Wilson O. Weldon - "Now!" (June 2, 1968)
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- | Last February in Nairobi, Kenya, East Africa, | 0:27 |
I sat across a table from a young Native-African. | 0:34 | |
As we drank coffee and talked, | 0:40 | |
I was caught up in his feelings, | 0:43 | |
his concerns and his idealism. | 0:45 | |
Not yet certain whether he would seek a career | 0:49 | |
in civil service of his young Republic, | 0:51 | |
or give himself in the Christian ministry of the church. | 0:59 | |
He kept pointing out situation after situation. | 1:04 | |
Which in his judgment was calling for remedy. | 1:09 | |
And as we talked, I felt something of his impatience. | 1:13 | |
With so much that was around him and in his world. | 1:18 | |
At the same time, I sensed his eagerness | 1:23 | |
to invest his life into something | 1:26 | |
that would bring change and bring it in a hurry. | 1:29 | |
Was it coincidental that that evening, | 1:35 | |
when I returned to my hotel room | 1:38 | |
and picked up a copy of the New Testament reading | 1:41 | |
in today's English version, I came across these words. | 1:44 | |
"Listen, this is the hour to receive God's favor. | 1:50 | |
Today is the day to be saved." | 1:57 | |
No more than a coincidence. | 2:01 | |
Because these are the words | 2:06 | |
which are among the most important | 2:09 | |
and at the same time, the most emphatic | 2:12 | |
that one finds causing throughout the New Testament. | 2:15 | |
And surely this is the cry of the present generation. | 2:20 | |
The mood of the young in heart. | 2:25 | |
You find it in the philosophy of existentialism, | 2:29 | |
you hear it from the lips of an impatient young African. | 2:34 | |
You feel it and sense it whether you're | 2:39 | |
on the duke campus of the Vanderbilt Campus | 2:41 | |
across from which is my office. | 2:44 | |
However, you find it in the ghettos of our large cities | 2:47 | |
of America and of the world. | 2:51 | |
The theme goes over and over. | 2:56 | |
Our world is not what it ought to be. | 2:59 | |
It's shaking and some of it is crumbling. | 3:02 | |
We must act now and we must change now. | 3:06 | |
We must grasp for that which alone is ours. | 3:10 | |
And crown this present moment with meaning and with action. | 3:15 | |
And the generations of alumni of Duke University, | 3:23 | |
yay of any other academic institution will do well | 3:27 | |
to comprehend and to heed this cry of the present. | 3:32 | |
For you see, God has a way of shaking his world. | 3:38 | |
Why? | 3:45 | |
Because man, you and I become so complacent and so lazy, | 3:46 | |
and so satisfied that often times | 3:51 | |
it takes some kind of moral, | 3:53 | |
some kind of religious economic crisis to shake us up. | 3:56 | |
A Christian preacher converted from Judaism | 4:02 | |
in the first century of the Christian era wrote | 4:05 | |
to his parishioners, | 4:09 | |
"God is saying once more, | 4:12 | |
I shake this earth, | 4:15 | |
signifying the removal of those things that can be shaken. | 4:18 | |
So that those things which cannot be shaken may remain." | 4:25 | |
This is the hour. | 4:31 | |
The only hour of which you and I are certain | 4:35 | |
that we may receive God's grace and God's favor. | 4:39 | |
Earlier in the fifth chapter of the Second Letter | 4:45 | |
to the Corinthians using one of the modern versions, | 4:48 | |
we have these words. | 4:51 | |
"Now that you have received the grace of God, | 4:54 | |
do not let it go for nothing." | 4:58 | |
Do not let it go for nothing. | 5:01 | |
And then arm asked immediately it comes these words. | 5:04 | |
"This is the hour to receive God's favor." | 5:07 | |
Well, for one thing, | 5:13 | |
and I believe that every sermon ought to cause a person | 5:15 | |
to feel something, to remember something | 5:19 | |
and to wanna do something. | 5:22 | |
And the feeling of this present moment is | 5:24 | |
that which I've already mentioned. | 5:28 | |
A time of upheaval, a time of rebellion, | 5:31 | |
a time to use a tri-phrase of great change. | 5:36 | |
Some of my generation are saying the young people | 5:42 | |
of college age and of high schooling age are rebelling. | 5:45 | |
Well, why not? | 5:51 | |
After all, our generation created the bomb, | 5:53 | |
provided several horrible wars, | 5:58 | |
and at least acquiesced in unspeakable racial | 6:01 | |
and religious persecutions. | 6:04 | |
Caught up in affirmant of values. | 6:07 | |
This is the hour. We must dare to feel it. | 6:11 | |
The world of yesterday produced the confused world | 6:16 | |
of the president hour. | 6:19 | |
And I take some satisfaction sometimes in imagining | 6:23 | |
that experience that we commonly refer to | 6:27 | |
as the First Palm Sunday. You remember? | 6:31 | |
Jesus, the strange and different, | 6:35 | |
young prophet, | 6:39 | |
choosing such vastly distinctively different ways | 6:42 | |
in which to mediate his message of the meaning of God. | 6:46 | |
Chooses to dare to enter the capital city | 6:51 | |
of the Judaistic world. | 6:56 | |
Not in pump and glory, but in a very humble situation. | 6:59 | |
Have you ever thought how those stayed affluent? | 7:06 | |
First families of Jerusalem possibly considered him. | 7:11 | |
Well, sometimes when you are looking | 7:18 | |
at some of the new modes of dress | 7:21 | |
and some of the new modes of interpretation | 7:23 | |
of some of those who are in the younger generations, | 7:27 | |
let us remember that possibly most likely Jesus appeared | 7:30 | |
to the people of his day, | 7:34 | |
somewhere like some of the so-called (indistinct) appeared | 7:36 | |
to some of our day. | 7:40 | |
Not in the second place as you feel this present hour. | 7:42 | |
Some of the concepts a teenager is talking, | 7:50 | |
and I quote, | 7:56 | |
"My father is always preaching to me how to be a lady, | 7:56 | |
but you ought to listen to him and my uncle | 8:01 | |
when they are planning an advertising campaign. | 8:04 | |
What we need is more sex appeal in our heads | 8:08 | |
is all I ever hear from their lips." | 8:12 | |
Another teenager is talking. | 8:15 | |
"And my father complains if I wear dresses to my knees, | 8:18 | |
but you should see those horrible magazines, | 8:22 | |
which he brings home and the weird creepy girls in them." | 8:25 | |
They wouldn't publish these magazines | 8:30 | |
if some adults, many adults, were not buying them. | 8:34 | |
Take an example from a younger level, | 8:41 | |
in a great school not far from where I live | 8:45 | |
in Nashville, Tennessee. | 8:48 | |
Last fall, a first grader, mark you a first grader. | 8:49 | |
Hurrying along, fell down the stairs, | 8:55 | |
bruised himself and injured himself. | 8:59 | |
And as his teacher rushed up to him to console | 9:02 | |
and comfort him, he was trying to hold back the tears. | 9:06 | |
And she was saying, "Johnny, go ahead and cry. | 9:11 | |
If you feel like it, just cry." | 9:15 | |
Between the sorbs, he looked up and said, | 9:19 | |
"Cry, hell, I'm going to sue somebody." | 9:22 | |
Well, this you see is an exception | 9:27 | |
and yet it is a part of so much that is | 9:30 | |
in deferment our day. | 9:34 | |
Take another illustration. | 9:38 | |
In the last 1,500 years, | 9:42 | |
the population doubled. | 9:45 | |
It is estimated that within the next 50 years, | 9:47 | |
it will double. | 9:50 | |
1,500 years over against 50. | 9:51 | |
Take another. In this day of technology and automation, | 9:56 | |
how many jobs are diminishing | 10:02 | |
in the United States estimated by some | 10:05 | |
at the rate of 40,000 a week. | 10:08 | |
Where will some of our children look for jobs? | 10:11 | |
Is one of the questions of this age of upheaval. | 10:15 | |
800 million people have risen from the colonial | 10:21 | |
and primitive rural conditions | 10:25 | |
to an era of industrial development | 10:28 | |
and political independence. | 10:31 | |
Now in man's often unsteady hands, | 10:34 | |
is a destructive power | 10:40 | |
that is able to kill 400 million people | 10:42 | |
in one hour. | 10:45 | |
An insecure world indeed, | 10:49 | |
but let us not forget what the writer of the Epistle | 10:53 | |
to the Hebrew says in chapter 12 verse 27. | 10:58 | |
"Any of these things are being shaken, | 11:04 | |
so that those things which cannot be shaken may remain." | 11:07 | |
We men are crooked. | 11:14 | |
They build their fails on crooked principles. | 11:16 | |
When they are unjust, | 11:20 | |
they build their injustices into the institutions. | 11:21 | |
And so there must come a judgment day. | 11:24 | |
There must come a shakeup because it simply must come. | 11:26 | |
Our human history is chocked full of such repeated shaking. | 11:30 | |
You ever thought about it? | 11:35 | |
What kind of a crazy world would this be | 11:37 | |
if the Roman Empire built as it was could have lasted? | 11:40 | |
A sprawling system as merciless as it was strong, | 11:45 | |
build it upon power and upon pride and lust | 11:49 | |
and upon the tired backs of human slaves | 11:53 | |
that had to topple. | 11:56 | |
Yet in that hour, | 11:59 | |
a man imbued with the revelation that came from God, | 12:02 | |
wrote a book, the City of God. | 12:07 | |
Things crumbling around him | 12:11 | |
and many of them going to pieces, he dared to affirm | 12:12 | |
that there are two kinds of civilizations, | 12:17 | |
the perishable and the imperishable. | 12:19 | |
The city of man and the city of God. | 12:23 | |
In our day we would say | 12:27 | |
that they are not separately desegregated, | 12:29 | |
but that there is and can be the city of God | 12:32 | |
in the city of secular man. | 12:37 | |
So it is that we ask ourselves this morning | 12:41 | |
as alumni of Duke University, | 12:45 | |
as those who constitute the representatives of power | 12:48 | |
in many aspects life. | 12:53 | |
Will we remember that forms must change, | 12:57 | |
but that there are values which will persist and continue. | 13:04 | |
You know, I believe | 13:10 | |
that the only unpardonable sin is only one. | 13:11 | |
And that is the sin that God will not forgive in any man. | 13:18 | |
That's the sin of giving up trying. | 13:24 | |
For in reality, | 13:27 | |
it is the sin against the Holy Spirit | 13:30 | |
for the Holy Spirit is ready to guide man | 13:32 | |
through all experimentation, through all his seeking, | 13:35 | |
through all his dark hours of despair and despondency. | 13:40 | |
Guide him into finding the truth, | 13:44 | |
which is valid and which is worthy of not being destroyed. | 13:47 | |
As all forms must give away, | 13:52 | |
but the stars remain. | 13:56 | |
The builders of this university placed this chapel building, | 14:00 | |
smacked down in the center of the then newly built campus. | 14:05 | |
As the years bring their changes | 14:11 | |
with the expanding of buildings, | 14:13 | |
this chapel may not be | 14:18 | |
in the exact geographical center of the campus. | 14:20 | |
But the ideal that man's quest for meaning in God, | 14:25 | |
has reviewed in his fellowman will and must prevail. | 14:31 | |
Beyond the library buildings, | 14:37 | |
house, thousands upon thousands of volumes. | 14:40 | |
Many of them becoming dusty, perhaps somewhat archaic. | 14:43 | |
But with the frequent edition of new volumes, | 14:48 | |
the library is committed to the principle | 14:52 | |
that man has learned things in each generation | 14:54 | |
and that as he continues his search for truth, | 14:57 | |
each new generation must dare to relate itself | 15:00 | |
to the best of the past and bring it | 15:03 | |
into the focus of the present moment. | 15:05 | |
For whether you are a radical or a conservative, | 15:08 | |
you must have roots, or else one will wither and die. | 15:10 | |
I suppose the thing that tends to make most of us | 15:17 | |
and notice that I included myself, my generation. | 15:20 | |
Tends to make most of us in a rebel panic | 15:25 | |
in a revolutionary hour, | 15:30 | |
is the unfounded fear that all will be lost | 15:32 | |
if the world, as we know it, | 15:36 | |
it's customs and its systems of which we are familiar, | 15:38 | |
should be upset or destroyed. | 15:42 | |
Because we find it hard if not difficult, | 15:45 | |
to imagine a world different from our on. | 15:48 | |
We dig in and we resist change | 15:52 | |
and we try to keep all the forms | 15:55 | |
and customs of which we are familiar. | 15:58 | |
This especially is one of the dangers of middle age. | 16:01 | |
May I say it is a danger of becoming an alumnus. | 16:06 | |
Back in Bricks day, he complained, quote, | 16:14 | |
"The age of shivery has gone." | 16:18 | |
To which some of us would say, | 16:22 | |
thanks be unto God. | 16:24 | |
Who wants plumed nights for steel armor, | 16:26 | |
riding around airplanes and in limousines? | 16:30 | |
Thank God that era is gone. | 16:34 | |
Recently, I received a letter | 16:37 | |
from my fellow alumnus of Duke. | 16:39 | |
And in substance, he was saying Duke's changed. | 16:42 | |
Oh, how much it has changed. | 16:46 | |
He was concerned as I sensed it | 16:50 | |
with the change of some of the outward falls. | 16:53 | |
And I wrote back to him and said, | 16:57 | |
"Thank God Duke is changing." | 17:00 | |
But let us this morning remember | 17:04 | |
that it is given to us, each of us in our own situation | 17:07 | |
to seek, to discover those values that should not change, | 17:12 | |
those things that cannot be shaken, | 17:17 | |
no matter how the outward forms may perish. | 17:21 | |
The leading true faith braised into Martin Luther | 17:26 | |
and brought a reformation. | 17:29 | |
Well, in my opinion, | 17:31 | |
braised into our day and bring a new reformation, | 17:32 | |
adequate for the leading of these days. | 17:36 | |
These days he here and now. | 17:40 | |
It is as though men in every age are saying, | 17:44 | |
"Back would turn back with all time invite flight." | 17:46 | |
It isn't it true that God is always shaking us | 17:52 | |
in a fresh new moment of the now, saying, | 17:56 | |
"No, that's not it." | 17:59 | |
There'll be more stately mansions, | 18:03 | |
more stately mansions, oh my soul. | 18:08 | |
Some of you will recall | 18:12 | |
that David Lloyd George was a peppery little Welshman | 18:15 | |
who became prime minister of England. | 18:19 | |
One day on the floor of the British parliament, | 18:23 | |
he blundered into an amusing slip of the tongue. | 18:25 | |
The opposition party was about to put through a bill, | 18:29 | |
which he vigorously opposed, | 18:33 | |
intense debate, | 18:36 | |
he was picturing the disaster, | 18:37 | |
which he thought would fall upon his England. | 18:39 | |
In the heat of a rhetoric, | 18:43 | |
he somewhat got mixed in his metaphor. | 18:44 | |
"I tell you, he said, if this policy prevails, | 18:48 | |
the foundations underneath us will fall down upon us." | 18:53 | |
From the other side of the house, | 18:58 | |
there came a titer of laughter. | 18:59 | |
Someone rose into the amusement of his colleagues ask, | 19:02 | |
"Will the speaker explain to the house | 19:06 | |
what he means by the statement, | 19:10 | |
the foundations under us will fall down upon us?" | 19:14 | |
Then in one of the sharpest instances | 19:19 | |
of come back ever heard upon any floor. | 19:23 | |
David Lloyd George wheeled around and said, | 19:27 | |
"I mean, sir, that you are building castles in the air." | 19:31 | |
Is it not a misuse of language in this present hour | 19:38 | |
to speak of the foundations being destroyed? | 19:43 | |
For this precisely is what is not happening. | 19:48 | |
What we are seeing is not the collapse of moral foundation, | 19:52 | |
but a tremendous demonstration of their solidity. | 19:58 | |
What we are seeing is more of the old old principle | 20:02 | |
of the harvest at work. | 20:07 | |
Chicken still coming home to roost, | 20:09 | |
parrots still defeating themselves, | 20:13 | |
for they dig their own in glorious graves. | 20:17 | |
Certain behavior persisted and unrepented on, | 20:21 | |
comes to inevitable judgment. | 20:25 | |
What's going to pieces of the false ideas, | 20:29 | |
which we've been trying to live by, | 20:32 | |
certain behavior coming to its hour of judgment | 20:35 | |
in the present hour. | 20:40 | |
It is not Christian faith today, | 20:43 | |
but the rejection of it is being tested before our eyes. | 20:45 | |
Something to feel, something to remember, | 20:50 | |
something to do. | 20:58 | |
It's a time of action. | 21:00 | |
As alumni as mature adults, | 21:04 | |
we hope we dare not try to live in a dream world. | 21:06 | |
This is the hour for action. | 21:12 | |
The president of Yale University, Dr. Kingman Brewster, | 21:15 | |
recently said that he thought that on the Yale campuses, | 21:18 | |
student could have two feet and two camps at the same time. | 21:22 | |
One in the camp of the scholar | 21:27 | |
and one in the camp of activism. | 21:29 | |
I think it is significantly true | 21:34 | |
that those of us who have received | 21:37 | |
what duke has had to offer, ought to face up to the fact | 21:40 | |
that we cannot afford to contemplate the idea | 21:46 | |
that we shall, well, only in one camp. | 21:50 | |
And perhaps this is a distinctive difference | 21:55 | |
between the generation of youth in the present moment | 21:57 | |
and my generation. | 22:01 | |
So many are saying, | 22:05 | |
"Seek the truth, but as you find it in limited portions, | 22:06 | |
put it into action, put it into action now." | 22:11 | |
You and I dare to ask, what can we do for Duke University? | 22:17 | |
Criticize her? | 22:24 | |
Yes? | 22:26 | |
Always analyzing and evaluating | 22:29 | |
and doing it in a constructive manner. | 22:32 | |
But that's only one camp. | 22:36 | |
The other camp, which is equally desirable, | 22:40 | |
equally mandatory and equally unimperative. | 22:42 | |
Is that at the same time we criticize her and analyze her, | 22:47 | |
we shall seek to undergird her with our support. | 22:52 | |
Support of words, support of our giving, | 22:56 | |
support of our encouragement, support, support, support. | 22:59 | |
If you ask, what can we do for our nation? | 23:05 | |
The same principle, analyze, evaluate, criticize. | 23:08 | |
But in the sake of Almighty God, | 23:15 | |
let's keep one foot in the other camp. | 23:19 | |
That is to undergird this our Republic | 23:24 | |
with our quest for truth | 23:28 | |
and with the utmost of our sacrifices. | 23:31 | |
Your generation and mine needs to keep on becoming. | 23:36 | |
Someone has said, "That which would remain what it is, | 23:41 | |
renounces existence." | 23:46 | |
This is one of the perilous temptations of my age. | 23:49 | |
Someone has said that adulthood lies | 23:54 | |
in the acceptance of limited objective. | 23:57 | |
I don't wanna be an adult if that's the proper definition. | 24:02 | |
And as long as God gives me the power to live, | 24:07 | |
I wanna have some unlimited objectives | 24:11 | |
in the discovery of his will for me and for my church | 24:15 | |
and for my world and for my university. | 24:20 | |
Now in these fine moments, | 24:25 | |
let me bring to you quickly a summation | 24:27 | |
of what I've been trying to say. | 24:30 | |
Listen, this is the hour. | 24:33 | |
This is the hour to receive God's favor. | 24:36 | |
Wilma Dykeman a Tennessean, | 24:40 | |
wrote a book about the French Broad River | 24:45 | |
over in West and North Carolina. | 24:47 | |
And in it, she draws a striking analogy | 24:49 | |
of what I've been trying to describe. | 24:51 | |
George Vanderbilt came from France | 24:54 | |
to build a beautiful Vendeuvre Chateau | 24:58 | |
on the edge of Asheville. | 25:02 | |
Many of you have visited it. | 25:03 | |
Evidently, he thought he would settle there | 25:06 | |
in many years of comfort. | 25:08 | |
He died at the age of 51. | 25:10 | |
Not far away in a boarding house that his mother operated, | 25:14 | |
grew and developed a restless creating and longing, | 25:19 | |
write her name, Thomas Wolf. | 25:23 | |
Thomas Wolf fled the mountains of his home, | 25:26 | |
possessed of a craving for experience | 25:30 | |
with all the peoples of the world. | 25:33 | |
Yet in his stories he wrote, | 25:36 | |
of that male strum of many characters he had known | 25:40 | |
in his mother's boarding house. | 25:43 | |
He died restless, | 25:46 | |
hurrying at the age of 38, | 25:49 | |
to be buried by the waters of the French fraud. | 25:53 | |
These two percentages in West and North Carolina, | 25:56 | |
represented two extremes between possession of every person | 26:00 | |
in this chapel today. | 26:05 | |
The longing to settle down and to wait and to wait. | 26:07 | |
And at the same time, | 26:12 | |
a hurrying restless demand for action here and now. | 26:14 | |
Which one will come to be your ruler? | 26:23 | |
Christopher Wren writing in a reporter at large, | 26:28 | |
described his visit recently to the Isles of Greece. | 26:30 | |
When he saw Ithaca, you remember. | 26:35 | |
Ithaca was the home of the warrior Ulysses. | 26:39 | |
And this modern journalist said | 26:44 | |
that it was even from the glimpse of the harbor, | 26:47 | |
a hard rocky little island with much character, | 26:52 | |
but with little aspect of comfort on it. | 26:57 | |
Even when it was merely glimpse from a boat in the harbor, | 27:01 | |
Ithaca, he said, | 27:05 | |
makes one sympathize both | 27:06 | |
with the wanderers expressed longing to return to it. | 27:09 | |
Yet at the same time, | 27:14 | |
he's delaying 10 long years before doing so. | 27:16 | |
So it seems to me, | 27:23 | |
this is both the glory and the danger of now. | 27:26 | |
We long to cling to the old, | 27:30 | |
we wanna postpone accepting the changes | 27:34 | |
in outward structure, | 27:37 | |
which even now are impinging upon us all. | 27:40 | |
But we must fear for confident and unafraid, | 27:44 | |
knowing that while some things are being shaken, | 27:50 | |
there are those values which will remain to keep us, | 27:55 | |
to bless us, our children | 28:02 | |
and our children's children. | 28:07 | |
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. | 28:11 | |
Let us pray. | 28:15 | |
Oh God who rules the world from end to end | 28:17 | |
and from everlasting to everlasting, | 28:21 | |
speak to our hearts when courage fails | 28:23 | |
and when we fade for fear | 28:26 | |
and when the love of many grows cold | 28:27 | |
and there is distress among the peoples. | 28:30 | |
Keep us all, God, resolute and steadfast in the things | 28:33 | |
that cannot be shaken, | 28:37 | |
knowing that no labor is in vain in thee. | 28:39 | |
Store our faith in the omnipotence | 28:44 | |
and make us to lift up our eyes | 28:47 | |
and behold beyond those things which are seen temporal, | 28:49 | |
things which for the moment may be unseen, | 28:55 | |
those things which are everlasting, | 29:00 | |
through Jesus Christ our Lord. | 29:03 | |
Amen. | 29:07 | |
(praise music) | 29:11 |
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