James T. Cleland - "Bought with a Price" (May 7, 1961)

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-	Thanks, well we acknowledge God,	0:03
	Let us pray.	0:17
	Let the words of my mouth	0:20
	and the meditations of our hearts	0:24
	be acceptable in thy sight	0:26
	oh Lord, our strength and our redeemer.	0:30
	Amen.	0:35
	As you listened to our minister preaching,	0:47
	have you ever tried to figure out the relationship	0:52
	between the announced scriptural text	0:58
	and the pious content of the sermon?	1:02
	The present emeritus of a (murmuring) college	1:09
	once commented after hearing me preach.	1:11
	"If the biblical verse chosen as a text had smallpox,	1:19
	the sermon would never catch it."	1:25
	I still wonder if the observation was a general statement	1:31
	following on years of sitting in the pew,	1:35
	or if he had a teasingly particular relevance	1:40
	to the sermon, he had just heard.	1:45
	Many sermons depart from the text with the speed of a rocket	1:50
	and remain in discursive orbit	1:56
	with no attempt at re-entry.	2:00
	This has led one professor of preaching to observe	2:05
	that a text out of context is a pretext.	2:10
	Such a performance is at best a knotty procedure	2:16
	at worst, it is wicked.	2:22
	Yet this morning, I have deliberately planned	2:28
	almost to do this naughty thing,	2:31
	but with safeguards.	2:36
	There are some words from scripture	2:40
	which have long haunted me.	2:42
	However, I shall not tell you the author	2:46
	nor why he said them,	2:50
	nor where he wrote them,	2:53
	nor how he used them.	2:57
	This sermon will not be developed by the conventional method	3:01
	of exegesis, exposition	3:05
	and application.	3:10
	There will be no pretense that what will be said	3:13
	is in line with the author's purpose	3:17
	when he spoke the words.	3:20
	It is my hope that the development	3:23
	will not be contrary to the Christian faith,	3:26
	but the elucidation	3:30
	of one central theme within it.	3:33
	Well, what are these words which have haunted me?	3:39
	Why do I find myself constantly returning to them	3:46
	as a touch stone?	3:51
	They are, "you are not your own	3:55
	for you are bought with a price."	4:03
	Let's look at them.	4:10
	Maybe you'll see why they will not let me go.	4:11
	First, we are not our own.	4:17
	Do we believe that?	4:23
	Oh, living in this generation,	4:26
	most of us feel that the statement is true,	4:28
	happily true or tragically true.	4:33
	The belief has been forced on us by	4:39
	critically then, see even if we did not have the gumption	4:42
	to appreciate it before in the mind's eye.	4:46
	But, our fathers and their fathers	4:52
	were not so ready to accept it.	4:56
	They are heirs of the individualism of the 19th century.	5:01
	Now in the United States,	5:09
	this individualism was a combination	5:10
	of the predominant capitalist system,	5:13
	which believed that the common good could be brought about	5:19
	only by each individual seeking his own good	5:23
	and on the other hand of the pioneer spirit of the frontier,	5:29
	where each man played his own hand,	5:33
	proud of that fact,	5:38
	determined to maintain it.	5:41
	Now, we find people today	5:46
	who hold to that point of view still.	5:47
	If we believe in them,	5:53
	we call them good old American stock	5:55
	and economic realist.	5:59
	If we don't believe in them,	6:05
	we call them Tory die-hards and economic royalists.	6:06
	And yet looking at the matter objectively,	6:14
	their point of view is a distortion of the truth.	6:17
	We are not our own.	6:23
	We are linked with other people for good or ill,	6:27
	even for better or for worse.	6:33
	Isolationism is not the atmosphere we breathe.	6:40
	Interrelatedness is our human environment.	6:46
	Interrelatedness is the fact for us,	6:52
	a disagreeable fact often, but always a fact,	6:55
	do we make our own decisions in the business world?	7:04
	Yes.	7:08
	After we have dealt with government help	7:10
	in the shape of tariffs	7:13
	and government hindrances in the shape of taxes	7:16
	focusing one eye on trade unions	7:22
	and the other on our competitors.	7:25
	Ask your fathers as they fill out their income tax forms,	7:29
	if they are their own,	7:34
	but leave the door open behind you for a speedy exit.	7:37
	In education, those of us who teach	7:45
	are for the most part intellectual middleman	7:47
	drawing upon the stores	7:52
	accumulated through the ages by others.	7:54
	We retail what we consider the best goods to you	7:59
	defending ourselves with the whimsical fact	8:04
	that Shakespeare borrowed too.	8:07
	Plagiarism is copying from one book.	8:13
	Research is copying from two books.	8:16
	(audience laughing)	8:20
	In the field of religion we are met today in a chapel,	8:28
	which is the era of Methodist mission.	8:32
	A faith, which was founded by a Jew,	8:37
	interpreted by Greeks,	8:41
	organized by Romans,	8:44
	reformed by a German,	8:47
	formulated by a Frenchman living in Switzerland	8:51
	and revamped and brought to this country by Englishman.	8:55
	Are we our own in business,	9:01
	education, religion?	9:04
	Well, what should we say of Henley's lines.	9:09
	It matters not how straight the gate,	9:13
	how charged with punishment, the scraw.	9:16
	I am the master of my fate.	9:22
	I am the captain of my soul.	9:26
	Well, that may be courage but it's not proof.	9:32
	Listen to J.M Barry	9:37
	speaking about Henley to the students	9:40
	of St. Andrew's University in Scotland.	9:42
	I found the other day, an old letter from Henley	9:47
	that told me of the circumstances	9:52
	in which he wrote that poem, in 'Victus'	9:54
	He writes,	9:59
	"I was a patient in the old infirmary of Edinburgh.	10:01
	I had heard vaguely of Lister	10:07
	and went there as a sort of for longed hope	10:11
	on the chance of saving my foot.	10:14
	The great surgeon received me as he did	10:19
	and does receive everybody with the greatest tenderness.	10:22
	And for 20 months,	10:28
	20 months,	10:32
	I lay in one or other ward of the old place	10:35
	under his care.	10:40
	It was a disparate business, but he saved my foot	10:43
	and here I am."	10:49
	That's the end of the quotation from the letter	10:53
	and J.M Barry adds, "there he was ladies and gentlemen.	10:55
	And what was he doing during that dispersate business	11:00
	singing that he was master of his feet?	11:05
	Yeah,	11:11
	thanks to Lord Lister and a procession of nurses	11:12
	for 20 months.	11:17
	We are not in sole control of our fate.	11:20
	We may be junior officers,	11:25
	but we are not captains of our soul.	11:28
	Isolationism is a willow the wisp.	11:32
	Interrelatedness is the fact	11:37
	we are not our own.	11:41
	More than that we are bought with a price.	11:46
	Now, it's unpleasant to accept the fact	11:55
	that we are not our own,	11:58
	it's even harder to acknowledge that we are bought,	11:59
	paid for, purchased.	12:04
	But it means that we belong to someone else	12:09
	in the vocabulary of religion,	12:14
	we come face to face with the fact of atonement	12:16
	from the simplest aspect	12:23
	that means that our life has been guaranteed to us	12:25
	because of the work of someone else.	12:30
	Take an example from the history of our own country.	12:36
	George Washington	12:41
	is not an easy man to estimate.	12:42
	He has been buried under an avalanche of words	12:48
	and clouded in the midst of sentiment,	12:53
	yet he is our past.	12:58
	We never had a past as America until he came.	13:04
	America did not produce him	13:11
	rather,	13:15
	he produced America certainly the United States.	13:16
	Defeated in almost every battle he fought.	13:22
	The tenacity of purpose in his character, won the war.	13:28
	He bought us with a price.	13:35
	What shall we say of Lincoln?	13:42
	When I left Scotland,	13:45
	a businessman there surprised me with this farewell.	13:46
	"Think of the privilege of living in the same country	13:52
	that produced Abraham Lincoln."	13:58
	A poet who was one of my colleagues at Amherst	14:04
	summed up Lincoln in this way,	14:07
	that face like a sad poem	14:10
	whose genius it was	14:17
	to administer a hard wisdom	14:21
	with infinite pity.	14:24
	Who's genius it was to administer a hard wisdom	14:29
	with infinite pity.	14:35
	One understands the words, ascribed to a Negro woman,	14:37
	holding up her baby	14:41
	as Lincoln's funeral procession passed by	14:43
	take a long look, honey,	14:49
	he died for you.	14:53
	What shall we say of soldiers, sailors and airmen.	14:57
	Some unknown, some only too well known	15:03
	who in two world wars and in Korea,	15:08
	gave themselves for an idea,	15:13
	an idea which granted us	15:16
	the privilege of continuing life	15:20
	in a continuing good society.	15:25
	If we think of atonement in terms of education,	15:31
	we remember Socrates	15:35
	believing so much in proof	15:38
	that he drank the cup of hemlock to it	15:42
	almost as a toast.	15:46
	We recall men in the middle ages,	15:49
	amid the seeming darkness of that time.	15:52
	Preserving for us the riches of classical civilization.	15:55
	We think of the descendants of the Renaissance	16:00
	and of the enlightenment seeking truth.	16:03
	Come whenst it may, cost what it will	16:07
	and we must not forget the men and women of America	16:12
	who so passionately believed in education	16:18
	that they gave themselves and that processioned	16:23
	to found schools and colleges,	16:28
	the length and breadth of this land,	16:31
	including this university.	16:35
	We are bought with a price.	16:39
	If we think of atonement in terms of religion,	16:44
	we recall the procession of saints and martyrs,	16:48
	priests and prophets	16:52
	who gave us our decent Christian heritage,	16:54
	Jesus, Paul, Augustine,	16:57
	Aquinas, Luther, Calvin,	17:01
	Bunyan, Wesley,	17:05
	Jonathan Edwards, Moody,	17:08
	and a host of ordinary men and women.	17:11
	The concept of atonement teaches us	17:16
	that our lives are what they are	17:19
	because men and women in all ages	17:24
	have been willing to die for things	17:28
	which they believe to be of ultimate importance.	17:31
	And we rise on stepping stones of their dead selves	17:38
	to higher things.	17:46
	If we are at all sensitive in spirit,	17:49
	with our knowledge of our history penetrated by imagination,	17:53
	we appreciate the fact	17:59
	that we are the indebted heirs of a heritage,	18:01
	which stretches across the centuries	18:05
	and across the seas.	18:09
	We're not our own, we are bought with a price	18:15
	What's our response to that fact?	18:20
	Do we deserve what has been done?	18:24
	Do we passively, carelessly,	18:30
	thoughtlessly accept our tradition	18:34
	or do we consciously, gratefully,	18:41
	seriously, possess our inheritance.	18:45
	The writer of the epistle to the Hebrews	18:51
	in his chapter on the heroes of faith,	18:55
	suddenly slips in an unexpected comment	18:58
	of whom the world was not worthy.	19:06
	Now that may well be the saddest parenthesis in holy writ	19:14
	of whom the world was not worthy.	19:21
	It may have been a thought which struck him suddenly	19:27
	as he reflected on the great men and women of old	19:30
	who had given him his heritage.	19:33
	He may never have meant to dictate it,	19:36
	but his secretary heard him mutter it out aloud	19:40
	and jotted it down so that we read it today.	19:43
	Is that the verdict to be passed on us?	19:48
	How can we be worthy?	19:54
	Well, we can be worthy by remembering.	19:59
	It's no strange theological doctrine	20:04
	that we are saved by memory	20:09
	as much as by faith and hope.	20:13
	That's why we rejoice in such a passage from the Apocrypha	20:18
	as Ecclesiasticus 44,	20:22
	which was read as the morning lesson,	20:24
	let us now praise famous men	20:28
	and our fathers that begot us.	20:33
	Subjects did bear rule in their kingdoms.	20:38
	Men renowned for power, giving counsel	20:42
	by their understanding and declaring prophecies.	20:47
	Leaders of the people by their counsels	20:52
	and by that understanding men of learning for the people,	20:57
	not just men of learning, men of learning for the people.	21:03
	Why isn't there eloquent in that instructions.	21:09
	And then in the light	21:15
	of the St. Matthew Passion this afternoon,	21:18
	think of that line.	21:20
	Searches found out musical tunes	21:21
	and set forth verses in writing.	21:27
	Their bodies are buried in peace	21:33
	and their name liveth forever more.	21:35
	The people will tell of their wisdom	21:40
	and the congregation will show forth their praise.	21:42
	(mumbling) we sense the reason for such words as these,	21:46
	the glad acceptance of a goodly heritage,	21:51
	we shall not speak slightingly	21:56
	or superciliously of independence day	22:01
	and Amherst's day in the nation	22:05
	or a founder's day in the university.	22:08
	Moreover,	22:13
	we shall go behind the political and historical facts.	22:14
	We look at the ideas	22:18
	which inspire these men and women of old.	22:19
	They gave themselves to something greater than themselves,	22:24
	even though the price might be death.	22:29
	Now, that means they weren't religious	22:33
	because one valid, though broad definition of religion	22:35
	is self committal to the more than self.	22:39
	Self committal to the more than self.	22:45
	And since we worship within the aspect of religion	22:50
	known as the Christian tradition,	22:52
	we shall remember Christmas, Good Friday and Easter	22:55
	because they're high days	23:02
	in the life of our Lord Jesus Christ.	23:04
	Conscious, grateful remembering	23:08
	is the first step in making ourselves worthy.	23:11
	So that, that sad parenthesis in Hebrews	23:17
	may not apply to us.	23:21
	But there's a second aspect to our being worthy.	23:24
	We cannot really repay those who have bought us	23:29
	in the nation, in the school,	23:34
	in the church,	23:37
	but we can emulate them	23:41
	by helping this generation to buy the next	23:45
	and the next and the next again.	23:50
	We can honor our past by doing for our descendants	23:56
	what was done for us.	24:03
	The late Dean Ing of St. Paul's	24:08
	has put this into theological language.	24:11
	Listen to him.	24:14
	"The cross, as I understand it	24:16
	is not so much an atonement for the past	24:20
	as the opening of the gate into the future.	24:26
	Redemption means admission to redemptive work,"	24:32
	and that's interesting.	24:38
	Redemption means admission to redemptive work.	24:39
	Now think of that in the areas that we've been looking at.	24:45
	Some of us will enter redemptive work	24:51
	in the varied aspects of national service.	24:54
	We had better.	24:58
	We shall make sure that the beliefs of the founding fathers	25:01
	are carried on with their determination	25:04
	and for support of this declaration	25:09
	with a firm reliance	25:12
	on the protection of divine providence,	25:14
	we mutually pledge to each other our lives,	25:18
	our fortune, our sacred honor,	25:23
	and they meant it.	25:31
	We shall vote always and as wisely as we can,	25:34
	some of us will enter the fields of local state,	25:41
	national and international government	25:44
	as political candidates.	25:47
	Others obvious, will find out redemptive work	25:51
	in the realm of education.	25:53
	We shall attend PTA meetings	25:58
	with interest rather than with annoyance.	26:02
	We may run for the local education authorities.	26:07
	We may give ourselves to teaching on any level	26:11
	from kindergarten to the graduate on professional schools,	26:14
	all of which are equally important.	26:19
	We can try to be intelligent alumni	26:25
	believing that what is good in this university	26:31
	is worth preserving yet knowing that even the good	26:34
	is not good enough for future.	26:40
	Not many of us will enter a professional religious life,	26:45
	but a church is strong because of its laity.	26:51
	Shall we who recognize our religious heritage,	26:58
	make sure that the verities	27:01
	and saving pieties of the Judeo Christian tradition	27:05
	are maintained.	27:09
	Shall we always recognize that the fear of the Lord	27:13
	is at least part of wisdom,	27:18
	if it be not the beginning of wisdom.	27:21
	Let us not lose sight of the gentle redeeming virtues	27:25
	in the midst of an angry, noisy world.	27:32
	The payment for being bought, is to buy.	27:38
	Since this is the last opportunity	27:45
	I shall have to speak to those of you who graduate in June	27:46
	from the various schools and colleges of our university,	27:51
	let me say a closing word, especially to you.	27:55
	Some of whom I have known well,	27:59
	all of whom I appreciate.	28:03
	The late Sir, Henry Jones	28:06
	Once professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University	28:09
	wrote this haunting statement.	28:12
	"If I were asked to say	28:16
	what period in the life of a man or of our nation	28:19
	is to be called most happy, I should answer,	28:23
	it is when outer circumstances and inner mood	28:29
	conspire to send them forth upon a great enterprise."	28:35
	It is when outer circumstances and inner mood	28:43
	conspire to send them forth upon a great enterprise.	28:50
	Well, seniors the outer circumstances are almost here.	28:57
	You must go.	29:03
	Your rooms have probably already been rented to others.	29:06
	The inner mood	29:13
	that you alone know.	29:17
	I've sought to suggest a mood	29:23
	one, which has meant much to me.	29:26
	We're not our own,	29:30
	we're bought for a price.	29:34
	It is the laudable aim of the Christian scholar	29:39
	to square that debt	29:45
	by buying with any price,	29:48
	those who come after.	29:54
	Amen.	30:00
	Let us pray.	30:02

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Title:

James T. Cleland - "Bought with a Price" (May 7, 1961)

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https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r42z16r02

Date:

May 7, 1961

Speaker:

Cleland, James T. (James Tough), 1903-1974

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Duke University. Chapel

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UA.17.01.0003 RR-0142
ref5488_1z7
uachapelsermaud
duke:628425
dcrau002160
ark:/87924/r42z16r02
28773e62-2258-4295-bb98-4459154e0463

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James T. Cleland - "Bought with a Price" (May 7, 1961)

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