Transcript
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UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: "Behold, I stand at the door and knock," said the Lord. "If you will hear my voice and open the door, I will come into you." Let us worship God. Let us pray. Almighty and ever-blessed God, our Savior, Thou who art our strength every morning and our rest when the shadows lengthen and the evening falls. We bow before Thee to invoke Thy presence in our
midst. Strengthen us as we move toward the week that will include not only the triumphal entry into the city, but also the cross and the resurrection. Keep us always close to Him who died, and rose again, and lives now to make
intercession for us. This, our prayer, we make in His name. Amen.
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UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Be seated, please. Hear the Word of God, first from the book of Genesis chapter one, beginning to read at verse one. "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was
light." And from Paul's second letter to the Corinthians, chapter four, beginning to read at verse three. "But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost, in whom the God of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not. Lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.
For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord, and ourselves are servants for Jesus' sake, for God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. For we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God
and not of us. We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed. We are perplexed, but not in despair. Persecuted, but not forsaken. Cast down, but not destroyed. Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body. For we which live are
always delivered unto death for Jesus' sake, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh. So, then, death worketh in us, but life in You. We, having the same spirit of faith according, as it written, I believed and therefore have I spoken. We also believe and therefore speak. Knowing that He which raised up the Lord Jesus
shall raise up us also, by Jesus, and shall present us with you. For all things are for your sakes, that the abundant grace might through the thanksgiving of many redound to the glory of God." Amen. Here endeth the readings. May God bless to our understanding these readings of His holy Word. Let me remind you that the
Warfield lectures begin this evening, at seven o'clock here in Miller Chapel. They will be given by Dr. Jane Dempsey Douglass, Professor of church history, in the school of theology at Claremont, and the theme -- overall theme -- of her lectures is Christian freedom in Calvin's theology. The lecture tonight at 7:00, the foundation and significance
of Christian freedom. It gives me very great joy and pride to welcome in your behalf, and to introduce, the president elect of Princeton Theological Seminary. He will become the seminary's fifth president on September 1 of this year. His wife and daughter, Dr. and Mrs. Thomas W. Gillespie, and Dale Gillespie.
Would you please rise.
We wanted them to feel at home this week, and so we arranged the weather to be an exact replica of Burlingame, California. Seriously, Dr. and Mrs. Gillespie, and Ms. Gillespie, will be here for the better part of this week, and there will be many opportunities, some formal, others informal, to meet them and to get to know them, and to welcome them to Princeton.
If you are wondering why I am about to make this introduction, I would say that a year ago, I would not have made it, but if you notice in the catalog, Dr. Bernhard Anderson is guest Professor of Old Testament. He has served for many years as the very distinguished professor of Old Testament theology, and
was prevailed upon to remain this additional year with the title, "guest professor." But on the campus and in the faculty of Princeton Seminary, he will never be a mere guest. He is a beloved member and he is one that has meant so very much through the years in his influence on his students, now in the ministry, who preach
more Anderson, they say, than Old Testament. Dr. Anderson.
ANDERSON: Years ago, when I was serving a church in California, and struggling every week with the question, "What shall I preach?" You know that situation. I came upon a book by Paul Shearer, the Yale Lectures in Preaching for 1943, under the title, "For We Have This Treasure." That book made a great impact upon me, not just because of its lively style and its homiletical wisdom, but because it lured me
into the embrace of wonderful scriptural passages, such as the passage that the president has read this morning. That passage from 2 Corinthians 4, and which is suggested by the very title of Shearer's book, we read in 2 Corinthians 4:7: "but we have this treasure in earthen vessels to show that the transcendent power belongs to God, and not to us."
What has happened through the years is that I have come to read that text more and more in its context. That is, the theological context of apostolic experience, and the theological context of our own experience as Christians. Out of apostolic experience, we hear the announcement of the gospel of the glory of Christ. A gospel so glorious that Paul sounds, and
resounds the notes of the creation story found at the beginning of the Bible. Christ, who is the image of God, and therefore the new [atham?], the new humanity, and also Christ, who is the beginning of a new creation, for echoing the first creative work of the creation story -- that is, the creation of light out of chaos and darkness -- Paul writes "It is the God
who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness,' who has shown, in our hearts, to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, in the face of Christ." This glorious gospel is too good to be true. Certainly in this world, which seems to be
perilously near destruction, as though pre-Creation chaos were about to return. If this were only the announcement of good news, the response would be incredulity, if not laughter. "You must be kidding, Paul! That's a glorious future that you're talking about, this new creation that corresponds to and fulfills the original creation, but it's not now." Not in this mad, mad, mad world, where one must have a sense of humor, as in the movie to which I've just alluded.
Otherwise, things would easily get you down. Yet this is not just an announcement. It is also a celebration. Listen to the shock of the text. "We have this treasure." This glorious gospel of the new age, now, in our lives, as it were treasure in earthenware jars. Now, in this
context, Paul uses a term related to ostraca, a word that is very familiar to archaeologists. The archaeologists unearth Ostrica, or pot shards, fragments of clay vessels that once held liquid, perhaps a treasure like costly wine, or fine ointment, and often these broken jars can be reconstructed to give evidence
of life in a bygone period. Frail and earthly, we human beings are made of dust and returning to dust, and yet our ostraca-like human life is the vessel which contains the reality of the new creation. Already, in these frail vessels, we know that light shines in darkness, that life is at work in the midst
of death, that creation is overcoming chaos. And as evidence of that, Paul goes on to recite a whole litany of dangerous experiences in crisis situations. "We are in difficulties, but never cornered," as one translation puts it. "Knocked down, but never knocked out," as another translation continues. Always embodying the death of Jesus, so that the
life of Jesus may be manifest in our bodily, corporate existence. Surely, we can tune in on this apostolic witness out of our own experience, can we not? Indeed, in our community this very year, shockwaves of sorrow have gone through our common life, owing to tragedy and suffering in the lives of students, and the faculty, and administration.
I'm thinking here of individuals by name. We are frail human vessels, fragile and delicate, all of us, and yet, vessels that contain the gospel of the new creation so that the transcendent power of God might belong to God and not to us. Moreover, this is a year of transition for this seminary. It's the end of the ear of President McCord's leadership.
A glorious era in which I rejoice to have participated, and it's the beginning of a new era under new leadership, and if I may use a Pauline expression, the [ara bone?] or the foretaste of that new era is given in the presence of president elect, Thomas Gillespie, in this worship service. This is a year when a number of teachers are retiring, and when a lot of changes are being made, only to show that time
moves on. We are frail human vessels of clay, creatures limited by temporality, and yet this vessel -- this very seminary -- holds the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ, showing that the transcendent power belongs to God, and not to us. Can we really believe -- can we really live -- this gospel of the new creation
in a world where the power of death is at work? The newspapers carried the other day a story of a band of scientists. I brought the clipping along with me. A band of scientists who journeyed from MIT to Washington D.C. to lend weight to the sentiment for a nuclear freeze. One of these scientists -- indeed, an architect of the atomic bomb -- said that 100 years from now, this present situation in which the two world powers
have deployed 50,000 nuclear weapons around the world will be regarded, he said, as "a time of mental disease." Of course, that is on the assumption that there will be enough people around in a hundred years, to look back upon our time with some kind of reflectivity. We are living in an apocalyptic time, and yet perhaps in this apocalyptic time, we may hear anew the gospel, with its apocalyptic
overtone of the in-breaking of the new creation, corresponding to and fulfilling the original creation. Death is at work in the world, but life in you. Well, you're wondering, perhaps, how an Old Testament scholar who has crossed the boundary into the New Testament for this sermon will turn at the conclusion to the Old Testament.
Well, that's no problem to me because Paul himself does it, at the very climax of his exposition of the dawning of the new creation. Notice how he quotes Psalm 116, the psalm of thanksgiving. He says, I quote, "Since we have the same spirit of the one who wrote, 'I believed, and so I speak,' we too
believe and so we speak." Psalm 116, as I've just said, is a psalm of thanksgiving, a psalm of praise to the God who delivers one from the power of death that invades our earthy experience even during our lifespan. The power of death
with its erosive and its debilitating weakness, the power of death which may seem to separate us from community and even from relationship to God. This psalmist, writing in Psalm 116, speaks out of his own experience of the grace of God in the midst of life, and says, "Thou hast delivered my life from death. / My eyes from tears. / My feet from stumbling. / I walk before Yahweh / And the land of the living." His endorsement of that experience
was translated, "I believe and so I have spoken." Strikingly, Paul says that it is this same spirit of faith. Not an alien spirit of faith, but the same spirit of the faith of the psalmist that moved from the minor key of lament in the midst of distress to the major key of thanksgiving and rejoicing. It is that same spirit, says Paul,
that we should have in Jesus Christ. To believe in and to celebrate the new creation that God has initiated in Jesus Christ is not only to receive divine comfort in the midst of all of our afflictions. That's part of it, thank God. But more than that, it is to take part in the new creation. And so, let our weak and fallible human lives, these clay vessels,
may be used by God in the triumph of light over darkness. Of life over death, of victory over chaos. In that book which I mentioned at the very beginning, Paul Sheerer ends the first chapter entitled, "A Constant Pageant of Triumph," by quoting as did Paul that verse from
the psalm of thanksgiving, Psalm 116. "I too believe / And so I speak." And so should every sermon end, and so should every chapter of our life in Christ, together. Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Rise with us.
ANDERSON: Now may the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make his [face?] shine upon you and be gracious unto you. May the Lord lift up the light of His countenance upon you, and give you peace. Now, and evermore. Amen.