Hilton Head Island, SC – May21, 2017
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 15:1-7; Genesis 1:26
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” – Genesis 1:26 (RSV)
If you read newspapers thoroughly, you could get the idea that humanity is going to pot. If you read news magazines thoroughly, you could get really get the idea humanity is going to pot. If you watch the news on television, you may have concluded that humanity is irretrievably lost, and that the end is near.
No doubt “news” about the human race has always been bad, if there was anyone to report the news as news. However, it is only in the last few generations that people had any access to what was going on in the world. And most of what we are told is going on in the world is bad or controversial or not universally acclaimed. It is only in the last fifty years that television showed us every day how bleak things can be, and it is only since the advent of 24/7 cable news networks that we are absolutely inundated with bad or explosive news on a depressingly steady basis.
But the thrust of the media is accurate. Humanity is seriously flawed. It’s also true that humanity has always been flawed. However, it is impossible to quantify that the human race is worse now than it has ever been. Who, other than God, is in a valid position to judge that? It appears that humanity is far off track, it feels like we have lost our way in the world, but only God can truthfully know whether that supposition is correct, especially relative to previous epochs in human history.
The purpose of this sermon is to suggest that as imperfect as we may be, humanity nonetheless is a marvelous species by countless measures. To ignore our terrible shortcomings is fruitless and willful. But nothing is to be gained by continuously disparaging humanity, either. Indeed, much is to be lost in such a misguided, misanthropic venture. It can lead to permanent dumb glum.
Last Tuesday Lucy was skipping rope, and Charlie Brown said to her, “It’s really a good thing that people are different. Wouldn’t it be terrible if everybody agreed on everything?” “Why?” asked Lucy. “If everybody agreed with ME they’d all be right!” Well, although in many ways Lucy is wiser in the ways of the world than Charlie Brown, and Charlie Brown is more innocently naïve than Lucy, he represents humanity more successfully than she does. She is usually a crabby little girl. Even so, the Lucys of the world are as fully and beautifully human as anyone else.
My friend Gordon Stewart has just published a book called Be Still! Departures from Collective Madness. Gordon was in seminary a couple of years after me. In his book he quotes our philosophy of religion professor, Willem Zuurdeeg. “Threatened by non-being, by chaos, man looks for a foothold in the Imperishable.”
Only human beings are capable of contemplating God and that we might forever cease to be. Animals cannot contemplate their deaths. Plants can’t do it. Certainly rocks or dirt can’t do it either. But humans do it. We wonder about whether at some point, presumably after we die, we might cease to exist. “When faith is ill conceived,” Gordon Stewart wrote, “acting to end the ambiguities represented by the enemies of God instead of coping with life’s inherent ambiguities, we create what we seek to escape. We create a foothold in what will not hold” (p. 41).
God alone is the Imperishable. Of all the earthly species God created, only Homo sapiens, People of Wisdom, have the capacity to seek God. We want to move beyond ourselves, to transcend ourselves. And so, as Augustine said, our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God.
To hear the St. Matthew Passion by Bach or the Mozart, Brahms or Verdi Requiems is to hear humanity at its best. To hear Kenneth McKellar sing Scots Wha Hae wi’ Wallace Bled or Charlotte Church sing Men of Harlech in English, but especially in Welsh; to read Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood by William Wordsworth; to listen to Prospero summing life up in Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits, and melted into air, into thin air/ And, like the baseless fabric of this vision/ The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces/ The solemn temples, the great globe itself/ Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve/ And like this insubstantial pageant faded/ Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep” (Act iv, scene 1, line 148).
William Hutt was one of Canada’s most famous stage actors. For decades he held forth in the four different theaters which evolved in the picturesque small Victorian town of Stratford, Ontario. He was my mother’s first cousin, and therefore, I guess, my second cousin. Lois and I heard him as Prospero a month or so before he finally retired from the Stratford stage, and not long before he died. It was a never-to-be-forgotten electrifying performance. We are such stuff as dreams are made on. Such thoughts are profound beyond description.
And what thoughts they are! How deep, and how abiding! To attempt to comprehend either humanity or God: to imagine that somehow we can do that: to transcend ourselves by the exercise of our minds and souls and spirits: of such stuff are we, and we alone of all earth’s beings, made!
To see a new mother gaze lovingly at her first-born child as though that baby is the only baby ever to come into the world is to hear the Hymn to Humanity sung once again. To remember Franco Harris making the Immaculate Reception when it appeared as though all was lost: to have watched Martin Luther King on a grainy black-and-white television screen declaring in melodious tones, “I have a dream”: to see an elderly man smile at his Alzheimer-afflicted wife as though she were a twenty-two-year-old beauty with the whole world ahead of her: the Hymn to Humanity never stops ringing in our ears, if we tune ourselves to its music.
Jane Sine teaches an annual course for Lifelong Learning here at The Cypress. Jane is a professional musician and musical impresaria. Her favorite orchestral conductor is Claudio Abbado. Several weeks ago, in this room, she showed us a video of Maestro Abbado leading the Vienna Orchestra in a performance of Dvorak’s New World Symphony. When they came to the “Going Home” section of the symphony, Claudio Abbado directed with his hands, in small movements, but much more so with his eyes and eyebrows and face. He is a minimalist conductor with maximalist results. Emotion oozes from his very being, and it is emotion in music which Jane Sine most appreciates. Because she so appreciates it, she makes us also appreciate it. It was The Hymn of Humanity, played in slow-moving beautiful cadences from a Negro spiritual.
The first chapter of Genesis is the most familiar chapter of Genesis. There are stories that are widely remembered from the Bible’s first book: the eating of the forbidden fruit, Cain and Abel, Noah and the flood, Jacob and the ladder reaching into heaven, Joseph and the coat of many colors. But the entire creation story in its totality sticks with us: first the separation of night from day, then the separation of the earth from the sky, then the separation of the sea from the dry land, then the creation of the sun and the moon, then the sea creatures, then the land creatures, and finally, people: women, men, and children --- human beings.
The RSV sounds like the KJV; “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth” (1:26). The plural “we” has fascinated scholars for centuries. Why didn’t God say “I” rather than “we” when He talked about making humanity in His image? Well, they say, it is because God was representing the heavenly host (whoever they are) when He said it. None of the ordinary creatures God made ever thought like that; only people think like that. The Hymn to Humanity therefore includes stanzas like that.
The New Revised Standard Version doesn’t state it in quite the same way. “Let us make humankind in our image,” it says. I have never understood why politically-correct language seems to shy away from the word “humanity.” Maybe it’s because the emphasis is on the second syllable, “humanity.” That word sticks in politically-correct craws. I guess that’s okay, because it wasn’t “man” God created on the sixth day; it was humankind, humanity, females and males.
Whether correctly or incorrectly, the writer or writers of Genesis very clearly intended to declare that human beings are the epitome of earthly creation. For centuries that was the universally accepted theology. In the last couple of centuries, and especially in the last century, that notion has come under a cloud of suspicion. How can human beings be the highest order in God’s creation? Look at what we have done - - - and what we do! Wars, crimes, widespread narcissism, children hurting children, mothers abandoning children, fathers leaving home without warning: and we are the best and brightest earth has to offer? Belleau Wood, the firebombing of Dresden, the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, My Lai, 9/11? Mass murders, religiously-motivated slaughter? Where is the Hymn to Humanity in the face of such monstrosities?
In my senior year in college, Aaron Copeland came to campus to conduct the University of Wisconsin A Cappella Choir in his oratorio called In the Beginning. Mr. Copeland was a Jew, and he was what Jews would call a Mensch. A Mensch is the real McCoy among human beings, the genuine specimen, the person God meant people to be. He exuded warmth and joy and unquenchable spark. A Mensch, even at a distance on the UW Memorial Union stage.
The musical text for the oratorio follows the King James Version of the creation narrative in Genesis 1:1 through Genesis 2:8. The first creation story is Genesis 1:1 through 2:4a. The second, 2:4b through verse 8, is much shorter, and it only speaks of the creation of human beings, presumably the crème de la crème of God’s creative plans for the world.
In the Beginning begins with a contralto soloist singing the first verse of Genesis 1. She recites the text verbatim through verse 3, which declares, “And there was light.” With that the chorus comes in with a huge, sudden, electrifying crescendo, singing, again and again, “Light, and there was light, and there was light!” By its very strength and verve, the music tells us that creation is going somewhere. God has plans for His universe, and for this planet. And so the theme goes back and forth between the soloist and the chorus, as each of the six days of creation are delineated. The volume increases and deceases for both the choir and the contralto.
And then Aaron Copeland took us beyond Genesis 2:4a into 4b and the following three verses, the second abbreviated creation story of humanity. The alto sings, “The Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the soil.” And then the choir came in, quietly at first, then building and building and building, “But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul, a living soul !” It ended fortistissimo, the loudest of the loud. And when it was finished, and the audience instantly rose in thunderous applause, the Masterful Mensch Musician looked at us and at the soloist with a smile on his face as bright as the light of the first day of creation, and the Hymn to Humanity completed another of its endless stanzas. “What is man, that Thou art mindful of him?” the psalmist asked God. What indeed. What, indeed?
We’re not perfect. We all make mistakes. But it is God who created us, and God who sustains us, and God who redeems us --- all of us. We are His, and He refuses to lose any of us.
The fifteenth chapter of the Gospel of Luke is one of the most important chapters in the entire Bible. In fact, if we had only Luke 15, that would be enough to understand the essence.
The opening verses say this: “Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear (Jesus). And the Pharisees and the scribes murmured, saying, ‘This man receives sinners and eats with them.’” According to some scholars, the word “Pharisees” means “Puritans.” Most puritans of all varieties would probably agree that all people are sinners, but they make it their business to decree that some are worse than others. Puritans tend to look down on skuzzy sinners, but they accept smooth sinners. Skuzzy sinners are people whose sins are openly scandalous. Smooth sinners are those whose sins are hidden from view, where no one can see them. Some of the time Jesus openly hung out with openly skuzzy sinners. That made his theological enemies very upset.
So, knowing what the scribes and Pharisees were thinking and murmuring among themselves, Jesus told three parables: the parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the two lost sons, or as it is much more widely known, the parable of the prodigal son.
The first parable, of the lost sheep, is straightforward. A shepherd had a hundred sheep, and he lost one. So he left the ninety-nine and went out to seek the one that had gotten itself lost. Without actually saying it, Jesus implied that God is like that. He who created all humanity will not allow any of us to become permanently lost to Him. If anybody strays, God searches for that person until He finds the one who is lost. And because God is like that, Jesus is like that.
Sometime and someplace I saw one of those little painted wooden plaques they sell in gift stores. It declared, “God Don’t Make No Junk!” And He don’t, neither. When I was a student in the East Junior High School in Madison, Wisconsin, we sang a stirring extended musical composition called Song of Man. (If it sounds like music stirs me like nothing else, it’s true; it does.) I remember none of the lyrics except this one from those pre-politically-correct days, “Song of man, driving him on, driving him on!” We sang that line with all the oomph our pre-pubescent voices could muster. In my mind, I can still hear the squeaky, enthusiastic sound.
In music and art and poetry, in science and invention and technology, in great buildings and monuments and architecture, the Hymn to Humanity continues its perpetual newly composed stanzas. However, we must sing it without getting a big head while doing it. Christian humanism is humanism at its best, but we must be careful with it. After all, it is God who made us. We did not make ourselves. Thank God that we have been created. Thank God for each of us; thank God for all of us. Let all of us always sing the Hymn to Humanity, and never stop singing.