THE ENIGMA John M, Buchanan
Psaim 8, Romans 7:15-25 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
September Il, 1983 Columbus, Ohio

At the heart of this Christian faith is the word: God's word about God and
about us. It is a living word, expressed in history in the story of a chosen people.
It is expressed in the extraordinary life of one we know as God's son. And it is, we
believe, a word expressed in the words of an ancient book. Sometimes the lively
word of the Lord is heard with new clarity when these ancient words of scripture
are brought into dialogue with a modern word. It is a provocative exercise,

Listen now to ancient words and contemporary words, and in the dialogue listen
for God's living word to you this day.

First, Psalm 8
"O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is thy name in all the earth!...When I
lock at thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars
which thou hast established; what is man that thou art mindful of him,
and the son of man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man
that thou dost care for him? Yet thou hast made him little less than
God, and dost crown him with glory and honor."

Next, Reinhold Niebuhr, American theologian:
“Man has always been his own most vexing problem. How shall he think
of himself? Every affirmation which he may make about his stature...
becomes involved in contradictions when fully analysed." (The Nature
and Destiny of Man, p. 1)

Third, St. Paul, writing to the church in Rome (Romans 7):

“I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate...[ can will what
is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil
I do not want is what I do...I delight in the law of God, in my inmost
self, but [ see in my members another law at war with the law of my
mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members,
Wretched man that.I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?
Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!"

Walt Kelley, creator of Pogo: “We have met the enemy, and he is us,"

Finally, Sam Keen, philosopher:

"We crossed Court Street and climbed through a hole in the fence, leaving
God, good manners, cleanliness, and all the polite virtues of Presbyterian
children behind. The moment we were in the trees, cut of sight of home,
we became pagans. A short way down the path we stopped, pulled out
our stolen pack of Camels from the hollow tog, lit up. And coughed.
All morning we worked on our fort, cutting saplings with a hatchet we
borrowed from Granddad's toolbox, and wove them into walls beneath
the felled forked oak. Midafternoon our domain was invaded by a party
of picnickers. We became Indians and stalked the unwary, stealing two
egg salad sandwiches and a cake when they were not looking. After
that we dammed up the creek, went swimming, and tried to catch a craw-
fish, When the sun went down, we climbed back through the fence, checked
to see if our breath still smelled of tobacco, put on the mask of civility,
and went home for dinner." (The Passionate Life, p. 46)

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week before Christmas. She feared for her life. A man had been assaulting her regular-
ly for two years and the Situation had worsened. She was the mother of his child and he
threatened to kidnap the baby and do her great physical harm. The story goes on. But
two months later and with the legal counsel of a member of this congregation, and the
assistance of COMPASS, this Young woman is free from tha bondage of fear. In the gospel
of buke, Jesus begins his ministry quoting the prophet Isaiah and Saying, "the Spirit

of the Lord is upen me, because he hag anointed me to preach good news to the poor, He
has sent me to proclaim release to the captives." Thank you for giving me the freedom
and for supporting ma to minister in this way.

Ihave been gifted in learning more concretely that God speaks to us in our every—
day lives. God calle us to teave our aative soil, community, people, for the sake of a
promise that we do not fuliy understand. Ged is not bound to local soil, but is the God
of history, the God of our lives. One of the great joys of ministry is the opportunity
to share in the lives of othere in times of great joy and sorrow. The task of the parish
theologian is net to merely share the experience, but to try to understand life ex-
periences from the perspective of faith. That means asking some hard questions and hear-
ing the tough questions of others. One experience stands ont in my mind. A woman was
dying of cancer. She had suffered many months and was very thin and weak and close to
death. Her daughter asked that I take communion to her in the hospital. And so the
three of us met one Sunday afternoon. As i began the communion liturgy, the woman began
to cry ~- first softly and then rather uncontrollably. I was not sure whether to con-
tinue or to stop. I decided te trust God’s grace in the mystery of sharing bread and
wine. Several times during the liturgy the woman, who had been toc weak to Speak for
days said, "This is not enough!" What a troubling thought to a new pastor. T thought
to myself "Of course it's nat enough, but it's the most I have to offer." Part of the
lesson for me was that it was not what fT had to offer at all. Tf was right to feel in-
adequate. But when at the end of communion the woman interrupted me and said she wanted
to give the final prayer, I knew as T had never known before the f¢ep power of the Lord's
Supper. God's presence was known in the brea@ing of bread,

to be a part of people's lives is a priviledge beyond words. For as a minister I
much admire told me, "Sharing the lives of people is walking on sacred ground." such
is what Frederick Buechner axpressed in hig autobiography, The Sacred Journey, “To try
to express in even the mogt insightful and theologically sophistocated terms the meaning
of what God speaks through the events of our lives is ag precarious a business as to try
to. express the meaning of the sound of rain on the roof and the spectacles of the setting
sun. But I choose to believe that he speaks nonetheless and the reason that his words
are impossible to capture in human language is, of course, that they are ultimately
always incarnate words. They are words fleshed out in the everydayness no less than in
the crises of our own experience,"

My time as a sojourner with this congregation has sharpened my desire for intellect-
ual growth. The Calvinist view that religion is faith seeking understanding has been
challenged and nurtured in the Classes and small groups ft have taught. My belief that
one reason for being in a faith community is that we learn best by reflecting and being
challenged by the ideas and experiences of others has been confirmed. I have Loved my
teaching ministry here -- which f know has been more learning than teaching. I'm grate-
ful that my thirst for understanding grows. I felt this well expressed by the great
black mystic, Howard Thurman, when he wrote, “Always there seems to be something more
to be experienced, to be felt, to know. My mind rejects any conclusion as being final.
The greatest source of hope, therefore, for both the present and the future, is the
awareness of potential in me, in other people, in life itself."

Of the litany of gifts T have received from you there is one ether I would like to
tention. At my recent Dialogue with the Clergy interview, I was asked what I haa found

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code hidden in our DNA and Dr. Skinner submits that choice or freedom has Httle
fo do with it, and behind it all, 2000 years ago St. Paul called it sin and in his passion-
ate confession to those new Roman Christians described it as a virtual war in his
own members, an all-out battle in his very being. Now, the problem is that the low
view has been baptized by a religion which hears 50% of what Paul said about us,
The result is a diety founded on guilt and an anthropology which sees us fundamentally
as Sinner, guilty of offending God simply by standing there breathing, guilty by some-
thing called original sin, guilty by a depravity which infects and spoils everything.
We are not at our best here. Here religion becomes an exercise in emotional black-
mail: making people feel awful about themselves and then offering the only solution
te its self-generated, self-loathing, namely its own brand of pallative. The low view
is not the Biblical view. You and I are asked to account for it on occasion, and we
need to know that it is a perversion, as gross oversimplification of the Biblical posi-

tion. yn low - eu had, ~ Sen phew P3

ne Glau» The Bible, as you may now be concluding, holds both views - simultaneosly,

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We are, in the wonderful cadences of the ancient Psalmist, "little less than God,
crowned with glory and honor, given dominion over the work of God's hands." We
are, “created in God's own image," God's children, God's friends. And we are, at
the same time, human, which is to say Hmited, finite, of the earth-made of the dirt.
We are flawed, imperfect: that is the meaning of our humanness. It is not the whole
story about us, but without it the story is incomplete. "I do not do the good I want,
but the evil I do not want is what 1 do," Paul confessed, and in moments of candor
most of us are able to identify with that diagnosis.

wo The Biblical view - is that we are neither totally saint nor totally sinner, but
t* both
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The late Reinhold Niebuhr, in the work to which I referred earlier, helped
Several generations of Christians to understand the human condition in terms of
a tension, a dialectic between the high and low view of humanity. He taught that
bad things begin to happen when people feel so good about themselves they forget
their limitations, or when people feel so bad about themselves they don't aspire
to anything higher than the lowest behavioral common denominator.

Sin comes in two basic forms (Niebuhr taught}. Pride - thinking too highly,
and sloth ~ thinking too little of ourselves. As pride, the final form of sin is the
unwillingness to admit to sin, a dynamic with which we are all familar, As intellec-
tual pride, sin becomes an intolerable arrogance. Niebuhr noted that every great
thinker concludes that he/she is the final thinker, a conclusion we meet in modest
social conversations about politics or economics, If you have trouble with sin as
an abstraction, think about intellectual arrogance. How Imany political partisans
do you know who affirm that their positions are finite, limited, partial? Worse yet,
is religious pride. And if you are still having difficulty with the abstraction, envision
if you will, all the evil in history done by sincerely religious men and women who
knew that their way was the only way. The results are The Inquisition, Holy. Wars,
heretic hunts, and being consigned to eternal hell by your otherwise cheerful friend
who has recently seen the light.

Sin as sloth is the simple refusal to be all and as much as we can bez morally,
physically, spiritually, I love the story Loren Eisely told about Thomas Huxley, a
disciple of Charles Darwin. Huxley was leaving his house in a hurry. A friend asked
where he was going, to which he responded: “To tell people they are all apes." Eisely
wrote: "It's easy to convince people they are monkeys. The difficult thing is to
convince them that they are human beings."