THEREFORE John M, Buchanan
I Corinthians 15:51-16:1 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
November 5, 1978 Columbus, Cuio

It is always difficult to asscss the long-range significance of a phenomenon
as it is happening. But I am convinced that historians one day will shake their
heads in wonder about the fact that a generation of young people who for a decade
or so shook an entire society to its roots by marching, demonstrating, streaking,
singing the music of revolutisun and congregating all over the country challenging
everything the middle class held dear - that generation -, faded as quickly as it
emerged and gave way to another generation that found, of all things, religion,

The telephone calls began about five years ago, Every minister I know has
received them and agonized over them. The pattern is uncanny because of its similar-
ity. The call is precipitated by the fact that a young man or woman has just
announced to his parents that he has seen the light and has joined a religious sect,
the Moonies for instance, Hare Krishna, The Church of Scientology, or a radically
evangelical Christian group, The young person was brought up in the church, the
story goes; baptized in a mainline Protestant congregation, attended Sunday School
fairly regularly as a child, joined the church at adolescence in a Confirmation
Class, and then began to lose interest. The Youth activities of the church were the
first to go, tlien Sunday School, finally worship, No one was alarmed: it is, after
all, the accepted and now typical way middle class families deal with institutional
religion, By the time the youns person went off to college, Christianity simply had
nothing whatever to do with the rest of his or her life, Armed with an adolescent
theology, a collection of obscure Bible stories from the fifth grade, and a worship
experience which included a grant total of ten hours in the past three years, the
young person walked straight into the buz: saw of articulate, reasoned, academic
atheism and the battle was over before the fifst shot was fired, And then, out of
the blue, this: this unlikely, frightening phenomenon of that middle class young
person, suddenly shaving his head and wearing a saffron robe; or moving into the
Moonie commune and selling flowers at the airport; or standing on the street corner
handing out tracts that ask, "Are you certain where you will spend eternity?"

"Why, Reverend? What happened? What did we do wrong?" There is a lot of
anguish and guilt and real poignancy in the phone calls, and as a parent I am any-
thing but judgmental, I'm not sure I know what went wrong - although I have some
strong hunches,

Robert Bellah, a sociologist at the University of Califonia in Berkeley, and
a strong United Church of Christ layman, worked with a survey in the Bay Area to
discover why the conservative, evangelical churches were scoring so heavily with
middle class collcce students, The survey revealed that young people turn to those
churches for three main ruasons: they find in the theology simple answers and a
purpose for living: they discover group experiences and an identity different from
the rest of society: and, most important of all, these churches demand discipline
and sacrifice; there is a high cost to belonging. There are many scholars studying
the phenomenal srowth of Sun Myong Moon's Unification Church, and the answers are
strikingly similar, Commitment must be total: young converts Live together, work
together for the common good, bind themselves to a puritanical ethic which strictly
forbids alcohol, drugs, tobacco and pre-marital sex. There is, apparently, tre-
mendous appeal to a religion that demands much from its adherents,

To pursue our inquiry further we must compare that phenomenon with the tradi-
tional institutions of religion in our society; namely, the mainline churches.

-2-

There - here = T vould submit, Christianity has become an intellectual exercise,

Now we must procecd carefully: we are called to love God with heart, soul, body -

and mind, The Presbyterian tradition has held out for a reasoned faith and a
theology that does not have to run for cover in the halls of the academy, There is
no excuse, in our corner of che Kingdom, for intellectual shoddiness, But somewhere
along the way of our evolution as a particular religious tradition, we gave birth

to the notion that Christianity is, essentialiy, believing certain ideas to be true:
ideas about God and Jesus and humanity, To be a Christian is to know the ideas, to
speak the vocabulary, and to believe - in one's mind ~ that the ideas are true, Nov,
I would defend that as a portion of what being a Presbyterian is all about, But
when it is the tetality, the essence of our Gospel, it becomes dry, sterile, detached
from most of life which is not intellectual and ultimately rather boring. I'm reading
a book by a Scotsman, Tan Pitt-Watson, in which he characterizes most Church of
Scotland preachins as "offering painstaking answers to questions that nobody is
asking,'' (The Foliy of Preaching, p.52).

Truth, in oux church tradition, is something one establishes in the mind, Sut
the Biblical tradition, however, knows better than that, Alan Richardson writes:
"According to the Bible our knowledge of God is not like our knowledge of electrone
or square roots; we know truth about God only by doing it, not by talking or reason~
ing about it, just as we know love only by loving, Truth in the Biblical sense is
something to be practiced," (In Watson, ibid, p,36).

We may need a theologian to tell us that but I believe youns people know it
inherently, They are vored, rightly, with "mere theology", Their integrity forces
them to conclude that religion that is confined to the intellect; religion that
requires nothins but intellectual assent; religion that demands nothing of its
adherents is religion that isn't worth much,

With ali that by way of introduction, look with me at cur text this morning:
the fifteenth chapter of St. Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, one of the most
beloved and glorious passages of Scripture. Paul is talking about the Resurrection,
Theologically, the question is the ultimate question: "What happens when I die?"

No one who ever allowed himself a moment of integrity has not asked it, No one who
ever loved another person - a child, a man, woman, parent, grandparent or friend has
not wondered - “what becomes of it all? Is this intense love for nothing?" No one
who ever lost a dear one has not, in the dark night of the valley of the shadow of
death, wondered about this - this eternal human question, Is it merely peripheral?
As some of the academics suggest, is our concern simply the rusting armour of our
own obvious mortality? Is it no more than our insatiable ego crying out - "I can't
stand the thought that the world will one day be going on without me“? Is it
nothing more than our fantasies and illusions and essential weakness? Was Shakes-
peare right?

"Out, out brief cancle,
Life's but a walking shadow:
A poor player that struts and frets
His hour upon the staze and then is heard no more,"
(Macbeth, Act V, Scene 3, Line 19),

To be human is to ask the question, And so Paul, with the tight logie of the
scholar presents his argument, The Gospel is essentially the zood news of a
resurrection; and because Jesus Christ overcame death, so shall His people, That

~3-

is the promise: it is more than hope: it is now reality. By the time you cead to tlie
end of the fiftecnth chapter the argument is exhausted and Paul becomes artist,
straining for the poatry to express a joy and peace too profound to comprehend,

There are no dearer words: “Lo; I tell you a mystery, We shall not all sleep, but

we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye - - for the trumpet
will sound!" There are many parts of Handel's Messiah which move me deeply, But
none more so than the duet which resolves this passage, The voices are Light, play-
ful, "O death, where is thy stinc? O grave, where is thy victory? Thanks be to God
who gives us the vietory throucsh our Lord Jesus Christ.,..s5.."

Therefore, ,..be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord,
knowing that in the Lord your work is not in vain.,,Now concerning the contribution
for the saints," Without breaking stride, without taking a breath, Paul moves from
the loftieat doxology in the music of our faith te the mundane realities of the life
of faith and from there ta a collection for the poor, From Easter to Stewardship
Sunday without missing a beat, From the empty tomb of Jesus Christ to the Every
Member Canvass, It's all of a piece: there is no divide: "Therefore, my beloved
brethren, be steadfast,"

Christianity is a "therefore religion, Someone took the time to count and
tabulated 1,035 "therefores" in the Bible. It's on every pase, Since such and such
is true, ‘therefore’, this is how we shall now live,

Religion that is worth anything at all is always "therefore" faith: a synthesis
of believing anc obeying, of knoving and doing. The agenda for every Christian is to
bring together, in the context of everyday life, faith and practice, And it is
precisely at this point that the mainline Protestant Church is most vulnerable.

We Presbyterians value freedom, Our tradition was born out of conflict with an
ecclesiastical power that presumed to dictate every detail of the individual's life
and granted to the clergy an authority which was abused more often than not, Presby-
terjans dig their heels in whenever they sense the church tying any strings to the
grace of God in Jesus Christ which they believe, rightiy, is a gift. It's a very
healthy skepticism: it has served us well, But it has also become the rationale for
throwing out the church window any vestige of religious discipline or religious demand,

William Huehl, a lawyer on the faculty of Yale Divinity School, is a contempor-
ary Christian who commands my attention, Listen to him on the subject: "Most modern
Christians have let the relationship between faith and practice become an automatic
thing, something to be taken for granted and avoided in polite conversation... By
avoiding discussion of the rulisious implications of our daily behavior, we manaze
to avoid facing tose im,iications directly, The man who said chat he did not know
what he believed avout a particular subject because he had never heard himself talk
about it spoke a more prefound truth than he intended,” (Ali the Damned Angels, p.&5),
Muehl goes on to explain how he Landles the ordeal of sharing a plane seat with a
man who wants to talk trivialities for five hours, "Tne surest, quickest way to end
such a conversation is to bring up a serious issue and ask my companion about its
moral implications, What's wrong about adultery? What's se right about family life
and the market economy?..,For a few seconds he waits expectantly for the punch line
of my little joke, But when he perceives that I am serious and mean to pursue the
inquiry, he mutters something appropriate such as, ‘well, Jesus‘ and quickly dis-
covers urgent business in the center spread of Playboy,”

- -

At our best, ve Christians have known that you cannot separate theology from
ethics, At our vest we have practiced what we preached and preached what we prac-
ticed, In ous finest hours we have known, and imown clearly, that to believe in
Jesus Christ is to pick up some kind of cross and follow Him, In the Roman Colosseum;
in Germany in the 30's and 40's; in Birmingham and Selma, Alabama; and today, in
Moscow and Peking and Seole and Hanoi: in rare moments of clarity we have known that
Jesus Christ calls us to give and love and siiare and heal - and that His call is a
demand without which our faith isn't worth the time of day, In moments of under-
standing we have known with a terrible clarity that the Gospel of Jesus Christ calis
us in 4a direccion almost diametrically opposite to the tenor of the culture in which
we live,

We do not live under Marxism or fascism, but we do live in a culture that is
unapologetically acquisitive, The Westminster Divines may have believed that the
chief end cf man is to "glorify God and enjoy Him forever", but everyone knows that
our chief end is to "buy, own, use, discard and buy some more", The sociologists
and psychologists are now understanding that since the Second World War this country
has undergone a mammoth and profound chanse in moral values, Suddenly everyone
concluded that he or she deserved a bigger slice of the pie. Suddenly it became the
norm simply to take a bigger slice, across the board ~ from the price of sugar to
food stamps, from ITT to the teenage shoplifter, Lotteries and television pive-
away shows becane the eschatological hope for millions of Americans who bought the
lie - that there is something for nothing, and to get it is to be saved.

And instead of naming that for what it is,the Church meekly followed suit,
Listen to this indictment, written by an American churchman: "We of the liberal
Protestant tradition have accommodated ourselves to the cultural climate of the free
and easy, We have capitulated to our secular environment,,.,our churches are crowded
with } mest, genial folk who ware svept into membership around the ape of twelve
because it was the thing all the other children were doing,folks who perhaps never
once have been challenged to make an adult commitment of life te Christ, with all
its implications." (R. Raines, New Life in the Church, p, 23-56).

Discussins the survey I mentioned earlier Robert Bellah sussests that we
shouid learn anev the power and value of a Christian faith that requires much of
its adherents; that we should have Learned by now that we do no favor by making it
easy for ourselves and others to be Christians.

The simple fact is that in human history, only the disciplined have changed
things much, Onl: forty years ago or so Whittaker Chambers stunned the world by
revealing the ticlht discipline and total commitment required in underground
communist cell «vorps - veside which church membership seems child’s play,

And a siupler fact is that a religion of power and peace and wholeness and
salvation is inevitadly a relision for which you will give everything,

This is Stewardship Sunday,and you may have been wondering when he was going
to get around to talking about money, I’ve been talking about it all along, But,
in fact, the issuc is not just money, This church has a budget which describes the
activities and programs which will happen here in 1979, It is possible only
insofar as members of this church believe in what we are doing enough to pay for
it. That's simple: you didn't have to come to church to hear it,

~5-

The real issue is the "therefore of faith: the wholeness and integrity of
your religion, The real issue is the matter of your Christian discipleship, your
personal and decp commitment to Jesus Christ. The crux of the matter for you and
me ig to move from the verbal affirmation we make so easily to lives that reflect
the struggle and sacrifice and glory of being disciples of Jesus Christ,

There comes for all of us a moment of truth, when we can no longer escape into
the safety of vague theology: a moment when we must see the issue in all its
clarity, Our evangelical brothe-s and sisters structure those decisive moments a
little too overtly for our Presbyterian sensitivities, But may LI respectfully
submit that finally, your faith, your wholeness as a Person, your salvation, depends
on saying yes to a Lord who asks you to pick up a cross and follov, That is the
issue,

Dag HNammarskjoid wrote in his diary on Whitsunday, 1961:

"T don't know who - of what - put the question:

IT don't know when it was put, But at some moment I

did answer yes to someone - or something - and from that

hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that,

therefore, my life, in self surrender, had a goal,"
(Markings, p,205),

Or as St, Paul had it:

“Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovanle,
always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowine that
in che Lord your labor is not in vain,"

Amen,

Father, forgive our timidity, our brittle faith, our Lack of courage,
Help us to be what we say we are - what we want to 5e. Give us strength and
grace and love to follow Jesus Christ, to welcome the sacrifice and privilege
of bearing His cross,
Amen,