O. Kelly Ingram - "Christmas and the New Humanity" (December 20, 1964)
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
Preacher | One might very appropriately | 0:40 |
ask the question at such a time as this. | 0:44 | |
Well, what have you got to be so happy about? | 0:46 | |
Why should you celebrate? | 0:54 | |
Peter Bergerxx has suggested in his book | 1:00 | |
the 'Noise of Solomon Assemblers', | 1:02 | |
that the American people have become very interested | 1:04 | |
in religion because it gives them another opportunity | 1:07 | |
to assure themselves that this is an okay world | 1:10 | |
and everything is going to be all right. | 1:17 | |
As one walks through restaurants, pumpexxr clubs, | 1:21 | |
places of entertainment and observes people | 1:27 | |
having their good time, it feels like saying to them, | 1:31 | |
well, what have you got to celebrate about? | 1:35 | |
And he has the feeling that actually it's superficial | 1:40 | |
the day at the end, the cheerfulness, | 1:46 | |
the gladness is all on the surface of life, | 1:49 | |
but there's really a yawning emptiness on the inside | 1:53 | |
Christmas comes to say to us that | 2:01 | |
it doesn't have to be empty. | 2:05 | |
Amid the stories of shepherds and wise men | 2:10 | |
and angelic choruses | 2:13 | |
we need to remember that Christmas comes as good news | 2:18 | |
because it says something about love. | 2:21 | |
The Bible pictures us as a bundle of contradictions, | 2:28 | |
likely less than God likened to the beast | 2:39 | |
mortals with intimations of immortality, | 2:46 | |
the glory and calm of the universe, | 2:51 | |
the quintessence of God. | 2:56 | |
Man is the wretched creature with the image of God stamped | 3:02 | |
upon his spirit pathetically the face to be sure, | 3:05 | |
but nevertheless | 3:11 | |
still they are like some grand old masterpiece, | 3:12 | |
retouch and profaned by less sensitive hands | 3:17 | |
awaiting the recovery of the original genius. | 3:23 | |
The myth of the Garden of Eden dramatizes this paradox. | 3:29 | |
There Adam is every man enjoying his birthright | 3:36 | |
of modest, innocence, fellowship with God, | 3:42 | |
at home in his environment, at peace with this companion | 3:46 | |
an idyllic existence | 3:52 | |
made possible by his uncomplicated acceptance | 3:53 | |
that he is dependent upon his creator. | 3:57 | |
But Adam yields to the temptation to upgrade his role | 4:02 | |
to exchange his dependence for independence, | 4:09 | |
his God's sufficiency for self deficiencies, | 4:12 | |
thereby committing himself to the proposition | 4:17 | |
that if it is to be permanent | 4:20 | |
paradise must be a do it yourself project. | 4:24 | |
The consequences are tragic | 4:30 | |
Adam's existence is disrupted, | 4:33 | |
his fellowship with God is suspended, | 4:35 | |
the benign earth becomes malignant, | 4:38 | |
the peaceable animal kingdom becomes a snarling jungle | 4:42 | |
and instead of eating the produce of the garden, | 4:46 | |
Adam must eat his bread in the sweat of his brow. | 4:48 | |
Adam is every man, | 4:54 | |
and his fall is the fall of the race. | 4:57 | |
Now take a way from the Biblical account | 5:01 | |
of the nature of man the religious perspective, | 5:04 | |
and you have a representation that is remarkably modern. | 5:09 | |
For many poets and dramatists and artists are saying, | 5:14 | |
essentially the same thing. | 5:17 | |
Man is a strange from any central source of meaning | 5:20 | |
alienated from his fellows, | 5:27 | |
unable to communicate feeling that his existence | 5:29 | |
is hopelessly disrupted. | 5:34 | |
The theater of the absurd pictures, | 5:39 | |
this desperate flight of man, Picasso's family portraits | 5:41 | |
show people with black faces looking away from one another, | 5:47 | |
effective communication extinct, | 5:55 | |
the artist seems to be saying, | 5:57 | |
this is the old Adam. | 6:01 | |
This is the spoilt creation | 6:07 | |
and it is against this background | 6:11 | |
of hopelessness and wretchedness and despair | 6:14 | |
that the Christmas story becomes good news. | 6:17 | |
It has all the thrills of fresh exhilaration | 6:22 | |
of the hopeless man who finds a way out. | 6:25 | |
For it is the story of every man | 6:31 | |
caught in the web of despair | 6:33 | |
and suddenly discovering that | 6:37 | |
life doesn't have to be absurd, | 6:39 | |
work doesn't have to be a curse, | 6:44 | |
and communication isn't necessarily impossible. | 6:48 | |
For Christmas is the story of the coming of Christ, | 6:54 | |
whom Adam described, whom Paul described as the second Adam. | 6:58 | |
Mankind second chance, | 7:04 | |
and circumstances, clearly hopeless | 7:09 | |
the second Adam is hope. | 7:13 | |
In an existence from which all of the acceptable | 7:17 | |
alternatives have been removed, | 7:19 | |
Christmas speaks to us of the grand possibilities of life. | 7:23 | |
For here is God acting in one life in a way that foreshadows | 7:28 | |
the real creation of humanity. | 7:34 | |
Christmas does something to it. | 7:39 | |
It forces us to take a second look at life | 7:42 | |
to reappraise its possibilities. | 7:45 | |
On our rational terms, | 7:49 | |
anything approaching ultimate meaning | 7:52 | |
seems to be impossible but Christmas says to us, | 7:54 | |
an act of faith can make it otherwise. | 7:57 | |
The impersonal character of our interdependencies | 8:02 | |
does indeed deny our humanity. | 8:08 | |
But through the second Adam, | 8:12 | |
there was released a new concern | 8:15 | |
that promises to rehumanize the race. | 8:21 | |
Christmas then is the story of a second chance | 8:27 | |
a fresh start for mankind and Jesus Christ | 8:35 | |
the new creation. | 8:39 | |
How appropriate that a little baby | 8:44 | |
should symbolize this new potentiality of life. | 8:48 | |
And what is our appropriate response? | 8:55 | |
John Knox, the guests that | 9:01 | |
that's the Christ event is continuing | 9:06 | |
and the loyal response of the church. | 9:10 | |
Jesus was the first specimen of the new creation, | 9:15 | |
the new humanity, but only the first | 9:19 | |
for we are to be specimen of the same humanity. | 9:23 | |
Now this involves the rehumanization of our lives. | 9:31 | |
The recovery of the image of God within us. | 9:36 | |
This rehumanization that achievement of the new humanity | 9:43 | |
is possible only as we become feeling, caring, | 9:48 | |
loving, self giving person. | 9:53 | |
Self emptying love | 9:59 | |
was the most characteristic traits of Jesus. | 10:00 | |
Of himself He could say | 10:05 | |
the son of man came not to be ministered unto, | 10:07 | |
but to minister and to give his life for ransom for men. | 10:13 | |
And to his followers, | 10:22 | |
He has made it clear that they are to find their new quality | 10:24 | |
of existence in their willingness to give them love. | 10:28 | |
With the old Adam is particularly tenacious at this point. | 10:35 | |
Our drives are primarily toward the conservation of life | 10:42 | |
not towards giving it away, | 10:46 | |
the focus is inward not outward, | 10:49 | |
and we are enthusiastic go getters | 10:54 | |
but very unenthusiastic go givers. | 10:57 | |
Being loved is much more important to us than loving. | 11:03 | |
In his play, 'The Death of a Salesman' | 11:10 | |
Arthur Miller has closed old Adam and contemporary garb | 11:12 | |
and has named him Willy Lawman. | 11:19 | |
Willy's life is pathetically perverted, | 11:24 | |
the equations by which he lives are all wrong, | 11:28 | |
which is just another way of saying that | 11:33 | |
he's totally degrade. | 11:35 | |
The only hope Willy he ever had was summed up in the cradle | 11:38 | |
a man can end up with diamond here | 11:41 | |
on the basis of being loved. | 11:44 | |
Of course the gospel, that gospel hasn't worked out | 11:47 | |
in Willy's life, | 11:50 | |
but he's too old and too tired to do anything about it now. | 11:52 | |
Well he must resign himself | 11:56 | |
as he says to standing here | 11:58 | |
the rest of my life, bringing up a zero. | 11:59 | |
Perhaps the most strategic mistakes Willy made was | 12:05 | |
in misunderstanding the nature of love. | 12:09 | |
He wanted love | 12:13 | |
but he thought that meant primarily being loved, | 12:14 | |
not his capacity to love. | 12:17 | |
And so he was desperately concerned to be lovable. | 12:21 | |
He had to be a success because people love successful people | 12:25 | |
for women according to what Willy's philosophy | 12:30 | |
being lovable means being attractive | 12:33 | |
whatever that happens to mean at the moment. | 12:35 | |
Willy, mistook love for being lovable, | 12:39 | |
developing pleasant manners, | 12:45 | |
cultivating the art of conversation, | 12:47 | |
being modest and inoffensive, | 12:49 | |
really an amalgam of being popular and having sex appeal. | 12:52 | |
Willy failed to understand that love | 12:58 | |
is a relationship of active concern for the life | 13:01 | |
and growth of that which one love. | 13:07 | |
His insistence that success and lovableness | 13:11 | |
will attract love, causes him to turn his family | 13:14 | |
into what they are | 13:18 | |
and thinks of them, not as they really are, | 13:20 | |
but as the lovable things, he would like them to be. | 13:23 | |
He thinks of himself not as he really is, | 13:27 | |
but as this man who people will love. | 13:31 | |
There is an air of make me live in his relationships | 13:35 | |
with his family, with whom he can never be honest | 13:39 | |
and therefore never really intimate. | 13:41 | |
Willy is a pathetically tragic figure | 13:46 | |
because the reaction patterns of his life | 13:49 | |
or have built in frustration, | 13:52 | |
another way of saying so we're depressed. | 13:56 | |
There is an air of unreality and everything about it. | 14:00 | |
His image of himself, the important he attaches to his job, | 14:04 | |
the way he relates to people. | 14:12 | |
He's a complete phony and what is worst, | 14:15 | |
he doesn't know it. | 14:18 | |
Well, his epitaph is pronounced by his son Bill. | 14:21 | |
After Willy dies with pity in his voice, pity his life | 14:28 | |
(indistinct) Bill says, | 14:31 | |
"He had the wrong dreams, all, all wrong." | 14:38 | |
He never knew who he was. | 14:45 | |
Newness of life requires that we become extroverts | 14:51 | |
whose focused is outward, not inward, | 15:01 | |
who are more concerned to love than to be loved | 15:07 | |
and who approached their loving responsibilities | 15:12 | |
with genuine realism. | 15:18 | |
But notice if you will some other characteristics of this, | 15:23 | |
self giving love. | 15:27 | |
It is informed and wise and relevant. | 15:31 | |
It is a worldly love, Godly to be sure, but worldly. | 15:40 | |
We are called to reclaim the kingdom of this world | 15:48 | |
for our God, not the kingdom for 2000 years ago | 15:52 | |
and certainly not some abstract world | 15:58 | |
that never really existed. | 16:00 | |
If Christmas means anything at all, it is John 3:16, | 16:04 | |
God loved the world. | 16:08 | |
Those of us whose lives are being authenticated by that love | 16:13 | |
will not be content to carry on our pious exercises | 16:19 | |
and religiosity. | 16:24 | |
Oblivious to that rapidly accumulating body of data | 16:27 | |
describing the world and man and society, | 16:31 | |
Christians all too often have been perfectly content | 16:35 | |
to deal with man and society, not as they really are, | 16:40 | |
but in terms of some stereotype notions | 16:46 | |
of what they ought to be. | 16:49 | |
You've got to be concerned about the world, about man, | 16:51 | |
as the biologist and the psychologist | 16:56 | |
and the social sciences see them. | 16:58 | |
Our concern and our love must be liked that of God | 17:02 | |
in that it is an informed love | 17:08 | |
that recognizes the world like it really is. | 17:12 | |
It must also be a relevant love. | 17:17 | |
We are to be conscientiously concerned | 17:22 | |
about the most pressing needs of our society. | 17:27 | |
Our new humanism means not only that we are to be kind | 17:33 | |
that of course, | 17:41 | |
but also that we are to be profoundly disturbed | 17:44 | |
by the dehumanizing effects of an economic order | 17:49 | |
that brings people together | 17:53 | |
in increasingly impersonal interdependence. | 17:55 | |
For instance, | 18:02 | |
I can't know the engineer who operates the subway train, | 18:05 | |
even though I place my life in his hands. | 18:10 | |
The say, old lady who serves me, the elevator operators, | 18:17 | |
the taxi driver, the servers behind the cafeteria bar, | 18:21 | |
all function in my life. | 18:25 | |
What is useful is things, objects and not this person. | 18:29 | |
The crowded conditions of urban life, | 18:35 | |
intensify the problem by bringing us together | 18:39 | |
in close proximity to multitudes, whom we do not know, | 18:43 | |
indeed cannot know the chances of isolation | 18:46 | |
and loneliness are multiplied | 18:52 | |
by the congestion of urban life. | 18:55 | |
No wonder, Owen Henry had one of his characters | 18:58 | |
in a great city, | 19:00 | |
walk into a place of business and point a gun at the cashier | 19:02 | |
and forced that startled individuals | 19:06 | |
to come across with conversation. | 19:09 | |
It is in just such a culture as this | 19:14 | |
that robs persons of their identity | 19:17 | |
and we must a achieved a new humanity. | 19:23 | |
It doesn't do us any good to be naive. | 19:29 | |
We're not going to succeed | 19:33 | |
in furnishing all of our interdependencies with humanity, | 19:35 | |
with recognition, | 19:45 | |
perhaps the most we can hope for in most of them | 19:48 | |
is something approaching justice and occasionally | 19:52 | |
there will be something to call forth mercy. | 19:57 | |
But the limitations of our humanity are stuck, | 20:03 | |
that we cannot personalize all of our interdependencies. | 20:05 | |
But let me tell you this, the church, | 20:12 | |
the company of those committed to the achievement | 20:19 | |
of a new humanity must provide a community of recognition | 20:22 | |
in which people are known, listened to, | 20:29 | |
understood and accepted. | 20:35 | |
It must provide a confessional for the guilty, | 20:39 | |
support for the anxious and insecure, | 20:43 | |
guidance for the confused and the perfect. | 20:47 | |
If it fails to do so, | 20:51 | |
it will fall short of the new humanity | 20:53 | |
and it will fail in its mission. | 20:57 | |
How encouraging it is that in fire shopping centers | 20:59 | |
across America, capitols and chaplains | 21:04 | |
have been established to carry on just such a ministry | 21:07 | |
among people outside the church | 21:12 | |
who desperately need to have their humanity recognized. | 21:15 | |
How, wise the church is to recognize, | 21:21 | |
but it will discover its own humanity | 21:25 | |
only as it confers humanity among others. | 21:28 | |
It doesn't sound like religion as usual. | 21:37 | |
Somehow we have this strange notion in the back of our mind, | 21:43 | |
that unless we're doing things in the same way | 21:48 | |
that Jesus did them 2000 years ago, | 21:50 | |
they're not religious. | 21:53 | |
Our task is to enter creatively and imaginatively | 21:56 | |
into the spirit of our Lord. | 22:02 | |
We're not called to a slave its duplication of His word | 22:05 | |
and deeds, but to represent his concerns | 22:07 | |
in the conditions of our own lives, | 22:13 | |
presumably there are two ways to copy a famous painting. | 22:17 | |
One might make mathematical calculations | 22:20 | |
and produce a technically correct copy, | 22:24 | |
or one might study the painting, | 22:28 | |
enter into the spirit of the artists | 22:32 | |
and then produce, not an imitation, | 22:35 | |
but a picture that is alive with war and vitality. | 22:40 | |
We're not called to copy the example of our Lord, | 22:47 | |
but to become possessed of His spirit | 22:53 | |
and to reproduce His light | 22:56 | |
in the circumstances of our existence. | 23:00 | |
This is what the new humanity means for us. | 23:04 | |
When we are living this Christ life, this new humanity, | 23:10 | |
we have the insight to realize that our own deepest | 23:19 | |
and truest self is the image of God within us. | 23:26 | |
And we see that as He emptied Himself in love, | 23:34 | |
so are we to become more concerned about loving, | 23:39 | |
than being loved. | 23:44 | |
As a matter of fact, | 23:48 | |
I think it is not incorrect to say | 23:50 | |
that we authenticate ourselves as person | 23:54 | |
in the act of giving ourselves away. | 23:58 | |
This is precisely what the Charles Dickens was saying | 24:02 | |
in a Christmas Carol. | 24:05 | |
Here's old Scooge, | 24:08 | |
though locked up in his shell of cynicism | 24:12 | |
and concern for the Schilling and tuppence | 24:15 | |
that he's willing to let the tide of Christmas spirit flow | 24:20 | |
all around him with only resentment | 24:24 | |
that fools take time for Christmas at all. | 24:26 | |
The nephew comes in to invite him to dinner | 24:32 | |
and is insulted and abuse. | 24:34 | |
"Nothing you can say | 24:38 | |
can take away my Christmas cheer uncle," | 24:39 | |
declared the young man. | 24:42 | |
"What right have you to be cheerful?" Snarls the old man, | 24:45 | |
"You are poor enough." | 24:48 | |
In which the young man replies good naturedly, | 24:50 | |
"And what right do you have to be sour, | 24:54 | |
you're rich and old." | 24:56 | |
Bob Cratchit and shivering with cold | 24:59 | |
is denied to offer with fire | 25:01 | |
and is humiliated by the greedy grasping Scrooge, | 25:05 | |
when he asked for Christmas day off. | 25:11 | |
Determined to ignore the demand of Christmas that he love | 25:15 | |
and feel the pain of others, | 25:19 | |
Scrooge goes home to shut the world out | 25:22 | |
but during the night, a dream comes to shock him | 25:25 | |
into humanity, into feeling | 25:33 | |
into becoming involved in humanity. | 25:35 | |
Christmas came to Scrooge. | 25:40 | |
It made him realize that compared to the prosperity | 25:42 | |
of the firm of Marley and Scrooge, | 25:45 | |
the life and health and happiness of tiny Tim | 25:48 | |
were infinitely more important. | 25:51 | |
Dicken's story has survived the generation | 25:56 | |
because it is a faithful account of the odyssey | 26:03 | |
of every man from a denial of humanity | 26:07 | |
to authenticate Christmas. | 26:13 | |
Perhaps this is the purpose of Christmas to us. | 26:17 | |
It calls to shake off the calluses from the heart | 26:21 | |
and rediscover that the true meaning of life | 26:26 | |
is not in dollars and cents | 26:30 | |
or any of the dehumanizing activities, | 26:32 | |
that is of our time, but in the quality of relatedness, | 26:37 | |
that we managed to achieve with other human beings. | 26:43 | |
Let us pray. | 26:51 | |
Give us the grace, oh Lord, to pray Adam's likeness | 26:59 | |
now he says, stamp thine image in it place, | 27:07 | |
send us Adam from above, reinstate us in thy love, | 27:13 | |
the grace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, | 27:22 | |
the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit | 27:27 | |
be with you always. | 27:30 | |
Amen. | 27:32 |