Bishop Gerald Kennedy - Baccalaureate Sermon; John Casteel - "The Prevenient Love of God" (June 2, 1957)

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Announcer	Back alert service, Sunday, June 2, 1957.	0:09
	Speaker, Reverend Gerald Kennedy,	0:16
	Los Angeles, California.	0:20
	(soft music)	0:23
Man	Let us pray,	2:05
	Almighty and most merciful God	2:10
	only because of our own worthiness,	2:13
	but boldly because of thy goodness	2:16
	and the ceaseless patience of thy love	2:19
	we bow our heads before thee in adoration,	2:22
	thou has created us,	2:26
	preserved us and brought us to this hour.	2:29
	Thy has told out to us,	2:33
	the offer of thy companionship when we were most alone,	2:34
	thou has given us strength when we were weak	2:40
	and light when we groped in darkness,	2:43
	we thank thee our Father for all of thy blessings,	2:47
	but most especially for the many opportunities	2:53
	which thou has provided for us a Duke	2:56
	for sound learning and exciting truth.	3:00
	Which have enlarged our acquaintance with ourselves,	3:03
	thy world and thee, for classes, books, assignments,	3:06
	and examinations,	3:12
	which have helped in the discipline of our minds	3:14
	and releasing them into new freedom.	3:17
	For parents, professors, administrators, alumni,	3:20
	and fellow students who have given of their time	3:26
	and talents that we may learn the truth.	3:30
	And for the special privilege	3:34
	of having thy Word interpreted to us each Sunday	3:37
	in the University service of worship.	3:41
	We confess before thee	3:44
	that we have often failed thee	3:47
	that our selfishness has made evil out of our intended good	3:50
	that our prejudice has blinded us,	3:55
	that our indifference has kept us	3:58
	from the knowledge of thy will.	4:01
	And that our pride has hidden thee from our sight.	4:03
	We asked thee on this special day for thy pardon	4:08
	and for the grace that will make us whole.	4:12
	Cleanse us of the wrong that distorts the mind	4:15
	of the willful desire that twist life away from thy purpose,	4:19
	cherished hatred and thoughtless contempt,	4:24
	and of pride of place and envy.	4:28
	Bring us in every moment of decision to set before thee	4:31
	the choices we would make.	4:35
	Submitting our knowledge to thy wisdom	4:38
	and yielding all that we are to the service	4:41
	of what thou with service be.	4:44
	Oh God, who has taught us to pray	4:48
	for others as well as for ourselves,	4:51
	we beseech thee to have regard for all schools,	4:54
	colleges, and universities,	4:59
	that they may be dedicated to true learning	5:01
	whereby life may be enriched.	5:05
	The bond of ignorance and superstition broken	5:07
	dullness sharpen into insight and wonder into reverence	5:11
	writ us together in this uneasy world	5:17
	of all that makes for enmity,	5:20
	of the narrow loyalties that breed war,	5:23
	of the cramped horizons where our spirits grow poor	5:26
	and rule among the affairs of men everywhere	5:32
	to the establishment of thy love and righteousness.	5:35
	That thy mind may be brought by our hands into the future,	5:39
	not in trembling under thy wrath but in willing obedience.	5:43
	We offer our prayers in the name of the master teacher,	5:49
	Jesus Christ, our Lord.	5:53
	Amen.	5:55
	(soft music)	6:29
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	6:35
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	6:39
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	6:42
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	6:48
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	6:53
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	7:00
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	7:05
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	7:38
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	7:44
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	7:46
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	7:50
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	7:55
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	8:00
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	8:06
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	8:12
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	8:18
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	8:24
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	8:34
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	8:56
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	8:59
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	9:02
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	9:06
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	9:14
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	9:19
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	9:25
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	9:29
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	9:34
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	9:40
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	9:55
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	10:22
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	10:24
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	10:27
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	10:32
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	10:34
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	10:45
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	10:48
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	10:53
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	10:58
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	11:03
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	11:07
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	11:12
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	11:16
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	11:19
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	11:24
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	11:27
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	11:30
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	11:32
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	11:35
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	11:37
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	11:38
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	11:40
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	11:41
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	11:42
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	11:45
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	11:47
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	11:55
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	12:40
	(Indistinct choir singing)	14:26
Priest	The scripture lesson this morning	16:53
	is taken from the 12th chapter of Romans	16:55
	the first through the eighth verses.	16:59
	"I beseech you therefore brethren,	17:03
	by the mercies of God that you present your bodies,	17:05
	a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God,	17:10
	which is your reasonable service.	17:18
	And be not conformed to this world,	17:22
	but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind	17:26
	that ye may prove what is that good and acceptable	17:32
	and perfect will of God.	17:37
	For I say, through the grace given unto me	17:42
	to every man that is among you,	17:46
	not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think,	17:49
	but to think soberly,	17:53
	according as God hath dealt	17:56
	to every man the measure of faith.	17:57
	For as we have many members in one body,	18:02
	and all members have not the same office.	18:05
	So we, being many, are one body in Christ,	18:09
	and every one member is one of another.	18:15
	Having then gifts differing according	18:19
	to the grace that is given to us,	18:21
	whether prophecy,	18:24
	let us prophesy according to the proportion of faith	18:26
	or ministry, let us wait on our ministering.	18:30
	Or he that teacheth on teaching,	18:34
	or he that exhorteth on exhortation,	18:38
	he that giveth, let him do it with simplicity,	18:42
	he that ruleth, with diligence,	18:47
	he that sheweth mercy, with cheerfulness."	18:51
	Thus endeth the reading of his Word.	18:57
	(soft music)	19:18
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	19:44
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	19:47
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	19:51
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	19:53
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	20:04
	♪ His grace and glory ♪	21:42
	♪ By his grace and glory ♪	21:46
	♪ By his grace and glory ♪	21:52
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	21:57
	♪ His grace and glory ♪	22:41
	♪ His grace and glory ♪	22:45
	♪ His grace and glory ♪	22:48
	♪ His grace and glory ♪	22:51
	♪ Hallelujah ♪	22:55
	♪ Praise the Lord ♪	23:33
	♪ Praise the Lord ♪	23:35
Gerald	After one has come into what is certainly	24:20
	one of the most beautiful churches in the world	24:22
	and listen to this great music.	24:26
	It takes a good deal of courage to stand up	24:28
	and try to preach.	24:30
	One has the feeling that the spoken word	24:32
	is hardly necessary for the worship of God.	24:34
	You will understand therefore,	24:37
	why I count it such a very high honor	24:39
	to be in this pulpit this day and to speak on this occasion.	24:40
	There has come down to us from 1,650	24:47
	a list of the names of the German of Sussex county, England.	24:51
	They were all Puritans apparently,	24:57
	and they all had names expressing their faith.	24:59
	One man's name was, Fight-the-good-fight-of-faith White.	25:04
	Another one was called, Peace-of-mind Knight,	25:09
	that sounds modern.	25:11
	One man was called, Kill-Sin Pimple.	25:15
	And there was another named, Renewed-right-wise Barry.	25:18
	The English essayist, E.V Lucas says that	25:24
	if he could choose a name	25:26
	which was descriptive of his life	25:27
	he would prefer to be called Renewed.	25:29
	He says, that's what everybody is looking for.	25:33
	Renew, to start over again, freshly not weary,	25:36
	not cynical, not disillusioned.	25:42
	And I suppose he's right.	25:45
	There is in nearly every man's life	25:48
	and almost in escapable nostalgia for good old days.	25:50
	When we get old we want to begin again	25:56
	we think of the days of our youth	25:58
	as the great days of our lives,	25:59
	fresh beginnings, great hopes, renewal.	26:02
	So as I have been thinking about that	26:08
	during these past days,	26:10
	there came to my mind that great verse read this morning	26:11
	by the praeses from Romans	26:14
	where Saint Paul is saying to those early Christians,	26:17
	"be not conformed to this world,	26:21
	but be ye transformed by the renewal of your mind".	26:25
	And he seems to be saying	26:31
	that one of the gifts of the gospel	26:32
	is this gift of renewal.	26:34
	The sense of fresh beginnings and of our a new start	26:38
	and of a fresh dream.	26:40
	And I want to talk about that	26:42
	for a little while this morning.	26:43
	I read some time ago there was a professor	26:47
	from the Middle West, Henry Mark,	26:48
	that if you do not want your children	26:50
	to over hear what you're saying,	26:52
	act as if you're talking to them.	26:53
	And so this morning I'm reversing that a little bit	26:56
	and I'm talking primarily	26:59
	to what I think is going to happen in a few years from now	27:01
	in the hopes of maybe the graduating class	27:03
	may overhear something I say.	27:06
	The first thing I wanna say this morning	27:11
	is a rather pessimistic thing	27:13
	and I feel sure it's true.	27:14
	So far as the vast majority of people are concerned,	27:17
	life is a gradual running down.	27:20
	Now that's inevitable.	27:26
	That's inevitable, of course, physically speaking,	27:27
	there comes a time when suddenly we realize	27:31
	that we have run down considerably, physically speaking,	27:33
	and the life in a sense is a process of gradually dying.	27:38
	Comes as a very hard blow to us, as a very great shock.	27:44
	That first time when we have to admit to ourselves	27:49
	that we got more weary than we used to become.	27:52
	That the print is a little smaller	27:57
	and the blocks are a lot longer.	28:00
	That would not be so bad in some countries	28:05
	I think where they honor age,	28:07
	there are some cultures	28:08
	where the elderly man is a man respected,	28:10
	and a man could know that as he grew older,	28:14
	at least he would obtain something	28:16
	to make up for this loss of physical vigor,	28:18
	but not in America.	28:20
	We do not for the most part honor age,	28:23
	this is a young country.	28:26
	We worship youth, we worship action.	28:29
	So a man has to act young, even if it kills him.	28:33
	And sometimes it does.	28:37
	This thing does not always come as it does to an athlete,	28:42
	the realization to a baseball player, for example,	28:45
	that he's an old man of 38	28:48
	or a boxer who probably is toward the end when he's 32,	28:50
	it sometimes comes very gradually to us,	28:55
	but it comes in a way that brings about	29:00
	what some psychologists call the dangerous age.	29:02
	When a man or a woman in desperation	29:07
	to recapture the sense of youth does something silly,	29:09
	like trying to find a new wife or a new husband.	29:11
	It's a bad time.	29:17
	And we all have to get ready for it because it's coming.	29:19
	The son of Robert Benchley says that	29:22
	his father always thought he ought to take exercise	29:26
	and keep in good condition, but he hardly ever did.	29:28
	He says that his father bought a rowing machine	29:31
	brought it home, put it under the bed	29:33
	and never used it once.	29:35
	He paid enough rent on a sunlamp	29:38
	to buy it several times over and never turned it on.	29:39
	He called the couch which he had in his study, his track	29:44
	and he would announce blissfully	29:49
	he was going to take a couple of turns around the track	29:50
	by which he meant he was going to take a nap.	29:52
	(congregation laughing)	29:55
	He always insisted after he became a spectator sportsman	29:57
	that the toughest game was high a lie.	30:01
	He said the steps at the hippodrome	30:03
	are the longest I have to climb.	30:04
	(congregation laughing)	30:06
	And he speaks for most of us	30:08
	because we come to that time ultimately,	30:10
	when suddenly we know that we have run down	30:13
	and perhaps in a more serious way,	30:18
	we run down mentally, many of us.	30:22
	I do not know whether the faculty	30:26
	would agree with me on this or not.	30:29
	But about the saddest thing I see	30:31
	is the average college graduate	30:34
	10 years after he's graduated, he's running down.	30:36
	He's an individual who has given up	30:42
	all intellectual interests for the most part.	30:44
	No more does he think no more does he study.	30:46
	He has been too busy becoming a success.	30:51
	And so perhaps he may now and again,	30:55
	glance through his trade journal	30:57
	or his professional magazine.	31:00
	He may take a hasty look at life	31:02
	at the barber shop usually,	31:05
	he may read an article or two from the reader's digest,	31:08
	but it has been a long time	31:10
	since he really wrestled with an idea,	31:12
	the social conditions of his time	31:17
	and the political situation in his country,	31:19
	the international problems,	31:22
	all these things pass him by.	31:23
	He is no longer interested.	31:26
	He has run down mentally,	31:30
	and this is something that can happen so easily	31:36
	and we know it not,	31:38
	it comes upon us and we do not know exactly	31:39
	what has happened to us, but here it is, it has happened.	31:42
	And it's a desperate thing.	31:47
	I speak to you this morning of that possibility,	31:49
	almost probability unless you're very careful	31:53
	that you become a part of the majority of people	31:57
	to whom life is just running down.	32:00
	The late Steven Vincent Benet	32:05
	I think one of America's great poets	32:06
	wrote some lines a good many years ago, just four of them,	32:09
	which he called, "Interestingly enough 35".	32:12
	I happened to find them when I was just about that age	32:14
	and they struck me hard.	32:17
	This is what he wrote,	32:19
	"The sky, the sun was hot.	32:22
	The sky was bright and all July was overhead.	32:24
	I heard the locusts first that night,	32:30
	six weeks til frost they said".	32:34
	And he was speaking of that moment,	32:38
	when suddenly we know like all our fathers,	32:40
	we will grow old and one day we will die.	32:43
	That moment when this becomes real	32:46
	and it can become a very destructive tragic moment	32:51
	in our lives.	32:56
	Other second thing I want to say this morning is	33:00
	that in our generation,	33:02
	we assume that there is some physical answer to this problem	33:03
	that if we are running down,	33:07
	we can find some physical things	33:08
	which will wind us up again so to speak.	33:09
	If you'll read the magazines,	33:14
	you see that we assume	33:15
	that there was a physical answer to every problem	33:16
	that faces you the young lady that's having trouble	33:19
	with her romance, only needs to change her toothpaste.	33:21
	Or maybe she needs a new shampoo.	33:26
	The young man who is not getting along	33:30
	very well in business is wearing the wrong kind of shirt.	33:32
	He needs the kind of that full of wear	33:36
	for the partial rizai or something like that.	33:37
	(congregation laughing)	33:40
	There is a physical answer to the thing	33:42
	if you're not succeeding	33:43
	and all you have to do is discover what it is	33:44
	somewhere you can find it.	33:47
	Something that will solve the whole business, romance,	33:49
	success, friendship, family life.	33:53
	It's amazing how the whole pressure upon us	33:57
	is to make us believe	34:00
	that somewhere there is a product if we find it	34:01
	that will take care of this whole business.	34:04
	Some years ago,	34:08
	the novelist Ernest Hemingway had a crack up in a plane	34:09
	and narrowly escaped death.	34:12
	He was in Africa.	34:14
	I remember seeing a picture of him	34:16
	shortly after that accident.	34:17
	I'm sure some of you saw it.	34:19
	He stands just at the edge of the jungle.	34:21
	He hasn't shaved for a long time.	34:23
	In one hand, he has a bunch of bananas	34:26
	and the other hand a bottle of gin.	34:28
	And as one of my friends says rather cynically,	34:31
	who has written a book.	34:33
	He says, "By looking at Hemingway,	34:35
	you can't tell whether he's emerging from the jungle	34:37
	or whether he's going back into it".	34:39
	(congregation laughing)	34:41
	But here it is, jungle philosophy,	34:44
	all you need on the one hand enough to eat	34:49
	and on the other hand enough to drink and all is well.	34:52
	There's a physical answer to the problem that you face.	34:57
	There's even a physical answer we believe if we go stale,	35:05
	if life suddenly caves in on us,	35:08
	you'd need to travel.	35:10
	Buy yourself a ticket on a plane or a ship,	35:12
	go to some other country, discover a new environment,	35:15
	put yourself from here over there	35:18
	and you will have a healing.	35:20
	You will feel good again	35:23
	and life will may have meaning for you again.	35:24
	Well, I wish it were true.	35:26
	There's so many Americans traveling a day,	35:27
	I wish it were true.	35:28
	I think it is a good thing that we travel a great deal.	35:30
	I'm glad that Americans are traveling	35:32
	many who can't afford to traveling	35:34
	they, now can pay it later.	35:35
	But it is a good thing that we are seeing other cultures	35:39
	in other nations,	35:42
	because then we understand our own better	35:42
	and we understand our place in the world.	35:44
	And I hope we have a growing appreciation of our oneness	35:46
	as a world.	35:50
	It's good,	35:52
	but it won't solve many problems for you.	35:53
	The fellow that's a born to mind	35:55
	will be one of Honolulu, almost certainly.	35:56
	The man who finds it very difficult	36:02
	to discover a meaning in his life in Durham	36:04
	probably won't find it in Hong Kong either.	36:05
	And there are any number of these Americans traveling	36:10
	who do only one thing,	36:12
	criticize everything they see	36:14
	in terms of what they have back home.	36:16
	And they come back just as they left,	36:19
	still unhappy, still bored,	36:22
	still lacking any real purpose or meaning in their lives.	36:25
	There's an old Spanish proverb that sums it up.	36:28
	It says, "he who would bring home	36:32
	with him the wealth of the Indies	36:34
	must take the wealth of the Indies with him".	36:37
	And what a man is here, he will be there	36:42
	and you'll never can leave yourself behind	36:45
	and this doesn't solve it.	36:47
	It is a wonderful thing to travel,	36:48
	but don't think it's going to change your life very much.	36:50
	I don't know whether any of you have ever been	36:54
	in one of those old country stores or not.	36:56
	Some of the older people in this congregation,	36:58
	I'm sure have been.	37:00
	When I was Bishop of the Portland area,	37:01
	I had Alaska under my jurisdiction	37:03
	and many a time in one of those frontier,	37:06
	Alaska communities,	37:08
	I went into an old fashion country store.	37:09
	Everything that that community had to have,	37:12
	had to be in that store.	37:15
	There was only one and you want to see them	37:16
	piled up this way and that,	37:20
	I don't know how anyone ever could find anything	37:22
	and I remember a sign I saw it said,	37:24
	we have it if you can find it.	37:27
	(congregation laughing)	37:29
	And that's our belief today.	37:33
	We have it if you can find it,	37:35
	we have an answer if you can discover it,	37:37
	if it isn't in this product it will be this one,	37:39
	search for it.	37:41
	Well, I don't believe it.	37:42
	And the third thing I want to say is,	37:46
	all healing, all renewal has to come from inside.	37:50
	It has to be something from within.	37:57
	They don't have it and you can't find it.	38:00
	It has to come from inside.	38:05
	Not too many years ago when I graduated from college,	38:07
	I was talking with a man who had been a friend	38:11
	of our families for a long time.	38:13
	He knew that it was a sacrifice for me to go to college.	38:15
	In fact, he tried to discourage me	38:17
	and it had been a hard grind.	38:20
	And I remember seeing him one day and he said,	38:21
	"well, do you think it was worth it?"	38:23
	And I said, yes.	38:24
	He said, "what did you get out of it?"	38:27
	And I spoke just off the top of my head.	38:31
	Well, I said, I got an attitude.	38:33
	And he thought that was a rather flipping answer.	38:36
	I think maybe he thought I was stupid,	38:39
	but as I've lived a number of years and thought back on it,	38:42
	I would still say the same thing.	38:45
	I got an attitude, a critical attitude,	38:47
	a horror of becoming just a victim	38:52
	of high powered propaganda.	38:54
	They believe in the truth and a love of it.	38:57
	A desire if possible, to understand the truth and to find it	39:01
	and a willingness to away these things	39:07
	without first accepting a critical attitude.	39:09
	I believe that was the thing I got from college,	39:14
	which I value the most.	39:16
	Most of the information I received I've forgotten or lost.	39:17
	I discovered where it could be found	39:21
	or where my secretary can find it for me.	39:23
	And the main thing I believe that came from that experience	39:26
	and it was a great experience,	39:28
	it was a changing experience in my life	39:30
	was an attitude of the critical mind,	39:34
	something inside,	39:37
	a psychiatrist, a psychologist,	39:41
	all of those who deal with the mind	39:42
	do not always agree on the right explanation	39:45
	of why we do what we do.	39:48
	But there's one thing on which they do all agree.	39:49
	All the various schools and it is this	39:52
	that a man's healing has to come from inside.	39:55
	And we are discovering in these days,	39:59
	that close relationship to a man's physical strength	40:01
	with his inner strength and his physical health,	40:05
	with his mental health.	40:08
	We are discovering in this day	40:09
	that if inside of us we have something	40:11
	which is the center of resentment and hatred and fear	40:13
	until that's removed there's nothing that can heal us	40:16
	not from the outside, it has to be an inner healing.	40:19
	If we are to be healed at all.	40:23
	Jesus said something one time	40:26
	that we have rather ignored,	40:27
	we do not preach on it very much,	40:28
	we did not discuss it, it's a radical statement.	40:30
	He said, "blessed are you when you are persecuted	40:33
	for righteousness sake".	40:36
	What does that mean?	40:37
	He was saying, "blessed are you, fortunate are you,	40:38
	lucky are you, happy are you when you are persecuted	40:40
	because you have a conviction.	40:45
	And because at the end of the day,	40:48
	in spite of all the unpopularity that has surrounded you,	40:49
	you can live with yourself and say,	40:52
	"I stood by what I believed",	40:54
	happy are you, this is where it comes from.	40:57
	He's saying this is health, this is success,	41:00
	inside nowhere else.	41:04
	Have you read that little classic,	41:07
	"The Lonely Crowd" where Riesman speaks	41:08
	about the outer directed in the inner directed people.	41:11
	A poor man who was merely the victim	41:14
	of the most pressured,	41:16
	who goes wherever the pressure pushes him.	41:17
	The outer directed, who is no longer actually a person,	41:19
	but simply a result of what other people want him to be,	41:23
	over against that inner directed individual	41:27
	who has certain great convictions from within	41:30
	which he stands.	41:33
	That's the thing I'm speaking of	41:35
	and this comes to mean strength to men.	41:38
	John Wesley, who was a spiritual father	41:41
	of the Methodist church, lived to be an old man of 88.	41:43
	He started with a rather poor health as a child,	41:47
	did enough work to kill a hundred men,	41:50
	rode up and down England in all kinds of weather,	41:52
	preached any number of times a day	41:55
	and seemed to thrive on it and died at 88.	41:57
	Toward the end of his life	42:00
	somebody asked him what the secret of his health was.	42:01
	And he said, "the main thing was this	42:03
	I got up at four o'clock every morning.	42:05
	I preached at five, it's the best exercise in the world".	42:06
	I take his word for it.	42:11
	I haven't tried it.	42:13
	(congregation laughing)	42:15
	But I think that what he was saying was this,	42:17
	that when a man has a sense of a higher purpose in life,	42:19
	when he's doing something that he knows is worth doing,	42:22
	somehow it even affects his physical strength	42:25
	that he doesn't get tired	42:27
	and he has great resources, great reservoirs of power.	42:29
	The man whose life is meaningless never finds,	42:34
	renewal and power come from within.	42:38
	There was a very cynical book in the Old Testament	42:43
	called the book of Ecclesiastes	42:45
	has always been a favorite of mine.	42:47
	This man who's looked around	42:49
	and has studied some of the cliches	42:50
	that they were speaking in his generation	42:53
	turns his back upon them.	42:54
	He says in one place, the race is not always to the swift,	42:56
	nor the battle to the strong.	43:01
	And I have lived long enough	43:04
	to understand something of the meaning of that.	43:05
	I have seen the young man who has everything in his favor,	43:07
	who walked around swiftly to the top, falters some way,	43:10
	that young man who you were not very much impressed with,	43:17
	perhaps at the beginning,	43:19
	proves to have inside himself tremendous swiftness	43:21
	and speed that carries him on and on to the heights.	43:25
	I've watched those battles	43:34
	and as you watched the beginning of it you said,	43:35
	"this cause can't win, look what's against it.	43:37
	All the newspapers, all the powerful people in the community	43:39
	are on the other side,	43:42
	what chance does it have	43:44
	till you discover that a few people dedicated	43:47
	to a high purpose win	43:50
	because inside they had power that no one saw,	43:54
	no one understood.	43:59
	I'm saying this morning, that renewal comes from inside	44:02
	not outside.	44:06
	Power is from within and not from without.	44:09
	If you read that famous biography of Johnson by Boswell	44:12
	and I expect most of you have.	44:16
	You may recall that little incident	44:19
	where Boswell is reporting to Johnson	44:20
	about a condemned criminal.	44:22
	He said, "this man had lived a very evil life	44:25
	and now just in the last days before his execution	44:27
	he had suddenly turned to religion and studied it	44:31
	with great intentness"	44:33
	and Johnson said,	44:35
	"sir when a man is going to be hanged in a fortnight,	44:36
	it wonderfully concentrates his mind".	44:39
	And the truth is	44:45
	that when we come up against 10 great crisis in our lives,	44:45
	suddenly we know that all we have is our mind.	44:48
	All we are is what we are inside.	44:54
	All we have to stand upon is the quality of our characters,	44:57
	the faith by which we live.	45:01
	You're not going to be renewed by buying that product,	45:03
	you're not going to change your life	45:08
	by some physical answer.	45:10
	You're going to find it inside	45:12
	or as Paul put it, by the renewal of your mind.	45:14
	Now, the last thing I want	45:23
	to say this morning is, that this, in my judgment	45:24
	is one of the greatest gifts of religion.	45:27
	And it is a special gift	45:30
	I think that God gives us through Christ	45:31
	the renewal of our minds,	45:34
	He does it by giving us hope.	45:38
	This may not have happened to you yet	45:40
	and I hope it never does, but it has happened to some of us.	45:42
	We come to the realization that we did something	45:46
	that is utterly unforgivable.	45:48
	We did not think it could ever happen to us,	45:52
	but it did, and in that desperate moment,	45:54
	what we need above everything else is hope	45:57
	that somehow once more we can believe in ourselves.	45:59
	And I believe that one of the great things	46:05
	that Christ does for men is to perform this miracle	46:07
	of restoring faith in ourselves	46:11
	when we have done something that is utterly unforgivable	46:13
	and we know it.	46:17
	And we hope again and we try again.	46:19
	You may not have had this experience	46:23
	and I hope you never shall, but you might.	46:25
	Some of us have,	46:27
	when a friend that we trusted	46:29
	and would've build our lives on, sold us out.	46:31
	And there are some here this morning	46:35
	who can think back with me on such an occasion	46:36
	when the heavens caved in and you said,	46:40
	I can never believe in anyone again,	46:42
	but He came and performed that miracle upon us again.	46:46
	And we began to understand	46:49
	there were things in this man's life we never knew	46:51
	and there are people who are trustworthy	46:53
	and we began to believe in folks again,	46:57
	He brought us the renewal of our hope.	47:00
	And it may be that we shall have that experience	47:04
	of taking the wrong turning	47:06
	or coming one day to the dead end.	47:08
	When all of life seems to be as a tale told by an idiot	47:10
	sound and fury signifying nothing.	47:14
	And then instead of sitting down	47:19
	and feeling sorry for ourselves,	47:20
	He may give us grace to believe that we were at fault,	47:23
	not life.	47:28
	And that somewhere back there,	47:30
	we have to return and take the other track.	47:31
	This is what's wrong	47:34
	with the generation of novelists of our time.	47:35
	They had been writing their stories	47:38
	about men who have ignored every moral law of life,	47:40
	every decent convention and then when life caves in on them,	47:43
	they cry out as if life had let them down,	47:47
	not once ever facing up	47:51
	to maybe the truth is that they left life down	47:52
	and they were wrong and not life.	47:55
	He comes to us when we have taken that wrong turning	48:00
	to make us hope again, that life is right.	48:03
	Life is full of meaning and excitement	48:07
	and unventured dignity.	48:09
	We have to find the way again.	48:12
	And our hope is renewed.	48:15
	One of my very close friends in the console of bishops	48:19
	is Bishop Frank Smith of Houston, he is retiring in 1960.	48:21
	They say that he can take a young man	48:26
	who has to go out to the very most difficult	48:29
	discouraging job in the conference.	48:32
	Put his hand on that boy shoulder	48:35
	and talked to him for a little while	48:36
	and the boy straightens up, throws his shoulders back	48:38
	and goes out as if he was facing	48:41
	the greatest opportunity there is and does a wonderful job.	48:43
	So one of his friends has suggested	48:48
	that they make Bishop Smith a chaplain	48:50
	of Huntsville prison after he retires.	48:51
	That's where they execute the bad Texans	48:53
	for this friend says that Bishop Smith	48:58
	could put his hand on the shoulder of a fellow	49:00
	going to the electric chair	49:01
	and making him think he's facing the greatest opportunity	49:02
	he ever faced.	49:04
	So that he'd be willing to pull the switch himself probably.	49:06
	(congregation laughing)	49:09
	Oh, this gift of encouragement,	49:11
	this gift of a new hope,	49:13
	this gift of a vision	49:15
	that goes beyond the present difficulty,	49:16
	what a gift that is in men	49:20
	to bring encouragement to others.	49:22
	But of course, above all that we can ever do	49:25
	it is his gift through Christ,	49:27
	to make us hope again.	49:30
	To teach us that we live by faith	49:32
	and no man can live for 10 minutes	49:34
	on the basis of what he can prove.	49:36
	That we choose this faith	49:38
	that has within it the promise of God.	49:40
	That we tested as Paul tells us to do,	49:43
	this will of God for us.	49:45
	And as we live by this faith,	49:48
	to find that every day is a new life,	49:50
	that there's no boredom connected with this.	49:53
	That we can hardly wait for the next year	49:56
	to see what life has to bring us never forget this.	49:57
	Even Robert Browning wrote those off folded lines,	50:00
	"Grow old along with me.	50:03
	The best is yet to be", that he was a Christian	50:05
	and he was speaking as a Christian.	50:10
	It made no sense to the pagan and it never will.	50:13
	I look around about some people who feel	50:22
	that life has grown weary,	50:25
	and I wonder about them what's happened to them.	50:26
	Bernard Berenson, one of the great art critics of our time,	50:30
	and one of the great art philosophers said,	50:32
	recently, because he's an old man now,	50:35
	has so much work ahead of him	50:38
	that he's afraid he'll die before he finishes it.	50:39
	Said he'd like to stand on a street corner,	50:42
	like a beggar with his cap in his hand	50:44
	and beg for some extra hours from the passerby,	50:46
	who are wasting them.	50:50
	And I speak to you this morning	50:55
	of the kind of life, the life of hope,	50:57
	the life of faith, the life of love.	50:58
	That it's a constant life of renewal,	51:02
	so that everyday a man begins a new with expectation	51:04
	and hope for the future.	51:10
	The renewal of your mind.	51:13
	I close with this.	51:17
	One of the outstanding priest in the church of England	51:20
	is a man called Father Dolling,	51:23
	who spent a good many years in Portsmouth.	51:25
	His parish was down in the slum section	51:29
	he was the poor man's priest.	51:31
	He had a very great sense of a mission	51:34
	to this parish to improve the living conditions	51:37
	in this section of the city.	51:39
	He discovered for example,	51:42
	that the sewer system of the city of Portsmouth	51:43
	had not extended itself into this slum section	51:45
	there were no drains there.	51:47
	It upset him so much that he began to organize opposition	51:50
	and these formerly acquiesced and humble people	51:53
	began to put pressure up on the mayor for a change.	51:55
	And the mayor who was a good politician,	51:59
	didn't want things stirred up,	52:01
	and he thought everything was all right the way it was.	52:02
	And so he went to the Bishop and said,	52:05
	"Can't you quiet this priest?"	52:07
	Told him what he was doing,	52:09
	and the Bishop called Father Dolling into talk to him	52:12
	and said in a nice way,	52:15
	"Now this is out of your bailiwick really.	52:16
	You're doing things that the priest has no business doing.	52:18
	Yours is a spiritual task.	52:21
	You're supposed to teach these people,	52:23
	religion and theology and faith	52:24
	and tell them what they ought to believe.	52:26
	You have no business interfering in this".	52:28
	And then Father Dolling,	52:31
	who was notoriously slow of speech and fumbling with words	52:32
	suddenly burst out and said,	52:36
	"But my Lord, the reason I'm making a fuss	52:38
	about the drains is because I believe in the incarnation.	52:42
	I believe in the dignity of life.	52:49
	I believe that God came into life in a real way.	52:53
	I believe in everyman who has to live.	52:58
	And my task therefore is to make life better for every man.	53:02
	And I submit to you this,	53:09
	that no man who believes in the incarnation	53:11
	will ever discover that life is dull,	53:15
	but he will discover that	53:19
	that phase central in his life is a renewing thing	53:20
	every day of his life.	53:26
	Be not conformed to this world,	53:30
	but be ye transformed by the renewal of your mind".	53:33
	Let us stand together for the benediction.	53:41
	(congregation speaking indistinctly)	53:45
	Now, oh Lord, we commend into thee in a special way	53:51
	these young men and young women	53:53
	who graduate from this great university	53:55
	and ask thy blessing upon them.	53:57
	We pray especially that this experience	54:00
	which has been there shall be to them through all the years	54:02
	of their lives,	54:04
	like a well of water springing up	54:06
	to give them the water	54:08
	where if they drink, they shall not thirst again.	54:09
	May the grace of the Lord, Jesus Christ, the love of God	54:14
	and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit	54:18
	rest and abide with you now and evermore.	54:20
	(soft music)	54:30

	(soft music)	0:04
	(congregation singing indistinctly)	1:04
	(soft music)	1:35
	(congregation continues singing)	2:19
-	Let us offer unto God our unison prayer of confession.	4:29
	Let us pray.	4:36
	Our heavenly Father, who by thy love has made us,	4:38
	and through thy love has kept us,	4:44
	and in thy love wouldst make us perfect.	4:47
	We humbly confess that we have not loved thee	4:52
	with all our heart and soul and mind and strength,	4:55
	and that we have not loved one another	5:00
	as Christ hath loved us.	5:03
	Thy light is within our souls	5:06
	but our selfishness hath hindered thee.	5:09
	We have not lived by faith, we have resisted thy spirit.	5:13
	We have neglected thy inspirations.	5:19
	Forgive what we have been.	5:23
	Help us to amend what we are,	5:25
	and in thy spirit direct talk we shall be	5:28
	that thou must come into the full glory of thy creation	5:33
	in us and in all men,	5:38
	through Jesus Christ our Lord, amen.	5:41
	Now as our savior, Christ, hath taught us,	5:46
	we humbly pray together, say,	5:50
	our father who at in heaven, hallowed be thy name,	5:53
	thy kingdom come.	5:59
	Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.	6:02
	Give us this day our daily bread	6:07
	and forgive us our trespasses	6:10
	as we forgive those who trespass against us.	6:13
	And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,	6:17
	for thine is the kingdom	6:23
	and the power and the glory forever, amen.	6:25
	(congregation singing)	7:22
-	First lesson for the morning is written	10:19
	in the First Epistle of John,	10:21
	the fourth chapter of the seventh verse.	10:24
	"Beloved, let us love one another for love is of God.	10:29
	And he who loves is born of God and knows God.	10:35
	He who does not love does not know God for God is love.	10:40
	And in this,	10:47
	the love of God was made manifest unto us.	10:48
	That God sent his only son	10:53
	into the world so that we might live through him	10:55
	in this is love.	11:01
	Not that we loved God,	11:04
	but that he loved us and sent his son to be the expiation	11:06
	for our sins.	11:12
	Beloved, if God so loved us,	11:15
	we are also to love one another.	11:18
	No man has seen God,	11:22
	but if we love one another God abides in us	11:25
	and his love is perfected in us.	11:30
	By this we know that we abide in him and he in us	11:34
	because he has given us on his own spirit.	11:39
	And we have seen and testified	11:43
	that the father has sent his son as the savior of the world.	11:46
	Whoever confesses that Jesus is the son of God,	11:52
	God abides in him and he involved.	11:56
	So we know and believe the love God has for us,	12:01
	God is love.	12:06
	And he who abides in love abides in God,	12:08
	and God abides in him.	12:12
	In this is love perfected with us	12:16
	that we may have confidence for the day of judgment,	12:20
	because as He is so are we in this world.	12:24
	There is no fear in love but perfect love casts out fear,	12:30
	for fear has to do with punishment.	12:37
	And he who fears is not perfected in love.	12:41
	We love because He first loved us."	12:45
	And the second lesson in the Gospel according to Mark,	12:53
	the 12th chapter and the 28th verse.	12:56
	"One of the scribes came upon	13:01
	and heard them disputing with one another.	13:02
	And seeing that Jesus answered them well,	13:06
	asked him, 'Which commandment is first of all?'	13:09
	Jesus answered, 'The first is, hear, O Israel.	13:14
	The Lord, our God, the Lord is one.	13:18
	And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,	13:23
	and with all your soul and with all your mind,	13:27
	and with all your strength.	13:31
	The second is this,	13:35
	You shall love your neighbor as yourself.	13:38
	There is no other commandment greater than these.'	13:42
	The scribes said to him,	13:47
	'You are right teacher.	13:47
	You have truly said that he is one	13:49
	and there is no other but he,	13:52
	and to love him with all the heart	13:55
	and with all of the understanding,	13:58
	and with all the strength and to love one's neighbor	14:00
	as oneself is much more	14:03
	than all bull burnt offerings and sacrifices.'	14:05
	When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely he said to him,	14:10
	'You are not far from the kingdom of God.'	14:17
	After that, no one dared to ask him any questions.	14:21
	May God bless you (indistinct) of His Word.	14:28
	(soft music)	14:36
	(congregation singing indistinctly)	15:08
-	The Lord be with you.	17:12
	Let us pray.	17:15
	Most gracious Father,	17:24
	who for every new generation prepares the new, thy blessing.	17:28
	We, thy people offer this prayer of thanksgiving,	17:35
	for the power thou hast given us	17:42
	to lay hold of things unseen.	17:44
	For the strong sense we have that	17:48
	this world is not our abiding pole,	17:52
	but our restless hearts,	17:57
	which nothing finite tend to satisfy,	18:00
	we give thee thanks, oh, God.	18:04
	For the invasion of our souls by thy Holy Spirit,	18:10
	for all human love and goodness that speak to us of thee,	18:15
	for the fullness of thy glory outpour in Jesus Christ.	18:23
	We give thee thanks, oh, God, thou author of every good.	18:30
	Let us offer unto God our prayer of intercession	18:39
	for all conditions of men.	18:42
	Loving and Holy Spirit of God,	18:46
	we pray that we and all men may increasingly work together	18:51
	that thy will may be done on the Earth,	18:57
	that the resources of the Earth may be gathered, distributed	19:03
	and used with unselfish motives and scientific skill,	19:08
	for the benefit of all.	19:15
	That beauty may be given to our towns	19:19
	and left to our countryside,	19:23
	that children may be finely bred and finely trained,	19:28
	that there may be open ways,	19:37
	and peace and freedom from end to end of all the Earth.	19:40
	That all men may learn goodwill through keeping thy company.	19:49
	Let us offer onto God our prayer of intercession	19:59
	for our own country.	20:03
	At this season of remembrance,	20:07
	we commend unto thee our country,	20:09
	so distraught in its thinking,	20:13
	so puzzled in it's acting	20:18
	as it seeks to serve both thee and mammon.	20:22
	Help each of us to remember	20:28
	that's unless thou doest build the nation,	20:32
	we labor in vain as we seek to put it together.	20:35
	Recall to us our forebears,	20:42
	who came here because they wanted freedom to worship thee.	20:44
	Help us to be in spirit, their children.	20:51
	Recall to us our ancestors who made this country, America,	20:57
	independent, free,	21:02
	and help us to preserve in it the independence and freedom,	21:07
	which allows us to worship thee and server others,	21:12
	in Christ's name.	21:18
	Let us offer unto God our prayer of supplication	21:21
	that we may always have His spirit.	21:27
	Eternal God, in whom is our health and our peace,	21:34
	how may we utter our need of thee?	21:42
	Our minds need thee to give them poise.	21:48
	Our wills need thee to give them strength.	21:54
	Our hearts need thee to give them triumph.	22:00
	We need thee as we labor for a better to world.	22:07
	Very urgent is our need of thee	22:13
	if we are to face persistent evil	22:17
	with hopeful determination.	22:21
	Oh, thou who understandest us	22:25
	better than we understand ourselves,	22:29
	grant unto us a healing,	22:33
	heartening consciousness of thy presence	22:36
	as revealed in Jesus Christ our Lord.	22:40
	And the grace of our Lord, Jesus Christ	22:45
	be with us all ever more, amen.	22:50
	(soft music)	23:06
	(congregation singing)	26:27
	All mighty God,	29:25
	in whom we live and move and have our being,	29:28
	we offer and present unto thee our gifts.	29:33
	A symbol of our sacrifice,	29:38
	ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy,	29:41
	and living sacrifice unto thee,	29:50
	through Jesus Christ, our Lord, amen.	29:54
-	Let us pray.	30:32
	Oh, God, who has given unto us thy Word	30:35
	put a lamp onto our path, and light unto our feet.	30:38
	Grant us (indistinct),	30:45
	adhering in faith and acting in obedience.	30:49
	We may ever glorify thy name,	30:53
	through Christ, our Lord, Amen.	30:57
	On a text, we take the phrase	31:03
	from the Epistle which was read for our first lesson.	31:05
	"We love because he first loved us."	31:09
	Concerning the love of God for us, it might be said	31:17
	that there's nothing we need more urgently,	31:22
	or find more difficult to believe in than this.	31:26
	We need, of course, to believe that God loves us.	31:32
	We cannot live even without human love.	31:37
	An unwanted infant may receive the best of scientific care,	31:43
	but if he does not receive love, he languishes and dies.	31:49
	A boy may go out into the street from an unloving home,	31:55
	either with or without plenty of money in his pocket.	31:59
	And he soon becomes a juvenile delinquent.	32:04
	Multitudes of people perpetuate	32:09
	not only in their own adult years	32:11
	but in the lives of their children,	32:14
	same fears and anxieties and hostility	32:17
	that are caused by the perversion of or the want of love	32:21
	in their own childhood.	32:27
	To be unwanted, to be forced to live	32:30
	but at the same time not to be loved,	32:34
	can become so unendurable	32:38
	that men will take to crime, to war, to rebellion	32:40
	in an effort to claim for themselves	32:46
	the heritage of being loved and accepted,	32:49
	which life has denied.	32:54
	We need, if life is to be endurable at all,	32:57
	we need to be loved by other people.	33:01
	How much more we need the assurance	33:06
	that we are loved by God,	33:08
	how indeed are we to endure and to come triumphant	33:11
	through the evil and tragedy that beset human history	33:16
	and befall inescapably in some measure on us fall,	33:22
	without the sustaining confidence that through all of this,	33:27
	God loves us and his love prevails.	33:31
	And of course, we're always trying to work out our own ways	33:37
	of meeting and overcoming our misfortunes	33:41
	and our sufferings without taking God into account.	33:43
	Sometimes we attempt it by denying that evil exists at all,	33:48
	except as a kind of illusion in our inconstant minds.	33:52
	To do that may give us a kind of temporary peace,	33:57
	but we don't succeed in maintaining the illusion very long.	34:02
	And even while we do,	34:06
	by maintaining it we make ourselves irrelevant	34:09
	to the great conflict between life and death,	34:13
	good and evil and rages through human history	34:16
	that is a part of the life of every individual.	34:20
	And again, we attempt to set bounds to our suffering	34:26
	and to make ourselves safe behind defenses	34:30
	of our own erecting.	34:33
	In 1939, James Hilton,	34:35
	who you may remember as the author of "Shangri-La",	34:38
	wrote an essay in which he, looking ahead	34:43
	to the catastrophe that was about to fall on the world,	34:46
	in which he said that there was so much evil	34:51
	in the world that we cannot,	34:54
	we dare not open ourselves to it all.	34:56
	"The best we can do," said Hilton,	35:00
	"Is to make very sure of what we love	35:03
	and shut all the rest out entirely."	35:07
	Not a great many people were trying that in 1939,	35:13
	the great many more are still trying it today.	35:18
	Most of us in fact give most of our time, our thought,	35:22
	our energy, our resource, to the attempt to arrange life	35:27
	so that we can make sure of what we love	35:32
	and can shut out all the rest that imperils.	35:36
	Then sooner or later as individuals,	35:44
	and as societies and as nations,	35:47
	we discover this can't be done.	35:51
	No American standard of living,	35:54
	no particular pattern of life,	35:58
	no personal security or achievement can preserve us	36:02
	or be preserved against the changes of time,	36:08
	the forces of destruction, the last triumph of day.	36:12
	Only a love greater than all of these can save us.	36:19
	Well, can we believe that God does love us with such love	36:28
	or we need desperately to be able to think that he can	36:35
	and that he does?	36:39
	(indistinct) And this may come somewhat as a surprise	36:43
	to us if we recognize it,	36:47
	we need to believe in the love of God	36:50
	in order to make the thought of God himself endurable to us.	36:52
	It is one thing of course,	36:59
	to believe somewhat vaguely in the existence of God.	37:00
	It is something more to believe	37:06
	that he has certain attributes and thoughts.	37:08
	It is still something else to believe that	37:12
	among these attributes, one is the character of love.	37:15
	And it is still a greater thing	37:21
	to believe that love stands first	37:23
	among all the attributes of God.	37:27
	So preeminent in fact,	37:30
	that the writer of our Epistle this morning says,	37:32
	"Not God doesn't love but simply God is love."	37:35
	well, suppose He were not.	37:44
	Suppose as a large number of mankind,	37:48
	past and present have believed	37:51
	that God is merely a passive being,	37:54
	taking no interest in the fortunes	37:58
	and the hopes and sorrows,	38:00
	the dangers and distresses of we whom he has created.	38:01
	Suppose Elijah's talk to the priest of Baal in Mount Carmel	38:08
	are indeed through of the Lord of Israel also.	38:12
	"Cry aloud," said Elijah, "For he is a god.	38:16
	Either he is musing or he's gone aside,	38:19
	or he's gone on a journey	38:22
	or perhaps he's just fallen asleep."	38:24
	You can talk the idolaters that way	38:28
	only when you are convinced	38:31
	that the Lord of Israel slumbers nor sleeps.	38:34
	Belief in an indifferent God	38:41
	would be almost more than unbearable, would it not?	38:46
	Enough to believe in any God (indistinct).	38:51
	Suppose God be as some have held him,	38:59
	not simply indifferent to our loss and fortune	39:02
	but purposefully malevolent toward us.	39:06
	At the end of his life,	39:11
	HG Wells said he was searching for a word	39:12
	or the Supreme being that would not have	39:15
	the same kindly meaning attached to it,	39:18
	that goes with the name God.	39:22
	And he decided at last to call the Supreme being	39:26
	the antagonists.	39:31
	"The stand," he said, "For the unknown implacable	39:34
	who had put up with creation for a long time	39:39
	but now at the last most determined to wipe it out."	39:43
	Well, there are times in human history	39:49
	when men have been tempted to take this view	39:51
	of God's attitude toward us.	39:54
	There are times in human life	39:56
	when we are all compelled to raise the pride.	39:58
	How can any good God let this happen?	40:02
	Under the duress of human history and experience,	40:07
	we find ourselves driven to that point where	40:10
	if we are to endure the thought that there is of God at all,	40:13
	we must be able to think of him as a God of love.	40:18
	Mildred Cable, who spent 30 long years in missionary travels	40:25
	in the Gobi Desert,	40:30
	drove camel one day in her journeys,	40:32
	on a row of Muslim tombs.	40:35
	In one of these every year,	40:38
	some holy man of the Mohammed and faith entered	40:41
	and was sealed up with an opening left just large enough	40:44
	to hand him a pitcher of water at sunset.	40:48
	There for 40 days he fasted,	40:53
	his only occupation repeating over	40:57
	and over the 99 attributes of Allah,	41:00
	dropping a pebble to the floor as he pronounced each name.	41:05
	Mildred Cable says that,	41:12
	"As I stood there	41:14
	and let my imagination picture the stones	41:15
	falling ceaselessly from the fingers of this man,	41:19
	who knew all the 99 names for God,	41:24
	except the one thing that would have changed everything	41:29
	for him, God is love."	41:35
	Endured as we are in life and history,	41:43
	we can surmise many characteristics	41:47
	of God that seemed to fit with our experience.	41:50
	He is tall, He is mind,	41:53
	He is the prime mover,	41:57
	He is the antagonist or He is not at all.	41:59
	But what we need to be able to say and believe about him is,	42:06
	that He is love.	42:11
	For unless God is love, nothing really matters,	42:13
	not for long.	42:20
	We need then to believe that God is love,	42:24
	but can we believe?	42:26
	Is there not too much in our experience	42:29
	to contradict this claim that faith makes?	42:31
	Indeed it is not those very...	42:34
	Is it not those very considerations that make up our need	42:36
	for his love that also tempt us to believe	42:40
	that faith in his love is only an illusion,	42:44
	which sentimentally religious people can accept?	42:48
	I think a great deal here as in many matters in life,	42:53
	depends upon the point of view that you choose	42:57
	when you start thinking about this question.	43:00
	Take for example, the Parable of the City,	43:04
	"A man," he says, "Tries to cross a busy street.	43:07
	As he steps out into the traffic,	43:11
	a truck comes bearing down on him.	43:14
	And only because it swerves aside at the last moment,	43:17
	does he escape being run over.	43:20
	'God loves me,' he says, 'He's spared my life.'	43:23
	A few days later, he ventures across the street,	43:29
	but this time the truck does run him down	43:31
	and he is carried off to the hospital mangled but alive.	43:34
	'God loves me,' he says, gratefully,	43:39
	'He spared my life.'	43:41
	(speaks indistinctly) He makes a third venture	43:45
	into the world of traffic and this time gets killed.	43:47
	'God loves him,' say his friends, 'He took him home."	43:52
	And now from the point of view of the skeptic of course,	43:58
	God may love this man but he cannot be set to do so	44:01
	in all three instances.	44:05
	You cannot maintain that God loves him equally well.	44:08
	Whether he escapes harm or simply has his life spared,	44:12
	or gets killed in order to take him into eternity.	44:18
	To say that sort of thing from the skeptic point of view	44:22
	is to throw logic to the wind.	44:26
	And yet it is just such an affirmation as this,	44:30
	which the Christian makes.	44:34
	God can and does love the man	44:36
	no matter what may happen to him.	44:40
	The question whether God loves him is not to be answered	44:43
	by trying to identify that love with our own particular idea	44:47
	as to what is good or bad for the man.	44:54
	Indeed it is just this mistake of measuring God's love	44:58
	for us by the way it fits into our own particular idea	45:02
	as to what his love should be	45:07
	so often makes it difficult for us	45:10
	to believe that he loves us at all.	45:12
	We are not going to believe Him unless it coincides	45:16
	with our own love for ourselves.	45:22
	You'll remember (indistinct)	45:27
	about the prayers of the people under his roof.	45:32
	How they would say to God,	45:36
	"Leave thy heavens and come down	45:37
	to our earth of water clocks and hedges,	45:39
	be interesting and weak like ourselves	45:42
	and we will love you as we love ourselves."	45:45
	All of our pain and sorrow is made up	45:51
	in some part of real affliction,	45:53
	but also it is made up of grief and bitterness	45:57
	that brings it out because something	46:01
	of our own self centered life is being denied or torn out.	46:03
	All of our protests, God can't love me	46:11
	or He wouldn't let this happen to me.	46:15
	There's the infliction of our own wound self love.	46:18
	Believe that God loves us	46:27
	to meet whatever may happen to us	46:30
	with a persuasion that neither death nor life,	46:32
	nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers,	46:35
	nor things present, nor things to come,	46:38
	nor height, nor depth,	46:42
	nor any other creature can separate us from the love of God	46:44
	in Christ Jesus.	46:48
	To believe this is possible only as we are delivered	46:50
	from the self calculation that sees everything	46:54
	through the eyes of our own desire.	46:59
	And when we begin to yield all that we are,	47:02
	or desire or cherish into the hands of God,	47:05
	in order to pass from human love to divine love	47:11
	(speaks indistinctly) a new burden is needed.	47:16
	These words come not from an armchair philosophy	47:23
	but from a man who spent five long years	47:27
	in a concentration camp,	47:30
	trying to cheer thousands of his federal country men,	47:33
	to whom every form of human love, friends, lovers, family,	47:37
	was denied.	47:44
	To pass from human love to divine love,	47:46
	a new birth is needed.	47:51
	That new birth which makes belief	47:57
	in the love of God possible will show itself for one thing,	47:59
	in the way in which we now seek to know God for himself.	48:04
	In human experience, love comes only as the result of a law	48:10
	or at least a vivid and intimate personal meeting.	48:15
	We seldom love strangers.	48:19
	We find it difficult to believe we are loved by somebody	48:22
	we have never even known.	48:26
	How are we to conclude that God does not love us	48:30
	if we have never come to know him	48:35
	as one person can know another?	48:39
	We may not of course deny that he exists.	48:42
	Our Atheism is of another kind.	48:46
	The Psalmers described it simply by saying,	48:49
	"God is not in all our core.	48:51
	Being able to believe in and to receive the love of God	48:55
	waits upon our willingness to seek God and come to know him	48:59
	as far as we are able,	49:04
	and to speak with him as a man speaketh to a friend."	49:06
	But more than that, our failure to know God	49:13
	and therefore to be assured that he loves us	49:16
	is more than a matter of chance.	49:20
	This is strange but the truth is we do not know God	49:22
	because we do not want to know him.	49:26
	We do not believe he loves us	49:29
	because we do not want his love.	49:31
	All love makes a claim upon us.	49:36
	We cannot accept it	49:40
	without giving back something of ourselves,	49:42
	some love of our own.	49:45
	And that always means surrendering	49:48
	something of our own self will.	49:51
	Bride at the June wedding is no longer asked	49:54
	to promise that she will love, honor and obey.	49:57
	Perhaps this change in the ritual is a gain for everybody,	50:02
	including the groom.	50:06
	But if the marriage is founded on love,	50:09
	the bride is nevertheless surrendering herself	50:12
	to an obedience which love makes inescapable.	50:15
	And the groom too has to make the same surrender	50:19
	and offer the same obedience.	50:25
	And when neither husband nor wife are willing any longer	50:29
	to live with that kind of selfless surrender,	50:33
	then not only does the marriage fail,	50:38
	but their refusal begins to express itself in anger	50:41
	and bitterness and in hostility.	50:46
	If we are to be able to believe that God loves us,	50:51
	therefore to accept his love	50:56
	in all the experiences of our lives,	50:58
	we shall have to make that kind of surrender to him.	51:02
	The love of Christ constrains us from fall.	51:08
	We're never quite sure whether to take his words	51:13
	as a promise, or our guidance and reassurance,	51:15
	or as a threat to our independence and self will.	51:20
	When you cannot accept love,	51:25
	when you will not make the surrender	51:29
	that the acceptance of love demands,	51:30
	then you must reject the love	51:35
	even though you will be driven to bitterness	51:38
	and to violence or you can cut yourself free,	51:41
	thus from human love, divine love, a new birth is needed.	51:48
	Only those who are delivered from the love of themselves	51:57
	can begin to know and to believe in the love of God.	52:01
	Well, if this is all we might say	52:08
	concerning the love of God for us,	52:10
	we might find out understanding of our problem may be fear,	52:13
	but it might well be doubted	52:18
	whether we will have found	52:19
	the love of God anymore real or present for us.	52:20
	To be able to say only that we need God's love desperately,	52:25
	and that to believe his love requires us to be born again	52:30
	might be the cause for despair more than hope.	52:34
	If God really loves us, would He not both give us his love,	52:39
	and at the same time give us the power, the will,	52:44
	the capacity to believe Him	52:49
	and to accept the love that He wants?	52:51
	The answer to that question is,	52:55
	he not only would do so but he does do so.	52:58
	Bernard writing to his friars	53:03
	in the medieval monastery said,	53:05
	"He loves both more than you love	53:07
	and before you love at all."	53:11
	The patriarch of the early church	53:15
	when we were reading this morning makes quite clear	53:17
	what he means.	53:20
	"We love because he first loved us.	53:21
	Hearing is the love of God.	53:26
	Not that we love him but that he loved us and sent his son	53:28
	to be the expiation for our sins."	53:34
	The Lord is fair, the love of God is given us in a person,	53:39
	Jesus Christ.	53:45
	In our helplessness, the love of God acts to deliver us	53:47
	even before we think for us.	53:52
	The form of his giving is in one who enters,	53:57
	and shares and redeems our lives.	54:00
	And the time of his giving is always beforehand.	54:03
	It is by the (indistinct) love of God,	54:10
	that we are rescued and made triumphant	54:14
	over all that history or experience may bring	54:18
	to afflict or to destroy.	54:22
	But are we able to believe this and to live by it,	54:26
	to say that it is true for us?	54:31
	The answer to that can only be discovered	54:34
	by those who will make the venture of living	54:36
	as if it is true for them.	54:39
	To discover God loves us is to face the doubts	54:43
	and hazards that be set us with courage,	54:46
	with determination to find our way through them	54:50
	and in doing so to make a complete surrender	54:53
	of our course into the hands of God.	54:57
	To discover that is to undergo pain and defeat,	55:02
	and grief in the assurance that in everything,	55:05
	he is able to work for good with those who love him.	55:08
	It is to face and battle against temptations	55:15
	to self-indulgent, to self aggrandizement,	55:19
	and to self (speaks indistinctly),	55:23
	we can do all things through him who strengthens us.	55:27
	To learn to believe that God loves us,	55:32
	is to learn slowly and by his grace,	55:36
	that we can be certain of that love	55:40
	only as we've come to love one another.	55:42
	Those who make such ventures in all probability,	55:47
	those who never made such ventures will never discover	55:50
	whether the love of God is true or not.	55:55
	Those who do, take the risk and make the venture.	56:01
	More then the discovery turns from doubt to probability	56:07
	and from probability to unfailing and blessed assurance.	56:13
	The end of the 19th century the brilliant,	56:19
	young English historian, John Wilhelm Rowntree,	56:22
	discovered at the very time when the promise of his learning	56:27
	and his devout personal life were about to come to fruition	56:31
	that his eyesight was failing.	56:36
	The day came when his physician told him the truth.	56:39
	He would soon be totally blind.	56:43
	He came out from the consultation with the doctor	56:49
	into the street and stood for a few moments	56:52
	by a railing in the sunlight to collect himself.	56:56
	And as he wrote later,	57:00
	"As he stood there, he suddenly felt the love of God	57:01
	wrap him round as though a visible presence enfolded him	57:08
	and a joy filled him such as he had never known before."	57:15
	We're are to be going blind,	57:24
	to be facing the darkness beyond our prideful	57:28
	for the future, stand sometimes on the dizzy edge	57:31
	of dark or even despair,	57:36
	and yet to feel the love of God wrap us about,	57:41
	as though a visible presence enfolds.	57:45
	To know this is to believe and find proof	57:50
	that God is love,	57:56
	(indistinct) it is that we love because He first loved us.	58:00
	Let us pray.	58:10
	We rejoice, oh, God, in all the light of thy truth,	58:18
	and guide us on our way and grant us	58:21
	with it also thy same spirit.	58:24
	We may be guided into all love for thee and for one another.	58:28
	Now may the love of our Lord Jesus Christ,	58:34
	grace of God, the Father,	58:38
	communion of the Holy Spirit be with us this day	58:40
	and forever more.	58:44
	(congregation singing indistinctly)	59:05
	(bells ringing)	1:00:35
	(soft music)	1:00:45

Item Info

Title:

Bishop Gerald Kennedy - Baccalaureate Sermon; John Casteel - "The Prevenient Love of God" (June 2, 1957)

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https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4cr5sd96

Date:

June 2, 1957

Speaker:

Kennedy, Gerald

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Duke University. Chapel

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UA.17.01.0003 RR-0037
ref5295_b6b
uachapelsermaud
duke:628286
dcrau002086
ark:/87924/r4cr5sd96
04f835e9-218e-4b1f-abf6-6a8292d54b38

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Duke Chapel Recordings

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Duke University Chapel recordings, 1954-2005

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Bishop Gerald Kennedy - Baccalaureate Sermon; John Casteel - "The Prevenient Love of God" (June 2, 1957)

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