Transcript
Whenever I hear Denise Rogers sing, I'm reminded of the story of the two American Indians who were on their respective maces out in Arizona carrying on a wonderful conversation by smoke signal. And as they were talking back and forth, suddenly an atom bomb on the Nevada proving ground went off, and both of them stood there, slack-jawed as they watched that great mushroom cloud rise on the horizon, and finally one of the Indians got on his
blanket and said to the other, gee, I wish I had said that. And look who's back. Joe, stand up and take a bow. Welcome home. We're glad to have you here. They say timing is everything, and I note with some twinkle in my eye that you have chosen the first week of school to have a revival. If the Lord doesn't revive us this week, it ain't going to happen. Because by next week, the academic fad will
be in the fire, and we won't have time for meetings like this. I'm pleased that you have honored me by asking me to be the first in a series of very distinguished speakers, and I want to speak to you tonight from an Old Testament text, which may be surprising for a conference on spiritual renewal, but I assure you there is a method to my madness. I invite you to remember that, at least according to our best
Old Testament scholarship, the 55th chapter of Isaiah belongs to that anonymous prophet known in the guild by the unimaginative of second Isaiah, which locates the text historically in the experience of Israel's Babylonian captivity. And I ask you to feel that, imagine that, sense what that must have meant to them as you hear the text read, beginning at the first verse. Oh, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters. And you who have no money, come, buy, and
eat. Come buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Harken diligently to me and eat what is good, and delight yourself in fatness. Incline your ear and come to me. Hear that your soul may live. And I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David. Behold, I made him a witness
to the peoples, a leader and commander for the peoples. Behold, you shall call nations that you know not, and nations that knew you not shall run to you because of the Lord your God, and of the Holy One of Israel, for He has glorified you. Seek the Lord while He may be found. Call upon Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts. Let them return to the Lord that
He may have mercy on them, and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and return not thither, but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving
seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth. It shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and prosper in the things for which I sent it. This is the word of the Lord. Amen. As I travel about this great land of ours, and not only this land, but other lands as well, speaking to the alumni of Princeton Theological Seminary,
we have had meetings in Seoul, Korea, and in Tokyo, Japan, and in Taiwan, and in Edinburgh, Scotland this last year, and believe it or not, in downtown Budapest, Hungary, it's a great family of graduates of this seminary who have gone forth from these walls to serve Jesus Christ across the world, and as I go about talking to our graduates, the question that I hear over and over again is, Dr. Gillespie, what are the issues now on
the campus? Many of those who asked belong to those who graduated in the '60s and the '70s when the issues were indeed exceedingly painful back when students here locked the Board of Trustees in the Boardroom and wouldn't let them out. You didn't know about that, did you, at the time of the Cambodian invasion? The students want to know what you're worried about, what you're concerned about, what's uppermost on your minds and deepest in your hearts just
now, and I tend to answer a little bit flippantly, well, it depends on which day of the week you're talking about, because the issues do have a way of coming and going and going and coming, but then I become serious and say to them, the abiding issue on our campus just now is the issue of authentic spirituality. The students worry about it, think about it, struggle with it, complain about it, but the issue is one of
authentic spirituality. Now I hate to disappoint you, but yours is not the first generation of Princeton Seminary students to be concerned about this topic. I want to tell you tonight about Tex Eubank. Tex Eubank graduated from Princeton Seminary in 1931. He is now well into his '90s. He lives with his wife in a little tin-roofed ranch house out in the middle of West Texas. Tex Eubanks was a missionary to China. He took a herd of
cattle out to China, and he was there and discovered that helping the people feed themselves was not enough. There was a deeper need, and so he came home and came to Princeton Seminary. He didn't have a terrific time at Princeton Seminary. He has many, many sad memories of how he was treated here by fellow students and by faculty, because Tex just didn't fit in. And he and I have a correspondence going now, because believe it or
not, Tex Eubank loves Princeton Seminary. He has left us his ranch. He has given us the oil and the gas rights to his property. Tex Eubanks loves this school. He loves what this school does. And he writes to me occasionally, and I'm saving his letters for our archives. I have to be a textual critic to read most of them. Tex has long forgotten the difference between caps and lowcase, and the letters vacillate back and forth between
the one and the other, and he has a fondness for the space bar, and so words are separated. But he's always telling me about what it was like to be a student here in the early 1930s, and you know what the great issue was in the 1930s? Authentic spirituality, believe it or not. The great issue in those days was the so-called Oxford movement, a movement that later became, or I should say degenerated into up with
people, but it was a movement that emphasized the personal and the individual and the spiritual side of the Christian life, and it was not all that well received on the Princeton Seminary campus. It was because of his embracing of that particular understanding of Christian piety that Tex had so many difficult times and experiences here. And I found myself wondering since reading his letters, why is it that generation after generation of theological students, including my own, should
come to this place and worry so much about authentic spirituality? I think the answer is that we come to this place and we struggle with keeping faith alive. We struggle with keeping our faith alive. We are, I think, like Israel. If not in bondage, at least displaced people. Think of it for a moment. Students are all volition, so far as I know. You certainly stay because of your own volition, but we have all come as students
to this place leaving behind all those institutions which brought us to faith, nurtured us in faith, sustained us in faith, our local congregations that defined for us what it means to be a Christian, what it means to believe as a Christian, what it means to live the Christian life. We've left all that behind. We've left families behind where some of us, at least, were nurtured in the faith and raised in the faith and encouraged in the
faith. We've left all that behind and we've come here. And we don't have the institutional supports for faith that we had when we heard God's call to ministry. We're like Israel. We have moved into Babylon. And as Israel was confronted for the first time with religious pluralism in spades, so we are confronted. If not religious pluralism, certainly theological pluralism and Christian lifestyle pluralism and different understandings of what it means to be a Christian, what it means
to believe as a Christian, what it means to live as a Christian. And we're thrown into this melting pot and we all feel that we have to fight for our very lives, to maintain our own sense of identity, to be true to our own traditions, to be true to our own families, to be true to our own denominations, to be true to our own experience. And so we find ourselves in this great academic setting struggling to
keep faith alive. It must have come as a great surprise to the Israelites in Babylon to learn from the prophet that God had not been left behind in Jerusalem. That was their theological conviction. They took the temple seriously. The temple was the house of God. God dwelt in the holiest of holies where only the high priest could go and he but once a year. That's where God was. Where is God on earth? God is in the
temple. The temple had been destroyed. The people had been displaced. Had they left God behind? The prophet says to the people, come to the waters. You who thirst, you who have no money, come buy and eat, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Harken diligently and eat what is good and delight yourselves in fatness. Incline your ear and come to me. Hear that your soul may live. God is not restricted by geography. The God
we knew when we were called to this place, whether it was called from Korea or called from Europe or called from Latin America or the southeast or the far west or the middle west or wherever it was, the God who called us here is here too in this place. Those of you who know about Hebrew parallelism know how in Hebrew parallelism and Hebrew poetry the one line is then restated by the second line. Oh everyone who
thirsts, come to the waters. What are the waters? The waters are the spirit. The spirit that nourishes. The spirit that gives life. And notice how it's interpreted. Incline your ear and come to me. Come to me. Whatever else faith may be, faith is our relationship between the individual human being and the living God. St. Paul had it right when he said to the Romans, we have received not the spirit of slavery that we might fall back
into fear, but we have received the spirit of God so that when we cry Abba Father, it is the spirit of God bearing witness to our spirit that we are the children of God. That's who we are. It's a relationship. Spirituality in the Christian faith is not as it is in New Age thought. Coming into consciousness of your higher self or coming into cosmic mystical relationship with the all. Spirituality in the Christian faith is the human
spirit standing in covenant relationship with the Holy Spirit. It is the spirit of God claiming us for himself. It is the spirit of God shedding abroad the love of God in our hearts. It is the spirit of God empowering us to be obedient servants of God in the world. The spirit of God is here even as the spirit of God was present in Babylon. The spirit of God is here as a presence. Presence is important. In
my first church I had a wonderful Presbyterian elder by the name of John Donald MacGregor. If you think he was Scottish, you're right. John Donald MacGregor taught me many things. One of them had to do with preaching. He used to say if you can't save them in 20 minutes, they aren't worth saving. I got the message. But J.D. as he was known to the congregation had a lovely wife named Edna or Eddie as we called her.
One time Eddie had gone up to San Francisco to be with their daughter when she gave birth to another grandchild. He and I were out having lunch one day and he said to me, this man well into his '60s, this man who had been married over 40 years, he said, you know Tom, I miss Eddie. He said sometimes when we're home together she likes to watch the television and I can't stand the boob tube and I
go in the den and get out my viola and I'm playing my viola to my heart's content but he said, oh it feels so good to know that she's present in the house. The presence of God is important. We don't have to always be talking to God or about God simply to know the reality of the divine presence. But relationships are more than presence. Relationships need to be nourished, need to be enjoyed, need to be exercised.
Think of the most intimate of all human relationships, think of marriage. Marriage is a relationship where you either grow together or you grow apart. It never stays the same. Marriage depends almost 100% on communication. The person you're married to is someone you need to talk to, someone you want to talk to, someone you want to talk to you. You want to talk about the things that matter to you both. You want to talk about the
trivial. You want to talk about the important. You want to talk about life. How was your day? What was your day like? It's the communication that makes the marriage. The same is true with the parent-child relationship. More children have difficulty growing up because they do not have parents who will talk to them. And parents, I know, reach that stage where they have children no matter how good the parenting has been when the children won't talk
to them. Where'd you go? Out. What'd you do? Nothing. But you live through that and you try to keep those lines of communication open so that no matter what the issue is, they will come and talk to you about it. Communication is what nourishes relationships. Or think of friendship. You're in the process now of making friendships that will last a lifetime. I guarantee you the friendship you are forming here during these years will be with you
forever. You will flee to your separate ways come graduation. But then you will meet each other. I meet classmates at our General Assembly 10, 15, 20 years after we graduated. And you know what? We pick up the conversation right where we dropped it. Friendships need to be exercised. Friendships need to be enjoyed. And the key to friendship is sharing. A friend is someone you can talk to. A friend is someone who will talk to you. That's
what a friend is. Is it any different in our relationship with God? Faith is fundamentally a relationship. T.F. Torrance is one of the few theologians known to me who at least claims to understand Albert Einstein. I don't know whether he does because I don't understand Albert Einstein. But he claims to and I trust him. And Torrance does a lot with how our understanding of knowledge has developed with an understanding of how the physical world is
put together. And some of the leading physicists are the ones who are teaching us the most about how knowledge really works. And Torrance points out that in the history of physics we kept digging deeper and deeper into nature looking ever looking for that basic fundamental irreducible physical particle that is the basic building block of the universe. And the deeper we delve into that, the realities become more rather than less. And we're down now to quarks and
who knows where they go. And modern physicists says Torrance have established that reality is not predicated upon some single building block but upon the relationships that exist between the electrons and the neutrons and the quarks and all the basic undergirding of physical nature. Relationships in other words are not merely functional things. Relationships are the essence of reality. And to be related to God is real. It establishes reality. It establishes your reality and my reality. Because not
only are we related to God, we're related to one another because we're related to God. We have each other because God has us. And we can't have God without having one another. Relationships are the key. And the key to the relationship is the communication. When the prophet talks to Israel about the waters that quench the thirst of humankind, when the prophet invites Israel in exile to come buy and eat whether or not they have money, when
the prophet invites them to give their life to that which satisfies, to that which fills their soul, their living being, he's inviting them to come into relationship with God. A faithful relationship to God. A loving relationship to God. It is God's word that establishes their relationship. There's an awful lot of talk in modern theology about which is more basic, experience or tradition. The folks up at Chicago think it's experience. That all religions including the Christian religion
is simply the outgrowth and the emerging and the expression of some undefinable but nonetheless common religious experience. And the people up at Yale say, no, that's crazy. There is no such thing as a common religious experience that undergirds all religions. Religions are a matter of a tradition, a matter of a theological culture. Religion, theology is a matter of theology and doctrine and hymn books and creeds and polities and traditions. That's what faith is about and you're
socialized into a faith. One of our own graduate students from a couple of years ago, Stephen Stell, did a study of both of these schools of thought and said, you know, the problem is, the problem is that there is no meaningful experience apart from an interpretation of that experience and that's what the tradition provides you with. But he said to have a tradition without the experience is to have a dead faith. Someone said that traditionalism is
the dead faith of people now living. But tradition is the living faith of people now dead. So our experience of God's presence in our midst, our experience of God's purpose for our lives, our experience of hearing God's word is an experience that is mediated to us by our traditions. I have to admit that as a Calvinist I really stand in envy, particularly of the Lutherans and the Methodists. You heard it here, yes? Yes? Yes? No, you
know, really, I mean, Denise loves the Wesley's. And she's without prejudice. She loves John as much as Charles. And why do Methodists love the Wesley's? Because they wrote great hymns. They loved to sing. They could give you something to sing about. They talked about the warming of the heart. They talked about that experiential side of the Christian faith. Methodists love the Wesley's. And Lutherans love Luther. Oh my, how Lutherans love Luther. I don't know, maybe it's
because he drank beer and sang body songs. I don't know. But I never met a Lutheran who didn't love Luther. Have you ever met a Presbyterian who loved Calvin? I mean, Calvin seems so unlovable. He seems so unlovable. He seems unlovable. I've never seen a picture of Calvin smiling. Presbyterians don't love Calvin, they're embarrassed by him. The only thing Presbyterians know about Calvin is they know two things and both of them are bad. They know that
he had poor old Servetus burned at the stake. Dumb Servetus took Calvin's book and wrote in the margin all the corrections you know to his Trinitarian theology, sent it back to Calvin, and then went to Geneva. Now that's dumb. But we know that he had Servetus burned at the stake and we're not into that anymore. And we know that Calvin taught that horrible doctrine of double-barreled predestination, God before the foundation of the earth, predestined that
certain people would be saved and others would be equally damned, and you can't change the numbers. And Presbyterians think that's a bit rude. But you know, there are some people who think there's some things that we can learn from Calvin. And one of the great things that I have come to learn about Calvin and to learn through Calvin is that God can be known personally. Father Joseph Lucien Richard, a French Roman Catholic priest, has written a
wonderful book on of all topics the spirituality of John Calvin. I bet you didn't even know John Calvin had a spirituality. But he writes a whole book on the spirituality of John Calvin and he points out how in the Middle Ages the standard doctrine was that people like you and I could know about God through the tradition, through the teaching of the church, through the Bible, but people like us couldn't know God. And then a Scottish
theologian found his way over to one of the colleges at the University of Paris and John Major made a philosophical breakthrough. And John Calvin was a student in that college and John Calvin learned that God could be known personally. And throughout Calvin's writings there is this pervasive understanding that spirituality is the standing of the human spirit in relationship to the spirit and that that relationship is predicated upon the word and the spirit. Calvin didn't only teach
about the word of God, but he talked about the presence of the spirit of God empowering the word of God and being met in the proclamation of the word of God. So that humble believers, people who have never been to grammar school, people who have never been to high school, people who have never gone to college, people who have never gone to seminary, people can know God through the proclamation of God's word. That's what Isaiah is
telling the people in Israel. Not only come to me but incline your ear and come to me. Hear, hear that your soul may live. Faith is kept alive by the hearing and of course the doing of the word of God. We have it on high authority here that God's word does not return unto him void, but it does indeed accomplish that which God intends. My young friends and some not so young friends, the real issue as
you head your life into ministry is not simply how to keep faith alive in seminary. I want to tell you as one who has been a minister for 29 years, the issue is how to keep faith alive when you're in ministry. When you're in ministry, you have more encouragement on this campus than you can shake a stick at. You have more people here who think like you do, feel like you feel, care about the things you
care about than you're ever going to have again. How do you keep your faith alive day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year in ministry? Do you think that's easy? I want to tell you it's not. There's a wonderful story about the time when the British were occupying Palestine and the Arabs came with their Arab Arabian ponies and they challenged the English with their great stallions to a race. And so the English
accepted the challenge and they staked out a two-mile race course and the Arabs came and the British explained the race course two miles long and the Arabs said, oh, we didn't come to race two miles, we came to race two days. Anyone can run a hundred yards, but it takes stamina and it takes a mile to go the mile. Nurture your souls, listen to the word of God, read the word of God. I had a
friend who won a wonderful graduate fellowship to go to Oxford. He studied in Oxford for two years and he was told when he went that in addition to all the course work that he would be required to take with tutor, checking up on him regularly, that he would be expected to read the English Bible 1,000 hours while he was there. Read the Bible, let God speak, be in chapel, let God have a chance to speak
and then pray. That's the other side of the conversation. And when you pray, don't do all the talking. Jesus said we're not going to be heard for our many words, but a few well-chosen words like help. God will not help you learn the Hebrew paradigms, but God may help you remember them. Pray without ceasing. Do not forget to say your prayer. That's why this chapel is built so close to the classroom. There is a symbiosis.
The God of whom we study in the classroom is the God we worship in chapel. The God we worship in chapel is the God of whom we study. We sang tonight about how awesome God is. That's true. That's true. But don't you want to know a little bit more so your awe can be expanded? God's more awesome than our awe. God is bigger than our thoughts as Marilyn Adams told us this morning. So beautiful. Listen again
to this wonderful text that speaks to all of us who feel that we are in some kind of exile, some kind of captivity, some kind of displaced situation. Oh, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters. Incline your ear and come to me. Hear that your soul may live. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.