O. Kelly Ingram - "Christmas and the New Humanity" (December 20, 1964)

Download
- Rights
- Limited Re-Use
  CC BY-NC 4.0
  More Rights Info
- Files (1)
- MP3
- Please be patient with media downloads. They are often large files.
Share

Embed Code
<iframe src='//idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4bv7fx0x?embed=true' height='125px' width='100%' frameborder='0' marginwidth='0' marginheight='0' scrolling='no' allowfullscreen></iframe>
Permalink

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4bv7fx0x
Skip to Item Info

Loading the media player...

Files for this Item

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

Item Info

Title:

O. Kelly Ingram - "Christmas and the New Humanity" (December 20, 1964)

Permalink:

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4bv7fx0x

Date:

December 20, 1964

Speaker:

Ingram, O. Kelly (Osmond Kelly), 1918-

Contributor:

Duke University. Chapel

Identifier:

UA.17.01.0003 RR-0278
ref5761_vz7
uachapelsermaud
duke:628276
dcrau002277
ark:/87924/r4bv7fx0x
73b95c72-8f93-458a-8d5a-e4a1d7d7f69c

Digital Collection:

Duke Chapel Recordings

Source Collection:

Duke University Chapel recordings, 1954-2005

Language:

English

Location:

United States
North Carolina
Durham (N.C.)

Format:

Provenance:

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

Rights:

Limited Re-Use

CC BY-NC 4.0

Rights Note:

This recording may contain 3rd party materials, such as music or readings that are therefore not covered by the Creative Commons license indicated here. For more information see https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/research/citations-and-permissions.

Sponsor:

Sponsor this Digital Collection

O. Kelly Ingram - "Christmas and the New Humanity" (December 20, 1964)

Transcript

Item Info

Duke University Archives

More Info & Options