Samuel H. Miller - "On Hearing the Word" (November 1, 1965)
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Transcript
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- | Our convocation preacher, | 2:43 |
has suggested that I say very little about him | 2:46 | |
by way of introduction. | 2:49 | |
At this point, he is completely in accordance | 2:51 | |
with the rules of this chapel, | 2:55 | |
where we very, very seldom introduce any preacher. | 2:57 | |
And yet it would be discourteous of us | 3:04 | |
not to welcome this distinguished man of God, | 3:07 | |
to our convocation, | 3:12 | |
and to our pulpit. | 3:14 | |
You have heard so many dates this afternoon, | 3:17 | |
both in the Bishop's address, | 3:19 | |
which delighted me, even as a Presbyterian, | 3:23 | |
and in Dr. Smith's talk tonight that I would like to add | 3:28 | |
just one more date in introducing our preacher. | 3:31 | |
In 1636, | 3:37 | |
Roger Williams was expelled | 3:40 | |
from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts | 3:43 | |
because of Baptist leanings. | 3:46 | |
323 years later, | 3:50 | |
Harvard University called as Dean of its Divinity School, | 3:53 | |
a Baptist, and so redressed this wrong that had been done. | 3:59 | |
Our convocation preacher is Dr. Samuel H. Miller, | 4:05 | |
the Dean of the Harvard Divinity School. | 4:10 | |
And our lector is the Reverend Harley M. Williams, | 4:14 | |
pastor of the Memorial Methodist church in Thomasville, | 4:19 | |
who was on the board of managers of this convocation. | 4:24 | |
He will now read the evening lesson. | 4:29 | |
- | Now let us listen reverently to the reading of God's word | 4:45 |
found in the gospel according to St. Luke, | 4:48 | |
the eighth chapter, the first 10 verses. | 4:51 | |
"Soon afterward, he went on through the cities | 4:57 | |
and the villages, preaching and bringing the good news | 4:59 | |
of the kingdom of God. | 5:02 | |
And the 12 were with him. | 5:04 | |
And also some of the women who had been healed | 5:07 | |
of evil spirits and infirmities. | 5:10 | |
Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, | 5:13 | |
and Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod's steward, | 5:19 | |
and Susanna, and many others who provided for them | 5:22 | |
out of their means. | 5:26 | |
And when a great crowd came to gathering people | 5:29 | |
from town after town came to him, | 5:31 | |
he said, in a parable, | 5:34 | |
'A sower went out to sow his seed, | 5:36 | |
and as he sowed some fell along the path | 5:38 | |
and was trodden underfoot, | 5:42 | |
and the birds of the air devoured it. | 5:45 | |
And some fell on the rock, | 5:48 | |
and as it grew up, and withered away, | 5:50 | |
because it had no moisture. | 5:52 | |
And some fell among thorns, | 5:56 | |
and the thorns grew with it and choked it, | 5:57 | |
and some fell into good soil and grew | 6:01 | |
and yielded a hundredfold.' | 6:03 | |
And as he said this, he called out. | 6:07 | |
'He who has ears to hear, let him hear.' | 6:10 | |
And when his disciples ask him what this parable meant, | 6:16 | |
he said, | 6:19 | |
'To you, it has been given to know | 6:21 | |
the secrets of the kingdom of God, | 6:23 | |
but for others, they are in parables. | 6:26 | |
So that seeing they may not see, | 6:29 | |
and hearing, they may not understand.'' | 6:32 | |
May God bless unto us, | 6:38 | |
this reading of His word. | 6:41 | |
(church organ music) | 6:48 | |
- | He who has ears, | 9:24 |
let him hear. | 9:29 | |
A few verses beyond, | 9:34 | |
this intense, | 9:38 | |
injunction of the Lord, | 9:41 | |
a woman cries out in the crowd, | 9:46 | |
impulsively. | 9:50 | |
"Blessed be the womb that bear thee." | 9:52 | |
And with immediate reaction, | 9:58 | |
and one can still hear the, | 10:06 | |
power of the voice and the intonation of it. | 10:10 | |
Jesus replied, | 10:14 | |
"Blessed rather they that hear the word of God." | 10:15 | |
Every age, | 10:25 | |
is held together by the great images it holds, | 10:27 | |
at the center of its imagination, | 10:32 | |
and its way of life. | 10:35 | |
When they disappear, | 10:39 | |
society tends to fall apart into a cultural chaos. | 10:42 | |
And the individuals of such a world | 10:49 | |
are left to subsist in a kind of hand-to-mouth fashion, | 10:53 | |
as well as they can, | 10:58 | |
seeking what meaning they can elicit from life, | 11:01 | |
but tormented, | 11:06 | |
and driven | 11:08 | |
by the shattered condition of the world | 11:11 | |
into which they were born. | 11:14 | |
This evening, I wish to speak about one of those | 11:17 | |
great images, | 11:21 | |
which has been largely compromised | 11:24 | |
in our contemporary usage. | 11:26 | |
Namely the word of God. | 11:30 | |
And I want to use for my texts, this impulsive, | 11:35 | |
spontaneous, | 11:40 | |
almost threatening injunction of the Lord. | 11:42 | |
"He who have ears, | 11:48 | |
let him hear." | 11:52 | |
or as he said later, | 11:54 | |
"Blessed rather, they that hear, | 11:56 | |
the word of God." | 12:01 | |
Herman Melville has Ahab, | 12:06 | |
in Moby Dick, | 12:10 | |
has Ahab, that ungodly God-like man, | 12:14 | |
say, as he tightens the vice upon his hand, | 12:18 | |
I like to get hold of something | 12:24 | |
that will grasp the slippery word. | 12:27 | |
All of us in this age of transition, | 12:33 | |
of confusion | 12:38 | |
and of changing morals, | 12:40 | |
would like to find some such vice, | 12:43 | |
which could be closed upon the swift changing, | 12:47 | |
fast running flux of our time and age. | 12:50 | |
If we could only get our hands on something permanent, | 12:55 | |
if our feet could feel some firm, | 12:59 | |
unshaken ground beneath them, | 13:02 | |
if our hearts could be established against the winds | 13:05 | |
and storms of catastrophe, | 13:09 | |
if our souls could take a stand amid the ruins of faith, | 13:13 | |
and the noises of solemn assemblies. | 13:20 | |
If in short, we could find something stable, | 13:23 | |
perhaps something our forebears | 13:28 | |
would have called the sure rock of their salvation. | 13:30 | |
We would be profoundly grateful. | 13:34 | |
Now at the very center of the Jewish | 13:41 | |
and Christian traditions, | 13:44 | |
there has been a solid rock of assurance | 13:46 | |
in the mystery, which we have always called the word of God. | 13:50 | |
The very foundations might shake of this world, | 13:57 | |
but the word of the Lord endured forever. | 14:00 | |
The patriarchs struggled manfully | 14:04 | |
at the awful edge of mortal mystery, | 14:07 | |
through the long night of angelic agony, | 14:10 | |
to hammer out the strong shape of that eternal word, | 14:13 | |
which tortured, and yet bless them. | 14:17 | |
The prophets stood in the midst of their own people, | 14:23 | |
with bold and audacious eyes, | 14:26 | |
measuring the easy morals of their time | 14:30 | |
with God's mighty word of justice and of mercy. | 14:34 | |
In Christian times, the vast, | 14:39 | |
inexplicable mysteries of Christ, | 14:42 | |
that word which proceeded from the mouth of God, | 14:47 | |
became the judge of all human conduct and character, | 14:51 | |
over and over again the word, | 14:56 | |
that mysterious word, | 15:00 | |
that ineffable word, that elusive word, | 15:02 | |
was the rock, the sure foundation, the firm ground, | 15:06 | |
the only hope. | 15:11 | |
It's thunder could be heard in Martin Luther, | 15:13 | |
its comprehensiveness in Augustine and Aquinas, | 15:17 | |
it's mercy and compassion and St. Francis, | 15:22 | |
indeed, | 15:27 | |
that word of the Lord was a carpenter's vice | 15:28 | |
where the slippery world could be held in a fast, firm grip. | 15:33 | |
Little wonder that you and I, | 15:43 | |
and the kind of world in which we live, | 15:46 | |
have lost the power and the splendor, | 15:50 | |
the magnitude and massive mystery of that word of God. | 15:53 | |
For in our age, we have changed the currency of speech | 16:00 | |
into smaller and smaller coin. | 16:04 | |
Words are a glut on the market. | 16:08 | |
Like the Sorcerer's apprentice, | 16:13 | |
our talkativeness has gotten out of hand. | 16:15 | |
Newspapers alone stacked, | 16:19 | |
like a dirty white Everest | 16:22 | |
higher than anything else in the Himalayas | 16:24 | |
of this over-productive world of ours, | 16:27 | |
stand over our heads and hide the sky. | 16:30 | |
The incredible spate of books, | 16:35 | |
the garrulous and incessant flash flood of the airways, | 16:37 | |
and the ubiquitous verbalization | 16:42 | |
of well nigh everything under the sun, | 16:44 | |
leave us with little silence in which to conceive | 16:47 | |
of the mighty word of God. | 16:53 | |
With such a massive word, | 16:57 | |
such speed and turnover, | 17:00 | |
The quality has suffered badly. | 17:03 | |
Their roots in the basic mystery of life have been cut off. | 17:07 | |
And the very magic of their being has been emasculated, | 17:13 | |
deadpan prose, | 17:17 | |
machine gun syntax, | 17:20 | |
journalistic non-thinking, | 17:23 | |
pervades a field originally capable | 17:26 | |
of pointing beyond itself | 17:29 | |
to depths and dimensions, | 17:31 | |
which once invigorated and indeed transformed | 17:32 | |
the very nature of human life. | 17:37 | |
When the true word, | 17:41 | |
is lost, | 17:44 | |
that word from which all other words | 17:46 | |
come and derive their power, | 17:49 | |
then the mind grows frenzied | 17:53 | |
and, | 17:57 | |
fanatical in its use of words. | 17:58 | |
With nothing underneath any of them, | 18:02 | |
or in back of them, or within them, | 18:05 | |
words then begin to be the subject | 18:09 | |
of a desperate idolatry, | 18:12 | |
and of a wild inflation. | 18:15 | |
If the ground of meaning, the invisible foundation, | 18:18 | |
the eternal "Logos," vanishes, | 18:22 | |
then each little word is forced to bear too much weight. | 18:25 | |
The ritual of the whole is lost. | 18:32 | |
The ceremony of faith is dimmed, | 18:35 | |
the passage from the little words to the great word, | 18:38 | |
disappears. | 18:44 | |
The man who cannot live without some kind of meaning, | 18:46 | |
then fastens upon the most ephemeral, | 18:50 | |
or the most artificial, | 18:53 | |
clutches like a drowning man at the smallest thing | 18:56 | |
in verbiage. | 19:00 | |
And then, he strings them together like the broken beads | 19:02 | |
of a rosary one after another, ad infinitum, | 19:05 | |
hoping to achieve by their excessive quantity, | 19:10 | |
what they lack in quality. | 19:13 | |
And so there comes the day when a great artist, | 19:16 | |
would say of it, | 19:19 | |
the literalists, are the greatest suppliers of all, | 19:22 | |
for thanks to our technical facilities, | 19:26 | |
we have become the wordiest of all ages, | 19:30 | |
and the least wise of them. | 19:34 | |
The path, | 19:38 | |
back to where we could at least begin to hear the word, | 19:41 | |
the path back to the great word itself, | 19:47 | |
is beset with difficulty. | 19:53 | |
Little words have wrapped us up in their own | 19:56 | |
trademarked cellophane. | 19:59 | |
Wrapped up our minds, our habits of thoughts, | 20:01 | |
our notions of life, | 20:04 | |
until we only see or think or feel the way | 20:06 | |
these wrappings allow us. | 20:09 | |
It takes a long time and a great while | 20:12 | |
to divest ourselves of the verbal wrappings, | 20:16 | |
which hide reality from us as often as they disclose it. | 20:19 | |
Indeed, one of the fantastic things about the words we use, | 20:24 | |
is the way they hinder us and block us | 20:29 | |
from getting at what is greater and deeper | 20:32 | |
than the cliches we are currently using. | 20:35 | |
We are victimized by our stereotypes, | 20:41 | |
and nowhere more than in religion, | 20:46 | |
we actually protect ourselves from the mystery | 20:49 | |
of the great word, | 20:54 | |
by a vast wall of little ones. | 20:56 | |
As Martin Buber puts it, | 21:01 | |
"Each of us is encased in an armor whose task, | 21:03 | |
is to ward off the signs of the living word." | 21:07 | |
Let us move to the center of this matter. | 21:14 | |
If our hunger is deep enough to want some knowledge | 21:17 | |
of that word out of which all our continual | 21:21 | |
spate of words must come. | 21:24 | |
If we're searching for some solid ground | 21:27 | |
with our uncertain foot in this world of shifting shadows, | 21:31 | |
if we have heard in the little shells of little words, | 21:36 | |
the sounding surf of the great sea, | 21:42 | |
then the simplest statement that can be made | 21:47 | |
for our direction, is that we must listen | 21:50 | |
in the same magnitude, | 21:54 | |
as that of the word we want to hear. | 21:58 | |
Rilke express this with power. | 22:04 | |
The word he said which pressed man from all sides, | 22:07 | |
he conceived as the realm of angels, | 22:12 | |
vast principalities and powers | 22:16 | |
of enormous and unimaginable benediction. | 22:21 | |
Great winged creatures | 22:27 | |
who stand between, | 22:30 | |
the ultimate mystery of God and the intimate mystery of man. | 22:32 | |
and these great creatures, | 22:38 | |
solicited the openness of man. | 22:40 | |
But the terror of this encounter, | 22:46 | |
the intensity of it, | 22:49 | |
in painful ecstasy, | 22:51 | |
such as one sees in Jacob at the ford Jabbok, | 22:53 | |
or in Jesus in Gethsemane, | 22:59 | |
the terror of this encounter and the painful ecstasy of it, | 23:02 | |
is described in his lines where he says, | 23:08 | |
"Hear, oh my heart, | 23:11 | |
hear, as only saints have heard. | 23:14 | |
Heard until the grand call lifted them off the ground. | 23:19 | |
And yet they went on, impossibly with their kneeling | 23:25 | |
in undistracted attention, | 23:32 | |
so inherently hearers, | 23:35 | |
not that they could endure the voice of God, | 23:39 | |
far from it." | 23:44 | |
The hearing of God's word, | 23:48 | |
as Jesus suggested, | 23:51 | |
is not a casual thing. | 23:54 | |
It is not an accident sparked by fortuitous circumstance. | 23:57 | |
It is not a passing glance or a momentary turn of the head. | 24:02 | |
As the Psalmist himself has said, | 24:08 | |
"Thou has dug out our ears." | 24:12 | |
Or as an ancient rabbinic legend has it, | 24:18 | |
Rabbis sat in silence for seven long years | 24:21 | |
before they were deeply enough attentive | 24:27 | |
in silence, | 24:33 | |
to hear it. | 24:36 | |
If a man is to hear beauty, as Beethoven heard it, | 24:39 | |
it will take all his skill, all his anguish of spirit, | 24:44 | |
all the experience of his mortal striving, | 24:50 | |
all the discipline of his senses, | 24:53 | |
all the drudgery of practice, | 24:58 | |
all the patient pressures on the limits | 25:01 | |
of his own sensibility. | 25:05 | |
Only a lifetime at every level of his own human equipment | 25:07 | |
will suffice to hear the beauty | 25:13 | |
and the glory of Beethoven's music. | 25:16 | |
So it is with God's word. | 25:19 | |
It is not heard, | 25:22 | |
easily. | 25:25 | |
A man begins to listen, | 25:28 | |
when he works at his job, listening. | 25:31 | |
He begins to listen when he plays, | 25:38 | |
listening. | 25:44 | |
He begins to listen when he suffers, | 25:47 | |
listening. | 25:51 | |
He begins to listen when he thinks, listening. | 25:55 | |
He begins to listen when he reaches, | 26:02 | |
listening. | 26:08 | |
when his whole body and mind and soul | 26:10 | |
listen together in silence, | 26:15 | |
as the saints have listened. | 26:21 | |
In an agony like the greatest joy man has ever known, | 26:24 | |
to hear the soft word of God, | 26:31 | |
in a little child. | 26:38 | |
Or the awful word of God, | 26:44 | |
in death, | 26:47 | |
or the beautiful word of God, | 26:54 | |
in love, | 26:58 | |
or that terrible word of God, in pain. | 27:04 | |
requires nothing less than our whole undivided strength, | 27:09 | |
to listen, | 27:16 | |
to listen beyond our words, | 27:19 | |
to listen beyond our speech, | 27:23 | |
to listen beyond all the words that men have ever had heard, | 27:27 | |
to listen for that, out of which, | 27:31 | |
every wise and humble word has ever come. | 27:34 | |
One of the most precise images of such listening I know | 27:43 | |
is in, | 27:50 | |
the figure of the man with a blue guitar painted by Picasso. | 27:52 | |
The lean ascetic figure, sitting on crossed legs, | 27:58 | |
holds a guitar, while his hunger sharpened face | 28:03 | |
is bowed to catch the slightest nuance of sound | 28:07 | |
from the strings. | 28:12 | |
In a poem by Wallace Stevens, the image is characterized. | 28:18 | |
Stevens says, "The poem of the mind, | 28:23 | |
is in the act of finding what will suffice. | 28:26 | |
It has to be living, | 28:32 | |
to learn the speech of the place | 28:35 | |
it has to face the men of the time, | 28:37 | |
and to meet the women of the time. | 28:40 | |
It has to think about war, | 28:43 | |
and it has to find what will suffice. | 28:47 | |
The actor is a metaphysician, | 28:50 | |
twanging a wiry string that gives sounds | 28:54 | |
passing up through sudden rightness, | 28:58 | |
wholly containing the mind. | 29:02 | |
It must be the feeding of a satisfaction. | 29:06 | |
It may be of a man skating, | 29:12 | |
a woman dancing, | 29:16 | |
a woman combing her hair, | 29:19 | |
but this is the poem of the act of the mind. | 29:22 | |
It is, | 29:29 | |
when everything ascends into the mind, | 29:30 | |
and the man's whole life, night and day, | 29:35 | |
birth and dying, | 29:38 | |
love and hate, | 29:40 | |
everything he has known, | 29:42 | |
listens, | 29:46 | |
For the word that cannot be spoken, | 29:48 | |
but the word that once created | 29:52 | |
all things that ever was were created, | 29:55 | |
and holds within its mystery, the judgment of all history." | 29:59 | |
Certainly the second thing that we will encounter | 30:06 | |
in our search for the word of God is the assumption | 30:09 | |
I presume, rather widely held, | 30:13 | |
that it is, | 30:16 | |
a word which will inevitably occur in a holy language, | 30:20 | |
or sacred vocabulary. | 30:29 | |
This is not the testimony of either the biblical | 30:32 | |
or the early Christian traditions of our faith. | 30:34 | |
The word of God is manifested un-ecclesiastically, | 30:38 | |
and its vocabulary is the vernacular. | 30:43 | |
You will hear God's word in other words | 30:48 | |
where you least expect it. | 30:52 | |
There is, in the wisdom of Solomon, an interesting passage, | 30:55 | |
which says that the Israelites, | 30:58 | |
"They went through the wilderness that was not inhabited. | 31:00 | |
And they pinched tents where they were lay no way. | 31:03 | |
And when they were thirsty, they called upon thee, | 31:06 | |
and water was given them out of the flinty rock, | 31:09 | |
and their thirst was quenched out of the hard stone." | 31:12 | |
This is always the story of God's word. | 31:16 | |
I suspect that the place where it is the most difficult | 31:21 | |
at times to hear the word of God, | 31:23 | |
is where you most expect to hear it. | 31:25 | |
In church. | 31:28 | |
The Puritans themselves said in one of their tracts, | 31:31 | |
we have a proverb that they, that will find | 31:34 | |
must well seek where a thing is not, | 31:37 | |
as well as where it seems to be. | 31:39 | |
The word of God rises out of life where there is no beauty. | 31:43 | |
It comes into lives where there is no justice. | 31:47 | |
It flowers in the mind that oft times is not expecting it. | 31:50 | |
And often resisting it. | 31:55 | |
It is the most unconventional | 31:57 | |
of all the manifestations of life. | 31:59 | |
It burns for Moses in the Bush, and does not turn to ash, | 32:03 | |
in the very back of the wilderness. | 32:07 | |
It blooms like a vision for Jeremiah | 32:09 | |
from the muddy wheel of the potter's house, | 32:11 | |
It flares like lightning for Paul, | 32:14 | |
from the sudden illumination on the Damascan road, | 32:16 | |
and at the very center of our faith. Jesus Christ, | 32:19 | |
the word made flesh is by that very fact, | 32:23 | |
the vernacular itself, | 32:26 | |
and as such will remain forever the embarrassment | 32:29 | |
of every ecclesiastical establishment | 32:32 | |
the world has ever known. | 32:35 | |
Finally, one must come back to the too harshly drawn | 32:38 | |
distinction, which I have made between the great words | 32:41 | |
and the little words, | 32:44 | |
the great word | 32:47 | |
for which there is no language, but creation itself. | 32:48 | |
And the little words which slip, and fade, and crumble, | 32:52 | |
as we use them. | 32:55 | |
There is a mysterious place where these meet, | 32:57 | |
where they touch one another. | 33:03 | |
Where the mystery of the great word | 33:06 | |
seeps into the little words, | 33:08 | |
and where are the little words of men | 33:11 | |
are somehow by the grace of God, | 33:13 | |
derived from the silence of the great word. | 33:16 | |
There is a kind of breakthrough, | 33:21 | |
as in Steven's poem of the guitarist | 33:23 | |
who, running up the strings finds the right pitch | 33:26 | |
and strikes the note, | 33:29 | |
for which his whole listening has been waiting. | 33:33 | |
How many, many times, | 33:38 | |
civilization has seen this happen. | 33:41 | |
The stalemate at the beginning of the Christian era, | 33:44 | |
and then Christ coming and the right word uttered | 33:50 | |
in the right place. | 33:53 | |
Or the fall of Rome and Greece. | 33:55 | |
And Augustine's appearance with the word | 33:58 | |
that established the foundations for the world | 34:01 | |
for a thousand years. | 34:03 | |
And now our own time, | 34:06 | |
with all its disjointed vocabularies, | 34:09 | |
it's chaos of words, | 34:12 | |
it's degradation of the language in advertising | 34:14 | |
and propaganda with all our knowledge, | 34:19 | |
without wisdom. | 34:26 | |
Perhaps we too, in this new era of darkness | 34:29 | |
await a new advent, | 34:33 | |
a new word to speak the great word, | 34:36 | |
in such a way that men can hear it, | 34:40 | |
in such a way that the whisper of it | 34:45 | |
will reverberate in the hearts of men | 34:47 | |
as in a great cathedral. | 34:51 | |
Revelation, | 34:55 | |
that mysterious experience of the guitarist, | 34:57 | |
or of any man. | 35:02 | |
Revelations spans the great word and the little word, | 35:06 | |
and binds them together until they burn and shine, | 35:10 | |
dazzling our eyes and surprising our souls. | 35:14 | |
This is one thing we should know now, | 35:19 | |
as surely as every man knew it, | 35:21 | |
that there is something back of our human words, | 35:23 | |
partly hidden by them, partly revealed. | 35:27 | |
We may not know what to make of that much battered word, | 35:31 | |
"God," which has been exiled by so many today. | 35:34 | |
But in an act of violence two years ago, | 35:40 | |
when the president of the United States was assassinated, | 35:43 | |
multitudes of men the world around, | 35:51 | |
suddenly found the mystery of that great word | 35:55 | |
ringing in their hearts, | 36:00 | |
and stabbing them in a pain that becomes something | 36:02 | |
like the joy of a common humanity. | 36:07 | |
And out of that tragedy, | 36:13 | |
there stood for a few short hours, at most a few short days, | 36:15 | |
the sense of being human beings with all their shame. | 36:22 | |
And yet, | 36:27 | |
the strange, lingering grandeur, | 36:29 | |
that would not die. | 36:33 | |
We knew then, a mystery behind the word, | 36:37 | |
which shattered and shook us, | 36:40 | |
and held us with a strange tenderness, | 36:42 | |
and a very peculiar glory. | 36:46 | |
We may not know what to do with the word, "God" | 36:49 | |
or what to hang it on. | 36:55 | |
But reality, | 36:58 | |
the mystery in which we live, | 37:01 | |
the greatness behind the word is still with us. | 37:02 | |
We may argue about God, or the meaning of the scriptures, | 37:07 | |
or the ecclesiastical services of the church, | 37:11 | |
But once we push away all the little words | 37:14 | |
and look got a piece of bread, | 37:17 | |
born of the sun, | 37:21 | |
and of the rain, | 37:24 | |
and of the earth. | 37:27 | |
Born of the mystery of nature, | 37:30 | |
and of man's hunger. | 37:34 | |
Born of falling empires, | 37:37 | |
and the skill of men. | 37:40 | |
Born of dreams and deeds of sorrows, and ecstasies, | 37:44 | |
and sin, | 37:49 | |
even of life and death. | 37:52 | |
Hold that bit of bread and see if you do not discern | 37:56 | |
the flashing fall of the great word | 38:00 | |
through the dark and thirsty seas | 38:05 | |
of our blind and partial seeing, | 38:08 | |
then you will know why Jesus seemed to have an ear | 38:14 | |
for the hearing of God's word | 38:18 | |
under such difficult circumstances. | 38:21 | |
In the terrible intensity of the wilderness, | 38:27 | |
or in the hilarity of the wedding at Cana, | 38:33 | |
or in the furious judgment in the temple, | 38:37 | |
or in the bold suffering of the cross. | 38:41 | |
Jesus heard it, | 38:45 | |
at table, | 38:48 | |
in a fishing boat, | 38:52 | |
even, | 38:57 | |
when men persecuted him and hung him on a cross, | 38:59 | |
he listened for it everywhere, | 39:05 | |
and always with his whole life. | 39:10 | |
That word has not ceased to reverberate. | 39:16 | |
But until our hearts grow larger, | 39:22 | |
deeper, | 39:29 | |
higher, | 39:31 | |
they will not resound | 39:35 | |
to its mighty thunder. | 39:39 | |
Let us pray. | 39:42 | |
Almighty and everlasting Father, | 39:52 | |
Let Thy word, | 39:59 | |
fall upon our ears, | 40:04 | |
until at last, | 40:09 | |
it makes for hearing. | 40:13 | |
Awaken us from our sleep, | 40:17 | |
deepen our hunger, | 40:23 | |
enlarge our hope, | 40:26 | |
until, | 40:30 | |
we hear Thy speak, | 40:33 | |
in the silence of our hearts, | 40:36 | |
and speak thy word, | 40:40 | |
in love and mercy, | 40:45 | |
for all men. | 40:49 | |
Amen. | 40:52 | |
(soft church organ music) | 40:58 | |
(choir singing) | 41:19 | |
Onto God's gracious mercy and protection, | 43:03 | |
do we commit you, | 43:07 | |
the Lord bless you, | 43:10 | |
and keep you. | 43:12 | |
The Lord make his face to shine upon you, | 43:15 | |
and be gracious unto you. | 43:19 | |
The Lord, lift up his countenance upon you, | 43:22 | |
and give you peace, | 43:27 | |
this night, and forevermore. | 43:30 | |
(choir singing) | 43:38 |