Hilton Head Island, SC – May 2, 2021
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 7:1-10; Romans 7:13-20
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. - Romans 7:15 (RSV)
There is a term which has long been used to describe the complexity of human life, although its meaning might never be completely clear. It is a kind of catch-all phrase. It consists of just three words: the human condition.
When we speak of the human condition, we are confronted by a whole host of issues and challenges: childhood, youth, adulthood, old age; good times, bad times, glad times, sad times; health, sickness, wealth, poverty; success, failure, strength, weakness.
George Floyd emerged from a convenience store in Minneapolis, Minnesota, shortly to be detained by four policemen, then to die beneath the ever-pressing knee of one of them. That, and what followed from it, is an example of the human condition for both Mr. Floyd and those policemen. Yet from that tragedy may come another major impetus toward improving police standards and practices, especially toward Black men. That would be a positive addition to the human condition.
A child of ordinary parents grows up to become a medical genius, discovering a cure for a major childhood disease. A young boy with a persistent stutter becomes a president of the United States. A wrong turn down the wrong street ends in disaster, while a chance response to a cryptic invitation can result in a life of unimaginable joy and satisfaction. These, and countless other such occurrences, illustrate the human condition. Our lives are not determined for us. They unfold in their own time and pace.
After Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount, he went into Capernaum, the fishing village on the north end of the Lake of the Galilee. A Roman army officer heard that Jesus was there. He had befriended the local Jews whom it was his duty to pacify. The centurion had a slave who, Luke tells us, “was dear to him,” and the slave was very sick. He requested that some of the elders of the Capernaum community ask Jesus to come to heal his slave, while the worried soldier waited by his bedside. The human condition was seen in the illness of the slave, the desperation of the soldier, the willingness of the elders to make the request, and the ability of Jesus to provide the miracle. Sometimes the human condition is unpredictably complex.
Before Jesus arrived at the centurion’s house, the Roman sent some friends with a message for Jesus. It said, “You don’t need to bother coming all the way to my home. I, like you, am a man under authority, with soldiers under my command, and I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes, and to my slave, ‘Do this,’ and he does it. Say the word, Jesus, and I believe my beloved slave will be healed.”
The slave was dying, and could not save himself, nor could the centurion. The officer could order people to do things, and they would do them, but he could not order health to be restored to the slave who was dear to him (and that would not be the normal relationship between most masters and most slaves). Jesus said to those who witnessed this, “Not even in Israel have I found such faith.” By the time the soldier’s friends returned to his home, the servant had been released from his infirmity. The human condition shines through in every aspect of that story.
Life is a roller coaster ride, a journey on a bumpy road, although more often than not it is smooth. We tend to remember the bumps more keenly than the smooth parts, while a few people are blessed to see only clear sailing with no rough seas, to mix our metaphors.
Marilynne Robinson is a novelist and essayist who grew up in Iowa, and has written four novels about a fictional Iowa town. She is so outstanding that I think the Nobel Prize people should give her the prize for literature. She has already been awarded an American Pulitzer Prize. In her four stories she bounces back and forth in time, and the reader has to keep the chronology and the characters in mind in order to derive the greatest benefit from her wise and wonderful Calvinistic observations about all of us. Parts of all of all of us are found in all of her characters.
Gilead was her first of the four Iowan novels. Her latest book is simply titled Jack. Jack Ames Boughton is the ne’er do well son of the Rev. John Boughton, the Presbyterian parson of Gilead. Jack bounces in and out of all four of the stories, but he is the main character in the latest saga, which is set in St. Louis in the 1940s. Jack, a restless, rootless white man falls in love with Della, a cultured Black woman who is also a P.K., a preacher’s kid, although she is much more grounded than Jack. He has the indelicacy to do this when the Civil Rights movement hadn’t really begun, so it was a very risky test of the human condition for both of them.
Marilynne Robinson writes of Jack, “What a scoundrel he was, before he made a vocation of harmlessness.” When Jack meets with Della’s minister in her large Black church in St. Louis, he tells Pastor Hutchins as much of his story as he dared but also as little as he must in order to be understood. After listening for a while, the minister says, “Maybe you’re looking for someone to tell you to go home and spend a little time with your father….You look like you could use a little forgiving.”
We all have people back there whom we disappointed or hurt or neglected. It is an inevitable corollary of the human condition. We want to make amends, if we can, but sometimes we can’t, and we wonder whether they, or God, can ever forgive us. The wise Black pastor says, “(I)f the Lord thinks you need punishing, you can trust Him to see to it. He knows where to find you. If He’s showing you a little grace in the meantime, He probably won’t mind if you enjoy it.”
And that’s also a factor in the human condition. God or others want to help us, and we may balk at being helped. Either we think we’re not worth it, or we think we don’t need it. Too often we turn out to be our own worst enemies.
Writing a review of Jack in last October’s Atlantic, Jordan Kisner said, “If Jack feels somehow less than a world and more like a morality tale or thought experiment than (Robinson’s) other novels, that’s because its central character is so ill-tethered in the world.” The human condition can produce a Jack Boughton or a Francis of Assisi, a Lucretia Borgia or a Mother Theresa. None of us is all of one piece. We are a mixture of motives and inclinations and intentions.
The human condition is such that it will never coalesce in agreement on some of the biggest people or events in human history. Can anyone imagine unanimity of assessment for George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, TR, FDR, HST, LBJ, RN, RR, DJT, or Barak Hussein Obama? How about Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel, Hillary Clinton, Susan Collins, Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, Marjorie Taylor Greene? Or what about the New Deal, the Fair Deal, or the Great Society --- or Mainline Protestants, white evangelicals, Popes John XXIII, John Paul II, or Francis I? What about Billy Sunday, Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell (Sr. or Jr.), or Pat Robertson? Or what about King David, the Old Testament prophets, Jesus of Nazareth, or Saul of Tarsus? How do all of them fit into the human condition? And how are we objectively and fairly to assess all these people and subjects?
Here is what may be the best illustration of the human condition in the currents news. President Biden has decided to remove all American troops from Afghanistan, except for those who are guarding the US Embassy in Kabul. To do that is fraught with peril, and not to do it is fraught with other kinds of peril. Many outside powers have tried for three millennia to pacify Afghanistan, and none has ever succeeded. Tribalism and chaos are too endemic there. Almost certainly the lethally conservative Taliban Islamist extremists shall be the only victors, and their victory will bring yet more terror to a permanently unsettled section of an unsettled world.
The most cogent all-time example of the human condition is war. War is always perceived simultaneously (but usually not by the same people) as either glorious or terrible. Normally most of us see war as one or the other, but we do so through very different sets of minds and eyes. War has always been common throughout the passage of time, except in magical places like Switzerland or Costa Rica, and they are the exception more because of their geography than sociology or politics. If you want to study the human condition in its highest magnificence and its most fiendish debauchery, study war. But remember, no matter how you dress it up, war is hell.
The term “nature vs. nurture” is rather like “the human condition.” We all know what it implies, sort of, but not for sure. David Linden is a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University. He recently wrote a book called UNIQUE: The New Science of Human Individuality. “He does not like the term “nature vs. nurture.” He thinks it is too misleading about who we are and turn out to be. Instead he prefers specifically to consider many issues that make us who we are: height, weight, food preferences, personality styles, gender and racial identity, sexual orientation, when and where we were born, who our parents were, and so on, and so on.
Prof. Linden took a massive survey on these subjects among a wide variety of people. He discovered that the people who best understand these matters, which from our standpoint in this sermon means those who best comprehend the human condition, are college-educated mothers with more than one child. He feels they are the best equipped to understand the complexity of individual human beings and of all human beings together, or what the rest of us might call nature and nurture. Unite all of these factors, and it results in a singularly complex species.
The apostle Paul was a careful student of human nature, especially as it appeared to him to be revealed in his own nature. His letter to the Romans is the most theological of his epistles, and the 7th chapter of Romans is at the heart of his perception of who he saw himself to be. I also suspect he deduced that everyone else was somewhat like him in his self-observations.
Paul had “a thing” about excessive adherence to the religious law. He had spent the first half of his life in a slavish obedience to the Old Testament Torah, and the last half of his life trying to escape from it. He wrote, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate….So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me.”
Was Paul trying to make excuses for his behavior? I don’t think so. He was saying that only the grace of God could save him from his dilemma. His dilemma was a flawed human nature, or to describe it in other words, the human condition.
Every one of us is a mixture of facets: good and bad, wise and foolish, self-centered and other-centered, faithful and faithless, predictable and unpredictable. In the matter of guns, abortion, our attitude toward LGBTQs, which were addressed in the previous three sermons, in everything, we do or we don’t do what is right. The God who created us knows that about us. We also need to know it about ourselves. Therefore we can say with Shakespeare in Measure for Measure that we are all “a wretched soul, bruised with adversity,” but we can also say with Hamlet, (who didn’t always feel this way), “What a piece of work is man!/ How noble in reason/ How infinite in faculty/ In form and moving how express and admirable!/ In action how like an angel/ In apprehension how like a god!”
There is no one who ever understood the human condition better than William Shakespeare! What a genius! What a knave! What a superior person! What a magnificently flawed creature!
At the age of everyone here today who is listening to this sermon, we need to admit that we are who we’re going to be. What are we going to be? Who do we want to be? Do we exhibit the best of the human condition to everyone around us, or do we want to concentrate on ourselves, living out the rest of our lives with as much self-satisfaction and self-aggrandizement as possible? Will we undergird the human condition, or will we undermine it?
If we seem not to be the species God intended us to be because of the human condition, we always have the potential to become that species. That is, after all, at least half of the human condition. Thank God! Thank … God.