Howard C. Wilkinson - "When the Cure Is a Disease" (May 31, 1959)

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-	Although many of our students	0:05
	have completely finished their examinations	0:07
	and have gone home, and many other students still here	0:10
	have been completely finished by their examinations,	0:15
	I feel that as chaplains of the university,	0:20
	there is a word of appreciation which I should speak	0:23
	on this last regular Sunday in the academic year.	0:26
	A word of very sincere and enthusiastic appreciation	0:32
	to the chapel choir, who in season and out,	0:37
	and however busy they may have been,	0:42
	have under the skilled direction of Professor Paul Young	0:45
	been in their places and have had excellent music	0:51
	prepared to sing for the glory of God each time	0:56
	the congregation assembled for worship.	1:01
	I would like also to express such hearty appreciation	1:05
	to the ushers and collectors, who have without fail	1:10
	been in their places and have given excellent service	1:14
	in a way such as to contribute to the glory of God	1:19
	and to the smoothness of our service of worship.	1:22
	I would like to recognize my great dependence upon	1:28
	and my appreciation for the splendid cooperation	1:31
	of Dean Cleland throughout the years.	1:34
	Our university organist, Mrs. Hendricks,	1:38
	and then the two students who during the time	1:42
	of her illness, Mark Nash and Frank Jordan, Jr.,	1:45
	have continued the very fine tradition	1:52
	which we have had at the organ.	1:54
	Last but not least, a word of great appreciation	1:57
	to the chapel congregation, on some Sundays	2:02
	we have not been able to accommodate the entire group	2:07
	who came because of space limitations.	2:10
	On other Sundays, we have had to ask you to stand,	2:15
	several hundred of you.	2:19
	On every Sunday except the last three,	2:21
	we have had a filled chapel.	2:25
	During these last three Sundays, we have had interference	2:28
	from the beaches and from final examinations.	2:32
	We expect this.	2:37
	I am particularly grateful for your presence here today.	2:39
	We had a larger congregation today than we did	2:44
	on this same Sunday last year.	2:46
	Speaking of the beach, a couple of summers ago	2:50
	my family went to the beach for a vacation	2:54
	lasting two weeks and one day.	2:58
	The evening we arrived at the beach,	3:01
	my son, age seven,	3:04
	said that his hands were itching and were swollen,	3:07
	and he showed me some blisters on them	3:10
	which indicated that before we left Durham,	3:13
	he had had contact with poison ivy.	3:16
	Well, thinking that we would take care of this little matter	3:20
	in a hurry, we went to the drugstore	3:23
	and told our plight to the druggist	3:26
	who very quickly suggested that we get a bar of soap	3:28
	which he sells, and which he said would certainly	3:33
	take care of the malady in a hurry.	3:37
	So we returned to the cottage,	3:40
	I lathered up and began to bathe the affected areas	3:44
	of his hands and arms.	3:48
	And then the family retired in the certain confidence	3:51
	that with the rising of the sun on the next day,	3:54
	a glorious vacation would begin.	3:56
	Alas, however, such was not to be the case.	4:00
	Because the next day, not only was he much worse,	4:04
	but his father's hands also were swollen and itching.	4:10
	Well, concluding, as it happened erroneously,	4:16
	that I had rubbed off some of the juice of the ivy	4:21
	upon my own hands, I decided that what we needed	4:24
	was more frequent and regular applications	4:28
	of this miracle soap, and so for the next two days,	4:33
	he and I stayed in an almost continuous,	4:37
	literal lather.	4:41
	By the end of two days, our hands were extremely painful	4:44
	and mercilessly swollen,	4:48
	and so we consulted a doctor,	4:52
	who informed us that this soap contained an ingredient	4:55
	to which many many people, including the two of us,	5:00
	were violently allergic, and while the soap	5:03
	may have cured the poison ivy,	5:06
	it had brought on new and far worse woes.	5:09
	He gave us some hope by saying that if we were to be treated	5:15
	with cortisone we might still enjoy part of our vacation.	5:18
	So he gave us some cortisone to take,	5:23
	and we took it and the poison ivy improved.	5:25
	After a few days, it occurred to me	5:29
	to ask him if the cortisone might bring on	5:32
	any additional woes which we did not already have.	5:35
	He said, "Well, sometimes, prolonged use of cortisone	5:38
	"will release pockets of tuberculosis germs	5:41
	"in the lungs, and people have been known	5:44
	"to get tuberculosis"	5:46
	"through the use of cortisone."	5:48
	He said, "Really, the worst thing that sometimes happens	5:54
	"through prolonged use of cortisone	5:57
	"is that you have to have psychiatric treatments."	6:00
	We decided to discontinue the taking	6:06
	of the cortisone pills and be content	6:09
	with the maladies which we had.	6:11
	This we did and by the end of two weeks and one day,	6:14
	I was able to help a little with the packing,	6:18
	and we returned to Durham, happy that our glorious vacation	6:20
	had come to a glorious end.	6:25
	Now I relate this incident this morning,	6:29
	not to warn you to sit back and steel yourself	6:31
	for 20 minutes of family reminiscences	6:34
	nor to suggest ways by which you could avoid	6:38
	becoming involved in the Ivy League.	6:41
	Instead, I suggest this	6:45
	as an illustrative introduction	6:48
	to a commentary on a verse in the Bible.	6:52
	It is the last verse which was read	6:56
	as a part of the morning Scripture lesson,	6:58
	being Matthew 6:23.	7:01
	The words of Jesus,	7:05
	"If then the light in you	7:07
	"be darkness,"	7:12
	"how great is that darkness."	7:16
	Restating that text in terms of this analogy,	7:21
	we would find Jesus saying something like this,	7:27
	"If the cure in you be a disease,	7:30
	"how great is that disease."	7:36
	Now the trouble with this saying of Jesus is	7:42
	that you can understand it.	7:44
	How much more comfortable we would be,	7:48
	if, when Jesus came to teach at this point,	7:50
	He had been vague and unclear, but He was not.	7:53
	His meaning is perfectly clear.	7:58
	And therefore, we need to face what He meant	8:02
	when He said, "If the light in you be darkness,	8:04
	"how great is that darkness,"	8:08
	for he was here discussing what George Buttrick calls	8:11
	the optic nerve of the soul.	8:14
	As Buttrick has reminded us, the eye is the organ	8:19
	of the body through which light comes into the person.	8:23
	And we expect to be illuminated and guided by the light	8:28
	which comes in through the eye.	8:33
	Now then, if what comes into the person	8:37
	through the eye is not light, but is darkness,	8:41
	then the destructiveness of that darkness	8:47
	is compounded.	8:51
	Now in order to understand the importance	8:55
	of what Jesus was saying here, there are several truths	8:57
	which we need to get clearly in focus.	9:01
	I suggest that we commence with a very simple truth,	9:04
	and then build upon it.	9:08
	The first truth which is suggested by this text is	9:10
	that not every cure,	9:14
	so-called, is in reality a cure.	9:17
	That not everything which parades as light is light.	9:21
	Not all so-called solutions	9:27
	are in reality, solutions.	9:31
	I think you and I know something of the reality of this,	9:38
	because we have here on the Duke campus,	9:43
	as people have everywhere else in the civilized world,	9:46
	too many organizations, too many meetings,	9:49
	too many responsibilities,	9:51
	too many overlapping responsibilities,	9:53
	too many conflicting meetings.	9:55
	You cannot be a good member of the Duke University	10:00
	marching band because you have responsibilities	10:02
	with the glee club or the choir or the fraternity	10:04
	or the dramatics group or the debating team.	10:08
	You cannot do this, because you have to do that,	10:11
	and you would like to do both but it will not work out,	10:14
	and then you would like to study a little on the side,	10:16
	and this finds itself in trouble.	10:18
	A man by the name of W.H. Whyte saw this plight	10:25
	of modern man and he decided that he would offer a cure	10:30
	for this disease, and so he wrote a book,	10:33
	which is always a cure, isn't it?	10:36
	His book was entitled The Organization Man.	10:39
	Well now because a man wrote a book,	10:44
	somebody had to read it, this meant that someone	10:46
	had to write a review, and then we had to have	10:50
	a study club to read the review and to discuss the book,	10:53
	and then we had to organize committees	10:57
	to see what should be done as a result	10:59
	of what we had learned in our book study	11:02
	and from the reading of The Organization Man,	11:04
	and so we have found ourselves discussing the possibility,	11:07
	on this campus, of having meetings and forming organizations	11:10
	to see what should be done about eliminating	11:14
	some of the organizations we have.	11:16
	I am not exaggerating, as you know, when I say	11:21
	that the book The Organization Man	11:24
	has not eliminated any organizations	11:26
	nor canceled any meetings, if anything	11:29
	it has contributed to the number of organizations,	11:31
	and added to the number of meetings	11:34
	which we are supposed to attend.	11:36
	Not everything which seems to be a cure or a solution	11:38
	is indeed a cure or a solution.	11:41
	Progress is not inevitable, it is not automatic.	11:44
	Not everything which mankind does when he is confronted	11:49
	with a problem is a solution to that problem, unfortunately.	11:52
	Probably the most terrible illustration of this	11:59
	comes from any front page	12:03
	of any day's paper this year.	12:06
	While the foreign ministers meet,	12:11
	whether in the air or on the land,	12:13
	they and we are confronted with the dire prospect	12:16
	of the annihilation of civilization.	12:19
	We stand today as a world in anxiety	12:24
	over the possibility of the most terrible kind of war	12:28
	that could ever break out.	12:33
	Now how did this happen?	12:35
	How did we get this way?	12:37
	Why are we in this fix?	12:39
	Simply because	12:42
	we decided that we needed a weapon	12:44
	more terrible than the weapon of our enemy,	12:48
	who decided that he needed a weapon more terrible	12:52
	than our last weapon, which was developed	12:57
	as an antidote to our enemy's last previous weapon	13:00
	which was developed as a deterrent against the use	13:05
	of our last previous best weapon,	13:08
	which was, and you know how the tennis game goes.	13:12
	What started all this?	13:16
	A simple desire on the part of the American nation	13:19
	and the Russian nation and the French nation	13:23
	and the British nation to have peace.	13:26
	To be free from anxiety, to be delivered from the fear	13:30
	that we would not be attacked.	13:35
	We started with the simple desire to be free	13:38
	from anxiety and we cured that problem,	13:42
	as a world,	13:46
	by putting ourselves in the most anxious state	13:48
	international affairs have ever known.	13:52
	Not every so called solution, not every attempted solution,	13:57
	is indeed a solution.	14:02
	We need now to move beyond that truth to a second one,	14:05
	which is that sometimes the very effort,	14:09
	the very effort to overcome a problem,	14:13
	to cure a disease, has within it the seeds	14:17
	of a new disease,	14:22
	the ground of a new problem.	14:25
	Although I read this in the paper,	14:29
	I did not think it really happened.	14:31
	This was supposed to have happened,	14:34
	but I believe it is completely apocryphal.	14:37
	Two men, according to the article,	14:39
	were playing golf and it began to rain.	14:41
	They sought shelter under a small barn near the course.	14:44
	One man said he was deeply worried,	14:49
	because his wife was downtown without a raincoat.	14:51
	The other man said that the solution to that was very simple	14:55
	because all she would need to do	14:57
	when the rain got downtown would be to step inside a store.	14:59
	The first man said, "That is the basis of my anxiety."	15:03
	The thing which sometimes is an effort to cure a problem	15:09
	has within it, within the very effort itself,	15:13
	seeds of new problems and new diseases.	15:17
	But although that probably never happened,	15:21
	there is something that is happening about us,	15:23
	and I believe if we will take a look at that,	15:25
	we will see how this great problem of mankind	15:27
	works in social relationships.	15:32
	We have recently lived through	15:38
	the International Geophysical Year,	15:41
	during which the combined efforts of scientists	15:44
	across the world	15:47
	resulted in discoveries	15:50
	heretofore unheard of.	15:54
	Doctors Kaplan, and Donn, and Ewing,	15:58
	have made a combined report of some of the findings	16:02
	of the scientists during the International Geophysical Year.	16:05
	One of their findings indicates that the world	16:09
	is getting progressively warmer.	16:12
	This might seem to be good news	16:15
	to those of us who do not like extremely cold weather.	16:17
	Do not take too much comfort in that, they tell us,	16:21
	because in spite of the fact	16:24
	that during the last 37 years, the world has become	16:26
	approximately 10 degrees warmer on the average,	16:30
	this is bringing on a new Ice Age,	16:35
	which will cover approximately half the earth	16:41
	with ice when it is completed.	16:45
	They explain it this way,	16:48
	"The glaciers of Alaska and of the Alps	16:51
	"and of the Scandinavian area are melting progressively	16:54
	"under this warmer climate,	17:00
	"and bye and bye,	17:05
	"these glaciers will be entirely melted."	17:06
	Of course, the Texas Chamber of Commerce says	17:10
	that when all of the ice in Alaska has melted,	17:12
	that Texas will again be the largest state in the Union,	17:15
	but this was not a part of the report of the scientists,	17:18
	who say that when all these glaciers melt	17:21
	that the level of the oceans will be raised enough	17:24
	so that the warm waters of the Gulf Stream	17:29
	may pass over the shallow areas of the straits	17:32
	between Greenland and Norway	17:36
	and flow into the Arctic Ocean,	17:39
	which it cannot now do, because the water	17:43
	in those straits is too shallow,	17:46
	but when it is able to flow into the Arctic Ocean,	17:48
	it will completely melt the Arctic ice cap	17:52
	and make out of the Arctic Ocean indeed an ocean of water.	17:56
	And this, they say, will create far more snow	18:01
	than we have had for the last 11,000 years,	18:05
	and all the way down to about St. Louis,	18:10
	the North American continent	18:13
	will be under one huge glacier.	18:15
	They say we may be beginning our preparation for this,	18:20
	because this age will be here in	18:23
	another six or eight thousand years.	18:24
	Now, the point of this is	18:30
	that the very process by which	18:34
	the world is becoming warmer	18:38
	has in it the seeds of a new Ice Age.	18:40
	This happens in social and moral situations,	18:46
	in personal religious problems.	18:51
	Our pastoral counselors and psychiatrists	18:56
	are saying that the one largest problem	18:59
	from which mankind suffers in an individual way	19:02
	is the problem of insecurity.	19:06
	Man begins to solve that problem	19:10
	by seeking security wherever he can find it.	19:12
	When he finds that security in God,	19:16
	it is a lasting security, but when he finds it	19:20
	in a bank account, a large salary, a beautiful car,	19:24
	a big house, physical beauty, he is finding it	19:28
	in things which the world can give,	19:33
	but alas, which the world also can take away.	19:36
	Accidents, fires, disease, death, certainly old age,	19:41
	can eliminate all these world given securities.	19:46
	And say our psychologists, that the person	19:51
	who puts his security in these things	19:55
	which instinctively he knows	19:59
	do not have lasting security in them,	20:02
	he is creating the basis of a worse feeling	20:05
	of insecurity within himself, because the security	20:10
	that is in him is insecurity,	20:15
	and how great is that insecurity.	20:17
	You see, sometimes, the process by which we seek	20:24
	to solve our problems can become itself a new disease,	20:27
	a new problem, a new darkness.	20:31
	We need, therefore, to push quickly to a third truth,	20:36
	which is, the affirmation,	20:42
	which when we focus it clearly in our minds,	20:45
	that truth	20:49
	and solutions to problems	20:53
	come to us best	20:57
	when Christ is the source of that truth.	21:01
	Christ alone	21:07
	is the source	21:09
	of	21:12
	pure security,	21:13
	of pure light,	21:15
	and of	21:17
	pure solution to problems.	21:18
	Jesus said, "I am the light of the world,	21:23
	"he that walketh in me shall not abide in darkness,	21:27
	"but shall have the light of life."	21:33
	Jesus Christ, to change the analogy,	21:37
	was the Great Physician, and those who would like	21:40
	to have a cure for disease that is lasting,	21:44
	and which does not have in it the seeds of new disease,	21:49
	must find that cure in Jesus Christ.	21:52
	Only in Him do we find the perfect cure,	21:57
	the perfect life, the perfect truth.	22:01
	George Bernard Shaw was a social prophet	22:07
	who saw that mankind had many diseases	22:11
	that could not be cured by the men of medicine.	22:14
	He felt that he knew the answer to some of the problems	22:19
	of mankind, and so he decided that he would write plays	22:22
	as a method of getting over to mankind his cure.	22:26
	And in these plays he had what he called the medicine	22:32
	that would doctor the ills of the world,	22:37
	"But," said Shaw, "if you're going to get people	22:40
	"to swallow medicine, you have to put a sugar coat on it."	22:42
	So in the later years of his life,	22:47
	he gives us the bitter testimony of his experience.	22:48
	Shaw said, "What I hoped would happen	22:53
	"was that the audiences would come,	22:57
	"taste the sugar and swallow the pill,"	23:01
	but he said,	23:05
	"I found that what happened was they licked off the sugar,	23:06
	"and threw away the pill."	23:10
	Now, the destructive thing about that was	23:13
	that they licked the sugar and swallowed it	23:18
	and thought they had the medicine.	23:21
	But when they threw away the medicine	23:25
	they did not have the solution to the problems of mankind.	23:29
	Shaw said this was worse than if they had not gone at all.	23:35
	For in thinking they had the cure,	23:40
	they deceived themselves by quoting my witticisms,	23:44
	and by quoting the witticisms,	23:49
	they thought they were quoting the cure	23:52
	and therefore they closed their minds	23:55
	against any further effort to find the cure.	23:58
	This is not true with the teaching of Jesus.	24:03
	He comes as the revelation of the heart and mind of God,	24:07
	to speak to our ills, He said, "I did not come	24:13
	"to call the righteous, but sinners.	24:16
	"I did not come for the healthy, but for the sick."	24:19
	He came to a sick world, a world filled with problems,	24:23
	a world of which you and I are very familiar.	24:27
	We need His medicine, we need His light.	24:32
	He has it to offer,	24:36
	we may accept it freely.	24:39
	Please stand.	24:44
	Oh God, the Author of Light, in Whom is no darkness,	24:50
	illumine our hearts by the radiance of Thy truth	24:55
	and love, that we in turn may let our lights so shine	24:58
	before men that they may see our good works	25:03
	and glorify our Father in heaven.	25:07
	Now may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ,	25:10
	the love of God the Father, the communion and fellowship	25:13
	of the Holy Spirit rest upon you	25:17
	and abide with you, now and evermore.	25:20

Item Info

Title:

Howard C. Wilkinson - "When the Cure Is a Disease" (May 31, 1959)

Description:

Sermon start time: (Part 1) 2:50. Sermon end time: (Part 1) 25:23.
3-points sermon 1) not every so-called cure is in reality a cure (not everything which parades as light is light, not all so-called solutions are in reality solutions. 2) sometimes the very effort to overcome a problem/ to cure a disease, has within it the seeds of a new disease, the ground of a new problem. 3) truth and solutions to problems come to us best when Christ is the source of that truth. Jesus Christ is the Great Physician, and those who would like to have a cure for disease that is lasting, and which does not have in it the seeds of new disease, must find that cure in Jesus Christ. (Abstract created by Duke Divinity School staff.)
Key quotation: “Jesus came to a sick world, a world filled with problems, a world of which you and I are very familiar. We need His medicine, we need His light. He has it to offer, we may accept it freely."

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https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4m03zb6r

Date:

May 31, 1959

Speaker:

Wilkinson, Howard C.

Biblical Book:

Matthew

Chapter and Verse:

Matthew 6:23

Subject:

Contributor:

Duke University. Chapel

Identifier:

UA.17.01.0003 RR-0074
ref5347_21p
uachapelsermaud
duke:320319
dcrau001781
ark:/87924/r4m03zb6r
6dd4acf2-c297-4bc3-adc5-a53632112fd2

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Howard C. Wilkinson - "When the Cure Is a Disease" (May 31, 1959)

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