Charles E. Raven - "Sequel to the Resurrection" (May 5, 1963)

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	(choir sings)	0:03
	(organ music)	2:58
	(choir sings)	3:25
-	Almighty God, we, the disciples of the risen Lord,	4:10
	make these offerings for thy service.	4:14
	Praying that as the resurrection of Jesus Christ	4:18
	brought new life and hope to all mankind.	4:21
	So may these offerings remind the world	4:25
	and impress the world that Christ is alive	4:28
	for all of them in his name, amen.	4:32
	(soft organ music)	4:37
	In the name of the eternal God, Father, Son	4:59
	and Holy Spirit, amen.	5:03
	The Lord is risen.	5:10
	The Lord is risen indeed.	5:12
	So the church throughout the ages has acclaimed	5:16
	the message of Easter and its splendor	5:20
	in the victory of Jesus.	5:25
	But in the joy of that victory, we have too often,	5:29
	I think, forgotten the full significance	5:34
	of Easter's message.	5:39
	We have stopped with the idea	5:41
	of the living presence of the Lord with us,	5:45
	each one of us and in his church,	5:48
	but we have too often neglected the sequels to it.	5:52
	By which alone, I think the apostolic band was able	5:59
	to undertake the colossal task of evangelizing the world.	6:05
	It is with those sequels,	6:11
	that I want to be concerned today and the weekends,	6:14
	because they are of enormous relevance	6:21
	to our present situation and opportunity.	6:23
	In this amazing day of the Lord,	6:27
	when for the first time, the vision of the ages	6:30
	of a worldwide human family could be,	6:35
	indeed must be brought to fruition.	6:39
	We cannot afford to neglect	6:43
	the two consequences which flow from Easter.	6:46
	The first to them of course,	6:52
	is the revelation to the disciples	6:54
	that this Jesus, whom they had known	6:58
	as companion, and teacher, master and prophet, Messiah,	7:01
	and gift of God, was much more than that.	7:10
	That he was not just one more	7:17
	the last and greatest in a succession of messengers,	7:20
	though he held that place.	7:24
	But that he had for them,	7:27
	and as they came for the world,	7:29
	the eternal value of the divine.	7:33
	That is of course the meaning	7:36
	of what we commemorated ascension tied.	7:39
	When the they saw the glory of God	7:43
	transfiguring and fulfilling the presence of Jesus.	7:51
	That is the first sequel.	8:00
	And the second is of course	8:02
	that which happened at Pentecost.	8:05
	The consequent development,	8:09
	the consequent emergence, as we might say,	8:12
	in the group of the apostles of a new kind of community,	8:16
	a community of which it could truly be said	8:21
	that the multitude of them that believed	8:24
	were of one heart and of one soul.	8:27
	Now those two consequences represent the answer	8:31
	which the church can give to the two supreme needs	8:38
	of our day and generation.	8:43
	No one could spend as my wife and I have spent	8:46
	the last three months since Christmas	8:49
	in the city of Brussels	8:52
	without realizing the total bewilderment,	8:54
	not to say the total bankruptcy of European statesmanship.	8:58
	And anyone who takes the future of the world seriously	9:04
	must find it almost impossible to predict	9:10
	what will be the position of that world,	9:14
	even of the western alliance in the next six months.	9:18
	We have lost what, when I was last in this place,	9:25
	five years ago, Walter Lippmann had taught us	9:31
	to call a public philosophy.	9:35
	We have not got a coherent outlook upon the world,	9:39
	neither churches nor sexual societies,	9:44
	neither art nor music, neither ethics nor sex,	9:49
	neither philosophy nor religion,	9:55
	has a coherent philosophy.	9:58
	And we are at the mercy of bright ideas in religion,	10:01
	plenty of them in the world,	10:07
	it's almost universal bright ideas	10:11
	but no consistent and generally acknowledged	10:15
	compass bearings for our course.	10:22
	Now that is what the early church claimed	10:28
	to have discovered when they had reflected upon	10:32
	the impact which Jesus made upon his contemporaries.	10:37
	They had seen him give life and life abundant.	10:43
	They had seen him exemplify the great law of sacrifice	10:49
	life by life laid down.	10:54
	And they were coming to experience the life	10:58
	which is life indeed,	11:01
	the knowledge of God and to this Christ.	11:03
	Yes, they had received a new outlook.	11:07
	You can trace the sequel, the two sequels	11:16
	in the book of the Acts.	11:22
	But I would rather trace it	11:25
	in the life history of the apostle St. Paul.	11:28
	Because of course of all the figures in the Bible,	11:32
	St. Paul is the one whom we know best.	11:36
	The one who is incomparably revealed to us	11:41
	in the series of his letters.	11:46
	We can see how a real man facing this situation	11:49
	of the death and resurrection,	11:58
	and continued influence of Jesus reacted to it.	12:00
	That is why I would take as a text this morning,	12:06
	the first verse of the lesson, which was read to us.	12:12
	In the fifth chapter of the second letter	12:17
	to the Corinthians.	12:19
	Words written when St. Paul had passed,	12:22
	far beyond his first conversion experience.	12:27
	To the great achievement of his career	12:31
	when he came to Corinth.	12:34
	And so could write,	12:36
	"If any man be in Christ, there is a new creation.	12:39
	The old is gone.	12:46
	Rather it has become new,	12:50
	and all things old and new are God,	12:55
	who has reconciled us unto himself in Christ Jesus,	13:00
	and given unto us ministry of reconciliation.	13:04
	A new creation."	13:09
	That is what we in the church,	13:13
	no longer appear to be able to recognize.	13:17
	This complete novelty of outlook,	13:21
	which the Christian faith rightly understood	13:25
	and faithfully practiced, must involve.	13:29
	St. Paul had seen himself,	13:33
	how the event of the resurrection had challenged	13:37
	his way of life, had broken his career,	13:42
	had transformed his whole outlook,	13:46
	so that no longer was Jesus to him via person to God	13:50
	But he acclaimed and glorified of God.	13:55
	He had experienced that transformation,	14:01
	and had taken time in Arabia, in Antioch, in Tarsus.	14:06
	And on his first journey in Galatia	14:13
	to work out the significance of it.	14:17
	But in spite of recognizing	14:21
	the contrast between old and new	14:24
	in his letter to the Galatians.	14:28
	And receiving those flashes of insight,	14:30
	which come through that amazing letter,	14:34
	"I live, yet not I, Christ lives in me.	14:38
	There is neither Jew nor Greek,	14:42
	there is neither bond nor free,	14:44
	there is it male or female."	14:45
	He could say that and we can't.	14:50
	We can't say neither American nor Chinaman.	14:53
	We don't say it. He could.	14:57
	So soon after his conversion,	15:02
	and then love and joy, peace and courage,	15:05
	mercy and virtue coupling the new Christian virtues	15:14
	as we call them, love, and joy, and peace.	15:19
	With the old pagan virtues,	15:24
	fortitude, virtus as the Romans called it.	15:29
	But in spite of his flashes of genius,	15:36
	he was still a long way from realizing	15:40
	the stupendous thing that he learned	15:44
	through his failure in what was, I suppose	15:47
	the most remarkable of all the invasions	15:51
	of Europe from Asia.	15:53
	Is there anything so effective among various movements	15:56
	as the occasion when the Greek doctor	16:04
	and the Jewish evangelist,	16:06
	science and religion of the time hand in hand,	16:09
	set out from Samothrace to come to Philippi	16:12
	to invade the new western continent	16:16
	where it started badly.	16:20
	You remember he stood on his dignity in Philippi	16:24
	And to stand on your dignity is to assume	16:28
	one of the only positions	16:30
	in which a man cannot conceivably see God.	16:33
	Some of us might do well to remember that.	16:37
	Fatal, they have cast us and condemned	16:41
	into prison, being Romans.	16:45
	Would they throw us out secretly?	16:48
	Let them come themselves and fetch us out.	16:51
	That's not a very high level of Christian achievement.	16:54
	And it was followed by his proclamation	16:59
	of a crude Jewish apocalyptic,	17:03
	a person in Nicaea preaching one Jesus,	17:07
	a king who should come from heaven	17:11
	at a time when all the Roman world was wondering	17:14
	what would happen when Claudius died?	17:16
	Well he aroused riots, which he had to write	17:20
	two good letters to restrain.	17:25
	Went on to Athens and tried to turn himself into a dawn.	17:28
	Preaching a sort of university sermon on the text,	17:34
	we are also his offspring.	17:38
	And receiving what academic audiences are apt to give,	17:41
	nothing but mockery.	17:47
	And so he went to Corinth humbled.	17:50
	And learned the amazing lesson,	17:54
	which he expressed in the familiar words.	17:58
	It is the Jews who are a God for miracle and a God of power.	18:03
	It is the Greeks who are beset with the idea of wisdom.	18:10
	We preach of God in terms of a man on a cross,	18:15
	in terms of the love that suffers to the utmost.	18:20
	That is of course a scandal to the Jews,	18:25
	and mockery to the Greeks.	18:30
	But to those who come under its spell,	18:33
	it is the power of God and the wisdom of God.	18:39
	He saw, you see ,that if Jesus was like God,	18:42
	then God must be like Jesus.	18:47
	And he set himself to rethink the images,	18:50
	of power and wisdom,	18:56
	the universal provider and the Lord of the earth.	18:59
	And even I think the king of the religious mysteries,	19:05
	in terms of the oldest and simplest	19:10
	of all human relationships,	19:13
	the thing that really distinguishes man from the animals,	19:15
	in terms of the family, our father.	19:19
	And consequent, to revolutionize his whole way	19:25
	of proceeding, he must no longer huckster the gospel.	19:30
	He must no longer think in terms as a power and wisdom.	19:37
	He must be content with the building	19:44
	of what he could only call agape,	19:51
	the unable word for which love is our nearest	19:56
	but our remote translation.	20:01
	And so he came, you see, to see	20:08
	how if the old had passed,	20:12
	nevertheless, it had given rise to the new.	20:16
	Because in old and new alike was God.	20:21
	God reconciling the world to himself.	20:26
	A great philosopher, Teilhard,	20:33
	Teilhard de Chardin, the French paleontologist	20:36
	paleontologist and seer has literally revived	20:40
	a word used by biologist in my younger days,	20:45
	the word convergence to indicate exactly	20:50
	what St. Paul means by reconciliation.	20:55
	This coming together into a solid and organic community	20:58
	of those who share the same loyalty.	21:06
	Express that loyalty in the same activities.	21:11
	And so find among themselves	21:16
	the most intimate kind of partnership.	21:20
	That we shall speaker on weekends.	21:26
	Today I just want to finish by reminding you	21:29
	of the novelty with which we should approach	21:34
	the things of our faith.	21:40
	Jesus had set us the example.	21:43
	In his first utterance the time is fulfilled,	21:47
	the kingdom of God is upon you.	21:53
	Change your outlook and believe the good news.	21:56
	The good news of God's kingdom.	22:00
	We don't believe in one world, do we?	22:04
	At least we blessedly accept two,	22:08
	if not three or for our 50 worlds.	22:11
	We don't believe in one world,	22:16
	although we profess to believe	22:17
	that the world is God's world.	22:19
	We believe in two worlds and try fitfully	22:22
	to find a place in both of them.	22:28
	Trying to ride two horses	22:32
	which in fact are proceeding fairly rapidly	22:34
	in different directions.	22:36
	No wonder we don't make much of a success	22:39
	either of secular or of religious affairs.	22:43
	And we are not making much of a success	22:48
	of them at present, are we?	22:50
	Jesus, you see set himself to disabuse men	22:55
	of the idea that to the welfare state	23:00
	command these stones that they be made bread	23:05
	was the right basis for a community.	23:10
	And he regarded the stockpiling of armaments	23:13
	as merely diabolical.	23:16
	No doubt about that, that was sacred.	23:19
	And I think he also regarded the paraphernalia	23:25
	of religion as not his way.	23:29
	He would not exploit the Lord his God	23:34
	by casting himself down,	23:38
	and appearing as the Jews expected the Messiah to appear	23:41
	in the courts of the temple.	23:47
	On the contrary, He told men and women to open their eyes	23:50
	and see God in his world.	23:56
	And he began with flowers and birds	24:01
	and little children at play.	24:04
	And women sweeping houses and baking bread.	24:07
	And men sewing fields and searching for pearls.	24:11
	And said, do you see, do you see the many splendor thing?	24:16
	Do you see the glory in the midst of you,	24:22
	in the common ways of common folk,	24:26
	there is the kingdom.	24:30
	You needn't fly away to the beyond.	24:33
	You needn't to descend into the heavens.	24:37
	You needn't delve into the earth,	24:39
	Heaven and hell are poor metaphors for Christian.	24:42
	Here in the midst is God,	24:50
	doing his eternal work.	24:53
	Bringing good out of evil,	24:57
	challenging the pride of man.	25:00
	Because the first effect of his configuring vision	25:04
	upon the disciples was to make them ask	25:09
	which of them was the greatest?	25:13
	What privilege do we have?	25:16
	What can I get out of this?	25:18
	They went up to Jerusalem arguing you remember,	25:21
	about seats on the right hand, and seats on the left.	25:25
	So they had to be broken into life	25:31
	by way of betrayal.	25:35
	Think of how often we say to others,	25:40
	"Depart from us we are holier than thou."	25:44
	How often we claim to be the only free people in the world.	25:50
	God forgive us for our misunderstanding	25:57
	of what freedom means.	26:00
	Think of it, of the humbling that it means.	26:05
	If we are to escape crucifying the son of God of flesh,	26:13
	and putting him and ourselves to a perpetual shape.	26:20
	Well, they had begun to learn that lesson	26:27
	as please God, after two world wars	26:31
	and this constant reign of fear and suspicion	26:34
	we are beginning to discover that that is not the road.	26:38
	It is God's world.	26:46
	And the movements towards	26:50
	a larger understanding of that fact,	26:53
	are plain for all who have eyes to see.	26:56
	To me, at least, the movements of sounds	27:03
	in the last 10 years, indeed in the last 50 years	27:07
	have been full of an indisputable encouragement.	27:13
	And the movements within the churches, the ecumenical	27:19
	are council of the churches,	27:27
	and the Vatican council	27:30
	and the noble and cyclical of Pope John.	27:33
	These things beckon us in the direction,	27:37
	which St. Paul had proclaimed.	27:43
	Be ye ambassadors for God.	27:48
	That is the task of this great people.	27:54
	To be ambassadors for the prince of peace.	27:59
	And in doing so, to disclose once more to the world,	28:05
	the fullness and the splendor of Jesus.	28:11
	To say again, to the world as the Victorian poet said.	28:16
	I say the acknowledgement of God in Christ	28:22
	accepted by thy reason,	28:25
	solves that the all problems in the earth and outreach.	28:27
	And has so far advance thee to be wise.	28:32
	We have a great gospel.	28:37
	We have a great sequel to the Easter message.	28:40
	God the all in all,	28:45
	in and through Jesus Christ, our Lord.	28:48
	Let us pray.	28:55
	O thou who art the light of the minds that know thee,	29:02
	and the joy of the hearts that love thee,	29:07
	and the strength of the will that serve thee,	29:10
	grant us so to know thee that we made truly love thee.	29:14
	So to love thee that we may faithfully serve thee,	29:19
	whose service is our freedom and our fulfillment	29:23
	through Jesus Christ, our Lord, amen.	29:29
	♪ Amen ♪	29:40
	♪ Amen ♪	29:48
	♪ Amen ♪	29:55
	♪ Amen ♪	30:13
	♪ Amen ♪	30:24
	♪ Amen ♪	30:39
	(soft piano music)	34:57

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Title:

Charles E. Raven - "Sequel to the Resurrection" (May 5, 1963)

Permalink:

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4154jq6j

Date:

May 5, 1963

Speaker:

Raven, Charles E.

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Duke University. Chapel

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UA.17.01.0003 RR-0226
ref5657_k5s
uachapelsermaud
duke:628505
dcrau002232
ark:/87924/r4154jq6j
f98d9c35-a5db-4c47-9395-5defe769d2dc

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Duke Chapel Recordings

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The Duke University Chapel Recordings were transferred to the Duke University Archives beginning in 1970.

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Charles E. Raven - "Sequel to the Resurrection" (May 5, 1963)

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