Transcript
LINDQUIST: I had not realized yesterday how pertinent it was to talk about fatigue to people who were then in their fourth lesson of the morning. But I soon found that you have this quality of persistence. Yesterday, we thought about the law of fatigue which is inexorable, as Whitehead says. Ours is the age of concentration on the thought of energy. Energy is God at work in the universe. He has made it
available to His children, and regardless of how weary His children are, if they wait on the Lord, they shall renew their strength. Now, allied with this thought of energy is the problem of fear, because fear is what bleeds energy away. In the text, you probably have already cited out of this selection, which Dr. Brown so sonorously gave this morning. It is the word of a man
who is about to die to a young man who is about to live. The man who is about to die has considerably changed his inner posture toward the factor of fear since that day in Ephesus when he wrote back to Corinth in a reminiscent mood and said, "I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling." Now older, more mature, and facing a much
more bitter and distressing problem, out of a prison with death knocking at the door, says to his young son in the faith this great word. "God has not given us the Spirit of fear." Now, that's a good thing to remember, because if God didn't give it, it is not in the nature of the universe. It is something that you and I have worked out for
ourselves. We've manufactured it. And therefore, with God's help, we can solve it. "God hath not given us the Spirit of fear." How touching it is to have this man, who was timid before the congregation in Corinth, being no longer timid now before the great congregation of the saints invisible whom he will presently join when
the Roman broadsword flashes in the sunlight on the Appian Way and mortal Paul will become immortal Paul. What a commentary on our own lives, because so often upset by the little, we're put back together again by the big. I knew a gentle lady once who was afraid of a mouse but was unafraid to die. And Paul here rises to new
stature as he ministers to a young man afflicted with tentativeness (inaudible) impressionability regarding Greek culture and Roman civilization and his own mortality. "God has not given us the Spirit of fear," says Paul to Timothy. Now, fear, of course, in a baby
consists of just two things. Other fears have to be taught the way Dr. Turner this morning taught that prejudice has to be taught, and read that amazing poem from South Pacific. You've got to be carefully taught to hate and to be afraid of others who are not quite like you. Here Paul is busy building up the kind of confidence that will put Timothy into orbit, will
make him the true servant of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. This fear, I say, starts in a baby in two ways. It's apparently a part of its human heritage, the fear of falling and the fear of a loud noise. But that little baby doesn't get very much older before it has taken on the colors, the dark and gruesome colors of our civilization. Because when we put people together, not only do we intensify that
pigment of faith which is barely discernible at the start, but we intensify it by adding others who have the same thing. As I was looking at these windows today, you can hardly tell that there's a lavender cast in the unreinforced pane of glass. But when you put two panes together, you can see the undoubted tinting, you see, of that lavender color. And that is the way it is with us. We borrow from each other not only faith, but we borrow fear. And fear has that same horrid contagion
which pulls into itself the destruction of those who are present at that point. In her article about early youth, Daphne du Maurier, who wrote Rebecca and The Scapegoat tells how at the age of three, her nurse told her a nursery story about a little kitten named Tom who was left home alone in a big country house for the rainy day. And Tom,
like most kittens, became disturbed by the boredom, ennui of time. Incidentally, that's one of the biggest factors, I think, in childhood is combating boredom. And Tom then began to chase around the house and went up the fire chimney. And presently, after rummaging around in various flues, fell out in open daylight in an attic where a tall rat, clad in a blue frock
coat seated on a high chair saw him and said, "Get that kitten!" And from a side door came Mrs. Rat in a red apron with a big net, which she flung with expert grace over Tom as he tried to avoid on soft step her arc. But he was caught. And she rolled him up in this net and dipped him in some flour and got out a rolling pin, which she handled with great expertness,
as you could see by looking over at Father Rat. And she began to roll him out, preparatory to frying. And just then, a terrier friend of Tom came in and set Tom free, and they went off to the terrier's capacious apartments to have tea and crumpets. But Daphne du Maurier says the story doesn't stop there. The last picture in the story was of the two rats with their bundles on sticks over their backs walking down the street, looking for other
defenseless little kittens that they might lure into their hideouts and bring on strange, fearsome, cruel death. "And my mind," says Daphne du Maurier, "at the age of three was open to the presence of tragedy in our civilization." We have been conscious of it, you and I, sometimes in the echo of a nightmare, remembered
not in tranquility but in terror on the following morning. As a lad growing up in the country manse in Texas, I had a favorite recurring dream at about the age when Miss du Maurier heard this story. I would be asleep in the upstairs iron bed -- you remember those iron beds? On the second floor of a farmstead, it would creak -- and wake every time I turned. But in my dream, there would be a ladder put against the outside, under
my window, and up it would go, a skeleton with a kind of gay, disconnected, [dolesome?], ghoulish music. And he would reach his bony hand in and grab me by the throat. And I would wake, not completely disinterested in what would happen to me. This kind of fear built up within a person causes sensitivity later as we face life and have to make decisions
like those our Atlanta friends have been making in terms of the integration of our society. What is it that held Kennedy, the senator, back when McCarthy, with obscene [feet?] and face, walked through the aisles of the Senate and made those lying statements and never once convicted one communist, and all
America at his feet, until 50 percent of the people said they were impressed by him. Read the story by Rovere, the Washington correspondent of The New Yorker in his new book. It's a fearsome thing. And yet, Kennedy could write a book about the heroes in the Senate and make it a best-seller, because Kennedy isn't a coward. He was a hero for his country. But at that point, his enemies
say he was something other than heroic when it came to stating exactly what he felt about McCarthy. And then I remember that I never said one word in my pulpit about McCarthy myself. Oh, I said plenty at Rotary and service clubs and other places, I will admit that. But I could've done more, because there was this timidity, thinking that maybe this thing will slide by.
Maybe it will solve itself, and to a degree it did. But it's an unpleasant footnote in the pages of our history, and if Thucydides were writing the story of America now rather than the Peloponnesian War, he wouldn't have it in a footnote. He would have it up in the main body of his work. Well, what can be done about it? A fear has to be solved with courage, and courage
is not an uncaused consequence. There has to be something powerful to make possible the action of courage. Three hundred and fifty-six boys marched off from my Orange church in New Jersey during the war. Fourteen never came back, mostly flyers. One did come back, prematurely grey. Tall, handsome Jay Zeamer, who won the highest award of America, the Congressional Medal of Honor. And the governor
came to town to do him honor, and the rest of us. And I drove Jay to the YMCA dinner honoring him, and on the way home I said -- remembering how he had been so utterly discomfited by being compelled to say a few words, and had just stuttered out a thank you after he'd almost shaken the table to pieces -- I said, "What is the psychology of courage, Jay?" And he said, "I don't know. I don't know. All I did was go to Bougainville and take some pictures."
Well, I knew that that sentence included a good deal more than that simple little fragment of a structural statement, because Jay had a Flying Fortress and they'd pulled all the armor out of it. And then, he had taken that Flying Fortress with his copilot and several photographers back of him on into Bougainville. And 20 Zeros, fresh and full of fight came to meet him
and shot him full of holes, and any skipper would have been justified in turning back. But Jay went to Bougainville to take pictures, so he went on in and took the pictures. And on the way back, 20 fresh Zeros tailed him. And on that long, aerial 561 mile trek back to home base, his copilot was bleeding to death. And two men back in the fuselage were dead. And he himself had in his
thigh fragments to the number of 60, and blacked out when he arrived, and was unconscious for two weeks. And they poured blood in him the way we pour water on soil in the desert. But Jay went into Bougainville to take pictures. And it's the man who has a cause who gets the work done. And that is the secret of Paul.
Paul was in the world to honor the Savior. He was crucified with Christ. He was there to build, as God's man, the purpose of the eternal in history. And God supplied him with the fuel for his fatigue and granted him the power to fight his fear. Now, how? Well, he tells us. He tells us in this magnificent sentence, one of the central
sentences of the Bible, "God hath not given us the Spirit of fear but of power, which is to say the Spirit of power, which is that which creates power." I believe that it is the power of the Holy Spirit that is the Spirit of power. It was given to Paul, it was given to Timothy. It came in part, I think, through the laying on of hands, and there might be some clue here to the negotiations going on between the
Church of England and the Church of Scotland at the present time regarding ordination. There may quite possibly be something for us here in America on that point. But through the laying on of the hands, there had been somehow a historical continuity made between Pentecost and the personality of Timothy. And, of course, the power of Pentecost, the power of the Holy Spirit is a multiple
thing. It expresses itself in innumerable ways. And one of the ways in which it expresses itself is to detach a Christian from that kind of sensitivity which merges into shame and makes him self-conscious about the cross and its offense in a civilization that has no place for that kind of thinking. "Be not thou
therefore ashamed of the testimony of God, nor of me His prisoner," writes Paul, ostensibly a criminal, from a prison, to Timothy who still breathes free air, though is probably in the ambivalence of his racial mixture sensitive to Greek culture, the great
enunciations of the philosophers, the insights of the historians, the beautiful words of the poets, and the gracious harmonies of Grecian art, and at the same time is unduly impressed by Rome's organizing power, her screaming eagles, her marching men as they go down the streets of the provinces, and
also for his own persistence as a man in the flesh. Because at any moment, the executioner's representative may knock on his door and say, "Come with me." So, not to be ashamed is a big part of the gospel adventure in the world. And the word shame is constantly used. I'm not ashamed of the gospel. It's used many times right here in this book, so that even Paul probably at
times was sensitive to the offense of the cross and the idea that out of death life can come, and that out of one who was lifted up as a criminal the eternities open their pearly doors for those who are willing there to fall down and receive the transfusion of life's greatest tragedy, which went into life's greatest triumph.
T.S. Eliot puts it in his Four Quartets. He tells about the bleeding hands of the surgeon. We feel "the sharp compassion of the healer's art / Resolving the enigma of the fever chart." Be not thou, therefore, ashamed of the testimony of the Lord. The power to be brave will come from the spirit
to do that. The little girl, sweet as she could be, had come into the study and told about her university, and climbing until she was head of her sorority. And her rustic father, with his own particular brand of country humor and her sweet little Victorian mother not coming to the university so that she had three and a half years of comparative ease regarding family background
-- and then one day, the fatal letter came and said, "Lois, Dad and I are coming over to see you." And Lois could see that little ancient car pull up in front of the pillars of her sorority. And for a little while, there came this unworthy sensation. And then Lois said, "I said to myself I don't care what the girls think about Mother and Dad.
They are putting me and have put me through university. And part of the reason for the ancient equipment around our place is myself." And so they arrived and Lois came down the stairs, and she fell into the arms of her parents. And just then, the girl who was beauty queen of the campus came down. Lois said, "Come on over, Mildred. Meet my parents." And she was brought into the embrace
of these parents. And suddenly, everything was right. And when the weekend ended, Lois said, "Why, they all loved Mother and Dad." I wonder if there's a new power that's released in us when we overcome shame and remember that this power of God is able, indeed, to do it. Be not thou ashamed of the testimony of the Lord. Of course, another element of fear that we must have divine power to fight
is the simple fear of death, dissolution. Death, destruction and decay. The worst is death and death will have his day. Unamuno preaches his own sermon on the text, "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth will make you free." And he says, "Free from what?" And he says, "Free from death, that's what it is." And Paul says, "Our Savior, Jesus Christ, who hath abolished death
and brought to light life and immortality. These are only two of the ways in which the Spirit of power helps us overcome the Spirit of timidity, tenderness, flight, the desire to recoil from the granitic angularities of our existence. There are many others. Paul goes on and he says not only that, but "God
gives us the Spirit of love." And here, of course, he's at the creative heart of our whole faith. Paul says, "Faith, hope, love, and the greatest of these is love." Now, why does he say that? The proponent of the great doctrine of justification by faith, the father of the Reformation in a very personal sense is Paul. And you would think that in reading Romans, on the whole, that faith is the mighty sword and the most powerful.
And yet, we must remember that the nature of God is love, that this is love. Not that we loved Him, but that He loved us, gave Himself for the propitiation of our sins. And God so loved the world, and little bits of this love, of course, have been distributed into human relations. They've sometimes lost their labels. I believe even that in its right way, love of country comes truly from God, because it
is, in its very interior disinterestedness, allied to sacrifice. When John Adams went down to Philadelphia and wrote those homesick letters back to Abigail, when the Constitutional fathers were at work, you can tell how love of land moves in his soul just as certainly as you find it in Herodotus when he, with those mighty words, tells about the Persians coming up to subdue
Greece. And Leonidas, with his mixture of Spartans and other Greeks, sends the other Greeks home because he feels the men of Sparta should take that last leap. And they guard the pass, and they know that certain death will come on the morrow. I'd like someday that -- to know of someone who would write a book on the famous nights before the famous battles. We've got the famous battles. But the night before Philippi,
for example, there is a tide in the affairs of men. Or the night before Agincourt, when Harry walks in the camp, in the very vision of the baleful lights of the preponderant French. Well, this is the night before that famous stand at Thermopylae. And the boys sit and talk in the gloaming. And one boy says, Herodotus quotes, "You know, the Persians
are so numerous that their arrows blot out the sun." "Good," said the boy next to him. "Good. Then we will fight in the shade." And they did. And what they there did is remembered. Now, that was love of country. Patriotic love. There is, of course, fraternal love. Remember the men whose shoulders pressed ours as we fought.
Remember Horatio? He is too little regarded, I think, in the study of Hamlet. But at the end, when the envenomed blade has pricked to the beginning of his death, that pale prince of Denmark, Hamlet, finds that Horatio with him wants also to die. And then Hamlet in true brotherhood says, "If thou didn't ever hold me in thy heart, absent thee from felicity awhile,
and in this harsh world draw thy breath in [pain?] to tell my story" -- which I feel is what the martyrs wanted to do as they said farewell, because that narrative of the cross would find itself articulated in those who remained after the lions had feasted and after those lights for the roads of Rome had burned their body into
the final ashes. There's romantic love, the love of a maid for a man. Are you acquainted with Helen Waddell's Heloise and Abelard, the book Peter Abelard, one of the world's greatest romances. There's Dante and the unforgettable one, Romeo and Juliet, and you and I, because God has been good, has touched us with it. And it's given life a freshness,
a forcefulness. And how we miss that other half when we are separated. We're like Plato's half people in the symposium, always longing to get back again into wholeness. A bachelor was told about these romantic things, and he brushed it all off. "Oh yeah?" he said. "Romantic love? Ho-ho, it's nothing but an ocean of emotion, completely surrounded with expenditures."
But the great love, of course, is the love wherewith God has loved us. This is the creative love. He hath made us. It is a love even beyond the paternal love of Paul for Timothy. "My dearly beloved son," he says, "I long to see you." I turned up a letter in an old diary the other day from my father. Came from Watertown, Minnesota in the year 1929, and I was a night
clerk in a place, a den of inequity, a hotel filled with the most amazing people. It's a long piece of legal paper, and in his characteristic hand, he tells about grandmother and how at 85, in the night, silently being held by Charlie, my father's brother, suddenly fell on silence. And then, at the end, Dad says, "I'm coming to Chicago, Ray, and I'm so looking forward to seeing
you." Paul to Timothy, "My dearly beloved son, I remember you in my tears." I think we need these windows in order to catch some vision of God's love for us, because it's only on such ladders, really, that we climb to the appreciation and the firsthand acceptance and participation in His love, so that we're changed from spectators
into participants, as Rex Warner states in his first chapter of his translation of Thucydides. He says, "Thucydides takes you in and he lets you see and you become a part of it, and you're not simply looking on." Speaks about the poet's precision, which is a combination of passion and candor. That's God, the supreme poet. The hands of Christ seem
very frail, for they were broken by a nail. But only they reach peace at last whom these frail, broken hands hold fast. The Spirit of love. Finally, the Spirit of a sound mind. Now, sound mind here, as I see it, is not sanity, which is the gift ordinarily, we believe, at the beginning of life to most of us, though sometimes I doubt
mine and yours. Down in Texas, Governor Long yesterday or the day before arrived with a pillowslip over his head. And he was in trouble with the reporters, and evidently there is a problem there. But sound mind here doesn't mean that thing. I don't believe it's IQ, which my psychologist brother says is pretty well set at conception.
We're born into life with a tender -- equipment. He likes to think of it as one of those little sand pails that you use as a child or your children use when you go to the sea. You don’t carry from the sea any larger pail than you brought. But the big joy, of course, is that none of us use all the capacity we've got. So, maybe there isn't too much worry to be concentrated on the capacity itself. And it isn't
common sense, which is so horribly uncommon, and it isn't horse sense, which is that inestimable quality in a horse that keeps him from betting on a man. Sound mind here means, I think, the focus of faith that God gives to those who receive His Holy Spirit and try to decide wisely and to live a disciplined
Christian existence, not only in outward act but in the management of their thoughts, which are so easily lost. Plato says that the mind is the charioteer, drawing in and holding together the two horses that pull the chariot of life, the black and the white, one striding toward the stars and the other going down into Hell. It's this disciplined ability to handle your horses. That's
the sound mind, a disciplined mind. Not letting yourself be beguiled by these peripheral fears that, at the portal of dreams, would pull you off, in the dark night drag you down. "I can handle my days," said the patient the other day in the Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital, "but I can't handle my nights. Everything is so monstrously out of shape." Friend of mine who
had a malignancy was operated on a number of years ago. Was called from a wealthy, well-established church to a brand new church without a building, without a manse. He'd just had the operation, so he was looking far into the country of the unknown. And he said to his children and his wife, after family devotions, "What shall we do?" And with one voice, they said, "Go on,
take this other task." And he's built it up to something today which has stature. But he went through some pretty deep waters before he arrived. After his operation, he could not help but wonder, night after night, if the thing would last. He'd sleep for two hours exactly and then wake up and be awake all the rest of the night. And he was losing weight and confidence and preaching power and pastoral ability and
studiousness and emotional constancy and all the other things so necessary to a minister. Night after night, two hours, and then awake all the rest of the time. One night, he happened to reach out for his Bible, picked it up, and in it, opened to a psalm. And it said to praise God and give thanks unto Him. And then it said, "Let the redeemed of the Lord say so." And he suddenly ejaculated, "I say so," right out loud. He was sleeping in another room, so he didn't wake anybody, probably. "I say so," he said.
"I say so. This is where I stand. This now is my posture." Went back to sleep for a few minutes. Next night, he slept a few minutes longer. After several weeks, he was sleeping his regulation eight hours and has done so right through. This is the sound mind, this disciplined way of letting God's grace use us and come into us. It isn't that God's grace can't help us, but it's that we can't accept it.
Down in the San Joaquin, there are the big valves which you have to turn if the liquefied crystals, the lovely sparkling snows of the Sierra Nevadas are to come into your ranch. At the very opening, there is this big gate, and you turn a wheel and then presently they come. They're there all the time, but only the rancher gets that water who opens up the gate. Now, we can't even open that gate
by ourselves, Augustine says. And so does John Calvin. We wait even on God, but then we apply every ounce of energy God gives. When the Greeks came up to take -- in that last naval battle, came up to take Greece, Themistocles, who was from Athens -- and the Athenians had permitted the Spartans to plan the battle --
gave this as his thought that the Delphic Oracle meant by the statement, the cryptic statement, that Greece would be saved by the wooden wall. He said that that probably meant, being interpreted, the ships of the Greeks. And he said, "Now let's deploy our ships in the narrow waters around Salamis." The night before the battle, everyone expected that this would be the dissolution of Greece,
and men cried on their gods in fear. But Themistocles said, "Remember, when you go into battle tomorrow, the one word liberty." Liberty. And the battle was fought, and as you know, the Persians were ignominiously routed and Greece was free. And afterwards, as the torn sails retreated, Themistocles sobbed out this statement, "It is not
we who have done this." Lest we get the impression that by subtle little techniques, we can turn off and on and can channel the waters of the grace of God, let us remember that not even this can we do. We can only put ourselves in the position where it can be done by God for us. And
if we're willing to do that, something of this strategic advance and development which was in Paul [went?] from the statement "I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling, and at the last could say God hath not given us the Spirit of fear," then for us, [too?], the Spirit of power, the Spirit of love, and the Spirit of a sound mind can foil fear
and enshrine courage. Let us pray. Thou knowest, O, God, what cowards we are, how unconsciously we become cowardly in the areas of our largest sensitivities. Thou knowest also, O, God, what opportunities
there are for heroism, and Thou certainly has put a hero in our soul, Thy servant has so clearly indicated. Wouldst Thou bring that hero out more and more into the brightness. Help us, O, God, to remember that this is Thy doing, this is Thy grace. And as Thy [day?], so shall Thy strength
and Thy courage be. We give thanks unto Thee for all that Thou hast given us, for loving homes that taught us love, for the chance to be affectionate people in affectionate families, for the factors of fatherhood and motherhood and grandfathers and grandmothers. Our Loises and Eunices, yea, and even our Pauls have
taught us, imperceptibly at times, this ultimate tenderness which sometimes is almost insupportable. But Thou, above all else, has demonstrated Thy love. Help us to love in that love and live in that love and be loyal in that love. And may it help Thee in Thy task of transforming that part of the world for which we
bear some responsibility, beginning in our own hearts and homes, reaching out to our churches, students, and then into the community and the world. And may the grace of Jesus Christ and the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit rest and abide upon each one of you, now and forevermore, Amen.
CONGREGATION: Amen.