Dr. Laubach Sermon, 1966-01-16, Lessons From A Transit Strike

the ms bee one of the very great pleasures about preaching at riverside is that from the moment when you announce a sermon titled people in the congregation began second guessing what you are about to say i think this is really quite wonderful because you really know that at least they are interested enough to want to know what you're going to present and in the case of this morning's serve and there has been a great deal of second guessing going on until the week a good many people in the congregation have offered me suggestions of things which they feel they have learned as a result of the transit strike that we have just been through one older woman in the

congregation said he was glad to discover that she could still walk two miles without difficulty somebody else mentioned that it was interesting to find out what the real courage new yorkers have in the face of obstacles still other person said that he thought the biggest learning for him was the fact that under the pressure of the crisis the traditional reserve and separateness of new yorkers somehow broke down and he discovered that people were good deal more warm and human and genuinely good and he had never supposed before well all of these have been warnings for people you could name a good many more learnings from your experience there's an old proverb which suggests that the darkness passes but the lessons which we have learned in the darkness to remain with us for ever well the strike is over it does not need to be post

mortem to hear this morning but if there are some lessons we can learn if there are some lessons that we can use that it would be worth are looking for a little while at what these might be i should like to begin a sermon about a transit strike not talking about a strike it all but about a situation of conflict that occurred in the first century it's one of the dramatic events of church history and one that we ought to know about it's a story you heard read for our scripture lesson this morning the major figures in the story are called the newly converted disciple of jesus christ and peter head of the jewish christians the roots of the conflict still very very far back you remember that ball out of his experience on the road to damascus felt that he had been given a call to preach which came from the risen christ himself that must have been terribly difficult for the original disciples to

accept that day who had known the lord when he was upon earth did not have the only call to preach even more troubling must have been the inference that not only did they not have the only call but perhaps they did not even have the authentic message paul was a jew as they were but his background had given him a much broader understanding of the world and he seems to have understood as they did not that the christian message was for the whole world that although it had come through the jewish faith it was to be in no way limited by a given those die now makes it was not long before paul's preaching brought him in conflict with these jewish christians and the basic issue as you heard it said this morning in its simplest form was whether what had become a jew in order to become a christian the jewish christian said of course you do jesus and worship in the temple he had participated in the religious life of his people he

said he had come to fulfill the law not to destroy it therefore all new christians should keep the restrictions of the jewish all as a preliminary consideration of their becoming christians at all not so said all four he knew there was no set of regulations which could make a man blameless before god not only that but such restrictions even the law itself he pointed out might become an end in itself and actually be a stumbling block in a man's search for god becoming a jew he said was not essential to becoming a christian and there the battle lines were drawn they learned a lesson this morning that paul came up to a conference in jerusalem in order to try to settle the dispute he came armed with amazing reports of the success of his message in the churches in asia minor the works seem to support his point following debate there in jerusalem by compromise was agreed upon a compromise that really avoided the basic issue

it was agreed that paul and barnabas would be free to preach to the gentiles op here and the others would fulfill their mission to the jews i think they must have hoped desperately that in this compromise they could stay out of each other's way but like most compromises that wasn't a good one and it lasted only a short time and the issue came boiling to the surface again for peter came down to visit paul and his friends in antioch and while he was with them he ate with a gentile questions ignoring the food laws in the ceremony over the jews all must have thought this was a real evidence of a shift in his friend and his acceptance of the gentile christians israel believers but when the jews came down peter under the pressure of their criticism withdrew from the gentiles and again they'd only with the jews and according to their food lots and that was too much for paul because either the gospel had wiped out all need

for such distinctions or their top had been just words and his characteristic fashion paul appeals to peter directly he bases his case neither on the compromise which had been made in jerusalem nor on the fact that it is embarrassing to be in this position before his friends he appeals instead to the witness of peter's own conduct in he sees that he must bring the situation to a head by bringing out the underlying issue because of his genuine love for peter is able to confront him in love with the truth about himself but he has acted and sincerely and pointing to this principle paul makes it possible for genuine reconciliation to take place and for the issue to be decided in a way that makes a decision a permanent one now by this time you must all be asking yourselves what in the world this has to do with a transit strike

but it seems to me that this story from the scriptures as well as a witness of our everyday lives matter is the experience of this biblical story and it seems to be that the story and the strike and our experience can teach us several lessons about handling conflict let me suggest the first lesson is a lesson about compromise and it is just this that any compromise which avoids a basic issue cannot be a solution and is going to cause trouble later on because you say in the very nature of a compromise each side clings to its own beliefs it seeks room to operate but it wants to hold on to what has it says what is the least that we can give in order to get all that we want and frequently a compromise merely is an appeasement of one side or the other

in order to relieve the strain of conflict you will know is that that was the case in the story of peter and paul the basic issue have all always been there but it had been covered up and never honestly face the compromise that allowed paul to work his side of the street and jewish christians to operate on various was no practical solution or nothing had been solved and eventually it was going to have to come open again now i don't pretend that i understand all the issues that are involved in the transit strike i am not as you know an economist or an expert on transportation i don't pretend to be a political analyst or labor management specialist and i have a feeling that all of these might be useful to me in making decisions about the strike but out of the experience that we have just been through and from what i have read it seems to me that the real issue is a good deal deeper than just the attempt on the part of one union to get all at once

it seems to me that the strike is a symptom of a deeper problem that we really need to face of how a great metropolis shop act to insure services for all its people there are great many people involved in city planning today that are pessimistic about the future of the metropolis they maintain that no city in america has begun to cope with the kind of planning that's going to be necessary to secure adequate housing or enough schools enough facilities transportation or public services for all its people if it is true as some people have suggested that it is true that the strikes settlement has avoided these basic issues it's a settlement has not really established whether the action of any group that paralyzes services for the total goodies to a responsible to be tolerated in the city and what we have is a compromise rather than a real solution and there will be trouble ahead because

the compromise is no solution at all let me point out to you that this principle also operates at the personal level i find myself getting more and more troubled by the way in which i see parents compromising their standards in order to appease their children rather than giving them the genuine strength which comes from discipline i heard a child in a story the other day demanding that his mother buy him some candy and his threat to her was if you don't buy me that can be awful myself on the floor now yelled to my face gets blue well what does a child learn about appeasement when his mother compromises her principles and buys and the candy in order to avoid a scene i think of a teenager who presses her mother that when her friends come to the house for a party mother and father show kindly please leave the house and so the mother and daughter argue for a while and finally the teenager rages at her mother if you don't do this and i won't ever again

invite any of my friends' homes here i never ever and the mother trying her best to preserve her own integrity and her daughters affection begins to chip away at her standards and she says well dear i'll call some of the other mothers and i'll see what they think is best but you say the real issue is the standards of this home and avoidance and compromise and appeasement at this point cannot become real answers we don't make the best decisions under pressure if we are to avoid being traps like the mother of a blue face child on a supermarket for more than it seems to me we have to establish are it's a bull's well in advance we must be willing to act not out of the desire to get an unpleasant situation off our backs but out of this place that knows that our principles are going to be the same in any situation in which we find ourselves my friend

radar can send me a story about dick gregory the comedian gregory tells about an incident from his boyhood which still stands out in his memory he got a good day selling papers and shining shoes and so he went into a restaurant and ordered himself a veritable feast a bowl of chili cheeseburger a soft drink and a piece of chocolate cake and as he was sitting there eating an old wine okay man and ordered twenty six cents worth of food and made the most out of every bite when it came time to pay the check the man simply said he didn't have any money whereupon the owner knocked him down with a bottle watched him bleed a little and then began to kick him and a young dick gregory said leave him alone i'll pay you for twenty six cents and the old man managed to pull himself up and leaning on the counter he said keep your twenty six cents you don't have to pay

not now i'd just finished paying for it you started out and then he put his hand on the boy's shoulder and with the venom in his voice replaced by sadness he said thanks money but it's too late now why didn't you pay before and the young gregory realize that he had waited too long to help the other man and that there came a time when his health was no help at all but it seems to me that if some of the fundamental problems of our times are going to be answered it will be because a great many people like us ordinary people who don't wield a great deal of this world power but refused to allow the real problems of this community or a varsity or of our nation or of our time to be pushed aside ok bringing them back again and again to the attention of people who would rather

look the other way i think from a transit strike we can learn that compromise may be no solution at all the second lesson that i think we can learn from the situation that we have just been through is a lesson about retaliation if we could just have back all the energy that has been spent in this city cursing mr quillin his union we could probably like all of new york with it for quite a period of time i am pleased that the settlement strike statement announced the need that we must all avoid retaliatory measures and this of course is precisely what the gospel demands jesus said i say unto you love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you i think this is a very wise demand because it gives us an alternative to retaliate being unkind to those who move against us it saves us from bitterness and anger and enables us to

operate not out of hostility but out of strength now let me be very clear about one thing to love your enemies does not mean at all that we agree with everything they do it does not mean that we do not oppose them it really means that we do not equate their worthless human beings with the things they are standing for in our scripture story again it would have been the most natural thing in the world for paul to have attacked peter in a dozen underhanded ways for his breach of faith he might've gone about the gentile churches complaining bitterly won a writer peter was for what he had done he might have taken the gentile churches and go on his own way in the first dramatic denominational split in christendom but he didn't because he cared about peter and cared about their cause he approaches the man on the basis of his conduct and points out that it doesn't make sense here isn't bitterness it is a concern for the person

and concern for the cause to love those who oppose us to be concerned enough to pray for their means that were saved from retaliating in the way in which they treat us the problem a retaliation you see really is that we become what we most dislike in our opposition a man comes in my office to tell me what and bendable thing has been done to him by somebody we both know and i look at his face while he's talking and his teachers are contorted by anger and bitterness is blood pressure mounts and his temper is flaring it makes wild and extravagant statements about what he is going to do in return another these represent really responsible behavior this would shock him in it in a more sober moment what you're saying he doesn't want to retaliate in kind but he's about to do so he has become the very thing which he despises

a part of my responsibility as his friend and his minister is to say that he does not act of hate and fear now on the broader level if we have any conscience we cannot help but be disturbed by the way in which something of the same thing seems to be operating in our country's foreign policies at the conference table we condemn wrongly and continuously the immoral acts of those we oppose but at the operational level i'm not sure that our methods look much different we seem to be acting as if by some divine right we had been given permission to enter into political intrigue to overthrow governments to back revolutions to put our friends in and out of office that will to finance invasions whether we like it or not we are compelled to be judged by the same standards

that we demand from others and when we allow ourselves to be pushed into a moral actions or dishonest deals in the name of political expediency we're on dangerous ground so i simply am saying that we must recognize there needs to be an alternative to retaliation from fear anger and so far as i know the only workable alternative comes here from the gospel and is based on a concern for the other person deep enough that we refuse to treat him as he treats us we are commanded to pray for him i can't tell you whether your prayer is going to make any difference in his life but i think it will change you and i think it will give you an alternative to retaliation the last lesson that we can learn both from this strike situation from arts experience and from st paul is that we need to accept

reconciliation as an operating principle in life in reconciliation two parties become involved and identified with one another's needs the situation is turned inside out any age begins to look at the way in which the other fee you know it's a question of firms that this is a basic standards a basic operating principle at any level in life and your friends this because he understands this to be the way in which god has acted in relationship to our world cole says that the whole purpose of god's coming into our world in jesus christ can be summed up by saying that he was seeking to reconcile the world to himself an anything which tends to block that reconciliation whether it is individual attitudes are national ambitions these things run counter to the will of god and ultimately we'll be self defeating

well let's test the principal on a personal level a man and a woman come in to talk about getting a divorce they can't go on they say things have gone too far and now there is no possible way in which they can heal the wounds which they have inflicted on each other at this point if they should begin to discuss what has brought them to the situation they will inevitably come forth with charges and counter charges they will harden more and more into fixed positions and reconciliation will be a lasting less possible than when they came in the door each is isolated by the fact that he is chosen himself and his own pride and how things look from his own point of view and while he's in this frame of mind he has no basis for choosing the other but if we can talk for a while about what it was that originally brought this family together

if they can think about the things that attracted them to each other in the first place what made him the man she fell in love with what made her the kind of woman he wanted to marry more than any woman in the world and frequently they can begin to work together on images and ideals that they want shared and they can discover what has corrupted these and what has driven them apart but the major issue you see is whether they can choose themselves and their pride or whether they will choose to accept reconciliation as a principle and seek to learn and to understand the feelings of the other and seek to listen to each other without defensiveness now in an awfully elementary form it seems to me this is part of the dilemma that we faced in the transit strike and we'll face in any other strike unless reconciliation is accepted as a principle there is no way that two isolated units can get together i was greatly bothered during a strike by the fact that the issue

seemed less significant than the demands we were told at the beginning that unless demands could be guaranteed there was no reason for us to talk because if we don't get what we want we will talk with you at all when we make such claims we choose ourselves and the rift widens and it becomes more and more difficult to get together now i must point out that it seems to me that this is the same line that we have heard on the international scene in relation to the peace talks in vietnam except there it seems to me we find ourselves as a nation sitting in a different seat it appears that we may have rejected opportunities to talk about a peaceful settlement in the situation there for the same reason because certain guarantees will not be made and our reasoning looks a good deal like that of the te wu but unless we get our own way before hand we won't talk we

can begin to settle anything ever anywhere when both sides remain close to each other when all they have in common is a hostile frontier unless there is openness to the possibility of reconciliation we're not going to get anywhere now this demand to accept reconciliation as a basic stance is perhaps one of the hardest things that you will ever do in life is done oh because it leaves us open as individuals and as nations to the fact that we shall not always be right it forces us to lesson and to care about the people that opposed us it exposes us in a way to the needs of other people and once we are exposed to their knees we become vulnerable it's much easier if we don't have to get involved and we don't have to listen to their problems but we as christians are always brought up short by the demand that

we act as we understand god has acted in relation to us but he has come to seek and to save that which was lost that is coming to our world to reconcile that which has been broken apart even if that reconciliation shall be made at terrible cost to himself well the strike is over but the lessons i think remain they remain because they are the same old lessons which we shall have to earn over and over and over again in every conflict on the personal or the national or the international level the futility of compromise the necessity to find alternatives to retaliation and an acceptance of reconciliation as an operating principle these are lessons which emerged from every new testing with new power and new truth for us they're the lessons which mankind is going to have to learn if we're going to survive

on the surface and they are the lessons which each of us is going to have to learn in his own personal life if he is going to be what god meant him to be in his life and in his world but a sport fb fb