Halford E. Luccock - "Advent in a Distressed World" (December 5, 1954)
MP3
Loading the media player...
Transcript
- Download transcript as:
-
Text
-
PDF
-
WebVTT (includes timecodes)
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
| (upbeat organ music) | 0:03 | |
| ♪ Praise God, from whom all blessings flow ♪ | 0:30 | |
| ♪ Praise Him, all creatures here below ♪ | 0:37 | |
| ♪ Praise Him above, ye heavenly host ♪ | 0:46 | |
| ♪ Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost ♪ | 0:55 | |
| ♪ Amen ♪ | 1:07 | |
| - | Most merciful and gracious of whose bounty | 1:15 |
| we have all received, accept we beseech Thee | 1:19 | |
| this offering of Thy people. | 1:23 | |
| Remember in Thy love those who brought it | 1:26 | |
| and those for whom it is given. | 1:28 | |
| And so follow it with Thy blessing | 1:31 | |
| that it may promote peace and goodwill among men | 1:34 | |
| and advance the kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. | 1:38 | |
| Amen. | 1:43 | |
| - | Our text is from the 78th verse | 2:17 |
| of the first chapter of Luke. | 2:19 | |
| "The dayspring from on high hath visited us." | 2:22 | |
| This Advent sermon really began | 2:29 | |
| a few months ago at Cornell University. | 2:32 | |
| After the chapel service, I had lunch | 2:38 | |
| with a casually collected company of people. | 2:41 | |
| One young instructor, a very courteous man said to me | 2:47 | |
| he said, "I didn't hear you this morning. | 2:53 | |
| I don't ever go to church." | 2:55 | |
| He said, "The fact is that the Christian religion | 2:58 | |
| is just about washed up. | 3:02 | |
| In 50 years more, the church will just be a little company | 3:06 | |
| of people on a side street singing ditties about Heaven." | 3:09 | |
| That threw me back for about 10 yards. | 3:16 | |
| I finally recovered a bit, however, | 3:21 | |
| and I hope later to tell you what I said. | 3:22 | |
| Perhaps that will keep an element of suspense in the sermon. | 3:26 | |
| (congregation laughing) | 3:30 | |
| But that Joe did bring up an issue. | 3:31 | |
| Just how relevant is Christianity to our world? | 3:33 | |
| It is the Advent theme. | 3:41 | |
| The meaning of the coming of Christ to our world. | 3:43 | |
| And we had better face the fact | 3:49 | |
| that the mood of many serious people today | 3:52 | |
| is that it does not have any very close meaning. | 3:57 | |
| They do not deny the faith. That is out of style. | 4:03 | |
| The loud village atheist is out of date. | 4:08 | |
| They just ignore it. | 4:12 | |
| They feel that it's not close to life. | 4:15 | |
| Something like the man | 4:19 | |
| who's taking a civil service examination for postman. | 4:21 | |
| One of the foolish questions was, | 4:24 | |
| "How far away is the planet Saturn?" | 4:26 | |
| He gave a good answer. | 4:30 | |
| He says, "It's so far away that it won't make any difference | 4:31 | |
| about my delivering the mail on Main Street." | 4:34 | |
| (congregation laughing) | 4:37 | |
| And some people feel that our Gospel is so far away | 4:39 | |
| that it's irrelevant to our world and to our lives. | 4:44 | |
| During the Second World War when Eve Curie the scientist | 4:50 | |
| visited Jerusalem, she looked back on that hill of Zion | 4:53 | |
| and said she felt like saying, "Ah Jesus. | 4:59 | |
| So powerful and yet so powerless." | 5:03 | |
| You told us to be kind and forgiving | 5:08 | |
| yet for 20 solid centuries wretched, incorrigible men | 5:11 | |
| have gone on being merciless full of violence and hatred. | 5:16 | |
| Religious men and atheists alike | 5:20 | |
| have lived and ruled in a non-Christian way. | 5:23 | |
| And look at us now. | 5:27 | |
| We've never been in a worse mess. | 5:29 | |
| Those words, "so powerful and so powerless," | 5:33 | |
| if we dismiss them lightly or take them casually, | 5:36 | |
| we have not faced a challenging mark of our time. | 5:40 | |
| So I would ask this morning, | 5:45 | |
| how relevant is our religious space | 5:47 | |
| to the life of the world today? | 5:50 | |
| The opening of the 20th century, Thomas Hardy wrote a poem | 5:55 | |
| with the arresting title, "The Funeral of God." | 5:58 | |
| He described seeing a funeral train move across a valley. | 6:02 | |
| Then he discovered that the figure | 6:06 | |
| that they were burying was God. | 6:08 | |
| He said, "O man-projected Figure, | 6:13 | |
| whence came it we were tempted to create One | 6:15 | |
| whom we could no longer keep alive? | 6:18 | |
| How sweet it was in years far hied | 6:21 | |
| to start the wheels of day with trustful prayer, | 6:24 | |
| to lie down liegely at the eventide | 6:28 | |
| and feel a blest assurance He was there." | 6:32 | |
| Now, in the minds of many, that is all over. | 6:36 | |
| Many feel as Bliss Carman puts into the words of grass. | 6:43 | |
| The birds ask the grass, the Church, | 6:50 | |
| what the people are doing inside | 6:52 | |
| with all the music and the grass answered, | 6:53 | |
| "They're praising God on Sunday. | 6:56 | |
| They'll be all right on Monday. | 6:58 | |
| It's just a little habit they've acquired." | 6:59 | |
| Now, in that whole question first, | 7:03 | |
| is our Christianity out of relation to our world? | 7:05 | |
| We must say this, that many kinds of Christianity | 7:09 | |
| as practiced are terribly irrelevant to the world. | 7:13 | |
| And the sooner we recognize it the better. | 7:19 | |
| Here are a few of them. | 7:24 | |
| One of 'em is this. | 7:25 | |
| That a religion of words is irrelevant to human needs. | 7:27 | |
| Saying something, letting it in there, | 7:34 | |
| feeling that something important is done | 7:37 | |
| if only the right words are said. | 7:40 | |
| In our Protestant churches | 7:43 | |
| we do not go around swinging incense, | 7:44 | |
| but we have another kind of incense, abstract words. | 7:47 | |
| We swing them through the sanctuary | 7:50 | |
| and they're dead in the mind. | 7:52 | |
| Forget the words of Jesus. | 7:57 | |
| Not those who say, "Lord, Lord" but those who do what I say. | 8:00 | |
| James A. Michener out there in South Pacific | 8:05 | |
| in the recent article on holiday described Buddhism. | 8:08 | |
| He said a Japanese scholar said to him, | 8:11 | |
| "Buddhism suits us exactly. | 8:15 | |
| It does not concern itself with this life | 8:17 | |
| but with a life after death, therefore it does not set up | 8:20 | |
| a system of day behavior or a weekly demand of church going. | 8:24 | |
| The services are conducted in Chinese | 8:29 | |
| and cannot be understood by the worshipers. | 8:31 | |
| It's a very lovely religion." | 8:34 | |
| Well, it is a very lovely little religion. | 8:38 | |
| It doesn't bother you at all. | 8:42 | |
| And there are a great many Christian Buddhists | 8:44 | |
| who enjoy that kind of a religion. | 8:47 | |
| No demand on life, no effect. Everything is lovely. | 8:51 | |
| And many people just listen for words and not sing. | 8:55 | |
| John Wesley said, he was getting a little angered once, | 9:01 | |
| "Let but a pert, self-sufficient animal | 9:04 | |
| bawl out something about the blood of Christ | 9:07 | |
| and people will say, 'What a fine Gospel sermon.'" | 9:10 | |
| That was true 200 years ago, and as many of us know | 9:15 | |
| it's true in many places today. | 9:18 | |
| Jesus knew the difference between words and the real thing. | 9:20 | |
| He said about a Roman Centurion | 9:25 | |
| who didn't have any of the proper words at all, | 9:27 | |
| "I have not seen such faith in all of Israel." | 9:31 | |
| A second kind of religion very popular today | 9:34 | |
| that is completely irrelevant to the world's need | 9:37 | |
| is the cult of comfort | 9:40 | |
| in which the Christian Gospel | 9:44 | |
| has degenerated in many places. | 9:47 | |
| I do not mean there is no place in our religion for comfort. | 9:50 | |
| We've all seen people held up | 9:55 | |
| by the faith and on their knees. | 9:59 | |
| Or the everlasting arm. | 10:01 | |
| We have seen people go through experiences | 10:04 | |
| we wonder how they could stand up, saying, "I am cured. | 10:07 | |
| That neither life nor death nor anything else | 10:10 | |
| in all creation can separate me from the love of God." | 10:12 | |
| But the cult of comfort, | 10:17 | |
| just for comfort and ease itself is a shabby thing. | 10:18 | |
| And it frequently comes | 10:24 | |
| when we substitute psychology for religion, | 10:25 | |
| that is, a complete substitute. | 10:30 | |
| It's often done. | 10:32 | |
| One woman sitting under the ministry | 10:35 | |
| of a very up-to-ate preacher thought that the words neurosis | 10:36 | |
| and psychosis were the names of two women | 10:40 | |
| in the New Testament to whom Paul sent his greetings. | 10:43 | |
| (congregation laughing) | 10:46 | |
| Something like Tryphena and Tryphosa. | 10:49 | |
| That kind of a comfort makes God | 10:54 | |
| not enough the sovereign of the whole world | 10:56 | |
| but an office boy who is busy looking after my wants. | 10:58 | |
| And no idea of how not pray? Many do. | 11:05 | |
| Marie Bashkirtseff, an ego as to the point of genius, | 11:08 | |
| wrote this prayer in her journal. | 11:12 | |
| She'd repeat it every day. | 11:14 | |
| "Oh God, grant that I may never have the smallpox | 11:15 | |
| and that I may remain pretty | 11:18 | |
| and that I may have a beautiful voice | 11:20 | |
| and that I may have a rich marriage." | 11:22 | |
| That was not just what Jesus had in mind when He said, | 11:25 | |
| "After this manner pray ye." | 11:28 | |
| The second kind of irrelevant religion | 11:32 | |
| is one that's in a social vacuum. | 11:34 | |
| It does not make any difference to human needs | 11:37 | |
| nor do anything for human welfare. | 11:40 | |
| I remember one day in a class in sermon in the seminary, | 11:44 | |
| Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin, so recently gone from us, | 11:47 | |
| said about a student sermon. | 11:51 | |
| It wasn't mine. I wouldn't tell you what he said about mine. | 11:54 | |
| He said about a student sermon, | 11:58 | |
| he said it was a hoop skirt sermon. | 11:59 | |
| It went all around the subject | 12:02 | |
| without touching it at any point. | 12:03 | |
| (congregation laughing) | 12:05 | |
| And there is religion. | 12:09 | |
| It goes around life without really touching it. | 12:10 | |
| So an instance of it in the 1840s. | 12:14 | |
| The House of Lords was considering the Ten Hour Bill. | 12:16 | |
| A bill designed to limit the work of little children | 12:21 | |
| under 10 years of age to 10 hours a day. | 12:25 | |
| And the English bishops voted solidly against it. | 12:29 | |
| It didn't touch lives. | 12:35 | |
| Now, that's one side of the picture. | 12:38 | |
| The other side of the picture, true side, | 12:40 | |
| the disturbing side, there is the other evidence | 12:44 | |
| that our Christian faith does come into light | 12:48 | |
| with very close relevance. | 12:52 | |
| When a man said that the church would be a little company | 12:56 | |
| of people on a side street, singing ditties about Heaven, | 12:58 | |
| after I got my breath, I said, "Thank you. | 13:02 | |
| You put it beautifully. | 13:05 | |
| And you have just described | 13:07 | |
| the most powerful force in history." | 13:08 | |
| A little company of people | 13:12 | |
| on a side street singing ditties about heaven. | 13:14 | |
| That's what it was in the upper room when it all began. | 13:16 | |
| That's it was in the Roman catacombs, | 13:21 | |
| a small company of people, but it was a larger place | 13:24 | |
| than the Coliseum because the future was there. | 13:27 | |
| That little church where the Pilgrims gathered | 13:32 | |
| in Leiden, Holland was just a little company | 13:34 | |
| of people on a side street. | 13:37 | |
| Theirs was the power of shaping a nation. | 13:41 | |
| I made a sentimental pilgrimage, | 13:45 | |
| a pious pilgrimage a few years ago to a little place | 13:47 | |
| on a side street in London in Aldersgate Street | 13:51 | |
| where there began the movement that went out | 13:56 | |
| to take in a world in its parish. | 13:58 | |
| Very swiftly, the evidence that Christianity | 14:03 | |
| is relevant to our world. | 14:07 | |
| Jesus does not come into our world | 14:10 | |
| like a Rip Van Winkle, | 14:12 | |
| alien in speech and garb but a contemporary. | 14:13 | |
| For one thing, He gives to life great meaning. | 14:18 | |
| That is the one of deepest human need. | 14:25 | |
| I've had young people in school, in college, | 14:28 | |
| I've had people in the last hours in their hospital | 14:32 | |
| ask me the same question, "What is it all about?" | 14:35 | |
| And Jesus breaks the code of mystery's existence | 14:40 | |
| and floods you with meaning. | 14:45 | |
| We know the stories that have come | 14:48 | |
| with the breaking of a code. | 14:50 | |
| Jesus gives the key to the mystery. | 14:54 | |
| If the world is not an accident | 14:57 | |
| nor a whirling bit of gas and mud, | 14:58 | |
| nor a machine shop or an orphan asylum, but a home. | 15:03 | |
| Now, you can't prove that. | 15:09 | |
| You can't prove any | 15:11 | |
| of the most precious things in life at all. | 15:13 | |
| You can prove that Beethoven was born in 1770, | 15:17 | |
| but you can't prove that the Ninth Symphony is great music. | 15:20 | |
| Many people prefer Hernando's Hideaway. | 15:25 | |
| (congregation laughing) | 15:28 | |
| You cannot prove | 15:31 | |
| that the one more deeply loved by you is lovable. | 15:33 | |
| I might be ridiculous by scientific fact. | 15:40 | |
| You can say with feeling, "Music I heard with you | 15:44 | |
| was more than music, and bread I ate with you | 15:48 | |
| was more than bread." | 15:51 | |
| But a literally-minded person would say, | 15:54 | |
| "You're ridiculously exaggerating | 15:56 | |
| the differences between individuals." | 15:59 | |
| You can't prove it, | 16:03 | |
| but if faith does put high meaning into life, | 16:05 | |
| it puts foundations against our insecurity, | 16:12 | |
| it puts ultimates against our relativism, | 16:16 | |
| it puts community against our separateness, | 16:21 | |
| it puts liberty against our enslavements | 16:24 | |
| and hope against our despair, | 16:27 | |
| and it comes close to human need. | 16:31 | |
| Our religion is relevant | 16:36 | |
| that it comes at the particular time now | 16:39 | |
| close to man's need of a sense of worth | 16:41 | |
| that is slipping away from multitudes of people | 16:48 | |
| in this impersonal age. | 16:53 | |
| I heard a man say this summer that the most important thing | 16:57 | |
| in a person's life is he's answered the question, | 17:00 | |
| "Who do you think you are?" | 17:02 | |
| What do you think of yourself? | 17:06 | |
| For that determines what you get from life | 17:09 | |
| and what you put into it. | 17:13 | |
| A man's sense of his own significance is shrinking. | 17:17 | |
| There's a tremendous need. | 17:23 | |
| The need of the assurance of this light | 17:25 | |
| from the dayspring on high | 17:30 | |
| that man is not just an accidental collection of atoms | 17:32 | |
| but a child of God with an irreplaceable | 17:37 | |
| and eternal value that's desperately needed | 17:42 | |
| for a mood of our time is the feeling | 17:46 | |
| of the insignificance of persons. | 17:49 | |
| Here's a vivid picture, I think, | 17:54 | |
| of our age and of our Gospel found in a poem | 17:55 | |
| just published a few months ago in the volume, | 18:00 | |
| "The Love Letters of Phyllis McGinley." | 18:03 | |
| It pictures two people overwhelmed with the bleakness | 18:06 | |
| of the world and its threatening dangers say | 18:10 | |
| that they have nothing but their own human love as a shield. | 18:14 | |
| Nothing but that. | 18:21 | |
| Here's a few lines from it. | 18:24 | |
| "Stay near me. Speak my name. | 18:26 | |
| Oh, do not wander by a thought's span, | 18:29 | |
| heart's impulse from the light we kindle here. | 18:33 | |
| You are my sole defender as I am yours. | 18:36 | |
| In this precipitous night which over the Earth, | 18:40 | |
| is falling, without stars, and bitter cold. | 18:43 | |
| Stay near me. Spirit, perishable as bone. | 18:47 | |
| In such winter one cannot survive alone." | 18:50 | |
| That is the mood of many today. | 18:56 | |
| There's no hope in the world picture. | 18:58 | |
| There's nothing but our human love and in a remarkable way | 19:00 | |
| that's a perfect echo of another love poem also | 19:04 | |
| which might be called a mid-century love letter | 19:08 | |
| saying the same thing in the 19th century, | 19:11 | |
| Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach." | 19:15 | |
| Do you remember the words? | 19:19 | |
| He's saying, "We too have nothing but each other. | 19:20 | |
| In a bare world, that's all love. | 19:22 | |
| Let us be true to one another | 19:24 | |
| for the world, which seems to lie before us | 19:27 | |
| like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new | 19:29 | |
| hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, | 19:33 | |
| nor certitude, nor peace, nor help nor pain. | 19:36 | |
| And we are here as on a darkling plain | 19:41 | |
| swept by confused alarms of struggle and flight, | 19:43 | |
| where ignorant armies clash by night." | 19:47 | |
| Now, in such a mood so near to despair, in the 19th century | 19:51 | |
| or the 20th, of course, two heads are better than one. | 19:55 | |
| Two hearts that reach out to each other are better than one, | 20:02 | |
| but they're not enough in the desperate darkness. | 20:06 | |
| Here is the mid-century love letter, | 20:12 | |
| adequate for any century. | 20:15 | |
| "God so loved the world that He gave." | 20:19 | |
| That is something to sing about so we sing about it, | 20:26 | |
| "O Love that will not let me go." | 20:33 | |
| That is the meaning of Advent. | 20:37 | |
| That that sustaining love letter comes into life, | 20:39 | |
| makes it clear that we have something deeper | 20:44 | |
| and longer than our human love. | 20:48 | |
| And we can see the gifts to life that come with our faith | 20:52 | |
| that are sharply relevant to our needs. | 20:57 | |
| I was thinking of those gifts that faith brings. | 21:03 | |
| Bringing the other day that the author of a novel | 21:07 | |
| published this fall, a Literary Guild Selection, | 21:09 | |
| Miss Mary Deasy had to undergo | 21:11 | |
| a press interview not long ago. | 21:14 | |
| One of the questions was, "Do you collect anything? | 21:17 | |
| First editions, paintings or etchings, ships' models, | 21:20 | |
| glass paperweights, buns, boats, guns, or dogs?" | 21:24 | |
| And this is the way she answered. | 21:30 | |
| She says, "I collect sunsets, foggy mornings, | 21:32 | |
| old houses, summer afternoons, wet fall evenings, | 21:37 | |
| and silhouettes of chimney pots on roofs." | 21:42 | |
| Those are all good collectors' items, but faith, | 21:46 | |
| Christian belief and discipleship | 21:52 | |
| make possible rare collections as we go through life. | 21:55 | |
| We all collect something. | 22:00 | |
| Some people collect gripes. | 22:03 | |
| Other people collect grudges as they go along. | 22:07 | |
| Some people collect coins. | 22:11 | |
| Not rare coins but just current coins. | 22:12 | |
| (congregation laughing) | 22:16 | |
| The sweetest music to them is not a hallelujah chorus | 22:17 | |
| but the tinkle on a bell of a cash register | 22:20 | |
| when it goes ping. | 22:22 | |
| But a vibrant religion enables us to make collections. | 22:27 | |
| High moments when we can say, | 22:33 | |
| "Surely God is in this place." | 22:35 | |
| Hours of trust when we can say, | 22:38 | |
| "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, | 22:42 | |
| I will fear no evil." | 22:45 | |
| And when that final question comes to us, as it will come, | 22:48 | |
| the same question they put to you in a customs house | 22:52 | |
| when returning from a journey, | 22:55 | |
| "Have you anything to declare? | 22:57 | |
| Have you anything to declare?" | 23:01 | |
| Did you pick up anything on your journey through life? | 23:02 | |
| With our faith we can say, "I have much to declare. | 23:07 | |
| Collections of friends. Memories of service." | 23:11 | |
| We can make that faith far more relevant than we do. | 23:16 | |
| Finally, this last affirmation. | 23:22 | |
| Religion is closely relevant | 23:27 | |
| to the making of a livable world. | 23:32 | |
| We can't obliterate history. | 23:39 | |
| We must grant that in times past and present | 23:42 | |
| the Church and its faith has made little | 23:47 | |
| or no difference to the world. | 23:49 | |
| Worse still, many times religion has been | 23:51 | |
| on the reactionary side of a human question. | 23:54 | |
| All true, but on the other side it has been relevant | 23:59 | |
| to the human family coming up from bondage. | 24:05 | |
| Those words echo from one of the early centuries | 24:09 | |
| down through the years, the words attributed | 24:12 | |
| to the monk Telemachus who jumped down into the arena | 24:14 | |
| and by the sacrifice of his life | 24:19 | |
| put an end to the gladiatorial contest. | 24:22 | |
| He said, "In the name of God, stop." | 24:26 | |
| So with slavery, with child labor, with other evils, | 24:30 | |
| there has been the word, "In the name of God, stop." | 24:35 | |
| There's a great sentence of T.R. Glover's. | 24:38 | |
| He said, "Four words destroyed slavery. | 24:41 | |
| For whom Christ died." | 24:45 | |
| And it is our faith that those same four words | 24:50 | |
| will destroy racial conflict and ultimately destroy war. | 24:54 | |
| Our task is to make religion more closely related, | 25:02 | |
| doing what we can. | 25:05 | |
| The picture I like to keep in my mind | 25:07 | |
| of the early days of Marshall Field in Chicago, | 25:09 | |
| he didn't spend all his time selling ribbons. | 25:13 | |
| He went out there and contracted to raise a whole city block | 25:17 | |
| full of buildings from the marshland foundation. | 25:22 | |
| He got 6,000 jackscrews under the base | 25:27 | |
| and a small army of 600 men | 25:31 | |
| and each of them turned to the signal the screws | 25:34 | |
| half a turn, raising the whole block a fraction of a inch. | 25:36 | |
| Picture of our task raising the level of life | 25:43 | |
| in city or state maybe just a fraction of an inch, | 25:46 | |
| but that's what it is, a fraction of an inch. | 25:51 | |
| And our gospel has a saving meaning | 25:54 | |
| for the hope of survival. | 25:57 | |
| A picture of our task by a traveler coming back from Russia | 26:01 | |
| saying that one of the great favorites of Russian children | 26:04 | |
| at the present time is a new variation of fairy story. | 26:07 | |
| The favorite picture story is how a man became a giant. | 26:13 | |
| And this giant has telescope and television for eyes, | 26:18 | |
| radio and telephone for ears, airplanes for legs, | 26:24 | |
| and atom bombs for hands. | 26:30 | |
| That would be a giant. | 26:34 | |
| It is. | 26:37 | |
| And ours is the story of Jack the giant killer | 26:40 | |
| for our generation. | 26:42 | |
| Can we control him, the giant? | 26:44 | |
| And our faith points a way to mastery. | 26:50 | |
| People in one blood living together. | 26:53 | |
| And it induces us and throws a light on our path | 26:58 | |
| patiently to labor for what contributes to survival together | 27:01 | |
| for world welfare that reduces the appeal | 27:06 | |
| of the mirage of communism, strengthening the means | 27:10 | |
| of avoiding war for all of existence | 27:16 | |
| means that we can add our opinions, | 27:22 | |
| strengthened this Advent season | 27:24 | |
| for the things that make for survival. | 27:28 | |
| I've been greatly disturbed in recent weeks. | 27:32 | |
| Two United States senators seem to be competing | 27:35 | |
| for some kind of a prize | 27:39 | |
| in their lusty denunciations of coexistence. | 27:43 | |
| Someone oughta tell him if he ever stopped talking | 27:52 | |
| that the only alternative to coexistence is no existence. | 27:55 | |
| The only alternative to get along with something | 28:01 | |
| that we don't like is not getting along. | 28:03 | |
| And in that endeavor, | 28:09 | |
| we have in the words of the Advent song, | 28:10 | |
| the dayspring from on high hath visited us. | 28:14 | |
| And into every nook and corner of our world, | 28:20 | |
| there floods the light of the revelation of God in Christ | 28:24 | |
| and the way that we can safely walk. | 28:29 | |
| He is not far from any one of us. | 28:35 | |
| Let us pray. | 28:40 | |
| Let Thou come into Thine world, O God, | 28:50 | |
| through the life of Thy servants. | 28:52 | |
| Breathe on us the breath of God. | 28:56 | |
| Fill us with life anew | 29:00 | |
| that we may love what Thou dost love | 29:04 | |
| and do what Thou wouldst do. | 29:07 | |
| And may grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father, | 29:11 | |
| the Son, and the Holy Spirit be with us all evermore. | 29:15 | |
| ♪ Amen ♪ | 29:26 | |
| ♪ Amen ♪ | 29:30 | |
| ♪ Amen ♪ | 29:37 | |
| (church bell ringing) | 29:52 | |
| (stirring organ music) | 30:00 |