which we find Him today. | 2:31 | |
| He begins to teach His disciples about the direction | 2:34 | |
| that He is walking. | 2:38 | |
| Do we want to walk with Him in that direction? | 2:40 | |
| Somebody comes up to Jesus and says, "I will follow You | 2:45 | |
| "wherever You going, only my father's recently died | 2:49 | |
| "and I've got to plan the funeral arrangements. | 2:52 | |
| "And then, we'll go." | 2:55 | |
| And Jesus, in not one of the more pastoral moments, | 2:58 | |
| says, "Let the dead bury the dead. | 3:03 | |
| "Come, follow Me." | 3:07 | |
| Someone else says, "I will follow You. | 3:09 | |
| "Let me just tell people at home where I'm going. | 3:11 | |
| "I won't be there anymore." | 3:15 | |
| And Jesus says, | 3:16 | |
| "Anybody that just for a moment, | 3:20 | |
| "having put hand to the plow, just looks back, | 3:24 | |
| "is not worthy to follow Me." | 3:27 | |
| And a text like this reminds you that following Jesus | 3:32 | |
| is not always that easy. | 3:35 | |
| Because if we're gonna follow Him, | 3:39 | |
| we're gonna have to follow someone | 3:41 | |
| who has set His face to Jerusalem. | 3:42 | |
| Someone who is walking a narrow way, | 3:45 | |
| the way of the cross. | 3:47 | |
| And if you've been in church very often, | 3:51 | |
| if you've been with Jesus that often, | 3:53 | |
| you know that He has a way | 3:55 | |
| of surprising us, | 3:58 | |
| of correcting us. | 4:01 | |
| And time and again, when you're with Jesus, | 4:05 | |
| you get reminded of just how odd, | 4:06 | |
| how very different, | 4:10 | |
| is this following than maybe we first imagined. | 4:13 | |
| On a number of occasions, Jesus impresses with | 4:18 | |
| how against the grain His way is with our way. | 4:21 | |
| Here are nice people | 4:28 | |
| and they're wanting to follow Jesus, | 4:31 | |
| but they have obligations. | 4:32 | |
| Doesn't the Bible say to honor your father and your mother? | 4:36 | |
| Certainly, by going to the funeral. | 4:39 | |
| Isn't family values a good thing? | 4:43 | |
| And here is Jesus, | 4:46 | |
| seeming to attack such values. | 4:48 | |
| What you've got here, | 4:53 | |
| and you have this often with Jesus I think, | 4:54 | |
| is a kind of clash between good and good. | 4:56 | |
| One good and another. | 4:59 | |
| Oh, it would be easy if the choice with Jesus | 5:02 | |
| was always, "Now, here's a good and here's a bad. | 5:04 | |
| "Now, you decide which one you're going to embrace." | 5:08 | |
| But here, as in so many occasions, | 5:12 | |
| the problem is you've got one good. | 5:15 | |
| Parents, family. | 5:17 | |
| Then you got another good. | 5:20 | |
| The way of the cross. | 5:22 | |
| The way of discipleship. | 5:25 | |
| And it is a | 5:28 | |
| narrow way, | 5:30 | |
| more narrow than we often appreciate. | 5:31 | |
| So one reason why we get together on a weekly basis, | 5:36 | |
| and you have to get dressed and come down here | 5:39 | |
| at an inconvenient hour of the week, | 5:41 | |
| is to hear these stories. | 5:44 | |
| To examine these texts, | 5:47 | |
| and let them examine us | 5:49 | |
| so that we might more clearly discern His way. | 5:52 | |
| And sometimes that means discerning the difference | 5:57 | |
| between His way and our way. | 6:00 | |
| Isn't family a good thing? | 6:04 | |
| Shouldn't we show respect to parents? | 6:07 | |
| So many times with Jesus, | 6:10 | |
| it's a clash between one good and another. | 6:12 | |
| Here you got these good things: Family, parents, | 6:17 | |
| money, | 6:21 | |
| good things. | 6:24 | |
| But sometimes with Jesus there's this clash of good. | 6:26 | |
| Just as it is difficult to mix oil with water, | 6:33 | |
| a lot of times it's difficult to mix our allegiances, | 6:37 | |
| our values, with those of Jesus. | 6:40 | |
| A former student of mine at the Divinity School, | 6:45 | |
| I saw her a month or so ago. | 6:49 | |
| I asked her how things were going at her new church. | 6:51 | |
| And she said, "Well, not all that well." | 6:54 | |
| I said, "Really? | 6:57 | |
| "I heard that you'd gotten off to a great start. | 6:59 | |
| "They were pleased with you." | 7:02 | |
| "Well, they got less pleased during December." | 7:03 | |
| I said, "What happened in December?" | 7:07 | |
| She said, "Well, I went head-to-head with Santa Claus." | 7:10 | |
| I said, "What?" | 7:14 | |
| She said, "At my new church, they told me in November, | 7:16 | |
| "they said, "By the way, on the second Sunday of December, | 7:19 | |
| "we have this wonderful thing where during the service, | 7:23 | |
| "right before the offering, | 7:26 | |
| "Santa Claus comes in and he walks down the aisle | 7:27 | |
| "and he has gifts for all the children. | 7:30 | |
| "Everybody just loves it. | 7:31 | |
| "Really gets people in the Christmas spirit." | 7:32 | |
| (congregation laughs) | 7:34 | |
| And she said, "You know, I remembered what you said | 7:36 | |
| "to do in class and all. | 7:39 | |
| "Go easy on these kind of things. | 7:40 | |
| "Just don't jump right in to trample on their traditions." | 7:42 | |
| But I said, "You know, | 7:46 | |
| "this bothers me." | 7:50 | |
| She said, "This is like the second Sunday of Advent. | 7:53 | |
| "We've got a lot of business to do in the church." | 7:55 | |
| "Well, ya," they said. | 8:00 | |
| "And Santa Claus, Christmas." | 8:01 | |
| And she said, "I'm a young parent. | 8:04 | |
| "And Christmas can be a hard time when you got children | 8:07 | |
| "and you're tryin' to teach your children | 8:12 | |
| "about what Christmas is really about, | 8:14 | |
| "but they're being just pumped with all this advertising | 8:16 | |
| "and commercialism. | 8:19 | |
| "And it's just hard for the church to make its point. | 8:21 | |
| "Particularly, when we mix all that up. | 8:26 | |
| "Santa Claus has got most of the airways tied up, | 8:28 | |
| "got a monopoly since early in October. | 8:32 | |
| "Church is where we kinda make our point." | 8:36 | |
| And she said, "I think they're gonna kill me for that." | 8:41 | |
| (congregation laughs) | 8:45 | |
| But you can see the young pastor's point. | 8:51 | |
| 'Cause one of the purposes of church | 8:55 | |
| is to get together, on a regular basis, | 8:57 | |
| and keep clarifying the Christian way. | 9:00 | |
| We are bombarded every day by thousands of messages, | 9:03 | |
| mostly in the form of advertising, | 9:09 | |
| that proclaim a different point of view, | 9:12 | |
| a different world, | 9:15 | |
| a different system of values from that of Christ. | 9:17 | |
| So, we have to get together in church | 9:21 | |
| and we do the best we can, | 9:23 | |
| just for an hour, | 9:24 | |
| to try to get things clear, | 9:26 | |
| focused. | 9:29 | |
| And it isn't easy. | 9:32 | |
| A few years ago, I had this conversation on campus, | 9:34 | |
| painful conversation, | 9:38 | |
| with a Jewish student. | 9:40 | |
| And he was, obviously, kinda nervous being this close | 9:42 | |
| to a Christian clergyman. | 9:45 | |
| And he was tryin' to make conversation. | 9:47 | |
| He said, "Say, you got the Easter thing coming up | 9:49 | |
| "in a week or so, right?" | 9:53 | |
| (congregation laughs) | 9:55 | |
| And I said, "Yeah, in a week or so, Easter, yeah." | 9:56 | |
| He said, "Well, tell me, | 10:01 | |
| "just what is Easter anyway? | 10:05 | |
| "What do the decorated eggs have to do with it? | 10:09 | |
| "Did Jesus decorate eggs? | 10:13 | |
| "Do you all do this at church? | 10:18 | |
| "Is it some kinda Christian ritual?" | 10:19 | |
| And I said, "No, eggs don't have anything to do with it." | 10:22 | |
| He said, "The bunny then, what about the bunny? | 10:26 | |
| (congregation laughs) | 10:28 | |
| "Did Jesus like bunnies?" | 10:29 | |
| I said, "No that doesn't have anything to do with it either. | 10:33 | |
| See, he put me in an embarrassing position of realizing | 10:38 | |
| how much stuff had gotten mixed in | 10:42 | |
| with our stuff. | 10:45 | |
| All these images, eggs, the bunny. | 10:47 | |
| All dearly beloved, widely-celebrated. | 10:51 | |
| What did they have, really, to do with the Easter thing? | 10:53 | |
| Of course, he is not of this faith. | 10:59 | |
| He's not supposed to know about these details. | 11:01 | |
| But as a preacher, I had to ask myself | 11:05 | |
| about the way we allow extraneous symbols | 11:08 | |
| to muddy the water of our faith, so to speak. | 11:12 | |
| It's hard for us to keep our stuff straight. | 11:17 | |
| Because, as Jesus reminds us today, the stuff | 11:20 | |
| can be tough. | 11:24 | |
| It's narrow. | 11:25 | |
| There's a big difference between our way | 11:26 | |
| and that narrow way of Jesus. | 11:30 | |
| Once He's set His face toward Jerusalem. | 11:32 | |
| Friend of mine says, when he stands up to preach | 11:36 | |
| on a Sunday morning, | 11:39 | |
| he looks out on a congregation of people | 11:40 | |
| who think they're Methodists. | 11:43 | |
| But in reality, a lot of them are really Shintos | 11:45 | |
| who are worshiping their ancestors, | 11:49 | |
| buried out in the adjacent church graveyard. | 11:51 | |
| Or some of them are Muslims, | 11:54 | |
| who believe God just wrote down every... | 11:56 | |
| Dictated every single word of Scripture. | 11:58 | |
| Or Buddhists who come to church | 12:01 | |
| in an effort to avoid getting in contact with the world. | 12:03 | |
| Or just good pagans who come to manipulate the gods | 12:06 | |
| to try to run errands and do good things for them. | 12:10 | |
| But, there are these moments when we get clarification. | 12:14 | |
| And we realize that Jesus' way | 12:21 | |
| does not easily mesh with every other way. | 12:22 | |
| As Paul says, we gotta test the spirits. | 12:26 | |
| Because every spirit, the Christmas spirit, | 12:30 | |
| the American spirit, not every spirit is the Holy Spirit. | 12:33 | |
| And so, that's why we dare to open the Scriptures, | 12:39 | |
| and we ask a preacher, | 12:42 | |
| "Is there any word from the Lord? | 12:46 | |
| "Now, we've heard a lot of words, | 12:50 | |
| "but is there any word from the Lord? | 12:52 | |
| "Because we've spent all week listening | 12:54 | |
| "to this cacophony of voices | 12:56 | |
| "that are not God's." | 12:59 | |
| A couple of summers ago, | 13:03 | |
| I was in a little church in suburban Berlin. | 13:04 | |
| And when I came up to the church, | 13:09 | |
| I noticed that Mercedes were pulling up, | 13:11 | |
| and people were pulling in, | 13:14 | |
| and they were unloading this lace bedecked baby. | 13:16 | |
| And I said, "Well, I guess we're gonna have a baptism | 13:19 | |
| "in the service today." | 13:22 | |
| And the minute the baby emerged from the car, | 13:23 | |
| the video camera's recording every move. | 13:26 | |
| Well, we went through the service. | 13:31 | |
| We had a sermon and we had some hymns, | 13:33 | |
| and the Creed. | 13:35 | |
| And all the adoring relatives endured this. | 13:36 | |
| And then, came time for the baptism. | 13:40 | |
| And this dour German pastor called the people | 13:41 | |
| for the baptism to come forward. | 13:45 | |
| And a large number of people got up | 13:47 | |
| and they were presenting the baby. | 13:49 | |
| And two or three video cameras began to whir. | 13:51 | |
| And then this German pastor just blurted out, | 13:54 | |
| as best I could translate him, | 13:57 | |
| "Stop!" | 14:00 | |
| (speaking in foreign language) | 14:02 | |
| "This isn't a theater! | 14:05 | |
| "This isn't a movie going on here, people! | 14:07 | |
| "This is church! | 14:10 | |
| "We're getting ready to do a baptism! | 14:12 | |
| "We're getting ready to take this child | 14:14 | |
| "and lay over his life, the cross of Jesus. | 14:16 | |
| "This could be painful. | 14:21 | |
| "Turn the cameras off! | 14:24 | |
| "This is hard, holy business!" | 14:26 | |
| And then, he said, "We don't want any distractions | 14:30 | |
| "that might confuse the parents or the church | 14:34 | |
| "about the solemn, holy, difficult thing | 14:38 | |
| "we're about to do here." | 14:41 | |
| Well, as a preacher, | 14:45 | |
| I wondered, "Now, would I have been that severe? | 14:48 | |
| "Would I have reacted in this way?" | 14:52 | |
| No, I probably wouldn't have | 14:54 | |
| and that's because I'm so nice. | 14:56 | |
| (congregation laughs) | 14:58 | |
| I'm a lot nicer than these German preachers. | 14:59 | |
| But then, I remembered, "Wait, wait, wait. | 15:04 | |
| "This is a German pastor." | 15:06 | |
| Four blocks away from that church, | 15:10 | |
| there's a huge house there in this elegant suburb | 15:13 | |
| where they had the Wannsee Conference, | 15:16 | |
| where a group of people, | 15:21 | |
| most of them worship in Christian churches, | 15:22 | |
| got together and had a discussion, | 15:25 | |
| and voted to exterminate the Jews. | 15:28 | |
| So forgive that German pastor for being a little picky. | 15:33 | |
| A little careful about what goes on in the church | 15:37 | |
| in Sunday morning. | 15:40 | |
| Look, he was part of a church, | 15:42 | |
| that when the time for the church came | 15:44 | |
| to say to the world, "No!" | 15:46 | |
| "Nein!" | 15:48 | |
| It lost the ability to say, "No." | 15:51 | |
| Had lost the ability even to know | 15:53 | |
| there was something to say, "No," to in the culture. | 15:54 | |
| So he's a little picky. | 15:58 | |
| This past Spring, I went up to Washington, DC, | 16:01 | |
| to speak at a pastor's conference. | 16:04 | |
| And after I spoke, | 16:06 | |
| we were to have a worship service. | 16:08 | |
| And Alan Storey, young pastor from South Africa, | 16:09 | |
| led us in worship. | 16:14 | |
| And Alan handed out the bulletins, | 16:15 | |
| was giving us some instructions about the worship. | 16:16 | |
| Alan Storey, some of you'd be interested, | 16:19 | |
| is the son of Bishop Peter Storey, | 16:21 | |
| who preaches from this pulpit frequently. | 16:24 | |
| Sometime professor at the Divinity School. | 16:26 | |
| Bishop from South Africa. | 16:29 | |
| Well, Alan stood up and, | 16:31 | |
| after giving us instructions, | 16:33 | |
| walking us through the service, | 16:35 | |
| before the service began, | 16:37 | |
| he said, "May I just say one more thing? | 16:38 | |
| "Could I just say, as a visitor to your country | 16:43 | |
| "from another place, | 16:45 | |
| "I wish you would consider removing the American flag | 16:47 | |
| "from your sanctuary. | 16:52 | |
| "I was shocked when I entered your church today | 16:54 | |
| "and saw that your country's flag was positioned | 16:57 | |
| "so prominently next to the altar. | 17:01 | |
| "That would not happen in my church. | 17:04 | |
| "'Cause my church forbids us to have flags | 17:07 | |
| "and other secular, political paraphernalia in our services. | 17:11 | |
| "I wish you would just think about how that flag | 17:16 | |
| "clashes with this cross." | 17:20 | |
| Then he said, "Of course, I'm from South Africa. | 17:24 | |
| "And we learned the hard way about the difference | 17:26 | |
| "between the ways of God and our ways." | 17:29 | |
| Well, we sat there in awkward silence. | 17:35 | |
| And then, we went on with the service. | 17:38 | |
| What do you think about that? | 17:42 | |
| Does the American flag have a place | 17:44 | |
| in a Christian sanctuary? | 17:45 | |
| What we're talking about here is a confusion of symbols. | 17:49 | |
| And we're Christians, | 17:53 | |
| and to us, symbols are a big deal. | 17:54 | |
| You sit here and the whole building is a symbol. | 17:56 | |
| And we're surrounded by these symbols of our faith. | 18:00 | |
| And we take these, | 18:03 | |
| we take all symbols, very seriously. | 18:05 | |
| Because we know from experience in this faith | 18:08 | |
| that symbols don't just express our deepest feelings, | 18:11 | |
| they form our feelings and our commitments. | 18:13 | |
| Now, I expect when we hear somebody like Alan Storey, | 18:18 | |
| we think to ourselves, "Now, wait, wait, wait. | 18:22 | |
| "You're talking about South Africa. | 18:24 | |
| "We're different, we're Americans. | 18:26 | |
| "We live in a democracy. | 18:30 | |
| "Our country is good, our country is innocent." | 18:32 | |
| I hope none of you would say such sentiments | 18:37 | |
| because they're not true. | 18:39 | |
| Our country has blood on its hands. | 18:41 | |
| The souls of countless African slaves, | 18:44 | |
| of slaughtered Native Americans, | 18:47 | |
| that would rise up to accuse us if we said such things | 18:48 | |
| about our country. | 18:52 | |
| Our nation, like any nation I know of, | 18:53 | |
| has got blood. | 18:56 | |
| Time and again in Scripture, | 18:59 | |
| the great competitor for our allegiance to God | 19:01 | |
| is allegiance to the nation. | 19:04 | |
| Much of the time, when Hebrew prophets | 19:08 | |
| are getting into trouble for what they say, | 19:10 | |
| and they're talking about idolatry, | 19:13 | |
| this is the idolatry they're talking about. | 19:15 | |
| The first lesson, this strange story about Elijah, Elisha. | 19:18 | |
| Prophets of God who always in trouble with the government. | 19:23 | |
| Always reminding us that we don't put our ultimate | 19:27 | |
| love and trust in armies, and violence, | 19:31 | |
| and nations, and kings, and mechanisms of the state. | 19:35 | |
| It's not enough to say, "Well, now, fortunately, | 19:40 | |
| "we live in a democracy. | 19:42 | |
| "We don't have a king. | 19:43 | |
| "Here, we're king, the people." | 19:45 | |
| But maybe for that very reason, | 19:49 | |
| democracy puts us in an even more | 19:50 | |
| spiritually demanding situation. | 19:52 | |
| Once, we went to war only when the king | 19:56 | |
| commanded us to go to war. | 19:58 | |
| But now, we go to war for ourselves. | 20:01 | |
| Once, only a king was brutal enough | 20:04 | |
| to cut off somebody's head for a crime. | 20:06 | |
| But a couple of weeks ago, | 20:09 | |
| we executed a murderer. | 20:11 | |
| The government has now become our protector | 20:15 | |
| from the cradle to the grave, | 20:17 | |
| our main source of meaning, | 20:19 | |
| that to which we look to for all solution | 20:21 | |
| to every human problem, | 20:24 | |
| and for our salvation. | 20:25 | |
| I think we just ask way too much of the government. | 20:29 | |
| And we sacrifice way too much for the nation. | 20:32 | |
| For instance, anybody who would die for his religion | 20:37 | |
| is considered a fanatic, an idiot. | 20:41 | |
| And yet, think of all the people who sacrifice | 20:45 | |
| their lives for the government. | 20:47 | |
| We call them heroes. | 20:49 | |
| So don't tell me we shouldn't be careful | 20:51 | |
| about what objects we bring into Christian sanctuaries. | 20:53 | |
| Jesus, I will follow You wherever you go. | 20:58 | |
| But first, let me be sure that I get my allegiances | 21:01 | |
| in order and I do this, and I do that. | 21:04 | |
| And let me give my pinch of incense to the altar of Caesar. | 21:08 | |
| In a couple of days, we're gonna celebrate the 4th of July, | 21:13 | |
| birth of a beloved nation. | 21:16 | |
| A nation that has been so good to so many. | 21:19 | |
| On the 4th of July, | 21:23 | |
| we're celebrating our declaration of independence. | 21:25 | |
| Just a little reminder, | 21:30 | |
| you won't find the word independence anywhere in the Bible. | 21:31 | |
| That's not a Bible word. | 21:35 | |
| Independence is what the government promises us. | 21:37 | |
| If we'll just pay our taxes, and offer our children, | 21:41 | |
| and serve the government. | 21:44 | |
| But as Christians, | 21:46 | |
| our Sunday morning goal is never independence. | 21:47 | |
| We don't wanna be free to do what we darn well please to do. | 21:51 | |
| Our goal is dependence, | 21:55 | |
| upon the will and the righteousness of God. | 21:58 | |
| And all of this reminds us that Christians | 22:02 | |
| are a lot more weird than we often admit. | 22:03 | |
| And maybe the best thing we can do for our country | 22:08 | |
| is to love it discreetly. | 22:11 | |
| De Tocqueville said, "Democracy is a form of government | 22:14 | |
| "that needs to be modestly loved." | 22:17 | |
| Think of the church in our country as a way that keeps | 22:22 | |
| helping us keep our loyalties | 22:25 | |
| modest. | 22:29 | |
| Well, I've told some of you this story. | 22:31 | |
| But every year, we come to this Sunday of the year. | 22:34 | |
| The Sunday before the 4th of July. | 22:37 | |
| I can't hep but remember a Sunday nearly 20 years ago, | 22:39 | |
| when I and my family visited at a church. | 22:43 | |
| I'm not gonna mention the name of the church. | 22:46 | |
| It's in California, has lots of glass. | 22:47 | |
| (congregation laughs) | 22:50 | |
| Have a lot more people watching on TV than we do. | 22:52 | |
| Anyway. | 22:56 | |
| We get to the service, | 22:58 | |
| and we find out that the preacher is spreading the gospel | 23:00 | |
| in Hawaii that Sunday and won't be there. | 23:03 | |
| They got a guest preacher. | 23:06 | |
| And the guest preacher is Charles Colson. | 23:08 | |
| Some of you are old enough to remember Charles Colson, | 23:12 | |
| Watergate fame, went to jail for his stuff with the state. | 23:14 | |
| My dear mother, sitting there, said, "I haven't come | 23:21 | |
| "to church to hear some jailbird preach." | 23:24 | |
| And I said, "Well, now, wait. | 23:28 | |
| "He's been born again, he's been converted." | 23:29 | |
| My mother said, "Yeah, they all do when they come | 23:32 | |
| before the parole board." | 23:34 | |
| And I said, "Look, it's Southern California, | 23:36 | |
| "just keep quiet." | 23:39 | |
| We went through the service. | 23:41 | |
| We got to the point in the service where | 23:43 | |
| the Associate Minister gave the children's sermon. | 23:44 | |
| And the children's sermon was delivered by this rat puppet. | 23:47 | |
| And the rat puppet had an American flag and talked about | 23:51 | |
| how good it was to be an American, and etc. | 23:54 | |
| And then, we got to the sermon. | 23:57 | |
| Charles Colson stood up. | 23:59 | |
| And Charles Colson said, | 24:01 | |
| "I just wish all of you | 24:04 | |
| "could see how good you look arrayed before me today. | 24:06 | |
| "The sun streaming in through the windows. | 24:09 | |
| "What a beautiful Southern California Sunday. | 24:11 | |
| "I just wish you could see how beautiful | 24:14 | |
| "this congregation looks. | 24:16 | |
| "Quite a contrast from where I was preaching yesterday | 24:20 | |
| "about this time. | 24:22 | |
| "I was preaching out at the Los Angeles Prison Camp. | 24:23 | |
| "And there, I did not preach in this beautiful cathedral. | 24:28 | |
| "I was preaching in a little cinder block chapel, | 24:32 | |
| "in the middle of the prison camp. | 24:36 | |
| "And there, my congregation were not you distinguished | 24:38 | |
| "people here, but were murderers, | 24:40 | |
| "and rapists, and thieves." | 24:42 | |
| He paused for a moment and he said, "And you do know | 24:46 | |
| "where Jesus would be more comfortable?" | 24:50 | |
| Man, and then, he started hammering on us. | 24:54 | |
| He hammered on us for the cars we were driving, | 24:57 | |
| the lives we were living. | 25:00 | |
| At one point, he said, "And these preachers that know | 25:01 | |
| "better how to use a blow dryer than a Bible." | 25:04 | |
| (congregation laughs) | 25:06 | |
| It was rough. | 25:07 | |
| After he finished preaching, | 25:11 | |
| my mother leaned over and said, "I hope he had a good time | 25:12 | |
| "because he won't be coming back." | 25:15 | |
| (congregation laughs) | 25:16 | |
| You wanna know the greatest service | 25:24 | |
| we could render this nation? | 25:25 | |
| Is to be the church. | 25:29 | |
| To be a critique. | 25:31 | |
| A visible reminder that God, not nations, | 25:33 | |
| rules the world. | 25:37 | |
| That we have a loyalty that qualifies | 25:39 | |
| every other loyalty. | 25:41 | |
| Jesus Christ is Lord. | 25:44 | |
| Let us and the nations of the world | 25:47 | |
| walk His | 25:49 | |
| narrow way. | 25:51 | |
| Amen. | 25:53 | |
| (congregation shuffling) | 25:57 |
Item Info
The preservation of the Duke University Libraries Digital Collections and the Duke Digital Repository programs are supported in part by the Lowell and Eileen Aptman Digital Preservation Fund