Ralph W. Sockman - "The Wonder That Grows" (December 11, 1960)
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| - | May I preface my Christmas message | 0:18 |
| with just this personal word. | 0:22 | |
| It's always a pleasure to come | 0:26 | |
| to this great campus, this beautiful chapel | 0:29 | |
| this pulpit distinguished by its current preaching. | 0:33 | |
| It's been my cherished remembrance to have the friendship | 0:39 | |
| of your presidents from Dr. Fuze date of this. | 0:44 | |
| Now I count myself singularly fortunate, | 0:50 | |
| but I come on the weekend of founders observance, | 0:54 | |
| but I have had the privilege | 1:00 | |
| of knowing three generations of the Duke family. | 1:02 | |
| I think of the good they done to the world | 1:08 | |
| and the splendid way in which that tradition | 1:12 | |
| is being carried on by the present members of the family | 1:15 | |
| even in this city | 1:20 | |
| I counted high privilege to be here at this particular time. | 1:23 | |
| There are some wonders which we outgrow | 1:32 | |
| and some which grow with us. | 1:35 | |
| Consider the field of aviation 57 years ago. | 1:39 | |
| Arville and Wilbur Wright down here | 1:46 | |
| in your state of North Carolina | 1:50 | |
| flew the first power driven airplane in history. | 1:53 | |
| So unbelievable was their achievement, | 1:59 | |
| but most American newspapers were loath | 2:03 | |
| to risk their reputations by printing the report. | 2:06 | |
| But 40 years later, 1943 | 2:11 | |
| when it was desired to observe the 40th anniversary | 2:16 | |
| of the Wright brothers miraculous attainment. | 2:20 | |
| A little item appeared in a back page | 2:25 | |
| of a New York newspaper to this effect. | 2:27 | |
| Kitty Hawk celebration canceled by blizzard. | 2:31 | |
| Can you imagine the American papers two weeks | 2:37 | |
| hence announcing the Christmas celebration canceled | 2:41 | |
| by a blizzard or a flood or even a global war? | 2:47 | |
| Christmas will be observed by more people | 2:54 | |
| this year than ever before. | 2:57 | |
| The wonder of it grows, the Bethlehem event grows | 3:00 | |
| in wonder in my own personal thinking. | 3:07 | |
| When I was a boy, | 3:10 | |
| Christmas was the red letter day of the year, | 3:12 | |
| and when the first holiday decorations began to appear | 3:16 | |
| my spirits began to Mount until they reached a crescendo | 3:20 | |
| on the night before Christmas. | 3:26 | |
| The emotional excitement of Christmas | 3:29 | |
| has abated some with maturity | 3:32 | |
| but the wonder of it, deepened and widens. | 3:36 | |
| Whereas in my childhood, I thought primarily | 3:40 | |
| of the gifts to be received and to be given. | 3:45 | |
| Now, I think of that glow | 3:50 | |
| which suffuses the face of almost the whole world | 3:53 | |
| no matter how dark our and dismal our dangers and our fears. | 3:59 | |
| What keeps Christmas going and growing? | 4:05 | |
| Oh, some cynic may say | 4:12 | |
| it's the commercialization that keeps it going, | 4:14 | |
| and to be sure trades people have | 4:19 | |
| all too much taken advantage of the season | 4:22 | |
| to turn it into a period of profit making. | 4:25 | |
| But the Christmas observance outruns the lanes | 4:29 | |
| of the marketplace, it will quicken the hearts | 4:32 | |
| and pulses of people in Karenni refugee camps | 4:36 | |
| in the far north and in lonely prisons. | 4:40 | |
| Yes, you can't explain Christmas by commercialization. | 4:45 | |
| The wonders is a baby born in Bethlehem | 4:51 | |
| should have the power to quicken business. | 4:56 | |
| Others may say that we have made Christmas | 5:01 | |
| a kind of pagan celebration that sort of stirs | 5:04 | |
| a glow in our hearts. | 5:09 | |
| Oh, we admit that many pagan elements | 5:12 | |
| have come into the Christmas observance. | 5:16 | |
| The very date of it comes, you know | 5:19 | |
| from a pagan Roman celebration of the solstice | 5:23 | |
| and we've brought the Yule Log from Iceland, | 5:29 | |
| the missile toe from England, | 5:34 | |
| the jarring St. Nicholas from Holland, | 5:37 | |
| the Fox furry from Germany, | 5:41 | |
| all of them pre-Christian in their source. | 5:42 | |
| Nevertheless, I do not think | 5:46 | |
| of Christmas as just an artificial concoction | 5:48 | |
| of pagan elements to give us a kick. | 5:52 | |
| No, it would seem to me that these pagan elements | 5:58 | |
| signify this fact that all over the world | 6:02 | |
| from beginning of history there have been dreams and hopes, | 6:06 | |
| and when the Christ child appeared | 6:10 | |
| he was the magnet that drew dreams | 6:13 | |
| and hopes of all the years and all the places. | 6:17 | |
| The wonder of Christmases that it does bring | 6:22 | |
| in all these universal pre-Christian elements. | 6:27 | |
| And the wonder grows, when I think that only that it endures | 6:33 | |
| but that the fact of our calendar | 6:38 | |
| is that Christmas dates our calendar. | 6:41 | |
| What other event in history is universal enough | 6:47 | |
| to be a reckoning point of time? | 6:53 | |
| Some 700 years ago, Genghis Khan swept his Imperial rule | 6:55 | |
| across Asia, unparalleled phenomenon, | 7:02 | |
| but if you ask a man on the street | 7:06 | |
| what he knows about Genghis Khan, | 7:08 | |
| he isn't sure whether it's a mountain peak or a race horse | 7:11 | |
| or a former wife of husband of Rita Hayworth. | 7:14 | |
| He wouldn't know. | 7:17 | |
| There other events that are so called a puddle | 7:20 | |
| the fall of Rome, | 7:25 | |
| signing of the Magna Carta, | 7:27 | |
| The declaration of independence. | 7:30 | |
| But what would those dates mean in Asia or Africa? | 7:32 | |
| Know that only one event seemingly | 7:39 | |
| universal and perennial enough to mark time. | 7:43 | |
| The only explanation that I can make of this is, | 7:51 | |
| that in Christmas we see what the prophet Isaiah predicted | 7:57 | |
| and what Matthew declares in his first chapter. | 8:02 | |
| That the one born in Bethlehem shall be called Emmanuel | 8:07 | |
| which means God with us. | 8:12 | |
| The reason that Christmas grows in wonder, | 8:17 | |
| and in the observance is it's God within us coming closer | 8:21 | |
| to us consider first this fact it is the God within us. | 8:31 | |
| The response to Christmas is spontaneous, | 8:38 | |
| almost instinctive. | 8:41 | |
| We, when Christmas is in the air | 8:44 | |
| our spirits begin to fluter toward Bethlehem | 8:46 | |
| just as birds fly south in the winter. | 8:50 | |
| It is said that birds, even in a cage, | 8:54 | |
| feel the flutter in their wings | 8:58 | |
| when the migrating season is on, | 8:59 | |
| and so we, we adults caged in our conventions | 9:02 | |
| the wings of our imagination clipped by the shears | 9:08 | |
| of science limited by the grab daily surroundings, | 9:12 | |
| we like little children somehow feel the lure | 9:16 | |
| of Bethlehem, children take to it. Naturally. | 9:23 | |
| It's more than a mere nature story. | 9:29 | |
| It's more than the perennial fascination of a baby. | 9:32 | |
| It's the fact that when we come back to Christmas | 9:36 | |
| we're coming back to something | 9:40 | |
| that we feel is our native air, our homeland. | 9:42 | |
| It's amazing to me in New York | 9:49 | |
| how crowds are Christmas Eve will flock | 9:51 | |
| from the theaters and nightclubs and places | 9:54 | |
| of entertainment to the churches to sing Christmas carols | 9:56 | |
| for when they come back to that tender love of a mother | 10:00 | |
| the hospitality of the humble | 10:06 | |
| the amazing wonder of the wise, | 10:09 | |
| it's like coming back to the home of our souls | 10:13 | |
| our native air, the best in us is born at Christmas. | 10:20 | |
| The God within us comes to light. | 10:26 | |
| It's more than a birthday of even a great personality. | 10:31 | |
| I have a friend who just passed his 104th birthday, | 10:35 | |
| Dr. Arthur J. Brown. | 10:39 | |
| He has a whimsical way of saying | 10:42 | |
| that if you want to know how long you will be remembered | 10:45 | |
| after you die, just stick your finger into a pale | 10:49 | |
| of water and pull it out | 10:53 | |
| and see how much of a hole it leaves. | 10:55 | |
| Rather vivid reminder that we are quickly forgotten. | 10:59 | |
| Only one of our presidents is recognized | 11:03 | |
| for his birthday throughout the whole country. | 11:07 | |
| This is more than the birth of a great prophet or man. | 11:11 | |
| Jon Belcher, late beloved governor general of Canada | 11:16 | |
| wrote a book biography of Caesar Augustus | 11:20 | |
| who ruled the time of Jesus birth, | 11:23 | |
| and when Caesar Augustus died the mourners and Rome said, | 11:25 | |
| "well, we made Caesar a god and gods do not die, | 11:29 | |
| he'll be remembered," but he's not remembered, | 11:33 | |
| and Belcher explained it to us, he said, | 11:37 | |
| "Caesar Augustus is not remembered, | 11:40 | |
| whereas Jesus Christ is, because making a man | 11:45 | |
| into a God is not the same as God coming into a man." | 11:50 | |
| We didn't make Jesus by our ceremonies into a God. | 11:56 | |
| It's God coming into man. | 12:02 | |
| That's why Christmas lived. | 12:05 | |
| His name is Emmanuel, God with us. | 12:07 | |
| Now think in a second place, how he also brings | 12:13 | |
| near to us the God who is above us | 12:16 | |
| in our music this morning we sang of the star, | 12:20 | |
| on our Christmas cards we shall see the star, | 12:25 | |
| Matthew records, the wise men following a star. | 12:29 | |
| Now of course Matthew and Luke were not eyewitnesses | 12:34 | |
| of the Bethlehem event. | 12:39 | |
| When we read the nativity stories | 12:42 | |
| we must think of a, something like this, | 12:45 | |
| when we go into a motion picture theater | 12:48 | |
| and the play is on, our minds follow the plot as it goes on, | 12:52 | |
| but our imaginations try to reconstruct | 12:58 | |
| what took place before we came in. | 13:02 | |
| The biographers of Jesus came on the scene | 13:06 | |
| in the midst of Jesus, amazingly dramatic achievements, | 13:09 | |
| and they tried by getting tradition | 13:15 | |
| and by their inspired imagination to picture | 13:18 | |
| what could produce this Jesus who lived | 13:22 | |
| and loved and work as he did. | 13:26 | |
| The symbolism of Bethlehem reveals something deeper | 13:30 | |
| than mere superficial fact reveals truth. | 13:36 | |
| The truth symbol lies in that star is what John put | 13:40 | |
| into the prologue of his gospel | 13:45 | |
| when he tells the story | 13:47 | |
| of Christ's birth, in the beginning was the word | 13:48 | |
| and the word was with God and the word was God. | 13:53 | |
| What we see in Christ is the, a creator of the universe, | 14:00 | |
| the God above us coming near to us | 14:08 | |
| the star hovers over the manger. | 14:14 | |
| The creation of heaven is showing its kingship | 14:18 | |
| with the creatures of earth. | 14:22 | |
| Oh, it it's hard, isn't it, | 14:26 | |
| to think that this universe, the creator is revealed | 14:28 | |
| at a baby born and out of the way province, | 14:33 | |
| and it's even harder now in these days of space travel | 14:38 | |
| because we're beginning to raise the question | 14:41 | |
| of whether we may discover planets that are also populated, | 14:44 | |
| and if we do, people say how then can you say | 14:49 | |
| that Jesus child of Bethlehem reveals the God of creation | 14:53 | |
| there may be other gods there. | 15:00 | |
| Well, the way I approach it is this, | 15:04 | |
| God has to be the highest we can imagine. | 15:07 | |
| What is highest form of creation we can imagine? | 15:11 | |
| It's personality, more than any Sputnik, | 15:15 | |
| more than any Milky Way is this personality | 15:20 | |
| that can think and dream | 15:23 | |
| and make its space traveling machines, | 15:25 | |
| personality is the highest form of creation we know, | 15:29 | |
| and what's the highest form of personality? | 15:32 | |
| 19 centuries have tested and out of all that testing | 15:35 | |
| this tangled scheme of human events | 15:40 | |
| the most thoughtful minds have come to believe | 15:45 | |
| within that brief life in Palestine, | 15:47 | |
| we see reveal the character of the creator. | 15:52 | |
| When we see how Jesus lived and loved and died, | 15:57 | |
| how on the cross he said, | 16:02 | |
| "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do." | 16:03 | |
| We can't think beyond such living and loving | 16:08 | |
| therefore the God who is the highest we know | 16:13 | |
| must be like the Christ the highest we could imagine. | 16:19 | |
| It's not easy, but that's what we can think of Christmas. | 16:27 | |
| Paul Tillich has said that you can't really see the divinity | 16:33 | |
| in the manger unless you realize how much | 16:38 | |
| like a child creation is, a child is here, but not all here. | 16:43 | |
| We think of his mystery | 16:51 | |
| of his birth and the potentialities of his future. | 16:53 | |
| You can't appreciate a child unless say you see the whole | 16:57 | |
| in a fragment, the invisible invisible, | 17:04 | |
| so is it with the manger. | 17:09 | |
| You can't appreciate it | 17:14 | |
| unless you use your imagination to see | 17:18 | |
| that that star means the heavens are involved | 17:20 | |
| in the creation of the most perfect personality. | 17:27 | |
| Oh, it takes more than imagination. | 17:31 | |
| You said today in your collective prayer | 17:35 | |
| we have worshiped at the manger, | 17:39 | |
| we have not obeyed his will, | 17:41 | |
| you wanna feel that God within us and above us, | 17:44 | |
| you've got to commit your will to this Christ. | 17:49 | |
| Last summer, I was for a week teaching | 17:54 | |
| at over here in Richmond at the union, theological seminary | 17:56 | |
| at Presbyterian church, and one of the ministers there, | 17:59 | |
| Presbyterian minister, drew illustration from Blondin, | 18:03 | |
| the famous French tight rope walker | 18:10 | |
| who visited this country in 1958, 1859, a hundred years ago, | 18:14 | |
| and he walked on a tight rope | 18:20 | |
| back and forth across Niagara falls | 18:22 | |
| even carried a man on his shoulders across Niagara falls, | 18:25 | |
| and this minister, since he was a Presbyterian | 18:30 | |
| I assume of course his report was authentic, | 18:34 | |
| but anyway, this minister said | 18:36 | |
| that Blondin once asked a man at Niagara falls | 18:38 | |
| "do you believe I can carry a man across that tight rope?" | 18:41 | |
| Man said, "yes" | 18:46 | |
| "will you be the man?" Man said "no" | 18:48 | |
| there's our point in a nutshell, | 18:52 | |
| we believe that God revealed himself | 18:54 | |
| in the manger of Bethlehem but will we follow? | 18:57 | |
| ah, the most convincing thing | 19:02 | |
| about the Divinity of Christ to me is the reveal | 19:05 | |
| of God's goodness is, those who've tested it | 19:10 | |
| most deeply believe it most firmly, | 19:14 | |
| hopefully hard to think that a God who creates a world, | 19:17 | |
| which there are wars and floods | 19:20 | |
| can be the kind of loving being we saw in Christ, | 19:22 | |
| but those who tested him most believe it most. | 19:26 | |
| Only this morning, I talked with a friend of mine, | 19:32 | |
| a former member of this faculty | 19:35 | |
| who in the year has lost an only son, | 19:37 | |
| he still believes God is love. | 19:40 | |
| Think of George Frideric Handel, | 19:46 | |
| the time in his life when he had lost all his money, | 19:48 | |
| his debtors were about to throw him into prison, | 19:53 | |
| his body was half paralyzed, was about to give up, | 19:56 | |
| then an inspiration caught him and he wrote the Messiah. | 20:01 | |
| When this Christmas we sing the Messiah | 20:08 | |
| and stand to sing the hallelujah chorus, | 20:11 | |
| the Lord, God omnipotent reign. | 20:14 | |
| Just remember Handel wrote that | 20:18 | |
| when he was dead broke and half paralyzed. | 20:22 | |
| There is a power in Bethlehem | 20:26 | |
| that reveals the God within us and the God above us. | 20:29 | |
| Eight years ago, this Christmas | 20:34 | |
| I broadcast my Christmas message | 20:36 | |
| from Jerusalem for the national radio pulpit. | 20:38 | |
| The only broadcasting station then | 20:42 | |
| in Jerusalem was in the Israeli side of the city, | 20:44 | |
| but I asked my Israeli host to take me as closely | 20:49 | |
| as they could to Bethlehem | 20:52 | |
| that I might catch the atmosphere. | 20:53 | |
| They took me to a hill. | 20:56 | |
| I could see Bethlehem some nine miles away, | 20:59 | |
| but right within a few yards of east to the soldier | 21:03 | |
| withdrawn bay in it just below was the barbed wire | 21:06 | |
| separating those two tenths countries of Jordan and Israel, | 21:11 | |
| and my heart was sad to think that 19 centuries had passed | 21:16 | |
| and we still hadn't caught the spirit of Bethlehem. | 21:22 | |
| The Christian century wrote an editorial shortly after | 21:27 | |
| with this caption, 'Bethlehem is still there,' | 21:31 | |
| and a year ago, last summer, I was again in Jerusalem | 21:36 | |
| on the Jordan side, | 21:41 | |
| and I went to Bethlehem, | 21:44 | |
| I went to that field where tradition says | 21:47 | |
| the shepherds watched their flocks by night. | 21:49 | |
| I saw the sun set behind those dusty domes of Bethlehem. | 21:52 | |
| The city's grown, (inaudible) gone. Caesars are gone. | 22:00 | |
| I still felt the urge that made Phillips Brooks write | 22:08 | |
| "O Little Town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie | 22:13 | |
| above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by | 22:19 | |
| getting by dark street shining, the everlasting light, | 22:24 | |
| the hopes and fears of all the years | 22:29 | |
| are met in thee tonight." | 22:32 | |
| Bethlehem is still there, | 22:37 | |
| and the one who was born there has a power over men today | 22:41 | |
| that all the armies, the marks and the bummers | 22:47 | |
| that fly can't match. | 22:50 | |
| Truly he must be Emmanuel, which means God with us. | 22:53 | |
| Let us pray. | 23:05 | |
| Eternal father who does hold the stars in thy hands | 23:16 | |
| and yet keeps track of the falling sparrows, | 23:24 | |
| we would feel by greatness and by nearness | 23:29 | |
| as we approach the season of thy revealed love, | 23:34 | |
| and now unto him, but is able to do exceeding | 23:41 | |
| abundantly above all that we ask | 23:45 | |
| or think according to the power | 23:48 | |
| that worked within us to him be glory | 23:51 | |
| and honor through the church, world without end. | 23:54 |