Dorothy Day:
Icon of Compassion
The First Congregational Church
United Church of Christ
Columbus, Ohio
January 12, 1997
Memory Verse: "Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us" (Hebrews 12:1)
Today's Texts: Genesis 1:1-5 and Mark 1:4-11
Opening Prayer: Gracious Spirit, brood over us as you did over the waters of creation. Bring forth life. Help us to see new ways to be faithful. In Christ's name we pray. Amen.
As most of you know, I have just returned from two weeks away. The first week was spent visiting some balmy ports of call, as we celebrated my parents' 50th wedding anniversary on board a cruise ship in the Caribbean. The second week was spent in Orlando, Florida at the annual consultation on parish ministry. Although the weather is colder here in Columbus than when we left, and significantly colder than in the southern Caribbean, it is good to be back. The warmth and vitality of this church more than make up for the challenges of winter.
One thing that goes with traveling is the opportunity to read The Nation's Newspaper: USA Today. Perhaps some of you saw the front-page story in the weekend edition: One Wrong Number Causes Beeper Madness. (January 10-12, 1997). For about 30 minutes on Thursday morning beepers around the country apparently went berserk flashing real phone numbers, nonsensical number strings, and even repeated strings of "911". More than 100,000 customers were affected, after a new customer was given an identification number which triggered a glitch in Skytel's nationwide paging network.
As the beepers vibrated and buzzed without pause, people became alternately concerned, confused, irritated, and amused. They were afraid to turn them off, since a real page of importance might come through. But they could hardly get anything done with the constant distraction. A Silicon Valley newsletter publisher is quoted as saying, "I was amazed. I was thinking, did Bill Gates die?" Or what?
Such is the state of affairs in which we find ourselves at the end of the 20th century. A chorus of runaway pagers heralds prematurely the death of someone who has arguably become the most recognizable icon of success. As a reality check, how many of you have heard of Bill Gates? Raise your hands. That's what I thought.
Last week Bill Gates, "the man who is shaping our future," made the cover of Time magazine. During 1996, Gates' financial position in Microsoft increased by more that $10.9 billion, or about $30 million a day. He is brilliant, competitive, ambidextrous, and intense.
"I don't think there's anything unique about human intelligence," Gates observes. "All the neurons in the brain that make up perceptions and emotions operate in a binary fashion. We can someday replicate that on a machine." Earthly life is carbon based, and computers are silicon based, but that is not a major distinction. "Eventually we'll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a carbon-based system."
Might there be some greater meaning to the universe? "It's possible," Gates mused, "that the universe exists only for me. If so," he giggled, "it's sure going well for me!" But are we ever going to build a machine that can giggle like that about its position in the universe? "Isn't there something special," he was asked by the reporter, "perhaps even divine, about the human soul?" Gates became silent and started his quintessential rocking, back and forth, in his chair. Finally, with an expressionless face and a toneless voice, the answer came. "I don't have any evidence on that." Rock, rock, rock. "I don't have any evidence on that." (Time magazine, January 13, 1997).
This morning is the first Sunday of Epiphany, the season of the church year in which we look for evidence of the God who was in Jesus Christ. The English word "epiphany" comes from a Greek word which literally means an "appearance." As a religious term it means a visible manifestation of a hidden divinity. In other words, it means to see the evidence that Bill Gates, with his self-preoccupation, has managed to miss.
Lest we be too hard on Mr. Gates, keep in mind that we are looking for evidence of a something hidden. The Spirit of God is not just lying around for anyone to see. It's imbedded in life, like a piece of computer code which looks like nonsense to the untrained eye. Epiphany is a time to learn the code, and to see it in our midst.
Such was the start of Jesus' ministry according to the gospel of Mark. John the Baptist was preaching in the desert and baptizing in the Jordan River. Jesus presented himself to be baptized by John. As he was coming out of the water, the scriptures report that he had an epiphany. It was as though the Spirit of God was again hovering over the waters, as in the first day of creation. Jesus saw the heavens being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. "And a voice came from heaven: 'You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.'" (Mark 1:11)
Notice that it was Jesus who saw these things. Not John the Baptist. Not the crowds. But Jesus. He was the one who witnessed a visible manifestation of a hidden divinity. He was the one who had an epiphany. And immediately it drove him out into the desert where he was tempted by Satan and cared for by angels. One moment he had seen "no evidence on that." The next moment he saw a world teeming with Spirit. Such was the beginning of the gospel of God.
In trying to figure out how to make this season come alive for us, in trying to figure out how we could have some epiphanies of our own, I've decided to take the next five weeks in order to tell the stories of Five Great Christians. I'm not Bill Moyers, with the ability to reproduce live interviews and original film clips, but I hope to tell enough of the story to help us glimpse how these people saw God. They are epiphanies of the risen Christ; icons through which we can see the evidence of God.
The more I learn about the new quest for the historical Jesus, which was the focus of our consultation in Florida, the more convinced I become that the historical Jesus expected people to follow in his footsteps. It is not beyond our capacity to do so -- to love whom he had loved and to live as he had lived. It is more a matter of will than of ability. The five Christians we will meet in the next five weeks had the fortitude and courage to act upon their faith. If, by considering their lives, we come to take our own faith more seriously and to see God more plainly, then this sermon series will have done its job and this epiphany season will have worked its magic. The point is not to feel guilty about our lives, in comparison to someone else. These people are not without their flaws. The point is to live more fully for the reign of God, that code imbedded in life, by catching wind of someone else's vision and commitment.
Our first person, an icon of compassion, is Dorothy Day. Once again, as a reality check, how many of you have heard of Dorothy Day? Raise your hands. That's what I thought. Bill Gates has a definite advantage. One might say we've been more influenced by a technological whiz kid than by a theological wonder.
Dorothy Day was born 100 years ago this November, in Brooklyn, New York. There was nothing spectacular or privileged about her background. Her father's work, when he had any, was centered around horse-racing. Although raised as a Congregationalist, he became a professional skeptic known for making intemperate remarks about immigrants, people of color, Catholics, and Jews. Dorothy's mother went to work in a shirt factory when she was twelve, shortly after her father died. Life was difficult. Although she had been raised as an Episcopalian, she accepted her husband's skepticism and agreed to withdraw from church. Dorothy was neither baptized nor raised in the church.
In April of 1906, Dorothy was living with her family in San Francisco when the great earthquake hit. Immediately after the earthquake the family moved to Chicago, living in dire poverty above a saloon, until her father could find a job. This series of traumatic events caused Dorothy to become concerned about the problems of her existence. Happiness was such a fleeting thing. Here today, gone tomorrow. Security. Relationships. Health. Ambition. They were all cut short by difficulty or death. Dorothy became an avid reader and an introspective thinker. She started keeping a daily journal in order to record her thoughts and fears.
So began Dorothy's passion for the enduring reality of God. As a teenager, she read The Brothers Karamozov by Feodor Dostoyevsky and it proved to be a baptism of fire. This book includes a scene at a monastery where a number of travelers have gathered, seeking counsel from the monk whose wisdom and holiness are well known. One of the persons hoping to be helped is an attractive society woman who tells him that she is suffering from a lack of faith.
"Lack of faith in God?" he asks. No, not that, she says. She is worried about immortality. It is such a problem; no one can prove it, "and I say to myself, 'What if I've been believing all my life, and when I come to die there's nothing but the (flowers) growing on my grave?... It's awful! How can I prove it? How can I convince myself?" The monk responds with the answer which became the substance of Dorothy Day's philosophy. "By the experience of active love," he replies. "In so far as you advance in love you will grow surer of the reality of God and of the immortality of your soul."
But what was meant by "active love," the woman asked. She loved humanity. Often she dreamed of a life of service to the unfortunate that filled her with warmth. She could nurse the afflicted; she would be ready to kiss their wounds. But what if she was not repaid in gratitude for her service? What if the patient "began abusing you and rudely commanding you, and complaining to the superior authorities of you? What then?" She could not bear ingratitude. "I expect my payment at once," the woman concluded. "That is praise, and the repayment of love with love. Otherwise I am incapable of loving anyone."
To this confession, the monk offered a reply that set the course for Dorothy's life: "Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to live in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed in the sight of all. (People) will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking and applauding as though on stage. But active love is labor and fortitude, and for some people, too, perhaps a complete science. I predict that just when you see with horror that in spite of all your efforts you are getting further from your goal instead of nearer to it -- at that very moment you will reach and behold clearly the miraculous power of the Lord who has been all the time loving and mysteriously guiding you." (Adapted from William D. Miller, A Harsh and Dreadful Love: Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, Doubleday New York, 1974).
This story, often quoted by Dorothy later in life, became her own story of conversion from radical activism to Christian personalism. Dorothy dropped out of college in 1916, moved back to New York City with her family, and pursued the radical causes of her day: women's suffrage, free love, labor unions, and social revolution. She was greedy for immediate action. But when a decade of protest and social action failed to produce changes in the values and institutions of society, Dorothy converted to the Catholic church and the radicalism of Christian love.
The triggering event for Dorothy's conversion was the birth of her daughter. After an earlier abortion, Dorothy had desperately wanted to get pregnant. She viewed the birth of her daughter as a sign of forgiveness from God. It was as though Dorothy herself had seen the heavens torn open and had heard a voice, saying, "You are my daughter, whom I love. With you I am well pleased." The radical causes had failed her, but this was a promise incarnate.
How many times have children brought their parents to the doors of the church! We see it all the time. But the Catholic church could hardly have known what it was in for when it baptized Dorothy Day. Dorothy never thought of the Catholic church as an unblemished institution to be followed blindly. Instead, she thought of it as a context for people to work out their own salvation, with fear and trembling. At the start of the Great Depression, Dorothy met Peter Maurin, the "gentle personalist," with whom she founded the Catholic Worker movement -- one of the first truly lay movements in the history of the church. This movement was based upon three principles: thought clarification, houses of hospitality, and agrarian communities. It was in obedience to these principles that Dorothy lived out her life.
For the next 50 years, Dorothy loved and lived with the poor, conducted conferences, and published a newspaper, all dependent entirely upon donations. The paper challenged such madness as one person making $30 million a day while others died of starvation and exposure. Seventy-five houses of hospitality were established during her lifetime, where the hungry were fed, the naked clothed, the homeless sheltered, the sick cared for, and the dead buried. She was put in jail, for the first time, at the age of 20 while marching in support of women's suffrage. She was put in jail, for the last time, at the age of 75 while marching in support of the United Farm Workers. She was an avid peacemaker and a prolific author.
Dorothy Day is the rare example of a poor person who dedicated her life to serving poor people. She was not an uptown philanthropist. She was not a nun looking for a good work to do. She was not a social worker who took the commuter train home. Dorothy Day was without sophisticated theological training. She was an average person who read her bible and tried to live and to love like Jesus. She allowed the reign of God to rule over her life. Since her death in 1980, the church has been trying to catch up to Dorothy's vision. The church has struggled with and made significant statements on peace, the arms race, economic justice, and human rights. Dorothy Day challenges each of us to take seriously the message of the gospel. In a world blinded by injustice and enthralled with greed, Dorothy Day is an icon of compassion. Her witness dares us to be different and to let our lights shine as good news for the poor. Amen.
Desmond Tutu:
Icon of Inclusion
The First Congregational Church
United Church of Christ
Columbus, Ohio
January 19, 1997
Memory Verse: "Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us" (Hebrews 12:1)
Today's Texts: 1 Samuel 3:1-10 and John 1:43-51
Opening Prayer: Gracious God, we thank you for the opportunity to worship you and to witness for your reign. Speak to us through the power of your Holy Spirit and move us to faithful action. In Christ's name we pray. Amen.
Today's scripture lessons focus on the call of Samuel, as an Old Testament prophet, and on the call of Philip and Nathanael, as New Testament disciples. Each story speaks to the transcendent dimension of being called by God. Notwithstanding my conversation with the children, there are significant differences between being called by God and being called by anyone else. There's always an extra dimension when God's in the mix, and that makes all the difference in the world.
You remember the story of Samuel. His parents were having trouble conceiving. In the absence of modern reproductive science, his mother went to the temple to pray. She promised that if the Lord would give her a son, she would raise him for holiness and ministry. She would set him apart according to the nazirite vow. She would make him a steward of the temple priests.
In the course of time, Hannah conceived and gave birth to a son. The Lord had answered her prayer. After the child was weaned, in obedience to her promise, Hannah took Samuel to the temple and presented him to Eli the priest. But this was not his call by God. The temple family was the context for his call, which came at a time when the word of the Lord was rare and the people were not having many visions.
One night Samuel and Eli were lying down in their usual places. The narrator makes sure we know that Samuel was near the ark of the covenant while Eli was almost blind. He could barely see. Nevertheless, when Samuel started hearing the voice of God, when he started having a vision of God's will for his life, it was Eli -- bad eyesight and all -- who discerned what was happening.
"If you hear the voice again, say, 'Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.' And the Lord began speaking to Samuel, 'See, I am about to do something in Israel that will make ears tingle.'" This call, this vision, was not the kind of thing one could capture on audio- or videotape. And yet it was so real as to catapult Samuel into greatness. None of his words fell to the ground. The people hung onto them because they were coming from a trustworthy prophet of God. In him, the people experienced something larger, something earth shaking, something which set them free.
So it is with the call of God. Hear it. See it. Feel it. Follow it. And life will never be the same. One thing great Christians have in common is a call from God which transforms their sense of self. "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me," wrote the apostle Paul. Great Christians tend to think of themselves as pencils in the hand of God. They consistently depreciate their own efforts in order to appreciate the efforts of God. "Why look at the one pointing at the moon," they all seem to ask, "when it is the moon that you seek?" Even Jesus objected to being called "good," since God alone is good. (Mark 10:18). Yet through these humble servants we see an unmistakable glory.
More than sixty-five years ago, while this great church building was under construction, at the start of the Great Depression, two men were born half a world apart with the common bond of being born black in a world of white influence and power. Martin Luther King, Jr. was born on January 15, 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia. Desmond Mpilo Tutu was born less than three years later, on October 7, 1931 in Klerksdorp, a gold-mining town west of Johannesburg, South Africa.
Both men grew up with happy childhoods, King as the son of a middle-class Baptist preacher and Tutu as the son of an educated Methodist headmaster. They had more opportunities than most of their peers. But economic class and education could not erase the fact that both men were growing up black in a world dominated and controlled by whites.
King had a vivid memory of his father's confrontation with an arrogant traffic policeman. The policeman, who began his lecture with the traditional salutation "Boy," was instantly reprimanded by King's father. "That's a boy," he said pointing to Martin Luther, "I'm a man." On another occasion a shoe clerk declined to serve them unless he and his father moved to the rear of the store. "We'll either buy shoes sitting here, or we won't buy any shoes at all," his father growled, and they marched out the door. Even more disturbing was the defection of two white playmates, whose parents had forbidden them to associate with King and his brother. (David L. Lewis, King: A Biography (Urbana / Chicago University of Illinois Press, 1970, 1978).
Tutu had similar experiences of racial discrimination. Sometimes when walking with his father they would be stopped and his father would be asked to produce his "passbook," a document which every "non-white" was forced to carry and to produce on demand. It was to the blacks in South Africa what the Star of David was to the Jews in Nazi Germany. Those without "passbooks" faced heavy fines, imprisonment, loss of employment, or forcible removal to one of the poverty stricken "tribal areas" reserved for blacks. It was a system of harassment and humiliation.
Tutu began to notice other discrepancies as well. Although there was no meal program at his school, because the government could not afford to feed them, the white schools had fully-subsidized school lunch programs. And then there was history class. "We found it distinctly odd," Tutu remembers, "that in virtually every encounter between the black Xhosa and the white settlers, (the textbook) invariably described the Xhosa as those who stole the settlers' cattle and the settlers (as those who) captured the cattle from the Xhosa. We did not press the point...but when we were outside we would mutter that it was very funny. ... After all, (the settlers) had no cattle when they landed in South Africa, and all the cattle had to be procured from the indigenous peoples." (Shirley du Boulay, Tutu: Voice of the Voiceless, Grand Rapids Eerdmans, 1988).
This was the unique mix which forged the character of these two men. On the one hand you have educated, intelligent, churchmen who grew up on the stories of Jesus and God's love. God loves everybody! On the other hand you have systems of racial discrimination and hatred which denied these men the most basic of human freedoms and dignities. It was an explosive combination; sooner or later a spark was sure to hit the powder keg.
For King the spark came when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white man, in December of 1955. This was the trigger which led him into the forefront of the civil rights movement. But this was not the call from God, which came several weeks after the start of the boycott.
"Shortly after midnight, just home from a steering committee meeting of the boycott, King got a telephone call. The voice, beginning with a derogatory racial epithet, said, 'we are tired of you and your mess now, and if you are not out of this town in three days, we're going to blow out your brains and blow up your house.' Though he had received many similar threats, about 40 a day, this one stunned him, preventing him from going to sleep. He began to realize that this wife and newly born daughter could be taken from him or he from them at any moment. He went to the kitchen, 'thinking that coffee would give me a little relief.'"
"In the midst of one of the most agonizing experiences of his life, King started thinking back on the theology and the philosophy he had just studied in the university, but the answer didn't come there. 'Something said to me,' he would later remember, 'you can't call on daddy now; he's in Atlanta, a hundred seventy-five miles away.... You've got to call on that something, on that person your daddy used to tell you about, that power that can make a way out of no way. And I discovered then that religion had to become real to me and I had to know God for myself. And I bowed down over that cup of coffee. I never will forget it.'"
"Oh yes, I prayed a prayer. And I prayed out loud that night. I said, 'Lord, I'm down here trying to do what's right. I think I'm right. I think that the cause that we represent is right. But Lord, I must confess that I'm faltering, I'm losing my courage, and I can't let the people see me like this because if they see me weak and losing my courage they will begin to get weak."
"It was in the midst of this crisis of faith that King experienced a heavy burden being lifted from his shoulders, and he felt the liberating presence of God as never before. Almost out of nowhere he heard a voice, 'Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo, I will be with you, even until the end of the world.' After that experience, Martin Luther King, Jr. was ready to face anything. Three days later his house was bombed." (James H. Cone, Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare, Maryknoll Orbis Books, 1991).
Desmond Tutu's story is very much the same. He too was raised in the church. He too could have pursued a more prestigious and comfortable career in academia, away from South Africa. But he too heard the cry of his people. "God was grabbing me by the scruff of my neck," he would later say about his decision to leave teaching and to begin training for the Anglican priesthood in 1958. In the context of a monastic community, he learned to see the centrality of the spiritual. Every day there was compulsory meditation before breakfast, followed by Matins and Mass. There were frequent retreats and devotional addresses. Apart from the round of monastic hours, there was always someone on his knees in the Father's chapel.
Such contemplative disciplines were accompanied by the community's active identification with the suffering and the oppressed. When the residents of Sophiatown were forcibly removed, they were there. When there were problems in the schools, it was they who would be speaking with the voice of sanity. Through their faithful witness, Tutu's spirituality became a balance of contemplation and action which has guided and served him throughout his life.
"It is from these remarkable men," he exclaims, "that I learned it is impossible for religion to be sealed off in a watertight compartment that has no connection with the hurly burly business of ordinary daily living, that our encounter with God in prayer, meditation, the sacraments, and bible study is authenticated and expressed in our dealings with our neighbor, whose keeper we must be willy nilly." Ever since that time, "if I do not spend a reasonable amount of time in meditation early in the morning, then I feel a physical discomfort -- it is worse than having forgotten to brush my teeth!... I would be completely rudderless and lost if I did not have these times with God." (du Boulay, Ibid.).
"Rudderless and lost" would hardly be the words for either King or Tutu. Both men have won Nobel Peace Prizes -- King in 1964 and Tutu in 1984. The common thread is their passion for what King called "the beloved community" and what Tutu calls "the rainbow people of God." That passion is as merciless in its attack on injustice as it is compassionate in its approach to people. Their love for the oppressor is disarming. Their refusal to respond to racism and discrimination with hatred and violence is unnerving.
A few years ago Tutu came to town and preached at an ecumenical worship service. The clergy all processed in together and as we gathered I had the opportunity to greet him and to talk with him face to face. This tiny little man had an enormous Spirit and a smile which consumed his frame. When you think of our struggles here at First Church, and of his struggles there in South Africa, you wonder what we're doing with our long faces and our tale of woes. Tutu's Spirit and smile was enough to consume the entire convention center.
"At home in South Africa," he preached, "I have sometimes said in big meetings where you have black and white together: 'Raise your hands!' Then I've said, 'Move your hands,' and finally I've said, 'Look at your hands -- different colors representing different people. You are the rainbow people of God. And you remember the rainbow in the Bible is the sign of peace. The rainbow is the sign of prosperity. We want peace, prosperity, and justice and we can have it when all the people of God, the rainbow people of God, work together." (Desmond Tutu, The Rainbow People of God: The Making of a Peaceful Revolution, New York Doubleday, 1994).
Martin Luther King, Jr. and Desmond Tutu knew of each other. King, by virtue of his martyrdom, influenced Tutu more than vice-versa. But there were black South African leaders in the home of King's parents as early as 1948. King saw the civil rights movement in America and the movement against apartheid in South Africa as of one piece. "Our struggle for freedom in the United States," he wrote in 1963, "is not fundamentally different from that going on in South Africa.... We share a common destiny." Tutu would agree. He likes to remind his fellow South Africans of King's challenge that "together we must learn to live as brothers (and sisters) or together we will be forced to perish as fools." His vision is nothing less than a worldwide community of love.
Desmond Tutu is an icon of inclusion in a world of exclusion. It is a miracle that he is still with us, along with others who have survived the long South African nightmare. But "hey!" Tutu likes to say, "if God is with us who can be against us!" Martin Luther King, Jr. discovered that one night over a cup of coffee. The prophet Samuel experienced it while sleeping near the ark of the covenant. Desmond Tutu found it in those early morning hours of prayer. Surely "greater things" have taken place among us in my lifetime than we might ever have thought possible. And I believe that God isn't through with us yet. Amen.
Mother Teresa:
Icon of Charity
The First Congregational Church
United Church of Christ
Columbus, Ohio
January 26, 1997
Memory Verse: "Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us" (Hebrews 12:1)
Today's Texts: Jonah 3:1-5, 10 and Mark 1:14-20
Opening Prayer: Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on us. Melt us, mold us, fill us, use us. Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on us. Amen.
Throughout this sermon series on five great Christians, I have used the word "icon" to describe the luminous quality of their witness. In them we see the likeness of God. They are, indeed, epiphanies of the Spirit appropriate for inspiration and emulation.
The word "icon" is not used customarily by Protestants, because of its association with the notion of idolatry. This ancient debate precedes the Protestant reformation and goes to back to the formation of Christianity itself. As Greeks came into the early church, with their penchant for statues and iconography, they ran head-long into the Hebraic injunction against images and idolatry in worship. Bringing these two historic traditions together has created a dialectical tension regarding the power and fear of religious images.
In the eighth century the church went so far as to excommunicate those who venerated or produced such images. But the church quickly modified its position, adopting the distinction made by John of Damascus between idols and icons. Idols, he said, mislead the minds of the faithful through superstition and have no referents other than themselves. Icons, on the other hand, are adornments and illustrations of the faith which point beyond themselves to the realm of the Spirit.
The validity of this distinction was challenged by the Protestant reformers. John Calvin and Huldrych Zwingli rejected completely the use of images in worship. Martin Luther took a more moderate approach, recognizing the didactic function of the visual image. Nevertheless, as Protestants took over Catholic churches, they would typically whitewash the walls in order to minimize distractions from the reading and preaching of God's Word.
These differences persist to this very day. Go into a Catholic church and you will find statues with votive candles. Go into an Orthodox church and you will find wall-size icons of saints and biblical characters. Go into a Protestant church and you may find stained-glass windows. That's about as far as we go in terms of religious iconography. But walk into any one of those churches today, Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox, and chances are you will find icons of another sort which all look very much the same.
These icons are found on our computer terminals. They not only identify the programs which can be found on a particular computer system. They serve as the gateway through which those programs can be accessed. Click on an icon and, voilà, you've entered a whole other world. The American Heritage Dictionary defines such icons as "pictures on a screen that represent a specific command." And that, it seems to me, is not a bad definition of the five great Christians in this sermon series.
Their names are like the pictures on a screen. We may be more or less familiar with them, based upon past experience, but we know that behind each and every one of those names there lies a story. Tell the story, click on the icon, and we enter a whole other world. We execute a specific command based upon the course and commitments of their lives. For those of us who find it hard to imagine that anyone could live like Jesus, these icons are a godsend. They are invitation to see life from a different point of view, to take our faith more seriously, and to incorporate it into ourselves.
Mother Teresa is one of the world's best known living religious personalities. Two weeks ago I asked you to raise your hand if you had heard of Bill Gates. Practically every hand in the sanctuary went up. Now I ask you to raise your hands again, if you've heard of Mother Teresa.
As I thought, Mother Teresa has just as much name recognition as Bill Gates even though she has a very different story to tell. Bill Gates has climbed his way to the top by putting icons on a computer screen. He is now building a home in the Pacific northwest, at a cost of $40 million, to shelter three people. Mother Teresa has climbed her way to the bottom by becoming an icon of Christian charity. She is now preparing to die, after founding a movement which has opened hundreds of homes for thousands of dying and destitute people in scores of countries around the world.
Mother Teresa's and Bill Gates' paths are very different paths indeed. Instead of the upward mobility of the world, Mother Teresa has chosen the downward mobility of the Spirit. She was born on August 27, 1910 as Agnes Bojaxhius, the third and youngest child of a prosperous Catholic family in what used to be Yugoslavia. Her father was the owner of a successful construction company. He eventually became a merchant who traveled throughout all of Europe. Her mother also came from a prosperous family. Together they built a home full of joy and love.
All this changed when Mother Teresa was eight years old. Her father died from a stroke. It was a severe trial for her mother, but she worked hard to make sure that her children still enjoyed a peaceful childhood. The Bojaxhius home was marked by spiritual discipline and open commensality. The Catholic church was an integral part of their lives. They went to Mass faithfully and every evening they said their prayers together. Once a year they made a pilgrimage to a local religious shrine. On one such occasion, Mother Teresa was cured of her chronic cough and malaria. It was a time of great happiness.
The term commensality comes from a Latin root which means to share a meal or table together. The table at the Bojaxhius home was open to all. Her father had had a reputation for giving to beggars, which made their home a frequent stopping place for the poor people of Skopje. Never did anyone go away empty-handed. At every meal something was always left for the poor, and the poor usually showed up. When she asked who these people were, her mother called them relatives or friends. Only later did Mother Teresa understand that these were poor strangers who had nothing. "When you do good," her mother would say, "do it as if you were casting a stone into the depth of the sea."
Mother Teresa has done good for as long as she can remember. As a child, she helped her mother and did favors for her sister and brother. At the age of twelve, she first thought of pursuing a religious vocation. She wanted to belong wholly to God and she wanted to serve the poor. For the next six years she wrestled with the question of her calling, at times even trying to free herself from such thoughts, but God would not leave her in peace.
Some missionaries had gone to India from Yugoslavia. Whenever they came back to report on their work, Mother Teresa's heart was filled with joy at the thought of going with them to the Bengal Mission. This joy was interpreted by a priest as a sign that God wanted Mother Teresa to pursue a religious vocation. "A deep joy is like a compass," the priest told her, "which points out the proper direction for your life. One should follow this, even when one is venturing upon a difficult path."
Finally, at the age of eighteen, Mother Teresa made her decision. She would live for God and God alone. Even though she was first in her class at school and was esteemed by everyone in town, Mother Teresa left those comforts behind to serve the poor in India. She became a teacher of geography and later she became the principal of a Catholic school for privileged girls in Calcutta. The school was an opulent oasis in a sea of poverty and human misery. "I am sorry not to be with you," she wrote to her mother at home, "but you can be pleased because your little Agnes is very happy.... I am living a new life. Our center is a lovely place. I teach, and this is the kind of work I like best. I am also in charge of the whole school, and everyone here loves me."
What mother would not have rejoiced at the news of her daughter's successful vocation? You might think she would write back with praise and thanksgiving. But instead she sent her daughter a letter which has gone on to change the world. "My dearest daughter," she wrote, "do not forget that you went out there to help the poor. Do you remember old Filja? She is covered with sores, but what bothers her most is to realize that she is all alone in the world. We do what we can to help her; indeed, the worst thing is not her sores but the fact that she has been forgotten by her family."
That letter was a call for Mother Teresa to return to the spiritual disciplines and open commensality of her childhood. The hardships endured by the Indian people and her mother's poignant remarks unsettled Teresa more and more. The work at the school no longer gave her peace. She could not close her eyes or her heart to the homeless people, dying of starvation in the streets.
In July of 1946 she made a retreat to the Himalaya mountains. This proved to be the most important journey of her life. On this occasion she received a new call, what she describes as a "call within a call," while traveling on the train to Darjeeling. "I heard the voice of God," she remembers, "I was sure that God was calling me. The message was clear: I must leave the convent to help the poor by going to live among them. This was an order, a task, certainly. I understood what I needed to do, but I did not yet know how to go about it." (Lush Gjergji, Mother Teresa: Her Life, Her Works (New City Press Hyde Park, NY, 1991).
So it is with the call of God. When we recognize the presence of the holy, it is not given for self-fulfillment, but for the good of others. When the word of the Lord came to Jonah, it gave him something to do. "Get up and go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you." Jonah was told to cry out and to proclaim the judgment of God. But when the people turned from their evil ways, God had a change of heart and did not bring calamity upon them.
When the word of the Lord came to Simon and Andrew, it gave them something to do. They were fishing in the Sea of Galilee, when Jesus said, "Follow me, and I will make you fish for people." And immediately they left their nets and followed him.
Now that doesn't make much sense unless Jesus had become for them an icon of God. You don't just walk away from your livelihood because some fellow says, "Follow me, and I will make you fish for people." But if in that moment you hear the voice of God. If in that moment you have a vision of the holy. If in that moment you become clear about what it is God wants for you and your life, then you may walk away from it all and march out into the streets of Calcutta with only five rupees to your name.
"The form of the call is not important," writes Mother Teresa. "What is important is that God calls each one in a different way. There is no merit on our own part. The important thing is to respond to the call. Just as (I am sure that) in that difficult and dramatic moment (I heard the voice of God,) even now I am sure that this is God's work, not mine. And since it is God's work, I (know) that the world benefits by it." (Ibid.)
Mother Teresa has not political program for changing the world. Her concern is not to do the greatest good for the greatest number. Mother Teresa has simply tried to care for a few poor souls. In the process, she and the hundreds of sisters who now belong to her order, have found the secret of true happiness. "Nothing makes you happier," she writes, "than when you really reach out in mercy to someone who is badly hurt."
As an icon of charity, Mother Teresa challenges us to approach people with a logic, from a perspective, and in a place that remains unfamiliar to most of us. It is a divine logic, a divine perspective, a divine place. That is why many find her simplistic, naive, and out of touch with the "real problems." Like Jesus himself, she challenges her listeners to see things from God's point of view. "The biggest disease today," she writes, "is not leprosy or cancer. It's the feeling of being uncared for, unwanted -- of being deserted and alone."
"Doing something beautiful for God is, for Mother Teresa, what life is all about. Everything, in that it is for God, becomes beautiful, whatever it may be;... Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity provide a living witness to the power and truth of what Jesus came to proclaim. His light shines in them."
"When I think of them in Calcutta," concludes one of her biographers, "as I often do, it is not the bare house in a dark slum that is conjured up in my mind, but a light shining and a joy abounding. I see them diligently and cheerfully constructing something beautiful for God out of the human misery and affliction that lies around them. One of their leper settlements is near a slaughter-house whose stench in the ordinary way might easily make you retch. There, with Mother Teresa, I scarcely noticed it; another fragrance had swallowed it up." (Malcolm Muggeridge, Something Beautiful for God: Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Doubleday Garden City, NY, 1977). Amen.
Franz Jägerstätter:
Icon of Conscience
The First Congregational Church
United Church of Christ
Columbus, Ohio
February 2, 1997
Memory Verse: "Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us" (Hebrews 12:1)
Today's Texts: Deuteronomy 18:15-20 and Mark 1:21-28
Opening Prayer: Holy God, you reign among us wherever your word is heard and received in faith. Help us now to listen for your voice and to submit our lives to thee. Amen.
I would guess this sanctuary has seen more hand raising and hand waving during the past few weeks than it has seen in quite some time. We've checked out the name recognition of Bill Gates, Dorothy Day, and Mother Teresa. We've also heeded Desmond Tutu's plea to raise our hands and wave them as the rainbow people of God. I wish you could have seen yourselves that Sunday, from up here in the pulpit. It was such happy sight, as though everyone was waving hello.
This morning I will spare you any additional hand raising, partly because I suspect that I already know the answer to my questions. For the past several weeks, we have been looking at people who have demonstrated an exceptional commitment to living and working with the poor. Although their stories have been inspirational, I doubt that any hands would go up if I were to ask how many of you are ready to follow in their footsteps. I'm afraid that most of us are not that brave.
Our stories are more like the story of the rich young man who rushed up to Jesus and asked him what he must do to inherit eternal life. When Jesus told him to sell all that he had and give the money away to the poor, he went away grieving. The prospect of such loss and vulnerability was too great to bear. (Mark 10:17-22).
This morning, however, will be different. In fact, by the end of the hour you may question whether or not Franz Jägerstätter even belongs in a list of five great Christians. You may conclude, along with his contemporaries, that the man was suffering more from mental derangement than from heroic faith. But if conscience counts for anything, Franz Jägerstätter deserves the benefit of the doubt. And he may, more than any other figure in this sermon series, give hope to ordinary Christians like you and me that we too might one day act out the full measure of our creed.
That is, in the end, what makes a Christian great. It's not what we say, and it's not even what we believe. It's what we do that counts. To love others as Christ has loved us, to take a stand for divine justice, that is what manifests the reign of God in the world. John Dominic Crossan, one of the participants in The Jesus Seminar who was a keynote speaker at last month's consultation on parish ministry, has reported on an imaginary conversation with Jesus which demonstrates this point.
"I've read your book," Jesus tells him, "and it's quite good. So now you're ready to live by my vision and join me in my program?" "I don't think I have the courage," Crossan responds, "but I did describe it quite well, didn't I, and the method was especially good, wasn't it?" "Thank you, Dominic, for not falsifying the message to suit your own incapacity. That at least is something." "Is it enough, Jesus?" "No, Dominic, it is not." (John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, Harper San Francisco, 1994).
The story of Franz Jägerstätter is the story of someone who, at one critical point, tried to live by Jesus' vision and to follow his program. Nevertheless, if I were to ask for a show of hands, I might find no more hands than I would with my last question. And that's really no surprise. Jägerstätter's collected writings amount to 33 pages. W. H. Auden gave him brief mention in a poem once, while Gordon Zahn wrote a book about him that is now out of print. Other than a few small articles and a short film, the story of Franz Jägerstätter has been largely lost to the world. And the world has ended up the poorer for it.
Franz Jägerstätter was born on May 20, 1907 in the small village of St. Radegund, on the border between Austria and Germany. Eighteen miles away and eighteen years earlier another child was born whose destiny forms the backdrop for this story and whose name is a bit more familiar: Adolf Hitler. While Hitler tried to take the world by storm, as a latter-day Caesar, Jägerstätter tried to save his soul by faith, as a latter-day Christ: a rebel-peasant who rejected the Führer and refused to take his orders. But now we get ahead of the story.
As a youth and as a young man, there was little to indicate the direction that Jägerstätter's life would take. Born out of wedlock to a man who was killed in World War I, young Franz was given the Jägerstätter name when he was legally adopted by the man his mother eventually married. He grew up on a farm without significant intellectual stimulation or political ferment. Along with many of his peers in St. Radegund, he ended his formal schooling at the age of fourteen.
Other than one Jehovah Witness, who happened to be Jägerstätter's cousin, St. Radegund was a totally Catholic village -- being able to date its first church back to 1370. Jägerstätter attended Mass regularly and participated in the annual Passion Play. In his last performance, ironically enough, he played the part of a soldier.
The young Jägerstätter was described by those who knew him as "a little wild in his ways and in his style of living," as always "ready for a fight," and as someone who liked roughhousing and "had his weaknesses." Jägerstätter gained a reputation as the best fighter in town and he took leadership in a gang of young vigilantes who were always ready to defend the honor of their village in battles with their counterparts in neighboring communities. (cf.. Gordon Zahn, In Solitary Witness: The Life and Death of Franz Jägerstätter, Holt, Rinehart & Winston New York, 1964).
In addition to fighting, Jägerstätter enjoyed bowling, dancing, card-playing, and women. As much as anything else, he was remembered as the person who brought the first motorcycle to town. Such was his daring and progressive tendencies. Given this description of the early Jägerstätter, it may come as no surprise that Jägerstätter himself fathered a child out of wedlock, at the age of 27, in 1934. What is surprising is the effect this event had on him.
As in the story of Dorothy Day, the birth of this child started him on a spiritual journey which completely transformed his personality. People literally talk about the early and the later Jägerstätter, the old and the new, as though they were two different people. One was hell-bent upon his own gratification and pleasure. The other was heaven-bent upon the salvation of his soul. Having committed a grievous sin, Jägerstätter sought to work his way out from under God's judgment and wrath.
It was during this period that Jägerstätter made the first of his pilgrimages to a local shrine and even considered entering a religious order. In the end, however, he went back to the farm and took a wife who shared his new spiritual outlook. They went to Rome for their honeymoon, where they received the blessing of the pope in a general audience. Jägerstätter's commitment to the church and to the way of Christ was stronger than ever. He became the sexton of his local church and developed into what people described as a "religious fanatic."
This "fanaticism," however, was hardly remarkable. The new Jägerstätter was known to sing hymns and to say the rosary as he plowed the fields or walked to and from the church. Sometimes he would interrupt his work to pray or to read a bit of the Bible. He stopped playing cards and drinking beer -- which, I guess, is saying something for an Austrian. He stopped frequenting the local taverns, in order to avoid the inevitable questions and arguments. He began to go daily to Mass, and started fasting until noon as a mark of respect for the Sacrament. Finally, he began to distribute foodstuffs and meats to the poor of the area, even though his own family barely had enough for themselves.
These disciplines led Jägerstätter to take a radically different view of the world from that of his old neighbor, Adolf Hitler. When Hitler's armies came marching into Austria on March 11, 1938, Jägerstätter was the only one in his community who voted against the anschluss with Germany. It pained him to no end when the leadership of the Austrian church began to say "Heil Hitler!" rather than "Jesus is Lord!" "Pfui Hitler!" was Jägerstätter's oft repeated reply, or, more to the point, "Gross Gott!" which means "God's Greetings!"
"I believe that what took place in the spring of 1938," he later wrote, "was not much different from that Maundy Thursday nineteen-hundred years ago when the ... crowd was given a free choice between the innocent Savior and the criminal Barabbas. ... Woe unto us if we keep trying to shunt the consequences (of our sin) off on others and to avoid doing penance for the ... errors we have committed." Nazism, he pointed out, "did not just fall down upon us out of a clear blue sky." People cooperated freely and willingly, as though we were "under the spell of an adventurer who is interested only in seduction and the satisfaction of his sexual desires." (Cf. Zahn, Ibid.)
Franz Jägerstätter was not about to be used by Hitler as he had used that young woman almost ten years earlier. For Jägerstätter the choice was clear. Hitler demanded the total allegiance of his followers and a public confession of faith. So, however, did Jesus. And one could not serve two masters at the same time. Even as the first Christians were called to take a stand against the idolatries of their day, so was he called to take a stand against the most murderous and evil leader this world has ever known. If Hitler was to conscript him up for military service, he would refuse.
Jägerstätter's draft notice came in February of 1943. By this time he had three daughters, the eldest not quite six. Even though everyone told him he was acting crazy, even though he was going against the teachings of his pastor and his bishop, even though he had a wife and three children to think about, even though he knew that his decision would have no impact on the course of world history, Franz Jägerstätter was good to his word. This peasant farmer from a small village in Upper Austria said "No!" to Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich.
Franz Jägerstätter was imprisoned for six months, first at Linz, then at Berlin. His wife came to see him, as well as the prison chaplain. He was even offered a non-combatant position, but it was all to no avail. He still refused to take the oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler. After a military trial, Franz Jägerstätter was beheaded on August 9, 1943.
So what do you say? Was it mental derangement as the people of his village concluded, or was it heroic faith? When Jesus went to Capernaum he entered the synagogue and taught on the Sabbath. The people were astonished at his teaching, for he taught as one having authority. It was as though a new prophet had risen up in their midst through which they heard the word of God. Jesus even cast out the unclean spirit of a man possessed by demons. The people were amazed, and they wondered what this new teaching might mean.
Franz Jägerstätter knew exactly what this teaching meant. "The true Christian," he wrote to his lawyer in his statement of position, "is to be recognized more in works and deeds than in speech. The surest mark of all is found in deeds showing love of neighbor. To do unto one's neighbor what one would desire for oneself is more than merely not doing to others what one would not want done to oneself. Let us love our enemies, bless those who curse us, pray for those who persecute us. For love will conquer and will endure for all eternity. And happy are they who live and die in God's love." (Cf. Zahn, Ibid.)
Franz Jägerstätter was happy with his life because he was faithful with his death. He turned his back on the ways of the world and set his heart on the promise of heaven. He was never as remarkable in life as he was in death. This single-minded devotion to God is what transformed his witness from the mundane to the sublime, and is what makes him a truly great Christian. We dare not forget Franz Jägerstätter as an icon of conscience. His witness cries out, across the corridors of time, and demands an answer from every faithful Christian: is there anything so important for which you would be willing to die -- not to kill, but to die -- rather than to compromise your principles?
In this age of cultural relativism, far too many of us have lost the sense of divine justice which provokes such passion and commitment. Most of us, after all, may never have to make such a choice. But the life and death of Franz Jägerstätter will not let us off the hook that easily. And the authority of Jesus keeps asserting itself on earth as it is in heaven. To be ready to die like Franz Jägerstätter is perhaps the only thing that makes life worth living. That was the opinion of Albert Camus. And who knows? It may be that coming here, week after week, is preparation for just such a moment even as it was for Franz Jägerstätter. May God help us all to be ready. Amen.
Washington Gladden:
Icon of Justice
The First Congregational Church
United Church of Christ
Columbus, Ohio
February 9, 1997
Memory Verse: "Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us" (Hebrews 12:1)
Today's Texts: 2 Kings 2:1-12 and Mark 9:2-9
Opening Prayer: O God, speak to us of your justice and peace. Teach us to walk in all your ways. May the witness of those who've gone before us, inspire us to live as you would have us live. We ask this in the name of Jesus. Amen.
I want begin this final sermon in my series on Five Great Christians by thanking you for your enthusiastic and generous responses to what I originally thought of as a rather odd and eccentric approach to preaching. Biographical sketches were not covered, as I remember, in my homiletical courses in seminary. Nevertheless they seemed appropriate to the season of epiphany. We are, after all, looking for signs during this season of God's hidden presence in the person of Jesus Christ. What better way to see that presence than to look for similar signs in those who follow Jesus today.
Your response tells me that my intuition was correct. We have enjoyed learning about the lives of faithful Christians; their witness fills us with hope and challenges us to take our own faith more seriously.
The decision to end this series with the story of Washington Gladden was almost a fait accompli. As the most famous pastor of this church, and a towering figure in North American Protestantism, it went without saying that he should have a place in such a series. I remember joking with someone to the effect that I needed to tell his story -- whether he was a great Christian or not! Having now done the research for this sermon, I'm persuaded that a better choice could not have been made.
For one thing, this Tuesday -- February 11th -- would be Washington Gladden's 161st birthday. In the years following his death, this church had the habit of making the second Sunday in February "Washington Gladden Sunday." It was a celebration and a recognition of the man who made this church and this city famous. It was a way of keeping his legacy alive.
The Ohio State Journal wrote the following tribute upon the occasion of his death in 1918: Washington Gladden "was known and loved everywhere. He lived a great life. He filled his many years with noble deeds. As an editor, an author, a preacher he won great renown. But as a man he stands pre-eminent. He was a person of great learning, of strong convictions, of true courage. He had a great heart as well as a strong mind, and he never took a stand that his heart did not approve of his judgment. His memory will remain as a blessing to all the people. Many will feel his noble influence through all the coming years. Rev. Dr. Gladden will never be dead to Columbus." (First Church News, Volume II, Number 6, February 1929).
Such an assertion does not automatically make it so. If no one ever remembers the man or tells his story, it will eventually disappear from view and Washington Gladden will indeed be dead to Columbus. So it is with all things historical. Christianity, it has been said, is never more than one generation away from extinction. God will continue forever. But the agency of God in Jesus Christ -- as a historical figure -- depends upon the successful transmission from one generation to the next of the writings and stories that make up our tradition. Abandon that practice, and Christianity itself will die.
In light of the people we've met through this sermon series, I can imagine nothing more tragic or sad. Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Desmond Tutu, Franz Jägerstätter and Washington Gladden -- these men and women drew their inspiration and found their commitment from the pages of the holy scriptures and the customs of the Christian community. Were it not for Jesus and the people who follow him, these men and women would have been formed with different images and subjected to different influences. God knows what they would have become.
Certainly Washington Gladden viewed his upbringing in the church as the single largest influence on the course and accomplishments of his long and distinguished career. His was not the story of the apostle Paul, who went from persecuting the church to promoting the church on the basis of a dramatic encounter with the heavenly Jesus. His was the story of a life-long Christian, who tried to honestly understand and express the hymns, stories, and teachings of his people.
Gladden should be a welcome guide to every Christian who's ever struggled with the question of his or her own salvation and the teachings of those who argue that we must have an emotional experience of spiritual rebirth in order to enter the reign of God. Try as he might, Gladden never was able to produce such an experience for himself. And as a child, this provoked Gladden to frequent bouts of fear and despondency.
Gladden's struggle was made all the more intense by the fact that he was born in 1836 in Pottsgrove, Pennsylvania and raised in the heart of the "Burned Over District" in New York State. The District got its name because it experienced wave after wave of diverse religious excitements, including spiritualist séances and fundamentalist revivals replete with graphic hell, fire, and brimstone.
"I listened," Gladden later wrote, "in prayer meeting and revival meeting, to what they said about (how to escape the wrath of God); I noted with the greatest care the steps that must be taken, and I tried to do just what I was told to do. I was to 'give myself away,' in a serious and complete self-dedication. I suppose that I shall be far within the truth if I say that I tried to do that, a thousand times. But I understood that when I had done it, properly, I should have an immediate knowledge of the fact that it had been properly done; some evidence in my consciousness that could not be mistaken; that a light would break in, or a burden roll off, or that some other emotional or ecstatic experience would supervene." But nothing of the kind ever occurred. (Washington Gladden, Recollections, Houghton Mifflin Co. New York, 1909).
He marvels that he didn't become an atheist, but there was something about his home training that wouldn't let him go. His father had been reared as a Congregationalist in Massachusetts but affiliated with the Methodist church upon his move to Pennsylvania. He was a successful teacher and head master who occasionally served as a local preacher. Education and religion infused the home. When his father died quite suddenly and unexpectedly in 1841, leaving Gladden fatherless at the age of five, the foundation had already been laid. When Gladden took up residence on his uncle's farm, in Owego, New York, the foundation was built upon with daily family devotions and active participation in the Presbyterian church. Religion was too much a part of his life to be abandoned easily. But he could make no peace with God until, at the age of eighteen, he attended a series of services in the Congregational church conducted by the Rev. Dr. Jedediah Burchard.
"This clear-headed minister," Gladden would later remember, "lifted me out of (the) pit and made me see that it was perfectly safe to trust the Heavenly Father's love for me and walk straight on in the ways of service, waiting for no raptures, but doing his will as best I knew it, and confiding in his friendship." Suddenly, "with a breath," the "notion of Christian experience was simple and sensible." Religion could be summed up in the single word "Friendship" -- friendship with God as the Parent of all and friendship with others as sisters and brothers in one human family. It was no more complicated and no less radical than that. (Ibid.)
This was, in fact, a discovery of the ethical theology of the social gospel to which Gladden finally subscribed. "It was not an individualistic pietism that appealed to (him); it was a religion that laid hold upon life with both hands, and proposed, first and foremost, to realize the Kingdom of God in this world." He immediately joined the Congregational church and threw himself into the political fights of his day: the abolition of slavery, the prohibition of alcohol, and the elimination of discrimination against immigrants. Suddenly everything shifted for Gladden. These things were not just viewed as politics, but as the work of the church in the world.
The work of the church was not about getting people into heaven after they die -- that could be left to God. The work of the church was about getting heaven into people before they die -- that could be taken on by Christians everywhere. The advocacy and administration of Justice and the practice of the Golden Rule were not just civic responsibilities. They were the very essence of the gospel and the proper business of the church. By working out the dynamics of this shift, Gladden became one of the leading the voices of liberal theology and the social gospel movement, which was no small accomplishment for someone who never even went to seminary.
Although Gladden was graduated from Williams College in northwestern Massachusetts, he was primarily a self-educated and self-made man. Before and after college, Gladden tried his hand at both journalism and teaching, but he found these careers to be unsatisfying. The pastor of his local church in Owego, with whom he had developed a friendship, urged him to become licensed to preach so that he could exercise his gifts as occasion offered. When a pulpit opened up in LeRaysville, Pennsylvania, Gladden jumped at the opportunity. Within a matter of months he was ordained, married, and committed to a lifetime of pastoral service.
Gladden's second call took him to Brooklyn, New York, where he came face to face with the problems of a large urban center. The resolution of these problems would predominate his entire ministry and much of his writing. America was transformed during his lifetime from a landscape of individual and isolated farms to a cityscape of social and interconnected urban centers. He witnessed the creation of the first, private, for-profit corporation. He witnessed the inexorable march of the industrial revolution. He witnessed the abolition of slavery and the foolishness of reconstruction. These and other changes in society produced problems which Gladden viewed as critical opportunities for the Christian faith to be tested and applied.
Gladden held four significant positions during his lifetime: he was the pastor of two churches in Massachusetts, he was the editor of the Independent -- the most important Congregational newspaper outside of New England, and he was the pastor of this church here in Columbus. In every position Gladden distinguished himself as an author -- publishing about 40 books over the course of his lifetime -- and as someone who was not afraid to get involved with the significant issues of his day regardless of personal cost. Whatever the issue, Gladden believed that the reign of God could be applied and could ultimately prevail. He was optimistic and progressive. And he was successful.
Today when I stand in this pulpit and talk about the social application of our faith it costs me nothing in terms of courage. But when Dr. Gladden began to preach applied Christianity, "he was a voice crying in the wilderness. It cost him friends, it made him the target of vituperation and abuse, and it made him the prophet of new day." (First Church News, Volume II, Number 6, February 1929).
When Jesus went up on the mountain with Peter, James, and John they had a dazzling vision of Jesus in which they heard the voice of God. Their reaction, you will remember, was to set up three shelters in order to bow down and worship. It would have fit will in the "Burned Over District" of Gladden's youth. But the voice from heaven brought them all down to earth. It commissioned them to a life of servanthood and sacrifice with the clear command: "This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him."
Listen to him when he talks about justice. Listen to him when he talks about truth. Listen to him when he talks about love. The gospel according to Washington Gladden is the gospel according to Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, Mother Teresa, and Franz Jägerstätter. Gladden was the spiritual father of them all.
When Carl S. Patton was considering the call to become associated with Dr. Gladden here at First Church, he told Gladden that he had only two interests and not much more: "an interest in liberal religious thought and a desire to see the Gospel of Christ applied in all the manifold relations of life." Gladden looked at his new colleague, let one eyelid characteristically droop, and replied, "Well, what else IS there?"
Not all of you may know or remember that the stained glass window in the west transept of our church is the Gladden window. On one side it illustrates scenes from Gladden's life. On the other side it represents the commitments which made his life worth living. It is unusual church which has a panel of stained glass representing the arbitration of industrial disputes, but then Washington Gladden was an unusual man.
On the occasion of Gladden's 100th birthday, Dr. Lichliter -- the pastor of this church -- concluded his sermon with these memorable words: "By the quality of his awareness, his sensitive response to the richness of a changing world -- by the love of facts and the passionate quest for truth, by the pairing of heart and brain that made him the pastor and teacher of his people, by these things -- he being dead yet speaketh. This is Washington Gladden's church -- no matter who happens for the moment to stand in the pulpit. It will be Washington Gladden's church as long as (people) sing his hymn -- and follow him in spirit as he himself followed Jesus Christ." Amen.