Rockwell C. Smith - "A New Kind of Life" (July 14, 1974)

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-	But now are ye light in the Lord.	0:04
	Walk as children of light.	0:10
	I never consider that text,	0:18
	but that I remember the quaint description	0:22
	a little girl gave of a Christian.	0:27
	She said a Christian is someone	0:32
	who when he comes into a room makes all the others feel	0:37
	that somebody turned on all the lights.	0:44
	We are all children of light.	0:51
	We are people of privilege, educational,	0:56
	political, cultural, social,	1:03
	national, economic privilege.	1:09
	Our task as Christians	1:15
	is to discover the modern contemporary meaning,	1:19
	which may properly be associated with this admonition	1:26
	from the great apostle spoken now so very long ago.	1:31
	What does it mean to walk as children of light?	1:39
	Perhaps one approach to an answer is to search together	1:48
	for the functions of light as we know them.	1:55
	Fundamentally, I suppose there would be no question	2:02
	that the function of light is to dispel darkness.	2:09
	There is so much darkness abroad in our world this morning.	2:17
	The earth dwells in an eerie twilight	2:26
	of moral and ethical uncertainty.	2:31
	I do not refer to the absence of knowledge,	2:35
	but rather to the presence of knowledge	2:40
	uncontrolled by character.	2:43
	In a free society,	2:49
	the ideal of freedom is dependent	2:51
	for the safety of its practice	2:55
	upon the element of moral goodness.	2:58
	No one dares give an irresponsible person liberty.	3:04
	But the accumulation of facts alone may make a man clever	3:15
	without making him good.	3:19
	The foundation of a free society is not the clever man,	3:23
	but the good man.	3:29
	Therefore, it is education plus religion	3:32
	which illuminates life on this planet.	3:39
	That light does not burn brightly this morning.	3:46
	There are various ways of documenting this statement.	3:53
	For example, sociological statisticians tell us	3:57
	that for the last year when accurate records are available,	4:03
	there are at least 13 million boys and girls	4:12
	and young men and young women in these United States	4:19
	who were not at that time identified	4:24
	with any religious educational program.	4:29
	Furthermore, for the same year,	4:35
	the 1 million and more of you	4:38
	who encountered initial difficulty with the law	4:43
	upon analysis were not the great majority of them identified	4:48
	in any way with formal religious instruction	4:58
	nor were their parents.	5:04
	All of this in a nation	5:08
	that still spends more on the horse betting	5:10
	and on liquor than it does on all religious	5:14
	and philanthropic enterprises put together.	5:20
	But there are other ways of documenting this same statement.	5:25
	The light does not yet burn brightly.	5:30
	I was seated some months ago in the city of Minneapolis	5:35
	with a prominent layman of my own church.	5:40
	A man distinguished in his own professional career	5:45
	who had been given almost every responsibility	5:50
	that can be trusted to a layman in our denomination.	5:54
	We were eating dinner together	6:01
	and in the course of the meal,	6:03
	he laid down his knife and his fork	6:05
	and spoke a single sentence to me.	6:07
	"I find it impossible," said he,	6:11
	"to believe in a personal God	6:15
	or in the existence of a life beyond this life."	6:19
	I listened and in that single dinner time sentence	6:28
	there flashed before my mind the whole shocking pageantry	6:36
	of the modern world	6:44
	and indeed the modern church's doctrinal illiteracy.	6:47
	I remember the words of Dean Hough.	6:57
	Our civilization is falling apart	7:02
	for want of a sufficient number of great believers.	7:06
	In the words of James Stewart of Scotland,	7:12
	Christianity is often equated	7:16
	with a pious ethical behavior	7:20
	and a kind of mild humanitarian benevolence	7:26
	set in a context of big theistic belief.	7:38
	The success of the Christian enterprise dear friends	7:48
	is not dependent in the final analysis	7:53
	upon ecclesiastical machinery or upon liturgical duty.	7:58
	It is dependent rather upon the bigger	8:08
	of a set of great convictions about God and about Christ,	8:14
	about human sin and divine redemption,	8:24
	about judgment and about the kingdom of God,	8:30
	about prayer and about life everlasting.	8:35
	The whole fore flung program of the Christian Church	8:45
	will rest at last upon shifting sands	8:54
	if these convictions do not persist.	9:01
	The light does not yet burn brightly	9:10
	and if we are to walk as children of light,	9:16
	we must dispel this darkness.	9:20
	Again, there is a simple function of light	9:28
	about which every housewife knows.	9:31
	Light reveals shabby nooks and crevices.	9:36
	And so the light of Christ in the world	9:42
	reveals shabby nooks and crevices in human society.	9:46
	For example, prejudice.	9:52
	How much prejudice there is today.	9:57
	National, racial, religious, social prejudice.	10:01
	And every one of us is constructed in such a fashion	10:08
	that he holds on with greater tenacity to his prejudice	10:12
	than he does do his conviction.	10:20
	And yet we know as Christians	10:25
	that our prejudices must undergo the scrutiny	10:28
	of the will of Jesus Christ	10:34
	and some of them in the process must be abandoned.	10:39
	Macaulay in his essay on Sir James Macintosh	10:47
	has a passage in which he defends the right	10:51
	of a man to change his mind.	10:55
	He says the individual who believed the same thing	10:58
	about the French revolution in 1789, in 1794,	11:01
	in 1804, in 1814 and in 1834	11:07
	had to be either a divinely ordained prophet	11:15
	or an obstinate boo.	11:19
	Some of us need to change our minds.	11:24
	To abandon our prejudices.	11:28
	James Truslow Adams in his book Epic of America	11:31
	introduces an intriguing hypothesis.	11:36
	He suggests that one of the reasons why this young nation	11:39
	so quickly spanned the distance between two oceans	11:44
	was simply the fact that there was constantly a new frontier	11:49
	toward which people could move and when they become weak,	11:55
	when they became weary of struggling with a certain problem,	12:00
	all they had to do,	12:06
	said this author,	12:09
	was to break camp and to move westward	12:10
	and to pitch their tents again in a new place	12:14
	where for at least a little while they were free	12:18
	from the old trouble.	12:22
	Well, if this hypothesis could ever be assumed to be true,	12:26
	it cannot be assumed to be true now,	12:33
	for there are no more geographical frontiers.	12:36
	All of them have been swept off	12:39
	into the waters of the sea and now at last,	12:41
	whether we like it or not,	12:45
	the American people must stand where they are	12:48
	and come to grips with their problems.	12:53
	I sometimes think that if we could summarize the meaning	12:58
	of the message of the prophets of the Old Testament,	13:03
	men like Amos, (indistinct)	13:07
	and all the rest for our modern world,	13:09
	is that somebody could be given in a single word contact.	13:14
	Contact, the whole open bleeding wound of human society	13:18
	must be brought at last into therapeutic contact	13:25
	with the healing love of Almighty God.	13:30
	Prejudice must go.	13:37
	But there is another shabby nook or crevice	13:41
	that the light of Christ reveals affluent.	13:44
	I wonder if we have stopped to think	13:49
	that here in the United States,	13:51
	we have 6% of the inhabitable territory of earth	13:53
	and 7% of the world's population,	13:59
	but we have 37% of the world's goods.	14:03
	Reinhold Niebuhr said that,	14:10
	this nation is a gadget field paradise	14:12
	suspended in a hell of international insecurity.	14:16
	It's difficult this morning	14:24
	for us in the midst of our luxury to realize	14:25
	that there are at least 1,600,000,000s	14:30
	of people on this globe	14:34
	who have never had enough food to eat	14:38
	or enough medicine for their times of illness.	14:41
	The greatest danger inherent in economic prosperity	14:48
	and bounty is the danger	14:52
	of a certain allegedly innocent comfortable faultiness	14:55
	which almost imperceptibly destroys that spiritual awareness	15:01
	in the climate of which true compassion	15:07
	and stamina and the will to sacrifice flourish.	15:11
	Our Puritan fathers had a prayer that they prayed	15:21
	and that we might do well to learn to pray again.	15:25
	God gave us the gift of tears.	15:29
	But the light does another thing.	15:38
	Light shows the way.	15:43
	Jesus Christ said,	15:47
	"I am the way,	15:49
	the truth and the life."	15:51
	And we know of no other philosopher able adequately	15:56
	to reinforce such an assertion.	16:00
	He is the way for individuals	16:04
	because He can take a person who said it himself,	16:09
	I was a zoo of lusts,	16:12
	a bedlam of ambitions,	16:17
	a nursery of fears and a harem of bundled hatred.	16:20
	My name was Legion and make out of him a CS Lewis.	16:28
	He is the way of life for all humankind,	16:39
	because He can take the whole rank fabric	16:43
	of today's society with its problems of materialism	16:50
	of moral relativism,	16:57
	of emotional chaos,	17:01
	of racism, of alcoholism,	17:05
	of pornography, of political chicanery and all the rest.	17:11
	He can take the whole rank fabric of human society	17:20
	and weave it again into a pattern of deep	17:28
	and infinite meaning.	17:33
	This is not our problem.	17:37
	Our problem is that those of us who compose the church	17:41
	have lived in such a way and served in such a manner,	17:47
	that we have not effectively shown to our age	17:51
	that Jesus Christ is the way.	17:56
	The church, even those who love it deeply	18:02
	must acknowledge the church today is the victim	18:06
	of a strange bewilderment and of an immense impotence.	18:12
	We have seen the zeal which so often we have abandoned	18:28
	picked up and put to use by alien causes.	18:34
	Dr Trueblood in a recent sermon	18:38
	told of an afternoon in London,	18:43
	when he left his hotel to walk down to a station	18:44
	to purchase a ticket to go to Scotland the next day.	18:47
	(indistinct) had to pass	18:51
	one of London's great historic churches.	18:54
	There it stood in the gathering twilight	18:57
	with not a soul to see.	19:02
	No light, no door that was open.	19:05
	No sign of life.	19:12
	Dr Trueblood said he looked across the street	19:16
	and there was a vacant lot	19:19
	and in the middle of that lot	19:20
	there stood a little man on a soap box	19:23
	with scores of people gathered around him	19:27
	and this little man was preaching with vigor	19:31
	and with eloquence the doctrines of Karl Marx.	19:35
	And young men and young women were threading their ways	19:40
	in and out among the people	19:43
	distributing complimentary literature.	19:45
	And puzzled, Dr Trueblood walked on.	19:50
	30 minutes later he came back by the church.	19:53
	There it stood.	19:56
	Great edifice dating from Wellington's day still dark,	19:58
	still silent, still deserted.	20:05
	Across the way on that vacant lot,	20:13
	the first little man had finished his piece	20:16
	and another man was standing on the same soap box	20:19
	and more people had gathered around	20:21
	and the message was the same.	20:23
	Boys and girls were passing out free pamphlets.	20:25
	And Dr Trueblood said he went back to his hotel aware	20:33
	that he had seen something significant.	20:38
	Across the span of my own life,	20:45
	communism has done	20:50
	one of the most remarkable evangelistic tasks	20:53
	recorded in the annals of mankind.	20:56
	The year after I was born,	21:00
	every known communist on the face of the earth was in jail.	21:01
	This morning from Berlin to the Bering Straits,	21:06
	from Northern Finland to Indochina,	21:11
	there are nearly 1 billion people	21:15
	under the ruthless way of the hammer and the sickle.	21:17
	The ecclesiastical arithmetic of the annual conference	21:23
	to which I belong in my own denomination	21:25
	reveal that for us last year,	21:31
	it took 300 people 12 months to win a single person	21:37
	to a commitment to Jesus Christ.	21:43
	If we walk as children of light,	21:50
	must we not find means by which to show the way?	21:55
	Last and best of all.	22:06
	The function of light is to bring hope and cheer.	22:09
	The word eschatology means, of course,	22:19
	a doctrine of end things.	22:22
	It is used much by theologians and some by philosophers.	22:26
	There are at least two kinds of eschatology.	22:34
	There is the eschatology of unbelief,	22:40
	HG Wells in the last book that came from his pen	22:45
	Mind at the End of Its Tether,	22:49
	put this graphically.	22:53
	"Man is all played out," he said.	22:55
	"We're living in a jaded world	22:58
	"devoid of recuperative powers.	23:00
	"The darkness is closing in upon the face of humanity.	23:03
	"Our world is like a convoy, lost,	23:08
	"often dark, rocking unknown coast with savages	23:13
	and pirates taking command of the ships."	23:21
	Over against this eschatology of unbelief,	23:25
	there is the simple glorious eschatology of belief.	23:30
	The knowledge of the glory of the Lord	23:37
	shall cover the earth as the water cover the sea.	23:42
	The kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdom	23:51
	of our Lord and His Christ.	23:55
	Those of us who are Christians	24:00
	sometimes confuse eschatologies.	24:04
	I had preached in my last church one morning	24:10
	and a little girl from the junior department came up	24:15
	following the sermon and said,	24:18
	"Mr Hunt, were things really as bad	24:20
	as you said they were this morning?"	24:24
	I don't know what I said.	24:28
	I don't know why I said it.	24:31
	Maybe it was something that happened on Saturday night.	24:34
	Maybe it was something I ate for Sunday morning's breakfast.	24:37
	I'm sometimes appalled to contemplate the startling	24:42
	if indefensible relationship that may exist	24:49
	between a preacher's diet and his theology.	24:53
	But I resolved after that little girl	24:59
	said to me what she did that I would never preach again	25:02
	without a note of hope.	25:04
	For we Christians are the only authentically hopeful people	25:07
	on the face of the earth.	25:12
	You remember in the 49th chapter of the Book of Isaiah,	25:16
	the prophet has been pleading with the captive Jews	25:21
	to come back and they have been recalcitrant and difficult.	25:24
	Come back, they have said in effect,	25:31
	come back to what?	25:34
	To devastation?	25:35
	To debris?	25:37
	To ruble, to ashes?	25:39
	Come back to what?	25:41
	And the prophet groping for an answer to their cynicism.	25:44
	Here's God say,	25:50
	my walls are continually before me.	25:52
	God does not see ruins.	25:59
	God does not see devastation.	26:01
	God sees walls.	26:05
	We do not go out to make Jesus Christ king.	26:12
	We go out because the king Himself has sent us.	26:20
	The glorious fact of the Lordship of Christ	26:26
	is the sovereign fruit of our holy faith.	26:30
	Will you letting me risk an oversimplification?	26:39
	I have always had a bad habit in reading novels.	26:44
	I have enjoyed taking a peep at the last page	26:50
	and my wife gently used to chide me for it.	26:55
	For you see,	27:00
	I wanted to be sure that he kissed her.	27:02
	If he didn't kiss her,	27:07
	it wasn't worth reading.	27:08
	I wanted to be sure that the book came out right in the end.	27:11
	Oh, it's a naive philosophy of fiction to hold.	27:17
	And then my more mature years I have abandoned it.	27:22
	But let me say to you	27:27
	that this book comes out right in the end.	27:28
	The writer of the hymn put it in this way,	27:37
	the kingdom is coming,	27:39
	o tell ye the story,	27:40
	God banner exalted shall be,	27:42
	the earth shall be filled with His knowledge and glory,	27:44
	as waters that cover the sea.	27:47
	The world is not to go up in a thermo nuclear holocaust.	27:54
	The world is to see the dreams of God come true.	28:00
	Walk as the apostles as children of light.	28:10
	But how, how do we do it?	28:14
	May I give you the answer in a single sentence?	28:19
	The word that one great preachers spoke about another.	28:23
	The glory of the great example he said,	28:29
	tortured his mind,	28:33
	dominated his conscience and warmed his heart.	28:36
	And so, only when the glory of the great example	28:42
	tortures our minds,	28:52
	dominates our consciences and warms our hearts	28:55
	will we be able to walk as children of light.	29:02
	(machine buzzes)	29:13
	Let us pray.	29:19
	God our father,	29:23
	grant that we may live in such exciting intimacy	29:26
	with the mind and spirit of Christ.	29:30
	That in our own thought and speech and reaction and action,	29:34
	we may be true children of the light.	29:40
	And so, may we help in a way both bold and realistic	29:45
	to illumine our world and our age	29:51
	through Jesus Christ our Lord.	29:56
	And now make grace,	29:59
	mercy and peace from God, the father,	30:02
	from the Lord Jesus Christ, the savior	30:08
	and from the Holy Spirit, the comforter,	30:12
	be our portion for forever and forever.	30:17
	(machine buzzes)	30:21
	♪ Oooo ♪	30:24

Item Info

Title:

Rockwell C. Smith - "A New Kind of Life" (July 14, 1974)

Permalink:

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4m90646x

Date:

July 14, 1974

Speaker:

Smith, Rockwell C.

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Duke University. Chapel

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UA.17.01.0003 RR-0715
ref6630_wdt
uachapelsermaud
duke:628480
dcrau002689
ark:/87924/r4m90646x
383c1f01-2a64-4d59-b122-f79e47144658

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Rockwell C. Smith - "A New Kind of Life" (July 14, 1974)

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Rockwell C. Smith - "A New Kind of Life" (July 14, 1974)

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