Albert C. Outler - "Man Alive!" (October 29, 1961)
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| - | In the 10th chapter of the gospel according to Saint John, | 0:21 |
| and in the 10th verse, | 0:26 | |
| there is a text to which I call your attention, | 0:29 | |
| and then which I hope we will listen for and hear | 0:32 | |
| a word from the Lord. | 0:38 | |
| And Jesus said, "I am come that they God's sheep, | 0:42 | |
| "may have life and may have it in all its fullness. | 0:52 | |
| "Life in all its fullness." | 1:02 | |
| The centrum and the persistent of the urgent problem in life | 1:10 | |
| of course, is life itself. | 1:16 | |
| Its quality, its meaning, its destiny. | 1:19 | |
| What does it mean to be alive, really alive? | 1:26 | |
| What difference is there between their existence | 1:34 | |
| and life at its full potential, | 1:41 | |
| between impoverished and abundant living? | 1:45 | |
| This problem of life is posed for us | 1:50 | |
| by the experiences of living and working, but partly also | 1:53 | |
| by the tragic facts of life's denials and negations. | 1:58 | |
| By our experiences of transience and evanescence, | 2:05 | |
| and by the other present prospect | 2:12 | |
| and fore knowledge of death. | 2:16 | |
| Anyway you take it, anyway you turn, | 2:20 | |
| there is the challenge of life, constant, unavoidable. | 2:24 | |
| The ways in which men and women respond to this challenge | 2:31 | |
| are depressingly varied and insufficient. | 2:37 | |
| Still, every style of life, every behavior pattern, | 2:42 | |
| every basic conviction and goal, | 2:49 | |
| one way or another is an instance of life | 2:54 | |
| trying to come to terms with itself. | 2:59 | |
| You cannot deny life's challenge, | 3:04 | |
| either, for even to try to do this, | 3:07 | |
| and to run away from life, and to hide, to cut your risks, | 3:14 | |
| is itself a way, and a poor way | 3:22 | |
| of coming to terms with life. | 3:27 | |
| As a great sociologist Kurt Levine, | 3:29 | |
| used to talk about life spaces. | 3:31 | |
| The human beings total experience, | 3:35 | |
| the concurrent unity between the self and the world. | 3:39 | |
| The vital sum of the conscious and the half conscious, | 3:44 | |
| and the unconscious dispositions and attitudes | 3:49 | |
| which give color and value tone, and to experience. | 3:51 | |
| Our deepest anxieties arise from the sense of dread | 3:58 | |
| that our life spaces have become, or may become vacant, | 4:03 | |
| distorted, incoherent. | 4:11 | |
| One of those taunting reframes in modern literature | 4:16 | |
| is that chorus in "Murder in the Cathedral", | 4:19 | |
| where the women of Canterbury bespeak their fear, | 4:23 | |
| of having the drab vicissitudes of a dull piece upset. | 4:27 | |
| "Seven years, they say, "seven years we have lived quietly, | 4:35 | |
| "succeeded in avoiding notice. | 4:40 | |
| "Living and partly living. | 4:43 | |
| "There have been oppression and luxury. | 4:47 | |
| "There have been poverty and license. | 4:48 | |
| "There has been minor injustice, | 4:51 | |
| "yet, we have gone on living, | 4:53 | |
| "living and partly living. | 4:56 | |
| "Living and partly living. | 5:00 | |
| "One year, the apples are abundant | 5:03 | |
| "another year the plums are lacking, | 5:06 | |
| "yet, we have gone on living, living and partly living. | 5:08 | |
| "Living and partly living." | 5:15 | |
| Now, there's a burlesque version of this same theme | 5:20 | |
| and the new story about the oil man out at Midland, | 5:23 | |
| who was lying upon his death bed. | 5:29 | |
| And he said to his solicitors and hovering wife, | 5:32 | |
| "And honey, I'd like to be buried in the car." | 5:38 | |
| Now, to translate this off to (inaudible), | 5:41 | |
| this means in the Cadillac. | 5:45 | |
| And she says, "Darling, if that's what you want, | 5:48 | |
| "that's the way it'll be." | 5:50 | |
| And he died, and she made arrangements | 5:53 | |
| and they got a dragline and made a proper size grave | 5:57 | |
| and a crane for the committal service. | 6:02 | |
| And as the coffin and the corpse | 6:05 | |
| were being lowered into the grave, | 6:09 | |
| one of his friends nudged the other at the grave side | 6:13 | |
| and said, "And boy, now that's what I call, really living." | 6:17 | |
| Every way you turn in the New Testament, | 6:25 | |
| I think you will see a deep interest in this struggle | 6:27 | |
| about life's meaning. | 6:32 | |
| In this struggle of life with life and of life with death. | 6:34 | |
| But one of the most interesting ways | 6:40 | |
| in which this problem is dealt with, | 6:42 | |
| is by borrowing and adapting a linguistic distinction | 6:46 | |
| that the New Testament people picked up | 6:52 | |
| from the classical tradition, between bios and zoe. | 6:56 | |
| Now we know these terms as they occur | 7:02 | |
| in biology and zoology. | 7:06 | |
| But you could hardly guess from the difference | 7:10 | |
| between biology and zoology, | 7:14 | |
| and what the New Testament has in mind between bios, | 7:17 | |
| as the where with all of life and the what with all of life. | 7:23 | |
| And zoe, which regularly means life itself. | 7:28 | |
| Life in its fullness, life at its best. | 7:35 | |
| In the story of the prodigal son, | 7:40 | |
| the restless boy demands his share of the paternal estate, | 7:43 | |
| and the father as the story goes, | 7:47 | |
| divides and then hands over to this boy, | 7:51 | |
| his bios, his money and goods. | 7:57 | |
| And it was this bios, this life, this where with all of life | 8:05 | |
| that the boy and proceeded then to squander. | 8:10 | |
| And bios can be used to refer to physical vitality, | 8:15 | |
| as in our expression, step lively. | 8:20 | |
| It can refer to one's livelihood, | 8:24 | |
| how he makes a good living or a kind of a poor living. | 8:28 | |
| It can either refer to one's public career | 8:34 | |
| or one's public life. | 8:38 | |
| But every where in the New Testament | 8:41 | |
| and at least generally in the classical tradition, | 8:45 | |
| bios has the connotation of the substructure of life. | 8:49 | |
| The material means of life, the structures and processes | 8:55 | |
| by which life goes on. | 9:04 | |
| Now, zoe, on the other hand, | 9:08 | |
| always has to do with life in its ideal, | 9:11 | |
| or divinely ordained reality. | 9:17 | |
| Life as God designed it to be. | 9:22 | |
| Life as it may grow to flower and fruit | 9:24 | |
| from this sub soil of material subsistence | 9:28 | |
| and the molds of culture. | 9:32 | |
| Life, as it finds the power to defy deaths power | 9:35 | |
| to negate the power of life. | 9:40 | |
| Life at its full stretch of freedom, intelligence and love. | 9:44 | |
| And above all, life in communion with God. | 9:51 | |
| Now this is Jesus' message | 9:57 | |
| in the parable of the good shepherd. | 9:59 | |
| This parable is shaped around a complex metaphor, | 10:02 | |
| taken from the commonplaces of the experiences | 10:05 | |
| of a pastoral society. | 10:09 | |
| And this is, in some ways misleading. | 10:12 | |
| For most of us have not had very much firsthand experience | 10:16 | |
| in a pastoral encounter with sheep. | 10:23 | |
| That is to say, pastoral encounter with live sheep, | 10:29 | |
| with four footed wooly sheep. | 10:33 | |
| And what is worse, there are a great many people | 10:37 | |
| in the modern world, who do not know how deprived they are | 10:39 | |
| because they do not understand what it means to be a pastor, | 10:43 | |
| in it's original and literal sense. | 10:48 | |
| I speak of this with some complacence because as it happens, | 10:52 | |
| this gap in my experience was filled in two years ago. | 10:56 | |
| Our then high school senior, David, | 11:02 | |
| had declared his interest in agriculture over things urban. | 11:06 | |
| And we had arranged for him to commute | 11:10 | |
| out to the nearest small town high school, | 11:13 | |
| where they had an FFA program. | 11:16 | |
| But then as it turned out, | 11:20 | |
| he had to have an animal husbandry project at home. | 11:22 | |
| And what it was, was sheep. | 11:28 | |
| Two (inaudible) use in the fall and winter, | 11:32 | |
| three lambs in the spring, | 11:36 | |
| and all of this in a sizeable backyard | 11:39 | |
| in an upper middle class neighborhood in Dallas. | 11:41 | |
| Thank God, it was a neighborhood, | 11:46 | |
| and thought we have good neighbors | 11:48 | |
| and our sheep became something of a neighborhood project, | 11:50 | |
| especially for the kids. | 11:53 | |
| Now, you will endure to despair the details | 11:56 | |
| of how everybody in our family, including the dog | 11:59 | |
| became amateur pastors, | 12:03 | |
| with dad as the unlicensed veterinarian. | 12:06 | |
| Because, we discovered that city vest | 12:09 | |
| are not trained for sheep, | 12:12 | |
| and country vets charge outrageously | 12:13 | |
| when they are called into the city. | 12:16 | |
| But the upshot of the avail was that | 12:20 | |
| it brought home the pastoral imagery of the Bible | 12:23 | |
| more vividly than I would have ever imagined. | 12:26 | |
| And for sheep, will quite easily the most important | 12:30 | |
| domestic animals in the biblical world. | 12:33 | |
| A great deal of the economy and culture of that world | 12:36 | |
| was intertwined with the business of shepherding. | 12:40 | |
| And now sheep en masse or in flock, | 12:44 | |
| are not very bright creatures, | 12:47 | |
| but they have their attraction. | 12:50 | |
| And a healthy sheep is as lively a creature | 12:53 | |
| as you will ever have to deal with. | 12:56 | |
| Now, an oriental sheep fold was a kind of a co-op. | 13:00 | |
| Several flocks shelter, | 13:04 | |
| then one fold with their respective shepherds | 13:06 | |
| coming in and out and doing business through the doorkeeper. | 13:12 | |
| There was, you see, typically only one gate. | 13:20 | |
| And the gatekeepers job was crucial | 13:25 | |
| in this whole arrangement. | 13:28 | |
| Sheep were valuable prizes for rustlers. | 13:31 | |
| You can rustle a sheep over a sheepfold wall, | 13:34 | |
| as you cannot easily do with a steer or a horse. | 13:37 | |
| Now all of these things were commonplace | 13:43 | |
| to the people who heard this parable of the good shepherd. | 13:44 | |
| Although not even the disciples could first grasp | 13:47 | |
| Jesus application of the parable to Himself, | 13:51 | |
| and to His mission and to His work in the world. | 13:55 | |
| He speaks of Himself as the door or the gate, | 14:00 | |
| and then again, as the gatekeeper, | 14:04 | |
| one who knows the rightful owners of the several flocks | 14:06 | |
| and who keeps watching ward against the thieves and robbers, | 14:10 | |
| the rustlers. | 14:14 | |
| And then He speaks of Himself as the good shepherd. | 14:16 | |
| One who has sheep and who knows their needs, | 14:18 | |
| and who is more interested in their safety and wellbeing | 14:23 | |
| than in His own. | 14:28 | |
| He contrast Himself with the hireling, | 14:30 | |
| who has no stake in the business, | 14:34 | |
| no investment in the flock. | 14:36 | |
| And so feel free to decide | 14:38 | |
| when danger has used up his wages. | 14:41 | |
| And so, Jesus focuses these pastoral metaphors | 14:46 | |
| upon His declaration of purpose in the world. | 14:50 | |
| The reason for His coming, the reason for His being here, | 14:56 | |
| is that men may have life and have it in its fullness. | 15:02 | |
| Men may have life and have life up to its potential. | 15:11 | |
| Men may be alive. | 15:17 | |
| Now, the word of course, is the way, life itself. | 15:21 | |
| And this use of zoe is not to disparage or despise bios. | 15:26 | |
| Sheep have to have the wherewithal to live. | 15:32 | |
| And it is an anti-biblical asceticism | 15:35 | |
| that despises the material basis of life. | 15:38 | |
| Your heavenly Father knows | 15:42 | |
| that you have need of these material things. | 15:45 | |
| But, the problem remains, and it is particularly poignant | 15:49 | |
| for men and women and nevertheless, | 15:55 | |
| than in these days of hour. | 15:59 | |
| The question of the means and the ends, of living and life. | 16:02 | |
| As this question gets rather complicated | 16:09 | |
| by the pressures of priority and pride | 16:12 | |
| that fill out daily realm. | 16:16 | |
| If in the course of making a living or getting a living, | 16:19 | |
| or getting ready to live | 16:24 | |
| or struggling for minimum subsistence, | 16:26 | |
| you don't really come alive, don't appreciate or express | 16:29 | |
| or fulfill your life's faith, | 16:35 | |
| and then something very tragic has happened or is happening. | 16:39 | |
| If from the fear of life, or the lust for life, | 16:44 | |
| or the confusion as to what life is all about, | 16:49 | |
| a human being is diverted or derailed, or shattered, | 16:53 | |
| then something priceless is wasted and ruined. | 16:57 | |
| A human creativity has to come out of the energy left over | 17:04 | |
| after our needs as bio social animals have been met. | 17:09 | |
| No surplus, no creativity. | 17:14 | |
| This is why material competence is so very important, | 17:18 | |
| but it is also why materialism, | 17:23 | |
| the preoccupation with material competence, | 17:27 | |
| invariably corrupts the men who take it for a style of life. | 17:31 | |
| It is also why in a contest between a hungry materialism | 17:39 | |
| and a sybaritic materialism, | 17:45 | |
| the soft guys always finish last. | 17:49 | |
| If the current struggle for man's minds and commitments | 17:53 | |
| is a struggle between two materialisms, | 17:56 | |
| then we might as well face it, | 18:00 | |
| the lean and the mean have an advantage | 18:03 | |
| over the sentimental and the well intentioned. | 18:08 | |
| Now there's no need amongst thoughtful folk | 18:16 | |
| to be label the irony of confusing that, | 18:18 | |
| where with all of life and life itself. | 18:21 | |
| And to be label the unfairly obvious things | 18:24 | |
| about the spiritual poverty of a thing minded, | 18:28 | |
| gadget ridden, money mad, power obsessed society. | 18:32 | |
| What are you doing in a university, | 18:37 | |
| if you don't know that the quality of life | 18:39 | |
| does not consist in the abundance of things, of bios? | 18:42 | |
| What are you here for, if you do not already realize | 18:49 | |
| that materialism is a stultification | 18:54 | |
| of the real possibilities of human living? | 18:58 | |
| Surely, we agree with these parts of our minds and hearts | 19:02 | |
| that abundant life is a moral and spiritual affair. | 19:07 | |
| It's the experience of having one's life space full | 19:11 | |
| and resonant with intellectual excitement, model integrity, | 19:15 | |
| spiritual dedication. | 19:21 | |
| But, now, what is our life potential? | 19:24 | |
| Nobody knows for certain, | 19:28 | |
| but certainly it includes the peaks of delight | 19:30 | |
| and achievement that all too often we suppose are reserved | 19:34 | |
| for the geniuses, the saints, and the other guys. | 19:39 | |
| In a first rate book called | 19:46 | |
| the "Human Potential", Gardner Murphy | 19:48 | |
| has a whimsical suggestion that goes like this. | 19:51 | |
| "My thesis, he says, "is very simple, | 19:54 | |
| "and to a reasonable psychologist, very shocking. | 19:57 | |
| "If it is katydid nature to scrape, | 20:02 | |
| "frog nature to croak, wobbler nature to wobble, | 20:08 | |
| "then it must be human nature to play | 20:15 | |
| "the 'Air for the G-string' on a Stradivarius." | 20:19 | |
| And this may sound a try for homiletical | 20:25 | |
| for a great psychologist, | 20:28 | |
| and you yourself might like to vary the questions there, | 20:29 | |
| are aspiration and proportion, but the thesis is sound. | 20:33 | |
| On the one hand, bios is simply not enough for man alive. | 20:39 | |
| On the other hand, the typical human life | 20:47 | |
| has all too little zoe, all too little real fulfillment. | 20:50 | |
| And here's where we come to a crisis | 20:58 | |
| in this sort of reflection about life. | 21:01 | |
| And for our normal impulse, | 21:04 | |
| is to suppose that if we all ought to have more zoe, | 21:05 | |
| then let's gird ourselves for extra effort. | 21:09 | |
| Than to, let's choose more firmly | 21:13 | |
| between living and partly living. | 21:16 | |
| You may suppose that I am exalting you | 21:20 | |
| to a more careful rearrangement in your budgeted vitalities | 21:23 | |
| and in the allocation of your vital energies, | 21:29 | |
| and cheering you on to more zoe. | 21:33 | |
| But this is the last thing in the New Testament | 21:39 | |
| as a real possibility when it is talking about life. | 21:44 | |
| Now, bios, it is true, is more or less at our disposal. | 21:50 | |
| What we have, our material life of organic bio social life | 21:54 | |
| is more or less our own to have and to hold | 21:59 | |
| from this time forward, for better or for worse. | 22:03 | |
| But zoe, is not really our own. | 22:07 | |
| It is always spoken off as a gift, as a benefit, | 22:14 | |
| as a blessing. | 22:20 | |
| It is one might almost say, God's metamorphosis of bios. | 22:23 | |
| Every human life in its in most an utmost essence | 22:32 | |
| is a specific creation of God Himself. | 22:37 | |
| We receive it from God, we enjoy it in Him, | 22:41 | |
| we hold it in trust to Him. | 22:45 | |
| You are not your own, you are bought with a price. | 22:48 | |
| And the life which is given us, we must receive and use | 22:53 | |
| and be prepared to hand it back and to leave it | 23:02 | |
| in God's keeping. | 23:07 | |
| The abundant life which Jesus came to bring to man | 23:09 | |
| is not therefore, an augmentation of life. | 23:13 | |
| Where with all, nor even an addition of resolution | 23:16 | |
| and human effort. | 23:21 | |
| It is rather, the reinvigoration of moral concern | 23:22 | |
| of our spiritual power to respond to God, | 23:28 | |
| to commune with God and to live by God's grace | 23:32 | |
| in God's good world. | 23:37 | |
| Faith is not just believing that life is more than meat | 23:39 | |
| and the body more than raiment and that sort of thing. | 23:43 | |
| It is in essence our being willing to receive our lives | 23:46 | |
| from God and to be glad to have it so. | 23:51 | |
| Unfaith or bad faith is the effort to snatch our lives, | 23:56 | |
| to possess this gift from God, | 24:02 | |
| and then to dispose of it, by and for ourselves. | 24:05 | |
| Thus, Jesus, can say, "I am the life, | 24:12 | |
| "the mediator between the source of life, the giver of life | 24:17 | |
| "and our actual life spaces." | 24:22 | |
| Really to live, is to live from God, for God, to God. | 24:26 | |
| Zoe is at every moment and in its totality, | 24:35 | |
| an exercise of faith and enterprise our faith. | 24:40 | |
| If we are really to have life in its fullness, | 24:45 | |
| we must be willing to live it on God's terms | 24:48 | |
| and within the order of His providence and love and care. | 24:51 | |
| In a time like this, a time of war, | 24:57 | |
| a time of nerves stretching, tension and conflict. | 25:01 | |
| When the tides of materialism and barbarism and inhumanity | 25:05 | |
| are all running so strongly | 25:09 | |
| against the vitalities of the spirit, | 25:11 | |
| and the moral order in the human community. | 25:14 | |
| We will have to do much more than increase our efforts | 25:17 | |
| on behalf of personal or even national self enhancement, | 25:21 | |
| survival and glory. | 25:26 | |
| As men and as a nation, we shall not be worthy to survive | 25:29 | |
| in this struggle for survival, | 25:33 | |
| if we merely oppose one bios to another, | 25:35 | |
| set one materialism over against another, | 25:38 | |
| organize our freedom merely to oppose enslavement. | 25:41 | |
| As men of faith and freedom, we must be willing to seek | 25:47 | |
| and to receive the gifts of life from God. | 25:51 | |
| And we must learn to cherish and to enjoy them | 25:55 | |
| without fear and without greed. | 25:59 | |
| And we must take these gifts of life | 26:03 | |
| and make them an offertory to God and to our human brethren | 26:06 | |
| in self-sacrificing, self-fulfilling service. | 26:13 | |
| And finally, we must come to rest our hopes and confidence | 26:19 | |
| in God's purpose and God's power, | 26:23 | |
| to redeem and to fulfill our lives | 26:27 | |
| in the face of the threats of transience, | 26:31 | |
| evanescence, half-life and death. | 26:37 | |
| Jesus, said, "I am come that men may really live, | 26:42 | |
| "really achieve their full potential, | 26:47 | |
| "really learn to live and die in the love of God. | 26:50 | |
| "And in the certitude that God is Himself victor | 26:57 | |
| "and victor yet to be." | 27:04 | |
| And so to live in that devotion, | 27:07 | |
| which love and gratitude and confidence create and sustain. | 27:10 | |
| Eternal life in the midst of our historic exist, | 27:18 | |
| under the eye and by the power of God. | 27:27 | |
| What more could men aspire to? | 27:34 | |
| But what less should men alive settle fall?" | 27:38 | |
| Let us pray. | 27:47 | |
| Almighty God, who art the author and giver of life, | 27:54 | |
| whose service is our perfect freedom. | 27:59 | |
| Bestow our wills to be willing | 28:03 | |
| to receive our lives at thy hands, | 28:06 | |
| to live our lives in thy fear and favor. | 28:10 | |
| That in the agonies of decision and responsibility | 28:14 | |
| of our time, | 28:18 | |
| we may not confuse life's where, with all with life itself, | 28:19 | |
| nor ever be content with less than that fullness of life, | 28:24 | |
| which thou does promise and provide. | 28:29 | |
| Grant therefore that in all the changes and chances | 28:33 | |
| of our mortality, our hearts may be surely fixed on thee, | 28:37 | |
| whom to know is life and peace. | 28:43 | |
| And this we pray in the name of Him, | 28:48 | |
| who came that we might truly live, | 28:50 | |
| our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. | 28:54 | |
| Amen. | 28:58 |