Dr. Edward W. Bauman Sermon, 1968-03-10

it's been friends in christ it is obvious that most of the creation story is our mythology of the world written by man and not by women because in most of these stories women are blamed far getting mankind into trouble we're all familiar with the story in genesis of pop diva was the first to each of the forbidden fruit and so began our downfall

similarly in greek mythology it was pandora the first woman who got us into trouble from atheists fall far from heaven and sees the chief god was so angry at his stealing this fire in order to bring it down to us that he created woman as punishment for man which is a new twist to the story the guards decided that since it had to be done they would contribute to the creation of pandora the first woman aphrodite gave her beauty hermes gave her cunningham the other gods contributed until it came time for zeus himself and he gave her a box for many with great mythology you know that at this point there are several versions of what happened but according to one of the popular versions the box contains all of the

blessings that were to be brought down to mankind they were to give into pandora on condition that she not open the box and look inside but this was too much for her she opened the box and all of man's blessings flow out and were lost except one she managed to slam it down in time to save hope so that all the blessings intended for mankind by the gods only hope remained the story came to my mind especially because i'm teaching a graduate level seminar on some contemporary literature of our time and the classic become so hopeless as it moved through contemporary literature or that i decided pandora's box today is empty even hope is gone so many people i have talked to late may have given up hope some of the most hopeful people i

know very close personal acquaintances have said to me in view of the problems in our world a massive problems in the inability of man to find a solution and the way in which individuals are breaking down they have lost hope a woman wrote to the washington post just the other morning and listed so many of the problems and said in conclusion i am sure that god has abandoned us the students in this seminar reflected this as we went through chemo and sergeant william faulkner and hemingway and tennessee williams and others such a degree that one of the students is having a great deal of difficulty in his own life mr quinn tried to tell me what was a semi numerous story the significance of it is not in the story but that he was talking about himself about the college student who was unable to find any meaning for his life he climbed up on a break he was going to jump off commit suicide a policeman came along and

founding there was unable to reach him began to talk to and driver argue him down finally the policeman said well why dont we enter into an agreement you take fifteen minutes and tell me everything that's wrong with the world and why you want to kill yourself and then give me fifteen minutes to tell you what's good about the world and why you want to want to go on living and then if you still feel like jumping i suppose you have the job well according to this didn't they each took their fifteen minutes joined hands and jump off a bridge together the student was saying to me in a very very old way i'm ready to jump and i dare you to tell me something good that will convince me otherwise there are so many people today who are ready to jump there are many who have given up hope the atmosphere of

despair is pervading the whole atmosphere of our common life pandora's box is empty even hope is gone and then the christian picks up his new testament and finds himself in a different world because a pervading a note of the new testament is hope from beginning to end the new testament writers know that because god is god because god is the kind of god that he is because god has acted decisively and definitively and jesus the christ man will never be without hope whatever else happens to us in the tide and currents of our time the christian never loses hope because of who god is and because of what god is doing it seemed to me that this morning

for a few moments we just ought to reaffirm this truth remind ourselves of that prepared to go out into the world and witness to this truth because everywhere we go people are asking you go through their words and their silence is there any good news from the church today and we have the good news and the way in which jesus primarily chose to talk about this hope is for the concept of the kingdom the kingdom of god this is the theme of this duty this is the one thing that he thought he told us this is so important that in order to have it we will sell everything we have if necessary we will trade him the pearl of great price in order to get this one thing this is the thing that we seek first this is the second edition of the

lord's prayer and we have prayed and already this morning and we'll pray at each day this week most of us thy kingdom come but what we don't realize is that every time we offer this petition we are positioning ourselves as the people of hope because this is the petition of hope in the lord's prayer now some of us are thrown off because the word best eleven just used in the new testament is translated king them as little meaning to many of us because we've never lived in a kingdom we don't have a king it seems like an archaic idea and so it is very helpful it seems to me to translate this as most of the modern versions do the rain rei gm or rule of god bahrain to come upon us and upon the world rule over us as god be god by kingdom come now the mood or the atmosphere of this if we

are really praying this prayer can permeate every area of our individual and corporate life i was in the most interesting discussion the other day with a group of men one of them started an argument by saying he is positively convinced that the third world war is in eligible and he summoned a massive amount of evidence to prove that the third world war is an ever to book and he was impressing upon us among other things the fact that our country has been spared in recent world wars but it will not be so in terms of the physical devastation and we shudder to think of bombs falling on a church like this one we're three had us all worked up into this argument then he said but it doesnt matter and that really set us off because it matters infinitely this is god's world

and it is not god's ultimate will that we should destroy ourselves and we argued about this and then he came through with a real point of what he was saying and though it was a half truth it was a very important is that the reason the toxins were and the reason it's come to this conclusion is that he now knows that nothing man can ever do will ultimately defeat god and even if we are foolish enough to bring down this devastation upon ourselves god is still got and as he turned to cross into victory he could even turn this and this grier of all horror individual and i think it's important for us to understand what he was saying because he had captured the core of new testament hope

nothing that man can ever do will ultimately the feat got he is ruling he will roll up his kingdom will come perhaps you remember when the submarine pressure went down was an incredible interview with the wife of the skipper of the summer and this was at a time when no one knew what had happened she was in great anxiety for her husband but not only for him for the fact that he was responsible for the lives of all the other men and the crew and i can remember the interview that was held with her at this time of great anxiety when she made a statement of faith as strong as any i've heard in many a day which is that i have complete confidence and my husband and i know that you did everything possible to save the ship and the crew but if the worst is true and they're all lost god is still god

of the earth and of the sky and of the city this is precisely what we are saying when we praise thy kingdom come god is god god will rule and this is the reason why we never lose hope now let me say that this is not a council to inactivity on our part on the contrary when we know that god will win then we are all the more eager to be a part of the movement of his life and of the coming of the kingdom and we are more urgent in our desires to beat instruments and channels through which he can work and operate but the important thing in a humanistic age like ours is to see god back of it all and to see this in spite of all the talk about our need for new concepts of god and new ideas of god and the secular rising of religion and the rest of that all of

these are very important and very necessary but back of all of these is the fact of god and the fact that he will rule now changed our mood for just a moment i want to suggest one of the reasons our hope is so strong for the coming of god's rule is that we have already partially experienced it and to the degree to which we have experienced it and have felt the fullness of life searching within us and i felt no strength to love and serve to this degree we get caught up in the excitement of this time and our hope growth here for example we have already partially experience the kingdom or rule of god in jesus christ and that's what has brought us

here this morning as his people in his life his teaching his death his resurrection in our involvement with him in his continuing presence in the body the church we have experienced god's role giving us ally and health and the urgency of our mission and all of us recognize that in this area we have certain problems as far as the new testament is concerned and this is why i wanted to have a few verses from the seventeenth chapter of luke in front of us i found has an experience as a result of being on television for some ten years now and a bible study program that people are eager very eager to know more about the teaching of jesus in fact one of the

most cameras infrared happen to have happened some years ago in a city in the midwest where our program on the life and teaching of jesus was being shown and in this city the program was taken off one sided in order to put on a state basketball tournament because in that particular state i think basketball is almost a state religion some of you come from the midwest now i thought everyone would replace have the state basketball tournament on to their amazement the switchboard at the station let up with people protesting and they said they will never forget how one very angry male voice said to the operator where in the hell is the teachings of jesus every time i go out the midwest i look for that man i haven't read in a son now he's become a symbol for many of people who want this

and as we move into the teaching of jesus we discover what has been for modern scholars i suppose the chief problem the fact that jesus talked about the kingdom of god or the reign of god is something coming in the future as we heard this morning in the closing versus and albert schweitzer started assault integrates the lonely battle by insisting that jesus expected the consummation of god wrote within his all time and it didn't come so jesus was wrong and in that aspect of his teaching and thousands of words and thousands of books literally have been written in trying to solve this problem and we sometimes lose sight of the fact that while the primary emphasis in the new testament is on the future thy kingdom come jesus made it very clear that the kingdom is partially realized now and in that same chapter follies strange words about the future

coming of the kingdom he said that the pharisees the kingdom of god is in your mix open your eyes see and i am here god's rule through this christ event is partially realized on another occasion he pointed to the healing incidents that had just been occurring and he said efforts by the finger of god that is by the power of god that these people are healed then the kingdom has come upon you it is here it is present and to the degree that we have experienced christ and identified with him we have experienced the kingdom now it's very difficult in our modern time to accept this because we're in a period of anti church commentary everywhere i go i find that it's open season on the church everything that's wrong with it an attack on our institutional structures

that have become obsolete and outmoded i hardly get into our house at sometime or on to speak when people just waiting to talk to somebody about what's wrong with the church i felt like the two men who met on the street one ask the other how are you you said i'm medium today he said when he immediately said well i'm worse than i was yesterday but i'm better than i'm gonna be tomorrow so many people and their attitude toward the church seem to be feeling that it's getting worse and worse just want to say parenthetically this morning that in every period of history when the church has most needed ray knowing god has moved him to renew it and he is renewing it in our time through the power of the holy spirit and the evidence of the renault is so strong that we don't need to get ourselves caught up in the criticism anymore but we can move with the renault

exciting new things god is doing in the church and part of the excitement to me is the fact that as the church is renewed more and more people experience this hope this partially realized kingdom this calming massive got into our mid through jesus christ simply say that we have partially experienced this kingdom and so we pray everyday viking don't come back which we have partially realized come in formats come soon this is our petition of pope but we have also experienced the kingdom within our own lives as individuals seventeenth chapter of logan the particular verse the kingdom of god is in your midst is often miss translated in fact it's probably one of the most frequently miss translated versus in the

bible i hear people saying all over the place the kingdom of god is within you oh this is the only place where jesus said that and most translators agree he didn't say that and that's not the best way to translate this passage however the truth that is implied in this statement is certainly present throughout the teaching of jesus and especially in john's gospel but whatever else we say about god he is with in in the depths of our being welling up within us is jesus said like a spring of fresh water and this god is seeking to give us life and to call and again our unique gifts and to bring us into the fullness of our potentialities person's each unique individual and to the degree to which we are open to this and accept it accept the rule of god to say with them us we experience them the kingdom and those fleeting

moments are so full of joy and meaning that they often color all the rest of life even though we slip back into our own ways so many of us claiming to certain things in our live relationships with other people attitudes patterns of thought and why we cling to them even when we know they are blocking the movement of god's life within us they calm those rare moments when we let go and we let this power of god move within us that passage in the big fisherman lloyd douglas's novel when peter is in rome talking to one of his friends men's ears he's talking about how difficult the times of thin for the christians down in the catacombs and venture says asking peter how do you minister to people when they're going through what they're going through in theory remember replies i pray with them and minister to their sick ones nancy us

i offer words of comfort when they are dying and they saw their graves and i bet dumpy of board chair for the king dome is coming and nancy his replies it must take great faith peter for them to believe the kingdom is coming when everything they had lost and peter replies that's when our faith is strongest men's ears for them to believe that the kingdom is coming is more possible when there is nothing else to lean on what i'm suggesting this morning is that we've all had those times when there is nothing else to lean on we lose the false securities we let go we relinquish and the role of god is established within us and in the joy and wonder of it we cry out by kingdom come

that which we partially realize now come fully calm unassuming this is our petition of pope or just one other area to mention very briefly it is not only through the christ and not only within us but in the world out there that we are seeing god establishes rule and for many of us this is the most exciting thing of all it is hard for some of us who are used to religious categories to hear people saying that we can no longer use the religious categories because of the way in which our world is moving but we need to listen to what these people are saying in so called secularized religion because what many of them are saying is that god is out there are establishing his rule and christ people ought to be out there giving at the christ content but welcoming what god is going out there this

is to be very realistic about the world we don't gloss over the problems and pretend they're not there mom was just telling me the other day of a younger room he said to his bride just after they were married now that we are married my dear you won't mind if i mention a number of defects i've noticed about two whereupon she replied not all beer it was those defects that kept me from getting a better husband that ought to be an interesting marriage they're christian is realistic about the defects all what we are discovering is that fact is where god is at the cutting edges of our social life as well as our individual life god is present there and some of us are making the amazing

discovery that when we get out there in the so called secular structures they are really sacred structures because god is present they're establishing his rule so some churches are bringing into being coffee houses and arts festivals hundred other new structures to be out there we discover in our church in washington as we organize to move out into the ghettos nearby that god is already out there and we found him out there and the strangest most wondrous ways when we got out there discussions that we've been having on vietnam and the christian's role in this and we have discovered the presence of god in places we never dreamed of before in the midst of the situation on a recent retreat with teenagers i was using the traditional talk about god and wasn't getting through and so i started to play some simon and garfunkel records the modern folk singers i am a rock i am an island the sounds of silence richard corey

and something happened to that group and to those kids and i submit to you that god was present in that music though the name of god was never mentioned secular structures listen to the music of our time and what it is saying i had another interesting encounter the other day with some hippies on dupont circle which is just right around the corner from our church and washington decided that some of a bizarre rebels with our cause is hard for us to deal with them and understand what they're all about and also have come to realize that some of the so called techies are rebels with a cause and the strange thing is they have heard what the church's been saying for generations about the sacredness of life and they don't believe we are taking our own teaching seriously and so they are finding strange ways of protesting

and i wonder at the heart of the life of some of the so called flower children and others if they haven't caught something that we have been trying to teach the world for a long time life is sacred god is law oregon some of our big hospitals i talk to a person recently gone through the experience of being down in the cobalt rooms radiation treatment of what in her case of undiagnosed has terminal cancer and she said as she was taken down into the air in all were sterilized facilities and the best functions of a teaching hospital she found god waiting for her there though his name was not mentioned god is at the cutting edges of a ministry of healing as it goes on and

hospitals laboratories and it's a great thing to find the church rediscovering its role in the ministry of human well all of these are just examples of what people are trying to tell us today about the fact that god is out there in his world it is his world he is establishing his rule his kingdom and instead of withdrawing from it we move out into it with the christ content praising god and thanking god and praying every day by kingdom come come come in for that now let me just say once again in parenthesis that all i've said this morning is not a council for us to sit back and let god do it we really understand what's being said we will feel isn't just the opposite why god is god god will rule of god is establishing his role and we as his people are to be a part of that we are the channels through which he moves

and so with greater urgency we move out into that world a suite here to be a part of what god is doing eager to give ourselves to this coming of the kingdom but i do think there are times and this morning i felt might be one of them when there is value in emphasizing the god who is establishing his rule and what is back of all of our activity and our commitment and our joyful obedience we need to remind ourselves of that from time to time need to remind ourselves of it for our own sake really if get caught up in this pace of life we needed to come this morning and just to feel listened to experience it in a new way and to feel our own lives coming into a new kind of fullness realization but we need your farmer through because of our witnesses there've already suggested before this week is over someone is going to ask

you perhaps not directly in words but in some other way what is the good news is there any hope is there any hope and as we reaffirm in a worship celebrating context this fact of god we find our part to witness strengthen and to carry out into the world is good news just as last word some of you probably know marguerite higgins personally she was covering the korean war as a correspondent and won the peel it surprise among other awards as you remember for her sensitive covering of that war on one occasion with a company of marines numbering eighteen thousand and had been in combat over a long period of time with over one hundred thousand of the communist chinese and these men were

experiencing what so many of our men are experiencing today fear bone deep fatigue pain death and all that goes with war one huge marine as marguerite higgins reports it was leaning against a truck one day eating called supper out of a can his clothes were stiff with dirt and cold his face covered with a heavy beard was encrusted with mud one correspondent obviously looking for a storyline asked him a strange and perhaps in sensitive question as correspondent asked him if i were god and could give you anything you wish what would you want most the marines stood absolutely motionless for just a few moments then raised his eyes and

said just give me tomorrow you and i are living in a world that is very uncertain of its future but in the midst of that world we pray thy kingdom come knowing that because god reigns there will be mr osbourne a surprise but it's been eternal god our father by kingdom in the name of jesus christ you like a copy of our involvement sermon liking income right to w rv our new york one double two seven s w o r b r new york

won double to seven remember