Transcript
I'm very happy, on your behalf, to welcome back home to Princeton the Reverend Father Paul Verghese, who is well known to many members of this community, who is the Associate General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, Bishop-elect in his church, now the head of Seminary and professor back home in India. It's a joy to welcome Father Verghese and to present him as our leader in worship this morning. So then, Reverend, we are not children
of the born poor, but of the free. Stand fast, therefore, in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke bondage. Behold, I have always said that if ye be circumcised, Christ shall prompt you nothing. But I testify again to every man that is circumcised that he is a to the full law. Christ has become of no effect to you. Whoever of you is justified by the law, you are
farther from grace. So we, through the Spirit, wait for the hope of righteousness by the King. For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed by one another. I must first express my own gratitude for privilege of being with you this morning. I wish to speak to you briefly about the upsurge of
freedom. A slow but sure surge of freedom has been sweeping across the for two decades now. It has four basic streams which are beginning to gather force. It began first with the great colonial liberation of mid-twentieth century Asia and Africa. Then second, as the African peoples became free, the Afro-American people of this country began to affirm themselves in the sit-in movement and now in the confident but riotous self-affirmation of black power. The
third movement of freedom came in the sweeping wave of liberalization that is now passing over the communist countries. Czechoslovakia first, but inescapably, in Poland, in Hungary, in Romania, and even in Russia. A fourth and a very significant movement now comes nearer home but is actually a worldwide phenomenon integral to the other three movements, the student protests in Korea and Japan, in India and Ceylon, even in Turkey and Egypt, but certainly in Rudi Dotschke's West Berlin, in
the French universities of Nantes and the Sorbonne, in this country in Berkeley and Cornell, in Duke and Columbia. Small but resolute groups of students are standing up and demanding freedom. What is the word of God to us in this situation? I wish to submit to you seven brief points. First, an easy optimism which believes that the upsurge of freedom will sweep away all opposition and lead automatically to a better world would be both unchristian and misplaced.
None of us will be allowed to sit back in our comfortable studies or cubicles or living rooms and watch the movement come to fruition without cost to us. The Bible does not give room for a hope of salvation without a day of judgment. Second, an attitude of defensiveness that we can check the movement of freedom in the interests of our security and comfort would be equally misplaced. Security in an unjust social order was condemned by the
herdsmen of Tekoa 3,000 years ago when he indicted the cows of Beshan who oppressed the poor and sat in their living rooms on their ivory coaches asking their husbands to mix them a drink. The day of the Lord, when it comes to the middle class, will be a day of darkness and not of light. Third, the Bible does not allow us to put the interests of law and order above the demands of social justice and
human dignity. Law and order, especially any particular form of it, cannot be absolutized into an idol. When law and order is absolutized and idolized, it produces the alienated state which is no longer under the control of man. For freedom, Christ has set us free. Resist, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. Law and order must become an instrument of human freedom, a means of achieving justice and dignity for man, not a master
that stifles the freedom of man by permitting the continuance of injustice and the trampling upon the dignity of man. Fourth, the Bible does not give us the promise of a smooth transition from sin to righteousness. While the New Testament does not justify indiscriminate violence, the history of Israel was one continuous story of conflict, of violence inflicted and endured. Conflict cannot be avoided even in a democratic society. But violence begets violence. That is the oppression that is
endemic in the structures of society. And it is this endemic violence entrenched in the system that begets the counter violence of protest. If Christians are opposed to violence, they have the God-given duty of being more opposed to the violence in the present system. Than to the counter violence produced in reaction to an oppressive system. And when it comes to a choice between two forms of violence, the Christian certainly cannot oppose completely the counter violence of
protest. If this means allowing the systemic violence to continue until it can be disposed of at the pace and time to be chosen by the oppressor. The Christian cannot simply take sides in the opposition between two forms of violence. But neither can he stand by watching a simple message of reconciliation coming from the involved will be heeded by neither side. To be basically in sympathy with the protest, yet not to be drawn into the maelstrom of
hatred and destruction that counter violence generates is the kind of involved transcendence that is required from the Christian. Fifth, there is, however, one other basic difference between the revolution of protest and the Christian stance. The radical revolutionary of the type of a Che Guevara concentrates on the destruction of the system and the seizure of power in the name of the working class. He refuses to formulate a constructive blueprint for the new society because he feels that
there is a basic conflict between the principles of the revolutionary struggle for power and the reconstruction of a society of justice. And if you are required to apply the principles of the new society to the revolutionary struggle, you are beaten from the beginning, and therefore he keeps the two separate. The radical revolutionary believes that he can shift from the inhuman tactics of guerrilla warfare used in the struggle of power to a more humane approach when power
is in the hands of the revolutionary. This cannot always be the case, as has been proved in the histories of Stalin of Russia and the regime in Czechoslovakia that went out recently. The Christian, therefore, is more cautious in his endorsement of violence precisely because he knows that violence begets violence. This caution cannot, however, justify the condemnation of all counter violence. Counter violence then becomes a cross that mankind has to bear in order that justice may emerge.
At the Christian stance involves a responsibility to infuse into the revolutionary struggle some of the principles of the kingdom of justice and dignity in order that the struggle itself may not be dehumanized. He does not also draw out a complete blueprint of the world to come, but he has to make the future present in the struggle of the present against the past. He has to be the redeeming element in the revolution itself. Sixth point. It is
not possible to ask the revolutionary to place his totality of demands before the existing power structure. Many people in America are saying if only black power will clearly formulate what it wants, then we can see how much of it can be granted to them. But black power says none of that paternalism from you. If you are saying that you have the power to dispense with and that you will grant as much of it as you think
is the bare minimum possible to keep the status quo, then we are not prepared to tell you what we are asking for. And this has to be taken seriously. Black power is refusing to formulate the totality of its demands. It simply makes piecemeal ad hoc demands to keep needling the structure in order that they can become participants in the power. The revolutionary will therefore be unclear in his demands, negative in his protest, for he does not
come as a beggar. He is in his own home and he demands that he be allowed to have his say also in how much power the present group in power should have. And the present power group has called the tune till now. The revolutionary refuses to let him go on doing that. And my seventh and final point. The Christian cannot afford to have a horizon which is less than the whole of humanity. Parochialism is the great
enemy of the struggling minority. Black power is in danger of this parochialism just as much as the whites in power in the world. Black power in this country will have to widen its horizon to join hands not only with red power, which is so feeble and inarticulate in this country, almost stifled, but also with the oppressed Hispano-American and with the poor white trash. It is the same struggle. The horizon of the revolutionary struggle must however
go beyond to embrace the struggle of the oppressed in Southern Africa, that is in South Africa, Rhodesia, Angola and Mozambique. But Christians, whether they be brown or black, white or yellow, must constantly expand their horizon to embrace the whole of humanity. The wretched of the earth do mourn, crying out in despairing hope for bread and dignity. The voice of the 2,000 million poor of the world is the voice today crying in the wilderness. Prepare the
way of the Lord. Make His paths straight. Every depression shall be lifted up. Every exaltation shall be brought down. The crooked path shall be made straight. The rough way shall be levelled out. And all flesh, all flesh shall see the salvation of the Lord. Let us pray. Almighty God, who constantly rouses us from our slumber, grant us in this hour of Thy testing, that Thy church may no longer sleep. Grant us, O God, the expansion of
our consciousness and our compassion, that humanity may become our horizon. Grant us, O God, the courage to know that we have nothing to lose in the fight for Thy Kingdom. Free us from our false securities, that we may resist every bondage and move to the fullness of Thy Kingdom. And now, O Lord, we remember before Thee all the suffering people, the people of Vietnam and the American soldier, the people who are under oppression in this country,
whether they be black or red or white, the people of the two-thirds world, the 2,000 millions who live in poverty and deprivation, and the people who are in comfort. Have mercy upon all of us, O God. Lead us to work together, to seek the welfare of mankind, that we may no longer bite and devour each other, but stand fast in the freedom by which Thou hast made us free. And we sum up our petitions
in the prayer which Thy Son, our Lord, has taught us to pray, say, Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those that trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever
and ever. Amen.