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