Transcript
Here the Word of God, as it is written in the scriptures of the New Testament, in the Gospel according to St. Luke, Chapter 16, reading from verse 1 to the end of verse 12, And Jesus said also unto his disciples, There was a certain rich man which had a steward, and the same was accused unto him that he had wasted his goods. And he called him and said unto him, How is it that I hear this
of thee? Give an account of thy stewardship, for thou mayest be no longer steward. But the steward said to him himself, What shall I do? For my Lord taketh away from me the stewardship. I cannot think. To beg I am ashamed. I am resolved what to do, that when I am put out of the stewardship, they may receive me into their houses. So he called every one of his lords debtors unto him, and said unto the
first, How much owest thou unto my Lord? And he said, One hundred measures of oil. And he said unto him, Take thy bill, and sit down quickly, and write fifty. Then said he to another, And how much owest thou? And he said, One hundred measures of wheat. And he said unto him, Take thy bill, and write four score. And the Lord commended the unjust steward, because he had done wise things, for the children of this world
are in their generation wiser than the children of life. And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, that when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations. He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much, and he that is unjust in the least is unjust also in much. If therefore ye have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will commit to your trust the
true riches? And if ye have not been faithful in that which is another man's, who shall give you that which is your own? Amen, and may God bless to our minds and hearts and lives this reading and hearing of his own holy word, and of his name be the glory and the praise. Let us pray. O let my mouth be filled with thy praise, that I may receive thy glory and honor all the day long. Turn
thy face from my sins, O Lord, and put out all my sins. Make me a clean heart, O God, and renew my spirit within thee. Cast me not away from thy presence, and take not thy holy spirit from me. O give me the comfort of thy help again, and establish me with thy free spirit. O God our Father, whose loving-kindness is over all our days, we give thee thanks for thy goodness in all times and
in every place, because thou hast shielded, rescued, helped, and guided us all the days of our life, and hast brought us unto this hour. We thank thee for all gifts that make the earth beautiful and good to us, and for those friends who, through their need of us and their help, have given us happiness and strength. We would praise thee also for those withdrawals of thy gifts, by which we have learned to depend more simply upon
the love and goodness which never fail. We bless thee for the measure in which we have grown more sure of daily light and daily provision, and have come to be therewith content, leaving the future in thy hands. We thank thee for all that has made the unseen more real to us, and for every experience that has taught us amid change, to cleave more closely to thy unchanging grace. And above all, we thank thee for thy chiefest
gift, for him in whom the living live, and the dying die, and the glorified rejoice together, even Jesus Christ our Savior and Lord. We come at the close of day to receive thy mandiction. Suffer not that our sins should come thy mercy fast. With shame, O Lord, we confess them, our love of selfish indulgence and luxury and ease, our trust in material things, our blindness to those that are spiritual, our slowness of heart to choose the
blessed way of trust. We have not followed the sure light of his leading. We have gone eagerly after our own pleasures, and have often been deaf to his pleading and his calls. Bring us to repent that we have re-fighted his love so ill. Then, for his sake, let thy forgiveness rest upon us, and grant us to find shelter and cleansing in thy grace. Father Most Merciful, strengthen us by thy good spirit, we entreat thee, that
we may no more be later strayed from the right by desires unworthy of those for whom Christ died, but may, amid all temptation, be faithful to his heavenly light. Deliver us, he beseechs thee, from all that eludes and ensnares us, from low thoughts and mean ambitions, from covetousness and envy and the unspiritual mind. O thou who desires truth in the inward parts, make us to know wisdom, uplift us of holy purposes, and enable us ever to
be obedient to the heavenly vision. Grant us so to live under thy guidance, that each day may bear record of duty fulfilled, and kindness done, and honor kept with our fellows and with thee. Teach us how to cheer for others the path of life, to make the crooked straight and the rough places plain, to serve our generation according to thy will, and everywhere and always to be followers of our Lord. As thou hast made us members
of one household of faith, hear us for thy whole church, in all its ministers and missions, that by the preaching of thy word, and by the work and worship of thy people, Christ may be made more real and dear to the sons of men, and that thy believing children, amid diversities of knowledge and opinion, may be one in spirit, and may labor together with one accord for the realization of thy heavenly kingdom. This, our evening prayer,
we offer in the peerless, all-prevailing name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and for his sake. Amen. It's a great pleasure for me to introduce the preacher of the evening, the Reverend Dr. Margo Ewan McDowell. Dr. McDowell is a university panelist who took both his marks and ability at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, the oldest of our Scottish universities. In 1939, he enlisted in service and was a prisoner of war for several years. He
held a pastoral rite in the island of Orphe in the sky, and then, when I first got to know him, he was minister of all part of church in Glasgow, whereby the reigning successor was Harry Whitley, now the minister of the St. John's Cathedral in Edinburgh. In 1949, Dr. McDowell was called to be minister of the Great St. George's West Church in Edinburgh, where he had an outstanding pastoral rite for almost 15 years. That church, as
you probably know, has numbered among its ministers men like Alexander White, James and Hugh Black, and John Campbell, who left St. George's in Edinburgh to succeed Dr. Chowdhurt as minister of the 57th Presbyterian Church of New York City in 1919. In 1963, Dr. McDowell was nominated to be professor of practical theology at Trinity College, which is the Divinity School of Glasgow University, whereby one of his predecessors was Arthur John Gossett. He is no stranger to our
midst, having preached in this chapel on several occasions, and it is a pleasure and privilege for us to welcome him back tonight. He will preach to us after we have sung hymn number 85, 85, Immortal, Invisible, God-Holy, Wise, in light and in zest for him from our eyes, hymn number 85. Invisible, God-Holy, Wise, In light and in zest for him from our eyes, In accessible, with all our eyes, Most blessed, most glorious, creation of
praise, Almighty, made glorious, thy way made we praise. Thou resting, thou racing, and silent as I, Thou walking, thou racing, thou blest in mind, Thy justice, thy comfort, thy story above, Thy country, thy government, of goodness and love. To all thy covenants, to all praise and song, In all thy covenants, come to thy home, With awesome and courage, as we song our dream, And wither and perish, our love changed as we leave. Great father of glory,
your father of life, Thy angels, our glory, our railing, their sign. O praise, we surrender, O help us to sing, We shall be your saviour, of life, life, and life. Amen. First of all, may I thank Professor Norman Hope for his introduction. It is very fitting that he should introduce him. Not only are we fellow Scots, but he was a member. In fact, he was brought up in my previous congregation, St. George's West, in Edinburgh, and
you will agree with me that he has nobly overcome that handicap. Another thing that helped him immensely is that he had left St. George's West before I commenced my ministry there. Seriously, it's very nice to be here. I have preached quite a number of times from this pulpit in the past. In fact, I have been quite a number of times to America, and I am mastering the American idiom, helped, of course, by the fact that my
wife is American. But at the beginning, I had some trouble. I remember the first time I made a telephone call in America. It was in 1946, and I landed off a tramp steamer on the coast of Maine. I had promised one of my best friends, who is an American, and he teaches at Harvard now, to phone him to New York the moment I arrived. I had never phoned in America before, so I went into a telephone
box with a pile of nickels, and I put one in very gingerly, and a girl replied, saying, operator, and I said, will you give me trunks, please? That's the old British term for long distance. There was a frightful silence, and she said, will you please repeat? And I did repeat. I said, will you give me trunks, please? And then she became a little sarcastic, and she said, what kind of trunks? Running trunks or bathing trunks? And
I said very weakly, no, telephone trunks. There was another pause, and she said to me, you must be a foreigner. And I said, I'm not a foreigner, I'm British. And this made her very wild. And she said, you British never think of yourselves as foreigners. And I said, no, indeed. After all, you must remember that before we behaved stupidly, that we started your country for you, and we gave you your language. And she said, that's right
enough, she said. I didn't think of that before. And she and I became great friends all the way. So since 1946, I assure you, I have mastered all the necessary idea. Well, it's very nice to be here, and I'm very glad to see some friends again at Princeton. I would like to preach tonight on that rather puzzling parable, in fact, one of the most puzzling of all the parables, The Unjust Stuart. And I would like to
concentrate in verse eight, for the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light, which Professor Ronald Niebuhr translates as, for the children of darkness are wiser than the children of light. This is not an anemic allegory with an ambiguous model. It's a story based on an actual happening, either known to Jesus himself or related to him on good authority. It records the behavior of a factor who was discovered in the
process of double-crossing his master. When he was called to account, he retrieved what looks to us like an absolutely impossible situation by a most ingenious plan. He falsified the entries in the books. He debited the debtors with far less than they actually owed. Thus, he put them unequivocally in his power. By so doing, he could exercise a little judicious blackmail if the occasion demanded. In short, he was an unprincipled scoundrel. The type we all take
a dim view of, yet Jesus, this is the astonishing thing, Jesus went out of his way to commend him. That the early church found this parable, is clear from the fact that Luke gives us three different interpretations that couldn't understand it. Verse 9 seems to imply that material possession should be invested in friendships that outlast perishable riches. Verse 10 and 11 seem to teach the rather plain moralism that how a man shows up in a small
task is the only proof we have for whether he's fit for larger responsibility. While verse 13 points us to another model, the danger of divided loyalty, the schizophrenic business of trying to serve God and man. Now, most New Testament scholars, and in particular, Professor Jeremias of Göttingen, claim that the parable in its original form stopped at verse 8, for the children of darkness are in their generation wiser than the children of life. And in my own
opinion, all the details, the oil and the wheat, and the factor and the unjust, all of them, are mere dramatic machinery, stage props used by the supreme artist to drive home one tremendous truth, a truth which is as relevant in the 20th century as it was in the first when he expounded, namely this, and you know it too, that religious people tend to be incredibly naive and out of touch with their will, whereas the irreligious, the
children of darkness, the unethical, the unscrupulous, can be tremendously intelligent, absolutely on the toe, and capable of the most resolute action when it is necessary. For the children of darkness, or in their generation, wiser than the children of light, tonight I would like to claim that this parable presses home a number of important things. The first is this, the need for an intelligent appraisal of the situation. We are under no illusion whatsoever about this unjust steward.
Judged by any standard, his conduct is inexcusable. He was given a position of trust, and he betrayed it. Yet while we deplore his dishonesty, we find ourselves grudgingly admiring his initiator. He understood the psychology of the people he was dealing with. Furthermore, by a combination of shrewd bargaining and prompt resoluteness, he extricated himself from a desperate position. Jesus here is sitting out to the Pharisees, the religious leaders of his day. Compared with the Romans, even with
the Greeks, there were the children of light, custodians of a tremendous religious heritage, God's self-disclosure in his people Israel, an elite privileged core that could have used this liberating truth to enlighten their own nation and to emancipate all of mankind. But what did they do? They buried this liberating truth on the mountains of smothering regulations, and they let all the great dynamic revolutions of history pass them by. And isn't this precisely our own dilemma? We
too are custodians even of a more tremendous truth, God's disclosure of himself in Jesus Christ. And what have we done? We have allowed the children of darkness to push us off the main thoroughfares of life. We have shut ourselves in with unnarrow, parochial little systems. We have stood there, frightened and impotent spectators of stupendous forces that are making history before our eyes, over which we seem to exercise little or no control. We are supposed to be
living in a post-Christian era. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the coiner of that memorable phrase, probably meant that what we are witnessing now is the breakdown of Christian culture, which took a thousand years to build and another thousand to undo. And whether you agree with that or not makes no material difference whatsoever. While you and I are debating the point, our culture is being shaped by images and habits of thoughts which are no longer recognizably Christian. And this
is the tragedy. Within the Church, we have hardly begun to grasp the seriousness of the situation. Most Church members live in a fool's paradise. They immerse themselves in meaningless paraphernalia, in a whole host of tinkering trivialities that bear not the slightest relation to the well as it exists outside. None of us like to be compared with the Pharisees of the New Testament, but we are like them on at least two counts. Our preoccupation with trivialities and
our terrifying blindness to the real issues at stake in the world today, issues that threaten our very existence on this planet, issues which are now clamoring for a profound religious answer. We cannot hope to evangelize the well defectively till first we make a serious effort to understand the well we live in. And this means the recognition that for a great many leaders of thought today, the traditional God is dead. And that for many more, he is
only a social adjunct or a cultural accessory, which means that for them, he is dead too. We cannot, we just cannot, boost up our sagging morale by reflecting on American Church attendance and American Christian liberality. The truth is that our culture is secularized, and our precondition of the survival of the Church is an intelligent appraisal of the situation. And this is the second truth that I think this parable drives home, the need for a radical approach
to things. The unjust Stuart, realizing the seriousness of his predicaments, burned all half measures. He decided upon a most radical solution. The so-called debtors were wholesale merchants who had given promissory notes for goods received. He went up to one of them and said, you owe my master 100 measures of oil. We'll reduce it by 50%. Call it 50. To another he said, who owed his master 100 measures of wheat, he said, let's enter upon a
new deal. Make it 80, highly unethical, but I'm afraid highly effective. With one stroke he swept the status quo aside and utterly transformed his relationship with his business associates. Now, we would all agree, I think everyone here would, that the Church today is confronted with a crisis of the first magnitude. And there are only two courses open to us as Christians. We can carefully balance the pros and cons and, conscious of the maddening complexity of things,
we can proceed with conspicuous caution. And that's precisely what we are doing. Or else we can emulate the unjust Stuart of the parable and grapple with the situation with a bold and thorough going radicalism. No one, not even a bitterest enemy, could accuse the Church of passive inertness these days. Never has she been more furiously active. Never before has she tried so many experiments or launched so many campaigns. Never has she used the organs of publicity,
press, radio, and television so extensively, but the results, I'm afraid, are disappointing. They are not at all commensurate with the money we spend or the prodigious energy expended. We are all longing for a revival of religion, but you go and ask the average Church member or indeed the average minister what sort of revival he's praying for, and his answer reveals to you why the Church is so crassly ineffective in the 20th century. He can't get away
from the traditional image of revival in the shape of packed pews, resurrected prayer meetings, Sunday observance, and the recovery of the lost social prestige of the ministry, and it just doesn't occur to him that what he now nostalgically longs for was an established fact in the heyday of Victorian religiosity. All these things were true, and yet the Church then failed to grapple with the basic problems of society, and she didn't foresee the crisis looming over the
horizon. Medical science is at last beginning to treat man in the totality of his being. The day when the body with all its aches and pains was the sole preoccupation of the doctor has happily disappeared. The psychosomatic emphasis, the recognition that man is indivisible, that you cannot draw a clear line of demarcation between his body and his spirit, has become an article of medical orthodoxy. The Christian emphasis must be no less total, and I plead for
a radical reexamination and reassessment of evangelism in both our countries, mind you. I think there are too many naive Christians about to still prattle away like this. All you have to do is to convert individuals one by one, and when you have a sufficient aggregate, the world will say, what utter nonsense. Do they not see that society is made up of far more than individuals? Society is made up certainly of individuals, but society is made up
of philosophies, basic assumptions, attitudes, prejudices, and some of these basic assumptions and prejudices question the sovereignty of God and that deny the brotherhood of man. And any intelligent evangelism, radical evangelism in the world today will certainly aim at converting individuals. We have our New Testament charter for that, but it must go further, and it must aim at absolutely revolutionizing these structures of society that question God's sovereignty and deny the brotherhood of man. And the third thing
this parable presses home, I think, is this, the need for a prophetic anticipation of the future. You see, the unjust steward did not wait till calamity, crushing and irreversible caught up with him. He anticipated the crisis, which his own dishonest actions had triggered off. He exercised foresight, and thus he averted the judgment which was about to overtake him. We still entertain the weirdest notions as to what the word prophecy means. Many of us are prone to
think of the prophets as rather odd people with all sorts of psychic endowments like precognition and extrasensory perception. Indeed, some of the prophets may have been psychic, but what distinguishes great prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah was not that, but their ability to discern the signs of the time, their uncanny sense of anticipation, their capacity to see the shape of things to come and proclaim them in the name of the Lord. The secular conscience, I'm afraid, at
its best, and I repeat, at its best, is far ahead, far out ahead of the conventional Christian conscience today. In every single crucial issue that demands an intelligent appraisal, a radical approach, a prophetic anticipation, the secularists beat us to it. They're out there in front formulating answers where we are found somewhere in the rear feebly protesting about something that doesn't matter. The church's non-prophetic role in the 20th century, there's many examples that the difficulty is
one of selection. You take church unity. Oh, I know that we have made great advances since the last war, but I'll tell you what disgusts me. We talk about Evanston, Amsterdam, and New Delhi, and all these ecumenical come together as if they were veritable miracles. We effuse, isn't it marvelous, we say, to see Christians of different countries and divergent traditions come together in a spirit of brotherliness. We expect the world to clap its hand and to
give us a congratulatory cheer, and the only suitable thought is the word Jesus addressed to the Pharisees. What do ye more than other? The scientists have been doing it for decades. So have the economists. So blessed have been the psychologists without this demand for unseemly self-congratulation. And the other example I bring forward is the emancipation of women. Now, I tread on difficult ground here because I realize I'm in America, where all women are emancipated. At
least I think they are. But still in the church, there is opposition to the emancipation of women. Oh, I know perfectly well that the Presbyterian Church in the north here have gone forward to the ordination of women about, say, 11 or 12 years ago, and I believe that the southern churches have just accomplished it recently. But the Church of Rome and the Church of England and the church I belong to, the Church of Scotland, still refuse
to give women positions of top leadership. And we are surprised and we are pained that the world refuses to take us seriously. I think the greatest need at the moment in the church is the projection of a robust image. And let me put it as simply as nobody who is not robust can project a robust image. It's as simple as this. A person who hasn't got a sense of humor cannot be humorous. I had a friend
in Edinburgh who had no sense of humor at all. And do you know what he used to do to develop a sense of humor? He used to buy funny books and study them. Funny books crammed with corny jokes. And when I saw him coming down Prince's Street, whenever I saw the whites of his eyes, I ran away, sometimes he caught me, and he would give me the latest. Now, when I used to see him, I used
to rush into a chemist's shop, the excuse being that I was going to buy a toothbrush, but there's a limit to the number of toothbrushes that any man can buy. You see, the man had no humor inside him, therefore he could never effectively project it. And the parable is as simple as that. Unless you're a robust person, you can't project a robust image. And a church that is not robust can never project a robust image of
ourselves. And I think this is the number one need of the 20th century for the church to become robust again and to project a robust image, and this is practically the whole message of the parable of the unjust steward. The truth is that when you believe robustly, you'll always act robustly. A number of years ago, I read a book called The Prof. It was a pen portrait of Lord Chowell, Churchill's scientific advisor during the war. Lord
Chowell used to be Professor Lindemann, professor of physics at Oxford University. Now, the moment I read the book, I took an instinctive dislike to Lord Chowell. He was a snob, he was self-opinionated, he was an arrogant man, the kind which still, I'm afraid, tolerate in British society. And yet, as a Christian, I was immensely challenged by something Lord Chowell did during the First World War. At that time, I believe, if a pilot of an airplane
got into a spin, a spinning dive, he crashed with the loss of his plane. There was no answer to it. Lord Chowell, then Professor Lindemann, studied the problem, and in some way or other, he managed to translate the aerodynamics of a spinning dive into a mathematical formula, which he jotted down in a piece of paper. And he went up to the commandant of the aerodrome, and he said, I've discovered how to correct this. And he showed
him the formula on the piece of paper. The commandant was sympathetic, but he told him, you can hardly expect me to ask a pilot to go up and put this thing to the test on the strength of a mere formula jotted down on a piece of paper. Lord Chowell said, well, fair enough. You teach me how to fly, and I'll prove to you that the formula works. They taught him how to fly. Two or three days
after qualifying, he took an airplane up alone to a great height and deliberately put himself into a spinning dive, extricated himself from it safely, and landed the plane. And do you know what the bald boy did then? He went into the canteen and had a cup of tea. And after the cup of tea, he went up and demonstrated to those watching that it also worked in an anti-clockwise direction. Speaking for myself, I wouldn't have bothered
about the anti-clockwise direction. Here was a man who believed robustly and who therefore acted robustly. And I think this is the real inner nerve of the challenge, confronting the church and confronting all Christians today. I'm not decrying the new theology. Our minds must be open. We must go through this and come out of the other end unscathed, I hope. But I know this. I know it from my own experience. I know it with a colossal
certainty that you can never be robust about anything till, first of all, you believe robustly. And that is the whole message of the New Testament. Not everyone that says unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father, which is in heaven. Let us pray. Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, unto him be glory and dominion,
and power well without end. Amen. Let us conclude this service by singing together hymn number 484, hymn number 484, by [?] hymn number 484. hymn number 484.
[music]
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God the Father, and the fellowship and communion of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, rest on and abide with you all, now and evermore. Amen.