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

Item Info

Title:

Waldo Beach - "The Sacred and the Profane" (October 17, 1965)

Permalink:

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r44m95c3c

Date:

October 17, 1965

Speaker:

Beach, Waldo

Contributor:

Duke University. Chapel

Identifier:

UA.17.01.0003 RR-0309
ref5823_dm2
uachapelsermaud
duke:628344
dcrau002307
ark:/87924/r44m95c3c
68dc8573-6907-4a0a-a847-49a5110884db

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Duke Chapel Recordings

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Duke University Chapel recordings, 1954-2005

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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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CC BY-NC 4.0

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This recording may contain 3rd party materials, such as music or readings that are therefore not covered by the Creative Commons license indicated here. For more information see https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/research/citations-and-permissions.

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Waldo Beach - "The Sacred and the Profane" (October 17, 1965)

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