You need both, you know—both wings. Every nation, every organization, needs the conservatives, who give attention to the existing structure. And every nation needs its liberals and progressives, who give attention to what must yet come into being, and must come into our being, if we are to adapt to the forces of change in society and technology which history throws up like siege works against every living thing.
Today, we begin a series of sermons which aims to connect our faith in Christ with the fights of our times. Right up to the November presidential election, we will consider many of the vexed conflicts of our civilization around which no moral or political will exists for decision and solution of vast injustices. I do not aim to define “what Christians must believe” about the crises we face, but I do want to claim that your commitment to Christ must issue in a decisive way of seeing our situation . . .
In the Protestant tradition of the Christian faith, we do not teach that the sacraments “do anything” in heaven. God does not save the baptized child or ignore the unbaptized . . . Water brought from the Jordan River in a little bottle might be a nifty souvenir of your trip, but it won’t make a better baptism. The rituals of ordination don’t make the ordained more holy or important or powerful. It would be easier to say what religion is about if we believed in magic, but all that is dead and gone for those mature in the faith.
To be a Christian at Riverside, do you have to believe Jesus was born of a virgin? As many of you know, in the 1920s, some years before he began his ministry here, Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick got himself and the Presbyterians into a marvelous snarl preaching No! You do not have to believe in the virgin birth.
Does history matter? You might think the answer to this question obvious–yes, yes, of course!–and yet feel that the answer is hardly relevant to your personal life. The fact is that down through our thousands of years together, most humans most of the time have looked at the world through lenses which set history off in a vague distant field.
If you have heard a number of my sermons, you will not be surprised to hear me say that I do not worry about a person who is not a Christian. God is good–so that single piece of information–“not a Christian”– does not move me to alarm about the individual’s well-being, define it how you will. . . If it turns out that I am wrong about heaven and God and judgment, I am pretty sure my defense attorneys will be able to make a good case in the courts of the eternal that I learned my way from the example of Jesus.
Great question: Is Job blessed because things turned out well? Can he be happy–be satisfied, have peace, sing “It is well with my soul”–without the happy ending? Is Jesus blessed while he is on the cross, still unaware of what shall come? How critical to your own life–and even to the planet’s–your answer is!
When in the main a culture is unwilling or unable to ask the question of God’s absence, that people is unwilling and unable to be just, or even to hold the question, What is just?
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