Discerning the Signs of the Times

We’re saying stop the world, I want to get off, but today we are gathered as a Christian community and we are compelled to ask the question What is God doing amid all of these changes? Is there some sign of the divine presence in the upheavals of our day? Now this is the question that scribes, the Pharisees, and the Sadducees repeatedly put to Jesus. They asked him for a sign of the divine presence. He gave them at least four answers. First he pointed to their reprehensible ignorance. There were signs enough. The people of Nineveh had responded to the preaching of Jonah, the Queen of the South had responded to the sign of Solomon, and now there was an even pterosign, the son of Maya. There is an ignorance. It is attributable not to a low IQ but to moral indolence.

As Augustine said long ago, in order to know the truth, especially the truth about ourselves, about a society that has been favorable to us, in order to know the truth, you must first love the truth. In order to know the truth, you must first want to know the truth. Secondly, Jesus accused his heroes of hypocrisy. They knew how to decipher the most difficult signs of the weather, and they pretended not to know how to decipher the signs of the times. Jesus called them hypocrites. And thirdly, Jesus refused to give to them the sign they wanted, some dramatic act that would relieve them from the responsibility and the anguish of decision. Just as he had refused to turn the stones into bread and to cast himself down from the temple by Bertrand Russell the very erratic but a very brilliant a British philosopher as when asked if what would cause him or what would compel him to believe in God replied that if there should come a voice from heaven predicting everything that was to happen during the next 24 hours including some very improbable events and if the predictions came true then Then he would be inclined to accept the belief that some kind of superhuman intelligence existed.

But Jesus respected the dignity of man’s freedom. He would have nothing to do with some gimmick, some cheap magic that would relieve a man from the anguish and the decision of faith. And in the fourth place, Jesus responded by saying that a sign had been given. the sign of Jonah, the sign of his own life and death and resurrection. This was sign enough. Indeed, no greater sign could be given. Now, Jesus speaks to each of us in these four ways. We are the ignorant, who in our moral indolence refuse to think responsibly about the meaning of Christian faith amid the time in which we live. We are the hypocrites who pretend not to know what we surely do not. We are the shallow and superficial who want some cheap substitute for the responsibility and decision of faith.

But we are also believing people who live in the conviction that a sign of the divine presence has been given to us, and it is for this reason that we have gathered here this morning. So, as a church, as believing people of God who are convinced that the sign of God’s presence has been given in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we come asking, what are the signs of the presence of God in the time in which we live? Well, let us begin with our times. Karl Barth, the most celebrated theologian of our day, has said that no one can possibly understand the book of Romans without reading the morning newspaper. And so no one can read the signs of the time unless he understands the time. A knowledge of what is happening in our world is part of our Christian vocation.

The reading of a newspaper, at least a good newspaper, Christian duty. Let us note very briefly four developments of our day that are the consequence of the scientific revolution and of the revolution in the awareness of human dignity and expectation and that are of a special importance for us as Christian people. And the first of these is the absence of God from increasing segments of modern life. The simple fact is that multitudes of people in our day live with no awareness of the presence of the living God. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the brilliant German theologian, while in prison awaiting execution for his part in the plot on Hitler’s life, wrote, that the world has now come of age and can get along without God. Man, he says, has learned to cope with all questions of importance, without recourse to God as a working hypothesis.

The world is mature, adult, it has come of age. For many years, God had been used to fill the gaps in man’s knowledge, and now as man’s knowledge fills the gaps, there is no place for God. Men have looked for God not in the known but in the unknown, not in the center of life but on the fringes, and now as the circle of man’s knowledge expands, God is increasingly edged out of life. And so Bonhoeffer concluded, God is teaching us in this day to live without him. Now if Bonhoeffer’s analysis shocks you, as it should, ask yourself how many times you have given real attention to God in the solving of a problem in business, or in politics, social life. God is simply absent from much of modern life and the result is a banality of modern existence, the last dimensions of all of wonder and of transcendence.

People who have no sense of the presence of God use one another in cheap love. When many modern people say, I love you, what they really mean is someone has said is, I love me. And I am completely willing for you to serve me, to entertain me, and even to gratify my basic desires. People who have no sense of God lose the dignity of human freedom. The capacity for independent thought and for independent action, they capitulate to the standardizing forces of our society, the automobile, the radio, the TV, and the movies. They become mass men. As a sociologist, Riesman has put it today, all little things go to market, if any do. I’ll eat roast beef, and I’ll say we, we all the way home. A surprisingly large number of people in our time, even church people, live with personal happiness as the highest criterion of right and wrong.

If marriage makes me happy, then marriage is good. If divorce makes me happy, then divorce is good. There is surprisingly little awareness, even among church people, even among the best of church people, that the highest achievements of the human spirit have not been attained in the pursuit of personal happiness and comfort, but in response to the call of duty. Well, a second characteristic of our time is the secularity of our society. Here is, at once under the domination of theology of the church have been emancipated from that control and from that influence, education, social welfare, social life, the parish church in Christendom has become the voluntary church in a mobile, urban, pluralistic, and industrial secular society. And to summarize a whole vast history in one sentence, we can put it this way, increasingly in our society, fewer and fewer cards are stacked in favor of Christian faith and Christian life.

In the South Carolina community in which I grew up as a boy, it would have required real personal stamina and real courage to have rejected the church. The secularity of our time gives to men a freedom in regard to the Christian faith that man has not known at least in our history, for a thousand years. That is, since the ancestors of most of us were barbarians wandering through the bleak forests of Northern Europe. Thirdly, our times are characterized by the aggressive assertions of the rights and the dignity of human beings. A revolution has taken place in what men expect in terms of personal dignity and in terms of material well-being. There was a time when men were content to be the servants of the comforts of others, when a man was willing to be called a boy, when sentimental love was an acceptable substitute for justice.

But that day is gone. And the fourth development in our day is nuclear power and the politics of a nuclear age. There was a time when man’s power was limited to the thrust of his fist, and our Hitler could turn a continent into shambles. But today, we have the power possibly to incinerate an entire planet. And if not to do this, at least to destroy Western civilization. And therefore, for those of us who are gathered here this morning, the future is very uncertain. We do not know what life is going to be like in 1975. We do not know that in 1975 there will be a Russia, a United States, a North Carolina, Haiman Street, the absence of God, the secularization of life, the aggressive assertions of the rights and the dignity of men, the harnessing of nuclear power.

Each of these developments is a source of promise for good as well as a danger, an evil. In any case, these developments are here to stay, and we’re going to have to live with them. No one is going to roll back the progress of modern knowledge to make room for some archaic conception of God who fills the gaps of our ignorance. No one is going to give up the autonomy of science or education and allow the church to dominate life as it did, for example, in the 13th century or even in some instances in the 19th century. No one is going to deny the dignity of being a human being without destroying himself by that denial. And nuclear power is not likely to be given up. The simple fact is that the revolution in scientific knowledge and the revolution in the awareness of human dignity have ushered us into a radically new situation.

A radically new situation with indeterminate possibilities for good and indeterminate possibilities for evil. And the presence of these dual possibilities in each of these areas of life is the fact that makes the history in which you and I live so important. Now let us come a step further. Having looked at our times, let us turn to the Bible and let us ask, how are we to think of God in all of this. A very astute theologian in our time has put it very vividly. God, he said, is a politician, not a warred politician, but nevertheless a politician. Now some of you are immediately protesting that this is not a a very elegant metaphor for God, but the fact is it is both apt and it is biblical. We have to think of God in terms of some human analogy.

We think of God as a philosopher, we think of God as a mathematician, we think of God as some vital urge, but these metaphors do not shock us, Neither did they excite us very much. And certainly they do not express the messianic theology of the Bible, the expectation in the coming of the Messiah, the conviction that God is actively at work in history doing something for mankind. The earliest confession of God’s people went like this. The Lord brought us up out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror, with signs and wonders. Now that I submit is not the work of a philosopher, not the work even of a theologian, certainly not the work of a mathematician. This is the work of a politician, of a politician who is seeking to create a community in which human life is truly and authentically good.

Now this is precisely what the Bible tells us that God is doing. He is at work in the world to create his people, or as Paul Lehman has put it, to make and to keep human life human. This is what God was doing in the call of Abraham, in the deliverance of the children Israel from Egypt in the giving of the law at Sinai in the exile and the return in the life-death resurrection of Jesus Christ in the giving of the Spirit at Pentecost. And more than this, this is what God was doing through Pharaoh and through all the enemies of God. In a very remarkable sentence, Isaiah tells us that God is one who says of the heathen Cyrus, he is my shepherd and he shall fulfill my promises and my purposes. Now if you want to penetrate to the full meaning of this you have to substitute for the word Cyrus, the word Khrushchev or some other political leader.

God works through the prophets, God works through the good people to establish his community, but God also works through the evil men and women to fulfill his purposes in human history. In Psalm, God is a politician who is at work in human history seeking to establish a human community in which authentic human life is a possibility, and he has demonstrated how he works in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This we know from the Bible. And now we come to the heart of the matter. It is very important to know what God has done in human history. It is very important to know what God did in the deliverance of the children of Israel from Egypt in the giving of the law, in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. But we have not begun to live as Christian people until we see God at work in the times in which we live.

Now what are the mighty acts of God in this day? What are the mighty acts of God in the scientific revolution, in the technological achievements of an industrial society? What are the mighty acts of God? What are the signs of the divine presence in the revolution, in human expectations that are taking place in our day, in the South, in Selma, in Asia, in Africa. What are the mighty acts of God in our time? Are there any mighty acts of God? In the history of which we are a part, in the church, the denomination of which we remembers after Bonhoeffer had said God had been edged out of modern life he went on to say we as Christian people have got to stop seeking God in the shadows on the fringes of existence in what we do not know we have got to rediscover him in the center of the village in the midst of the known we We should find God in what we do know, not in what we do not know.

Not in outstanding problems, but in problems we are already solving. God is no stopgap to fill up the vacant places in our knowledge. We must seek to know God in the midst of life and the center of the village. This is our Christian task, to know God in the midst of life, in the center of the village, in the light of what we do know. Let us read our Bibles. Let us know what God did in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Let us listen attentively to the words of the Sermon on the Mount, and then let us ask ourselves, how is God working in redemption and in judgment amid the political and social and economic upheavals of this time in which we live? Now someone may protest that it is very presumptuous to even ask what God is doing.

How can we know? And this presumption is right. Someone has put it we know and we do not know what God is doing in North Carolina, in the Presbyterian Church, in Alabama, in Asia. We will and we do not will to be God’s servants in the history of our time. In both our knowing and in our doing, we have to ask for forgiveness as well as for strength. But the ambiguity of all that we know and all that we do must not obscure the clarity. We do have access to the facts, to the facts about what is happening in the South, in the world. We do have access to the record of the life, the acts, the words of Jesus Christ. We do know the facts, we know the life in the light of which the facts are understood. Let us not exaggerate our ignorance. We can be sure, we can be dead sure that God’s grace is at work in every word and in every deed that enhances the dignity and the responsibility of a human being that helps to make and to keep human-like human amid the brutalities, the impersonalism, the falsehoods of our day, we can be dead certain that God’s judgment is upon every word and every deed that abuses the dignity, the freedom, the possibilities of a human being and that makes human life inhuman.

We can be dead certain that God blesses every effort to know the truth, and that God’s judgment rests upon every effort in politics and economics and business and social life to live by falsehood. This we do know, and this that we know is light enough. No generation in human history, not even the generations that lived in the fifth century or the thirteenth century or the sixteenth century, no generation in human history has ever had so great an opportunity to share in the breaking up of old patterns of life and to have a part in the shaping of the world that is to be, no generation of Southern Presbyterians has ever lived in a time when it is more critical, more urgent to know what God is doing in the South, and then to serve the fulfillment of the divine purposes in the society of which in God’s providence we are a part.

The possibilities for life in our time are glorious beyond our imagining, and the possibilities for life in our time are also terrible beyond our conceiving. In sum, it is our Christian faith that God is the politician, the God who was embodied in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ as a politician spelled with a capital P. Working amid the dramatic changes and events of our time to create his own people, and he has called us to be politicians spelled with a little P for the establishment of his people in the world for the fulfillment of the divine purposes. An evil and an adulterous generation seeks for sign, but no sign shall be given it except the sign of Jonah, for this is sign enough, sign of our redemption and of our judgment. This is the crisis of this July 4th, 1965. Amen.