Warren Carr - "Crying over Spilled Wine" (August 15, 1965)
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| (microphone glitching) | 0:08 | |
| - | The 20th century | 0:29 |
| both enjoys and agonizes over | 0:33 | |
| the greatest theological ferment, | 0:39 | |
| since the days of the reformation. | 0:43 | |
| It would be ridiculous to say that, | 0:48 | |
| no man of any theological stature | 0:51 | |
| has come to the surface, | 0:57 | |
| in the interim between the reformation and now. | 1:00 | |
| But I think it's a safe conjecture to say that | 1:06 | |
| most of these men were not appreciated in their time. | 1:09 | |
| Men like the Danish philosopher, Kierkegaard, | 1:16 | |
| who came into his own in our own century. | 1:19 | |
| And most of the theologians between then and now, | 1:25 | |
| were exceptions rather than the rule. | 1:30 | |
| It is the 20th century, | 1:37 | |
| which has heard and read | 1:41 | |
| from Barth and Brunner and Bultmann. | 1:45 | |
| From the Niebuhr brothers and Paul Tillich. | 1:52 | |
| Bonhoeffer, John A.T. Robinson | 1:58 | |
| and many others. | 2:04 | |
| And because of this tremendous theological awakening, | 2:06 | |
| this surging revival of theological | 2:13 | |
| and intellectual concern, | 2:16 | |
| the parable of Jesus does become appropriate. | 2:21 | |
| You cannot put new wine into old wineskins. | 2:26 | |
| You cannot take what is happening today | 2:35 | |
| in religious and theological circles | 2:40 | |
| and pour it into the same outmoded vessels, | 2:45 | |
| which have been such miserable failures over recent years. | 2:51 | |
| We are a people if we are concerned at all with the church | 3:00 | |
| who have watched in our time, | 3:08 | |
| the new heady brew of theology, | 3:12 | |
| first average traditional form | 3:17 | |
| with which we have become accustomed. | 3:20 | |
| And the new wine is mixed with our tears. | 3:25 | |
| As it pours out over the ground | 3:30 | |
| and earth is no connoisseur of wine. | 3:35 | |
| The greatest need of Christians today | 3:42 | |
| is to discover, | 3:49 | |
| to establish and to sustain | 3:51 | |
| the new forms of which the new faith | 3:57 | |
| so desperately cries for. | 4:03 | |
| And as we stand contemplating our loss, | 4:07 | |
| theological wine mixed with the dirt. | 4:14 | |
| We have three options. | 4:20 | |
| We can try to patch up the old forms, | 4:23 | |
| which we have been trying to do | 4:29 | |
| with such remarkable failure. | 4:31 | |
| We can become anti-institutional | 4:36 | |
| and do away with all forms. | 4:39 | |
| Or we can find new skins for the new wine. | 4:44 | |
| I think most of us know | 4:52 | |
| what we have been doing recently. | 4:57 | |
| It is to confess to ourselves and to the world | 5:02 | |
| that the old forms are obsolete and gone, | 5:06 | |
| but because it is the line of least resistance. | 5:12 | |
| And because it has a certain fashionableness to it, | 5:17 | |
| we are rapidly becoming a people who say | 5:23 | |
| let's do away with form altogether. | 5:28 | |
| Let's do away with institution. | 5:33 | |
| And there is no more paradoxical and ironic place | 5:38 | |
| that this is occurring than in the academic community. | 5:44 | |
| Or whether it be Duke or Wake Forest. | 5:52 | |
| Or Davidson. | 5:57 | |
| Or universities farther away. | 5:59 | |
| These great, imposing institutions of learning | 6:03 | |
| are currently practicing and following the fad of say, | 6:10 | |
| let's do away with the institution of faith. | 6:15 | |
| This is a cheap and tawdry solution to a pressing problem. | 6:21 | |
| We cannot stem the tide of the faith, | 6:29 | |
| which does engulf us. | 6:34 | |
| I watched for many years with amazement | 6:38 | |
| student after student at Duke University. | 6:43 | |
| And the pattern is repeated where I now am. | 6:46 | |
| Students who would not be caught dead in church, | 6:51 | |
| majoring in religion. | 6:55 | |
| And I was reminded that these students | 7:00 | |
| were drinking theology to great excess | 7:05 | |
| because they had no place to keep it. | 7:08 | |
| It was much like the man who | 7:13 | |
| bought his bottle on Saturday night | 7:17 | |
| and because he had no place to hide it from his wife, | 7:21 | |
| he had to drink it all. | 7:25 | |
| We are in danger of what I would call | 7:28 | |
| a kind of theological hangover, | 7:31 | |
| because we've had no place to store the faith, | 7:36 | |
| no channels by which we can exercise new insights, | 7:40 | |
| no kind of institution or organization or program, | 7:47 | |
| which gives to the new theology | 7:53 | |
| in a particular sense or direction or endurance. | 7:56 | |
| And consequently, | 8:01 | |
| we are a people who, | 8:03 | |
| under the impact of the intellectual theological thrust | 8:06 | |
| are greatly enamored, preoccupied and intrigued | 8:12 | |
| with what we call the new theology. | 8:18 | |
| And yet it is a burden and an agony to us | 8:21 | |
| because we have no place to put it. | 8:25 | |
| I there, therefore, on any occasion, | 8:30 | |
| to be pedestrian enough to say | 8:35 | |
| that the church is an institution. | 8:39 | |
| And that unapologetically, | 8:44 | |
| it must be an institution. | 8:47 | |
| And that the only hope for our day religiously | 8:51 | |
| is to make of the church institutionally | 8:56 | |
| a reputable and meaningful community of people | 8:59 | |
| who take truth seriously enough | 9:05 | |
| to organize it and communicate it | 9:10 | |
| to the world in which we live. | 9:14 | |
| The church is the body of Christ. | 9:19 | |
| And when one tries to understand that theologically, | 9:24 | |
| the thing that strikes him most forcibly is this, | 9:30 | |
| that even the Holy Spirit was not willing | 9:34 | |
| to perpetuate himself in disembodiment. | 9:37 | |
| Even the Holy Spirit found the institution. | 9:42 | |
| And it is the church, the body of Christ in which, | 9:46 | |
| through which and by which the Holy Spirit makes himself | 9:52 | |
| felt and known in the world today. | 9:56 | |
| No matter how rash and reckless we may want to be, | 10:02 | |
| no matter how much we enjoy escaping | 10:10 | |
| of the rigidities of the institution | 10:13 | |
| and drinking in new truth, | 10:16 | |
| unless we are wise enough to recognize | 10:20 | |
| that it is necessary to incorporate faith | 10:24 | |
| into those terms that can be communicated to the world, | 10:28 | |
| then what we really are saying is | 10:34 | |
| that we do not take our faith seriously. | 10:37 | |
| No one is ever more ready than am I | 10:43 | |
| to be critical of the church, | 10:50 | |
| to talk about its inanities. | 10:54 | |
| It's pre-occupation with the trivia | 10:58 | |
| and it's introverted selfishness | 11:02 | |
| where it does not want to save the world, | 11:04 | |
| but only save itself. | 11:07 | |
| That is tragic. | 11:11 | |
| Let it be that that comes under the awful judgment of God. | 11:14 | |
| But the answer to that tragedy of our time | 11:21 | |
| is not an irresponsible dismissal | 11:27 | |
| of the institution we call the church. | 11:32 | |
| I wish that I were capable. | 11:38 | |
| Tying up these ideas in some neatly ribboned form | 11:43 | |
| and say, "This is the problem. | 11:49 | |
| "And here is the answer." | 11:53 | |
| And hand it to you as if it were a gift and say, | 11:54 | |
| "Take it home with you and open it up at your convenience." | 11:57 | |
| It is not that simple. | 12:03 | |
| Theology is so dynamic and so vital, | 12:07 | |
| biblical criticism and the addenda insights | 12:13 | |
| that come to doctrine move so rapidly | 12:16 | |
| that the development of forms to contain these truths | 12:22 | |
| is an exceedingly difficult task. | 12:27 | |
| A colleague of mine some four years ago, | 12:31 | |
| wrote a scholarly work on Soren Kierkegaard | 12:36 | |
| only to discover that as recently as four years ago, | 12:42 | |
| Kierkegaard was already out of date. | 12:47 | |
| How does one, therefore, | 12:52 | |
| in this dynamic changing society of ours | 12:55 | |
| develop the forms of the church? | 13:00 | |
| I cannot say for certain. | 13:04 | |
| But I can positively say these things | 13:07 | |
| about new skins for new wines. | 13:10 | |
| It is neither new nor profound to suggest to you | 13:16 | |
| that we need an increasing lay ministry. | 13:20 | |
| We have heard this, | 13:26 | |
| I affirm it and then asked for two safeguards. | 13:29 | |
| What bothers me about the lay ministry? | 13:35 | |
| The increasing lay ministry of the church | 13:39 | |
| is that whatever a layman | 13:44 | |
| gets a peculiar and specific religious bug inside of him, | 13:45 | |
| he wants to start preaching. | 13:53 | |
| Laymen can't preach. | 13:57 | |
| I do not say that laymen ought to stay out of the pulpit | 14:01 | |
| because I'm threatened by them, | 14:04 | |
| I am human enough to be threatened by other preachers, | 14:08 | |
| but not by lay preachers. | 14:11 | |
| And most of the time when they would pretend to do this | 14:14 | |
| out of their call to the lay ministry, | 14:19 | |
| do they simply succeed in making a terrible mess of things | 14:22 | |
| theologically and ecclesiastically speaking. | 14:27 | |
| The lay ministry means that the laymen | 14:32 | |
| ought to work in the world at those places | 14:35 | |
| and in those ways, which are shut up against the clergy. | 14:40 | |
| Lay ministry, yes. | 14:47 | |
| Not presiding over pulpit | 14:50 | |
| or holding businessman's revivals, | 14:53 | |
| but in the labor union. | 14:57 | |
| And in the national association of manufacturing, | 15:00 | |
| abroad in the world | 15:05 | |
| as laymen who have keys | 15:09 | |
| both to the kingdom of Heaven | 15:13 | |
| and to the doors locked up by secularism in our society. | 15:16 | |
| And if we are to have a lay ministry, | 15:25 | |
| let us make sure that this does do something | 15:27 | |
| about the rift hood the risk between, | 15:32 | |
| the rift lay and clergy. | 15:34 | |
| This rift is not primarily important | 15:38 | |
| because lay and clergy do not usually like each other. | 15:41 | |
| We have good reasons, I suppose, on both sides for that. | 15:46 | |
| The lay-clergy rift is most serious | 15:52 | |
| at that point where the layman saying | 15:56 | |
| they embrace the priesthood of believers, | 16:00 | |
| still willing to make of the clergy | 16:02 | |
| a peculiar kind of person so that if by chance, | 16:04 | |
| he must represent them before God, he will do a good job. | 16:09 | |
| And this is occurring increasingly in the churches, | 16:16 | |
| which do not believe in the sacrament. | 16:23 | |
| Priesthood of believers, these churches say, | 16:27 | |
| we embrace this. | 16:29 | |
| No priest can administer sacrament to us | 16:31 | |
| and thereby assure us of grace. | 16:35 | |
| What develops? | 16:40 | |
| They get a clergyman who has a personality | 16:42 | |
| who will be well-pleasing to God. | 16:45 | |
| And we joined therefore with a kind of personality cult | 16:49 | |
| for the clergy. | 16:54 | |
| Given the choice, | 16:57 | |
| I would always depend on for my salvation | 16:59 | |
| more upon the priest who can administer the sacrament | 17:03 | |
| than the priest who has a good personality. | 17:08 | |
| Secondly, the new forms of the church | 17:14 | |
| must demand active rather than static patterns. | 17:17 | |
| No longer can the church simply sit | 17:26 | |
| and say to the world, "Come and join with our fellowship." | 17:32 | |
| If the church is to have meaning in this society, | 17:41 | |
| the church must be at work. | 17:45 | |
| It must take seriously | 17:47 | |
| the bargain that our Lord made with his own time | 17:49 | |
| when he said, | 17:53 | |
| "If you do not believe that I do the work of the Father, | 17:54 | |
| "then just believe in me | 17:59 | |
| "for the sake of the works themselves." | 18:00 | |
| I dare to suggest that the church quit inviting people | 18:06 | |
| to join its membership | 18:12 | |
| on the basis of its fellowship or even its community. | 18:16 | |
| For this has proven to become a homogeneous | 18:21 | |
| club-like community, | 18:26 | |
| which always excludes the different. | 18:28 | |
| The church perhaps ought to invite people to join its work, | 18:34 | |
| to take a new posture in the world and to say, | 18:42 | |
| "This is what we are doing. | 18:45 | |
| "Do you want to join this?" | 18:49 | |
| Now, if the church dare to restrict its invitation | 18:54 | |
| to membership on the basis of an invitation to work, | 18:57 | |
| the church would become smaller. | 19:03 | |
| But this leanness of work would at the very least, | 19:07 | |
| rid us of those fat churches with their rose bud preachers, | 19:12 | |
| who try to deodorize the atmosphere | 19:17 | |
| so that we can't smell the stench of dead men's bones. | 19:21 | |
| Well, this leanness of work would strip the church | 19:28 | |
| of its rigidities and its encumbrances | 19:32 | |
| so that it could move in a mobile society. | 19:35 | |
| This leanness of work would put the church on edge | 19:42 | |
| and make it nervous and anxious | 19:47 | |
| so that it could anticipate the wiles of the devil. | 19:51 | |
| Thirdly, the new form of the church will most certainly | 20:01 | |
| embrace what I call | 20:06 | |
| ecumenical particularity. | 20:12 | |
| I am somewhat disenchanted | 20:18 | |
| with much of the ecumenical movement | 20:23 | |
| and I am disenchanted with it | 20:27 | |
| because I think it fails to recognize the economy of God. | 20:29 | |
| There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism. | 20:34 | |
| But in the Providence and the economy of God, | 20:38 | |
| there are many peoples and many churches | 20:43 | |
| to do His will and work in the world. | 20:45 | |
| These churches should not be at each other's throats. | 20:48 | |
| These churches ought to be in cooperation, | 20:51 | |
| but these churches ought to have particular | 20:54 | |
| and distinctive missions. | 20:57 | |
| Some years ago, | 21:01 | |
| a well-meaning mother came to me after a sermon I preached. | 21:04 | |
| And literally pointing her finger at my right eye, | 21:13 | |
| she said in evident anger, | 21:21 | |
| "It is time for my son to become a Christian. | 21:23 | |
| "And he could not understand a single word | 21:29 | |
| "in your sermon today." | 21:35 | |
| Now her son was only seven or eight years old. | 21:38 | |
| And I said to her, | 21:42 | |
| "I would have been grievously disappointed in my sermon | 21:43 | |
| "had your eight year old son been able to understand it." | 21:47 | |
| This university worship has a particular mission. | 21:55 | |
| It cannot cover the whole spectrum of God's will. | 22:02 | |
| So let it find what it can do and do it. | 22:09 | |
| And I would say that the most important | 22:18 | |
| concept to bring to the new forms of the church, | 22:22 | |
| is that the church must learn | 22:27 | |
| how to be an orphan in the world, | 22:29 | |
| because it is as Martin, Marty, | 22:34 | |
| has pointed out socially and culturally displaced. | 22:38 | |
| He criticizes the church because it is so busy defending | 22:46 | |
| its occupied ground | 22:51 | |
| and keeps saying the world owes us a particular place. | 22:54 | |
| The church has got to get over that. | 23:00 | |
| Do you remember the bill that was introduced | 23:04 | |
| at the national level, | 23:07 | |
| suggesting that we perhaps move election day to Sunday? | 23:08 | |
| And the clergy began its harangue? | 23:14 | |
| Now the church has to come to the place where it would say, | 23:18 | |
| if the choice must be made between voting on Sunday | 23:24 | |
| in the national election are going to worship, | 23:31 | |
| then fOr God's sakes, go vote. | 23:34 | |
| Society Doesn't owe us a place. | 23:40 | |
| But at least those of us who belong to the free church, | 23:47 | |
| disestablished ourselves a long time ago | 23:50 | |
| and said to society, "We don't really need you." | 23:53 | |
| Now, let's be faithful. | 23:59 | |
| Let us say, | 24:02 | |
| if we are free that we can operate in this society of ours | 24:03 | |
| without it giving to us place or establishment. | 24:09 | |
| This means that we must make room | 24:15 | |
| for ourselves unapologetically. | 24:21 | |
| Perhaps the church has to learn the technique | 24:27 | |
| of the PTA and the Boy Scouts. | 24:30 | |
| For of all organizations I know, | 24:36 | |
| these two organizations can make me feel | 24:38 | |
| as if I'm the lowest form of father | 24:41 | |
| if I don't join and attend. | 24:46 | |
| There are recent newcomers to the scene, | 24:51 | |
| somehow they've made their place. | 24:55 | |
| And in a world of competing elbows, | 24:58 | |
| the church needs to learn how to swing its own | 25:04 | |
| and make rules for itself in the world, | 25:08 | |
| rather than saying, "Give to us this place." | 25:12 | |
| The same is said for time. | 25:17 | |
| Sunday may have to be traded in for Tuesday. | 25:23 | |
| And if the weekends become more recreational, | 25:32 | |
| perhaps we shall seek this special | 25:38 | |
| dispensation from the Spirit | 25:40 | |
| to suggest the Tuesday become our holy day. | 25:43 | |
| All that I am saying is that the church has no right | 25:49 | |
| to demand time. | 25:53 | |
| And if by any chance, | 25:57 | |
| some of us drove by a pagan front yard this morning | 25:58 | |
| and saw a pagan up there playing with his children, | 26:03 | |
| having a better time than we were having coming to church, | 26:08 | |
| make sure of this, the pagan couldn't care less | 26:14 | |
| if you pray for him. | 26:17 | |
| And you also must make sure of this, | 26:21 | |
| that there isn't any particular kind of righteousness, | 26:24 | |
| which brought us to this place this morning. | 26:28 | |
| The church must find time. | 26:33 | |
| On many days and many nights. | 26:39 | |
| It may startle you for me to close by saying | 26:44 | |
| that in this cultural displacement, | 26:48 | |
| the church is also going to have to become honest | 26:52 | |
| and clever about money. | 26:56 | |
| Are we really telling the truth | 27:02 | |
| when we say the money you give to the church | 27:04 | |
| goes to the good cause? | 27:07 | |
| Into the United Fund, | 27:10 | |
| well, it's all right. | 27:12 | |
| Cigarettes, which built this building, that's bad. | 27:17 | |
| If the church is to be as clever as serpents | 27:26 | |
| and as harmless as doves in the world, | 27:29 | |
| a lot of it's real places of activity is money. | 27:33 | |
| And we must trick the world into giving money to good causes | 27:38 | |
| when it would not think of giving it to the church. | 27:45 | |
| Maybe the church will have to again, | 27:51 | |
| embrace the power of poverty and say, | 27:54 | |
| "Neither does the world owe us any money." | 28:00 | |
| The only money we need is money formation. | 28:05 | |
| Will we be able to store new wine? | 28:16 | |
| Are you concerned with foreign and institution | 28:24 | |
| which will take this tremendously exciting age | 28:32 | |
| and make it endure and store it | 28:40 | |
| against the uncertain tomorrows? | 28:45 | |
| This is the burning question | 28:50 | |
| of Christendom. | 28:54 | |
| Please stand for the prayer. | 28:57 | |
| Let us find in thee, oh God. | 29:07 | |
| And in the risen spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ, | 29:11 | |
| the courage and wisdom for the day. | 29:15 | |
| And the burning and tremendous excitement | 29:18 | |
| about the venture to my mission in life. | 29:21 | |
| And to bide with us, both in judgment and loss, | 29:26 | |
| as we joined those involved was called | 29:31 | |
| for thy purpose. | 29:36 | |
| And now, oh God, we pray. | 29:38 | |
| Attend us with thy mercy, fill us with thy spirit | 29:43 | |
| and hold us in thy hand to both now and forever. | 29:51 |