AT WHAT ALTAR WILL YOU KNEEL John M, Buchanan
Matthew 9:9-13 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
June 4, 1978 Columbus, Ohio

The first weekend in June is one of the major turning points in American
life, It is Listed on no schedule or calendar but something very significant
transpires in the mind and heart of this culture on this weekend, It is a time of
endings and beginnings: time to bring to a conclusion, or at least a resting place,
the September through May activities and concerns, It is time to slow down and
reflect a bit, to savor sunny days and long, pleasant evenings; For many families,
mine among them, it is a time for celebration, when one person emerges from the
educational process successfully, with diploma in hand, In thousands of commence~
ment addresses this weekend and next, millions of wise and witty words will be aimed
at graduating seniors, In many of them a question will be raised, one posed long
ago by the English poet, John Keats:

"To what green altar, O mysterious priest
Lead'st thou that heifer Lowing at the skies.,,?"

The late Howard Lowry, President of the College of Wooster, singled out
that question as the matter which had intrigued and occupied his attention and
energies and imagination for thirty years, To what green altar? Or, as I have
paraphrased, “At what Altar Will You Kneel?" (See College Talks, p,112), The question
is posed today for those who may be graduating, But in the broader sense I poge it for
all of us; for it is the religious question,

As I thought about the question I recalled a motion picture which was re-
leased ten years ago near the end of the stormy 1960's, The Graduate, attempted to
address the whole matter of the frustration the American middle class was feeling
about itself by examining its values, In theological terms the movie was a biting
commentary on contemporary idolatry, It begins, you may recall, as Benjamin returns
home after a very successful college experience, His parents have thrown a graduation
party for him, With his whole life in front of him, wanting now to make responsible
vocational and philosophic decisions, Benajmin realizes at the party that he is sur~
rounded by people who are no longer asking the questions, Each, in a way, particular-
ly his parents, have sold out, and given both body and soul to the pursuit of money,
suecess and prestige, A particularly insightful moment occurs when one of his
father's friends, a successful executive, ushers the graduate away from the crowd
for a minute, puts an arm around his shoulder and out of earshot from the noisy
cocktail party says intimately, "One word, Benji; maybe the most important word you
will ever hear," Benjamin's eyes light up, finally someone is going to discuss the
issues about which he is most concerned. The executive continues gravely, ''Plastice,
Benji: get into plastics,"

From there he is drawn into an affair with the infamous Mrs, Robinson and
proceeds to spend his summer at what the movie defines as the altar of Middle Class
America: the pursuit of pleasure, mostly through booze, Even though he knows he is
being seduced by both Mrs, Robinson and the value system she represents, he is bored
and uneasy, He is rescued from his emptiness by a young woman, whom he loves pro-
foundly, She happens, also, to be Mrs. Robinson's daughter. When he reveals his
intent to marry the girl, her parents push her into marriage with another suitor,
The movie concludes in a bazarre and brilliant sequence as Benji rescues Elaine from
the wedding, in a Presbyterian Church, beating back the enraged congregation with an
ornamental brass cross. He uses the cross to barricade the doors of the church with
all the people inside, and the happy couple rides off into the future on a bus. The

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message? Freedom, wholeness, joy become possible when you leave middle class values
behind, including its very proper religion,

Appealing as that sounds, it is never that simple, And yet the movie raised
some important issues, I thought it was one of Hollywood's better efforts, because
it identified in honest and understandable terms, the altars to which we are in-
clined to kneel, As such I have always regarded it as a modern commentary on the
central Biblical motif of idolatry which shows up as an underlying motif in both of
our texts this morning,

The New Testament Lesson begins with the call of Matthew, the tax collector,
to discipleship and proceeds to a dinner at which Jesus is discovered to be eating
with other tax collectors and assorted sinners, Those two actions were viewed with
horror by proper religious people. Jesus not only committed a social faux pas by
associating with outcasts, he was also violating a handful of ceremonial laws, When
He was quizzed by the Pharisees about His behavior He said simply, "Go and learn
what this means: I desire mercy and not sacrifice,"

The essence of the religion of the Pharisees was the whole legal and sacri-
ficial system, It guaranteed that the individual was right with God if he obeyed
the rules and performed appropriately at the altar, ;

Jesus was saying that God doesn't really care about that so much as He cares
about the way people treat one another, Legal propriety and ceremonial exactness
are not as important, that is to say, as kindness, love, generosity - around a
dinner table, In fact, in a complete turn about, sometimes relicion gets in the vay
of the things that matter most to God,

The Pharisees - translated "religious people" - were busy at the wrong
altar, Their altar was a solitary place - for God and themselves alone, The true
altar, Jesus was saying, is a crowded place, with lots of people around, And what
transpires between God and the individual there has everything in the world to do
with what subsequently happens between individuals, Thus, "I desire mercy and not
sacrifice,"

He Was quoting from a source they all knew well: the Book of the Prophet
Hosea, The goal of Old Testament Religion is righteousness and justice, Righteous~
ness has to do with the individual's standing with God: Justice - with the way love
is acted out in human relationships, The most dangerous deterrent to both righteous-
ness and justice in the Old Testament is idolatry.

Idolatry is the fundamental issue, ‘The Ten Commandments begin with the
injunction, "You shall have no other Gods before me." But the subtle twist to the
issue in Old Testament terms is that idolatry is associated with slavery, When the
people are in Esypt they are in bondage, When they trust God, He leads them through
the wilderness into freedom, That's important, Throughout the Old Testament the
issue recurs as the people chase after other gods, ending up in one form of bondage
or another, Sometimes, their bondage is to their own religion, Sometimes they
forget the intent of the law which was to build a community of Love and justice,
in their busy effort to obey it and carry out all its rituals and ceremonies,

The Hosea story was written out of that situation, Hosea's wife, Gomer,
had been faithless, The law prescribed that she be stoned, But Hosea could not

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give her up, His love was stronser than the religious law, and the very poignant
tale of how he loved her back to faithfulness is a brilliant indictment of the
idolatry of religion itself, The issue is mercy, not ritual: steadfast love and
compassion, not obeying the rules, The question the prophet put to the people is
simply: "Where do you stand? At what altar do you really worship?”

The texts come alive for us as we raise the same issue, At what altars do
you kneel? What, really, is important to you? ;

Observers of our culture are quick to identify the cult of "success" as the
most vigorous American religion, Its symbols are corispicudus consumption, materialism,
the order of the bigger and the better, the not-so-subtle gospel of Madison Avenue
that calls us to consume as a celebration of our salvation, Hoard Lowry observed
one time: “Even the occasional viewer of television gets the impression that America's
chief business ig glutting and guzzling and then recovering in some high bicarbonate
fashion by taking something that acts twice as fast as something else," (Ibid, p,116),
The slick magazine ads invite us to kneel at the altar of prestige: to announce our
salvation to anyone who might be interested by the cut of our clothes, the model of
automobile we drive and the brand of scotch we drink,

You have heard all that before and I would guess that there is no one here
who does not know intuitively the emptiness of that gospel and the shoddiness of
that altar, We are examining very carefully our commitment to materialism, But,
there is a more subtle form of idolatry which has emerged, however; the idolatry of
self, It is, by the way, the oldest and classic form of idolatry, born anew in our
generation in the respectable guise of psychology, Self discovery, self awareness,
self actualization have become obsessions with us, bordering at times on the edge of
self deification and self worship, ‘The New Narcissism, Tom Wolfe called it in an
excellent essay: it is the theolosy that salvation will happen when [I have finally
learned who I am: bean taught to love myself: and have given myseif permission to do
whatever I want to do without much regard for the consequences, But Professor
Joseph Sittler warns: "The core of man's freedom is his self-imprisonment, He is a
slave because he permits himself to be enslaved to his self's tyrannical power."
(The Care of the Earth, p,146). Sittler goes on, in almost poetic language, to put
his finger on the essence of the matter: talking about Luther's doctrine of sin as
the "curving in of the self" he writes, "What's new is that an incurvature which has
traditionally been regarded in Christian pedagogy as a disposition to be overcome is
among many in our day jubilantly cultivated as a way of redemption]" (The Ecology
of Faith, p.12)}.

The nev idolatry of the late 1970's has moved beyond the materialism in-
dicted by the Graduate, What we are dealing with now, Sittier is saying, is the
elevation of the self to the position and prerogative of God...

The litanies of the nev idolatry are devastating,.,

Moratly,.."if it feels good, do it," That ts to say: "me,
my senses are the ethical standard,"

Politically.,."what's in it for me?'' That is,"my self
interest is the rule,”

Intellectually..,"if it doesn't turn me on now, it's
irrelevant," Sittler includes a vignette in one of his
books to illustrate the new intellectual egotism, One time

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holding forth on some obscure theological motif from

the Council of Chalcedon, he was abruptly interrupted

by a student who complained: "But, Doc, I can't

interiorize this stuff!"

Spiritually,,."I want a salvation I can feel, an individual
sense of God's personal love for me," That is: "in religion
too, the self must be gratified,

Please understand that ve need to value and esteem ourselves, We needed
the impetus of the Human Potential Movement to teach us that each individual is
worth something and has potential, We need to recover a sense of dignity and im-
portance for the individual, But that whole house of catds comes crashing down when
we fail to place the individual in the community of other individuals - his or. her
family, school, nation, human race even: or, in Christian terminology, to place it
all in the context of a God who sees the highest humanity in terms of people treating
one another as brothers and sisters,

Toward a recovery, then: tovard kneeling at the right altar. The problem is
that our culture is increasingly secular, Someone observed recently that some. people
believe in God: others do not, Most don't think it matters, Hisher education pro-
ceeds merrily handing out sheepskins without once raising the issue of fundamental
meanings and values and convictions, Secular culture approves the deification' of the
individual because, in secularism, it's all we have, Former President of Harvard,
Nathan Pusey, marched to a different drummer and wrote, "Indeed it would seem to me
to be a very superficial intellectual credo which would imply that the question of
religion can be ipnored, (Best Sermons, 1958-60, p.255), Pusey thought the real
questions in life are always relisious questions: matters of life and death and hope
and meaning which the culture seems to want to ignore. He wrote, "It is no part of a
college's obligation to give or impose answers, but a college should help her sons
to ask the right questions - and all the questions." (Ibid, p,254), Finally, in what
is one of my favorite quotes he said, "It would seem to me that the finest fruit of
serious learning should be the ability to speak the word God without reserve or
embarrassment, certainly without adolescent resentment: rather with some sense of
communion, with reverence and with joy." (Cited by Lowry, op.cit. p.175),

Now, religion too can be idolatry, The forms and structures can get in the
way of honest faith, The answer is not simply joining up, making a pledge and
attending worship on oceasion, That can be a shoddy altar and no one is quicker to
know that than a young person, And yet, particularly to those of you who now must
come to some conclusion about institutional religion apart from parental pressure,
let me suggest that church and synagogue are the only places where the issue is raised,
where the question is asked and where people struggle together to arrive at the
answer, Religious institutions, for all their foibles and frailties, are the places
where the word God is used without embarrassment, where people honestly strive to be
loving and merciful and forgivine; where something other than success, prestige
and self occupies the gathered attention of all,

The people who were horrified when Jesus sat at table with tax collectors
and sinners meant well, They intended only to preserve and protect the institution
of their religion and the faith of their fathers, But somewhere in the process they
had made a god of that religion, and missed entirely its fundamental thrust and
purpose, They had to be reminded that real religion, real faith in God, begins by
obeying Him - and that, inevitably means welcoming other people to table,

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So, modern men and women mean well by the frantic pursuit of success and
prestige, No father sets out to alienate his children by working eighteen hours
a day. No wife intends to devastate her marriage in the process of self~discovery,
No student intends to leave integrity behind by borrowing a term paper from a room-
mate. Na person intends to leave unattended the fundamental matters of life; But it
happens all the time, It happens because what we really want in life - all of us -
is a little peace, a little security, a little joy, some sense that it all matters,
and we have believed that the idols of our culture will provide that, We have been
kneeling at the wrong altar,

The witness of the Faith is that God wants all that for us as well: real
peace, true joy, profound meaning and exhilarating freedom: freedom to become every-
thing we can become, freedom to live deeply and fully, The Bible suggests simply
that those gifts are given at the crowded altar of God himself,

I have depended on the thought of the late Howard Lowry throughout this
sermon, in the last Baccalaureate address he delivered before he died he told the
graduating seniors at Wooster: "IF L could wish anything for a young man or woman
this morning it would be the wish that, early in his days and far ahead of some
desperate need, he could come to feel that his own Life had eternal meaning, Tolstoy
used to complain that we had Lost the power to turn our minds to bear on those
important things that only the near thought of death could bring, ‘This seems a pity
if it be so, It means missing so much now - this side of the hospital corrider, So
math of ardor, so much of joy, so much of beholding," (Op,cit, p. 127}.

The witness of the Christian faith is that when we kneel at the altar of
the one God, we vill see some other people kneeling there with us, and some others
standing near by watching, and some others who aren't much interested in the whole
project. If, as we kneel there, we learn to Love them, to turn to them, parents,
brothers, sisters, neighbors, strangers, with compassion and kindness and justice
and healing, we will have discovered what Jesus meant when He said, "Go and learn
what this means; 'I desire marcy and not sacrifice,'™ And more; We will find that
at that altar, we have bean given what we have spent our lives sacking,

Amen,

God our Father, we are restless until we find our rest in You. Forsive
us our willingness to worship at other altars, And love as we return; through
Jesus Christ our Lord,

Amen,