Some of Dad’s sermons are of historical interest, including this one. He preached it as the Cuban Missile Crisis, probably the closest our world came to full-scale nuclear war during the Cold War, was winding down. (11/4/62)
Scripture: 2 Samuel 1:18 – 2:5
For November 4, 1962
Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
“These are the times that try men’s souls!” were words of Thomas Paine. He uttered them at a critical time for our nation – a time when we were struggling for our existence back in revolutionary times. And now once again we are at a very critical time. During the past two weeks the world has been hanging in the balance of nuclear war, a war that could mean the destruction of civilization. At the present moment the tension seems to have lessened, and perhaps for the time being the greatest danger is past. But this does not mean that the tension will not mount again; this does not mean that in a few weeks or months the fate of the world will not again hang in the balance; this does not mean that at some date soon the scales of nuclear war will not tip in the other direction. And if this happens then the holocaust will be upon us. To live under the threat of this kind of possibility of a war that could destroy all mankind and all that we hold most dear is agonizing. And so like Tom Paine almost two centuries ago we can cry out: “These are the times that try men’s souls! These are the times that try men’s souls!”
The situation in our world today is so grave that we are tempted to try to seek ways to escape thinking about it. It would be so good if we just could forget all about it. And yet it is too serious for any such easy way out. We are faced with a grave situation, and if we are to come through it, we must face up to the seriousness of what is before us in all its ugly gravity.
We are here today professing to be Christians. As Christians we have a long history of facing grave situations. The Old Testament is filled with how the Hebrew people faced one national crisis after another. The New Testament likewise is a record of crises faced both by Jesus and by those who followed him after his death and resurrection. Similarly following these events reported in the New Testament are centuries filled with grave situations. The days of Reformation were critical times. And even in our own day Christians have faces trial and prosecution in Nazi Germany, Franco Spain, and in many Communist countries.
Is there anything in our Christian heritage which will shed light upon our present situation? Is there anything in the way Christians have viewed things which will help us in our thinking and in our living during these perilous times? Yes, there is. Much of what is in our Christian heritage will give us solace and comfort, and then much else will make us uncomfortable and give us cause for pondering. If we are to face up to our heritage as Christians and if we are to bring this heritage to bear in our own perilous times, we need to take cognizance both of what gives us comfort and what gives us discomfort in the Christians faith.
This morning let us discuss two major areas of thought in the Christian heritage: first, the Christian view of man (both his potentialities and his shortcomings); and second, the Christian view of God (God’s action, God’s purposes, God’s sustaining power).
One of the most persistent themes in the Christian view of man is that man is sinful, that man turns away from God and from other men, that man does not live up to what God would have him be, that man falls short of the glory of God. This is true of man as an individual and man as a social being. The first story in the Bible is the story of the fall of Adam. And the name Adam is not just a meaningless name: the name means “Every man”. So the ancient Hebrews who wrote the book of Genesis were not just telling us a story about a man of long ago who had nothing to do with us; they were telling us the story of every man, the story of each one of us. Other parts of the Old Testament point out that men’s sin is corporate and social as well as individual. The Jews saw themselves as having a covenant with God, and this covenant involved the whole nation. And time after time it was the Jews as people who broke this covenant. The whole Testament is filled with the story of how the Jews turned away from God and his commandments and the consequences that they suffered. Much of the material in the books of the prophets deal with the corporate sin of the Jewish nation.
The way we are constructed as human beings it is relatively easy for us as individuals to see the shortcomings of others, to detect the sinful ways of others; but it is much more difficult to see and admit our own shortcomings, our own sinfulness. Jesus knew this well. This is why he had to caution us by asking “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?” The same can be said of nations. Any nation finds little difficulty seeing the errors and the sinfulness of other countries, but finds great difficulty in seeing its own errors and sinfulness. Amos knew this well. That is why his judgments against the nation in the first two chapters of the Book of Amos is such a masterpiece. Amos is speaking to the northern tribe, that is the nation of Israel. One after another he enumerates the sins of the surrounding nations. “For three transgressions of Damascus and for four, I will not revoke the punishment,” he thunders out in his prophesying, quoting the words of God. After he spells out the punishment to be meted out to Damascus, he goes on to Gaza, and then deals similarly with Tyre, with Edom, with the Ammonites, with the Moabites. We can imagine the Israelites smacking their lips in glee as they hear how all the surrounding nations are getting their just desserts from the Lord God. But then they begin to become less comfortable when Amos gets to Judah, the Southern tribe that used to be part of the Kingdom of David, so their next kin, so to speak. And finally the Israelites begin to sweat in earnest, for Amos centers right down on Israel, and tells how God will mete out to them a punishment worse than to any of the other nations.
We modern nations are not much different from the peoples in Old Testament times. For we too find it easy to see the faults of other nations and hard to see our own faults. We find little difficulty in finding fault with Russia or Cuba or Red China, and yet it is much less easy to find fault with our own nation. Yet we are not above reproach. We live in an age that is threatened with nuclear destruction, and yet little as we like to admit it, it is our nation that ushered in this frightful age. It was our nation that killed thousands of persons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when we might have obtained the same result had we demonstrated the terrible destructive power of the bomb by dropping it in some less densely populated area of Japan. And it is our nation as well as Russia that continues to pollute the atmosphere through our nuclear testing in spite of the fact that numerous neutral nations have requested us to ban testing. And just in the past two weeks we have indicated a willingness to risk nuclear war over Russian bases in Cuba, and yet for the past fifteen years American bases have been ringing Russia and her satellites.
What relevance does this Christian insight into the sinfulness of man and nations have for us in these trying times? We need to keep this insight in mind as we survey the international scene and think about our part in it. It is very important that our world stay out of war if it is humanly possible, for our world as we know it may not be able to survive a nuclear war. Part of a war psychology involves a nation’s convincing itself that that nation is in the right while another nation is in the wrong. If we hold on to the belief that all nations have their share of sinfulness and are in need of repentance and forgiveness, then we shall be much less likely to go into a war half-cocked.
This does not mean that we ought to become less astute in our surveillance of other nations. This does not mean that we ought to keep from being firm with others in our diplomatic encounters. This does not mean we ought to say that just because we have our faults we are necessarily as bad as other nations. This does not even mean that many Christians may not sometime decide that nuclear war must be risked. Such a decision is up to the conscience of each of us. What this does mean is that things are in such a state in the world these days that there is no room for blind self-righteousness. We need to be realistic about our own national motives and shortcomings. We need to be humble in recognizing some of our own shortcomings. With such an attitude we may avoid getting into a war frame-of-mind prematurely.
The Christian view of man includes not only an awareness of the sinfulness of man. It includes also recognition of the grandeur of man. As Christians we believe that man was made in the image of God. Although man through his turning from God has marred that image, this does not negate the potentialities of soaring to great spiritual heights. This is a great source of hope for us as Christians. For we believe that God is capable of ushering in a new age, and it is our hope that he may see fit to use us and our age in this redeeming work. Each time that we repeat the Lord’s Prayer we restate this hope: Thy Kingdom come.
What relevance does this Christian view of man’s potentialities have for us who are in the midst of these trying times? It can be a great source of comfort and hope for us. For we have the hope that the world need not always be in such a frightful state. We have the hope that God’s redeeming power can be at work in our age to make us better men and to create a better society. In fact, we believe that this power has been at work. In many areas in our own nations and in other nations there is far more humaneness than used to exist. And in the area of international cooperation there is also more joint effort to bring about a better world. Various agencies of the U.N. are at work to further this goal of a better world: UNICEF, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the Commission on Human Rights, to name a few. And little by little the United Nations seems to be hammering out ways of handling international tensions. The Congo Crisis seems now to be mainly a thing of the past, for example. And it looks as if the Cuban Crisis may be on the way to being settled. So although men and nations have capacities for sinfulness, they also have potentialities for being transformed into agents for good.
Let us turn now briefly to a second major area of Christian thought: the Christian view of God – his actions and his sustaining power. Down through the ages God has been seen as active in human events. In the New Testament we see the supreme act of God in the realm of man – the act of coming to earth himself in the form of man in order that all men might be given the opportunity of being transformed, of being saved. But all through the Old Testament also we see God as an active God. We see him as calling Abraham as the father of God’s special people. We see him as leading the people into Egypt under the hand of Joseph in order that they not perish. We see him as calling Moses to lead the people out of Egypt back into the land of Canaan. We see him at work all during this exodus and this wandering in the wilderness. We see him as establishing the monarchy.
Although God is seen as constantly active in the Old Testament, his activity is not always to the liking of the people of Israel. At times he chastised his people for their wrongdoing. Some of the later prophets even see God as using some of the foreign powers in order to accomplish his purposes. First the Northern Kingdom of Israel falls to foreign invaders in 722 B.C. Then more than a century later in 587 B.C. Jerusalem and the Southern Kingdom of Judah fall, and God’s chosen people are sent into exile. But even when his people are defeated, God’s purposes are not defeated. For his people return from Exile and reestablish themselves in the promised land.
For us today this concept of God’s continuing activity in the world has sobering implications. For although we are a Christian nation, this is no definite assurance that we shall survive indefinitely as a nation. For Christian nations have been destroyed before. As Christians we have been called for special service to the whole of God’s creation, but this does not automatically assure us of special privileges in God’s creation. For it is feasible that God might even work through our own destruction. He did not see fit to preserve his own son; he may not see fit to preserve us as a nation.
But although it is sobering, this concept of God’s continuing activity in the world is also comforting. For we continue in the trust that we are in God’s hands. We continue in the trust that God’s purposes cannot be destroyed. We continue in the trust that in spite of what happens to us, we belong to God and we are his children. We continue in the trust that nothing can separate us from the love of God. And this trust in the sustaining power of God gives us the courage to face all the anxieties and uncertainties of these trying times.
Yes, these are the times that try men’s souls. And what are we as Christians called to do in the face of the agony of these times? We are called to a realistic appraisal of ourselves as well as of other nations – an appraisal of our shortcomings as well as of our strengths. We are called to realize the possibilities of human greatness when man is redeemed and transformed by the love that God offers us in Christ. We are called to see the potentialities that lie in our nation and in the world when we allow God to work through us in bringing in his Kingdom. We are called to be alert to the fact that God is active in the here and now. We are called to a renewed trust that no matter what happens to us personally or to our nation that we cannot be separated from the love of God, and that God’s purpose cannot be defeated. And finally we are called to rediscover what we have been created for. Perhaps our role is a suffering role. Perhaps we have been created to live under tensions of these trying times, to live under the agony of constant fear and uncertainty, to endure with as much patience and calm as we can muster the tenseness and ambiguity of our strife-torn world. And perhaps through our agony and pain and patience our world can be kept from a violent destruction – be kept from destruction long enough for new ways of living together to be hammered out. Perhaps we have been created to hold the world together so that our children and our children’s children may have the opportunity to continue the struggle of ushering in God’s Kingdom.
Let us pray: We would ask thee for courage to face the uncertainties and the tensions of these trying times. We would ask thee for the wisdom and the astuteness to evaluate the world situation accurately. We would ask thee for the energy and the will to press persistently for a world of peace tempered with justice. And we would ask thee for a new vision of thy purposes and a fresh glimpse of thy never-ending concern for ourselves as individuals, as a nation, and as a world. In the name of thy son, the Prince of Peace – our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Sermon copyright © 1962 by Marjorie D. Palmer and
the direct descendants of William E. Palmer
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