Howard C. Wilkinson - "Deepen Your Spiritual Insight" (November 29, 1964)
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| (ethereal music) | 0:03 | |
| - | We're very happy to be worshiping together | 0:39 |
| here in the Duke Chapel on this recess Sunday, | 0:42 | |
| of course we miss the other members of our congregation, | 0:45 | |
| who normally are here. | 0:49 | |
| Who are having a very deserved vacation at home. | 0:51 | |
| We have missed the choir, our regular organist, | 0:56 | |
| our regular ushers and collectors, | 1:00 | |
| but we were very grateful | 1:03 | |
| that a number of our students leaders have stepped in | 1:05 | |
| to serve as temporary ushers and collectors, | 1:09 | |
| and the Dr. Soheir at the Duke Medical Center, | 1:14 | |
| and Dr. Frank Jordan of the University of North Carolina | 1:16 | |
| have given the substitute leadership | 1:20 | |
| and the vocal and instrumental musical offerings to God. | 1:23 | |
| It is always good when people gather | 1:30 | |
| to worship Almighty God. | 1:33 | |
| Our sermon today has to do with two verses of scripture | 1:37 | |
| that were a part of the morning scripture lessons, | 1:40 | |
| that was read. | 1:42 | |
| The 16th chapter of John verses 14 and 16. | 1:43 | |
| The words of Jesus, | 1:48 | |
| these were spoken to disciples | 1:51 | |
| to whom he had already spoken a great many words. | 1:53 | |
| The people with whom he had lived closely | 1:58 | |
| with whom he had worked carefully, | 2:01 | |
| and that's the end of his association with them | 2:04 | |
| on this earth as he was anticipating the hand, | 2:08 | |
| he said these rather strange words, | 2:13 | |
| "I have yet many things to say to you, | 2:16 | |
| but you cannot bear them. | 2:21 | |
| When the spirit of truth comes, | 2:24 | |
| he will guide you into all the truth. | 2:27 | |
| He will glorify me or he will take what is mine | 2:32 | |
| and declare it onto you." | 2:36 | |
| Now as I understand what Jesus was saying there, | 2:40 | |
| it would go something like this rephrased. | 2:44 | |
| I have said a great many things to you disciples | 2:49 | |
| in these months that I have been with you as your leader, | 2:52 | |
| as your elder brother, | 2:56 | |
| but whether you know it or not, | 2:59 | |
| I have said a lot to you that you have not understood. | 3:01 | |
| There are so many things involved in what I have said | 3:07 | |
| that have not become clear to you. | 3:10 | |
| The implications of what I have said | 3:13 | |
| have not somehow been assimilated in your hearts and mind, | 3:16 | |
| I still want to say these things to you, | 3:22 | |
| I still want you to learn these things, | 3:25 | |
| and although at the moment you are not in position | 3:29 | |
| to understand them, your minds are not open to them. | 3:32 | |
| When the holy spirit comes who is the spirit of truth, | 3:37 | |
| he will take these things I have been trying to say to you | 3:41 | |
| and guide you into an understanding of them. | 3:47 | |
| He will spoon feed them to you | 3:52 | |
| so that instead of your never knowing them, | 3:56 | |
| you will come to know them, | 4:00 | |
| instead of you're never seeing them, | 4:02 | |
| you will come to see and understand them. | 4:04 | |
| Now that is what the sermon is about this morning. | 4:10 | |
| You might say that's what the sermon is. | 4:12 | |
| Sometime ago I was spending some time with a man | 4:19 | |
| who had a young daughter. | 4:22 | |
| During the course of our conversation, | 4:26 | |
| he related to me an incident | 4:27 | |
| which occurred in his home shortly before that, | 4:29 | |
| that pertains to this young daughter. | 4:33 | |
| She had been to school and had been studying | 4:37 | |
| the multiplication table and she had been quite interested | 4:39 | |
| in the multiplication table, | 4:43 | |
| had mastered the table completely up to a certain point. | 4:45 | |
| And when she would come home in the evenings, | 4:49 | |
| she would recite it to her father. | 4:52 | |
| And with considerable pleasure, | 4:55 | |
| he noted the fact that she was able flawlessly | 4:57 | |
| to begin with one times one equals one, | 5:01 | |
| and go on up through 10 times 10 equals 100. | 5:05 | |
| He said that they had guests in their home one evening, | 5:12 | |
| proud father that he was, | 5:16 | |
| he was going to show off the new found knowledge | 5:18 | |
| of his little daughter and so he asked her to perform | 5:20 | |
| for the guests. | 5:23 | |
| He said, "Tell them the multiplication table." | 5:25 | |
| So she began with one times one, | 5:28 | |
| went up flawlessly through 10 times 10, | 5:30 | |
| and then thinking to stretch the matter a little bit, | 5:33 | |
| he said to his daughter, | 5:37 | |
| "Could you tell them what the 11 times 11 would be?" | 5:38 | |
| He said that with a forgiving look, | 5:44 | |
| but with nonetheless a patronizing air, | 5:47 | |
| his little daughter looked at him and disappointment | 5:51 | |
| and said, "Father, don't you know | 5:55 | |
| there isn't any 11 times 11." | 5:57 | |
| Now of course she came to this conclusion | 6:01 | |
| in the way that we come to a great many of our conclusions, | 6:04 | |
| namely that since 11 times 11 had not crossed | 6:07 | |
| the can of her experience, | 6:13 | |
| had not come into the line of her vision, | 6:16 | |
| had not been a part of what she had been taught at school, | 6:18 | |
| is therefore it did not exist. | 6:21 | |
| "Don't you know," she said to her stupid father, | 6:25 | |
| "There isn't any 11 times 11." | 6:30 | |
| Now, we can overlook this and understand it | 6:35 | |
| and even smile at it, | 6:37 | |
| when it occurs in a seven year old girl, | 6:38 | |
| but it is not a smiling matter and it is not something | 6:42 | |
| that we can easily understand | 6:45 | |
| and accept when this kind of attitude prevails | 6:46 | |
| in an otherwise mature adult and someone who is fully grown, | 6:49 | |
| perhaps even has a PhD degree. | 6:54 | |
| Who comes to the conclusion that things | 6:58 | |
| which have not yet crossed the line of his vision | 7:00 | |
| are entered into his experience and therefore do not exist. | 7:02 | |
| There are a great many people who fall into this category, | 7:07 | |
| who say that there is no God, | 7:11 | |
| because they have not seen Him in their test tubes. | 7:13 | |
| He has not appeared on any of the results | 7:16 | |
| that have come out of their computers, | 7:19 | |
| or He is not a part of the formula | 7:21 | |
| of their semantic machinations | 7:23 | |
| because they do not find God in that center of reference, | 7:27 | |
| which has meaning to them He therefore does not exist. | 7:31 | |
| There is no reality in religion | 7:34 | |
| because I have not found reality in religion for me. | 7:36 | |
| And this is unfortunate when this occurs, | 7:42 | |
| but something which is extremely more unfortunate than that | 7:45 | |
| is the occurrence in the heart and life of a Christian, | 7:51 | |
| of the attitude that there are no religious experiences | 7:56 | |
| that are meaningful or worthwhile, | 8:01 | |
| if I have not experienced them. | 8:05 | |
| The person who believes in God, | 8:09 | |
| who has committed his life to Christ he thinks, | 8:11 | |
| who has joined the Christian church, | 8:14 | |
| and who attends its services, | 8:16 | |
| and to a certain extent takes part in its activities, | 8:18 | |
| but who concludes that there is no area of Christian concern | 8:21 | |
| that there are no spiritual visions in existence. | 8:25 | |
| If he does not know about them and has not seen them, | 8:31 | |
| so that when Advent season comes | 8:37 | |
| and we sit down in church on the first Sunday in Advent, | 8:41 | |
| and we think about the fact that we are about | 8:44 | |
| to renew the celebration of the coming of God, | 8:48 | |
| in human flesh to this earth. | 8:54 | |
| There is not any sense of expectation, | 8:58 | |
| there is no feeling of joy that we stand on the threshold | 9:01 | |
| of new insights into the meaning of the will of God | 9:06 | |
| for our lives. | 9:09 | |
| There is no sense that we are about to move up | 9:11 | |
| to a higher level of spiritual commitment. | 9:13 | |
| Because haven't we gone through, | 9:17 | |
| Advent season many times before? | 9:19 | |
| Don't we know what this is all about? | 9:23 | |
| Haven't we climbed the highest peaks and we've been there? | 9:27 | |
| We know what it's about that, | 9:31 | |
| the manger, the camels, the shepherds, the wise men, | 9:32 | |
| all of that we know about it. | 9:37 | |
| So why should we expect that any new light will break | 9:40 | |
| through into the center of our experience | 9:43 | |
| and existence during this Advent season? | 9:47 | |
| And then when Lent comes we can take that in strike too, | 9:51 | |
| we know what Lent is, | 9:56 | |
| we've been through that before, | 9:58 | |
| it means doing without creaming your coffee, | 9:59 | |
| perhaps giving up cigarettes until after Easter | 10:01 | |
| or something like that. | 10:05 | |
| But we do not expect very often, do we? | 10:06 | |
| That there is going to be | 10:10 | |
| some kind of new light breakthrough | 10:12 | |
| that a new word from God to us will be spoken, | 10:14 | |
| because we've heard it all before. | 10:21 | |
| Haven't we read those scripture passages? | 10:23 | |
| Don't we know what Jesus said? | 10:25 | |
| Don't we know about the church has thought | 10:27 | |
| and done about this throughout all the centuries gone by? | 10:28 | |
| Consequently we do not expect | 10:34 | |
| to enter into a new relationship to Jesus Christ | 10:37 | |
| or a new understanding of the meaning of his message. | 10:40 | |
| If that is the case with you or with me, | 10:46 | |
| then perhaps we need to have spiritual | 10:50 | |
| or the experience which aeronautically | 10:52 | |
| a younger American had during World War II | 10:54 | |
| when he was flying over the hump | 10:57 | |
| and doing some work in Northwest China. | 10:59 | |
| He related that as he was going through the overcast | 11:05 | |
| in Northwest China, | 11:08 | |
| an area that we cannot now explore, | 11:10 | |
| he decided that he would fly higher | 11:14 | |
| and get up out of the overcast. | 11:16 | |
| And as his plane came up through the top of the overcast, | 11:20 | |
| his altimeter registered 31,000 feet | 11:23 | |
| and to his utter amazement | 11:27 | |
| he found himself flying alongside a mountain. | 11:28 | |
| The peak of which was still 2,000 or 3,000 feet higher | 11:32 | |
| than his airplane. | 11:35 | |
| If the time ever comes that we are able to move freely | 11:38 | |
| in China it can be checked whether or not his altimeter | 11:41 | |
| and his readings were correct, | 11:45 | |
| but if they were correct, | 11:46 | |
| then he saw a mountain that is several thousand feet higher | 11:49 | |
| than 29,140 feet which are geography books, | 11:52 | |
| confidently proclaimed now to be the highest mountain | 11:57 | |
| in the world. | 12:01 | |
| Mount Everest, as any fool knows | 12:03 | |
| is the world's highest mountain. | 12:05 | |
| But a wise man may believe that there could be | 12:08 | |
| a mountain higher than that somewhere on the earth. | 12:12 | |
| Any ordinary stuck in the mud Christian may know | 12:17 | |
| that he has experienced the greatest things | 12:20 | |
| in the Christian faith and that there are no peaks higher | 12:24 | |
| than the ones he has climbed, | 12:27 | |
| but a humble and wise worshiper | 12:29 | |
| may believe that there is something up there higher | 12:34 | |
| than what he has yet experienced. | 12:39 | |
| That there is something which Jesus Christ | 12:41 | |
| is trying to say to him that he hasn't yet heard. | 12:44 | |
| Well, there are Christian who would say yes, | 12:50 | |
| this is true undoubtedly. | 12:54 | |
| I don't pretend to be the world's greatest Christian, | 12:56 | |
| I know that there are things as a Christian faith, | 13:00 | |
| which I could learn about if I would. | 13:02 | |
| There are experiences I could enjoy if I would, | 13:05 | |
| but I'm busy and this is for the specialists, | 13:09 | |
| and I'm not a specialist. | 13:11 | |
| There are other things out there but they are not essential. | 13:14 | |
| I don't have to hear this other word. | 13:19 | |
| This was very vividly impressed upon me a few years ago, | 13:25 | |
| when I was living in another city, | 13:28 | |
| I picked up the local newspaper and saw there the account | 13:32 | |
| of the arrest of a local citizen. | 13:35 | |
| And it told how he had been arrested and had been charged | 13:39 | |
| with some very gruesome violations of the law | 13:42 | |
| and has been released on bail. | 13:46 | |
| These violations of the law were very serious, | 13:49 | |
| not simply because they were violations of the law, | 13:53 | |
| but because, | 13:56 | |
| in pathetic fashion they were violations | 13:58 | |
| of every canon of decency and of all morality, | 14:01 | |
| was really a terrible thing, | 14:06 | |
| series of things that he had done according to the paper. | 14:10 | |
| The next day this man came on my front porch | 14:15 | |
| and rang my doorbell and wanted to talk. | 14:17 | |
| I was glad that he came when he sat down in my study | 14:22 | |
| and began to say to me, "I suppose you've read in the paper, | 14:26 | |
| what I'm charged with there's no need preacher | 14:29 | |
| for me to try to fool you, | 14:32 | |
| I did these things, I did this, I did that. | 14:33 | |
| I did the other." | 14:37 | |
| And I was encouraged as he went ahead with his confession, | 14:39 | |
| and I said to him finally, | 14:44 | |
| "Well it is good that you have come, | 14:45 | |
| I know that you want me to you to get right with God." | 14:48 | |
| And with a look of utter amazement on his face, | 14:56 | |
| he said, "What? | 14:59 | |
| No, there's nothing wrong with my relationship to God, | 15:01 | |
| I am on excellent terms with God, | 15:05 | |
| I settled my dealings with God 20 years ago, | 15:08 | |
| and I've been a member of such and such a church ever since, | 15:12 | |
| and that's all permanently settled. | 15:15 | |
| No, I came to see you because my son tells me | 15:20 | |
| you're a good friend of the judge. | 15:23 | |
| and I have to come up before the judge in a few days | 15:25 | |
| and I want you to speak a word to him on my behalf." | 15:27 | |
| I said, "You mean to tell me that you consider yourself | 15:32 | |
| to be a fine Christian after all | 15:36 | |
| that you have confessed here?" | 15:38 | |
| "Oh, no listen I'm not one of the best Christian, | 15:40 | |
| there are a lot of things about Christianity | 15:43 | |
| that I ought to pay attention to I guess an adult." | 15:45 | |
| But he said all the essential things. | 15:48 | |
| He knew that there was more out there for him | 15:55 | |
| in the Christian life but it wasn't important. | 15:58 | |
| He didn't need to bother about it. | 16:02 | |
| Well, now let's go back for a little bit | 16:06 | |
| to these verses of scripture | 16:08 | |
| and hear what our Lord says again. | 16:10 | |
| After having said many, many things to the disciples, | 16:15 | |
| and there was evidence that | 16:19 | |
| they had understood these things. | 16:20 | |
| He said "Still there are many more things | 16:21 | |
| that I would say to you, | 16:25 | |
| but you cannot now bear them, | 16:27 | |
| you cannot now understand them and assimilate them." | 16:29 | |
| But it was important enough that a third expression | 16:33 | |
| of Almighty God should be sent into the world, | 16:37 | |
| to take these words of Christ, | 16:43 | |
| these actions of Christ and guide us into an acceptance | 16:45 | |
| and an understanding of them. | 16:51 | |
| So that the things which were true from the foundation | 16:54 | |
| of the world should become plain and clear | 16:58 | |
| and accepted by us, in our time. | 17:00 | |
| There are many of these things, | 17:08 | |
| which the holy spirit has guided his church | 17:09 | |
| into an understanding of since then, | 17:13 | |
| one of them that is quite dramatic, | 17:17 | |
| which is representative of many others, | 17:21 | |
| is the whole field | 17:23 | |
| of what we now call psychosomatic medicine. | 17:24 | |
| Dr. Flanders Dunbar is only one of many physicians | 17:29 | |
| who have degrees in psychiatry, in religion and medicine, | 17:32 | |
| who are telling us in very emphatic language, | 17:40 | |
| that there is a great relationship between the elements | 17:47 | |
| that we talk about in the gospel and religion and the church | 17:51 | |
| and the diseases of the physical body. | 17:57 | |
| Dr. Dunbar's book, | 18:02 | |
| there is a chapter on the relationship | 18:03 | |
| of fear and anxiety to physical health. | 18:06 | |
| A chapter on the relationship of a sense of guilt | 18:10 | |
| to physical diseases. | 18:14 | |
| And in her book, she points out that again and again, | 18:18 | |
| when a person can have the sense of guilt relieved, | 18:21 | |
| he can get up off a bed of physical sickness and go home, | 18:26 | |
| and that the physical illness in this case, | 18:30 | |
| that case in the other was caused by, | 18:36 | |
| an overwhelming sense of guilt. | 18:40 | |
| Now, the interesting thing about that is that, | 18:44 | |
| when I first became a theology student some years ago, | 18:47 | |
| my fellows and I were victims of a kind of servicetry | 18:52 | |
| which concerned itself altogether with the question | 18:56 | |
| of how and account of the curing of a disease | 18:59 | |
| by the forgiveness of sin could have gotten into the Bible, | 19:06 | |
| when of course it didn't happen? | 19:10 | |
| We did not seem to spend much time considering | 19:16 | |
| the possibility that it might have happened | 19:19 | |
| just as it was reported, | 19:22 | |
| until we began to read the writings | 19:26 | |
| of some of the specialists in psychosomatic medicine, | 19:30 | |
| who not only say that it could have happened, | 19:34 | |
| they say it happens all the time | 19:36 | |
| and therefore with a new reverence | 19:39 | |
| and a new openness of mind and with a deeper humility, | 19:41 | |
| we go back and read that gospel account of the young man | 19:46 | |
| who was brought on his bed of sickness to Jesus. | 19:50 | |
| He was paralyzed he could not move | 19:54 | |
| and Jesus said to him these words, | 19:56 | |
| which otherwise we would have thought quite strange | 19:59 | |
| and irrelevant "Son dies sins be forgiven thee. | 20:01 | |
| Rise, take up that bed and walk." | 20:09 | |
| And now the doctors say certainly, | 20:17 | |
| why not? | 20:22 | |
| Now, that has been in our New Testament for 1900 years, | 20:25 | |
| but the holy spirit is just now able | 20:29 | |
| to bring us with our scientific manual | 20:33 | |
| to understand the possibility | 20:38 | |
| of how this could happen by the power of God, | 20:41 | |
| through the forgiveness of sin. | 20:44 | |
| And yet if we look upon the word of God | 20:47 | |
| there is something that is padlocked in forever closed, | 20:51 | |
| and we know all about it, | 20:54 | |
| and there's nothing more to be learned. | 20:55 | |
| We will miss the insights that should come to us, | 20:57 | |
| which Jesus Christ promised would come to us | 21:02 | |
| and which the holy spirit is patiently | 21:07 | |
| and persistently attempting to spoon feed to us today. | 21:09 | |
| Now why do you suppose it is? | 21:16 | |
| And since this is true. | 21:19 | |
| We are so slow to see, | 21:22 | |
| so slow to hear and to understand | 21:26 | |
| is it because of our pride? | 21:29 | |
| Is it because of a lack of faith? | 21:33 | |
| Is it because of a closed mind? | 21:35 | |
| Well, perhaps I don't know, | 21:38 | |
| but it might help us a little bit, | 21:41 | |
| if we would ask the question | 21:42 | |
| of why it is that we do not hear and see many things | 21:44 | |
| in the natural order about us which go on? | 21:50 | |
| Why for example, is it true that although infrared | 21:54 | |
| has been here from the beginning of the earth, | 21:58 | |
| we didn't know of its existence until recently? | 22:00 | |
| The human eye cannot see infrared now, | 22:04 | |
| but we have instruments developed that detect the presence | 22:09 | |
| of infrared in the world, | 22:12 | |
| just as we see ordinary red is here. | 22:15 | |
| But isn't it a little bit humbling to us humans | 22:20 | |
| to know that there are certain tropical birds | 22:23 | |
| which have been able to see infrared all these centuries. | 22:26 | |
| They have been floating around in the jungle, | 22:31 | |
| seeing infrared just like we see ordinary red. | 22:33 | |
| We didn't know it. | 22:37 | |
| The reason was we did not have sensory organs | 22:42 | |
| that were sensitive enough to see infrared. | 22:45 | |
| A few years ago I was preaching in Knoxville, Tennessee, | 22:51 | |
| and my host pastor took me out to Oak Ridge | 22:53 | |
| to go through the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies. | 22:56 | |
| And we went through the Museum of Atomic Energy, | 22:59 | |
| the guide is one point said over here as a Geiger counter. | 23:06 | |
| And he noticed that I had on a wristwatch | 23:09 | |
| and had a luminous dial. | 23:11 | |
| He said, "Oh is your wristwatch up to the Geiger counter?" | 23:13 | |
| And I did, and the Geiger counter began | 23:15 | |
| to chatter away like a mucking. | 23:19 | |
| I said, "You mean to tell me that the watch | 23:21 | |
| that I'm wearing is radioactive? | 23:24 | |
| He said, "Certainly." | 23:26 | |
| Well, I said "I must be very insensitive, | 23:29 | |
| then not to be able to feel it." | 23:31 | |
| He said, "You are." | 23:32 | |
| The of course the congregation generally hopes | 23:35 | |
| that the preacher will be sensitive enough | 23:37 | |
| to know when the hands point to 12 o'clock on Sunday. | 23:39 | |
| They do not care about the radioactivity of the watch, | 23:43 | |
| but we are insensitive. | 23:47 | |
| We cannot feel what the Geiger counter can know | 23:49 | |
| about the luminous dial on a watch. | 23:53 | |
| Thomas Edison made a device a few years back | 23:58 | |
| that would detect, would hear | 24:03 | |
| if you please the sound of a man moving his hand, | 24:06 | |
| 30 feet away you cannot hear me, | 24:11 | |
| even those who are closest up front, | 24:15 | |
| you cannot hear this hand though you see it | 24:17 | |
| when it moves but that is because your ears | 24:20 | |
| and mine are not sensitive enough. | 24:23 | |
| They were more sensitive they would hear, | 24:26 | |
| our eyes if they were more sensitive, | 24:29 | |
| would see a great many things they do not. | 24:30 | |
| So, the reason we do not see these natural phenomenon | 24:34 | |
| or hear them is that we do not have eyes and ears | 24:37 | |
| that are sensitive enough. | 24:44 | |
| Having eyes we do not see, having ears we do not hear. | 24:47 | |
| And this is what Jesus said about us spiritually. | 24:51 | |
| He said, "You did not see because although you have eyes, | 24:55 | |
| they don't see." | 24:59 | |
| Now the American Indian can teach us about valuable lessons | 25:02 | |
| at this point. | 25:06 | |
| The American Indians eyes were able to detect things | 25:08 | |
| much better than ours and his ears likewise. | 25:11 | |
| And I am told that the secret of that is that he used them. | 25:16 | |
| An Indian could look on the horizon, | 25:21 | |
| see an object out there and could discern long before | 25:23 | |
| his pale face brother whether it was a Buffalo or a horse. | 25:26 | |
| He could put his ear to the ground | 25:30 | |
| and hear the distance sound | 25:32 | |
| and tell what kind of an animal it was that was approaching | 25:35 | |
| and how many of them there were whereas we could not. | 25:39 | |
| The Indian continually used and sharpened his sensitivities, | 25:43 | |
| and therefore the reach of his understanding was greater. | 25:47 | |
| And it may be that if we used our spiritual eyes and ears | 25:53 | |
| and felt listened with our hearts, | 25:58 | |
| we would hear the voice of God saying a great many things | 26:01 | |
| to us that we do not now hear Him saying. | 26:04 | |
| We would see the finger of God pointing | 26:08 | |
| where we do not now see it's pointing. | 26:10 | |
| But we should remember that Jesus has many things | 26:14 | |
| to say to us yet. | 26:16 | |
| Beethoven when he composed his symphonies, | 26:19 | |
| composed music for instruments that had not been invented | 26:21 | |
| when he did the composing but which subsequently have. | 26:24 | |
| Jesus Christ when he gave us his gospel, | 26:28 | |
| wrote music which the disciples of that day could not hear | 26:32 | |
| or understand but hopefully which we may in our day, | 26:37 | |
| hear and understand and play on our instruments | 26:41 | |
| if we are sufficiently sensitive to his voice. | 26:45 | |
| There was a geography scroll that was prepared in Europe | 26:52 | |
| many centuries ago. | 26:55 | |
| And out on the Western side of Europe, | 26:57 | |
| they showed what we call the Atlantic ocean | 27:00 | |
| and out on the edge so they thought of that, | 27:03 | |
| they wrote here be dragons and here would be demons, | 27:05 | |
| but if they had only known they might have written, | 27:11 | |
| here be Columbia the jam of the ocean, | 27:14 | |
| here be America, here be a new world. | 27:18 | |
| And arguably like the preparers of that geography school | 27:24 | |
| we ride out on the edge of our New Testament | 27:28 | |
| and out on the margin of our prayer books, | 27:31 | |
| on the edge of our experience, | 27:35 | |
| we ride here and be religious fanatics. | 27:37 | |
| Here be extremists. | 27:41 | |
| If we were wiser and more humble and believe | 27:44 | |
| the word of Christ we might wright | 27:47 | |
| here be a new spiritual world for me, | 27:50 | |
| a new understanding of the will of God. | 27:55 | |
| If I will have the faith to expect it, | 27:58 | |
| the eyes to look for it and in the years to hear it. | 28:02 | |
| These eyes to see and these ears to hear | 28:16 | |
| the heart to understand and believe. | 28:21 | |
| Now may the grace of the Lord, Jesus Christ, | 28:24 | |
| and the love of God, the father, | 28:28 | |
| and the communion of the holy spirit, | 28:29 | |
| abide with you now and evermore. | 28:32 | |
| Amen. | 28:35 | |
| (bell ringing) | 28:37 |
