James T. Cleland - "Homo Sum, Christianus Sum" (February 13, 1966)

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	(instrumental music)	0:09
-	Let us pray.	0:34
	Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts	0:37
	be acceptable in thy sight	0:42
	oh, Lord our strength and our redeemer.	0:47
	Amen.	0:52
	Those of us who are somewhat aware of European history,	0:59
	remember how the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine,	1:05
	commuted between France and Germany	1:12
	during the last 100 years.	1:16
	Albert Schweitzer, was born in Alsace	1:21
	and John Gunther once asked him,	1:27
	which he thought himself to be most.	1:31
	French or German.	1:35
	Schweitzer replied in Latin,	1:40
	homo sum	1:45
	I am a man,	1:49
	yet not in the sense of I am a male,	1:54
	homo sum.	1:59
	I am a human being.	2:02
	Now this affirmation of an under lying common denominator,	2:08
	is so simple that it may be overlooked.	2:16
	So true that it may be ignored.	2:20
	So devastating that it may be avoided.	2:26
	It is so much more natural to say of a person,	2:33
	he's German, she's French.	2:37
	He's a Northerner, she's a Republican.	2:41
	He's a Baptist, she's a pagan.	2:46
	He's white, she's a college graduate.	2:50
	He's a Negro, she's Jewish.	2:56
	We have to struggle to get behind and below	3:01
	and over these valid but the limiting classifications	3:06
	to the primal and ultimate fact that he	3:13
	and she and we are human be	3:18
	(Latin language)	3:20
	Let's look at this thought together	3:30
	especially as this is Race Relations Sunday.	3:32
	The Old Testament struggles	3:39
	with the idea of the oneness of man	3:41
	in collision with the belief in the chosenness of the Jews.	3:46
	Both creation stories in Genesis,	3:54
	point to a common pair of ancestors	3:57
	for all the people of the earth.	4:01
	The very word Adam, is a generic noun for mankind	4:05
	as well as a proper name for the first man.	4:14
	So, God created man,	4:19
	mankind, in his own image.	4:24
	In the image of God, he created him.	4:28
	Male and female, he created them.	4:32
	The Unitarian Universalist card for last Christmas	4:39
	which several of you sent me, re-echos this idea.	4:44
	"There is only one man in the world	4:49
	and his name is All Men."	4:55
	The words are Carl Sandberg's.	5:00
	The thought is as a old as the creation stories	5:04
	and as new as this rainy Sunday.	5:09
	The Jew was never allowed to forget this	5:14
	though he had a hard time living up to it.	5:17
	He so believed that he was of a uniquely chosen race.	5:21
	Amos the prophet, wrapped him over the knuckles about this.	5:27
	Are you not like the Ethiopians to me oh, people of Israel?	5:33
	Says the Lord.	5:40
	Did I not bring up Israel from the land of Egypt?	5:43
	And you can hear his heroes giving three cheers.	5:47
	Sure he did.	5:52
	And then Amos adds,	5:54
	and the Philistines from Caphtor	5:57
	and the Syrians from Kir,	6:01
	granted that Yahweh led the Jews out of Egypt.	6:05
	He also led the Philistines from Crete	6:10
	and the Syrians from the distant north east	6:14
	and thus provincialism is spanked	6:17
	and universalism is again enunciated.	6:21
	Homo sum is prior to I am a Jew	6:26
	or a Philistine	6:33
	or a Syrian.	6:35
	Now our classical heritage struggles with this thought.	6:38
	It was the Roman playwright, Terrance,	6:44
	who in the second century, BC,	6:47
	expressed the often quoted dictum.	6:50
	(Latin language)	6:51
	which may be paraphrased, I'm a human being.	7:03
	What concerns any human being must concern me	7:08
	and the use gentium,	7:17
	the law of the nations was an effort on the part of Rome	7:19
	to bring some order and justice into the relationship	7:25
	of the dependent peoples of the empire	7:30
	though all was recognizing the unique status	7:34
	of the Roman citizen.	7:38
	And the philosophers especially the Stoics,	7:41
	attempted to identify the law of nations.	7:44
	They used gentium with the law of nature.	7:47
	It was an understandable mistake	7:52
	to equate Roman might with divine Providence,	7:55
	but there was something noble in the effort.	8:00
	A man is a man is a man,	8:04
	is more basic than a man is a Roman	8:08
	or a Greek	8:12
	or a Jew.	8:14
	And the humanists echoed the slogan homo sum,	8:16
	was Alexander Pope who wrote, "An honest man's	8:20
	the noblest work of God."	8:24
	And it was Robert Burns who in an angry poem,	8:28
	looked forward to the day that man to man,	8:33
	the world o'er shall brothers be for all that.	8:37
	Maybe that's why the Russians issued a commemorative stamp	8:46
	on his 200th birthday though the English wouldn't.	8:50
	And before we play South Carolina tomorrow night,	8:57
	(narrator clears his throat)	9:00
	let me add one more testimony to this homo sum witness.	9:01
	It is spoken by U Thant, the UN secretary general,	9:08
	regarding the influence of Buddhism	9:14
	on his behavior as a spectator at a boxing match.	9:18
	Suppose that a Burmese boxer and a foreign boxer	9:24
	were fighting for a title,	9:27
	I could watch the progress of the match	9:30
	without any emotional reaction.	9:33
	I would not feel one way or the other	9:36
	whatever the result of the match might be.	9:39
	I was trained to regard humanity as a whole	9:43
	and not in terms of segments	9:48
	or divisions constituting the whole.	9:50
	Local interests became subordinated to national interests	9:54
	and national interests were subordinated to human interests.	9:59
	Maybe that's why the Burmese, U Thant,	10:06
	is the UN secretary general.	10:11
	But I wonder how many of us will behave like him.	10:15
	When we gaze on Mr. McGuire and his Gamecocks on the morrow.	10:20
	There then is the what of homo sum,	10:29
	but we know how far short of it we fall by accident,	10:35
	by intention,	10:40
	by default.	10:42
	I shall not speak this morning of Birmingham and Selma	10:45
	of Jackson and Chapel Hill.	10:51
	I would instead call to your remembrance two passages	10:56
	which we all know.	11:01
	The first is from the Merchant of Venice.	11:04
	Shylock is speaking,	11:08
	"I am a Jew.	11:12
	Half not a Jew eyes,	11:16
	half not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions,	11:19
	senses, affections, passions,	11:25
	fed with the same food,	11:31
	hurt with the same weapons,	11:34
	subject to the same diseases,	11:37
	healed by the same means,	11:41
	warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer	11:45
	as a Christian is.	11:50
	Homo sum.	11:54
	I am Adam.	11:58
	I am a human being.	12:02
	The second passage is a short poem by Countee Cullen	12:08
	entitled "Incident".	12:12
	Once riding in Old Baltimore,	12:17
	heart filled, head filled with glee,	12:20
	I saw a Baltimore and keep looking straight at me.	12:24
	Now I was eight and very small	12:29
	and he was no quite bigger.	12:33
	And so I smiled,	12:36
	but he poked out his tongue and called me nigga.	12:39
	I saw the whole of Baltimore from May until December.	12:47
	Of all the things that happened there,	12:54
	that's all that I remember.	12:57
	Puer sum.	13:03
	I am a boy.	13:05
	I'm not just a nigga.	13:08
	I'm not even just a Negro.	13:11
	I too I'm of Adam.	13:15
	I am Adam.	13:18
	Homo sum.	13:22
	Now the question rises.	13:28
	Why should I accept the what of homo sum,	13:32
	even granted its long history its widespread geography	13:38
	its recurrent affirmation?	13:42
	Oh, there are all kinds of reasons.	13:45
	Self-interest,	13:47
	intelligence,	13:50
	the other regarding quality in our makeup.	13:52
	But there's just one answer we shall consider	13:57
	assembled as we are in the university service of worship.	14:00
	Christiano sum.	14:07
	I am to some extent a Christian.	14:12
	Naturally we turn to our Lord	14:19
	for the motivation of our lives	14:21
	and we find him stressing homo sum	14:24
	both in his teaching and in his behavior.	14:28
	He told a parable in which the hated Samaritan	14:32
	was the humane human being.	14:37
	He instructed his followers to love their enemies,	14:43
	domestic and foreign.	14:46
	He ate with despised, publicans and sinners.	14:50
	He forgave an adulteress.	14:56
	He paid his highest compliment to a Roman junior officer.	15:01
	He healed the daughter of a Syrophoenician woman.	15:08
	He behaved in word and indeed like a human being	15:14
	par excellence.	15:19
	And when Pontius Pilate presented Jesus	15:22
	to the Jewish hierarchy he said,	15:25
	"Behold the man."	15:28
	And in the Latin version of the New Testament, the Vulgate,	15:33
	these words are translated, ecce homo,	15:36
	Which we may with dramatic irony render look a human being.	15:42
	And this emphasis comes to light in the Ephesian passage	15:53
	which was our morning lesson.	15:56
	The writer is struggling with the problem,	16:01
	how to make Jewish Christians forget their tribal background	16:03
	and Gentile Christians ignore their racial tradition	16:09
	and together live just as Christians.	16:15
	Pure and simple.	16:21
	And he used as an analogy, an architectural fact.	16:23
	In the temple at Jerusalem, which was destroyed about 70AD,	16:29
	there was a barrier beyond which a Gentile	16:34
	could not pass on penalty of death.	16:40
	The inscription which carried that warning,	16:45
	is now in a museum in Istanbul formerly Constantinople.	16:49
	You can see it there.	16:55
	Now the letter writer pointed out	16:58
	that Jesus had smashed that partition.	17:00
	Listen to his words, "For he is our peace	17:04
	who has made us both one	17:09
	and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility,	17:13
	that he might create in himself one new man	17:17
	in place of the two.	17:23
	So making peace."	17:26
	Now this from one angle, is the creation of a new humanity.	17:29
	From another angle, it is the recreation	17:35
	of the original humanity.	17:40
	The recovery of the fact that we are children of Adam	17:44
	the common ancestor of all men, because he was all men.	17:48
	This thought is echoed in another New Testament letter.	17:53
	There is neither Jew nor Greek	17:57
	for you are all one in Christ Jesus.	18:03
	Now this is why we should accept the what of homo sum	18:08
	because each of us is a Christian.	18:14
	Christiano sum with all racial qualifying adjectives,	18:16
	with all tribal restrictive labels omitted.	18:22
	Oh I know that we Christians	18:28
	have not have been a howling success	18:29
	in living up to the insights of our faith.	18:33
	We could cite example after example,	18:36
	dozens, scores, hundreds of failure upon failure	18:38
	to take seriously the example of our Lord	18:44
	or the teachings of the New Testament.	18:47
	But all is not lost.	18:50
	The very fact that our race relation Sunday is observed,	18:53
	is a sign both of sin and of repentance.	19:00
	The Vatican Council just ended,	19:08
	recognized this revived appreciation,	19:11
	not only in Roman Catholic Protestant relations,	19:14
	but in a new attitude to Jews and Arabs.	19:17
	Father Hans Kung, the great German scholar,	19:23
	in a recent issue of Commonweal,	19:29
	talks of a new period of Judeo Christian relations	19:32
	after 2000 years of church history.	19:37
	Imagine that.	19:44
	A new relationship after 2000 years of church history.	19:45
	And if that surprise you, listen to this one.	19:50
	He adds, "The church looks with great respect	19:52
	on Hinduism and Buddhism and especially on Islam,	19:57
	which together with her also worships the one God	20:05
	and honors Jesus as a prophet."	20:10
	Now there aren't many Protestants who'd say that.	20:13
	This is the official statement of the Vatican Council.	20:16
	Brethren this is a day for celebration	20:20
	as well as for confession	20:24
	but there's a third and last question to be answered.	20:28
	Granted that we should treat all men as fellow human beings	20:32
	and that the primary for us here this morning,	20:37
	is Christian love.	20:41
	How do we go about it?	20:43
	Well, Albert Schweitzer has answered that question for us.	20:46
	Here it is in three sentences.	20:50
	"Example, is not the main thing in influencing others,	20:54
	it is the only thing.	21:02
	Hope is renewed each time that you see a person you know	21:08
	who is deeply involved in the struggle of life	21:12
	helping another person.	21:16
	Example is the only thing.	21:20
	Example is the way to implement	21:25
	the how we can do it in our speaking,	21:27
	in the choice of our words,	21:31
	in the tone of our voice,	21:35
	in the obvious attitude	21:38
	that one person is addressing another person	21:41
	with both recognized as human beings."	21:46
	Those of us who are skilled	21:52
	with the pen can do it in our writing.	21:53
	Arthur Daley, the sports editor of the New York Times.	21:58
	And I wish that another sports editor	22:04
	not a 100 miles from here would read him.	22:06
	Arthur Daley won the Pulitzer Prize for his sport writing.	22:11
	He once quoted a classic remark about Joe Louis,	22:15
	the heavyweight champion which I've never forgotten.	22:19
	Talking of Joe Louis he said, "He's a credit to his race,	22:23
	the human race."	22:29
	"He's a credit to his race, the human race."	22:33
	That's a sentence that lives and sparkles and glows.	22:37
	And those of us who are activists	22:43
	can do it through our deeds.	22:45
	I think of the successful battle recently	22:48
	waged by some divinity school students	22:51
	to force Dunham to allow Negros,	22:54
	to play on the Edgemont Community Center basketball team	22:58
	in an official league.	23:02
	It was effected by righteous indignation,	23:07
	sheer stickability,	23:11
	and some humor.	23:14
	Ask yourself, where am I needed?	23:17
	And then move in.	23:21
	If we are really needed it doesn't matter	23:24
	if we are Baptists, Buddhist or blasphemers.	23:27
	Presbyterians, papist or pagans	23:32
	if we just care enough for people as persons	23:36
	and have some skill to go with a concern.	23:41
	Someone filling out a questionnaire form	23:48
	for a job set puzzled by this question.	23:52
	Person to notify in case of an accident.	23:56
	Person to notify in case of an accident.	24:01
	Do you know what he finally wrote?	24:05
	Anybody in sight.	24:07
	(audience laughing)	24:10
	That's what I felt two weeks ago.	24:12
	Anybody in sight.	24:15
	Are you in sight of a need?	24:18
	Move in.	24:21
	Yell for help.	24:23
	Example is the thing.	24:26
	Do you know what'll happen?	24:29
	We'll be scared to death,	24:32
	we shall fear for our inadequacy,	24:35
	and we shall be surprised with joy.	24:39
	Well, let's draw this sermon to a conclusion.	24:45
	We act as Christians by treating people	24:50
	as fellow human beings.	24:55
	We do not act to make them Christian.	24:58
	That is not our purpose though it may be a byproduct.	25:03
	And because we are Christian,	25:10
	we discover that we are human beings.	25:13
	(Latin language).	25:19
	I am Christian therefore, I am a human being.	25:28
	We are all children of the same creator and redeemer	25:35
	who is no respecter of color or of race	25:41
	and we are supposed to be like him.	25:48
	Amen.	25:55
	Let us pray.	25:57
	Our father God, whose blessed son died	26:04
	to break down the dividing wall of hostility	26:07
	between Jew and Gentile,	26:11
	help us to destroy barriers	26:15
	and to build bridges between the races	26:19
	that we may continue his work in our day in generation	26:24
	to thy glory and for the relief of man's estate.	26:31
	And may the blessing of God come upon you abundantly.	26:37
	May it keep you strong and tranquil	26:42
	in the truth of his promises	26:46
	through Jesus Christ our Lord.	26:49
	(choral music)	26:59

Item Info

Title:

James T. Cleland - "Homo Sum, Christianus Sum" (February 13, 1966)

Permalink:

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4t72ch4w

Date:

February 13, 1966

Speaker:

Cleland, James T. (James Tough), 1903-1974

Contributor:

Duke University. Chapel

Identifier:

UA.17.01.0003 RR-0326
ref5857_uyt
uachapelsermaud
duke:628441
dcrau002323
ark:/87924/r4t72ch4w
639dca25-23f1-4102-8fb2-bf1aa844e0c6

Digital Collection:

Duke Chapel Recordings

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Duke University Chapel recordings, 1954-2005

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Language:

English

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United States
North Carolina
Durham (N.C.)

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

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James T. Cleland - "Homo Sum, Christianus Sum" (February 13, 1966)

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1. James T. Cleland - "Homo Sum; Christianus Sum" (February 13, 1966)

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James T. Cleland - "Homo Sum, Christianus Sum" (February 13, 1966)

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