GOD IS NOTDEAD - Joshua 24:14-24
Serie thc end

I suppose it is natural to feela little ambiguous about the task
of preaching once a man has resigned, as I have done this week.\ It's
a little like the :lame duck" public official who knows that very

little can be accomplished between the time his successor has been

elected and his ownterm has run out | The relationship has been broken;

whatever influence there once was--is no more. And yet a minister

nurtures the optimistic hope that somehow--all those hundreds of

thousands of words add up to something; \that something of lasting and
significant value has been said or done, \orcourse--there 's no way ar
knowing; no way of measuring; yet the hope remains.

Pursuing this hope I spent sometime last week going over the sermons

of the past six years to see what was said,\ana as is the case when one

goes back over old work, I wasn't particularly impressed with anything

but the sheer vouume \ 1 had hoped that I would discover one or two

major themes that ran through my work, but none were apparent | And

so I was driven to ask myself ("How can I sum it all up? What's really

important? I have four Sunday's left-how can I tie ite¢1l1 together on

those four occasions?"
This morning's sermon, then, is my first answer to that series of

questions.\Under the general title ("what a Man Can Believe") I will be

attempting on four occasions, to leave with you a focus of the Christian

nessage | crantea, the initial effort is rather basic. ("God Is Not Dead."

should not startle anyone, an yet given the particular way our culture

believes in God, and given the recent theological school that proclaims

that "God is Dead" I felt it was semething—I_neededtodealwith. 7/Ac
pleec ar ay needed whe PSS on,

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and we are shocked when the crime rate, drug_addiction and prostitution
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remain.\ We've gained nothing but the replacement of horizontal ghettos

with vetical ones \ In short our logical analysis of the problem has
ir ae —

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been wrong, in neglecting the undefinable--the human element --the

thousands of individual prople--each one of which with a reason for
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being the way he is.

Our theological thinking, likewise, gets Lig foe on on togte | God

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simply doesn't fit into our scheme of things--and so we feel we have

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reason to doubt his existence \ Yet this is not accurate either for

What really has i os this;|we have stopped taking the possibility

of God seriously.| Basically God doesn't fit into our shceme of things

and so we don't bother even trying torelate him to our lives.| And yet

we continue to affirm_our Eel ee sehecneee itis proper or because we

are frightened to let it go;.or because it really doesn't matter much

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one way or ther other.
The philosopher Santayana once said: (ne brute necessity of believing
something so Ing as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.)

And Sydney Harris, writing for the Chicago Diily News expanded that

thought in a recent editorial when he said: ("nhc people who think

that faith is a good thing to have, no matter what it is faith in, merely
cheapen and debase the whole concept and turn what should be the quest
for truth inte a kind of spiritual sresengc” )

I don't know about defining faith as the (rauest for truth, ") but L de

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think Harris has pinpointed the problem. bm culture we hage m@afing

deified the act of having faith, while at the same time excluding any

specific affirmations regarding the subject or object of faith. In

fact, then Pres, Eisenhower summed it up when he said; ("amertoan

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Democracy today is basedon faith, and I don't care what kind of faith

it 19." py the way, D, E, is a Presbyterian.

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this nation strayed from God--and found itself defeated and destroyed thisé¢
is what God is Like. | The Bible says a man_who wanKed through the valley

of death-felt a nearness, a comfort and a renasein! tite is what God

is like,

And so, as we seek to. know God as a living reality through the

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Bible--we need to understnad what the Biblical writers had in mind. | Ana

clearly they hd in mind the unexplainable, mysterious presence they had

experienced and whgat they called God.\The Bible, then, becomes the

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signpost, the pointer for the modern reader .\It says to him--th&s is

what God was like to us-and this is what he is like éternally.
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We need, then,to do our theological homework in the depth of our
own experience--our own history .\ We need to know God as the ereator;

not so much as the creator of the universe--for that is, perhaps, a

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thought too distant from us| but as the one who created us--the one who

gave life to us and our parents, and our children | We need to know

God the creator as the one who brings newness and life to our rather

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unexceptional existences. \ We’ need to Know God as one who loves and

cares--not so much for all his creatures--but for us; the nmne who

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accompanies and strengthens us when we walk through the valley of the

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shadow of death,

We need to know God as redeemer--not so much of the whoel human

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race, but as the source of redemption and healing in aur vives \ Haven't

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we ever experieced reconciliation?\| Haven't we ever experienced the

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forgiveness of another-the closing of a wide gap be tween ourselves

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and another bao |e need to know that this is what God is life.