William H. Willimon - "Thinking After Easter" (May 9, 1999)
Loading the media player...
Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
- | We were having an evening discussion about morality. | 0:08 |
I think the topic under discussion that evening was this. | 0:14 | |
Is God necessary for morality? | 0:20 | |
And a speaker had been discussing the various implications, | 0:26 | |
the connections between religion and ethics. | 0:31 | |
Then a student, graduate student, rose and said, | 0:36 | |
"Well, it just all boils down to genetics. | 0:42 | |
"We are learning, there is genetic determinism | 0:49 | |
"of human behavior. | 0:54 | |
"We are genetically determined toward certain genetically, | 0:57 | |
"evolutionary, beneficial behavior. | 1:04 | |
"And you people just call that good ethics. | 1:07 | |
"But it's all genetics." | 1:10 | |
And I can picture in the Duke Gardens, in May. | 1:15 | |
Whereas in a previous generation, | 1:22 | |
someone might have looked into someone's eyes and said, | 1:24 | |
"I love you." | 1:29 | |
But now, someone would look at someone else and say, | 1:31 | |
"I feel a certain evolutionary propensity, | 1:36 | |
(audience laughing) | 1:41 | |
"to propagate the species with you." | 1:42 | |
His response seemed to me | 1:49 | |
one of the silliest things I'd ever heard. | 1:51 | |
But then I remembered, | 1:54 | |
no, wait wait wait, he's a graduate student. | 1:55 | |
He's been indoctrinated, into this sort of cause effect. | 1:59 | |
Everything can be explained genetically. | 2:04 | |
All human life can be reduced to biology, | 2:06 | |
a sort of closed system. | 2:10 | |
That enables him to think creatively about a few things, | 2:15 | |
and not to think about other things. | 2:20 | |
And as a preacher, I get you in here, | 2:26 | |
and I want to help you think about God. | 2:29 | |
But that's not easy, because immediately, | 2:35 | |
as I begin to talk and you begin to think, | 2:38 | |
you think while you're standing somewhere, | 2:42 | |
you come in here with certain preconceptions, | 2:46 | |
certain convictions about what can be, | 2:50 | |
and what is probably not going to be. | 2:53 | |
What is reasonable to expect | 2:56 | |
and what it's silly to expect of the world. | 2:58 | |
And they always told us in seminary preaching classes, | 3:03 | |
always begin where your hearers are. | 3:08 | |
You start with something | 3:13 | |
that the congregation knows or cares about and understands, | 3:14 | |
before you attempt to move them | 3:19 | |
toward anything new or unfamiliar. | 3:22 | |
But what if the good news is good? | 3:27 | |
Partly because it's news, | 3:33 | |
that is, it isn't something that's self derived. | 3:36 | |
Something that you came up with, | 3:40 | |
arising out of your experience. | 3:42 | |
What if it's something that has come to you? | 3:46 | |
What if my job is more complicated | 3:51 | |
than simply to come up with some answers | 3:54 | |
to your earnest questions, | 3:57 | |
but rather to give you different questions? | 4:00 | |
What if my task as a preacher | 4:02 | |
is not simply to help you think about the world | 4:05 | |
in a kind of new way, but rather to show you a new world. | 4:08 | |
And thereby convince you | 4:17 | |
that you don't yet know how to think about the world. | 4:18 | |
Well, Paul is in Athens, | 4:25 | |
and in Athens there are a lot of people who like to think. | 4:29 | |
Luke says because classical Greece was a slave society, | 4:35 | |
where most of the people had to work, | 4:40 | |
but then you had another class of people, | 4:43 | |
called philosophers and academicians, | 4:45 | |
that didn't have to work, | 4:48 | |
and they just spent their day doing nothing | 4:49 | |
but sitting around talking about something new. | 4:51 | |
And so they loved Paul when he comes to them. | 4:55 | |
And they said, my, this sounds like something new. | 4:57 | |
Some of them scoff, as you can see in the scripture. | 5:02 | |
And they say, "What would this babbler say?" | 5:06 | |
And if you've been around the academic community very much, | 5:10 | |
you know that that's a kinda typical academic response | 5:13 | |
for anything we don't immediately understand. | 5:17 | |
Mocking, derision, sarcasm. | 5:19 | |
That was a Greek name for anybody who didn't speak Greek, | 5:24 | |
these babblers, these barbarians, | 5:28 | |
'cause that's how people who didn't speak Greek | 5:31 | |
sounded to people who did speak Greek. | 5:33 | |
They ba-ba-ba, these barbarians when they talk. | 5:34 | |
Others though, more liberal, more open minded said, | 5:39 | |
"My goodness, he seems to be talking | 5:43 | |
"about some sort of foreign gods, | 5:45 | |
"and we're not narrow minded, after all our slogan is, | 5:48 | |
"Eruditio et Religio." | 5:51 | |
"Life has it's spiritual side, we need to talk about values. | 5:53 | |
"So why don't we have a discussion of the spiritual." | 5:58 | |
And so they bring Paul down to the Areopagus, | 6:04 | |
where they wandered around during the day | 6:07 | |
having this philosophical discussions, the Areopagus. | 6:09 | |
And, in other words, they're gonna start thinking. | 6:13 | |
"What is this new teaching," they ask. | 6:20 | |
"What is this new teaching?" | 6:25 | |
Which, if you've ever read Acts, | 6:27 | |
it's gotta be an ironic comment, | 6:29 | |
because Luke has been trying so hard to show | 6:31 | |
that there's really not much new in Jesus. | 6:33 | |
He is the fulfillment of the promises of God to Israel | 6:36 | |
and he backs all that up with ancient scripture. | 6:39 | |
But as Luke says, these Greeks just love new things. | 6:42 | |
Years ago, Margaret Mead called us Americans neophiles, | 6:47 | |
lovers of the new, the new and improved model. | 6:51 | |
If it's new, it's always improved. | 6:55 | |
And that's about the worst thing | 6:57 | |
they can say about you in a book review. | 6:58 | |
They say, this book contains what is true | 7:01 | |
but unfortunately there is nothing new here. | 7:05 | |
And they just spent their time discussing something new. | 7:08 | |
And Paul stands up among them in the Areopagus, | 7:15 | |
and Paul delivers | 7:19 | |
this marvelously crafted classical oration. | 7:21 | |
Aristotle in his rhetoric defined what you need | 7:27 | |
to have to have a perfect speech, | 7:31 | |
and you can take Aristotle's rhetoric | 7:33 | |
and just lay it alongside Acts 17, | 7:35 | |
and you've got a perfectly constructed classical speech. | 7:38 | |
The only one in the New Testament. | 7:42 | |
Aristotle said to speakers, | 7:45 | |
first begin by getting your hearers with you, | 7:48 | |
flatter your audience, | 7:51 | |
make a connection with your audience. | 7:53 | |
Paul seems to do that. | 7:56 | |
"Athenians," he says, | 7:58 | |
"I see that you are extremely religious." | 8:00 | |
See, he's beginning flattering them. | 8:06 | |
He says to them, | 8:09 | |
"I've traveled around a good bit in the Mediterranean, | 8:11 | |
"and I'll have to say, | 8:13 | |
you're just about the most religious people I've ever seen." | 8:14 | |
And the dummies, they're pagans, they don't know, | 8:19 | |
that for a Jew to say that about somebody | 8:22 | |
is not a compliment. | 8:24 | |
He says to them, | 8:25 | |
"I tell ya, I have to say, | 8:27 | |
"I have seen more gods per square inch | 8:28 | |
"in this town than any place I have ever been. | 8:30 | |
"You got a god for everything, | 8:33 | |
"money, sex, war, business, whatever. | 8:36 | |
"And I've noticed outside of town, | 8:39 | |
"you've even got an altar out there to an unknown god. | 8:41 | |
"And when you find the name of that god, | 8:45 | |
"you're ready to bow down to that too, | 8:46 | |
"you've never seen a god you couldn't worship, | 8:48 | |
"you are very very spiritual." | 8:51 | |
Or maybe he is flattering, because, later he says, | 8:57 | |
"You are at least groping for something, you're searching. | 9:00 | |
"That's good." | 9:04 | |
Then he starts preaching from one ancestor. | 9:08 | |
"From this Adam came all the people on the Earth. | 9:12 | |
"We have a lot in common, I'm Jewish, you're pagan, | 9:17 | |
"but we all came from one ancestor." | 9:21 | |
He quotes one of their classical poets. | 9:24 | |
Aristotle says the speaker has got to establish | 9:27 | |
a kind of credibility with the audience. | 9:30 | |
And one way you do that is by referring to things | 9:32 | |
that they know, that they understand. | 9:35 | |
This Paul is no backwoods bumpkin. | 9:37 | |
He's read their classical poets, | 9:40 | |
he quotes from some of the poets, | 9:42 | |
"As even as one your poets have said." | 9:43 | |
And he talks about the change of the seasons, | 9:45 | |
"And in Him we live and move and have our being, | 9:48 | |
"as even one of your poets." | 9:52 | |
But then Paul says, | 9:54 | |
"These times of ignorance, God is overlooked." | 9:57 | |
Which is not a very nice thing to say | 10:02 | |
about Greek philosophy. | 10:03 | |
Okay, 2000 years of ignorance, the best thing you can say, | 10:07 | |
is God won't hold Plato against you. | 10:11 | |
And then Paul mentions two things, | 10:16 | |
that don't come from Greek poets, | 10:19 | |
that don't arise out of classical philosophy. | 10:22 | |
Two things, you can note them there. | 10:25 | |
First he says, | 10:29 | |
"He has now fixed a day on which he will judge us. | 10:30 | |
"By somebody he's appointed." | 10:36 | |
What? | 10:39 | |
You mean my life is going to be judged | 10:41 | |
by a higher standard than my own conscience? | 10:43 | |
You mean I'm going to be held accountable, | 10:47 | |
to something larger than my personal point of view? | 10:50 | |
That surely came as jolt to them. | 10:57 | |
In our culture, when you say to someone, | 11:01 | |
"Now, why did you do that?" | 11:05 | |
And they respond, | 11:06 | |
"Well, it seemed personally right to me, | 11:08 | |
"and who are you to be judging me?" | 11:10 | |
Or, "I've thought about it, I've agonized over it, | 11:14 | |
and so I made this decision." | 11:16 | |
And after you thought about it and agonized over it, | 11:18 | |
it's got to be the right decision, 'cause I thought of it. | 11:20 | |
But, he says, "We shall be judged." | 11:23 | |
And then, second point, | 11:26 | |
"He has proved all this by raising Jesus from the dead." | 11:29 | |
And when Paul said that, | 11:36 | |
I don't care how good a classical speech it was, | 11:38 | |
church was over. | 11:41 | |
When Paul spoke about judgment | 11:44 | |
and he spoke about resurrection | 11:47 | |
they had heard enough, and they broke up into two groups. | 11:50 | |
Group A, they mocked again, | 11:54 | |
it was so weird and out of their frame of thinking, | 11:58 | |
they just mocked. | 12:00 | |
"This is the stupidest thing we've ever heard. | 12:01 | |
"You mean to tell us that there is some standard | 12:05 | |
"of accountability greater than ourselves? | 12:07 | |
"You mean to tell us that something that dies lives?" | 12:10 | |
Church was out. | 12:21 | |
Others though, say, | 12:22 | |
"Well my goodness, we're not conservative, | 12:25 | |
"we're liberal, we're open-minded. | 12:27 | |
"You told us some awfully, awfully interesting things today. | 12:29 | |
"It's just so interesting. | 12:36 | |
"We ought to form a seminar | 12:39 | |
"and have a more extended discussion | 12:41 | |
"of the things you're talking about." | 12:43 | |
"Let's just have a discussion." | 12:45 | |
And you can't tell at the end | 12:49 | |
which response Luke has more contempt for. | 12:50 | |
As a preacher, | 12:57 | |
here's this marvelously crafted speech that failed, | 12:58 | |
it ended in mocking and kind of open-minded relativism. | 13:03 | |
Paul says, "Hey, look, it was a university town, okay, | 13:09 | |
"it wasn't easy, all right?" | 13:13 | |
(audience laughing) | 13:15 | |
Nobody was persuaded by this speech much. | 13:19 | |
Oh yeah, at the end Dionysius the Areopagite, | 13:22 | |
he came for Baptism, | 13:26 | |
and a woman, Damrus, and a couple of other people. | 13:27 | |
Rather small pickings | 13:34 | |
for the most classically formed oration | 13:35 | |
in the New Testament. | 13:38 | |
See, I take this as a kind of parable, | 13:42 | |
about what it's like to think | 13:44 | |
on the sixth Sunday after Easter. | 13:46 | |
It talks about the difficulty | 13:50 | |
of getting your mind around Easter. | 13:53 | |
The speech went fine, | 13:57 | |
I mean they were into "the turn of the seasons," | 13:59 | |
and "in him we live and move and have our being," | 14:01 | |
and "we're all people, we all came from the same kind." | 14:03 | |
Everything went fine until he pulled out that business | 14:06 | |
about the resurrection of the dead, | 14:08 | |
and when he did that, they mocked. | 14:11 | |
It's about thinking after Easter, | 14:15 | |
and of course, it's therefore about you, | 14:21 | |
because, didn't I tell you at the beginning of the service, | 14:23 | |
we're thinking after Easter, | 14:26 | |
it's the sixth Sunday after Easter, | 14:28 | |
we're trying to think about Easter. | 14:29 | |
And how do we think? | 14:32 | |
Did not we say, we think on the basis of our experience, | 14:33 | |
and things that have happened to us, | 14:36 | |
and, oh yes, this happened | 14:39 | |
so I am sure it will happen again. | 14:40 | |
And we think by way of analogies. | 14:42 | |
When you're trying to explain something to someone, | 14:48 | |
something very strange, you say, | 14:51 | |
"It's like this, well it's sorta like that." | 14:54 | |
You notice how much of Jesus' teachings was just like that. | 14:58 | |
"The Kingdom of God is like, a man that had two sons | 15:01 | |
"and the younger son said to the dad." | 15:04 | |
Through analogies. | 15:07 | |
But you see, analogies only work | 15:10 | |
if you're working from something | 15:12 | |
that is already in my world. | 15:14 | |
And I say, | 15:16 | |
"It's like this, you know this, don't ya?" | 15:17 | |
"Uh-huh." | 15:19 | |
"Okay, well it's like that, okay?" | 15:20 | |
And Paul takes them as far as he can, | 15:23 | |
but then analogies break down. | 15:24 | |
GK Chesterton said, | 15:28 | |
you have to be careful with analogies, | 15:31 | |
you start out with someone, | 15:32 | |
and they say, "I don't understand." | 15:33 | |
And you say, "Well, wait, it's like this." | 15:35 | |
And they say, "I don't understand." | 15:38 | |
And you say, "We'll try, it's like this." | 15:40 | |
And they say, "I don't understand." | 15:42 | |
Chesterton says try that three times | 15:45 | |
and then say, "You know, you don't understand." | 15:46 | |
(audience laughing) | 15:50 | |
How do we think about things beyond our experience? | 15:54 | |
In this world I am the center of the universe, | 15:58 | |
I'm kinda like God. | 16:02 | |
I'm the center of all judgements of right and wrong, | 16:03 | |
don't worry about the Bible, | 16:06 | |
don't worry about what your mother told you. | 16:08 | |
Do what seems right to you. | 16:11 | |
Who are you to question me? | 16:15 | |
That's our world. | 16:17 | |
And this world, what lives, dies. | 16:20 | |
And what's dead, stays that way. | 16:24 | |
How am I to get my little modern mind around the possibility | 16:29 | |
that God may be stronger than death? | 16:33 | |
That death, and defeat, and evil don't have the last word. | 16:39 | |
As a preacher, I want so badly to be heard, | 16:46 | |
to be understood. | 16:50 | |
But it's hard to understand | 16:53 | |
when the matter for understanding is called Easter. | 16:55 | |
Oh, I kinda like Paul, | 17:01 | |
I want to take you as far down that road as I can get you | 17:03 | |
on the basis of your experience | 17:07 | |
of growing up in Macon, Georgia. | 17:10 | |
But then you get to that point | 17:12 | |
where analogy and correlation just crack | 17:15 | |
and experience is not enough. | 17:22 | |
It just won't lift the luggage | 17:25 | |
when the matters being thought about | 17:29 | |
are called resurrection from the dead. | 17:30 | |
I have few epistemological allies in this struggle. | 17:33 | |
Oh, reason? | 17:39 | |
Reason can take us a long way. | 17:41 | |
But as Aquinas said, it takes us right to a kind of cliff, | 17:44 | |
and then if you're going to continue to think, | 17:49 | |
you're gonna have to be dependent upon faith. | 17:54 | |
You need a gift. | 17:59 | |
You need faith to go into that terra incognita. | 18:02 | |
That strange unknown land of thinking after Easter. | 18:07 | |
I ask you, is the story about Paul preaching in Athens, | 18:17 | |
is it a story of communicative failure? | 18:23 | |
That's what I see, but I tend to be negative. | 18:28 | |
Or is it a story about astounding homiletical success? | 18:33 | |
Most everybody that day, like, didn't get it. | 18:40 | |
But that's true, it ends by saying some did. | 18:46 | |
This Dionysius the Areopagite, | 18:52 | |
oh yes, and a woman named Damrus. | 18:55 | |
They came forward to be disciples, | 18:58 | |
they came forward to follow | 19:02 | |
this new outbreak of life among them called Jesus. | 19:03 | |
They got it. | 19:08 | |
And it occurs to me that, | 19:11 | |
well, that's you. | 19:14 | |
You are only a small percentage | 19:17 | |
of all the possible people | 19:19 | |
who could be here in the city of Durham today. | 19:21 | |
You know, if this is true, | 19:27 | |
how come there are not more people here? | 19:28 | |
Well, maybe you could make the point, | 19:33 | |
if this stuff is true, | 19:35 | |
I think it's rather amazing that this many people got here. | 19:37 | |
Faith is not the result of some savvy application | 19:43 | |
of your intellect to certain pressing human problems. | 19:46 | |
Faith is a gift, as Paul said, it's grace. | 19:49 | |
And as you sit there, maybe you wonder why, | 19:56 | |
how come I believe in Easter, and a lot of people don't? | 19:59 | |
How come I got out bed and came down here this morning | 20:02 | |
to hear stuff like this? | 20:05 | |
It's called a gift, | 20:09 | |
it's not because you're smarter than other people. | 20:10 | |
It's just something's been revealed to you | 20:12 | |
the world doesn't yet know. | 20:14 | |
What is the proof of Easter? | 20:18 | |
It's not a videotape of once-dead Jesus, | 20:22 | |
departing the tomb on Sunday. | 20:25 | |
I think the only proof we've got of Easter, | 20:30 | |
in a way, is you. | 20:32 | |
You're the proof of Easter. | 20:34 | |
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, | 20:37 | |
despite all the limitations | 20:40 | |
in human experience and thinking, | 20:42 | |
despite all of the officially sanctioned intellectual means | 20:44 | |
to keep you from thinking about this. | 20:47 | |
You said, "Yes," you said, maybe in your modest way, | 20:53 | |
"I think I get it. | 20:57 | |
"I'll admit, I still got a lot of questions, | 21:00 | |
"I admit there's a lot I don't know, | 21:03 | |
"but, yeah, I really believe Jesus Christ is Lord." | 21:04 | |
And that's a gift you, Dionysius the Areopagite, and Damrus, | 21:12 | |
you, you're a gift of God, you got it. | 21:20 | |
This fall, this student who comes to the chapel frequently | 21:26 | |
said he wants me to meet a friend of his. | 21:29 | |
His friend plays football, and he said, | 21:31 | |
"My friend doesn't come to church, | 21:35 | |
"but I thought maybe if you could talk to him, | 21:36 | |
"maybe he would like to come to church." | 21:38 | |
Anyway, we sat down, we had a cup of coffee, | 21:40 | |
and, I said to his friend, | 21:42 | |
"Have you ever been inside the chapel | 21:45 | |
"since you've been at Duke?" | 21:46 | |
And he said, | 21:47 | |
"Yeah, I was there the first day." | 21:48 | |
And I said, | 21:50 | |
"So, let me get this straight, | 21:51 | |
"you've been here two years, you're a sophomore, | 21:53 | |
"you haven't been back in the chapel?" | 21:54 | |
He said, "No." | 21:56 | |
And I said, | 21:58 | |
"Well, it's odd, because we're getting ready | 22:00 | |
"to go into the season of lent, | 22:02 | |
"and that's when we talk about the cross | 22:04 | |
"and defeat and humiliation. | 22:06 | |
"I would think you as a Duke football player, I mean, | 22:08 | |
(audience laughing) | 22:11 | |
"I thought it would be something you could relate to, | 22:13 | |
"I thought we could be helpful." | 22:14 | |
And he said, | 22:19 | |
"Well, I went to church when I was a kid, | 22:20 | |
"and from what I remember of that, | 22:22 | |
"I don't think I'd like to be there now." | 22:25 | |
And I said, "Why not?" | 22:28 | |
And he said, | 22:29 | |
"Well, I'm happy with my life with the way it is." | 22:30 | |
I said, "Yes," | 22:34 | |
and he said, | 22:35 | |
"I've done some things | 22:36 | |
"in my first two years at the university, | 22:37 | |
"and I've got a few more things I want to do. | 22:39 | |
"And I'm kinda happy with my life the way it is, | 22:41 | |
"and from what I remember of church, ya know, | 22:44 | |
"ya'll are always trying to get people to change. | 22:45 | |
"And Jesus is always trying to get people | 22:48 | |
"to be born again and transformed, | 22:52 | |
"and I probably want that, like, by the second semester | 22:55 | |
"of my senior year, | 22:58 | |
"but right now, I'm kinda pleased with myself." | 22:59 | |
And I said, | 23:03 | |
"Let me get this straight, | 23:04 | |
"you're not avoiding church | 23:05 | |
"for the usual reasons I hear, | 23:06 | |
"it's boring, or I can't understand anything, | 23:08 | |
"or I don't know the hymns, or that kind of stuff. | 23:11 | |
"You're saying you don't want to come into church | 23:13 | |
"'cause you don't want to be transformed, | 23:15 | |
"you don't want a new life." | 23:20 | |
And he said, | 23:22 | |
"Yeah, that's pretty much that." | 23:23 | |
And I said, | 23:26 | |
"That is the most marvelous reason | 23:27 | |
"for not going to church I have ever heard. | 23:30 | |
"I think I'm gonna do that in needle-point over my door." | 23:33 | |
Hey, don't come in here if you don't wanna risk a new life. | 23:40 | |
Don't come in here unless you might like a whole new world. | 23:45 | |
We worship Jesus, risen from the dead. | 23:51 | |
After that, well, we know anything can happen. | 23:54 | |
(church organ music) | 24:04 |
Item Info
The preservation of the Duke University Libraries Digital Collections and the Duke Digital Repository programs are supported in part by the Lowell and Eileen Aptman Digital Preservation Fund