ALL THINGS BRIGHT AND BEAUTIFUL John M, Buchanan
Genesis 1:27-31 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
September 10, 1978 Columbus, Ohio

According to the media, there were more Americans overseas this summer than ever,
except in war time, You may have heard that the Buchanans were among them, What
was unusual about our experiences was that we went to live in Moffat, Scotland, as
a family - to live as Scots for eight weeks: and I was given the privilege of
practicing my ministry among the people of St, Andrew's Parish Church, We were
tourists, to be sure ~ but we were very aware that we represented you: everything
we did, what we ate for breakfast, what newspapers we read, the way we related to one
another, was a matter of close scrutiny with the Scots, And because I am a minister
Iwas granted immediate access to the deepest concerns and hopes and disappointments
and joys of people who soon became very dear friends,

IT am aware that Americans do not come to church on a warm September morning
to hear a travelogue, but I found it quite impossible to ignore the summer as T
prepared this sermon, And the first order of business is to say "Thank you": to the
staff - all of whom worked a little harder this summer to cover for me and to make
life comfortable for the Reverend Gerald Moule, Minister of St, Andrew's, and his
family: to those who entertained the Moules and made their stay in Columbus a memor-
able one: and to all the people of Broad Street Presbyterian Church who allowed their
minister to be absent so long and to have this stimulating, challenging experience
of a lifetime,

It is very good to be back, One of the distinct advantages of being away for
an extended period of time is that when one returns the ordinary becomes unique, the
everyday is suddenly interesting, We find ourselves still luxuriating in the comfort
of American life, appreciating a bit more what all of us take for granted, and en-
joying thoroughly the rich gift of friendship and affection,

We will live out of our experience for a long time to come, I trust that you
will forgive me if I refer to Scotland on occasion and assume that I am not really
name dropping but rather drawing on a very stimulating and thought provoking exper-
ience, This evening we will share the details of our summer in a more informal
setting and we invite you to join us at 7:00 for dessert in the Dining Room,

My interest in Scotland is on three levels, First, in terms of my roots,
Scotland is where both the Buchanans and the McCormicks originated. Second, in
terms of history the Scots, and the Scotch-Irish, were among the first to come to
the colonies, Some were Tories: most found the American Revolution more to their
Castes, They left an indelible mark on the founding era of the American Republic,
Third, in terms of theology, Scotland is the place where the ideas and constructs of
John Calvin took root and grew into an institution, Ina degree of intensity,
violence and bloodshed that we now find almost embarassing the Scots fought and died
for matters such as the type of worship which would be held in their Kirk, whether
communion would be celebrated kneeling or standing, or whether ministers would be
appointed by the landed aristocracy or chosen by the people, It is the birthplace
of Presbyterianism, and the Church of Scotland today remains resolutely the same,
So, if one is interested in beginnings, there is no place on earth, at least for an
American Presbyterian by the name of Buchanan, as significant as Scotland,

We fell in love with Moffat, a town of 2,500, fifty miles north of the Enelish
border; the same distance south of both Glasgow and Edinburgh, The countryside is-
rugged, steep, mostly barren and used mainly for sheep grazing, A statue of a ram
stands proudly in The High Street, Moffat's main thoroughfare, Tourists by the

a Sw

thousands stop at the Moffat Weavers for woolens and then drift into town for tea or
lunch: the people of Moffat appreciate their money, tolerate their presence and

look forward to September, Tourists, including Americans, are not ordinarily the
most gracious representatives of their homelands. Moffat is just north of the
Border Region where for centuries Scotsmen and English invaded, plundered, kidnapped
and killed one another for the sheer joy of it, it seems, It is the heart of
Covenanting Country, that radical Presbyterian movement that refused to acknowledge
the authority of the Church of England, the Episcopacy and the Prayer Book, Two miles
up a mountain, on a farm we visited, is a Preaching Rock, where the Covenanters
gathered to worship, out of sight of English troops, Five miles north of town is a
monument to a Covenanter who was shot, And directly across the street from St,
Andrew's Church is the Black Bull Inn, established in 1545, the postal coach stop
between Carlisle and Glasgow, where the infamous Graham of Claverhouse quartered his
troops while hunting for Covenanters, Robert Burns frequented that tavern as well and
once scratched a wee poem on a window glass there, it is told,

St Andrew's is the Parish Church, established to serve a geographical area, The
people of the town regard it as their Kirk, even if they do not belong to it, or
Support it, in a way that is difficult for Americans to understand, It is there - as
part of their heritage: it is as much a part of their establishment as the courts and
schools, Worship is dignified, solemn, reverent: without printed materials or
responses, or anything which might remind one of the formalized liturgies of Angli-
canism or Roman Catholicism, And yet, the unwritten liturgy is rigid: five hymns,
prayers, scripture, sermon - always in the same order, And while the Church of
Scotland is working on liturgical renewal, one had the distinct sense that this is
how God's people have been doing it for four hundred years and there had better be a
rather compelling reason for changing anything, I was responsible for a special,
community-wide service on a Sunday afternoon, and when I suggested that we might
do something a little different, my colleagues looked at me quizzically and asked
simply, "Why?"

The focal point of the Reformation was the preaching of the word and it still
is at St Andrew's and throughout the Church of Scotland, The Beadle, a church
officer, met me in the vestry for prayer, then ceremoniously carried the Bible to the
pulpit, then returned to escort me to the pulpit, closing the pulpit door behind
me - an eloquent expression of the expectations and priorities in the worship
experience,

I preached on seven of eight Sundays at St, Andrew's at 11:00 and Wamphray, a
small rural church, at 12:30, During the week I called on members, visited hospitals,
nursing homes, did a little counseling, conducted a funeral and baptized a baby,

We travelled north to the Highlands, Kinlochleven to see old friends, Stirling,
Buchanan Country around Loch Lomond, Buchanan Castle, Edinburgh, the ancient Abbeys
of Melrose and Dryburgh, We saw seventh century Celtic Crosses, and sheep clipped
in the same way as their ancestors have been clipped over the centuries, We took
countless walks through gorgeous mountains, worshipped in the High Kirk of St. Giles
in Edinburgh where John Knox preached, and saw where Mary, Queen of Scots, was born,
married, reigned, and the room where her Italian secretary and confidant was
murdered, We sailed to northern Ireland, drove to the Republic and stayed in the
house where Matthew Kearney was born, farmed, and decided to come to America with his
young bride, Fannie Montgomery - who died last week - and who, among other things,
became the mother of my wife's father, We traveled to London, saw what people see
in London; attended Evensong at St. Paul's: and, on the way home, stood in awe at
the magnificent windows of Yorkminster,

« f=

On the first Sunday in Moffat, I was called on to award books and prizes to
children of the Sunday School during worship, One of the hymns sung on the occasion
was a favorite children's hymn in both Church of Scotland and Church of England,
"All Things Bright and Beautiful", The tune is light, innocent, simple, much more
lively than most - obviously a children's hymn,

"ALL things bright and beautiful
All creatures great and small
All things wise and wonderful -
The Lord God made them all,
Each little flower that opens
Each little bird that sings
He made their glowing colors
He made their tiny wings."

Many of us are familiar with the words only because author James Herriot chose
them for book titles for his very popular sequence about life as a veterinarian in
the Yorkshire Dales, I confess that I had not heard the hymn before, and that,
frankly, it felt a bit awkward, as it always does when adults try to sing like
children, But then I had the privilege of hearing it sung as it was intended, I
was invited to address five separate school assemblies and at each one, the children
sang "All Things Bright and Beautiful", You haven't heard that hymn until you have
heard it sung by dear Scottish Kindergartners, In that context, the power and pro-
fundity of what the hymn asserts came through to me -

"All things bright and beautiful.,, Q py?
The Lord God made them all," \yu

4 \ter

At the heart of all honest religion are three identifiable experiences or \ yet
ct

feelings, I have come to trust them as criteria for my own religious experience :
and practice,.,the feeling and experience of wonder,.,the feeling and experience of \»\
trust,,,the feeling and experience of love - for life, self and others, ure

The Scottish Kindergartners couldn't have expressed it academically, but they ‘in
were, I felt, dealing with the most profound structures of the human spirit as they
sang their little hymn, We can, I submit, learn a great deal from them.

Years hence, the mid-twentieth century will be identified, I think, as the time
when people stopped believing that God, if He exists at all, has anything whatever
to do with the world, Theologically, it will be the time identified not as Death of
God, but when men and women were forced to rethink, in altogether radical terms, the
venerable doctrine of creation, or centuries Genesis 1 and 2 served well, Science,
such as it was, assumed a stable, serene universe, Theology assumed a sovereign God
whose handiwork could be seen in nature and whose will was clear in the fortunes of
history, The scientific and technological revolution of our century has changed
that fundamentally, The universe, it was discovered, is exploding outward at the
speed of light. Life evolved through the process of natural selection and matter
turned out to be not nearly as simple as everyone thought. God, somewhere in all of
that, receded into the safety of theological abstraction or the irrelevant nostalgia
of "Old-time religion", Thinking people were aware that the rules of the game had
been changed essentially, and radically and ominously, In a very substantial recent
work, University of Chicago theologian Langdon Gilkey writes: "The ordinary experi-
ence of contemporary men and women, and so the world they inhabit, pcssesses for
most of us no transcendent dimension: the horizon of that experience seems closed or

~ dew

cramped,,.What is real to most of us, and so alone effective, are only those natural
or human factors," (Reaping the Whirlwind, p,137).

And yet, we live in a pivotal time, when thoughtful people, not comfortable
with obsolete religious ideas, are realizing the inadequacy of secularism and
there is a lot of drifting, treading water, theologically, Gian Carlo Menotti,
composer of Amahl and the Night Visitors, mused in an interview recently about his
own loss of faith,,,"I am definitely not a religious man, All the same I am haunted
by religious problems, Why? I can hardly explain it to myself,,,I've lost my faith
but it is a loss that makes me uneasy, I often feel like a runaway, who suddenly
finds himself wondering if he has not left home too rashly or too soon," (Context,
June 1, 1978),

Haunting religious questions are posed today, interestingly, not by the
theologians but by their old nemesis, science, Time magazine did a feature article
last week on Black Holes, those "bottomless pits in space into which matter simply
disappears," In spite of itself, the magazine became theological by observing that
the intense interest in the subject is due to the fact that "black holes mark the
points when astrophysics intersects metaphysics and science finally converges
with religion," Perhaps the experience of wonder and mystery and awe is not as
obsolete as we thought, Perhaps the astrophysicist is the new priest leading the
litany - "When I look at the heavens, the stars and the moon,..0 Lord, our Lord, how
majestic is thy name..." or better yet, "All Things Bright and Beautiful,"

The second construct of honest religion, so eloquently expressed by singing
children, is trust: trust that the created order is essentially good: trust that the
Genesis writer knew what he was about when he affirmed that God liked what He had made,

There is a lot about our common life that seems to deny that, There is a lot
of warmed-over Greek dualism in our thinking that regards the created, physical order
with suspicion, It is reflected in our notorious ambiguity about human sexuality,
our disturst of sensual appetite of any form, our disregard of human life - whether
in demeaning pornography or slick violence, It is reflected also in our irresponsible
treatment of the world around us; the regrettable and thoroughly American refusal to
take seriously the precarious balance of the ecosystem of which we are only one part,
Our time is pivotal on this basic religious construct; the jury is still out and we
could well be instructed by my wee friends in Scotland, [i

Finally, and related to both wonder and trust, honest religion has to do with
the basic love of life which always includes love of self and love of others, Some-
where this too became a casualty of the twentieth century, In a New York Times
Book Review recently novelist Eudora Welty was asked why younger writers seem to
show so little love for the human species, and responded, "They tend to doubt the
truth of something that doesn't hurt pretty badly; there's a sort of distressing
feeling that if you admire or like something, there's a lie in it somewhere - either
in it or in yourself - which is such a frightening prospect when you think of all that
can be missed out of life if you can't embrace a little more of it than comes in
through such a narrow squint-hole, like the leper's squint in a church,"

Somewhere at the heart of honest religion is an unapologetic love of life,
which includes the world, one's own life and the life of others, It is there, clearly,
in Genesis, and there is nothing more sad nor more erroneous than religion that some-
how manages to ignore or eliminate it, or worse yet, turn it upside down so
thoroughly that life is hated, Gilkey calls it, in a very helpful phrase "the joy

-~ 5»

in one's own being", ‘There is no creativity, no music, no poetry, no deap Love
and honest laughter without an unapologetic joy about one's own being,

The Christian faith invites you to laugh and love who you are and to embrace
the world, It invites you to experience a little mystical awe at the fact that
‘you are, Or, as Pee Wee Reese, field captain of the Brooklyn Dodgers in the
1950's said twenty years Later: "there were lotsa days when I'd run out onto the
_ field and say, “Hey,Pee Wee, you've in the big Leagues,"

Jesus wanted desperately for His disciples to think like that, It's what He
was telling them in that brief portion of the Sermon on the Mount we heard this
morning. "Look at the birds of the air - Consider the lilies - are you not of
more value thatn they?" Honest religion has at its heart the sense that we have
been created by God, that we are loved by God, nothing will separate us from that
love, and that - all things considered, that is very good news indeed,

It means including others in the picture as weil, It means Living as if God
loves your neighbor as much as He loves you, It means rejoicins in the “essential
being" of another as well as your own, It means seeing the common humanity, the
hopes and loves and aspirations and disappointments of others and feeling them
personally: the tomato pickers, for instance, the welfare recipient, the ghetto
parent, It means living in leve and seod will and justice and equanimity with all
the other children in God's family,

There is a lot we shall remember from this summer. Somewhere in it all will
be a class of Scottish six year olds singing words which I commend to you very
highly:

“ALL things bright and beautifal
All creatures great and smail
All things wise and wonderful -
The Lord God made them all,"
Amen,

Almighty God, our Father, remind us that we are your creatures, the sheep
of your hand, Free us to rejoice in who we are, to Love you honestly and care
for one another openly and compassionately, © God, we give thanks for your love,
so evident in your whole creation: through Jesus Christ our Lord,

Amen,