Hugh Anderson - "Asking the Right Questions" (October 16, 1960)
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| - | In the name of God the Father, | 0:17 |
| God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. | 0:19 | |
| Amen. | 0:23 | |
| I feel very privileged at this juncture in my life | 0:32 | |
| to have had now three years experience | 0:37 | |
| of different American schools, colleges, and universities. | 0:40 | |
| I want to say to you this morning that I have the impression | 0:48 | |
| that at least with regard to a great many American students, | 0:53 | |
| there is a refreshing curiosity about them | 0:57 | |
| and an openness towards fresh illumination of the mind. | 1:02 | |
| One doesn't always discover this | 1:08 | |
| in all Europe in these days. | 1:10 | |
| We sometimes get rather the impression | 1:13 | |
| that our students have become | 1:15 | |
| somewhat jaded with curriculum. | 1:17 | |
| At any rate, I suppose that a great many | 1:22 | |
| of my teaching colleagues in this university | 1:25 | |
| who are here this morning would be ready to agree with me | 1:28 | |
| that there is nothing more thrilling | 1:33 | |
| or challenging in all life | 1:35 | |
| than to be set before a class of young people | 1:38 | |
| who are intent upon your every word, | 1:41 | |
| and with whom you can see the other one say | 1:45 | |
| the rare soul sitting in their eyes. | 1:48 | |
| There is no doubt at all | 1:54 | |
| that where the questioning attitude is present, | 1:56 | |
| tremendous possibilities and opportunities | 2:02 | |
| for the enhancement and the enrichment | 2:05 | |
| and the deepening of life open up. | 2:09 | |
| The questing spirit is the authentic spirit | 2:13 | |
| of the true university. | 2:18 | |
| This is the place where first and foremost, | 2:21 | |
| we ask life's most ultimate questions. | 2:24 | |
| The university is not in the first place | 2:31 | |
| the repository of all the world's wisdom. | 2:34 | |
| Certainly we expect to find on the campus | 2:39 | |
| at least one or two people who know a thing or two, | 2:42 | |
| but what is the fellowship of a university? | 2:46 | |
| Here in this fellowship, we rather try to channel | 2:52 | |
| our corporate energies and endeavors | 2:57 | |
| in our relentless drive towards | 3:01 | |
| life's as yet unexplored possibilities in every area. | 3:04 | |
| The true university don, or savant, | 3:11 | |
| is not in the last analysis the man who knows everything, | 3:15 | |
| but the man who in humility | 3:20 | |
| knows that there is everything to know. | 3:23 | |
| He is a man who is always asking questions of life. | 3:28 | |
| Let us apply this test to different departments | 3:35 | |
| of our university's life. | 3:38 | |
| Let us ask, for example, this morning, | 3:41 | |
| what constitutes a good medical school? | 3:44 | |
| I think the answer to that question is not only, | 3:48 | |
| and not perhaps even primarily, that its practitioners | 3:52 | |
| are already far advanced in technical skill and knowledge. | 3:57 | |
| What seems to me to constitute a really great medical school | 4:02 | |
| is that its practitioners live and work | 4:08 | |
| in a spirit by which they are constantly challenging | 4:12 | |
| the unanswered questions, seeking to forge new weapons | 4:16 | |
| in the unremitting and unceasing fight against disease. | 4:22 | |
| It is characterized, that is, by the spirit of adventure, | 4:27 | |
| the spirit of quest, and search. | 4:32 | |
| This certainly would be true also | 4:37 | |
| of any department of science in any university. | 4:39 | |
| It will be distinguished | 4:43 | |
| by the spirit of a Sir Isaac Newton. | 4:45 | |
| Remember how Newton said | 4:49 | |
| at the end of an amazing life of great discovery, | 4:50 | |
| how he felt that he had just been like a little child | 4:55 | |
| gathering pebbles on the seashore of the universe? | 5:00 | |
| He felt. | 5:06 | |
| And if any science department in a university | 5:08 | |
| is to be true to his spirit, | 5:11 | |
| it must feel also that the greatest questions | 5:13 | |
| are still to be asked, and the greatest discoveries | 5:17 | |
| still to be made. | 5:21 | |
| Let's ask further what will constitute in a university | 5:24 | |
| a good faculty of theology or divinity. | 5:29 | |
| Here in the faculty of theology, | 5:34 | |
| we most of all live by asking ultimate questions | 5:37 | |
| for we most of all dwell in the shadow | 5:42 | |
| of life's incomprehensible and unfathomable mysteries. | 5:47 | |
| Not for us are content and quiet and peace of mind, | 5:52 | |
| for we go seeking a city that we shall never find. | 5:57 | |
| It is the role of a faculty of divinity, of course, | 6:02 | |
| to send out into the world | 6:05 | |
| men who are to cheer the fallen, | 6:07 | |
| heal the pain, and bind up the broken hearted. | 6:09 | |
| It is not our role, however, | 6:14 | |
| to equip these men with a kind of a rule book | 6:17 | |
| or a card index system | 6:21 | |
| by which they will have an answer ready at their hand | 6:23 | |
| to every conceivable human problem, | 6:27 | |
| for the truth is life is too big and religion is too big | 6:31 | |
| and God is too big to be reduced to the status | 6:35 | |
| of our Ready Reckoner in the hip pocket. | 6:39 | |
| Let me tell you what I think is a classic little story | 6:43 | |
| about Dr. A.J. Walton, | 6:46 | |
| professor emeritus of practical theology in this university. | 6:48 | |
| It was his duty in the department of applied theology | 6:53 | |
| to try to teach his students | 6:57 | |
| how to conduct marriage services, | 6:59 | |
| burial services, and so on. | 7:02 | |
| One time six months after a particular class had gone out, | 7:04 | |
| Dr. Walton was startled one night | 7:09 | |
| to get a phone call from one of his former students, | 7:13 | |
| and the former student said to him over the phone, | 7:17 | |
| "I have a death in my congregation, sir, can you help me?" | 7:20 | |
| And Dr. Walton said, "Well, you learned the procedure | 7:25 | |
| "and how to go about it in class." | 7:28 | |
| And the student said, "Yes, but Dr. Walton, | 7:31 | |
| "this man's really dead." | 7:33 | |
| (crowd laughing) | ||
| (chuckling) | 7:39 | |
| Life has a way, life has a way, men and women, | 7:41 | |
| of upsetting our cut and dried answers | 7:44 | |
| and our actuarial calculations | 7:47 | |
| because the truth is that life is mysterious. | 7:51 | |
| Life is unfathomable in its depth. | 7:57 | |
| And God, the real God, | 8:01 | |
| the true God whom by our very littleness | 8:03 | |
| we so often obscure is not a familiar and well-known figure | 8:06 | |
| whom I can touch out here. | 8:10 | |
| The true God is the invisible and infinite | 8:12 | |
| and transcendental God before whose greatness | 8:15 | |
| we can only wrestle and struggle | 8:19 | |
| and ask ultimate questions. | 8:21 | |
| Hannon F.R. Berry, the great Anglican churchman | 8:25 | |
| said recently that the desperate need of our time | 8:28 | |
| in the Christian church is for believers | 8:32 | |
| who have the courage to ask questions. | 8:35 | |
| And Steven Bane put it even more forcibly | 8:39 | |
| when he said part of every man's university education, | 8:42 | |
| and assuredly part of every Christian's education, | 8:48 | |
| ought to be and must be education in ignorance. | 8:53 | |
| It's a startling thing to say, | 9:00 | |
| but I believe you will see it's profound | 9:02 | |
| and searching and challenging implications. | 9:05 | |
| Suppose we have established then | 9:09 | |
| that for fullness and depth of life | 9:13 | |
| and for wealth of character, | 9:15 | |
| it is necessary for us to keep on asking questions. | 9:18 | |
| I want to add now that even greater than the ability | 9:23 | |
| simply to ask questions is the capacity | 9:28 | |
| for asking the right questions. | 9:32 | |
| You see, after all, life's greatest discoveries | 9:37 | |
| have been made by men and women | 9:41 | |
| who have been able to put the right questions | 9:44 | |
| to the right data at the right time. | 9:48 | |
| This is particularly true in the area of religion | 9:54 | |
| in its relation to our daily life that we absolutely must | 9:59 | |
| put to our holy religion the right questions. | 10:06 | |
| Let me call this this morning | 10:11 | |
| the principle of correct interrogation, | 10:14 | |
| and let us try to apply | 10:18 | |
| this principle of correct interrogation | 10:20 | |
| to the principle phases of the biblical message. | 10:23 | |
| Some of the principle phases | 10:28 | |
| of the biblical message at any rate. | 10:29 | |
| First, let's apply it to the story of creation | 10:32 | |
| in chapters one and two of Genesis, | 10:38 | |
| part of which I read to you this morning. | 10:41 | |
| Here in language of sonorous beauty | 10:45 | |
| and concrete pictorial simplicity, | 10:49 | |
| we read how God created the world and everything in it, | 10:52 | |
| including man, in six days, and then rested the seventh day. | 10:57 | |
| Now it's important to ask | 11:04 | |
| of the creation story in Genesis the right question. | 11:07 | |
| Wrong questions would be did it happen this way? | 11:13 | |
| It would be quite naive to speculate | 11:18 | |
| about the creation narrative in Genesis | 11:21 | |
| in regards to its possibility or its actuality. | 11:24 | |
| We must not say to it, | 11:29 | |
| did these things happen in this way? | 11:31 | |
| For the truth is, of course, | 11:35 | |
| that the book of Genesis is not a book about science. | 11:38 | |
| The men of the Old Testament were a pre-scientific people. | 11:43 | |
| Their concept of the universe wasn't only pre-Copernican, | 11:47 | |
| it was pre-Ptolemaic. | 11:51 | |
| They envisaged this strange universe of ours | 11:53 | |
| as having three layers, the waters above the firmament, | 11:56 | |
| the firmament, and the earth, | 12:01 | |
| like a kind of gigantic cosmic Duke Grinder. | 12:03 | |
| This is how they regarded it. | 12:07 | |
| We must not go to the story to make biological | 12:15 | |
| or scientific or archeological investigations of it. | 12:20 | |
| The only right question to ask | 12:25 | |
| in the presence of this narrative is who am I? | 12:28 | |
| Who am I? | 12:34 | |
| Life's ultimate question, who am I? | 12:35 | |
| This is what you ask in the presence of the Genesis story, | 12:38 | |
| because in fact, | 12:43 | |
| it does not invite us to biological or archeological | 12:44 | |
| or geological calculations | 12:48 | |
| about the origins of the earth and man. | 12:50 | |
| It is seeking to break through to us | 12:54 | |
| to tell us something about ourselves. | 12:57 | |
| It is addressing your existence and my existence, | 13:01 | |
| and it is saying to us, | 13:07 | |
| you cannot say that God is the creator of all | 13:10 | |
| until in your heart of hearts | 13:14 | |
| you have said God has created me. | 13:16 | |
| And you can only say that God has created you | 13:20 | |
| on your bended knees in an attitude of worship, | 13:24 | |
| acknowledging before Him your creatureliness, | 13:29 | |
| your finitude, your frailty, and your dependence. | 13:32 | |
| The difficulty with the creation story | 13:37 | |
| is not that it presents intellectual | 13:40 | |
| or scientific difficulty. | 13:44 | |
| The difficulty with it is that it confronts us | 13:47 | |
| with a positive declaration about our own nature. | 13:50 | |
| It is trying to tell us that we are creaturely, | 13:54 | |
| that we are frail mortals who are dependent for life | 13:58 | |
| on the great God Himself, | 14:03 | |
| and we can only discover this truth on our bended knees. | 14:05 | |
| The belief in God as the creator | 14:09 | |
| is difficult and not easy to come by, of course, | 14:11 | |
| because life very rarely finds us on our bended knees. | 14:15 | |
| And that's not just because we are arthritic at the joint | 14:19 | |
| for most of us are young and agile still. | 14:23 | |
| The truth is that we refuse so often to be creatures. | 14:28 | |
| We grasp on to life as though it were our very own. | 14:35 | |
| Like SERT and the atheistic existentialists, | 14:40 | |
| we claim that we alone give meaning to our own lives. | 14:44 | |
| Extending around the whole world today, | 14:50 | |
| there is a kind of society which has no room for God. | 14:54 | |
| Which is self-contained, self-explanatory, | 14:59 | |
| and self-justifying. | 15:03 | |
| The French are referring to the spread | 15:06 | |
| of this secular society in the modern world | 15:07 | |
| as Cocacolonization. | 15:11 | |
| Like every single bottle off the deep dark red stuff, | 15:15 | |
| life has become for multitudes of men self-contained, | 15:23 | |
| self-explanatory, and self-justifying. | 15:28 | |
| And where we become so self-reliant and so self-resourceful, | 15:32 | |
| we are on the downward path to ruination. | 15:37 | |
| I have encountered young people | 15:42 | |
| who have made some tragic mistake in life, | 15:44 | |
| and I've heard them protest in their rebelliousness, | 15:48 | |
| well, after all, it's my life, | 15:52 | |
| and it's my body and I have a right to these | 15:54 | |
| and I can do what I wish with them. | 15:57 | |
| No, it's not your body, and it's not your life, | 16:01 | |
| and you have no right to do what you wish | 16:07 | |
| with either your body or your life. | 16:09 | |
| The word of the creation story in Genesis | 16:12 | |
| is that your life is a gift. | 16:15 | |
| That you are dependent for it | 16:18 | |
| on the creative action of God. | 16:21 | |
| As Paul Gerhardt, the German poet, puts it, | 16:25 | |
| all the creatures God has made | 16:28 | |
| are guests at a strange hearth. | 16:32 | |
| God is master in his house, | 16:36 | |
| and as he wills, his gifts impart. | 16:39 | |
| Our difficulty with the creation narrative, | 16:44 | |
| the word of Genesis, | 16:47 | |
| is not intellectual or scientific difficulty. | 16:49 | |
| Our difficulty is existential and personal. | 16:53 | |
| We will not readily go down on our bended knees | 16:57 | |
| and acknowledge that we are the weak and frail ones | 17:01 | |
| who are dependent upon the sovereign grace of a creator God | 17:04 | |
| for the life itself. | 17:09 | |
| All this comes home to us | 17:11 | |
| only when we ask the right question of the biblical message. | 17:13 | |
| Let us apply, secondly, | 17:19 | |
| the principle of correct interrogation | 17:21 | |
| to that interesting old story of the Tower of Babel | 17:24 | |
| in the 11th chapter of Genesis. | 17:29 | |
| Again, this story is told in the graphic and vivid way | 17:33 | |
| in pictorial concrete terms | 17:39 | |
| that were so characteristic of the Hebrew genius. | 17:42 | |
| It's as if the writer were saying, | 17:45 | |
| here's a group of folks, and he said, | 17:47 | |
| come on, boys, come on. | 17:49 | |
| We're so clever, we're so mighty. | 17:52 | |
| If the kingdom of heaven is to come, we'll build it. | 17:55 | |
| We, the human agents of the kingdom. | 17:58 | |
| And you see them there in their cleverness, | 18:00 | |
| expert bricklayers, expert architects, | 18:03 | |
| expert chemists, expert scientists, brick on brick on brick | 18:06 | |
| and up it goes until it's there | 18:12 | |
| at the very gates of Heaven, this tower. | 18:14 | |
| Ah, but the sequel to this abortive enterprise | 18:19 | |
| was chaos and confusion and misery on a lavish scale. | 18:24 | |
| This is symbolized for us in the story | 18:30 | |
| by the picture of the Babel of languages | 18:34 | |
| that resulted from man's humanistic enterprise. | 18:37 | |
| What question must we ask of this story? | 18:41 | |
| Not did it happen? | 18:45 | |
| You don't run looking for an Old Testament scholar | 18:47 | |
| and say please sir, | 18:50 | |
| draw me a wee sketch of a Babylonian tower. | 18:51 | |
| That's the wrong approach. | 18:57 | |
| You say in the presence of this word of God, you say, | 18:59 | |
| what is this saying | 19:03 | |
| about the realities of the human situation? | 19:05 | |
| And when you ask that question, | 19:10 | |
| the word of this story is a very sharp and disturbing one. | 19:12 | |
| Sharper than a two edged sword | 19:18 | |
| for it tells us precisely that man's tragedy, | 19:22 | |
| the disorder and the corruption of individual | 19:27 | |
| and community and international life today | 19:31 | |
| is the direct result | 19:35 | |
| of our imperialist, humanistic pretensions. | 19:37 | |
| We usurp, we who are one with the creatures, | 19:43 | |
| we usurp the sovereignty of the creator. | 19:46 | |
| We masquerade as Titans upon the earth. | 19:50 | |
| We cherish utopianist delusions | 19:54 | |
| about our own unaided ability to create new kingdoms | 19:56 | |
| and build heavenly towers. | 20:00 | |
| The novelist, Merejkowski. | 20:04 | |
| This is his novel, "The Forerunner," wonderful novel. | 20:07 | |
| He bases it on the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, | 20:11 | |
| and the theme and the thesis of the novel | 20:17 | |
| is the struggle that goes on | 20:20 | |
| in da Vinci's soul between God made man, | 20:22 | |
| the Christ, on the one hand, on manmade God on the other. | 20:27 | |
| And this is the truth of the struggle | 20:34 | |
| not only in the breast of Renaissance man, | 20:36 | |
| this is the truth of the struggle in the breast of all men. | 20:39 | |
| It is the struggle between God made man, | 20:43 | |
| Jesus the Christ, and manmade God, | 20:47 | |
| and our sorrow is that we annihilate the God-man, | 20:51 | |
| we annihilate the Christ, | 20:55 | |
| and we elevate the manmade God, | 20:57 | |
| and we worship man instead. | 21:01 | |
| This humanism in our day has taken | 21:05 | |
| the particularly sinister form of scientific humanism. | 21:09 | |
| Today, we think our mastery is advanced. | 21:14 | |
| We are lords today not only of the earth, | 21:19 | |
| we are lords of the stellar spaces. | 21:22 | |
| We make an apotheosis or deification | 21:26 | |
| of our technological and scientific skill. | 21:29 | |
| We are the crown kings of the nuclear pile. | 21:34 | |
| Ah, but the head that wears such a lordly crown as this | 21:39 | |
| lies very, very uneasy. | 21:44 | |
| So today, the nation's rage, | 21:49 | |
| and the demonic forces of our own rampant humanism | 21:52 | |
| bring us nearer and nearer to the edge of the precipice | 21:56 | |
| all because we crucify the God man | 22:00 | |
| and worship the manmade God. | 22:03 | |
| We cut ourselves off from the creative source | 22:08 | |
| of all good life, and idolize ourselves as little Gods. | 22:12 | |
| Indeed, we make ourselves big Gods. | 22:18 | |
| What I want to say in summing this up is this. | 22:23 | |
| If you look at a picture of Mr. Khrushchev, | 22:28 | |
| thumping the table in the United Nations | 22:32 | |
| in these recent weeks, | 22:34 | |
| if you look at a picture of Calder Hall | 22:36 | |
| Nuclear Research Station in England, | 22:39 | |
| if you look at a picture | 22:43 | |
| of a space rocket leaving Cape Canaveral, | 22:44 | |
| you are finding a more pointed illustration | 22:48 | |
| of the meaning of the Babel's story | 22:51 | |
| than you would in any Old Testament scholar sketch | 22:53 | |
| of an ancient Babylonian tower. | 22:57 | |
| You see, you must ask the right existential question | 23:00 | |
| of the biblical message. | 23:05 | |
| You can never expect to get a relevant answer | 23:07 | |
| unless you ask the appropriate question. | 23:10 | |
| Young people, don't dismiss our historic and holy religion | 23:13 | |
| without first trying to put to it the right questions. | 23:18 | |
| I plead with you in any university | 23:22 | |
| throughout the world today, | 23:24 | |
| you will find young men and women | 23:26 | |
| who have discarded and rejected our holy religion | 23:28 | |
| without having tried it. | 23:32 | |
| Without having asked the right questions of it. | 23:34 | |
| Let me just try to bring this home even further | 23:39 | |
| by seeking to apply the principle of correct interrogation | 23:43 | |
| to the centralities of the Christian message | 23:48 | |
| in the New Testament. | 23:51 | |
| Let's apply it to the cross of Jesus Christ | 23:53 | |
| because that is at the heart | 23:58 | |
| of our historic Christian faith. | 24:01 | |
| Now it's possible in the presence of the New Testament | 24:05 | |
| and in the presence of the cross of Jesus Christ, | 24:08 | |
| it is possible to ask the wrong questions. | 24:11 | |
| We can ask how did it happen? | 24:15 | |
| Why did it happen? | 24:19 | |
| Why was Jesus crucified? | 24:20 | |
| These are not illegitimate questions, | 24:22 | |
| but I want you to understand | 24:24 | |
| that they're not the primary or the principle ones. | 24:26 | |
| The principle question | 24:30 | |
| which we ask of the cross of Jesus Christ | 24:32 | |
| is again an existential question. | 24:34 | |
| There is only one question we can put to it, | 24:37 | |
| can I today in a world torn and tormented | 24:41 | |
| share in the fellowship of His sufferings? | 24:45 | |
| Can I in redemptive concern for all men | 24:48 | |
| be crucified myself with Christ? | 24:52 | |
| Well, the truth is that the cross discloses its reality | 24:57 | |
| only insofar as we know something | 25:03 | |
| of the agony of cross bearing. | 25:07 | |
| There may be some skeptically inclined students | 25:11 | |
| in this audience today who tend to laugh at the cross | 25:15 | |
| and the element of sacrifice. | 25:18 | |
| I want to put it to you, don't laugh. | 25:21 | |
| Please, don't laugh. | 25:25 | |
| For if there is to be any hope for the human race | 25:27 | |
| and any peace and any brotherhood of man, | 25:30 | |
| the sacrifice of Christ's cross | 25:33 | |
| will somehow have to become involved in it. | 25:36 | |
| Can you share in the fellowship of Christ's sufferings | 25:42 | |
| in redemptive concern for men? | 25:45 | |
| Can you be crucified with Christ? | 25:48 | |
| You may say if that's the right kind of question, | 25:51 | |
| please don't bother me with it. | 25:55 | |
| You may say to me this being crucified with Christ, | 25:59 | |
| we've heard all this before, | 26:02 | |
| this is an archaic mysticism | 26:04 | |
| which is the possession only of a select few, | 26:06 | |
| but it isn't, it isn't, | 26:09 | |
| for to be crucified with Christ, | 26:11 | |
| to feel something of the agony of his cross | 26:14 | |
| has the profoundest | 26:19 | |
| social implications for the 20th century. | 26:20 | |
| It means that once again, | 26:24 | |
| we shall meet the pride of every Caiaphas with humility. | 26:26 | |
| It means that we shall meet the nonchalance | 26:32 | |
| and callous indifference of every modern islet | 26:35 | |
| with silence, strength, and dignity. | 26:38 | |
| It means that we shall the meet | 26:41 | |
| the loud hectoring vices | 26:43 | |
| of every crowded modern marketplace | 26:45 | |
| with compassion and with a broken heart. | 26:47 | |
| It means that we shall confront the forces | 26:51 | |
| which would seek the crucify Christ of fresh | 26:54 | |
| in our time with a prayer on our lips. | 26:56 | |
| Father forgive them for the know not what they do. | 26:59 | |
| You can only know the cross in its reality | 27:07 | |
| in and through the anguish of cross bearing. | 27:11 | |
| Dietrich Bonhoeffer, | 27:17 | |
| perhaps more than any other modern disciple of Jesus Christ, | 27:19 | |
| Bonhoeffer has shown us | 27:24 | |
| that it is one thing to theorize | 27:26 | |
| and theologize academically about the cross of Christ. | 27:29 | |
| To think back to it as though it were a distant event | 27:34 | |
| of the faraway and long ago is easy, | 27:38 | |
| but, to feel the pain and the agony | 27:42 | |
| of trying to keep love's flame | 27:48 | |
| burning in our breast for men | 27:50 | |
| in the century that has known barbed wire | 27:54 | |
| and blood and brainwashing. | 27:58 | |
| That is another matter all together. | 28:01 | |
| And that alone is the reality of the cross of Jesus Christ. | 28:04 | |
| Good. | 28:10 | |
| Let us try to put the right questions | 28:11 | |
| to the Christian message. | 28:14 | |
| And lastly, let us try to put the right question | 28:17 | |
| to the resurrection of Jesus the Christ. | 28:21 | |
| It is possible to ask about the resurrection | 28:26 | |
| in terms of its possibility. | 28:29 | |
| You can say, how did Christ rise with what body? | 28:32 | |
| How do you account for the fact that his risen body | 28:36 | |
| was able to pass through locked doors | 28:38 | |
| and apparently to defeat the limitations of time and space? | 28:41 | |
| These again are not illegitimate questions, | 28:46 | |
| but they are not the primary ones. | 28:49 | |
| The primary one is what does the resurrection of Christ | 28:53 | |
| mean for men today, including myself? | 28:57 | |
| If you ask about the resurrection of Christ | 29:03 | |
| in terms of its possibility, | 29:05 | |
| you are likely to miss its reality. | 29:08 | |
| What is its reality? | 29:12 | |
| Its reality is that in this church | 29:14 | |
| and from this very pool pit today, | 29:17 | |
| and from innumerable pool pits across the world, | 29:20 | |
| Christ Jesus the risen one | 29:23 | |
| is being proclaimed as the lord of all life | 29:25 | |
| and the creative source of history. | 29:28 | |
| The reality of the resurrection is | 29:32 | |
| that some unexpected and dramatic moment, | 29:35 | |
| you in the intimacies of your life | 29:39 | |
| may encounter a living lord in Christ. | 29:43 | |
| And to encounter Him | 29:48 | |
| is to encounter the one who is the hinge of history | 29:50 | |
| because he discloses the meaning of man's pilgrimage. | 29:54 | |
| How do you encounter Christ? | 29:59 | |
| Are you skeptical about that? | 30:01 | |
| I can think of only one conceivable answer, | 30:03 | |
| and that is that men have encountered Christ | 30:06 | |
| when and as they have been willing | 30:11 | |
| to abandon their own self-reliance and self-resourcefulness, | 30:13 | |
| and have been ready to run, | 30:19 | |
| to cling even to the hem of the garment of the living lord. | 30:20 | |
| So in the night, my soul, my daughter, | 30:25 | |
| cry clinging Heaven by the hems, | 30:29 | |
| and lo, Christ walking on the water, | 30:33 | |
| not of Genesareth, but Thames. | 30:37 | |
| And out of the private sanctuary of one's own life, | 30:42 | |
| one could say that to encounter this living and risen Christ | 30:47 | |
| is to leave one in no doubt that one has been in touch | 30:52 | |
| with the final reality of the universe, | 30:55 | |
| and the universe's meaning. | 30:59 | |
| We have tried then, in a rather faltering way this morning, | 31:02 | |
| to put the right questions | 31:06 | |
| through some of the principle phases | 31:08 | |
| of the biblical message. | 31:10 | |
| We have tried to put the principle of correct interrogation | 31:12 | |
| to the creation story, | 31:16 | |
| to the word of God in the Babel story, | 31:19 | |
| to the cross, and to the resurrection. | 31:21 | |
| I hope that God will give us grace, you and me, | 31:25 | |
| to continue to ask the right questions, | 31:29 | |
| and may we find for an answer | 31:32 | |
| not some theoretical or theological | 31:35 | |
| or philosophical solution, | 31:38 | |
| but may we find the mystery of a transcendent power | 31:40 | |
| and the joy of an abiding presence. | 31:45 | |
| And unto our lord who calls us to question | 31:49 | |
| and to ask the right questions of Him. | 31:53 | |
| To Him, be honor and glory forever and forever. | 31:56 | |
| Amen. | 32:01 | |
| (paper rustling) | 32:03 |