Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Thursday, May 22, 2014
"Except These Abide in the Ship Ye Can Not Be Saved"
Jesse Halsey | Thanksgiving 1936
It is a good old New England custom that comes with
Thanksgiving to take stock, to consider the assets and liabilities of our
social and national life and at the same time that we express gratitude for our
privileges to assume the new obligations that entail upon us.
One of the most remarkable things on the world horizon to my
notion is the recent election. I am not thinking of the outcome of the election
but rather of the process itself. Fifty million people voting for a population
of one hundred and twenty million registered their choices without let or
hindrance in a peaceful fashion, and this after a campaign marked with
considerable heat and vehemence. Nowhere the country over was police or
military interference needed. The Republic can take pride in this achievement.
Look at Spain, Germany, Italy, or Russia by way of contrast if you need to
heighten the impression.
There are recurring waves of popular prejudice that seem to
sweep across the public mind at different times. Twenty years ago the railroads
were under fire due to a real or supposed attitude on their part expressed in
classic form by Commodore Vanderbilt in his reference to the public. More
lately, it is the public utilities due to abuse of privilege. Since the Depression, economists and bankers have come in for their share of criticisms—just
and unjust. The engineer has had his day both in public favor and out of it.
Lately, there has been a new distrust of the scholar. Periodically, the
clergyman comes in for his share of current disapproval, either he is too much interested
in public affairs and is too practical, or else he is too “other worldly.”
There are some who think that our pioneer traditions make great masses of the
population resentful of the higher education. This I very much doubt, but at
any rate, we are divided into all sorts of groups with differing interests. It
is a marvelous thing to me that we manage to get on together so well as we do.
At this Thanksgiving season every right-minded American
citizen ought to “highly resolve” as in the presence of his God, that he
individually will do all that he can to heal the wounds of the body politic,
that no prejudiced word of criticism will escape his lips, that he will be not
only tolerant of but generous toward men and women of other faiths and
conditions.
The only way that our ship of State can come successfully on
her voyage between the Scylla and Charybdis of Fascism and Bolshevism is for
all our people, committed to the great ideals of our common heritage, to
compose their internal and minor differences with common sense and mutual trust;
to put country above party, and faith in God above our denominational
differences.
Sermon: The Present Christ
Jesse Halsey | 1944
“It is expedient that I go away. I will not leave you
comfortless, I will come to you.”
These words in the 16th chapter of St. John have
their parallel for our purpose in the last verses of St. Matthew’s gospel, “Lo,
I am with you always, even unto the end.”
I know nothing of textual or high criticism, but I am going
to date both texts very late; not A.D. 33 or 65, or 110, or 200, but 1944, or
any other date you want to give! This is the Highest Criticism. In other words,
we seek the contemporary value and equivalent and experience that these words
used to convey!
Last Sunday night I walked from one station to another in
Springfield, Illinois—
“. . . here at midnight, in that little town
A mourning figure walks, and will not rest,
Near the old court-house pacing up and down.
He cannot sleep upon his hillside now,
He is among us: --as in times before! . . . .
The prairie-lawyer, master of us all . . .”
(Vachel Lindsay)
That you say is poetry. I understand. And in that poetic
sense Jesus comes back.
Quentin Reynolds, in a book scarcely dry, tells of talking
with a London bobby who believed that Sir Francis Drake took command of the
English boys who went up with their old crates to meet the first onslaughts of
the Luftwaffe.
The solid old admiral, under whom I served in the British
Navy, believed that Francis Drake was present at the battle of Jutland:
“Take my drum to England—
Guard it by the shore
Call me when your powder’s running low.
When the Dons sight Devon
I will leave the court of heaven
And we’ll drum them from the Channel
As we drummed them long ago.”
That, you say, is mythology. I know. And all the truth that
the great myths can carry gather round that Sacred head. The Catholics have a
much more fitting word for the truth I have in mind, they call it “Tradition.”
Travelers in Russia tell us that many a Russian peasant and
soldier believes tht e Lenin has come back to life. That, you say, is sheer
superstition. I know it. But when we speak of the Resurrection and Living
Presence of our Lord Jesus Christ, we are not dealing with superstition.
The British soldiers who fought so desperately at Mons—some
of them believe that they saw angels on the battlefield. I once asked
Studdert-Kennedy, the great chaplain, if he thought there were angels at Mons,
and he said, “Well, there were men at Mons and where there are men there can be
angels!” It is the spiritual presence of our Lord and its contagion—of this we
are thinking.
Look for a moment at that young Jerusalem deacon named
Stephen. The apostles were too busy, or too proud, to “serve tables,” so they
delivered that responsibility to a group called deacons. The irony of the
situation develops in that Stephen, the table server, becomes the most popular
preacher in Jerusalem! When he is stoned to death, they hear him say, “Lay not
this sin to their charge.” It is the echo of our Lord’s word on the cross, “Father,
forgive them, they know not what they do.”
Then there was that other young man, named Saul. He never
saw Jesus in the flesh; none-the-less, he saw Him and heard Him—“Saul, Saul,
why . . . ?” He said of his companions, “They heard not the voice of Him that
spake to me.” Take one example from his life: In the shipwreck—that hour of peril
and imminent disaster, it is not the Roman Centurion and the soldiers who prove
the heroes of the occasion, but this little man, Paul; not the captain (he and
the sailors turned coward), but this little man named Paul. He takes command,
“Sirs, be of good courage. Last night I saw the angel of God, whom I serve. He
said to me, ‘Be of good cheer.’”
And so through the contagion of Christ’s courage, embodied
in the little man Paul, the situation is saved and “all come safely to land.”
Augustine, in the garden, heard a voice and turned his back
on the old way of life. So on across the succeeding years of the Christian
centuries, “I am with you!”
I knew a boy some fifty years ago, he might have been 12
years old. In the midst of his play he was called to fill the kitchen wood box.
Reluctantly, he snatched grandfather’s old wheelbarrow, ran it violently into
the big woodpile, climbed to the top, picked up the biggest billet of wood and
was about to hurl it down in vengeance on the old vehicle, when suddenly his
arms froze in mid-air! Quietly and shamedly, he put the big stick down,
clambered off the woodpile, loaded up the wheelbarrow, and with succeeding
loads filled the big wood box (with the help of his playmates, for like Tom
Sawyer, he knew how to make them work for him). He could say with Paul, “They
heard not the voice of Him that spake to me.” But he heard it!
Christ still speaks—and in ways we can understand if we
listen!
On Mothers
During one of the periods in which Jesse was in England in WWI, there was
an outlook, an observation tower on the army base. Jess climbed the tower one night and found a
solitary soldier. Jess asked him, "Why are you up here in the tower rather than down
carousing with the other boys?" The soldier replied, “My damn mother.” Jesse later told his seminary students, “One
of the things that’s absolutely necessary in life is to have 'damn mothers' who
help you understand what you need to be.”
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