James T. Cleland - "Recognition and Discovery" (September 25, 1960)
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
- | Let us pray. | 0:19 |
Let the words of my mouth | 0:24 | |
and the meditations of our hearts | 0:27 | |
be acceptable in thy sight. | 0:29 | |
Oh Lord, our strength and our Redeemer, amen. | 0:35 | |
It is 15 months since any of you has seen me in this pulpit, | 0:51 | |
over a year has gone by since I stood here | 1:01 | |
to share with you the word of God in a sermon. | 1:04 | |
At that time, following a cue given by St. Paul in Roman 16, | 1:13 | |
I just said, thank you to the folk who for 14 years | 1:20 | |
had held up my hands in this place. | 1:28 | |
The title of the sermon was, "On being beholden." | 1:32 | |
Some of you felt that it was a farewell address, | 1:41 | |
some of you may even have hoped that it was. | 1:46 | |
I myself did know if it was the end of a period | 1:51 | |
or the end of an era, but here I am again. | 1:55 | |
What does one talk about | 2:05 | |
at the beginning of another period? | 2:06 | |
Especially on the first official service | 2:11 | |
of another academic year. | 2:15 | |
I think we should look together | 2:20 | |
at the university service of worship, | 2:22 | |
this interdenominational hour, at 11 o'clock | 2:27 | |
on the Lord's day, when as a university | 2:33 | |
we officially and unitedly worship God. | 2:39 | |
I think I laud with you of what | 2:46 | |
one has a right to expect at and from this service. | 2:48 | |
What can this hour spent together week by week mean to us? | 2:56 | |
A good service of worship has within it | 3:05 | |
for the sake of the worshiper, | 3:08 | |
the element of recognition. | 3:11 | |
Recognition is an awareness | 3:19 | |
that we have met this perceived phenomenon before, | 3:22 | |
that we are not strangers to it, | 3:29 | |
that we expect to continue to be okay with it. | 3:32 | |
Wordsworth knew that. | 3:40 | |
"My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky. | 3:43 | |
So was it, when my life began. | 3:49 | |
So is it, now I am a man. | 3:55 | |
So be it, when I shall grow old." | 4:01 | |
The recognition in his case was a joyous recognition. | 4:07 | |
There is a sense of at homeness, which the experience gives, | 4:11 | |
and also a sense of always expecting to be at home with it. | 4:18 | |
Now, man needs such moments of awareness, | 4:24 | |
awareness of the known, | 4:30 | |
else life could be a terrifying experience. | 4:33 | |
Man cherishes repetition, even routine. | 4:38 | |
Such a longing for his own foresight, for his own chair | 4:46 | |
may even make him glad to return to Durham after a vacation. | 4:53 | |
Now that's hard for some of you to believe, but it's true. | 5:01 | |
Also, haven't we found ourselves overseas | 5:09 | |
or in a strange part of the United States saying, | 5:12 | |
"My, that reminds me of the road up to Asheville, | 5:15 | |
or the Potomac, or even the Methodist flats." | 5:20 | |
I know one of our number, | 5:29 | |
in fact, I heard her remark of a European cathedral, | 5:30 | |
"It's kind of like the Duke Chapel." | 5:34 | |
(congregation laughing) | 5:37 | |
And what happened? | 5:42 | |
That medieval cathedral was domesticated, | 5:43 | |
tagged, accepted. | 5:47 | |
Now move this experience over to the realm of religion. | 5:52 | |
Why is the Roman Catholic immigrant | 5:58 | |
from Portugal or Italy, or Ireland, | 6:01 | |
so quickly at home at corporate worship in United States? | 6:10 | |
Isn't it because the service is couched | 6:17 | |
in the very same Latin | 6:20 | |
he didn't understand in Lisbon, Rome or Dublin? | 6:23 | |
He couldn't translate it for the life of him | 6:32 | |
into Portuguese, Italian, or English, | 6:36 | |
but their is recognition, joyous recognition. | 6:40 | |
Though America is a strange land, | 6:46 | |
he's in the right pew, in the right church. | 6:50 | |
He's content, he's happy. | 6:54 | |
And the New Testament word for "happy" | 6:58 | |
may also to be translated "blessed." | 7:03 | |
So with us here, Duke Chapel | 7:09 | |
with its really magnificent stone and woodwork, | 7:13 | |
it's glorious windows. | 7:19 | |
If one doesn't over concentrate | 7:23 | |
on the the goggle-eyed and splay footed saints, | 7:27 | |
it's glorious organs and its satisfying choir, | 7:33 | |
is hardly the first Methodist church | 7:40 | |
of Hohoka Center or the third Presbyterian Church | 7:42 | |
of Flat River or the eleventh Baptist Church | 7:47 | |
of Slippery Rock. | 7:51 | |
(congregation laughs) | 7:53 | |
It isn't even All Saints or McFlannel Memorial. | 7:57 | |
But there are touches of kinship, | 8:02 | |
hints of a similar genealogical Ecclesiasticism. | 8:07 | |
It's the same Bible we heard back home. | 8:15 | |
Here are the same hymns we sang back home, | 8:21 | |
some of them. | 8:25 | |
There's a collection here too, | 8:28 | |
though Duke calls it, the offering. | 8:31 | |
And with recognition comes satisfaction. | 8:35 | |
Let us probe deeper into the order of worship. | 8:42 | |
If your home church has an estimable order of worship, | 8:46 | |
no matter what your denomination, | 8:52 | |
then I think you sense here the rhythm of a good service, | 8:55 | |
adoration, confession, forgiveness, | 9:03 | |
thanksgiving, intercession, supplication, | 9:10 | |
the ministry of the word, dedication. | 9:17 | |
Of course, there ought to be an affirmation of faith, | 9:24 | |
and the offering is probably out place. | 9:29 | |
But basically the order here attempts to be in line | 9:33 | |
with the liturgies of the reform Protestant tradition, | 9:38 | |
in so far as one interdenominational service can be. | 9:43 | |
Brethren, if you catch this, I speak particularly | 9:49 | |
to those of you who have come new to Duke this year. | 9:54 | |
If you catch this, then you are no longer frightened cats | 9:58 | |
in a strange garret, but sojourner | 10:04 | |
who begin to realize that you can be at home | 10:11 | |
in the university chapel, | 10:17 | |
as worshipers of the same God | 10:20 | |
whom you may have thought you're left behind | 10:23 | |
in South Carolina or New Jersey. | 10:27 | |
It was to give you the sense of recognition | 10:31 | |
that the first hymn was chosen, | 10:34 | |
"Faith of our fathers, living still, | 10:38 | |
oh how our hearts beat high with joy | 10:43 | |
whene'er we hear that glorious word." | 10:48 | |
It's no strange gospel which is celebrated here. | 10:55 | |
The service is rooted and grounded in the good news of God, | 11:02 | |
as delivered in the Old and New Testament, | 11:10 | |
as transmitted by the holy Catholic Church, | 11:14 | |
as amended by the Protestant Reformation. | 11:19 | |
Therefore we echo the 122nd Psalm here, | 11:24 | |
"I was glad when they said unto me, | 11:29 | |
let us go into the house of the Lord." | 11:33 | |
I wish we could have sung that Psalm | 11:37 | |
in the metrical version this morning, | 11:39 | |
"I joyed when to the house of God | 11:43 | |
Go up, they said to me, | 11:46 | |
Jerusalem, within thy gates | 11:49 | |
our feet shall standing be. | 11:51 | |
Now, for my friends' and brethren's sake, | 11:55 | |
peace be in the I'll say, | 11:59 | |
and for the house of God our Lord | 12:03 | |
I'll seek thy good alway." | 12:07 | |
If this is a valid service, then our first response to it | 12:14 | |
should be the thrill of recognition. | 12:20 | |
Yet, this is only half the story, it is an important half. | 12:28 | |
Sunday by Sunday, there should be both in the service | 12:37 | |
and in our response to the service, | 12:42 | |
the happy element of recognition. | 12:45 | |
But there is another component, | 12:51 | |
one which should be sensed regularly, | 12:54 | |
though not necessarily every Lord's day. | 12:59 | |
It's not contradictory to what has already been said, | 13:04 | |
it's complimentary, supplementary. | 13:09 | |
It may be denoted by the use of the noun, "discovery." | 13:14 | |
Now, this does not so much mean | 13:22 | |
that something brand new has been added for our unearthing, | 13:24 | |
but for some of us, something does sometimes | 13:33 | |
bob up for a first time unexpectedly. | 13:42 | |
It swims into our kin like a new planet. | 13:49 | |
And we stare at each other with a wild surmise, | 13:56 | |
silent upon a pew in the Duke Chapel. | 14:01 | |
Last week, the chaplain to the university | 14:06 | |
talked to those of us who are freshmen | 14:09 | |
about growing up to maturity, | 14:13 | |
growing up to maturity in the realm of the spirit | 14:17 | |
as well as in the kingdom of the mind. | 14:20 | |
Any one of us is going to be a split personality, | 14:26 | |
headed for all kinds of awkwardness. | 14:32 | |
If we mature, really mature intellectually | 14:37 | |
and remain spiritually in swaddling clothes or rompers. | 14:44 | |
From one aspect, the long history of the church | 14:52 | |
has been a succession of attempts | 14:57 | |
to make folk less infantile | 15:01 | |
in the areas of faith and love, and to develop them | 15:06 | |
as grown up sons of and daughters of God. | 15:11 | |
That was the successive task of St. John | 15:18 | |
in the new Testament, St. Augustine, | 15:23 | |
St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, Paul Tilley. | 15:29 | |
Now such may cause the church to have growing pain. | 15:42 | |
They hurt. | 15:53 | |
Think of this again in the method | 15:56 | |
of this service of worship. | 15:59 | |
There are minor matters here which will annoy us | 16:04 | |
like so many pin pricks unless we cultivate | 16:08 | |
two of the marks of maturity, objectivity and humor. | 16:14 | |
The order of our worship may well be too organized, | 16:25 | |
too stiff. | 16:31 | |
For those of us who have been used | 16:34 | |
to our liturgical free-for-all Sunday by Sunday, | 16:35 | |
it's not going to be easy for some of us to sit | 16:44 | |
through the choir's rendition of some strange anthem. | 16:46 | |
If we would prefer to be crooning for ourselves, | 16:53 | |
I'm in love with the lover of my soul, | 16:57 | |
like some "Spiritually Arrested" Elvis Presley. | 17:01 | |
(congregation laughs) | 17:07 | |
It's going to be quite a piece of detective work | 17:10 | |
for more than a few among us to figure out | 17:13 | |
some of the organ music. | 17:16 | |
I can hear the humble listener murmuring, | 17:20 | |
"It must be good music. | 17:24 | |
I don't understand it." | 17:27 | |
Others will enter into a completely | 17:31 | |
new liturgical experience when they discover | 17:34 | |
that read prayers can be prayed, rather than merely recited. | 17:39 | |
But let me promise you | 17:52 | |
that if you'll give the service a fair trial, | 17:54 | |
that you are perhaps better, | 17:59 | |
many of you will find it an enlarging, | 18:02 | |
an enriching, a growing up encounter. | 18:07 | |
You'll not decide whether sorrowful shrug of the shoulders, | 18:15 | |
I suppose it must be that the old order changes, | 18:21 | |
yielding place to new. | 18:25 | |
It's not that new. | 18:29 | |
Rather you'll begin to appreciate Tenison's next lines. | 18:31 | |
"God fulfills himself in many ways, | 18:37 | |
less one good custom should corrupt the world." | 18:45 | |
That doesn't mean you'll all accept it, some won't. | 18:54 | |
They'll go downtown to a church | 19:00 | |
more like the one at home. | 19:03 | |
But if you'll stay with us, stay with us, | 19:06 | |
not necessarily in agreement, but in sympathy, | 19:10 | |
you may find yourself coming of age | 19:15 | |
in the realm of worship here. | 19:18 | |
Yet, let me be honest with you. | 19:24 | |
Some things may be said and done here | 19:30 | |
which may really shock you. | 19:35 | |
I think that's one truth lying, | 19:39 | |
ready for exposition in the passage that was read | 19:42 | |
as the scripture lesson, let's look at it together. | 19:47 | |
Jesus is at a crisis moment in his ministry. | 19:52 | |
What does public opinion say about him? | 19:59 | |
He asks the disciples, | 20:05 | |
"Who are men saying that I really am?" | 20:08 | |
The disciples' answer, | 20:14 | |
"Another prophet, Elijah come back to earth | 20:17 | |
to prepare the way for the Messiah, | 20:25 | |
a second John the Baptist." | 20:29 | |
Now, notice what's common to these answers, | 20:33 | |
they were the outcome of recognition. | 20:38 | |
They were the kind of answer | 20:45 | |
which might have been expected, | 20:47 | |
considering the background and the foreground | 20:49 | |
of the disciples. | 20:52 | |
As a matter of fact, they were the very answers | 20:53 | |
given to Herod Antipas, the local headman, | 20:57 | |
when he asked who Jesus was. | 21:02 | |
This is this stage of recognition. | 21:08 | |
And then Jesus asked the 12, "What do you think about me?" | 21:14 | |
And Peter answered in a moment of discovery, | 21:24 | |
"You're the Messiah." | 21:30 | |
I shall never forget how Professor Pitre | 21:34 | |
in the Divinity School Meditation | 21:38 | |
paraphrased Jesus answer to Peter, | 21:41 | |
"Peter, you of all people | 21:45 | |
never thought that up for yourself." | 21:50 | |
That took revelation. | 21:53 | |
Messiah was a new idea when applied | 21:59 | |
to a contemporary person, | 22:05 | |
no one had been called Messiah, | 22:09 | |
certainly since about 150 BC and before that, | 22:13 | |
oh, it's back at the time of the Rubber Bowl, | 22:18 | |
in the 6th century BC, this is new. | 22:20 | |
Now, one might wish that the story finished there, | 22:26 | |
but it didn't. | 22:31 | |
Jesus began to explain what he thought | 22:34 | |
the content of Messiah was, repudiation, suffering, death. | 22:38 | |
That was too much for Peter. | 22:50 | |
He drew Jesus to one side | 22:54 | |
and suggested that he stopped talking like that. | 22:56 | |
Now did Jesus answer, "Okay. Peter (laughs) | 22:59 | |
let's have a private bull session | 23:02 | |
on the concept of Messiah." | 23:05 | |
Oh no. (laughs) | 23:07 | |
In a voice that all the other disciples could hear, | 23:10 | |
he said to Peter, "Out of my way, Satan." | 23:14 | |
Now the Greek imperative there | 23:23 | |
is the same word Jesus used to the devil | 23:26 | |
in the wilderness temptation, "Out of my way Satan." | 23:31 | |
You will probably probably not be wrong to assume | 23:44 | |
that Peter was shocked. | 23:47 | |
But with discovery, there may very well come shock. | 23:53 | |
The effect of discovery is not necessarily | 24:02 | |
immediate peace of mind. | 24:05 | |
Now, you may be of offended, scandalized, | 24:08 | |
repelled, disgusted, by what you hear in this chapel. | 24:12 | |
The prayers may cause it. | 24:20 | |
In a bidding prayer, | 24:24 | |
I once gave the stage direction from over the lectum. | 24:26 | |
Let us pray for the holy Catholic Church, | 24:30 | |
and a worshiper was there upon had to mutter, | 24:35 | |
"My God. He's praying for the Roman Catholic." | 24:38 | |
Well, I was, and I wasn't. | 24:43 | |
The scripture lesson may cause it. | 24:48 | |
You may be so devoted to the King James Version, | 24:52 | |
which by the way is the King James, | 24:56 | |
and not the Saint James Version. | 24:58 | |
You study the life of that | 25:03 | |
James 6th of Scotland and 1st of England, | 25:04 | |
and you won't accuse him of being a saint, | 25:07 | |
except with a small S in the Pauline sense. | 25:10 | |
But you may be so devoted to the king James Version | 25:15 | |
that rebel against the Revised Standard Version, | 25:18 | |
the Moffitt Translation, and JB Phillips rendition | 25:22 | |
into modern English. | 25:26 | |
Just think, that may be because you prefer | 25:31 | |
the beauty of obscurity to the rebuff of clarity. | 25:36 | |
A hymn may cause it, especially if the choir director | 25:46 | |
puts words you love to a melody you don't know. | 25:51 | |
Right words, wrong tune. | 25:56 | |
And yet the tune he chooses maybe cleaner, | 25:59 | |
crisper, stronger, than the well known air. | 26:04 | |
The sermon may cause it, | 26:13 | |
it was something of a shock to at least one listener | 26:17 | |
last spring when I wasn't here, | 26:24 | |
so don't blame me, to discover a Palm Sunday sermon reading | 26:27 | |
leading straight into the racial fracas | 26:35 | |
at Vanderbilt University. | 26:39 | |
Our Lord himself may cause it, | 26:47 | |
as a careful scholar with devout exo Jesus | 26:51 | |
shatters our traditional notions | 26:56 | |
of what Jesus actually said. | 26:59 | |
Indeed, while Jesus was on earth, | 27:02 | |
he was full of surprising moments. | 27:07 | |
He wouldn't have been crucified | 27:13 | |
if he hadn't been a shocking person. | 27:15 | |
And the Holy Spirit, which is his continuing activity | 27:20 | |
in the world today may have more surprises | 27:27 | |
in store right here. | 27:34 | |
It was to stress that fact | 27:40 | |
that the second hymn was chosen this morning, | 27:42 | |
especially those words | 27:46 | |
"New occasions teach new duties. | 27:50 | |
Time makes ancient good uncouth. | 27:56 | |
They must upwards still and onward | 28:04 | |
who would keep abreast of truth." | 28:09 | |
If this is a valid service | 28:13 | |
our second response to it should be the thrill of discovery. | 28:14 | |
Brethren it is our hope that the university service | 28:22 | |
of worship is one worthy of God | 28:26 | |
who is truth and beauty, as well as love. | 28:33 | |
And one worthy of ourselves | 28:40 | |
in the stretching process of an academic fellowship. | 28:44 | |
It is our prayer that Sunday by Sunday, | 28:51 | |
we shall be recalled to what we quickly recognize | 28:54 | |
and be led on to the painful joy of discovery. | 28:59 | |
The thrill of recognition, | 29:07 | |
the thrill of discovery, that is the twin intent | 29:11 | |
and the double effect of a good service, of worship. | 29:18 | |
Let us pray. | 29:27 | |
Almighty and eternal God, | 29:34 | |
the beginning and the end of all our worship, | 29:38 | |
deliver us from scorn of that which is old | 29:42 | |
and from fear of that which is new. | 29:45 | |
Save us also from veneration of that which is old | 29:50 | |
and from contempt of that which is new, | 29:54 | |
that our worship may glorify thee, | 29:58 | |
as the framer of tradition and the author of truth, | 30:02 | |
world without him, | 30:07 | |
and may the blessing of the Lord come upon you abundantly | 30:10 | |
may it keep you strong and tranquil | 30:14 | |
in the truth of his promises, | 30:17 | |
through Jesus Christ our Lord. | 30:19 | |
♪ Amen ♪ | 30:27 | |
♪ Amen ♪ | 30:37 |
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