Waldo Beach - "The Sacred and the Profane" (October 17, 1965)
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| - | When you hear the word sacred, | 0:37 |
| what kind of bells ring or lights flash in your head? | 0:42 | |
| It is probable that in this Duke community, | 0:48 | |
| or for you here homecoming from suburbia, | 0:53 | |
| you immediately confine the realm of the sacred to chapel | 0:57 | |
| or church. | 1:02 | |
| Sacred music means church music about God and Christ. | 1:06 | |
| Now, in the secular city, | 1:13 | |
| which is this university, | 1:17 | |
| or Westfield, New Jersey, or Atlanta, | 1:20 | |
| there are places far from the jukeboxes | 1:24 | |
| set aside for sacred rites, | 1:27 | |
| 11 o'clock Sunday morning. | 1:31 | |
| We fence the realm of the sacred off | 1:34 | |
| into a place apart from our common life here | 1:37 | |
| of cafeteria and classroom and dormitory. | 1:42 | |
| Chapels or shrines, | 1:47 | |
| where the priests hired by the university or the church | 1:50 | |
| are custodians of a museum, | 1:55 | |
| where they keep the bones of our ancestors, | 1:58 | |
| and those who like this sort of thing | 2:02 | |
| can go to look at where the bones are to be. | 2:05 | |
| And it's kind of pleasant | 2:10 | |
| to get away from the real secular world, | 2:12 | |
| to the realm of the awesome and the mysterious. | 2:16 | |
| Here I am in chapel. | 2:21 | |
| My family would be pleased to know that, | 2:24 | |
| in whatever secular activity I was engaged last night, | 2:28 | |
| I'm going to church this morning | 2:32 | |
| and engaged in a proper sacred activity. | 2:37 | |
| Or we might draw an internal map of the campus mind, | 2:42 | |
| its set way of thinking of sacred and secular, | 2:48 | |
| in our implicit concept of education. | 2:54 | |
| The sacred would be the realm of mystery, the awesome. | 2:58 | |
| The secular would be the non-mysterious, | 3:04 | |
| the pain, the evident. | 3:07 | |
| By this division, | 3:11 | |
| the mysterious would mean | 3:14 | |
| only that which has yet to be examined and explained, | 3:16 | |
| brought out from hiding and smoke | 3:21 | |
| into the clear light of knowledge. | 3:24 | |
| The realm of mystery is only the unknown, | 3:28 | |
| and the mystery will be dispelled. | 3:33 | |
| When the so-called sacred is unpacked, | 3:37 | |
| it turns out to be not so scary after all. | 3:40 | |
| If you open up the Ark of the Lord, | 3:44 | |
| it proves to contain only some old bones or nothing at all, | 3:47 | |
| or the dark thundering of God's voice | 3:52 | |
| proves on unpacking to be only an echo | 3:57 | |
| of man's Oedipal complex. | 4:00 | |
| The compelling voice of conscience heard in church, | 4:05 | |
| nothing more awesome than the customs | 4:11 | |
| and mores of bourgeois culture | 4:14 | |
| instilled in me by my parents in Westfield. | 4:17 | |
| Nothing to be afraid of when the mystery is dispelled. | 4:21 | |
| Many a Duke student finds that his spiritual education | 4:28 | |
| going on beneath the lines of his technical education | 4:33 | |
| is a progressive disenchantment with wonder, | 4:38 | |
| the contraction of the sacred, | 4:43 | |
| the expansion of the secular, | 4:46 | |
| for the sacred and the awesome | 4:49 | |
| are gradually reduced to the everyday. | 4:51 | |
| If God be approached in fear, | 4:57 | |
| as that oblong blur somewhere up front in church, | 5:02 | |
| then he disappears, | 5:07 | |
| if you get up here and find nothing at all, | 5:08 | |
| not even a whisper of fog | 5:10 | |
| or the secret of the universe's power. | 5:15 | |
| The secret of atomic energy has now been found out, | 5:19 | |
| or the power of creating human life | 5:25 | |
| is now just about to be transferred into medical hands. | 5:27 | |
| There's really not much left that's awesome. | 5:34 | |
| A few tags and remnants of mystery left to be understood | 5:38 | |
| and explained away. | 5:46 | |
| So when the biblical words of our lesson of the morning | 5:49 | |
| out of Deuteronomy | 5:56 | |
| are put against this mindset of ours, | 5:58 | |
| they sound strangely archaic and remote, | 6:01 | |
| like the mumble of priests | 6:07 | |
| keeping the people quiet with incantations, | 6:09 | |
| or the ranting of prophets | 6:14 | |
| scaring the people with threats of hell. | 6:16 | |
| What's all this talk of Moses, | 6:21 | |
| about blessing and curse, life and death, | 6:23 | |
| meted out by some tribal deity, | 6:29 | |
| living on Mount Sinai | 6:33 | |
| in a back corner of the Mediterranean world? | 6:34 | |
| The Bible does not speak of sacred and secular | 6:41 | |
| as two realms, | 6:45 | |
| church as sacred | 6:49 | |
| and secular as everything outside the church, | 6:51 | |
| but of a single realm of the holy. | 6:55 | |
| It speaks of a God who treads the heights of the earth, | 6:59 | |
| who thunders in the storms, | 7:03 | |
| whose law is the stay of the whole universe, | 7:06 | |
| who speaks in the inner heart of a man, | 7:11 | |
| who sets the terms of a man's existence, | 7:14 | |
| not in church, | 7:18 | |
| but in his secular ways, | 7:21 | |
| in his lying down and rising up, | 7:23 | |
| his going in and his coming out. | 7:27 | |
| He is one acquainted with all man's ways. | 7:32 | |
| The terms set by this Holy One | 7:35 | |
| are the moral terms of the covenant. | 7:38 | |
| They are severe, | 7:41 | |
| inexorable. | 7:44 | |
| The Bible is eschatological about outcomes and destiny, | 7:46 | |
| no more or lessness, | 7:54 | |
| no gradual progression, | 7:57 | |
| no C-average existence. | 8:00 | |
| Life is a risky business, lived on the edge of an abyss. | 8:05 | |
| It is either/or, in or out, | 8:11 | |
| life or death, blessing or curse, salvation or damnation. | 8:14 | |
| It speaks of a house of faith, | 8:21 | |
| either built on a rock and standing firm, | 8:25 | |
| or built on sand and swept away by flood. | 8:28 | |
| And the difference is up to man. | 8:34 | |
| Obedience to the moral law spells life and length of days. | 8:36 | |
| Disobedience spells death. | 8:42 | |
| How can one draw a cogent line | 8:47 | |
| from this strange biblical worldview | 8:52 | |
| to us who live on the safe middle grounds, getting by, | 8:57 | |
| creatures of more or lessness, | 9:04 | |
| who sense no great either/or, | 9:08 | |
| cozy and complacent in our secular business? | 9:12 | |
| Yet we are haunted, too, | 9:17 | |
| by an intonation of transcendence, | 9:21 | |
| a summons from elsewhere, | 9:25 | |
| and an inkling within, | 9:28 | |
| that we do not come alive by drinking Pepsi, | 9:30 | |
| that there may be death and damnation | 9:37 | |
| in our very living it up, | 9:40 | |
| and a glory forsaken and a hell to pay. | 9:44 | |
| I suggest that we set aside the naive division of our life | 9:52 | |
| between sacred and secular | 9:55 | |
| as mystery unexplained and mystery explained, | 9:59 | |
| or church and outside of church, | 10:05 | |
| in favor of another way, | 10:09 | |
| really a biblical way of thinking about our life. | 10:10 | |
| Think, if you will, of three categories, | 10:16 | |
| the sacred, the secular, the profane. | 10:20 | |
| Not three places, | 10:26 | |
| the sacred in heaven over the earth, | 10:29 | |
| secular on the earth, | 10:32 | |
| the profane or hell under the earth, | 10:34 | |
| but directions of wills and loves | 10:38 | |
| mixed in the hearts of men on the earth, | 10:41 | |
| in their cities and universities. | 10:46 | |
| The sacred means the divine, the holy, the awesome. | 10:50 | |
| It points to the great power and great goodness | 10:57 | |
| that presides overall our life, | 11:01 | |
| the ground of being, the Lord of all life, | 11:03 | |
| the source of order in nature, | 11:08 | |
| the giver of beauty and pattern, | 11:11 | |
| whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, | 11:15 | |
| and the round ocean, and the living air, and the blue sky, | 11:19 | |
| and in mind of man. | 11:23 | |
| The secular means literally this age, | 11:28 | |
| this world. | 11:33 | |
| It is the whole scope of things as they are, | 11:35 | |
| as fact and data. | 11:38 | |
| It means the anatomy of the earthworm, | 11:41 | |
| the astrophysics of interstellar space, | 11:44 | |
| the economics of the common market, the politics of Durham. | 11:48 | |
| It means everything you might study | 11:54 | |
| in the curriculum of this university. | 11:56 | |
| And of course, | 11:59 | |
| there's nothing fenced about in this secular world | 12:00 | |
| that's off limits for critical study and investigation, | 12:06 | |
| nothing sacred, | 12:11 | |
| if that means a province of church truth | 12:12 | |
| watched over by the priests who say, "Uh-uh. | 12:19 | |
| You mustn't ask about that." | 12:23 | |
| Everything, even the most sacred relics, | 12:26 | |
| are fair game for searching investigation. | 12:30 | |
| In a university, the secular means the truth of things | 12:37 | |
| in all their hard, inert neutrality, | 12:42 | |
| but secular truths are taught and studied | 12:48 | |
| not by machines, but by persons. | 12:51 | |
| The facts of how and whence and what, | 12:57 | |
| things and people, | 13:02 | |
| how these operate are interpreted by persons and to persons, | 13:05 | |
| and used for some personal ends beyond themselves. | 13:12 | |
| Because the secular is known and used by persons | 13:17 | |
| who have the power of choice, | 13:24 | |
| who have purposes and ends, | 13:27 | |
| the secular becomes fraught with moral urgency. | 13:30 | |
| In all our chasing to class and library in this place, | 13:38 | |
| what we seek is technical knowledge of the secular, | 13:43 | |
| but the technical knowledge in itself | 13:47 | |
| is not saving knowledge. | 13:49 | |
| It does not carry automatically the moral wisdom | 13:53 | |
| that guarantees its right use. | 13:57 | |
| Knowledge is power, | 14:01 | |
| but power balanced precariously between good or evil uses | 14:04 | |
| teetering between human life or death, | 14:09 | |
| between blessing or curse. | 14:14 | |
| As soon as the secular is entrusted to living men, | 14:18 | |
| it becomes the moral battleground between good and evil, | 14:21 | |
| the arena in which men are saved or damned, | 14:26 | |
| the stuff out of which they sew or tear | 14:30 | |
| the fabric of community. | 14:35 | |
| And here's where the great biblical either/or comes in. | 14:38 | |
| It's impossible to remain morally neutral | 14:46 | |
| about the uses of the secular. | 14:51 | |
| They are turned to high or low ends. | 14:55 | |
| When the secular is turned toward good ends | 15:00 | |
| by those who respond to the commandments of God, | 15:03 | |
| who obey his commandments to do justly and love mercy, | 15:07 | |
| then secular truth is sanctified, | 15:12 | |
| and the secular universe becomes a sacramental universe. | 15:18 | |
| What, then, is the profane? | 15:26 | |
| The realm of the profane | 15:31 | |
| is the twisting of the secular into disorder by men | 15:34 | |
| as they seek demonic ends. | 15:39 | |
| Real profanity is not bad language, | 15:43 | |
| but bad action. | 15:47 | |
| Just as men hallow the name of God, | 15:52 | |
| not by mumbling, "Hallowed be thy name," politely, | 15:55 | |
| but by action that does his truth, | 16:01 | |
| so men profane God's name by action that destroys community, | 16:06 | |
| that fleeces the neighbor of his rights. | 16:13 | |
| Whether the language used in so doing be clean or inelegant, | 16:17 | |
| it doesn't matter. | 16:24 | |
| Put it in this blunt way, | 16:26 | |
| the name of God is profaned more by the wage scale | 16:29 | |
| that has prevailed for janitors and maids in this university | 16:35 | |
| until now current steps are being taken to improve it, | 16:41 | |
| than by a rock thrown through | 16:46 | |
| one of these stained glass windows. | 16:50 | |
| In a morally serious seculum, | 16:56 | |
| whose moral terms are set in the covenant | 17:00 | |
| by a morally serious God, | 17:02 | |
| it's impossible to remain morally neutral, | 17:05 | |
| to fool around, | 17:10 | |
| to get by, | 17:13 | |
| to sit this one out, | 17:15 | |
| to watch from the sidelines | 17:18 | |
| the game between those forces that hallow the name of God | 17:21 | |
| and those that profane it, | 17:25 | |
| between that which creates | 17:28 | |
| and that which destroys community. | 17:29 | |
| We don't need to be told to get with it. | 17:32 | |
| We are got with it already, | 17:37 | |
| the choice between life and death, of blessing and curse. | 17:41 | |
| Even to try not to choose is a form of choice. | 17:46 | |
| The outsider who's going to avoid all these bloody struggles | 17:53 | |
| and be comfortable in suburbia | 18:00 | |
| is already a parasite | 18:03 | |
| affecting the quality of community | 18:09 | |
| and subject to blessing or curse, | 18:12 | |
| just by his choice to ride along. | 18:14 | |
| There is an old and apt Puritan phrase, | 18:19 | |
| "Knowledge is in order to goodness," | 18:23 | |
| and one might add, where it is not in order to goodness, | 18:27 | |
| it feed perversity and corruption. | 18:32 | |
| In some, the form in which truth is probed | 18:38 | |
| and discussed and weighed | 18:44 | |
| in this university | 18:47 | |
| is under the aspect of the holy and the sacred. | 18:49 | |
| I learn engineering, literature, the law, | 18:56 | |
| medicine, forestry, psychology | 19:00 | |
| as apparently secular fields, | 19:05 | |
| but these secular fields are all charged | 19:09 | |
| with potential for sacred or demonic use. | 19:12 | |
| They are awesome, dreadful. | 19:19 | |
| They are set before us each day | 19:23 | |
| with overtones of destiny, | 19:27 | |
| hanging in balance between life and death, | 19:31 | |
| blessing or curse. | 19:34 | |
| For example, | 19:38 | |
| in the field of engineering, | 19:41 | |
| technical knowledge about soil and forests, | 19:44 | |
| ecology and water supply | 19:48 | |
| is secular equipment suspended in moral tension | 19:52 | |
| between sacred and profane purposes. | 19:56 | |
| We either obey the stern terms of the covenant, | 20:00 | |
| in which God gives us the good earth as sacred and precious, | 20:06 | |
| and assure its yield for our children and their children | 20:11 | |
| by morally responsible decision, | 20:18 | |
| or we profane the holy by polluting its streams | 20:22 | |
| and plundering the planet | 20:28 | |
| with a hell of desolation to pay. | 20:30 | |
| There's nothing in the technical knowledge itself | 20:36 | |
| that gives the blessing or the curse. | 20:38 | |
| This is a matter for the conscience | 20:41 | |
| standing before the Lord of the Covenant. | 20:43 | |
| For example, again, a legal education | 20:48 | |
| is a difficult and impressive performance, | 20:54 | |
| and a law school graduate who knows the law | 20:58 | |
| is a pretty impressive figure, | 21:03 | |
| but technical knowledge of law may be used | 21:07 | |
| to preserve and sanctify justice, | 21:11 | |
| or to profane it. | 21:14 | |
| When in an Alabama courtroom, | 21:17 | |
| the murderer of Jonathan Daniels, | 21:21 | |
| a seminary student and civil rights worker, | 21:25 | |
| is acquitted by an all-white jury | 21:30 | |
| on the flimsy ground of self-defense, | 21:35 | |
| one could say that the whole transaction | 21:41 | |
| was technically lawful, | 21:44 | |
| but it's a monstrous profanity, | 21:48 | |
| a vicious miscarriage of justice, | 21:52 | |
| where the laws of men were used to violate the law of God. | 21:56 | |
| And to any student of the law, | 22:01 | |
| I would pose the point | 22:04 | |
| secular skill in the knowledge of the laws | 22:07 | |
| is no assurance that it will be turned | 22:09 | |
| to sacred or profane ends. | 22:11 | |
| The moral sense comes from outside, is brought to the laws, | 22:15 | |
| and to have this moral sense | 22:20 | |
| is to fulfill Christian vocation for sacred ends. | 22:22 | |
| Or for example, still again, | 22:30 | |
| our knowledge of human behavior | 22:34 | |
| picked up in Psych 91 or sociology | 22:36 | |
| is in our hands, | 22:42 | |
| who stand at the brink of all sorts of human decisions, | 22:43 | |
| bewildered parents, | 22:49 | |
| advertisers, politicians, teachers. | 22:53 | |
| We use this knowledge viciously or benevolently. | 22:59 | |
| The secular realm of psychology, | 23:04 | |
| we can turn to honor the sacredness of persons, | 23:06 | |
| their precious worth in God's sight, | 23:10 | |
| as an instrument of therapy, | 23:15 | |
| or we may profane the sacred by exploitation | 23:19 | |
| in the dormitory, or at home, or on the market, | 23:24 | |
| in the consumer engineering that twists men's desires | 23:29 | |
| to the cheap and the degrading | 23:33 | |
| and uses him for commercial ends. | 23:36 | |
| All the way out | 23:41 | |
| from the immediate choice of words in the cafeteria line | 23:44 | |
| to the choice about nuclear policy, | 23:51 | |
| we stand under the urgency of eternal option | 23:54 | |
| between life and death, | 24:00 | |
| and in the presence of an Almighty One | 24:02 | |
| who sets them before for us each day. | 24:04 | |
| Technical knowledge only increases the stakes, | 24:09 | |
| heightens the bearing of consequences. | 24:14 | |
| This is the first age it has been said | 24:19 | |
| when men have to fear the educated man. | 24:23 | |
| What is required is moral insight | 24:30 | |
| to match and guide technical knowledge, | 24:34 | |
| and the heating of an ancient admonition reverence | 24:39 | |
| is the beginning of wisdom, | 24:43 | |
| and to depart from evil is understanding. | 24:45 | |
| Amen. | 24:53 | |
| Let us pray. | 24:55 | |
| Eternal God, who dost set before us each day life and death, | 25:05 | |
| blessing and curse, | 25:12 | |
| and hast entrusted to us the dreadful freedom of choice, | 25:15 | |
| grant us by thy grace, | 25:23 | |
| such a sense of awe in the presence of thy majesty | 25:26 | |
| as may issue in a tender conscience toward thy creation | 25:32 | |
| and a will to treat of holy things in a holy fashion, | 25:39 | |
| through Jesus Christ our Lord. | 25:46 | |
| Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling | 25:50 | |
| and to present you faultless | 25:55 | |
| before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy, | 25:58 | |
| to the only wise God, our Savior, | 26:03 | |
| be glory and majesty, | 26:06 | |
| dominion and power, both now and evermore. | 26:08 | |
| (gentle music) | 26:15 |