Robert E. Cushman - "The Bell Tolls for Whom?" (May 1, 1966)
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| (instrumental music) | 0:00 | |
| (clears throat) | 0:22 | |
| - | Let us pray. | 0:25 |
| Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts, | 0:28 | |
| oh God, father, son and Holy Spirit, | 0:35 | |
| be acceptable in thy sight. | 0:42 | |
| Amen. | 0:46 | |
| (clears throat) | 0:49 | |
| Thanks to the mass media, | 0:53 | |
| religious issues have lately become table talk, | 0:57 | |
| and theology or something like it is a sort of tinder | 1:04 | |
| for animated discussion of the household. | 1:10 | |
| Not for some time, I think, | 1:16 | |
| has God talk received such space in the public press. | 1:18 | |
| Hopefully, it might have been better informed, | 1:24 | |
| both in its sources and in its journalistic vehicles. | 1:27 | |
| But such as it is, we have it, | 1:32 | |
| and God, or some kind of fact similarly, | 1:36 | |
| is receiving unaccustomed attention. | 1:40 | |
| The issue that is being aired and kicked around | 1:45 | |
| might perhaps be stated thus, | 1:50 | |
| whether God is a hypothesis | 1:53 | |
| of which we have longer any need. | 1:56 | |
| And of course, the answer is | 2:02 | |
| that this depends upon what we are attempting to explain, | 2:04 | |
| to understand, or to render intelligible. | 2:10 | |
| Laplace, the 18th century French physicist | 2:15 | |
| was probably right in his mechanistic application | 2:21 | |
| of Newtonian gravitational theory to the solar system. | 2:26 | |
| He did not have need of God's intrusive power | 2:32 | |
| to explain the phenomenon. | 2:37 | |
| Given the Newtonian principles, | 2:41 | |
| he had enough data to explain all the operations and effects | 2:44 | |
| within the range of his prevailing interest. | 2:50 | |
| Now, while the prevailing interests may vary, | 2:55 | |
| it is very much the same, I think, | 3:01 | |
| with the earthbound and mundane among us | 3:03 | |
| whose whole preoccupation centers in buying and selling, | 3:09 | |
| in fabricating and using. | 3:14 | |
| Within this range of interests and endeavor, | 3:18 | |
| of goods and services, of supply and demand, | 3:22 | |
| the God hypothesis can and does become tenuous | 3:28 | |
| and often irrelevant. | 3:32 | |
| Not finely perhaps, but rather decisively. | 3:34 | |
| At length, men find themselves the solitary centers | 3:40 | |
| and in a limited sense, | 3:45 | |
| the sufficient cause of their own world, | 3:46 | |
| that is, the world of their own making, the made world. | 3:49 | |
| If they must accept also the social character | 3:55 | |
| of their existence within this universe | 3:59 | |
| of goods and services, of utilities and competitive claims, | 4:03 | |
| then salvation consists in contriving the greatest good | 4:10 | |
| for the greatest number of claimants. | 4:15 | |
| Social control becomes the instrument | 4:20 | |
| and the planned or perhaps the great society offers itself | 4:24 | |
| as a sort of substitute for the dissolving face of God. | 4:29 | |
| In such a system too, the words of Laplace apply. | 4:36 | |
| Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis. | 4:42 | |
| That is, for my present purposes. | 4:47 | |
| In short, I think we ought all to understand | 4:51 | |
| that for certain purposes | 4:55 | |
| and from frequently occupied perspectives, | 4:57 | |
| it is quite possible | 5:01 | |
| to entertain often imperceptibly and unwittingly | 5:02 | |
| a kind of practical and practicing atheism. | 5:07 | |
| It is simply that from some vantage points, | 5:12 | |
| as indeed Francis Bacon long ago knew and said, | 5:15 | |
| "God is not a useful hypothesis from some vantage points." | 5:20 | |
| From quite a different perspective | 5:27 | |
| and with the poets eye for human interests and values, | 5:30 | |
| words worth voiced his misgivings | 5:35 | |
| about the shape of 19th century | 5:38 | |
| mercantile English society and complaint. | 5:40 | |
| The world is too much with us late and so. | 5:45 | |
| Getting and spending, we lay waste our power. | 5:49 | |
| Little there is in nature that is ours. | 5:54 | |
| For this and for everything we are out of tune, | 5:57 | |
| we have given our hearts away assorted boom. | 6:00 | |
| Great God, I'd rather be a pagan suckled in a creed out war. | 6:05 | |
| So might I standing on this pleasantly | 6:11 | |
| have visions that would make me last for long, | 6:15 | |
| have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, | 6:19 | |
| or hear all Triton blow his wreathed horn. | 6:23 | |
| Now, in the Psalmist, standing under the night sky | 6:29 | |
| on some escapement of Judean Hills | 6:33 | |
| contemplated the vast canopy of heavens | 6:38 | |
| and contrasted the puniness of man with the splendor | 6:42 | |
| and majesty of the creator. | 6:46 | |
| You might say he got things into perspective, | 6:49 | |
| but we quite miss the Psalmist point. | 6:54 | |
| Unless we understand that the movement of his thought | 6:58 | |
| was not from heaven to earth, | 7:02 | |
| from this idea of splendor to the human frame, | 7:04 | |
| quite the reverse. | 7:09 | |
| The God of the Psalmist was first of all the God of Abraham, | 7:11 | |
| of Isaac and Jacob, the God of Moses and prophets, | 7:17 | |
| and Psalmist before this Psalms. | 7:24 | |
| God was first known in his visitation with man. | 7:30 | |
| He was first known in his approach to man | 7:34 | |
| in a kind of divine human encounter, | 7:38 | |
| such as an an encounter his God had with Moses at Sinai, | 7:41 | |
| or with Elijah on Mount Horeb, with Amos at Tekoa, | 7:47 | |
| or Isaiah in the temple. | 7:54 | |
| These men, as we view them in retrospect, | 7:58 | |
| were the human instruments, | 8:03 | |
| the harps of the human mind and spirit, | 8:05 | |
| the harps of God whose strings God picked and made music on, | 8:09 | |
| in which go on resounding for those who have ears to hear | 8:17 | |
| through the centuries. | 8:21 | |
| No, the astonishment and the amazement of the Psalmist | 8:24 | |
| is the same that of Augustine and Pascal. | 8:29 | |
| Not that I found thee, but that thou first found me. | 8:34 | |
| That is the amazement and wonder. | 8:42 | |
| What is man that thou are mindful of him, | 8:45 | |
| and the son of man that thou visits thee? | 8:50 | |
| The problem in our knowledge of God | 8:55 | |
| has to do with our controlling interests and perspective. | 8:58 | |
| It is the position we occupy. | 9:03 | |
| It is the preoccupation of our attention, | 9:06 | |
| the direction of our gaze and our predominating look. | 9:08 | |
| So, Plato had better be heard again in our time. | 9:13 | |
| He likens the lot of the generality of us | 9:19 | |
| to men in perpetual bondage. | 9:24 | |
| It is the bondage of the cave. | 9:27 | |
| Here, men sit and chained with their backs to the light, | 9:30 | |
| obsessed and preoccupied by shadows, passing figures, | 9:35 | |
| which these men in their ignorance of bondage | 9:41 | |
| confound with true realities. | 9:45 | |
| Their ignorance is in no way relieved | 9:48 | |
| just because they have a complete system of error, | 9:52 | |
| coherent and self consistent in itself. | 9:56 | |
| Whether for Plato or for Isaiah, the knowledge of God, | 10:03 | |
| the attainment of truth about reality | 10:10 | |
| requires the emancipation of the whole mind | 10:12 | |
| and the whole man. | 10:16 | |
| It requires a revolution of perspective, | 10:19 | |
| a complete conversion of interest and attention. | 10:22 | |
| Thus for Isaiah, the blindness of man to God | 10:26 | |
| is in the end, a perversity in the soul, | 10:30 | |
| as in Plato, it is a lie in the soul. | 10:34 | |
| Therefore, Isaiah says, "Go tell this people, | 10:39 | |
| here ye indeed but on understand not, | 10:43 | |
| and see ye indeed what ye perceive not." | 10:47 | |
| For both Plato and Isaiah then, | 10:53 | |
| ignorance of God is inattention, | 10:57 | |
| inattention fundamentally to the moral nature of man. | 11:01 | |
| It is ignorance of man's own calling. | 11:06 | |
| Man does not know who he is. | 11:09 | |
| He is deaf to the summons of God. | 11:12 | |
| He does not know, as Jesus said, the time of his visitation. | 11:15 | |
| His blindness is a moral problem. | 11:20 | |
| It is also a problem of improper self-knowledge. | 11:23 | |
| He does not know he is a moral being. | 11:27 | |
| He is called to responsible existence, but he does not heed. | 11:30 | |
| He can only know God | 11:36 | |
| in the acceptance of his responsibility to God. | 11:38 | |
| And it is for this reason, my friends, | 11:43 | |
| that Jesus taught, "Blessed are the pure in heart, | 11:46 | |
| the single-minded on God, for they shall see him." | 11:51 | |
| Now, some of us, most of the time, | 12:01 | |
| and most of us some of the time | 12:03 | |
| have trouble about God because in a manner of speaking, | 12:05 | |
| we don't look in his direction. | 12:12 | |
| Or further, we may look in his direction | 12:14 | |
| but we can't discern him because of airing | 12:16 | |
| but stubborn preconceptions about God's identity. | 12:20 | |
| Often, because of ignorance of our own | 12:26 | |
| essential nature is men, | 12:28 | |
| we don't know what we're looking for, | 12:31 | |
| or even yet again, we don't find God | 12:33 | |
| because we look in some place outside us, outside ourselves. | 12:37 | |
| God is already partly excluded | 12:43 | |
| from his proper place inside ourself. | 12:47 | |
| He has been barred from our flabby consciousness, | 12:54 | |
| overgrown and obscured by unintentional | 12:59 | |
| and intentional neglect. | 13:05 | |
| We might have learned from Elijah on Mount Horeb, | 13:09 | |
| if we had ever heard of Elijah or Horeb, | 13:15 | |
| that God was not in the wind, not in the earthquake, | 13:19 | |
| not in the fire, | 13:24 | |
| but that God had something to do with a still small voice. | 13:26 | |
| The God of the wind, the God of the earthquake, | 13:32 | |
| the God of the fire was in a manner of speaking | 13:36 | |
| dead with Elijah on Mount Horeb, | 13:40 | |
| but the still small voice was alive. | 13:46 | |
| It made Elijah a part of that resolute company. | 13:49 | |
| And despite the powerful social pressures of the age | 13:54 | |
| that would not bow the need to Baal, | 13:58 | |
| that is to the conventional gods of the peer group. | 14:01 | |
| Knowledge of God, and as opposed to knowledge of the Baals, | 14:07 | |
| is a matter of choice. | 14:12 | |
| Elijah knew it, and therefore, | 14:13 | |
| he called out ringing for decision, | 14:16 | |
| "Choose ye this day whom he will serve. | 14:20 | |
| If God, serve him, if Baal, him." | 14:23 | |
| Elijah knew that when the knee is bowed | 14:29 | |
| to the God's of the peer group, | 14:33 | |
| men have already cease to he, | 14:35 | |
| and therefore, know the God of Abraham. | 14:38 | |
| They may hear, but they do not understand. | 14:42 | |
| They may see, and yet they do not proceed. | 14:45 | |
| The Baals, the gods of this world, | 14:50 | |
| are always with us and never lack our patronage. | 14:55 | |
| They're the gods of all sorts of aims and interests, | 15:00 | |
| shorts of the final interest and the ultimate concern. | 15:03 | |
| They're the gods of gain of affluence, | 15:09 | |
| of technological achievement, | 15:13 | |
| of some politics and most partisanship. | 15:15 | |
| They are the gods of acquisition and comfort, | 15:19 | |
| and in some part of the American way of life, | 15:22 | |
| especially in its thirst to proffer itself to the world | 15:25 | |
| as a divine panacea. | 15:29 | |
| These Baals are mammon, and we were long since warned | 15:33 | |
| that we cannot serve God and mammon | 15:39 | |
| without pleading to the one and despising the other. | 15:42 | |
| In short, I say again, the knowledge of God, | 15:47 | |
| the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob, | 15:53 | |
| the God of Moses, of Jesus Christ, | 15:58 | |
| is in the end a moral choice and there is no evasion of it. | 16:01 | |
| You cannot serve God and mammon. | 16:07 | |
| But if in the great society, man opt for mammon, | 16:12 | |
| for the gods of self maintenance and self enhancement. | 16:16 | |
| Then, of course, for them and the trend of their motivation, | 16:20 | |
| God is dead. | 16:25 | |
| Either men affirm and assert their natures | 16:27 | |
| as moral, responsible beings, which means beings under God, | 16:30 | |
| or as Saint Paul declared, | 16:36 | |
| they worship and serve the Creator, | 16:39 | |
| rather than the created. | 16:43 | |
| Either they affirm their nature as an image of God, | 16:45 | |
| or they acquire the likeness of their idols. | 16:50 | |
| As a matter of fact, they create many of us | 16:58 | |
| are like Augustine, the sainted Bishop of Hippo | 17:02 | |
| who in his younger days prayed, | 17:09 | |
| "Lord make me one with thee, make me thy know but not yet." | 17:11 | |
| With this same Augustine, | 17:20 | |
| after long struggles and resistance, | 17:23 | |
| there came a decisive moment. | 17:28 | |
| Postponement could sustained no longer. | 17:30 | |
| The holdout and evasion was broken through | 17:33 | |
| and Augustine declared, | 17:36 | |
| "Thou has made us for thyself and our hearts are restless | 17:39 | |
| until they find the rest and leave." | 17:44 | |
| This is self knowledge. | 17:47 | |
| A divided spirit was resolved in favor of the God | 17:51 | |
| by whom Augustine knew himself long to have been visited. | 17:55 | |
| His converted soul began a new life | 18:01 | |
| under different auspices. | 18:05 | |
| Augustine, at length, gave he, | 18:07 | |
| and thou accepted the calling, | 18:11 | |
| the responsible existence to which all along | 18:14 | |
| he had had in suppressible intonations. | 18:17 | |
| In him, the still small voice had his way. | 18:23 | |
| Or in the metaphor of Francis Thompson, | 18:29 | |
| the hound of heaven of relentless feet | 18:34 | |
| had overtaken its quarry. | 18:38 | |
| For Augustine, it had been true. | 18:42 | |
| I fled him down the nights and down the days, | 18:47 | |
| I fled him down the arches of the ears, | 18:52 | |
| I fled him down the Labyrinthine ways of my own mind. | 18:55 | |
| And in the midst of tears, I hid from him, | 19:00 | |
| and under running laughter up fisted hopes I sped | 19:03 | |
| and shot precipitated the down Titanic blooms of chasm fears | 19:09 | |
| from those strong feet that followed after. | 19:14 | |
| But with unhurrying chase and unperturbed pace, | 19:20 | |
| deliberate speed, majestic instancy they beat, | 19:24 | |
| and a voice beat more instant than the feet. | 19:29 | |
| All things betrays thee who betrays me. | 19:33 | |
| Read Francis Thompson's Hound of Heaven. | 19:40 | |
| And I wager that you may come to understand more | 19:44 | |
| about the way of knowledge of God | 19:48 | |
| in its birthing and in its delivery, | 19:51 | |
| than many books of theology will disclose, | 19:54 | |
| and you may come to share the insight | 19:58 | |
| of the saints in all ages that the knowledge of God | 20:00 | |
| is not doing so much as it is receiving, | 20:03 | |
| that it is less an achievement than a gift, | 20:07 | |
| less a searching than a being found, | 20:10 | |
| less a capturing than a being overtaken, | 20:12 | |
| and above all, | 20:15 | |
| less annoying than as St. Paul said, a being no. | 20:16 | |
| You may learn that first of all, | 20:24 | |
| the knowledge of God is squaring up with yourself, | 20:29 | |
| leveling with your own inmost nature. | 20:34 | |
| Or you may learn that it is a congruence | 20:38 | |
| between your real being and your essential aspirations | 20:41 | |
| and highest calling. | 20:45 | |
| You may even come to see | 20:47 | |
| or better to understand with Socrates, | 20:49 | |
| with St. Paul, with Augustine, with Pascal, | 20:52 | |
| and with Francis Thompson, | 20:55 | |
| that the surest sign of God's presence | 20:57 | |
| is just the absence of that faithful | 21:00 | |
| and dismaying contradiction between the good that we would, | 21:03 | |
| as Paul said, and the evil that we do, | 21:08 | |
| even if it is only complicity in so little things | 21:11 | |
| as mean innuendo of insinuating words about our friends. | 21:16 | |
| So it is that most of the time | 21:25 | |
| we look for the tokens of God's presence in the wrong place | 21:30 | |
| and in the wrong direction. | 21:33 | |
| They're not, first of all, in the heavens. | 21:36 | |
| The Psalmist knew they are first of all in ourselves | 21:39 | |
| and must be honored. | 21:43 | |
| Most of us some of the time turn to the world without, | 21:46 | |
| rather than to the inward human world, | 21:51 | |
| to that battleground of the soul | 21:54 | |
| where the struggle between good and evil, | 21:56 | |
| between right and wrong, | 22:00 | |
| between faithfulness and unfaithfulness is forever waged. | 22:02 | |
| Here, in the warfare soul, | 22:07 | |
| is the surety of the divine presence. | 22:10 | |
| Here it is that the triumph, the righteousness in us | 22:14 | |
| is the passing into existence of the being of God, | 22:19 | |
| the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob, man. | 22:23 | |
| That is why in Jesus Christ, | 22:33 | |
| in the final triumphs of the divine righteousness, | 22:36 | |
| God is truly fully and finally manifest. | 22:39 | |
| He is manifest in a personal life. | 22:45 | |
| So in Christ, the author of Hebrews, | 22:49 | |
| in the text that was not read this morning, | 22:53 | |
| finds also the answer to the Psalmist searching query, | 22:57 | |
| "What is man in the perfect obedience of Christ? | 23:00 | |
| Is man's answer about his own and real identity?" | 23:05 | |
| Do we remember that we are in this Easter season, | 23:16 | |
| as Christians, invited to share in Christ likeness, | 23:26 | |
| share his victory, and partake of his righteousness? | 23:34 | |
| And when we do and in the measure that we do, | 23:40 | |
| God is present to us and then manifest among us. | 23:43 | |
| This is what the Christian community is supposed to be, | 23:49 | |
| a vehicle of the presence of God, | 23:53 | |
| for God is present in the shape, structure, | 23:55 | |
| the radiance of human lives | 24:01 | |
| that are becoming living sacrifices, | 24:04 | |
| that is, vehicles of his grace. | 24:07 | |
| And listen, God's eternal being, | 24:13 | |
| in itself unfathomable and incomprehensible, | 24:19 | |
| becomes existence and comprehensible in Jesus Christ. | 24:24 | |
| If you wish to say so, but in a figure of speech, | 24:30 | |
| God is alive in Christ holy. | 24:34 | |
| Yet it is better to say simply that God is manifest. | 24:38 | |
| So also again, in a figure of speech, | 24:43 | |
| God who is not manifest in life, in the lives of men, | 24:46 | |
| in the lives of the faithful may still in a figure | 24:51 | |
| be spoken of his dead. | 24:54 | |
| But in truth, this only means | 24:59 | |
| his eternal being is not manifest in us or among us. | 25:02 | |
| He does not yet have existence in us, | 25:09 | |
| in our time, in our society, in our nation, | 25:12 | |
| and perhaps not in our churches or in ourselves. | 25:16 | |
| God's essence, his eternal being, has not become existence | 25:21 | |
| in historical time. | 25:28 | |
| This is what is meant by complaining in an unfamiliar | 25:32 | |
| and dismaying and shocking idiom that God is dead. | 25:37 | |
| Then the complaint is as old as Isaiah, | 25:41 | |
| as true as Christ, and as Orthodox Saint Paul | 25:44 | |
| or Saint Augustine. | 25:47 | |
| But if this is so, | 25:51 | |
| then the complaint is pointing fingers at the wrong party. | 25:54 | |
| It is not God for whom the Baal told, it is man, | 25:59 | |
| from who so, the life of God is shut out by man's own doing. | 26:06 | |
| But man is not abandoned in his waywardness, | 26:13 | |
| in his flight from God. | 26:17 | |
| We may flee him down the nights and down the days, | 26:19 | |
| evade him in the labyrinthine ways of our minds | 26:24 | |
| and hide from him under running laughter, | 26:29 | |
| we may flee from those strong feet that follow after, | 26:32 | |
| yet with unhurrying chase and unperturbed pace, | 26:37 | |
| deliberate speed, majestic instancy they beat, | 26:42 | |
| and a voice beat more instant than the feet, | 26:46 | |
| all things betray thee, who betrayest me. | 26:51 | |
| My friends, if I am not mistaken, in our time, | 26:59 | |
| we have found with near utter certainty | 27:04 | |
| that all things do betray us. | 27:08 | |
| May it not be time to stop running and be overtaken of God. | 27:14 | |
| Amen. So be it. | 27:24 | |
| Let us pray. | 27:28 | |
| (soft instrumental music) | 27:30 | |
| Now I want to hear who is eternal, immortal, invisible, | 27:40 | |
| the only just and all wise God, | 27:45 | |
| be glory and honor, dominion and power, now and forever. | 27:50 | |
| And may the blessing of God almighty, father, son | 27:57 | |
| and Holy Spirit pursue you and be amongst you, | 28:01 | |
| and abide ever with you. | 28:07 | |
| Amen. | 28:10 | |
| (liturgical music) | 28:13 |