Sermonstudio

The sciences tell us that out of nothingness came an instantaneous burst of power, a power microscopically small, but so imponderably enormous, that it became all the planets and stars and suns we have ever seen or will ever see.

But the sciences cannot say why this happened at one specific instant rather than some other. Before, there was nothing -- there was no thing. There was no motion, no change, no thing to change or be changed, no thing to move or be moved. Yet, at a specific instant something did move, did change.

Had there been no cause for this to happen sooner? Obviously not, for had there been, it would have happened, wouldn't it? So, there being nothing to change, what changed? And why did it change at the instant it did?

The sciences cannot answer this. But we can, can't we? And the answer is: God willed to do something; God acted.

God, who is spirit, decided to make thing. God said, "Let there be ..." and "there was...." There was earth, with seas and land, and there was sky, and light of stars and sun.

I don't know how long, after that first burst of power, it took the orbs to find their places and to commence their great circular sweeps through space; but I don't need to know, for there it all was, because God had said, "Let there be...."

Physical, material, BE-ing -- this is what we call it. All things taken separately or lumped together -- we call it BE-ing. And why do we call it being? Because it IS.

And what is this being of which we speak? It is power doing something; it is energy in action; it consists of submicroscopic movements, and these movements constitute atoms, and these move together in combinations and are molecules, and this is what all things are.

No thing is really inert; any thing is a current happening. The chair or pew on which you sit is actually something going on right now. This is what science says, and no doubt science is right about it.

So, behold creation -- and understand this: It is God in action now. Colossians 1:17 is a masterful description: "God himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together...." In this sentence we have the story of creation, initial and current.

But there is another story, a story even more important than this one. Listen: Our creating God was not, and is not, satisfied to have his power manifest only in whirling atoms, or so it would certainly seem. Planets and suns and stars were not enough for him; and so in the midst of all this material creaturehood, our Lord resolved to place a creature of spirit kind, another sort of BE-ing, human being.

So he said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness" (Genesis 1:26). And so there was man and there was woman, there were people. At the risk of grammatical incorrectness, let me put it this way: there was us.

And I want to speak now about us, God's beings of spirit kind. I want to speak about the glory of being human.

The sensitive and thoughtful author of the eighth psalm was deeply aware of the wonders of the physical universe. Set amid the vastness of all that, he saw his own race, humanity, and speculated as to where humanity might stand in relation to it all.

So the psalmist addressed God concerning the matter, saying: "When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are (at all) mindful of them?" Then, as though in a great up-surging of spirit, he replies to his own question: "You have made them (only) a little lower than God, and have crowned them with glory and honor."

May I suggest you do this sometime: Walk out on a starlit night, spend some time beneath those very stars the psalmist saw, and set your soul free to soar. What do you feel? You may feel small; but don't you also feel an exhilaration of spirits, an exaltation tugging at your soul? For, you see, standing there alone amid the vastness of all that, you alone can feel and you alone can bring to it a soul that can be free to soar. Oh my friend, the glory of being human!

And do remember this: You never need apologize for your humanity. Every once in a while when some fellow commits some embarrassing goof, you may hear him say, "Oh well, I'm only human!" This fellow would thus excuse himself as though he thinks of humanity as being at the bottom of some totem somewhere. Not so, the psalmist thought, and I believe him right. Of all that God has made, he has placed humanity nearest himself. Whatever happens to you or around you, never forget who you are and where you stand in relation to all else. You need never to be intimidated by the universe or anything in it.

From the very beginning, through that event on Mount Golgotha, and all the way onward, God has tried to let us know how very important we are to him and how great is the worth of our human life. If you doubt this at all, take up your Bible, open it to the Gospel according to John, turn to the third chapter, and read verse sixteen: "God so loved ... that he gave his only Son...." Would God have done that had we not mattered greatly to him?

Too often, though, we have not clearly understood this, and have undervalued ourselves. We have allowed our occasional, and all-too-frequent, failures to obscure our view of the glory.

We have sometimes, and all too often, been too cynical concerning ourselves. Too much, we have seen life as Shakespeare has Macbeth see it, as he says: "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player/ That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/ And then is heard no more. It is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing."

Of course, Macbeth said that about halfway between the queen's death and his own, and perhaps at that juncture he had some personal excuse for being gloomy. But no amount of gloom can ever justify the notion that life is a "tale told by an idiot." I would rather say that life is a song written to be sung, and that it is in the singing that we experience its finest glory.

Once, at the Athenian academy, Plato, probably with tongue in cheek, described "man" as a two-legged animal without feathers. Hearing this, Diogenes went away, plucked the feathers from a cock, brought the denuded bird into the assembly, and said, "Behold Plato's man!" Well, please know this, my friend, and know it for sure: Humankind is infinitely more than a poor player or a plucked chicken.

Nevertheless, there persists a sort of poisonous cynicism that has long been abroad among us and has lately become a plague upon us. Once the heroic in us was a major theme of literature and art. In the century now closing, this has changed. We are now led to believe that what appears good is virtually always a sham. We are told that it is naive, even stupid, to be virtuous or unselfish, that people generally are really rotten at the core, and that all of us may as well admit our hypocrisies and "let it all hang out."

Losing sight of who we are, we are often convinced that whatever dastardly thing we do, our genes made us do it -- and this, as you know, is utter determinism, albeit of the biological variety. More and more, the notion prevails that we are biological organisms and that is that.

Several years ago Dr. Donald Soper often preached outdoors in a London park. On one occasion he spoke of Christian conversion as a change of heart. Afterward, a young man objected, saying, "Dr. Soper, you know that the heart is just a pump." Soper inquired if the young man was married, and he replied, "No, but why do you ask?" Soper responded, "I was quite sure you weren't, and I'll tell you how I knew: There was once a young woman you wanted to marry, but when you told her you loved her with all your pump, she turned you down!"

Do hear this, my friend, and remember it well: Our human life is more than pumps and arteries and glands. It is heart, and it is spirit and it is soul -- and it is glorious! And don't ever listen to anybody who tries to tell you it isn't.

Yes, I know how evil and ugly people may sometimes be. But I also know something about the heroic of the human spirit. Yes, we human creatures can fall to the depths, I know that. But we can also rise to the heights -- and it's here we fit best and most belong. Hero and coward, saint and sinner -- such is the range of capability within every one of us.

At the time of World War II, hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children were imprisoned, naked and starving, tortured, and driven like animals into the gas chambers of Hitler's Third Reich. It was the Holocaust, and it was awful, inhuman, beastly. But someone has noted that if "man" is that creature who invented the gas chambers of Buchenwald, then "man" is also that creature who could enter those chambers standing tall, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema on his lips.

Let me add: If a human can reach for the "forbidden fruit" in the Garden of Eden, he or she can also reach for the reaching hand of God. If a human can clobber his fellow man until he bleeds, a human can also bind up the bleeding wounds and kiss away the tears.

One characteristic of our humankind is well expressed by Saint Augustine, this dating to about 1500 years ago: "Thou hast made us for thyself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee."

You see, if there may be within us sometimes that which does not choose to cooperate with God and the good, there is also always within us that which will never rest until it can, and does.

Here, then, is the basic frustration of our kind: a disharmony that arises within from trying to squelch a longing that will not be squelched, to quench a Divine flame that will not be quenched.

Whatever you may do, whatever you may become, you are a human being and you cannot get away from this fact. E. Stanley Jones told of a deeply troubled young woman who came to him and spoke of awful moral issues with which she struggled. As the two of them stood talking, a neighborly dog came by and nuzzled about them. Observing the little animal, the young woman sighed and said, "Oh, to be a dog!"

To this, Dr. Jones responded, "Ah! my sister, that is just the rub; you cannot be a dog." Neither can you, nor can I; and why should we try? Even if we should desperately desire to, we cannot escape our humanhood. And this, of course, is just the problem in trying to live beneath it -- it's still there and won't go away.

There is an old story, often retold, about a black lad at the county fair who watched small helium-filled balloons go up as other children released them. They were red and green and yellow and white, variously assorted colors. Timidly, the boy said to the balloon man, "If I sent up a black one, would it go as high as the others?" And the balloon man answered, "Yes, son, it would; it's not the color that matters; it's the stuff inside."

The stuff inside -- here is the glory of being human; here is the wonder and the marvel of it.

I don't think any damage is done if occasionally you and I may say to ourselves: I am made in the image of God. Then, of course, we ought to go on and say to him: Help me, Lord, to live up to the full dimension of all I am.

The late beloved Rollin Walker of Ohio Wesleyan University used to say often to his students: "It is not egotism for a man to realize his own powers." To say, "I am not a nobody; I am somebody," is simply to acknowledge a fact.

There is a good story about an excited eight-year-old boy who approached an important citizen of his community on some errand or other. When the man asked his name, the boy replied, "Jefferson, sir." "What's your first name?" the man asked, and the lad answered brightly, "Thomas, sir." The man smiled and said, "Thomas Jefferson -- that's a very familiar name." To which the boy immediately responded, "It ought to be; I've lived around here for about two years now."

I like that lad, don't you? How truly thrilling to see someone gratefully and enthusiastically accept the gift of humanity and run with it.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, son of the famous poet, was for thirty years an associate justice on the United States Supreme Court. He told of a personal experience that I consider priceless. Walking one day on a waterfront beach, he came upon a small girl playing in the sand. As he passed, he smiled and spoke, and the child got up and walked along with him for some distance -- the great man and the little girl walking and talking together. After a while, the child excused herself, saying that she must go to where her mother was. Holmes pleasantly said to her, "Tell your mother that you have been out walking with Oliver Wendell Holmes." To this, the child politely and just as pleasantly responded, "And, sir, you may tell your momma that you have been walking with Miss Mary Susanna Brown."

I love that story! I love that child! I love that spirit! Oh, the glory of being human!

And please, my dear friend, never allow yourself for a moment to suppose that the glory of being human can be discovered only by doing something the world may consider great. You may experience that glory in the ordinary daily-ness of your living, in the plain, wholesome day-to-day expression of what you are.

It was Matthew Arnold who gave us these delightful and truthful little lines: "Is it a small thing / To have enjoyed the sun?/ To have lived light in the spring?/ To have loved?/ To have thought?/ To have done?"

In the ongoing routine of our life, whether in shadowed valleys or on sunlight summits, no harm is done, I think, if sometimes you and I remind ourselves who we are, in whose image we are made, and how much we mean to the God who gave us life and set us upon our way.

We sometimes speak about believing in God, and it is important, of course, that we do indeed believe in him. However, one day at Boston University, Professor William L. Stidger gave that idea an illuminating twist. The man walked into his classroom, placed his books on his desk, looked at his students, and said, "God believes in me, and that faith in me has lifted me up until I have been tall enough to touch the stars."

Well, you are human, and the stars are there, and they are probably nearer than you think.