"Paul Scherer has no peei in f>n!> : '
word oi God into wouU . . j->
with their penetration and haunt UN witli
their beauty. Each meditation is a seed
which starts growing in the mind ol the
reader. A lich contribution, unique in
concept and noble in content. A book
that will be read and reread by ourselves
and go on oei'ig read by our grancl-
childien "---k \i PH \V. SOCKMAN
Intellectual ugoi combines with poetic
lire and imagination in Paul Scherer's
first devotional book. From the w r hole
range of Dr. Scherer's writings pub-
lished and unpublished stimulating
sentences and memorable paragraphs
have been selected and arranged for the
seasons ol the Christian year. The reader,
il he chooses, may follow the selections
day by day, and week by week, from
Advent to Trinity. While each day con-
tains a complete thought, the whole has
been patterned to lend itself to consecu-
tive studs and meditation. An eloquent
prayei lot t;afh Sunda) pic cedes the
week's meditations.
*
"Sparkles with gems from the writings of
one who combines true spiritual vision
whh literary deftness and t>iMce. I)r
Scherer knows the Gospel a KIU* diar-
aiittisMc nowadays and festoons it with
beaut) betoie our eyes. Read and be en-
riched." -Ffi A jjiiiN CL-VRK FRY
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Love is a spendthrift;
meditations for th^ HK-m a*-? *^
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Scherer^ Paul^ 1S92-
Love is a spendthrift j
meditations for the Christian
yeax NI., Harper [1961]
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Love Is a Spendthrift
MEDITATIONS FOR THE CHRISTIAN YEAR
Day unto day . . .
Psalm 19:2
Love
Is a
Spendthrift
MEDITATIONS FOR
THE CHRISTIAN YEAR
Paul Scberer
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK
LOVE IS A SPENDTHRIFT
Copyright 1961 by Paul Scherer
Printed in the United States of America
All rights in this book are reserved. No part of the book may be used or
reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in
the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For
information address Harper & Brothers 49 East ggrd Street, New York 16, N. Y.
FIRST EDITION
M-K
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Abingdon Press, New York and Nash-
ville, for permission to reprint selected portions of the expositions of The
Book of Job and The Gospel According to St. Luke from THE INTERPRE-
TER'S BIBLE, volume 3 (copyright (e) 1954 by Pierce & Washabaugh) and
volume 8 (Copyright 1952 by Pierce & Smith). A list of sources for indi-
vidual quotations begins on p. 229.
Library of Congress catalog card number: 61-5268
To my wife and daughters
To the committee
and
To my friends and students
at Union Theological Seminary, New York
p. s,
Contents
Preface ix
First Sunday in Advent i
Second Sunday in Advent 5
Third Sunday in Advent 9
Fourth Sunday in Advent 13
Christmas 16
The New Year 19
Epiphany: January 6 22
First Sunday after Epiphany 27
Second Sunday after Epiphany 31
Third Sunday after Epiphany 34
Fourth Sunday after Epiphany 38
Fifth Sunday after Epiphany 42
Sixth Sunday after Epiphany 46
Septuagesima Sunday 50
Sexagesima Sunday 54
Quinquagesima Sunday 59
Lent 61
Ash Wednesday 62
First Sunday in Lent 64
Second Sunday in Lent 68
Third Sunday in Lent 72
Fourth Sunday in Lent 76
Fifth Sunday in Lent 80
Holy Week 83
Palm Sunday 84
Good Friday 86
Easter 87
First Sunday after Easter 91
Second Sunday after Easter 95
Third Sunday after Easter 99
Fourth Sunday after Easter 102
Fifth Sunday after Easter 106
Ascension Day 108
vii
Sunday after Ascension 109
Pentecost 113
Trinity Sunday 117
First Sunday after Trinity 121
Second Sunday after Trinity 125
Third Sunday after Trinity 129
Fourth Sunday after Trinity 133
Fifth Sunday after Trinity 137
Sixth Sunday after Trinity 141
Seventh Sunday after Trinity 145
Eighth Sunday after Trinity 148
Ninth Sunday after Trinity 152
Tenth Sunday after Trinity 156
Eleventh Sunday after Trinity 159
Twelfth Sunday after Trinity 163
Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity 166
Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity 170
Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity 174
Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity 178
Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity 182
Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity 186
Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity 190
Twentieth Sunday after Trinity 194
Twenty-first Sunday after Trinity 197
Twenty-second Sunday after Trinity 201
Twenty-third Sunday after Trinity 205
Twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity 209
Twenty-fifth Sunday after Trinity 213
Twenty-sixth Sunday after Trinity 217
Twenty-seventh Sunday after Trinity 221
Sources 227
Preface
This volume honors, on his retirement from the Brown Chair
of Homiletics at Union Theological Seminary in New York, a
man whose zeal for the Word of God, and whose ability to bear
witness to that Word in human words both beautiful and com-
pelling, have made him one of the great Christian preachers and
teachers of our age. For the sake of accuracy we must at once
qualify that statement; for, as the reader will soon discover, Paul
Scherer would be the last man to attribute whatever success he
has had in his ministry to his own zeal or ability. To proclaim
God's Word, to instruct others in the performance of that office
that is a gift and a calling, he would say, and whatever suc-
cess accrues from it belongs to the One who gives and who calls,
together with whatever honor may be due. Let it be said, then,
that this volume is a tribute to Him who calls men zealously to
proclaim His gospel, and who gives them the gifts wherewith
to do it bravely and well.
Those who are familiar with the preaching and published works
of Professor Scherer will know that peculiar grace with which
he clothes the biblical message in human language. Each word
is in its appointed place, each phrase conveys a picture: the
poet is at work in league with the preacher. It is just this
quality which has suggested to us the form of the present volume.
The sentences and short paragraphs collected herein have been
extracted from the various published and unpublished writings
of Dr. Scherer; and they are arranged in accordance with the
progression of the Christian Year, so that the reader, if he chooses,
may follow them, day by day, from Advent to Trinity. While
each quotation is a complete thought, the whole has been ordered
in a way that lends itself to consecutive study and meditation.
Those of us who assisted in compiling this volume have learned
much about the Christian faith from our pastor, teacher, and
friend; we express the hope that in these pages many others may
be taught by him and more: that through the carefully wrought
words of a preacher, they may be led to praise Him whose good
pleasure it is that faith should come by hearing . . . "And how
shall they hear without a preacher ...?'*
Douglas Hall Robert Howard Farley W. Snell
Marion K. Hausner Mary MacDonald John Mason Stapleton
Samuel Terrien
ix
Note to the Reader
With one exception, the Christian Year is divided into weekly
periods, each week being identified by the Sunday with which
it begins. A glance at the table of contents will show that after
Trinity Sunday, for example, there follows a series of weeks
headed by distinguishing Sundays, the last being the Twenty-
seventh Sunday after Trinity.
The exception to a weekly pattern occurs during the thirteen
days from December 25 to January 6, when the distinctive days
are not Sundays but Christmas, The New Year, and Epiphany.
Since this book is designed for perennial use, it covers a span
of fifty-seven weeks instead of fifty-two, thus adapting it to the
needs of any particular year. When Easter falls on its earliest
date, March 22, only one Sunday occurs following Epiphany
and before Septuagesima Sunday. When Easter falls on its latest
date, April 25, only twenty-two Sundays occur following Trinity
and before Advent. Therefore, five weeks of reading which have
been provided in this book will be omitted each year, either
from the post-Epiphany period or from the post-Trinity period,
or, more generally, from both, depending upon the position of
Easter in that year.
Similarly, Christmas may fall on any day during the Fourth
Week in Advent, and Epiphany may fall on any day during the
week prior to the First Sunday after Epiphany. Therefore, one
or more days of reading which have been provided in this book
will be omitted each year, either from the Fourth Week in Ad-
vent or from the week before the First Sunday after Epiphany,
or, more generally, from both, depending upon what weekday
Christmas and Epiphany occur in that year.
First
Sunday
in
Advent
PRAYER
O God, thou who art "untamed and perilous/*
who dost "deal in every form of danger, and many
modes of death," strip us of our pretensions and
vanities; expose to the strong his weakness, and
to the wise his folly but set in our hearts an uncon-
conquerable hope, and in thine own way fulfill it.
Through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
SUNDAY
It is far on in the night, the day is almost here. So does
Paul give us his reading of current history. He is telling
the hour by God's sundial, as he watches the shadow of
eternity fall across the shifting surface of man's uneasy
existence.
MONDAY
These hard facts we keep running into mean God! It
isn't his function just to undergird! It's his function too
to splinter the way we live into kindling wood! "The day
of the Lord so cometh as a thief." Have we time enough
left to learn that our desperate need of him centers just
there in the struggle that goes on day in and day out be-
tween our unbroken willfulness and his unbroken sover-
eignty?
TUESDAY
You may suppose that you can dodge God; but you
merely get away from one place where matters are bad,
to another place where matters are worse: and with the
same wistful eyes staring at you. You may be unconscious
of it all. You are unconscious of a good deal that goes on
in this amazing universe: your return trip, for example,
about the earth's axis from dawn to dawn, at the rate of
something over a thousand miles an hour; not to mention
that other trip year after year, with Mars and Saturn, Jupi-
ter and Neptune, around the sun; or still that third mad
rush through space in company with all the starry heavens,
at who knows how many thousands of miles an hour. And
you, forsooth, are eternally wanting to go somewhere!
WEDNESDAY
Human life has by some been taught to think of Itself as
a blob of protoplasm, an itch on the epidermis of a pigmy
planet, an accident of matter, the first cousin of an ape
that learned how to shave. A man has a hard time thinking
of himself as he should.
THURSDAY
In the view of the Christian gospel, the dignity that be-
longs to man is no inherent and proper dignity stemming
only from his humanity, from his awareness of himself as es-
sentially a spiritual being; the dignity which belongs to
him belongs to him ultimately by an act of God.
FRIDAY
Christianity means that precisely at the points where you
like your life least you may have another: where there is
a bad taste in your mouth; where things somehow have
gone wrong, inside and out; left you uncertain about
whether or not you want to continue living. You have felt
that way. Through the world now for two thousand years
the Christian religion has been hawking its wares: "New
Lives for Old!" If it cannot make good there, it cannot
make good, period. That is what it is about. And it is about
nothing else.
SATURDAY
This earth of ours was finished millions upon millions
of years ago. It circled round and round silently in the
3
dark inert, forgotten, dead; until something, groping its
way through the blackness, found earth's face, and stayed,
and played upon it. The light had come; and with it every-
thing that mattered came: color and beauty and life itself.
So God, who once shone out of darkness, has in the face
of Jesus Christ shone into my poor heart. The difference
between that dead ball spinning in perpetual night, and
this earth teeming with its wonders that's the difference
Christ has made for me.
Second
Sunday
in
Advent
PRAYER
O God, who in thy Son didst come among us,
and in him wilt come again, of thy mercy grant us
not to shrink from thy presence, but to rejoice in
it. Through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
SUNDAY
The Gospels see everything against the background of
that final consummation which will bring the labored story
of human life to its close, and which waits from day to
day only the hidden counsels of God. Indeed, from Gene-
sis to Revelation the end is always there. It is the context
of every book, the undertone of every hallelujah. But it
is not there as catastrophe; certainly not as meaningless
catastrophe, canceling every item of the past and present,
reducing it all to dust and nothingness. It is there as vic-
tory that victory which the death and resurrection of
Jesus Christ celebrate and, to say the whole truth, inaugu-
rate, in the very face of life's dismal word finished. It is
there to solemnize every beginning, to read every chapter
as if there were no other, to see in all days the last days,
to turn history itself into one great now of judgment, to
make of each moment a moment of high decision in the
loving-kindness of God.
MONDAY
Life will not be read save as a ghastly and answerless
riddle without regard to its beginning and its end. Posit
faith, then read events: Israel's history becomes God's
history, and the history of man's salvation; Bethlehem and
Calvary, the trouble he went to, and the price he paid.
Events are words; but they do not always say what we think
they say. The interpretation comes of faith or of unfaith.
TUESDAY
Hear above the confused going of that multitude, asleep
now under their quiet tents in the bivouac of the dead;
6
hear above the clamor of their voices, rising and then fall-
ing so strangely silent; hear the whispering anguish of
One weary, with the dust of the road on him: "Adam
Adam! Where art thou?"
WEDNESDAY
The havoc that tears its way through human lives comes
not of God's hiding, but rather of his persistent stepping
out from behind every corner just at the moment when we
undertake to sneak around it in our effort to get away.
Never is it true that we cannot manage to find him I
sometimes wish we would quit using that phrase. Always
is it true that we cannot manage to lose him. That was
Adam's problem, back there among the trees in the gar-
den. It was Jacob's problem, and David's problem. It
was the problem the chief priests and the scribes had on
Calvary: not how to find him, but how to lose him. It is
our problem.
THURSDAY
In the Bible the word for man make no mistake about
it is lost; high and low, rich and poor, Pharisee and
publican. The only difference is between the few who
know it and the many who do not. Now it is a coin, now
a sheep, sometimes a son; but the farthest, most immutable
value any of them has lies in the redeeming Love that
feels about in the dark nooks and crannies, or sets itself
through the night, with its weird shepherd's call, down
the steep ravine, or waits forever and a day by the gate
yonder where the road runs in from a far country.
7
FRIDAY
Whenever God stirs himself and moves, he seems to pro-
voke the earthquake shock and the tempest. It's rather
like turning over a huge stone in the woods and watching
the vermin scatter! He disturbs the greed that wants noth-
ing better than to sit on its moneybags. He routs out all
the evil things that like cover and the dark. Men with
their arms flung up in their faces fight back at him. He
sets the world by the ears. People say it's the devil . . .
and Jesus said it was the Kingdom of God.
SATURDAY
It isn't a King we need, not at the last. And it isn't a
Judge, not in the deep places where we come. In the deep
places it's a Saviour we need!
Third
Sunday
in
Advent
PRAYER
Almighty God, who of thy mercy dost ever speak
to us in our perpetual need, cause to shine upon
our lives in their darkness the brightness of Christ's
coming, that of the wonder of thy love we may
have a deep and constant joy, finding in him for
all our separate, quick misgivings the peace of
thine own unfailing purpose. To whom, Father,
Son, and Holy Ghost, be glory and dominion,
honor and praise, both now and ever. Amen.
SUNDAY
In our own individual lives we've grown so used to
thinking of a benign and beneficent Providence, that
we're quite sure, thanks to him, everything will turn out
all right. All you have to do is to make up your mind
where you're going, and carry the Ark of God along. "Take
the name of Jesus with you." Then something happens
that doesn't fit your idea of what God ought to do, and
you begin to understand that before he can ever be a
Friend he has to be the great Antagonist.
MONDAY
There is a sense in which God hides himself. Sometimes
it is because we are looking for him in the wrong place:
back in some yesterday, while he stands here beckoning
toward tomorrow; or among things that we can see, such
as "answers" to prayer: until one dull morning we seem
to lose him entirely because he refuses to do our bidding.
Sometimes it is because we carefully avoid looking for
him in the right place. Over and over again he is where
we are quite sure he is not.
TUESDAY
God is squarely across the road, no matter what road!
We might get along better at times if he weren't. We might
get away with our little conjunctions, if and but and when
and after a while. We might manage to fashion an abso-
lutely remarkable peace out of our altogether relative
morals. We might manage to build a democracy out of
race prejudice, and a world order out of vengeance. But
we run into God the Father Almighty, as well as John
Smith, on 4?nd Street!
10
EMBER WEDNESDAY
When Jesus came, nobody much would believe that
the Almighty cared anything about him; he had too hard
a time! The apostles must have thought so too! It must have
worried them no end, how the smile on the face of the
Eternal and the grin on the face of a tiger could go to-
gether!
THURSDAY
This deliverance it is that Christ both promises and
works for the Christian it becomes the ultimate meaning
of all history: whereby through the miracle of God's grace
bondage is transmuted into glorious freedom; ruined
hopes and tears into the order that is being hewn out of
chaos, the music that is being fashioned out of sound.
EMBER FRIDAY
There are times when we talk about finding God in
Christ. Infinitely truer is it that in him God finds us. We
hardly dare lose sight of that, with the poor, fitful search
we make, that cannot rightly be called a search, little more
than a groping discontent, and a distant, formal, weary
doffing of the hat. If anything ever happens in our lives,
it will happen because wherever we hide ourselves, in what
dark corner, there is a love that whispers and prods about
there with its wounded hands: walking yonder on the
streets, hungry, and someone yesterday gave him food;
thirsty, and someone gave him drink; a stranger, and
someone took him in.
EMBER SATURDAY
When the hymns are sung, and the responsive readings
over; when the sermon is at an end, the prayers quite
finished, and your knees brushed off; when the commit-
tees have all met, and the plans are all made God writes
Now over the whole thing. Keep changing what he writes,
and it will read Never!
Fourth
Sunday
in
Advent
PRAYER
What we ask o thee wisely, O God, do thou
of thy great bounty bestow; with all that we so
deeply need and know not how to ask: that in the
knowledge of thy love we may have the peace that
comes not of our striving but of thy gift. Through
Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
SUNDAY
What is the glory o God? The majesty that had no-
where to lay its head; the grandeur that was meek and
lowly; the beauty that had neither form nor comeliness
that anyone should desire him; the splendor of a lonely
Wanderer, weary and footsore, with nails through his hands
and feet. "The spirit of glory and of God."
MONDAY
It is the coming into history of The God Who Would
Be Man: acting as man's great Kinsman, vindicating the
honor of his house, putting away the past like a cloud
from the sky, and restoring to the land his wandering and
oppressed people; within his own being that tension be-
tween Love and Holiness, Justice and Mercy, wherein
stands this tragedy which was his death, and is the gospel
of our salvation.
TUESDAY
It is our part in the eternal drama of redemption, not
his own, that keeps God awake o'nights.
WEDNESDAY
The only time there is is God's time, and late! Shall
we say that to ourselves soberly, and mean it? The Bible
provides no further information. And it is God's time not
because of anything we would recognize as an emergency.
There are too many emergencies. Often we seem to be
governed by them. There is always an emergency when-
ever anybody wants to do anything. God's emergencies
do not look like ours. We are in the midst of one now
confronted as we are with a Truth that insists on facing us
as a Person, stalking around and laying hold of us by the
arm, gazing into our eyes, so that we have to say ''Yes" to
it or get rid of it! Christianity is not a creed, not a way of
thinking about life: it is the I and Thou of a God who ad-
dresses us; a moment of meeting, a moment for hearing and
becoming. The time is now.
THURSDAY
For four hundred years and more, ever since the dawn
of modern history in the Renaissance, man has struggled
to know himself as man it is almost impossible to assess
the gains that have come by way of that struggle only to
have such catastrophe overtake him at last as would seem
once and for all to underscore the fact that he cannot even
know himself as man unless he knows himself under God.
"Where there is no God, there is no man."
FRIDAY
God's final word to your life and mine has not to do
with everlasting demands: it has to do with everlasting
arms! This ''Maker of heaven and earth'* wants to say
simply that he has fashioned us, and we can count on him
not to forget it. He isn't going to create a human soul and
then leave it without any further pains on his part to get
along as best it can!
SATURDAY
Love is a spendthrift, leaves its arithmetic at home, is
always "in the red/' And God is love.
15
Christmas
PRAYER
Almighty God, who now in thy Son art ever
ready to bestow upon us thy very life, give us grace
so to receive thy gift that we may bear in our own
hearts that immemorial pain which is thy yearning
for all mankind. Through him that is born Jesus,
the Christ and our Lord, Amen.
16
DECEMBER 25
I have found in and through him all the God I want.
Nothing less than that. All that I know of God, I do not say
that I have learned it from him; I say that I have seen it
in him. And when I celebrate the day of his birth, I cele-
brate the day when God made himself so manifest that
men have not been able to get away from him.
DECEMBER 26
You'll never get Christ's measure until you chart the
distance which he makes possible for every man in this
utter about-face from the abyss. Never will you understand
what sense that turning makes until you see what nonsense
it is: not because of anything that can happen to us in
time, or when time itself is over: but because of what we
are and what God is with nothing now between him and
us but the coming of a child in a manger, and the death
of a man on a hill.
DECEMBER 27
Famine and pestilence, concentration camps, a field of
battle, great ships floundering in a storm, starving genera-
tions, a cemetery in Honolulu, the dragging of a lake
while this is being written for a young girFs body: try
squaring any of it with an ultimate motive of love unless
God really does slip into this world when nobody much
is looking. On one night of all nights he did it, coming
down the stairs of heaven with a child in his arms.
DECEMBER 28
Whenever freedom is born, back of it now is a manger
at Bethlehem. And Calvary, with its shadow; which is our
light! So does the religion that begins in rescue end in a
requirement set in the context of God's grace.
DECEMBER 29
It's a dreary sight this, watching men stroll around be-
fore the face of God like a committee of investigation,
believing what they choose, saying this and saying that,
whistling a tune, making him pay for being born in a
stable. But Jesus had to risk it. And there, I think, was one
of the sorrows of God which you will never be able to put
into words.
DECEMBER 30
Austerity has taken the place of forbearance; magnanim-
ity has given way to punctiliousness. There is a morbid
satisfaction to be had in the process, a kind of exhilaration.
Decry the human in order to exalt the divine. Depreciate
self "to the glory of God the Father." "Oh, to be nothing,
nothing! A broken vessel for the Master's use!" So may
men turn into beasts, and God into a devil. There have
been saints, "hell-bent for heaven." God became man in
order that man, in his effort to be God, may not become
a monster.
DECEMBER 31
How do you suppose we shall spend eternity, when so
many of us seem unable to spend time?
18
The
Mew
Year
Circumcision of Our ort)
PRAYER
We thank thee, O God, for all the wealth of past
years, and for every stalwart life that without reck-
oning the cost has borne its own brave witness to
that Eternal Truth of which now thou hast made
us here both heirs and stewards. By thy grace hold
us to it, that through us to our generation, and to
lives that yet are not, such faith may come as that
men shall dare once more on earth what thou dost
promise. Through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
JANUARY i
That he was different is the ground of the only hope we
have. We call him not Jesus the Great: we lift him bodily
out of all categories, and call him Christ, the Only,
JANUARY 2
The gospel doesn't pat the world on the back. It doesn't
try to get along with the world. It wants to turn the world
upside down! Did anything of the sort ever occur to you
during the festivities of the Christmas season? Somewhere
in the candlelight, between the carols, was there any up-
setting, discordant note? Writes Matthew, "When Herod
the king had heard these things he was troubled." Could
it be that the only trouble God has with Christmas is that
it troubles us so little? We set it to music, but we seem
more than a little shy about setting it to work! With its
preference for the commonplace and the humble. That
isn't my preference! And the love that comes not as Lord
but as servant. That isn't the role I choose to play! The
only shelter he offers me leaves me wide open! "Follow
me!" There seems to be no remedy for it but some annual
ritual of interment with robed choirs!
JANUARY 3
It began in Bethlehem and came out on Calvary. And you
remember how your pride used to hold you back, and your
ambition, and the stubbornness of your mind. Until you
come upon him in life's most desolate places, there before
you ever reach them, waiting for you to catch up, and the
hours you thought you'd have to go through alone seem
20
like home to you as you draw near with a fire burning,
and food spread on the table, and rest for the night.
JANUARY 4
We live in the moral order which he fashioned, and that
order makes his kind of sense. Not always our kind; his
kind. In that order the issues of living are not held out to
us as promises, or thundered at us as verdicts. They are the
the inevitable outcome of living in a world where law does
not simply emerge; where it is a will.
JANUARY 5
If the gospel means anything it means that at the heart
of Christianity there is Christ. Just as at the heart of the
universe there is God. And as at the heart of religion there
is a man standing on his feet in that power beyond his own,
purified and redeemed.
Epiphany
PRAYER
Silently now we would open our hearts to thy
presence, which is our hope, and all the beauty of
life is its shadow. Teach us thy truth, and grant us
to bear ourselves highly in it. Bring us to show
mercy, as thou art merciful. So let thy mind be
ours, through him who is thy love to us. Amen.
EPIPHANY: JANUARY 6
It begins to dawn on you that you cannot call Herod
Herod any longer. This wretched child has come to dis-
turb all of us. He wants to send you out on this most
disappointing of all the quests in which humanity has
ever been engaged and the most exhilarating. He shows
you that self of yours, until you can hardly stand to live
with you; and when you are willing at last to get out and
away toward the star, he talks to you about peace the
peace of sin forgiven, and you still sin! about joy, the
joy of being forever uneasy, because he has taught you to
care, and nothing anywhere is as he would like it to be!
and about hope, but hope enough only to throw up your
head, no matter what happens, and cry, as an eagle soars
to meet the sun,
"Lord God, Thy will be done!"
MONDAY
Not beauty; truth! You can turn John the Baptist into
a gentleman if you like, by making him proper and
comely; but gentlemen are bad swaps for prophets, nowa-
days at least! "Blessed are they that hear the word of God,
and keep it."
TUESDAY
It is precisely by the road of our own despairs, our
failures, and disappointments that we have come to think
of God as if he were indifferent. We have run up
against his steady faithfulness so unceasingly this God of
Amen, as the prophet calls him, making you think of
Jesus with his "Verily, verily, I say unto you"; we have
23
been groping around blindly at the center of things for
so long, trying to find some brand of almighty flexibility,
only to get in our hands over and over again nothing but
the feel of his greathearted constancy: that we have adopted
the mood of conciliation every time we turn our faces
toward him. Maybe his is the kind of rigidity that will
yield, if only we keep after him; ply him with honeyed
words; sing him the song of the Sirens, incite, incline,
induce, dispose, turn the scales. And nowhere, on earth
or in heaven, is there such a God! That is heathenism,
pure and simple. The God with whom we have to deal is
not only willing: He is eager and waiting. That is Chris-
tianity.
WEDNESDAY
"Jesus hid himself/ 1
The bold thing I am going to do is to ask a question.
Where would you hide if you were God?
Surely not in yesterday alone, but in today, in tomorrow,
if you wanted to keep men traveling. That certainly. Then
I think in things unseen in the courage it took one day
to put aside a glittering wrong and reach out for a dull-
looking right; in the old intolerable dream I saw a woman
pick up once more, after she had laid it away for years; in
the love with which a man set about atoning, a year or two
ago now, for the harm he had done; and in the kind of
love which has little atoning to do, but goes about spend-
ing itself in its home and on the streets; in the clean, hard
choice of a pure life, and a kind spirit, and a bearing that
disappointment serves only to make gentle. Yes, there I
should hide if I were God, and in that brave hour when
any soul of man may spread some sail of faith and slip away
24
from the low and level shore lines of common sense,
toward the great deeps, and the things that ought to be.
THURSDAY
I protest this constant, reiterated, everlasting phrase,
"finding God"; in duty, in people, in books, in stones and
running brooks, in everything! I wish we would all for-
swear it. Let us speak rather not of "finding" but of
"being aware." He is playing no game of hide-and-seek,
however much life looks that way. It is not his hiddenness;
it is our blindness. I have never heard that he was lost.
If he is, space is much too large, and eternity is much too
long, for me to do much finding! Seeking him in nature!
You may as well seek me in the doll's house I built once for
my children. I should not like you to get from that your
idea of me. My children knew me first, so they loved it!
FRIDAY
Simeon and Anna didn't even live into the angry dawn
of their world's new day. The first faint glow of it was all
they caught; but they were willing to leave it at that, and
die as men have died from time immemorial, with no other
certainty than this bare edge of a vision. "Lord, now
lettest thou thy servant depart in peace." I can't help
thinking of Christ's own whisper on the cross, "It is fin-
ished" when to all appearances nothing had even begun!
There was only a hint of God, a nod, a glance but they
got it; because they knew, as Jesus knew on Calvary, what
God was like: that he would always be alive, breaking
through in quiet corners; that he would always be standing
most surely in the very center of things most desolate.
SATURDAY
The only answer to the riddle is the face of Jesus, which
somehow refuses to fade from the picture that the ages keep
throwing up against the sky. It's all there is to say to the
man who is fighting his way along against some crippling
infirmity. It's all 111 ever have to say to anybody who is
beset with painful memories, at dread-ends with himself,
standing in front of a blank wall with his strength gone
and nowhere to turn. It's all I have to say when remorse
settles down over a soul, or the shadows of death steal up
silently. It's all I have to say when the world goes mad
again. With that face there, the love of God doesn't seem to
me to be a silly, unreasonable fancy, trying to look pretty
no matter how ugly the things are that happen; it seems
like Creation's heart beating against my own, as far down
under the assault and burden of life as I am, every bit as
far down.
First
Sunday
After
Epiphany
PRAYER
Every word of thine, O God, is thy very deed.
We don't have to plant our feet and try to hold
back against it any longer! Reveal to us thy will,
which is the nature of things, and our command-
ment. And turn the burden of our obedience into
a song. For Jesus' sake. Amen.
SUNDAY
What we have to deal with in the Bible is more than a
record; it is a revelation. It is not the story of humanity's
quest for God. It is not even the story of God's quest. As
all through the past he has continued to manifest himself
to the community of his people, so now he takes up what
has been written here to make of it his own redeeming act
in Christ; showing us who we are, and what we are, and
where we stand; giving life a meaning beyond any meaning
we could have discovered or fashioned for ourselves; bring-
ing us to deal seriously with the good that he has or-
dained, and the evil that we are forever making of it;
speaking to us soberly and insistently of the direction we
are taking, trying to spell out for us, beforehand, our
destiny.
MONDAY
Where did we get the idea of the "gentle Jesus, meek
and mild" except that we are forever intent on seeing
not what is there but what we want to see there! The peace
he brings is itself a "scandal." The healing is a wound.
The only shelter we have is on "the stormy north side
of Jesus Christ." Why did we ever suppose that the
words he spoke, by the inherent magic which we think
belongs to truth, would inevitably validate themselves to
any honest, forthright mind? The world has been busy for
twenty centuries twisting, adjusting, adapting what he
said to make it intellectually respectable, and demonstrably
practical, only time and again to give over the whole sorry
business, shrug its shoulders, and take off after its own
devices. There is something more serious going on that
does not lend itself to pastel shades.
28
TUESDAY
We are set down squarely in the middle o a place that's
absolutely full of bewilderment. Our own little excursions
into the surrounding dark have served among other things
to increase its circumference. They say that primitive man
was religious because he couldn't understand what was
going on. I doubt if that leaves us with much ground for
being irreligious.
WEDNESDAY
Men go stumbling about blindly before the face of God's
continual presence, wanting to know where he is: he who
is as near as any lingering thought they have, though vast
beyond it; close as the air they breathe and the words on
their lips, pressing upon them in the touch of some hand,
shining into their eyes with his accustomed light. But
these they pile up and say are common things, too common.
Common as the steam spurting from under the lid of a
kettle. Thousands had looked, but James Watt saw it.
Common as the drift water on the shores of Portugal.
Thousands had looked, but Columbus saw it, and it spoke
to him of another world across the sea that waited for his
coming.
THURSDAY
God never has been in the habit of making a show of
himself. He's a dream in the night; an angel wrestling
with Jacob by a brook, but gone in the morning; a whisper,
the sound of marching off-stage, footprints. "Verily, thou
art a God that hidest thyself/'
FRIDAY
The death of Jesus was either a tragic incident, which
meant that his kind of life was futile and impotent and
would be broken at last by a world that was too much for
it, or it meant that mercy and justice and peace are so
closely akin to the Eternal God himself that they can be
nailed to wooden beams and still win! wiped out, and
they '11 come back! buried, only to break death itself wide
open.
SATURDAY
If we ever begin finally and fully to think about our-
selves as mankind instead of as men, we are going to drop
clean out of our lives the best values that life has. You
lose sight of God, and the whole meaning and purpose of
your separate and distinct existence here on earth slides
away, until the best that can be said of you may be written
on a placard in a museum, Genus homo sapiens, variety
Caucasian! . . . which is to say you are an intelligent white
man. That's all. You are a zoological specimen, with a
cosmic chill. This is one of the differences Christ has made.
"For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ
Jesus/'
Second
Sunday
After
Epiphany
PRAYER
Show us, O God, as much o thy purpose, because
we have it, as shall steady us. We do not ask that
the way be made smooth, or even that thou wouldst
bestow upon us now the strength which thou hast
promised. We ask only for the grace to use what
thou hast already provided in Christ Jesus. Amen.
SUNDAY
They tell me in the books that Christianity was an
ascetic creed, a creed of withdrawal from life. It was, when
it got out of the New Testament: but not before! In Jesus
of Nazareth it held out its hands and threw its arms around
every ugly thing on earth.
MONDAY
Assume that the wrong which goes on clinging so fiercely
to you isn't on the surface; that it runs deep, and you're
in it all your days: but assume too as the Bible assumes
a readiness and a power in God which make it impossible
that his purpose in your life should ever be finally de-
feated except by your own will to have it so. Set him, not
yourself, against the evil. And you'll find that he isn't
somebody you've heard about or read about or seen on the
cover of the Gospels. He's real.
TUESDAY
"Blessed are the poor in spirit and the pure in heart.
Blessed are the merciful and the meek." It sounds lovely.
It's the tense and knotted anguish of the Eternal like a
man digging his feet into the ground, pushing forward
with both palms held flat against tyranny and injustice and
all evil speaking these things that tear our lives apart;
against sorrow and despair and all loneliness. It's God
leaning his weight against the world through us in Christ.
WEDNESDAY
Christianity is a religion of reward. It rewards responsi-
bility faithfully discharged with added responsibility. It
rewards the man who is steady under tribulation: he grows
patient. It rewards the man who is patient: he becomes
conscious of having weathered the storm. It rewards the
man who weathers the storm: his is a profound conviction.
It rewards the man of profound conviction: he is never
disappointed.
THURSDAY
And with his breathless awareness Jesus kept wondering
how anybody could forget that Other with the flowers
there, and the birds against the sky, and the sower in the
field, and the leaven working behind the stove. God caring
day in and day out, giving the round earth sun and rain and
food for all the hungry souls that walk its streets while
men shut up his bounty to make a living for themselves.
FRIDAY
To this riddle of life there is no answer that's full and
complete: no answer at all but that God is still making his
way through the thick of it, with his own inscrutable love,
and the glory of a dying Nazarene shining austerely out of
every ill my flesh is heir to.
SATURDAY
Seeking first the Kingdom of God isn't the pious exercise
of a man who is unusually religious and a little peculiar:
it's the road anybody can take into the only ultimate ful-
fillment life has to oiler,
33
Third
Sunday
After
Epiphany
PRAYER
It isn't the way out that we would seek, O God:
it's the way through. Give us thy hand in it, as thou
hast given us thy hand on it. For Jesus' sake. Amen.
34
SUNDAY
Faith was what got them into trouble. It was a Holy
Presence that more and more towered upon their lives.
It was the continuous and urgent invasion of One who
generations gone had led them out of Egypt, long ages
gone had fashioned the very world itself after his mind,
and for all their forgetfulness through the years had never
dealt with them after their sins nor rewarded them accord-
ing to their iniquities! Nothing had happened to the facts
of their tough existence.
Something revolutionary had happened to the interpre-
tation of the facts. The facts were still there, and they were
still unchanged; but they were facts under a stately rule
that rested over human history and made sense of it; kept
it from being ridiculous and futile; shaped it fore and aft;
and from under that strong and tender rule no living
human soul could ever get clean away! They were there
by the rivers of Babylon; we are here: because there's a
will of God in this matter that has to be served.
MONDAY
We do well to sing "Before Jehovah's Awful Throne."
But have you ever noticed how utterly incongruous the
second line seems? "Ye nations bow with sacred joy." The
"awful throne" and the "sacred joy" hardly belong to-
gether, do they? They wouldn't have, if Christ hadn't
moved toward us out of eternity, holding in one hand the
reins of divine judgment, and in the other all the mercy
God has in his heart for human life.
TUESDAY
There was a Master once of life. He spoke of it in terms
of beauty, reverently; he lived out its immortal destiny
35
for it with clear and lofty grandeur, carrying it unhurt
through death; men saw him do it, and wrote it down.
Since then nobody has had to suppose, or presume, or
hazard the guess that life after all may be a very great
thing. It is, or else you have to get rid somehow of this
troublesome Galilean. And that you cannot do. What he
said and what he did will not let go. It is just there, today
and tomorrow, to keep every man's sneer from making
sense.
WEDNESDAY
Forever lurking about somewhere in the shadows is a
question. Most of the time we keep it tucked away out of
sight and hearing. We just stare across the rooftops, or down
the street at the whole incredible business, seeing what we
still are, and what the world is, with all that's so crooked and
should be straight, and all that's so wrong and could be
right. Once in a while it does break out into a whisper that
may well be like an agony on a man's lips: "Art thou he?"
Just don't ever be afraid of it. He occasions it himself
you know, simply by not fitting into life as we know it to
be.
THURSDAY
Have you ever heard it said that some people just won't
listen to reason? Never say that of anybody in such a sur-
prised tone of voice, or act so hurt about it: reason is the
very last thing any of us listen to; and even when we do, it
makes very little difference. By the same token, when some-
thing goes wrong, really wrong, don't ever be content
simply to snap your fingers and say, "Why on earth was
36
I so stupid?" Stupidity isn't this world's primary problem.
I wish it were! A man may be as bright as a dollar, and
still where life is concerned be anything but up to it.
FRIDAY
From under the brows of the Nazarene, the Eternal God
looked long into man's tragic soul; spoke to him it was
like the first sane speech a madman hears when he Is
clear of his madness; said radiant things that swept across
his clouded mind as the sunshine sweeps across a
meadow; took him confidently by the hand, quite sure of
the future; led him to a cross and died for him there with
a gallant whisper, ' 'To-day shalt thou be with me in para-
dise"!
SATURDAY
Now Balaam the wise man saw not the angel of the
Lord. But the ass on which he rode saw, and stood still!
It may be that our knowledge is but a tiny island in some
unspeakable mystery of sea, and that the plain man after all
is right who kneels very quietly and prays, "Our Father,
who art in heaven!"
fourth
Sunday
After
Epiphany
PRAYER
Teach us to walk humbly before thee, O God, for
all that we know thee so familiarly in Christ Jesus.
And may we never sit down safely in the victory
thou hast so dearly won through him, lest sitting
there we come to think but poorly of it. We ask this
for his name's sake. Amen.
SUNDAY
Revelation is not the unveiling of something that was
hidden; not the record of what happened long ago across
the sea among a strange people: but God's invasion, what-
ever form it takes; and the sooner we quit thinking we can
confine it to a book the better. It isn't simply God's mani-
festation of himself: he imparts himself.
MONDAY
One world with another to attend it. The Word ad-
dresses the world. The world struggles with the Word. The
Word manifests its power in the world. But always its
power is a hidden power. There have always been facts,
insistent, brutal facts, to contradict it. There never has
been any conclusive, external evidence that the gospel is
true. In all conscience, there is little enough about any of
us here to make anybody drop his knitting and take to
reciting the Apostles' Creed!
TUESDAY
That you can't get away from the facts is one of our
modern fixations. A certain carpenter from Galilee kept
on doing it from morning to night, disregarding them and
getting away from them! Simon, the hearer? No! Peter,
the rock! Levi, the publican? No! Matthew, the saint! If
a man has anything in him at all he knows that he is here
to change the facts!
WEDNESDAY
One glimpse of those hills where righteousness dwells, of
those rivers of God's mercy rolling down to an eternal
39
sea: one glimpse and we may not even know how it hap-
pened; but we are whole again! Life has come into its
own, got its bearings; it's different, because once more it
has stumbled against eternity, and lifted its hot face if
only for a moment toward the cool, the wide and endless
corridors of a Father's House. SVe were made for that.
THURSDAY
"Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine!" Or is there some-
thing more blessed still: the blessed disturbance that comes
of being his?
FRIDAY
I wonder sometimes if the very things which would now
almost argue God's absence from the world will not show
us someday, more clearly than anything else, his presence
in it! That's how it was when Jerusalem was a desolate,
smouldering heap of ruins, and the people of Israel sat
by the lonely waters of Babylon singing their sad songs,
only to have every word stick in their throat with a sob.
If you wanted to pick out the one half-century of all their
long history when the brooding Mind of the Eternal was
palpably near, that would have to be it! And down the
years on a naked little hill where three crosses stood like
gaunt specters bearing their poor human freight; and a
man cried out as if he were forsaken; but whispered at
last, "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit." Where
else can you hear the deep Heart of the world beating,
inside created things? What man saw as the symbol of their
forsakenness was itself the sign of an unsleeping Provi-
40
dence! Everything was where it always had been in the
might of God; and where it was, it was safe.
SATURDAY
When everything looks just right for a miracle your
need over there, and God's power over here but some-
thing seems unaccountably wrong, and the issue is post-
poned, could it be that just there and then the wisdom and
the love of God are stubbornly at work? That he's never
so idle as he seems, nor so silent as you think?
Fifth
Sunday
After
Epiphany
PRAYER
Lead us, O God, into the secret place of thy
presence, that having seen thee in Christ we may
love thee, and having loved thee may fashion after
thy mind this place where thou has set our feet. For
Jesus' sake. Amen.
SUNDAY
God's good news is simply that we are invited to meet
him in the intimacy of that restored relationship in Christ
which is faith, where requirement goes hand in hand with
rescue, and mercy goes hand in hand with judgment;
where love, if it were experienced as law, would cease to be
love, and law, because it is experienced as love, ceases to
be merely law.
MONDAY
If the gospel comes to us not so much as history but as
conflict, not so much as succor but as demand, then it
comes also not primarily as an invitation to patient re-
liance upon God, but as a summons to ceaseless participa-
tion in his eternal and redemptive purpose.
TUESDAY
Forgiving seven times seven? Seventy times seven I And
still no rightful claim on God's favorl He "maketh his
sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain
on the just and on the unjust/* The gospel is deep enough
down to offend, and far enough in to hurt: where the
quick is, and the needs that have to be stirred into con-
sciousness before any need except the body's can be met,
before life can issue out of death. Proximate answers to
proximate concerns are all too often thoroughly fraudulent
answers. There is no ersatz for the disturbing gospel of a
redeeming God!
43
WEDNESDAY
It may well go without saying, and perhaps it should,
that what the gospel always has in mind is "to comfort the
distressed." What may not go so well without saying is that
it never undertakes that role prematurely. It is equally
concerned "to distress the comfortable." Jesus never oc-
cupied himself with the way out. One might think that he
was intolerably cavalier about that. To him it was the way
through that mattered. It was not with him as with us
the problems of living that loomed so large; as Bonhoeffer
somewhere points out, it was the problem of life. It is
this ultimate bewilderment, this ultimate alienation, this
ultimate anxiety that the gospel addresses; and the gospel
addresses it by increasing it! Freud, with a distaste which
almost amounts to nausea, calls religion an * 'irrational de-
lusion": man's assumption that he is invulnerable, im-
mortal, backed up by the Almighty. But where in the
Bible is that? If he is backed up, he is backed up into a
corner!
THURSDAY
In the gospel we are never allowed to lose sight of the
paradox of dust and divinity which we are: to forget the
devil within is to become a fool saying in his heart, "There
is no God"; to forget the angel is to become a cynic, whose
curse it is not even to believe in man.
FRIDAY
For the Christian, heroism is no gaunt thing which
simply faces the odds and outstares them. The Stoics used
to manage that. It is a spirit which, leaping against the
44
world, has discovered that God is indeed standing by: but
not as one who looks on idly and does nothing; as one who
holds himself in readiness to run up at a gesture and throw
in all he has! Until from that sovereign hand, out of the
evil itself, not in spite of it, comes good; out of the very
darkness, light; out of the pain, healing.
SATURDAY
"Thy son liveth." Where's the profit, then, tell me, in
trying to get away, when it's not only love, but that Love
from which we keep holding back, asking, "How can these
things be?" fending it off, "Art thou greater than our
father Jacob?" Are we afraid because of the threat and the
claim? They are the way God has of saying that life itself
is at stake if anybody wants to live it "all the way up."
45
Sixth
Sunday
After
Epiphany
PRAYER
Thou wouldst have us ask o thee, O God, what-
soever we will. Above all else we ask of thee thyself,
thou who hast never yet lost hope for any one of us,
though thou knowest us altogether. Seal upon us
the image o him whom we worship. Gather up all
our doubts and uncertainties into the meaning
which thou alone canst give to our lives. Make per-
fect in our weakness thy strength, and in the midst
of all our anxiety bestow upon us that costly peace
of thine which can be ours only as thy will becomes
our will. In Jesus' name. Amen.
SUNDAY
There Is a will then at the center of things, like a circle
drawn in the middle of life. Around that circle from the
same center in God is drawn another. It is the circle of
God's judgment: so that nobody, nobody is ever able to
break out of the first without running headlong into the
second. If you choose to stop within that circle, it is your
lookout. But beyond it is a third, drawn more widely still:
the circle of God's grace, which somehow like two great
arms includes the rest: so that one cannot break out from
under his judgments without running headlong into his
compassion. This is the framework of history, the very
structure of that sure and deep reality with which we have
to deal.
MONDAY
I want something impossible like this: God when the
clock isn't striking, and nothing is going on but the patter
of feet on the sidewalk, and the monotonous grinding of
wheels in their ruts! God when nobody at all is paying any
attention.
And that's precisely what you have right to the end of
the gospel. Just a heaped-up mass of little things that you
and I want to get by somehow. They seem to lie so heavily
on us, make us fretful and impatient: and the sum of them
is life! A carpenter's bench, a lake, a highway, and a hill.
Homes where Death has been, and the blinds are drawn.
A wedding, a supper, and a woman by a well. Men fishing
and sowing and building and reaping. People in pain. A
father who has lost his boy, and wanders out at evening-
time to watch for him down the long shadows. That is the
stuff God took up in his hands. And we brush it off, and
say that we're sick of it, and that none of it amounts to
anything! Why doesn't he give us something that's really
47
worthy of us, and not this tiresome rubbish that chokes up
all our time? And God made Jesus out of it out of
common days like yours!
TUESDAY
One is often amazed at the assumption that everything
Jesus said is easy to understand. But what item is there in
the record more insistent than this: that Jesus was being
constantly misunderstood?
WEDNESDAY
The important fact is not that Christianity provides us
with general principles. The important fact is that it
doesn't ask us to go around applying them to one predica-
ment after another, to this situation and then to that:
waving in the face of every current event the Sermon on
the Mount; hanging up a motto for the capitalist who sits
in the office, "Do unto others as you would have others do
unto you"; and displaying over the door of the factory a
set of maxims for the laborer who comes in with his lunch,
"Be not anxious for the morrow/' "Be subject to your
masters with all fear," The Christian life never boils down
to a simple question of what is written in the record. It's
always a question, wherever you are, of the Christ who
meets you there; and the Word he speaks then, and the
cleansing deed he does in your soul, and the swift and
following movement through your life of God's!
THURSDAY
You hear it said sometimes that the Great Command-
ment sets forth the sum and substance of our religion. It
doesn't at all. It sets forth only the sum and substance of
the part we can play in it. The part God plays in it is more
than a little necessary! And the part he plays is prior to this
in importance, and being from all eternity, is antecedent
to it in time. "God so loved the world that he gave . . ."!
You've got to write that in ahead of everything else if you
want anything at all. * 'Therefore thou shalt love the Lord
thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with
all thy strength, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as
thyself." Get them back, these two commandments, where
Christ put them, in front of a cross.
FRIDAY
There is much in this queer world that God cannot do
without contradicting himself and the whole wide uni-
verse. Quarrels cannot be stopped until men are ready to
stop them. People cannot be made good until they want
to be made good. The wickedness of evil lives cannot be
kept from spilling over and hurting the innocent, or air-
planes from dropping bombs on children, or shells from
bursting and killing somebody we love. God got into all
of it on Calvary, just so that he could go on being God for-
ever without asking or needing anybody's permission or
forgiveness. His glory is not so much in a "devouring fire
on the top of the mount" as in the compassion that made
its way down a steep hill toward a city, and wept.
SATURDAY
There are citadels in the human soul where power can-
not come, only weakness can get in.
49
Septuacjesima
Sunday
PRAYER
For every mercy of the past, and for thy presence
still, we praise and bless thee, O God: be thou
yet our guide and our one sure hope forever.
Through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
SUNDAY
There stands One who came to a manger in Bethlehem.
Thirty years he waited. Even then there was no crown to
be had for a leap. In the wilderness the devil whispered
to him, "Hurry!" But there was to be a cross first. It was
God's road, and it was long and roundabout, and it ran far
away, and out of sight, toward "the spires on the world's
rim."
MONDAY
The gospel didn't get up out of a featherbed to yawn its
way sleepily through the earth; it got down off of crosses,
came stalking up out of fire, with the smell of the flames
on it.
TUESDAY
That's why we have so little of the spirit of pioneers,
pushing on into undiscovered country: we are too much
under the tyranny of the possible*, and then we hope to
have some fellowship with this Jesus of Nazareth, who,
when a thing is possible, loses interest in it almost at once
and looks at you breathlessly, with his eyes all kindling, to
see whether you are going to stop with what you can and
sit down there by yourself, or come over where he is and
start what's beyond you!
WEDNESDAY
"Is the Lord among us, or is he not?" the people said to
Moses. In its crudest form it's the demand that somehow
the covenant God has made with us should pay off. "Let's
5*
have a little 'What's-it?" "manna" in Hebrew: this bread
we're after, the results we're looking for. . . . "We have
forsaken all" well, not quite all! "and followed thee"
at some little distance, it's true; but "What shall we have
therefore?" No what-you-may-call-it? No manna? The Ad-
versary in the Book of Job shrugs his shoulders, puts his
tongue in his cheek, kicks up the star dust, and gives it out
as his opinion that no man will serve God for nothing. And
no man has to! You don't, I don't, if we will quit plucking
at God's sleeve not for some word that comes out of his
mouth, but for something that can go into ours!
THURSDAY
A man doesn't go to Gethsemane lightly. He doesn't put
up a cross for collateral when what he says is guesswork!
All through this story there is sweat on God's forehead, and
the rippling of muscles that ache under the skin! If there
is a word on Christ's lips about forgiveness, he means it;
by all his fasting and temptation he means it! If there is a
word about the victory he can give you, the soul he can
make of you, poor and prodigal as you are, he means it; by
all his agony and bloody sweat he means it! If there is a
word there about his companionship on the loneliest of
ways, by his cross and passion, by his precious death and
burial, he means it! I don't care what your circumstances
have been, or what you have been, either been or done,
for that matter I don't care, not when God dares you with
his own signature to be one of his redeemed!
FRIDAY
The Bible punctuates human history. It confronts human
life with its scrutiny, question mark. It holds out in both
52
hands its revelation, period. It records humanity's choice,
exclamation point: "And they bowed the knee before him,
and mocked him, saying, Hail, King of the Jews!' 1 Either
that, or "O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and
knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments,
and his ways past finding out!" While after everything that
is written stands a comma, the symbol of humanity's destiny,
never fully complete, always "to be continued."
SATURDAY
What is so lovely in the gospel? "Woe unto you, scribes
and Pharisees, hypocrites, whited sepulchers that appear
beautiful outwardly but within are full of dead men's
bones!" Is that lovely? "If your right eye offend you, pluck
it out." Is that lovely? "Thou fool, this night thy soul shall
be required of thee." How lovely is that? There is some-
thing saccharine about our butterfly-chasing, and the reli-
gion that goes sniffing about for comfort instead of for the
sharp, soul-cleansing truth!
Sexacjesima
Sunday
PRAYER
Grant us, O God, so utterly to believe in thee
and in thy good and unchangeable purpose, that
believing we may by our lives bring back upon
the earth, for its darkness, light; and for its sad-
ness, that glory which need never have vanished.
Through Christ, our Lord. Amen.
SUNDAY
When he prays, a man must risk growing more like Jesus
of Nazareth; and being like Jesus of Nazareth in a world
like this is not a prospect to be viewed with composure.
To love where Love is crucified; to be unselfish where the
crowd will take advantage of your unselfishness, cheat you
for being honest, and hurt your feelings for showing your-
self affectionate! What if God should answer your prayer
as you stand naked and alone before him, risking what
you are on what he is!
MONDAY
The entire Christian revelation presupposes what we
are, and on the other side of it the grace of God! There
the gospel starts, with its preaching of repentance; and
there it comes out, with its doctrine of the last things. The
stuff of human life and of human history was on hand for
everybody to see. Jesus could hardly have understood less
about it than Paul. But the will of God was back of it, and
the will of God was underneath it, and the will of God was
the goal toward which it was moving! Within that will
stood publicans, and sinners, Levi and Mary of Magdala;
Peter and Thomas and Judas.
TUESDAY
Here is Love at the divine level, never mind the cost.
And on the instant we come within sight of the last word
the gospel has to say about the life full-statured in Christ.
At the heart of that life is a Love which leaves its arith-
metic at home and taking up into his hand a statute, makes
of the statute a song. You cannot argue with it, prove that
55
it never will justify itself in history, and so get it to quit
because the whole thing is unreasonable. It cares not a
snap of the finger for reasons. No use asking it why it keeps
on. It hardly knows how to answer. Not just because God
said so; that much is sure. It was not born of a command-
ment. It does not belong in the category of obedience. It
belongs in the category of gratitude.
WEDNESDAY
And so this New Testament, to keep you from seeming
too large, stands you up, not by the side of immensity
after all, what does that matter? but by the side of Love.
And you can't see how long it is, or how broad; you can't
see how high it is, or how deep! It goes trailing its gigantic
shadow down little lanes in Palestine, and across the thresh-
old of a widow's home. With its hand it touches every-
thing it sees, making no parade, eager to believe the best,
never mindful of a wrong, knowing how to be silent. And
at last it lays out its young arms on a beam of wood, and
answers the first stroke of the hammer with a prayer under
which this eavesdropping humanity of ours has been
peeping about ever since God whispering something to
make every man's grave dishonorable: "Father, forgive
them." I for one can stare light years and interstellar space
between the eyes without being very much upset; but I
can't stand in front of that and put my thumbs in my
armholes! I have overheard God once, and lost a good
deal of my stride.
THURSDAY
The havoc that tears its way through human lives comes
not of God's hiding, but rather of his persistent stepping
out from behind every corner just at the moment when we
undertake to sneak around it in our effort to get away. We
say that he reveals himself to us. Revelation covers no more
than half of it. There is a brand of downright stubbornness
with which God keeps cutting across the road. Each of us
is either the willing or the unwilling agent of that final
sovereignty, still at liberty to reject him, and so to destroy
ourselves; but not at liberty either to avoid him or to de-
feat him.
FRIDAY
To watch Judas there is like gazing out over a poor,
scarred battlefield, with nothing left to show for all its
once fair promise but lifeless, gaping wounds. "I have
sinned/' It is like a publican's smiting on his breast with-
out being bold enough to lift up his eyes and pray. It is
his Miserere Nob is, his litany from the farthest place to
which life can get away from God. "In that I have betrayed
the innocent blood." It is his worshipful hail to the best he
has ever seen, those long sea miles yonder from his desert
here! A sort of Te Deum Laudamus from hell! He was a
betrayer, but by his very betrayal was betrayed. Sin always
does that. The only thing left now was to destroy the self
that had betrayed him.
So off somewhere in the distance there was a soiled and
homemade gallows; while there on Calvary stood a clean
cross for One who had done nothing amiss. Is not the
meaning of it a mercy that can reach all the road between?
There is another way to destroy the self that betrays us.
The secret of it is still with Jesus of Nazareth. It is what
he died to do that carpenter whose love outstrode Judas,
and with a God-lonely kiss built a symbol of hope on the
world's altars.
57
SATURDAY
Prayer is petition; but brave petition. "Our Father who
art in heaven. . . ." There is a gallantry about it. Here are
petitions that hold up their heads. They will not stoop or
whine or dodge or fend off or cringe or let their teeth chat-
ter with a beggar's fear. They march along in unbroken
ranks from a name into a kingdom, with a will, through
bread and trespasses and temptation and evil, to a power
and a glory forever.
Quin^ua^esima
Sunday
PRAYER
We thank thee, O God, that thou art never at
home with us. Thy love is always discontent with
our lives. Give us of thy grace such power over all
those things which make us uneasy in thy company
that more and more we may find ourselves at home
with thee. Through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
59
SUNDAY
I submit to you if we're going to be pessimistic, let's
be pessimistic about the right thing! That may at least give
us the clue we need to life: not that it seems so short or
looks so futile or feels so hard; just that there's something
so abysmally wrong about it that nothing but a gospel with
Almighty God in the middle of it, and a Man on a cross,
could ever really be appropriate to our condition or
relevant to our need.
MONDAY
It has to be borne in mind that the gospel does not traffic
in advice. Nor did Jesus. Nowhere is it recorded that he
spent much time saying "Please." Or "It would be very good
for you indeed if you would/' The wind never tips its hat.
It sends you scurrying after your own. So does the New
Testament.
TUESDAY
Never is Christianity lopsided and pathetic, with a long
and sallow face, and pinched little morals: always it is the
lack of it that is! Christ tied nobody's hands. He set men
free to be the selves God meant.
60
Lent
PRAYER
Whenever we try to face life with nothing but
the strength that is ours, show us, O God, how poor
it is. Then share with us thine own, down the ways
of thy steady purpose. Through Jesus Christ, our
Lord. Amen.
61
ASH WEDNESDAY
You can't grow older before the face of this Christ with-
out sinking, sinking, sinking in your own esteem. All your
poor goodness has to crawl into his presence if it wants to
get there, not like a whipped cur, or because he wants it
so; but that's the way it feels, knowing its helplessness,
never feigning, or whining, or fawning on majesty, or
excusing itself just seeing in Jesus* eyes the daily beauty
that makes it ugly!
THURSDAY
"Think highly of yourself," says some peddler of slightly
old and somewhat warmed-over chestnuts. He thinks you 11
get well that way; and being what you are you get sicker try-
ing. An inferiority complex doesn't come of not thinking as
highly of yourself as you ought to think. An inferiority
complex is the seatbelt we use when we have to fly lower
than the stratosphere where we rightly belong.
FRIDAY
.What we think is ugly about sin is only the mask it puts
on! If the mask were ripped off, we could see what God
thinks is ugly.
SATURDAY
The gospel tells us what we do not know about the
source of all bitterness, about the real threat to our exist-
ence, come sunshine or cloud. It talks about the serpent at
the heart of every paradise we stake out for ourselves, turn-
62
ing it into a fool's paradise. And the name of that serpent
is I, alias my and mine a self so busy with its claims to
priority, its own ceaseless demands on life, that it has little
time to do anything more than to look around in the rush,
and shake its head about you and your, about him and her
and it as if something were unaccountably wrong with
the whole structure of the universe.
First
Sunday
in
Lent
PRAYER
Thou, O God, seest us, and knowest us alto-
gether. Be present to us now of thy mercy, and
grant us such grace of understanding as we of our-
selves, being ignorant, do not know how to ask. In
Jesus' name. Amen.
6 4
SUNDAY
When God took a handful of clay and hid in it the very
torment of eternity, he got him a turmoil out of it. And
why not? But the birds of heaven and the beasts of the
field looked on with wondering eyes; for this strange crea-
ture had its heart among the stars, and its head was only a
little lower than the angels! There was a man.
MONDAY
You aren't likely to be sent out under the will of God
to do startling, impossible things. You are likely to be sent
out to do the quiet, unspectacular things that matter, pre-
cisely where you are and with what you have!
TUESDAY
Here is the eternal paradox of the Christian faith: it
does our sufficient and lofty selves the indignity of sin;
and it does these brief lives of ours on this distant planet
all the honors of eternity.
EMBER WEDNESDAY
In our finiteness we both yearn toward the infinite and
resent it. There are tides in our being, like the systole and
diastole of God's own heartbeat; now broadly welcomed,
away up some spreading estuary, lifting the world's traffic
to the sea; thrown back now from every cliff and headland,
as if for all our frailty we ourselves were saying, "Hitherto
shalt thou come, but not further: and here shall thy proud
waves be stayed/'
65
THURSDAY
It is never long before the life that has no meaning be-
yond its own narrow horizons begins to grow emptier and
emptier. With no interest left but self-interest, there is
soon no interest left. With Job it was disaster; with others
routine, a listless boredom that plods down the hours
watching the clock; with others still, just sin. They start
out with a smacking of the lips; they wind up with nausea
in a third-rate hell, where everybody seems to be elabor-
ately and intolerably dull.
EMBER FRIDAY
Not God is love, but God is love. When you say it that
way you are saying the costliest thing that could be said of
God, and it's the costliest thing that can possibly be said
about us. If it ever lays hold on you, I don't know what the
upshot will be, and you don't either. What really matters
is, Have you ever got up close enough in the crowd around
Jesus to "buy" it, as we say, at any price? The wholeness
of God's love, austere and shieldless, will move in when-
ever you let it to make whole these broken lives of ours.
That's the only safety there is. God is almost intolerably
careless about crosses and swords, arenas and scaffolds, about
all the "evils" and all the "plagues." His caring doesn't
mean that he goes in for upholstering! There is no other
love that knows how to do what it has to do. His love
knows how to shape a human life.
EMBER SATURDAY
Jesus sees men as they are and sees that they matter. He
is never ready to accept their estimate of themselves. He
66
will not weigh their several skills in a balance, throw in a
few native talents here, add a social background there, and
multiply everything, or else divide it, by the position they
occupy in the city. He simply assumes, against "distress of
nations in perplexity," with "the roaring of the sea and the
waves/' that they count.
Second
Sunday
in
Lent
PRAYER
God of our life and hope, trouble us with such
visions of thee, and such knowledge of thy will,
that our hearts, touched into love again, and quiet-
ness, may be ordered and disposed to thy service.
Through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
68
SUNDAY
The proper study of mankind is not man, as Alexander
Pope said it was: it's God. As a matter of historical fact,
we are lost today precisely because we have spent so much
time studying ourselves. I know and you know that that
can ruin anybody. Galileo found out that this earth is not
a planet swimming along in space; it is itself in heaven,
with all the rest of that mighty panorama of stars. We have
got to make that discovery about ourselves: that there is
above us and around us God!
MONDAY
In the Old Testament they used to say that God was a
disturbing Person to meet, were quite certain it would be
dreadful, would mean death! Where did we ever get the
idea that being with him a little while before going to bed
would top things off nicely?
TUESDAY
The story of Jacob is the epic of all this shadowed
human life of ours, where we have to deal over and over
again with the presence of God, with his steady scrutiny,
and at the last and at the worst, with his ruthless love that
will not let us go on as we are, that will hurt us before it
will let us go on. There is something terrifying about the
experience when it's real, when at the last things have gone
on long enough, and God has to take a hand himself; when
the wrestling is no longer with an uneasy conscience, but
with the very God who has made the conscience uneasy.
69
WEDNESDAY
The disconcerting thing about God is that in this drama
o human life he is billed as a friend, and for the first two
chapters of Genesis he acts like it two whole chapters!
Then in the third, because we are what we are, he begins
to behave for all the world as if he were a foe.
THURSDAY
There is a threat in the Christian gospel. It's the threat
of a God who is just. You can't offer excuses to him or to
life. But I don't want to operate under that threat. There
is a promise in the Christian gospel. It's the promise of a
God whose mercy always does somehow outrun his justice.
But I don't want to operate under the promise. I want to
be in this thing because loving him just a little for his love,
I'd like to be as he is.
FRIDAY
Isaiah keeps talking of the God who hides his face; and
Paul keeps talking of his wrath. How can any of us be so
busy being righteous as not to hear either of them? I once
saw a cartoon in the The New Yorker of a man who had
just passed a sign reading "Prepare to meet thy God." He
was stopping now in front of a mirror to take off his hat
and smooth his hair! Tongue in cheek perhaps it was
yet an etching with acid, a sardonic comment on the shal-
low, cosmetic make-do that likes to strut around in
heaven's face, hoping to collect a scrap of credit! Hair
lotions indeed! And comfort! Who said comfort? It's a soft
word that gets harsh treatment in the gospels. We want to
be told that God is always near. It wouldn't occur to him
70
to go away! But what if the God we have is farthest off
when the God we want seems nearest, and nearest when
the God we want is farthest off! Is that what Luther meant
when he said in his violent fashion, "Nobody in this life
is nearer God than those who hate and blaspheme him. He
has no more dear children than they." At least they know
the God they have is not just the God they want!
SATURDAY
"The fear of the Lord'* is that dread which steals into
the human soul with the realization of God's awful holi-
ness, and is the mainspring of "faith and piety/' It is a fear
that troubles man's conscience and humbles his pride; for
before God no mortal can stand, nor any angel. It is a fear
that commands his allegiance and brings the whole of his
life into the unity of a willing and reverent obedience. It
is not the fear that love casts out (I John 4:18). Rather is
it the fear that casts out all other fears (Matthew 10:28),
and by the coming of Christ, in his life, his death, his
resurrection, is "made perfect in love."
Third
Sunday
in
Lent
PRAYER
Hear us, O God, In all our deep desires: some
we can put into words, most of them we can't, be-
cause we are strangers even to ourselves. Of thy
mercy answer us, after thy will and wisdom, not
after ours. Through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Arnen.
SUNDAY
There are so many worn-out, impoverished, uneasy
lives people who somehow seem to grow more destitute
with the years. Each day subtracts something, takes some-
thing out of them, and never seems to offer anything that
can quite make up the loss. Until after a while, they will
tell you so themselves, they feel much as a sucked orange
must feel when it gets a chance to meditate by the side of
the road!
MONDAY
We can hardly tell any more which way to travel: back
from the complexities of civilization, with its machines and
tyranny, to the sweet simplicities of nature; or on from
nature and the beast toward the fair light of reason, the
drone of planes, and the screech of bombs! Both are
marked EXIT, but there is no exit! It is the precise tragedy
of our time that we keep piling up in front of them.
TUESDAY
When Jesus said to his little band of disciples, "Without
me ye can do nothing," he wasn't talking to hear himself
talk. He wasn't embroidering anything, or crocheting a
fringe around it; he was turning out a usable piece of
homespun. That's how it is, whether it has our vote or not.
He knew what we're facing.
WEDNESDAY
Jesus won't turn the world into a playhouse for you,
where all you have to do is to say, 'Tm sorry," and every-
73
thing straightway will be all right. Rather will he bring
you face to face with a God who does rescue people: but
in that very moment starts a "serious conversation" with
them about themselves, and what life is worth as they Ve
been living it, and if they're planning to go on living it that
way forever. The woman at the well tried to wriggle out of
it by changing the subject and talking about theology.
The intelligentsia on Mars' Hill wagged their finger at
Paul and said, Ah, no! no! Well listen to you some other
time! But it won't do. For all the Sunday School picnic
some of us want to make out of Christianity, there comes
a day when we have to meet the God who inhabits our
loneliness.
THURSDAY
I know the things that happen: the loss and the loneli-
ness and the pain. But there's a mark on it now: as if Some-
one who knew that way himself, because he had traveled
it, had gone on before and left his sign; and all of it begins
to make a little sense at last gathered up, laughter and
tears, into the life of God, with his arms around it!
FRIDAY
There's a God here who has done a costly deed: bearing
on two rough beams of wood what only he can bear; carry-
ing here in these days of Pontius Pilate, and through all
of human history, what we can't; sharing with us the worst,
and still showing us the best; saying with every tired mus-
cle of his hurt body that we can have it whenever we like,
as much of it as we will. And no one who has ever been
within sight of that place can rest any more!
74
SATURDAY
This thing in front of you, this fear, this lot of yours,
this failure, this discouragement, this future, whatever it
is that keeps staring you out of countenance face it with
him, and it won't even use you up: there will be grace
enough left to share, if you'll only garner it somehow and
put it to work! The people I know who have met life's
hazards with Christ never do seem burned out and ex-
hausted: they had courage enough once; now they have
courage enough, and faith enough, to give away.
75
Fourth
Sunday
in
Lent
PRAYER
Almighty God, who knowest us to be set in the
midst of so many and great dangers, grant us such
strength as may support us, and ask of us such
strength as thou wilt thyself supply. Through Jesus
Christ, our Lord. Amen.
SUNDAY
Much has been said to comfort humanity. A good many
things have been spun out to inspire it. But there has
never been a deed like that deed of God's uttermost care
for men, the Love that with wounded feet comes along
the rough places with us as though it had now been long
familiar with them. And its whispering is like the whisper
of one who on a day bowed his head and went home, hold-
ing a thief by the hand.
MONDAY
There is a passion for torn and bleeding life which has
to root itself at the foot of a cross if it roots itself anywhere.
TUESDAY
If you will turn to the tenth chapter of John, where
Jesus is talking of himself as the Good Shepherd, you will
see how casually he introduces the wolf, as if it were an
integral part of the scenery. He seems to imply that any-
body who wants to deal with the world realistically must
begin by assuming the wolf. The wolf belongs to the
landscape as much as the sheep do. There's no "when"
about it, and no "if"; only this: "He that is an hireling
seeth the wolf coming." Life apparently, for some queer
reason, was never intended to run smoothly. So many peo-
ple give every indication of believing that it ought to flow
along with a comparatively unruffled surface. When it
doesn't, they say something must be wrong with it. I often
think this would come a good deal nearer the truth: to
guess that something is wrong with it when it does.
77
WEDNESDAY
Perhaps we need life's riddles if we are to hold on at all
to any sense of God's greatness, and not just waste our time
pottering about with a Deity who is indeed very like other
men, the grocer at the corner, or the neighbor across the
street, throwing open the windows of heaven in the morn-
ing, doing the day's chores, and pulling down the shades at
night. Remember the black curtain that fell on "Nebo's
lonely mountain" when Moses died there, looking out over
a land of promise he would never enter. In some far-off
way it was like the curtain that fell on Calvary, with some-
thing of the same sublime pathos, the sadness of inexplic-
able defeat. Yet strangely enough it serves only to make us
conscious of how awful a thing the soul of man is. Life is
not futile, life is nobler for it: less trivial because of the
victory that was not won and the trumpets that were not
blown.
THURSDAY
You can come upon no more optimistic a doctrine of
man anywhere than that he is a "fallen" creature, not at
all now what he was intended to be. Nowhere else can
you find such a realistic appraisal of the human situation
on the one hand, and such a boundless belief on the other
in man's possibilities under God. Victory is certain! God's
kind.
FRIDAY
Not so much out of the confused bustle of lives like our
own, rather from the quietness of those courts of heaven,
does revelation come; showing us ourselves as we are, and
7 8
laying a live coal from the altar of God on your lips or mine;
until our sin is purged, and a Voice speaks with some
human tongue! No message of good cheer, in spite of
everything; no making of people snug and warm against
the howling of the storm without: but with the stern and
balanced Word of One who will not be foiled in his hatred
of sin, but marches through terror and blood straight in its
face.
SATURDAY
The comfort of the Scriptures never was intended to
soothe you or make you feel all right, never mind how
nasty you've been, or how terrible things are: it was in-
tended to send you back into the fight, whatever yours
happens to be, with all the reinforcements God Almighty
himself can throw in.
Fifth
Sunday
in
Lent
PRAYER
Honor us, O God, with the true hospitality of
thy house, and give us of thy cup to drink: as much
as with thee we can lift and hold to our lips.
Through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
SUNDAY
Paul had unfurled his flag at the very start in his letter
to the Corinthians: "God is faithful, by whom ye were
called unto the fellowship of his Son Jesus Christ our
Lord/' It wasn't their faithfulness he was counting on: it
was God's.
MONDAY
The cross is any place where a saving love goes out to
undergird this life of ours, and comes back with the hot
stab of nails in its hands.
TUESDAY
Jesus was never pushed about and pressed into a corner
and nailed fast. Nobody in Jerusalem that day was as quiet
and uncompelled as he. Pilate went in and out wringing
his hands: but never once was Christ twining and un-
twining his fingers as if he didn't know what to do. So it's
we who are helpless now, not God. He has in his grip
we don't these days and these years, and what we've done
to one another and to him.
WEDNESDAY
"There is another king, one Jesus.'* A grim sort of
failure he was on the cross; but from that day to this it has
been better to fail with him than to succeed with the
people whose business it is in every generation to nail him
there!
81
THURSDAY
What does God see in every one of us? He sees in us a
life of his own devising able to resist not his might that
never really comes under consideration but his love.
FRIDAY
The whole secret of the Christian gospel lies in being
rescued, just so that you can be appointed to that unre-
mitting tension: holding taut as Jesus did between what
is and what God wants, pulling them together; because
you too have given heaven the use of you on this earth,
and of as many of your muscles as haven't turned flabby.
SATURDAY
You don't get laziness and indifference out of knowing
that God will carry through to the end what he starts; you
get Second Isaiah out of it, the prophet of the exile; with
his flag flying, nudging the poor Jews by the waters of
Bablyon, Thy God reigneth! Then trekking back to Jeru-
salem with them, tears running down his face, because
God wouldn't break his word!
Holy
Week
PRAYER
For all that we know of thee, O God, we give
thee thanks, and for all thou art which is beyond
our knowing. Stretch forth the right hand of thy
mighty power against everything that stands in the
way of thy will: against us, if it must be, and re-
deem us out of our fears and failures into what
thou wouldst have us be in Christ Jesus. Amen.
PALM SUNDAY
Two mighty, tragic characters enter on the wide stage of
the world: man and God. Here they are, Act I, in the city
streets at high noon, confronting one another. Quickly
they shift about, from temple court to the little village
of Bethany; until on Good Friday, with dry eyes and
parched lips, one comes upon Act II, "Man's Way with
God." After that the hours drag by from dusk to dawn to
dusk again: when there, in the dim twilight of morning,
the last Act opens, "God's Way with Man." We thrust him
away and he comes back, like "the eager, terrible spring."
And it goes on and on. Always, late or soon, man, with
the gods he makes Baal for his crops, Venus for his lust,
Mars for his anger meets the God who makes him! Never
until then does he know himself for what he is: harried
and hectored by grandeur and meanness; always halfway
between heaven and hell, between the abyss of his own
sin and the boldest, hungriest hopes that ever strode up
and down through the human soul. Nor until then does
he know what God is. This turbulent, ugly thing called
humanity, princely and full of heartache, Jesus loved
and left on it forever the mark of his hand, and the seal
of his unbroken dominion.
HOLY MONDAY
There is no ultimate design anywhere except a cross.
You might think God had woven it into the pattern from
the first. Whatever he intended when he set out, whatever
he planned to make of us, he was determined never to ask
anybody to do what he wouldn't: to be more alone or more
helpless in the face of defeat and death. At least he shoul-
dered the consequences when his dream went wrong, every
one of them, no anodyne, tasting it all, holding out his
steady promise down to the last dregs of the bitter cup
which the world still presses to his lips.
HOLY TUESDAY
Calvary was God's mark, his seal and signature, on the
bill of rights which he drew up at Creation. And more: it
was the vindication at cost of that holiness in him which
is the only hope humanity has, and of that power which
alone can give his love "eternal and righteous effect."
HOLY WEDNESDAY
But mind you, God's offer of himself is a dangerous offer!
The culture of which we are a part wants us to think of
him as if he were our great Ally. We sing "God bless
America/' and it never seems to occur to us that he may
find it very difficult. What is worse, it never seems to occur
to us that if he succeeds we may not like it! Everything
will not be all right when you meet him. If anything like
a meeting ever takes place between you, you are likely to
catch there the first real glimpse you've ever had of how
much is all wrong!
MAUNDY THURSDAY
"That we through . . . comfort of the Scriptures. . . ."
It has nothing to do with being coddled, in the nook and
chimney-side of God's tenderness. It has to do, may I say,
with being in a garden at night, as Jesus was, when the
torches began to flicker through the trees, the angry glint of
them falling on swords and staves: and all at once to feel a
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hand on your shoulder. But the hand is God's because you
signaled to him, and he's there. "Nevertheless not my will,
but thine, be done" then that towering presence in the
dark.
GOOD FRIDAY
I'm kin to these Jews, and they frighten me. Talk about
their being Christ-killers is all rot. You can't get rid of the
guilt that easily. It's the human heart that drives nails into
the hands and feet of God: your heart and mine. It's
eternity that is placarded on that cross; while time seems
just to march on in front of it! each generation giving
a blow.
HOLY SATURDAY
The buried Christ will not stay dead. The phoenix,
with a great beating of wings, soars upward from its own
ashes at the heart of the flame. No sooner is the obituary
read, and all the creed quite done for, than the birth notice
tumbles out on the desk and clamors for print. The Bible
sits up in its coffin and grins at Voltaire. "The word of the
Lord endure th forever."
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Easter
PRAYER
Keep our faces, O God, toward the coming of
thy kingdom; and grant us, against every repeated
assault, to choose thy way, and not our own, that we
may rest in the certainty of thy triumph. Through
Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
EASTER SUNDAY
On Calvary men had their fling at saying "No" to God.
But "very early in the morning the first day o the week/'
it was God's turn. He said his "No" to the judgment hall
where Pilate had condemned Jesus, to the hill where the
soldiers had crucified him, to the grave where Nicodemus
and Joseph of Arimathea had helped to lay him, to the
seal that had shut him in, and to the guard that had
stood watch. How much is there in us to which he must
say it still!
EASTER MONDAY
The resurrection of Jesus Christ tells all who will listen
that they are alive in a place which is itself alive, open at
both ends, with the winds of eternity blowing through
it. It shows them that "the whole wide world" is pre-
cisely where the old Negro spiritual locates it, in the hands
of God; that nobody in it can be hounded and victimized,
forced by circumstances into a kind of strait jacket that's
enough to choke the breath out of him. "O Death, where
is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? . . . Thanks be
to God!" We live in a world where in fairness to our-
selves we have to raise the question now about God's
knowledge of his universe, and his "infinite resourceful-
ness" instead of just trying to capitalize on our own.
EASTER TUESDAY
What is Easter for? To comfort us all, and make of that
"last enemy" a friend? It is the life-denying religions that
think of death as a friend. Christianity is a life-affirming
faith, as Judaism was before it, and knows death to be its
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enemy. Every effort to represent It in any other role is not
only sub-Christian, it is anti-Christian: covering it over
with flowers to make it look pretty partly in tenderness,
and partly to get away from it. It is not the function of
Easter to underscore our "intimations of immortality," or
to marshal all the facts in support of them. In the Biblical
faith, when we are dead, we are dead all over! It is God who
raises us into life again, by his own mighty act, even as he
raised Jesus from the dead.
WEDNESDAY
There is more than purpose in God's dealing; there is
the purpose of One who is always himself: not full of
whims and dispositions, not angry and tender by fits and
starts, always what we have now seen him to be in Christ.
THURSDAY
I have never been able to worry overmuch about a man's
fear of being too small. What worries me is our fear of
being too great. Is it greatness that we want, and all that
goes with it? The second mile, and maybe the third! The
seventy times seven! The Easter gospel is a costly gospel
because it refuses to let us flee from that, and under the
vast colossus of our time be satisfied to find for ourselves
the peace of some little grave! The resurrection gives to
life dimensions which we have either to accept or to reject:
and there will be a kind of suicide either way. Which kind
will you choose? "He that would save his life, shall lose
it; and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it."
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FRIDAY
That deep and dark dominion we don't know how
deep and how dark which is able to cancel right now,
while they are still in the cradle, your dreams and mine
about tomorrow. There are the odds! And the plans we
have and the hopes we cherish are up against them, and
nobody breaks through them easily, not even God. "That's
just what makes me wretched/* groans Dmitri, in The
Brothers Karamazov. "All my life I have yearned to be
honorable; and all my life I have been doing filthy things/'
If the odds against which Jesus set himself didn't amount
to anything much, I don't see why we go on talking about
him! "When a strong man armed keepeth his palace. . . .
But when a stronger than he shall come upon him . . . !"
SATURDAY
I only know that eternal judgment stands there on that
hill, hand in hand with an utterly reckless love. Death and
triumph! And I go out from it dumb and forgiven and
unafraid. Sure that this whole blundering world with all
the ages on it is secure in one little corner even of this
sheer amazement, this terror and this pity, which are "the
severity and the goodness" of God. And sure too that we
shall never be able to colonize more than the barest edge
and shore line of that vast continent!
First
Sunday
After
Easter
PRAYER
Deliver us, O God, from our little fears, and
spoil for us whatever confidence we have left in
anything but thy victory. Amen.
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SUNDAY
"Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands, and thy
hand, and thrust it into my side; and be not faithless, but
believing." Was it anything he saw that convinced Thomas,
anything he touched? Or just something that got home to
him, something so like the Jesus he had known that he
couldn't hold out any longer, or keep the others from
hearing what was in his heart and didn't have to be
heard. "My Lord!"
MONDAY
Men may cry "Barabbas" all they like; but theirs is never
the last word! God in the end says "Christ/' and says it un-
mistakably. He's saying it still. They went around once
before, looking for thorns and reeds and purple robes and
worse; but they didn't finish the story! There was One who
finished it! Nobody can ever hurl up into God's face such
a ghastly contradiction as that cross, and then go about his
business as if he had won.
TUESDAY
Jesus got out of it first one and then another who had seen
God's face in his, with the lined and ageless compassion on
it, and the peace in those eyes that looked so far ahead with
such assurance! People who began to guess, as they found
themselves still confronted by this Christ, that the end
had been God's from the very beginning; that all along
he had been weaving a pattern with his fingers that
they had never more than faintly glimpsed; as a man
might stare at the knots on the underside of some huge
tapestry, and only catch a hint here and there of the
grandeur and the color of the master's design.
WEDNESDAY
Christ means that the pivotal fact of being is not our sin
but God's deliverance. He means that cosmically, or he
means nothing: not this present and tangled wrong, but
that ultimate and sovereign Right, underneath and
through and back of all created things, deeper than man's
inhumanity to man, deeper than pain and death.
THURSDAY
Not one jot or tittle of this stupendous fact of the resur-
rection would Paul surrender to those who wanted to
substitute for it the pagan doctrine of immortality. Death
was not a door at the end of the corridor swinging open
gently into eternity. There is the story of a little girl who
every day as she left school, even on dark winter evenings,
walked through a cemetery. When she was asked if she
wasn't afraid, she answered brightly, "Oh no! This is the
shortest way home." The apostle will have none of it.
Death was no friend! Let the Stoic comfort himself with
that illusion if he wanted to. And the Gnostic. Theirs
was a life-denying faith. The Hebrew affirmed life as God's
precious gift. So did the Christian. "The last enemy that
shall be destroyed/' says Paul, "is death." And it would
be destroyed by the same mighty act which "raised up
Christ" from the dead. There was no created inevitability
working from within, no deathless substance, no soul
breaking through the body's shell. It was God that raised
j esus as it was God who in him had reconciled the world
unto himself.
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FRIDAY
There is one who came over on our side of the gulf,
and picked up somehow worse scars than mine. Our
tragedies are light against the darkness of his cross. I think
he has a right now to take all weary folk in his arms, and
say to them great, tender, knowing words, and not let them
go. Calvary is the last comfort God has to give when life
throws all its weight against a man!
SATURDAY
In the last book of the Bible ride the Four Horsemen
o the Apocalypse: War, and Famine, and Death, and one
other. And his eyes were as a flame of fire, and on his head
were many crowns; and he had a name written, that no
man knew but himself. And he was clothed with a vesture
dipped in blood: and his name is called The Word of
God. And he went forth conquering, and to conquer.
Second
Sunday
After
Easter
PRAYER
Almighty God, who art away, but not far; and
silent except for the sound of footsteps on the path
beyond, and this ceaseless knocking at the door of
our hearts: do thou reveal thyself to us, to each in
the way thou seest fit; that for all our darkness it
may be light again, out of our troubles granting
us that peace which maketh all things peaceful.
Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
SUNDAY
Trace the word "hope" through Scripture. See it blos-
som in the Psalms, when there were no signs of it in the
times. The noun does not appear in the Gospels. What
need is there, with Christ In every passing moment of
the day?
MONDAY
A world without questions, with the mystery all gone,
would be a world without God. And without anybody in
it who knows that he doesn't fit, fashioned as he is in God's
image. That beating on the pillow at night, the where
and the what 44 Oh that I knew where I might find him!"
"What shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" the
how and the why "How long shall I cry, O God?" "Why
art thou so far from helping me?" joy and pain and
human destiny: what if every bit of it forces itself to the
surface out of a sonship which we can betray and deny but
cannot break, with Christ there trying to restore it? Our
answers to the questions men ask never serve us, because
under them God asks his, and he has so many morel
TUESDAY
It Is extraordinary how futile exhortation is, and promise
as well. When there is question of redemption, fact is what
redeems, not advice; deed, not declamation.
WEDNESDAY
We find ourselves listening still to a man crowded with
his disciples into a narrow room on a dead-end street,
9 6
saying quietly in the face of measureless defeat, while the
ghost of that fear which had stalked them there began its
chattering at the door, "Be of good cheer; I have overcome
the world/'
THURSDAY
"In all things God!" In the memories that are too old,
but still come stealing up out of the past you once
thought you could make new ones for yourself; in the
dreams you've had that never will come true now; in the
illness that fastens its iron grip on somebody that's dear
to you; even in the sin that doesn't know when it's beaten
and keeps crawling back where it was before: do you sup-
pose that can defeat him, unless you want it to? "In all
things God!"
FRIDAY
We have seen him dressed in the ecclesiastical pomp
of two thousand years, with all the borrowed embroidery
of theological systems, the trailing garments of great
creeds and liturgies until no more anywhere does this
homeless Wanderer among the poor seem to walk the
crowded streets and dusty lanes of human life. The com-
mon corners where he used to stand are empty; the humble
homes where he sat of an evening have no light in them,
no sound of quiet words. I wonder sometimes if Mary,
stumbling away from an open grave, up our dim aisles
under stained-glass windows toward a marble altar,
wouldn't stop short and look around bewildered, faltering
out as she did so long ago, "They have taken away my
Lord, and I know not where they have laid him!"
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SATURDAY
When that night under the roof, behind the locked door,
Jesus stood looking at his disciples, as one might look out
on the sea how can you understand what it did to their
world? You have grown used to it! Their fear didn't matter
any more, or their running away, or the poor showing
they had made. By this one undefeated life, they were as
great now as ever they could bear to be; aye, greater than
they would have liked if they had known. Never again
would they have to settle for the grim facts. Neither do
we, not in world where Christmas comes out of a stable, the
Son of God out of a smelly little village, and twenty
centuries of Christianity out of a tomb!
Third
Sunday
After
Easter
PRAYER
Thou hast brought us to this place, O God, by all
our several ways, ever keeping faith with us, for all
our unfaithfulness. Go before us still, we beseech
thee, by thy Word and Spirit, leading us from this
day forth where it shall please thee. Through Jesus
Christ, our Lord. Amen.
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SUNDAY
Where Christ is, there is the End and the Beginning;
and Christ is here! In him we have already come to the
Judgment which casts its shadow before, and found it to
be a mercy that lays its demands on us, invades our life,
casts God's fire on the earth, only to unshackle in the midst
of it his love!
MONDAY
A higher order of reality has smashed through, and I
must stand up life to life; with a charge upon me that can
rid me, as nothing else can, of too much me. There, and
there alone, lies the secret of a new and greater freedom.
We are free when we obey God; we are slaves when we
quit. Cut seruire* regnare est.
TUESDAY
We have God! We think he holds the stars in their place,
That's what we say, there in the Creed. We say he came
to us once, died for every lonely soul of us, and rose again!
We've got to do something about it! We can't just sit here
and make nothing of it!
WEDNESDAY
In the cross and resurrection, and there alone, Paul
found the challenge of what these people in Corinth really
were. And he set it up in defiance of all they seemed to be.
THURSDAY
Who are these that "love God"? They are the people for
whom what we think is big has turned out to be uncomfort-
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ably little, and what we think is little quite intolerably
big. We want to be left alone with our loyalties, with our
good hard sense, and the ways we understand. We'd rather
hold fast our bargains, the stuff we've picked up from life's
counters, there under the artificial lights where we've paid
down the price of them! Why should we be so eager to
find out how shoddy many of them are? If we should ever
start living as big as this life out of death makes us,
we should have to be brave enough to manage as sons of
God, even in the rush hour, and when we aren't loved to
go on loving without fear! Is it bigness that we want?
Neither the Good Friday nor the Easter gospel will let us
run away from it. We have to receive it or reject it. And
there is a kind of suicide either way. Which kind do you
prefer? God will not waste anything; but there are always
those of us who waste God.
FRIDAY
It is a burden, living with a love like his in a world like
ours, never think it anything less; but such a burden as
sails are to a ship, or wings to a bird! With no fulfillment
for anybody short of taking it on.
SATURDAY
As a man sits by the hearth in fellowship with his friend,
never thinking to make life smoother by it, catching the
inspiration of that other's presence, sharing the vision of
those other eyes, and then goes out into the busy world
with peace again: so may a man before the fire sit with
God!
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Fourth
Sunday
After
Easter
PRAYER
Grant us, O God, to be mindful now of thy
presence, that what we think and say, and all we do,
may learn to arrange Itself as before thy face.
Through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
103
SUNDAY
There used to be a gospel hymn when I was a boy that
had a chorus which kept saying, "Hole! the fort, for I am
coming." I got so tired of holding that fort! I sang about
it among very so-called low-church friends and looked
around; but nobody came. The next Sunday I looked
around among the high-church folk, thinking that God
perhaps might prefer the somewhat more classical tradi-
tions of their church music; but nobody came. And for
a very simple reason: God was there to begin with.
MONDAY
There can be no toning down, no softening of that "note
of austerity** which is the very signature of all truth. What-
ever is true is rigorous and demanding, because it is
reliable and unalterable. It will not lend itself to compro-
mise, or pass over lightly any inconsistency. It is not con-
tent with what appears to be the case, but is on the lookout
for what is ultimately real, and therefore permanently
valid. It probes beyond the symptoms to the disease. It is
radical in the sense that it gets to "the bottom of things";
and in the Bible "the bottom of things" is whatever is
conformable to the will and purposes of God. His will is
not difficult, that a man by strenuous effort might do it:
it is in its holiness impossible, beyond all effort. His pur-
poses neither relent nor excuse: they require and exact.
He never says "please." Life never says it. There is very
little of the "ought" or the "should," or "it would be a
good thing if you would"! There is only the indicative
of what the world is as God made it, and the imperative
that under penalty of death commands us away from what
we have done with it to what he has done about it.
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TUESDAY
This world, since Christ died in It and rose again, is a
place where the tragedy and the triumph are so inter-
wrought that they cannot be disentangled any more. The
fire and the solace, the purge and the healing they belong
together only when you see in them the gospel of a crucified
and risen Christ, all the goodness and all the severity of
God, both the beauty and the terror of life, this madness
down here caught up and held fast by that majesty yonder,
and the splendor of his love.
WEDNESDAY
A religion about God is like a car without a clutch: all
the right ideas, but nothing to throw them into gear and
make them function. The religion we have is Christ, God
himself incarnate in human life, flesh and blood and bone,
now and forever: creating, redeeming, acting, moving
not out yonder, here. To be a Christian is to be on the road
with him, expecting no celestial handout, only a deep,
deep sharing of this glory and this power with One who is
God in the teeth of it all.
THURSDAY
To trudge across the dusty flats, when vision has dimmed
into sight, and the Kingdom of God is not to be taken
any longer by storm, and there are only the night and the
stars, the dawn, and the road again with the spires yonder
on the world's rim! Until fear shall say its prayers, find
heart, and light its candle instead of cursing the dark!
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FRIDAY
Riddles without an answer are in part the hope we have
of being found of God. The dark must fall before the stars
can show themselves, flaming this way and that, countless
jewels set against the soft cushions of the night.
SATURDAY
You say now and then of your life, that you don't like
the setup. What if the setup were a cross! What if it should
be God's purpose to conform you and me to the image
of his Son: and you know and I know where his Son died!
What if he were coming to you here on Calvary out of
eternity, through sin and defeat and suffering, all the
very darkest things of life, to show you how deep they are,
and how ready he is, and how unappalled!
105
Fifth
Sunday
After
Easter
PRAYER
O God, thou that wilt not flatter us who love
flattery, and dost offer us toil who love ease, open
our eyes that we may see what thou wouldst have
us see in all the world about us, and our ears that
we may hear what word thou wouldst speak in him
who is that Word, even Jesus Christ, thy Son, our
Lord. Amen.
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SUNDAY
The God who Inhabits our loneliness never holds out
both hands to us and says, "You do this and I will do that."
The claim and the comfort are not even the two sides of
the same gospel. They are so thoroughly wrapped into
one bundle that the comfort itself is God's claim; and the
claim is the only comfort there is.
ROGATION MONDAY
When Christ can no longer be avoided, when it is clear
that he never will be cajoled, men seek to be rid of him.
His claims, they say, are ridiculous; his demands are im-
possible; his purity is an offense. To officialdom, sometimes
in the church, far too often in the state, he is a disturber
of the peace; his intolerable freedom a burden too grievous
for any man to bear, or any institution.
ROGATION TUESDAY
The evil in this human stuff of ours is like a mad dog;
and God drew its teeth in his own flesh! He laid his scarred
hand on my soul, that I might no longer be so terribly
confused, wondering what is right and what is wrong;
left the print of his own scarred feet before me, by land
and sea.
ROGATION WEDNESDAY
He said to Simon, "Go and preach/' "To the men who
crucified thee, Lord?" "Yes." "To those who brought the
crown of thorns?" "Yes. To them say that I still have my
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crown, and to him who came with the reed say that I have
a scepter too." "Preach, Lord, to the men who drove the
nails?" "Yes. And to those who cursed me say that I have
a song for them; and to the soldier who pierced my side
say that there is a nearer way to my heart than that/*
ASCENSION DAY
You see, it's all a question of living up to our own origi-
nal grandeur, which is Christ himself! We have no other!
Jesus of Nazareth is what we are essentially! He's the
image of God in us that we've doctored up to suit our-
selves, changed it, painted it over; turned our assets into
liabilities, until we don*t like our own looks, want to for-
get and go away, as the prodigal did, dismiss it all. Only
this Jesus won't let us. He keeps coming to us, and every
word he says condemns us; condemns the world we've
built.
FRIDAY
There were those who killed a young carpenter once
because they cared not at all for a God they were unable
to handle. Pastel shades indeed! If he was soft, then so
are the laws which hold this universe together.
SATURDAY
The issue depends not so much on "what somebody said
in Galilee" as on what God did at Calvary.
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Sunday
After
Ascension
PRAYER
To whatever thou hast called us, O God, and at
whatever cost, let It be. Only do then lead us, lest
we stop anywhere when thou art saying "Gome,"
and by the gift of. thyself make us strong. Through
Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
SUNDAY
I am going to begin where Paul begins, with the grace
of our Lord Jesus Christ. In the New Testament, grace
means more than charm and winsomeness; it means the
sum total of all the blessing which Jesus came to bring
and to be. It means mercy and truth. It means the divine
favor. It means the power of God resting now by reason
of a Galilean upon human life. And all this in order that
every man might at last discover himself to be a creature
of the most amazing capacities, Intrinsically great, and
potentially triumphant. This surely is what Christ has
wrought on the stage of the world.
MONDAY
It is an alien land that we ourselves have made, for Christ
to be still walking about in it with his broken heart! We
rarely give him much credit for that. He is an exile too,
along those desolate ways that he meant for a garden; and
I do not see why we should squander our sympathy solely
on one another! I should like a moment here in which
to pity him a lonely, defenseless Galilean pitted con-
tinuously against the boisterous years, carrying his cross,
and trying to make his voice heard over the huge clamor
we raise and the peevish chatter of our own souls!
TUESDAY
There was not much that was new in Christian teaching.
Christ was new. He was the authentic majesty of God,
authenticated by the very laying of it aside. Where else
was God so vast?
no
WEDNESDAY
There Is no law to obey. There Is a Christ to follow!
THURSDAY
The miracles that Jesus wrought were never meant to
hold the eye. Beyond all o them is the mystery of the Man
himself turning his face at last toward Jerusalem, to
be mocked and spitted upon and scourged and put to
death; because that was God's way of winning back a lost
creation!
FRIDAY
God is not only beyond us, not only reticent where he
needs to be, lest my faith turn into the pride of self-as-
surance; he also has a disconcerting habit of breaking
out on human life through the very places and experiences
which I was confident at the time were the most desolate
of all: in Babylon, when Jerusalem was a smoldering heap
of ruins and his forgotten people sat by the lonely rivers
with their songs stuck in their throat. That's where he
was, there more than anywhere. It's just history. And on
a naked little hill where three crosses stood like gaunt
specters bearing their poor human freight: and a man
cried out, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
And it thundered, but not then: it thundered when he was
dead! Yet can you hear the deep heart of the Eternal
beating anywhere else so clearly now, inside all created
things?
in
SATURDAY
You think he was a dreamer, who died for his dream?
He was an unromantic Son of Fact if ever there was one!
With something in view that held him. Vast, so that you
and I have to stand on tiptoe even to see it: God's way
into God's kingdom. Dreamer nothing! You see, he got
there, with that tired sigh o his: "Father, into thy hands
I commend my spirit!"
112
Pentecost
PRAYER
Thou hast called us Into thy presence, O God.
Be thou therefore light for our darkness, and
strength for every high purpose wherein we are
weak. Through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
WHITSUNDAY
The Church is the knowledge that wherever Christ is,
in time or beyond it, there he precipitates the crisis.
Wherever he is there is judgment, and there is demand,
and there is this present being shaped by that future which
is the end without end. It is the knowledge that we have
already reached what has been described as our last fron-
tier, and there have encountered not nothingness but God!
\VHITMONDAY
Jesus once spoke* as men remembered it, of building his
church on the marshland of a life which he called a rock.
Peter it was, and a more unlikely bit of shifting sand you
could hardly have found. Yet Jesus added, in his "humble,
outrageous arrogance/' that the gates of hell would never
be able to prevail against it. Have you thought he meant
that hell was making the assault? He didn't. It was his
church pounding at the gates. Hell it was that couldn't
hold out! Will he then, do you think, find altogether be-
yond him the odds which happen at the moment to be
staring you and me out of countenance? "Now that'*
can you hear him answer as he looks at your outstretched
hands? "that I cannot possibly manage/* . . . Certainly
there's no guarantee anywhere in the Gospels that the
issue will be tailor-made, according to our specifications.
WHITTUESDAY
There are enough people who go about helping along
the twilight, and doing it theologically. A sick w r orld is
not likely to improve if we all keep jerking up the shades
in the morning and saying, "Well, I see it's worse today/'
114
Perhaps a sign should be posted for a while on the poor
patient's door: <4 No visitors." Neither is there anything to be
had of grinning or ot slapping every third person on the
back. There is much in being the kind of soul who has deep
and hidden resource. The apostles go marching through the
Acts singing their songs and waving their hands to us.
They had something to be gloomy about; but no man can
lay his lite alongside ot Stephen's or Peter's or Paul's and
not have his pulses quickened. There was a triumph on
which they drew in the midst of disaster; not a chirp and
twitter practiced for the occasion, but a note resonant, like
the diapason of an organ, leaving all the life around it
quivering and glad.
EMBER WEDNESDAY
When God quits having you on his hands and you start
having him on yours, you will find out how difficult he is!
Instead ot letting you count your many blessings, he will
begin asking you questions about what you are going to
do with them! We cannot afford to get our sociology and
our theology mixed up! The elect, as a friend of mine has
said, are not the elite. They are the uneasy ones, with the
broken crust!
THURSDAY
We are not the elect hand-picked for heaven. We are
hand-picked for responsibility and peril.
EMBER FRIDAY
The Church got its start there, where the worst in man
met the best in God and said "No" to it unmistakably;
7/5
only to have God "pound the table hard'* with his "Yes,"
and set about building the future on it.
EMBER SATURDAY
I heard the sober comment made recently by a very
intelligent person that there always seemed to be some-
thing wrong with very Christian people. They were odd
somehow and said odd things, with cramped, little ways
as if they had been forced into a mold they didn't fit. They
w r ore strange clothes and strange expressions. It wasn't fun
meeting them. It was funny. Maybe. But that isn't what
Christianity does to them: it's what they do to Christianity.
116
Trinity
Sunday
PRAYER
Thou, O Lord, hast never sent us empty away,
unless we Insisted on it. Deliver us from all our
willful strivings with thy spirit. Have thine own
way with us in this mysterious place, that from
being disturbed by thy severity we may find our
rest in thy goodness. Grant that this day our lives
may be ordered by some new obedience, and en-
riched with some new compassion: until we are
ourselves for running water where men's souls are
parched, and for the shadow of a great rock in a
weary land where other feet too are hot and tired
from the lone and level sands. Amen.
117
TRINITY SUNDAY
Getting back from Christianity to Jesus of Nazareth
would be getting back from the British Commonwealth
to Magna Carta, from the United States of America to
the thirteen colonies. It is conceivable that our interpreta-
tion is wrong: but the interpretation belongs now to the
fact and must be reckoned with. The union is indissoluble.
MONDAY
The Corinthians had been redeemed in order to re-
deem! That was the mission of the Church. And there
could be no question about it! By the very central act of
their worship they were the sacrificial community, set
here under the shadow of a cross to shape at cost what they
could of human history: "as often as ye eat this bread, and
drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord's death" the verb
"to shew* 1 is the word Paul uses when he speaks of pro-
claiming the gospel. It is by the death of her life that the
Church heralds that life out of death which is God's most
ancient habit! That's what the Church is for, and in that
she differs from all other communities, and transcends
them all.
TUESDAY
The wretchedness of the Church consists not in its weak-
ness, but in its refusal of strength; not in its finitude, but
in the pride that sets itself in the way of the Infinite; not
in the relativities of its temporal lot, but in its substitution
of them for the absolute and the Eternal. What it has to
fear is not so much infiltration from the world, but rather
love of the world. This is secularism. It is not in danger of
being colored by the life around it; it is that life caught up
118
into another dimension whenever it turns its face God-
ward. And there lies its greatness: not in anything that it
accomplishes, but in the fact that it is itself both the organ
and the object of God's redemption; its uniqueness deter-
mined by the character of its Founder, its holiness by the
creative brooding of his Spirit, its apostolic mission by his
continuous appointment.
WEDNESDAY
I remember worshiping in one of three churches that
belonged to the very same denomination, and stood on
three of the four corners where two streets intersected.
For years these congregations had prayed, each on its corner,
every Sunday. You could have heard them through the open
windows. They had prayed for the scattered sheep of Christ:
that every schism might be done away, that there might be
one fold and one shepherd. They did w r ell to pray. But
year after year nothing happened. It wasn't what they were.
They weren't bad. They had convictions. It was the use
they made of what they were that wasn't convincing.
THURSDAY
Perhaps after all it is a simple fact that the changes
which take place in history take place first in the Church.
Could it be that this is where God always lands, intense
and wearing his scars; that this is where the invasion be-
gins, that unimaginable, uncreated, incredible thing from
beyond nature? Where you and I meet each other again
because we meet him, at the foot of the cross; looking up
into the face of his eternal judgment on our sins, and that
eternal mercy for our souls: sure that we are something,
and never have to pretend any more; in the goodly com-
pany o these others who do not have to pretend either;
listening Intently to that prayer "Father, forgive them
. . ." until our own lips try to stammer it, and we begin
to rub our eyes a little dazed, in a world where we thought
we were
Alone on a wide, wide sea.
So lonely 'twas that God himself
Scarce seemed there to be.
But on it now a strange, long shadow rests, with out-
stretched arms: and we, being many, are brethren, one
body in him.
FRIDAY
As the Corinthians gathered around the table of their
Lord, they published anew to the world, precisely by what
they did, what God had done to make true the deepest
knowledge Paul had of them. In that divine faithfulness,
and In that alone, could they know themselves, in the face
of life's unceasing rebuttals, as the frontier, the very In-
vasion point, of God's history of salvation. They were the
community which God in Christ had already redeemed.
It lives on because Christ lives on! It's his plan, and not
ours. It Isn't a footnote to human history: God has written
it straight Into the text!
SATURDAY
And there at last, with true bounty, he gave them his
own cup to drink: *'As the Father hath sent me, even so
send I you" straightway yonder Into the world's teeth
to redeem it. It was the quiet opening of a door; but
after ? Ah, then, the traveling of a road that never could
grow smoother than God's!
120
First
Sunday
After
Trinity
PRAYER
We have come, O God ? at thy bidding. Unless
we are willing to be healed, thou canst not heal
the world's hurt. Grant us now in the power of
thy Spirit to hear the word which maketh whole
the sick, and all things new that were old.
Through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
121
SUNDAY
The charge Is often laid at the door of the Christian
faith that fundamentally It Is a means of escape, both from
the rigors of thought and from the harsh realities of exis-
tence. Let those comfort themselves with such excuses
who can. Escape It Is; but not out o life, into it: from
meaninglessness Into meaning, from futility Into purpose,
from bondage Into freedom, from security beset with peril
Into peril hedged round about by God.
MONDAY
Sympathy Is one of the things they come seeking of us.
And we are living In a w y orld where just now of all times
we can least afford to be without it. Not the cheap kind,
which Is nothing but diluted sentiment: the kind that
costs something, that makes Its way deliberately into the
center of another man's condition, and instead of lording
It about there with criticism and advice bows its head. We
can get along with considerably less rubber-gloved diag-
nosis and ten-foot charity and transatlantic indignation.
Wrongs are not righted with distant chatter, or the tips of
the fingers. No use opening the grill and looking sad when
somebody lays down his burden on your step: the question
then Is, How much can you carry and how far can you go?
TUESDAY
The world perishes not of dark, but of cold. The soul
in Its deep distress seeks not light but warmth, not counsel
but understanding.
123
WEDNESDAY
Those who contend that the true faith can never get
Into politics should remember that zeal for a false faith
can! National aggrandizement, private expediency, tribal
doctrines of blood and soil openly take the place of morals,
until man begins to lose his mind in the suppression of
thought and his soul in the body politic. He shuts his eyes
to what he is and begins to regard primarily what he has.
Things count, and life grows cheap, ending for him in
emptiness and hysteria and ruthless bondage to his own
sterile lusts: such folk as are pictured on the sinister walls of
ancient Pompeii. Over in Rome, when you take off your
hat and step into some clear, cool chapel of the early days
of Christianity, you realize what freshness fell with the
gospel on the jaded senses of antiquity.
THURSDAY
To be the conscience of the state, the leaven of human
society. That is my patriotism.
FRIDAY
May it not be for God's sake that we render to Caesar
the things that are Caesar's; and for Caesar's sake that we
render to God the things that are God's? The Christian
Church has more than a nuisance value to the state; but
the Word it speaks is a troublesome word, making the
world angry, causing it to strike back because it never
understands, but bringing it to wonder about itself!
123
SATURDAY
Paul in his letters, while consistently intent on moraliz-
ing religion, never makes the mistake which since his day
has shaken the world to its foundations: the failure to
religionize what morals had been left over to it from "the
age of faith/'
Second
Sunday
After
Trinity
PRAYER
Thou seest us, O God, that we have need. And
thou art open to the multitude of our prayers. Of
thy wisdom grant us such things as we should have;
and with them of thy love grace to use in accor-
dance with thy purpose what things thou dost
grant. Through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
SUNDAY
I have the greatest difficulty trying to understand why
Christian people could ever have allowed Christianity
to be called an opiate and with so much reason; how any-
body could ever have taken such a throbbing, vital thing
and used it as a salve for the wounds of living! The
one thing it was never intended to be was a comfort
unless we had got hurt in the battle for God and for his
kingdom! To think that we can run away from the struggle
to some upholstered place, and there appropriate for our-
selves the kindly and gracious promises of One whose face
is tense and muscles taut, like a man's face and muscles
on a cross, is not to think at all.
MONDAY
In the gospel life is seen not as a laboratory but as a
battlefield; not so much as a race, but at greater length and
apparently with far more enthusiasm as the shock of armed
legions, a war in the members, a panorama of fronts, flanks,
and reinforcements. For it men are to make themselves
ready. There is armor, there is a helmet, there are a shield
and a sword with belt and breastplate and sandals. All
in the knowledge of a security that runs deeper than life;
because the enmities that take life away cannot touch it.
TUESDAY
". . . It is enough for you to have my grace." That word
"enough" has always amused me a little. It sounds so much
as if God were trying to be very modest about it all, prom-
ising a grace just level with a man's need. And here it is,
some ten years later, in the letter to Timothy: "the grace
126
of our Lord has flooded my life." It was not "enough." It
was not up to the brim at all. It was a torrent, as If some
dam had broken!
WEDNESDAY
We have to accept the fact that rewards and penalties
In this life are not apportioned according to desert. A good
man on a cross? The Son of God there? It was blasphemy.
It has been pointed out that a friendly and favoring uni-
verse would indeed abolish the problem, but somewhat
after the manner in which death abolishes disease! Is it
possible that God is still in his heaven In spite of the fact
that all is not right in the world? Could It be that God Is
in his heaven to triumph over all that is not right in the
world?
THURSDAY
One often wonders what would have happened to Paul,
with his thorn in the flesh, if somebody from a pulpit had
talked to him about relaxing, about getting free of his
inferiority complex, about saying to himself after each
meal, and three times on going to bed, "Every day in every
way I'm getting better and better." Can there be any ques-
tion that if some preacher had made an easy Identifica-
tion of that with the Christian faith the world would have
lost Its greatest apostle?
FRIDAY
No wonder the apostle writes these same Corinthians
later on, in his own impassioned way, beseeching them not
127
to receive the grace of God In vain. You couldn't be satis-
fied to set that inconceivably great thing only meager
tasks, or reap from it thin and scanty harvests. Not the
grace o God! It was unthinkable! The depth of his wisdom
and the length of his patience, the clarity of his justice and
the fullness of his mercy, the gallantry of his love and the
steadiness of his power, holding the sea like moisture in his
hand. To harness the tides and turn a flutter mill! To
garner the driving energies of creation in order to keep a
civil tongue in your head! Heaven turned wrong side out
to no point and to no effect! Its treasure poured on the
sand for nothing!
SATURDAY
What shelter the gospel offers, it offers because shelter
is necessary: from the sheer futility of a godlessness that
would multiply everything by zero; from the grim empti-
ness of an existence that cannot take with ultimate serious-
ness the only real difference there is in the world, the dif-
ference between good and evil. We are not here to be
wrapped up in the power and promises of God, as if they
were cotton batting, until all our bones are jelly, and there
is no flame in the soul!
128
Third
Sunday
After
Trinity
PRAYER
Bestow upon us, O God, all that thou dost ask of
us, that in asking life of thee we may be ready to
share thy life, and the weight of it, which is thy
love in Christ Jesus. Amen.
SUNDAY
Seeking first the Kingdom of God isn't the pious exer-
cise of a man who is unusually religious and a little pe-
culiar: it's the road anybody can take into the only
ultimate fulfillment life has to offer.
MONDAY
God's kind of justice is not blindfolded. It sees with
the longing, steady eyes of Jesus; and they mean to win,
with God's unbroken promise in them: the God whose
awful power had to be gentle, or it would never have been
great; and had to be awful, or for all his gentleness he
would never have been of any use. A pity like that on
Calvary did not break into human life to wander about
helpless and witless, wasting its breath, unable to do any-
thing. It broke in to probe and cut away, and so set at
naught every costly fear men have all the galling slavery
of little souls, the odds that pile up, the things people
ought to do and cannot to make nothing of it, cancel it,
set God in its stead. The majesty which is back of God's
compassion is what makes the compassion matter.
TUESDAY
Life is not organized around us and our privileges.
Neither our assets nor our liabilities are a key to the mys-
tery. Is that why there are so many days when a closed
door seems to be the only accurate symbol of reality?
Pound on it ever so hard, and whoever lives there, if any-
body does, will not open it. Storms come and accidents
happen. Disease stalks up and down, holding hands with
death. Crops grow or rot with blight. Rain falls, or the
130
parched earth bakes hard and cracks open under the sun.
"What's the good of being good in a world like that?"
asked a woman. Rather, what would be the good of being
good in any other kind of world?
WEDNESDAY
God is issuing his summons. Humanity does not have
to look him up every once in a while. Whole generations
are obsessed with techniques. How go about the business
of praying? How cultivate the religious mood? HOW T tap
the reservoirs of infinite power? So was a book about the
Sermon on the Mount advertised! It rarely occurs to such
people that the most important step in the whole trans-
action has already been taken. The difficulty is not so much
that they are unable to find God; the real difficulty is that
they cannot manage to get rid of him.
THURSDAY
What if God doesn't seem to be around because under-
neath everything else in us there is something that doesn't
want him to be, couldn't stand it i he were! The cost of
that might well have been a crucifixion! It wouldn't be
enough then to relax, and say we're sorry for something
we remember, and for much that we've forgotten! We
couldn't go on supposing we have God, in some doctrine or
some church; know him, in some book or some experience.
It may well be that the God we know, and the God we
have, because he's the God we want, is not the God who is.
FRIDAY
What God is asking of us In this world he has not for-
gotten is the kind of gallantry that will stop hugging so
close everything we have, and stand up as he did, and fling
it to the winds if we must, on any cross life undertakes to
knock together for us.
SATURDAY
One evening, in the middle of his sermon, an old evan-
gelist, it is said, threw up his hands and shouted, "My
friends, God hates religion!" The whole Bible, Old Testa-
ment and New, is the story of how much he hates what we
make of it.
Fourth
Sunday
After
Trinity
PRAYER
Redeem us, O God, out of all our poor ways into
thine. Teach us thy will for us by calling us back
each day to the things which we know are most cer-
tainly true. Direct our lives by the constant pres-
sure on them of other lives that have felt the touch
of thy hand and loved the beauty of thy peace. Un-
til our faces be set toward thee, and all our hopes
hid forever in thine. For Jesus' sake. Ainen.
SUNDAY
We stand up in the world's face not because we are God-
bewitched, as we ought to be; but because we are self-
bewitched: obsessed with the powers of the human mind
or with the might of our human hands.
MONDAY
Let's quit being absurd. No use asking science to deliver
us from evil; for thine is the education and the legislation
and the evolution, forever and ever. It won't get us out.
The farther on we go, the vaster the wrong becomes. I
can do more harm in my kind of xvorld than Machiavelli
could do in his. There is progress in righteousness; but
there is progress in wickedness to keep step with it.
TUESDAY
I suppose nobody is quite so likely to turn complacent
as those of us who call ourselves Christians, just because
we've grown used to being what we are. We've listened
to sermons preached about God, we've read a few books
about him, we talk about him occasionally, and now and
then recommend him very, very highly. We can even ex-
plain the mystery of his dealings, particularly when some-
body else is hurt by them. We can give you definitions and
answers to your questions, and tell you precisely what's
wrong with you the minute you ask, and advise you as to
just what you ought to do. All of which I say by way of
gentle satire. And I'm rather well pleased with it. How well
pleased are you with yourself because you suspected that I
was well pleased with myself? That's how subtle com-
placency really is.
WEDNESDAY
Life doesn't seem to have much stomach for examining
itself steadily; so every now and then it puts on a devil-
may-care mood and takes to a bit of revelry for an anti-
dote. 1 have often thought what a soul-shattering thing
it would be to lift the maudlin masks you'll find in any
crowd and see people wearing their real faces!
THURSDAY
We can't get away from our own greatness, and let it
go, content to be blown about by circumstance like thistle-
down. There's a grandeur that was born in us, and it makes
us uneasy. The Bible calls it "the image of God." The only
trouble is, we don't like it as he made it.
FRIDAY
The cross is God's victory over sin, our sin: the old
habits that keep clinging like barnacles to a ship's hull,
blind, blazing prejudices, clammy indifference all of it
piling up into weird and monstrous things. Christ got
into it where it was heaviest and darkest, not to wipe it
out and make it as if it were not, but to do with it what
only God could do: not to change the past, to change the
future; to set our souls cleansed and steadied against the
rush of all the evil that continually wells up from within,
and from without swings like a tide across the dreary flats
of human life.
SATURDAY
Nor does the mind of God for men and nations seem
foolish and irrelevant any more, for all the angry way we
try to toss it off, crying out that it mocks us with its un-
attainable beauty. With the face of Jesus there, that mind
seems like the "established custom of Eternity," the only
mind there is, majestic and serene, bent as soberly today
as ever it was on getting itself done!
* 'Remember, I am God. There is none else. Declaring the
end from the beginning. My counsel shall stand/' When
God said that from a cross he said something that would
hold. It held through that unutterable darkness on Cal-
vary. I think it will not be shaken now!
136
Fifth
Sunday
After
Trinity
PRAYER
It isn't our knowledge, O God; It's the weariness
of it that we would have thee see and pity. It isn't
our skill, but the abuse of it not our energy, but
the languor of our souls. God pity that, and redeem
us, making us strong in thy grace for every day's
fresh adventure toward thy purpose. For Jesus*
sake. Amen.
*37
SUNDAY
The ageless symbol of the Christian faith is a cross with
a man on it, arms outstretched under a mute sky, nails in
his hands; and in his heart something he has never thought
to earn: the mystery of God's eternal peace. The very hard-
ness of that is flung down like a glove in front of all the
gallantry there is in the human soul. Jesus rests his whole,
whole case on it.
MONDAY
There is something you will never be without this
Christ. Watch some gaunt and naked bush in the park.
Under warm skies it seems suddenly to come alive. Little
by little it begins to swell with the mysterious tides of the
spring. Stem and twig and tendril, it pushes out one tiny
bud after another. And it will keep on crowding them with
life until they break open into a thousand delicate blos-
soms a very burst of flame there by the side of the road.
Call it fulfillment if you like. It is the filling full of all
there is inside that is worth fulfilling, until that "intoler-
able compliment" which God has paid us all begins to find
its way out through us into human life.
TUESDAY
Almost everybody is hounded and badgered about by
the specter of a grander self than any he's ever known or
laid his hands on. No use calling him a hypocrite. He may
be a failure, but he isn't necessarily a fraud. When you
see him going to church it isn't always a mask he's wearing;
it may be a battle he's fighting.
WEDNESDAY
God isn't likely to be offended by any man's asking for
what he wants and needs, as simply as a child would ask.
He invites it! "Whatsoe\er" is the word Jesus has for it
but with this flag at the masthead, "in my name"! When
you hoist that, you're headed for the open sea! This place
where you kneel and bow your head is only a port of
call: beyond the asking there is more!
THURSDAY
Duration is nothing much to be excited about, or to
boast of; particularly if it means that we are going on for-
ever as we are. Such a prospect might conceivably be quite
dreadful. But if living is other even now than we have
thought it not mean, or shallow, with all the world
laughing last and much the best but great and lofty and
deep; then let life let go, for Life Is born!
FRIDAY
Look to the man they nailed to a cross once, whom
force couldn't touch. And lies fell down around him help-
less. And injustice couldn't do anything but scourge him
and leave its scars on his hands and feet. Until everything
that tried to crowd in against him "broke itself on the fact
of God!" And he came back to haunt this life of ours for-
ever; because the worst we can do can't get rid of him!
SATURDAY
There is something grand about living, and majestic:
the sweat and the blood and the tears, the joy and the
tragedy. It all seems to be headed somewhere, to be bent
on some huge eternal gain for the universe. Either that or
nothing; and nothing doesn't think! It doesn't think any
more than a row of zeros would think, marching along page
after page. You come upon them somewhere in the middle,
and look back and back and back to see what sense they
make; but they begin with zerol That way madness lies!
We know very well what it is that's on foot, when we are in
our right mind: this incredible parade with God in front
of it! It isn't something to make a man sick and tired.
It's a thrilling thing when you see it whole and see your-
self as part of It, moving across this stupendous stage of
history against the backdrop of eternity. The challenge
of it is like the challenge of biigles. It's like the restless
rattle of drums in the dark!
140
Sixth
Sunday
After
Trinity
PRAYER
Keep us, O God, from presuming lightly to
preach or lightly to hear thy word, so upholding
us, and so opposing us, that in all our weakness
thy strength may be made perfect. Through Jesus
Christ our Lord. Amen.
141
SUNDAY
The tension of all human history and of all human life
is strung taut like a wire between God's weakness and our
might.
MONDAY
At the last, in its inmost heart, the world seeks not
reformation or revolution, but renewal; not forgetfulness,
but forgiveness; not prosperity, but peace; not security,
but strength.
TUESDAY
We are God's shock troops! Never to count on him at all
unless our counting on him spells for us a commitment,
high and glad and unreckoning, beyond expediency and
prudence and common sense; a commitment that will
leave its arithmetic at home, set out for those horizons
which are as far as it can see, and when it cannot see,
is willing to go it blind! Christianity never raises as a
primary question the defending of this faith or the sav-
ing of that institution. It always raises a prior question:
Are we caught and held by whatever it is up yonder to
which we are bound not just by duty, but by the freest
choices and the deepest loyalties of our being; not by
what we can command, but by what commands us; not
by what we can carry through this tragedy of a broken
world, but by what can set us about with power to bind
up its wounds and bring back into its eyes as we can that
light of the knowledge of the glory of God which is in the
face of Jesus Christ?
142
WEDNESDAY
"My grace Is enough for you/' I suppose there are
people who read those words and are far more sure than
they ought to be that Paul really heard them! We could
manage too, on such terms. He prayed once, and what he
wanted didn't happen; so he prayed again, and It didn't
happen then either. We'll go along with that. That's exactly
how it is. But the third time he got an answer, and we
haven't had any. I can't help wondering about that. It's
the silence, the terrible silence, that says "No" to us, I
wonder if it wasn't the silence, the terrible silence, that
said "No" to him "No, but. . . ?" He carried that burden
all his life, you know. Some blemish, was It, that would
make a Jew ashamed? The pride and the passion maybe
that kept nagging at him all his days. Perhaps the secret of
It lies hidden away somewhere in the agony of that seventh
chapter of Romans: "The good that I would I do not:
but the evil which I would not, that I do. . . . O wretched
man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this
death?" Then the doxology for a victory that hadn't been
won yet: "I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord."
When you don't hear anything, isn't there something you
ought to hear? "My grace Is enough for you."
THURSDAY
Scripture wastes very little time on the way we feel. It
sets something in front of you, not inside, outside, that
you can lay your hands on; and it Is not just the fact of
forgiveness, though you can document from many a
modern drama and novel what goes on where there is
none. It's not even the fact that some good at last can get
in where the evil used to be. Rather it's this, for anybody
who will take hold of it: the fact that life can come now
where death was! The Bible isn't interested in anything
else.
FRIDAY
The man on Calvary was not bowing his head to a
tempest he couldn't stand up against, resigned to some
bleak, inscrutable Providence that had overtaken him: it
was he that had struck those dreadful blows with the
hammer, nailing down the very evil that had thought to do
away with him and now could never again hold any man
fast: showing it up, taking its scepter from it, changing the
face of the earth. It wasn't a dismal rout; it was an in-
credible conquest.
SATURDAY
In the Bible you do not look around to see what you can
make of life, and then look up. When Moses 'looked
around" he killed a man! You look up; then you look
around!
144
Seventh
Sunday
After
Trinity
PRAYER
We would offer thee this day, O God, with
sobered minds, what we are: that to the enrichment
of our life, and of all life, thou mayest make of it
what thou wilt. Grant us to be weary at last of our
own too safe and cautious lives and from thy certain.
Presence here to bring back into this defeated
world some liberating sense of that inheritance
which always has been ours, except for our poor
dealing with it. So fulfill in us what thou didst
intend when thy hands shaped us, and of thy grace
fit us to thy service. Through Jesus Christ, our
Lord and Saviour. Amen.
SUNDAY
The only dignity that belongs to us comes not of us,
but of the simple fact that we are unintelligible without
God.
MONDAY
If we understood God we should do well to doubt him.
His inscrutable providences, embracing both the good
that he wills and the evil that runs contrary to it but can-
not defeat it, will not lay themselves open to our inquiry.
The nearest we can come is the knowledge we may have in
Christ of his unfailing gracious intent, with the readiness
and power which only his grace can fashion to clothe that
intent with our own flesh and blood. The only profound
and truly relevant question is not a question at all, but an
answer: "Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?"
TUESDAY
You can live without a design for living; but you can't
have a life without it! The trouble is, from a merely ex-
perimental point of view, that God has to be written
into it somewhere, or it never will prove adequate.
WEDNESDAY
If I'm not such a good preacher, lawyer, doctor, why
don't I take that for the fact instead of posing, and going
about touchy and sensitive? If you aren't such a howling
success either, nowhere near the genius you thought you
were, why don't you? Instead of putting on such a wretched
front, and spending the rest of your days being miserable?
Why don't we accept what we are, and hand it over to
Christ, and say, "Here, you take It and make something of
it; I can't/' Hand it all over!
THURSDAY
Peace in the New Testament is relevant primarily not
to secular but to religious anxiety. If there is no trace of
that to begin with, down where the ultimate questions are
asked and the ultimate answers are given, then the only
thing possible for anybody is the counterfeit of peace,
which is sentimentality, a kind of "premature sanctifica-
tion," as someone has called it, the illusion of security.
Faith in God is a priority and a preventive, not a remedy!
FRIDAY
Lies are crucified, and so is truth. The way of the trans-
gressor is no softer than it used to be; neither is the way of
redeeming love. And just there we come on the secret
that unlocks the whole mystery. The cross of Christ was
either a tragic incident which meant that his kind of life
was futile and impotent; or it was the supreme symbol of
God's conquering presence in the world that he made, a
rnercy and justice and peace so closely akin to the Eternal
that they could be nailed down and still win!
SATURDAY
You know what you're facing. Somewhere you want to
take to your heels. That much 1 know. You want to give
up, let the thing go, quit it cold. You'll climb down to the
level of your own naked impulse. But can you see your-
self doing it? Does the coward's part really fit the picture?
You, Christ's you, with what he has planned, and will yet
bring to pass? And these others around you, this "cloud
of witnesses"?
*47
Sunday
After
Trinity
PRAYER
God, our Father, we thank thee for the revelation
of thyself to us, thou who at sundry times and in
divers manners didst speak unto the fathers by the
prophets, but in these days hast spoken to us by thy
son. Show us thy glory, whose face we may not see
save in him whom thou didst send; and in him de-
liver us, not just from peril, not just from pain, but
out of the bondage of our narrow, selfish ways into
the freedom of thy love for his name's sake. Amen.
148
SUNDAY
Christian freedom always has its limitations: you are
only as free as the servants of God, no less, no more.
MONDAY
If I could manage God, I wouldn't have much confidence
left in him! Nobody is going to wheedle him, or fool him,
or escape him! He won't interfere much. He won't step
in and adjust things, as the government tries to do, every
time life gets in a muddle. That wouldn't be treating
persons as persons; and he'll always do that! He won't
force anybody to decide as he wants. Hell let you make
your own choice unimpeded. But hell keep you, while
you're at it, under those terrible blazing lights of eternity,
where even angels veil their faces! That's the awful dignity
that belongs to persons, and there's no getting away from
it!
TUESDAY
We are Aryans, believe it or not. We bluster and wear
gold braid. We pile up a big balance in the bank, pur-
chase wide acres, hail from New York, Miami, and Bar
Harbor all at once, pretend, fight. Like some prince of
the blood who has despised his rightful inheritance and
shut himself out of it, taken him a house in a mean and
gossipy village, and there tried to find some misshapen
outlet for the royal habit of his mind. It would be a
tragedy of the first water to watch him sink away into
peevish madness, from a throne to a broken chair by the
stove in a smelly little post office, snarling and snapping
at his neighbors. It is what happens inevitably when these
human lives of ours, fashioned for God, sell their birth-
right for one of the petty slaveries of the world.
WEDNESDAY
Here is how it is when a man starts with God. In that
hour I am free to be the self that God sees, instead of the
self from which I keep trying so hard to escape, with a
kind of nausea: free to quit running around after happi-
ness; because right where I am, here and now, I am stand-
ing at the very center of the truest happiness that can ever
come to me.
THURSDAY
To be free is to be engaged, wherever you may happen
to be, In what Is essentially an endless moral and spiritual
adventure: an adventure which moves by means of a con-
tinuous and progressive adjustment to that which Is ul-
timately real in the universe, and results in the unham-
pered achievement of a whole and genuine selfhood,
As actors in a stately role,
To some triumphant close. . . .
It is that continuous
adjustment to reality which constitutes the very main-
spring of freedom. In that lies the secret of man's ability to
become whatever it is that at his best he is capable of
being. Another has set down the manner of it for all the
following ages: "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth
shall make you free/'
FRIDAY
This "everlasting, end) Ing, untiring Spirit" that refuses
to let men go even when they forget him; clings to them
through all their blindness, with a compassion that is never
soft, but always quite ready to tear up and expose and root
out the evil with a high hand, taking the scars o it on
himself: a creative, defenseless Love that will have its own
way if anybody will let it! the cross is not a symbol of
that: the cross is that!
SATURDAY
Here is the "offense" of the gospel: not its wonder-
stories, which many would dismiss, and so have done with
the whole fantastic business; but its persistent upsetting
of even our religious applecarts. The real threat to human
life lies in trying to have done with that! Mark Twain once
said that what troubled him about the Bible was not what
he failed to understand, but what he understood, and all
too clearly. It is not with what we like, but with what we
very flatly do not like, that we are somehow to make
friends.
Ninth
Sunday
After
Trinity
PRAYER
God, we thank thee for this love-haunted world!
Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto thy
name give glory, for thy mercy and for thy truth's
sake. Amen,
SUNDAY
It is common enough to say that God's justice is tem-
pered with mercy, and by it mean that he will tip the
beam of his reckoning with the finger of his compassion.
He will err a little on the side o long-suffering. But to
temper does not mean to tamper. To temper steel is to
make it hard and elastic like a Damascus blade, to give it
tone and vigor. It is God's mercy that gives his justice its
cutting edge.
It were loss indeed to lose out of the heart of the
Christian gospel the rigors of that justice. There are
terrors in God's steadiness, and history itself is for wit-
ness. There is something terrible on this earth, and it is
not just sin; it is the way sin runs into God, and he will not
move.
MONDAY
The center is not in self or in others, but in God; with
a radius that is neither mind nor will, but love. To be
"righteous" is to stand in the relationship of love with the
God who is righteous.
TUESDAY
When you meet trouble with a truism you make trouble.
To say that whatever apparent discrepancies there are in
the divine ordering of the universe will be set right in
good time may qualify you, strangely enough, as either a
wise man or a fool: a wise man for believing it, a fool for
saying it. Far better to acknowledge the mystery which
remains mystery for all your pains. Better still to have
traveled that way yourself in faith and fortitude. Some-
thing may happen then. Not otherwise. Meanwhile, no
short cuts! No fool's gold that can pave nothing but a iooFs
paradise. One might wish, for instance, that hate were
born only of blindness, that love would come with sight.
Poets have said so and in saying so have got no more than
the soles of their feet wet in the facts. Ignorance is not
the only "maker of hell"; nor do "sympathy, charity, kind-
ness" always come of knowledge. They come of love, which
has its cradle neither in blindness nor in sight, but else-
where in the very heart of the mystery.
WEDNESDAY
The simple fact is that the cross never stayed on the
hill where they put it. It marched out across the Roman
Empire. It leaped on those proud standards and got itself
emblazoned there. It fluttered over Europe, in dark forests,
on lonely castles. And began to point the patient centuries
to a better way of treating men than man had found. It
brought them face to face with the stark reality of love's
triumph where hate would always fail.
THURSDAY
It is precisely the love of God that manifests itself in
his justice. It is the justice of God that carries, as the only
cutting edge it has, God's love. That love is concerned
about men, whatever they are, good men and bad men, not
for its own sake, but for theirs. It asks Cain, "Where is
thy brother Abel?" But it asks Abel too, "Where is thy
brother Cain?" It asks those who are up and in about those
who are down and out. The love that is at the heart of the
universe is a stern and splendid thing, deep and tragic.
FRIDAY
The cross is any place where a saving love goes out to
undergird this life of ours, and comes back with the hot
stab of nails in its hands!
SATURDAY
Most of the effective counsel given by friend or loved
one, by pastor or psychiatrist, is neither admonition nor
exhortation. The best word for it is contagion.
Tenth
Sunday
After
Trinity
PRAYER
Cleanse us, we beseech thee, O God, and deliver
us from all other fears save that fear of thy name,
which is the coming among us of thy holy love. In
Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
'56
SUNDAY
Facts! It's one thing to spend your days toiling along
in the ugly face of the present, counting over its liabilities
on your fingers when your mind is too dull to count
staring in the night at the way things are going, with wide,
burning eyes, when you ought to be asleep, wondering how
you can ever stop that dreadful drift!
Faith! It's another thing entirely, with all of that un-
promising material there in front of you, and the worn-
out tools still in your hands, to straighten the tired, bent
muscles of your back and by the grace of God let your gaze
wander away until it's caught and held again by the dream
you have had of that which is to be!
MONDAY
The only way to preserve a faith is to use it.
TUESDAY
Good heavens, aren't we ever going to see anything but
our own defeats! Leave that wisdom out which has our
life in charge, as if it were blind and impotent? Has God
died, or given up, or gone away? When some hope of
yours flickers out, can't you look yonder and tighten your
belt, and say, "Well, that hasn't upset any of God's plans!"
WEDNESDAY
The question we've got to put to ourselves is perfectly
clear. We've got to face every situation in life with it.
We've got to ask, not "What is there here that's against
me?" but "What is there here that's against God?"
THURSDAY
To commit oneself to God Is to make no detour around
adversity.
FRIDAY
Faith is still another thing men come seeking of us.
Do we find it such difficult business holding on to our own
that there is hardly enough for us, let alone a margin for
anybody else? In one painting of the Crucifixion the hands
of God may be seen, through the darkness that shrouds
the cross, supporting the two pierced hands of Jesus, and
beyond, the face of God, fuller still of agony than the face
of the Crucified, with the thorns on its brow. Facing the
facts is gallant work. But what facts? And did you find God
in any of them? Were there no hands back of them, and
no face? It is not realism just to grit your teeth and clench
your fists and run out and get in the dirt. Nobody will
swing along more bravely for it. Or less bravely for the
man who lifted up his clear eyes on Calvary and said, even
in that desperate place, seeing as he saw, "It is finished.
Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit."
SATURDAY
If Christianity is not true, there is very little percentage
to be had from playing about with it on the theory that it
is comfortable.
I5 8
Eleventh
Sunday
After
Trinity
PRAYER
Uphold us, O God we beseech thee, by thy
mighty power, that In all things thy gracious will
may be done, and that good work which thou hast
begun In us be made perfect. Through Jesus
Christ, our Lord. Amen.
SUNDAY
Prodigals leave home because elder brothers stay there.
There are "stale saints** and "attractive sinners"; and there
are times when the relationship between them is nothing
less and nothing more than cause and effect. The church
that is not somewhere in the slums, the church of the un-
concerned, whether in peace or in war, Dives' church,
would do well to tear down its steeple and quit pretending
to point a finger at the sky.
MONDAY
What would happen to me, said a man to his friend, if
I tried to carry on my business as Christ would want me to
do it? I'd be ruined! And what will happen to you if you
don't, the other asked him quietly. What kind of ruin do
you want?
TUESDAY
There is a sense in which freedom may be defined as the
very image in us of God's own being. It can scarcely be
called an inalienable right. It shows itself in human history
as an interminable quest.
WEDNESDAY
Christianity becomes decisive, and God a conscious neces-
sity, to the man w^ho has quit underestimating life; and
then has begun to shoulder his appropriate share of the
load which that life at the moment is thrusting on all of
us.
160
THURSDAY
You may not like the doctrine of a Fall; but you've got
to face the fact of It! You may not think in terms of our
Adversary the Devil; but you've got to think In terms of
what the apostles called his handiwork: pride and ambi-
tion and selfishness this huge drift toward the precipice!
They are the first enemies of your peace and mine. Find out
to what extent, by the grace of this cleansing and crucified
Christ, you can get rid o them; and your life will grow
measurably placid.
FRIDAY
You cannot leave to others the doing of what really needs
to be done! If this vision you have of God does not move
and drive and pull and tug and wrench and twist and
hold and stride and walk off grimly after him, it is nothing.
We stultify It when we use it as a solace and no more. We
prostitute it when we hitch it to some private little enter-
prise against headaches and nervous breakdowns. This is
to take the power of God that swings the stars in their
orbits and ask it to do nothing but the household chores.
It was designed to grip a world and to shape human history,
and we have to give it passage.
SATURDAY
Some of us acquire a conscience that grows weary of
operating at home where it belongs, and after rubbing its
hands a while and looking around, begins to operate on
the neighbors. We go up to somebody one day and we say
to him, Now look here. My conscience compels me to tell
y OU then you just listen how nasty it turns out to be!
161
The queerest, ugliest things happen to us sometimes when
we clench our teeth like that and strike our forehead with
the palm of our hand and start out grimly to do our
duty!
162
Twelfth
Sunday
After
Trinity
PRAYER
As we lift our eyes to the cross, O God, so lift
up our hearts as in no other place: that of thy
patient love we may know ourselves clean forgiven,
and for thy very defeat victorious. Through Jesus
Christ, our Lord. Amen.
163
SUNDAY
God doesn't seem to make it very clear what he's actually
about. Life is forever sticking its head around a corner
when we aren't looking and crying out "Surprise! Sur-
prise!" And it isn't always a pleasant surprise.
MONDAY
It is easy for us now to see what it was all along that had
been holding Nicodemus back. They were the things that
hold us back from the kind of loyalty this Christ keeps
asking of us. There was his position. To have that pulling
one way and the truth pulling another was not pleasant:
salutations in the market place, respect, influence on this
side, contempt, and futility, and who knows what else on
the other? There was stuff out of which to fashion many a
sleepless night! And we are not strangers to it. Just let
this Christianity come cutting across our privileges, as it
cut across his, and you will see: when we have to shave
the edges of honesty a bit or lose our jobs; when it is a
question of economic justice against a fistful of real estate
or a private bank account.
TUESDAY
We like to get rid of God by identifying him with the
"good"; and his good so often upsets our own! We identify
him with the "true"; and his truth contradicts our truth,
day in and day out! We identify him with the "beautiful";
we are all for beauty! You cannot tell how much we love
God by the tricks we play to be quit of him!
164
WEDNESDAY
If it's a burden that's laid on us, It's the burden of love;
and what if there were no freedom for you anywhere once
you get out from under that! In his play, No Exit, Sartre
says that Hell is other people! And the New Testament
goes on saying, "Ah, God pity us, but there is no other
heaven!"
THURSDAY
In the New Testament the one never-failing refuge is at
the foot of a cross. Nowhere else is the peace which passes
understanding. It steals into your heart under and over
and around every sorrow and every sin. But it is more than
peace. It is a Voice calling. A Voice which is our peril.
FRIDAY
Why do we want God's faithfulness to be other than it is?
On Calvary it contradicts all our contradictions, and is
so terrifyingly fixed, as the law of gravity is fixed, that
when you fool with it you only prove it!
SATURDAY
In the breach between life and faith, life becomes
demonic. Give the Golden Rule no more than a secular
context and see what happens: if I want others to share
their liquor and their narcotics with me, I must share mine
with them; either that or I must reduce the entire trans-
action to the dimensions of "Do unto others first!" I have
heard the Great Commandment used as if it were the sum
of religion. It isn't. It's the sum of the law and the prophets.
Without the gospel in front of it, it's little more than
sound advice!
165
Thirteenth
Sunday
After
Trinity
PRAYER
O God, who art eternally both merciful and just,
be thou our God: and that not in our way but in
Thine. Through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
166
SUNDAY
The gospel o Jesus Christ stands squarely in the way of
every tendency, every drift or pattern of thought or con-
duct, that would shut human life up within itself, and so,
robbing it of both its meaning and its destiny, reduce it
little by little to the category of the subhuman. It is a
gospel that does not address itself to some fragmentary
end, like the preservation of democracy or of civiliza-
tion. There are times when civilization is past saving.
There are times when it is no longer worth saving! The
gospel devotes itself to the task of providing the soil out
of which democracy and civilizations spring. It devotes
itself to the recovery, and preservation through use, of
those freedoms which give Freedom birth, and without
which nobody can ever be anything but less than he is,
It confronts the human soul with God.
MONDAY
God is eager; but we shall not draw his attention to us
with cantrap, a few passes in the air, the abracadabra of
religion, fee-faw-fum! Something has to happen which is
like a distant shout, with all the pent-up longing of a man's
soul in it. You get away into a far country, as the lad did
in the parable. You may have to feed the swine, too, with
the husks you should like to eat. But then you come to
yourself, pray God: that is the least you could do. And you
make up your mind, by the little touch of him left in you,
to get back on your feet out of the mire.
TUESDAY
Some of us are inclined to think that the gospel is all
very lovely and idyllic. We have a notion that it was in-
167
tended primarily to comfort us in this wretched world.
The rude offense of the cross is hidden away under flowers.
A gallows turned into a floral tribute! for use at funerals!
Jesus is represented as amazingly gentle, a good deal gentler
than he ever was, and becomes the mild friend of man.
God himself is little more than the superlative of human
kindness, and couldn't possibly be hard on anyone! We
sing "Come Hither, Ye Faithful/' but leave out that phrase
about "the angels' dread King/' It isn't good for children.
One of our books takes the old Russian hymn which used
to read, "God the All-terrible King who ordaineth/' and
makes it start, "God the All-merciful."
If we don't quit that kind of milk-and-water nonsense
now, we shall soon be much worse off than we have ever
been. Our sensitive, tender little delicacies won't get us
very far.
WEDNESDAY
When we get stirred up about things in general and the
going gets rough, we suppose we'd better pack our bags for
a return to religion: which is what we seern to be doing
at the moment! Though nobody is quite clear as to what
religion we're returning to! God may be a very present
help in time of trouble, but he's no escape from it.
THURSDAY
Paul insists that the Christian religion means one thing
only: it means that God has a mind to do something with
his own creation; and he won't ever do it by himself. He
has to have you to do it with, if life is to be anything more
than a puppet show; not people soothed once a week by
168
the prospect of their own salvation, but human wills
bound over today and tomorrow to that kindest will of alL
No matter what happened in Bethlehem, no matter what
happened at Calvary, only so can human history be kept
from lurching its way to ruin. Having then gifts what of
it? Are you ready to lay them where they belong, in the
creative hands of God? If you are, that's religion. If you
aren't, it's make-believe!
FRIDAY
The story can still be told simply: When they were come
to the place called Calvary, there they crucified him. But
it cannot even now be simply dismissed. It keeps haunt-
ing you with the sense of undiscovered worlds, as if you
had never really quite seen or understood it: the dark,
mordant mystery of sin, persistent and dreadful; the
mystery of triumphant assurance, lifting up its head in
that most desolate spot with the light of God's mercy
on it; and this last, which I think is the greatest mystery of
all, that I, being myself but a poor object of his grace, am
nevertheless one other hope, one other chance God has for
his world!
SATURDAY
He that is in Christ is a new creation. But the man who
fixes his eye first and foremost on the new creation is not in
Christ!
169
Fourteenth
Sunday
After
Trinity
PRAYER
Not our thought of thee, O God let thy thought
for us hold our eyes and keep us steadfast. We do
not ask so much for the strength which thou hast
promised as for the grace to use what thou hast al-
ready supplied in Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
IJO
SUNDAY
Never is life so insecure as when we take hold of it;
never is it safer than when we lay it in God's hands. That
moment is a creative moment. It is not at all where we
quit; it is where we may truly begin.
MONDAY
The ultimate fact about this common, life of ours is
that we are called into it to enrich it. There's no other
reason for our being here, aside from what happens to us
in the process. God has appointed us as creators with him
in a world that is forever uncreated, never finished, always
a dream in that Other Mind. Today he is issuing to us
his challenge that in obedient fellowship with him we form
and fashion toward that infinite dream some fragment of
reality where we are. It's from this deep and underlying
urge that we never seem quite able to escape. Not only
spiritual health, but mental health as well turns apparently
on our response to it. I believe that we are creators by
nature from birth. Until somewhere it can stand shoulder
to shoulder with this Master- Workman in his gnarled and
knotted task of shaping a world to his taste, the soul is as
helpless as Noah's dove that could find no rest for her
feet but flew disconsolately back to beat her wings against
the bare shutters of the ark. So far are we in his image,
makers of heaven and earth, as he goes suffering his way
through our bitter life, beckoning to us from cross to
cross, giving us gifts!
TUESDAY
No matter if you are worse than the average, or better,
or just as good: you know how sick you can get of you;
171
when all the best there is about you would enjoy very much
spewing all the rest there is about you out ol its mouth.
The Christian religion says it can change that: until life
is full of zest again, not stale, up and out of its ruts; so
that even an eternity of it would not prove nauseating.
WEDNESDAY
All the privileges we have are ours only on condition
that we hold them in trust. There's no other effective
method under God's sun of clinging to them.
THURSDAY
Somewhere along the road, hundreds of thousands of
years ago, humanity discovered that it had picked up a
mind in the process of becoming human so the textbooks
indicate. The Bible shrugs its shoulders at that and keeps
saying, Well, in any case, God gave it to them! I can't
figure it out any other way either, whether it was little
by little, or all at once. However, the upshot of it was that
man had quite a plaything on his hands! He could outwit
nature with it three times in five and the dumb animals
six times in four! If he looked sharp, he could get ahead of
Tom, Dick, and Harry to boot! So he began to assume that
brains are what it takes. Keener logic and better reasons.
Over the years everybody went all out for that assump-
tion except the few in every generation who always have
preferred just to depend on their good looks! And life
turned on this one of its aspects into a magnificent epic;
multitudes climbing up out of the dark, striking off the
shackles of ignorance and superstition with their godlike
faculties scanning the farthest horizons of their universe.
172
That's everything, said the Greeks. Altogether enough.
That's what life is about.
And it isn't.
FRIDAY
To be free is to plunge into human life "up to the
elbows," without looking at the price tag, or wondering
about the pay-off! To take inside what's outside, never
mind how much it hurts! And to see few things out there
and more faces! Something had happened to the inside
of the poet who on an autumn evening "saw the ruddy
moon lean over the hedge like a red-faced farmer," while
all "about were the wistful stars with white faces, like
town children." The moon and the stars were a farmer and
the village teacher's brood! It wasn't the pain that broke
Jesus' heart. It was the faces! It may even have been the
faces in what deep sense? that made him cry out, "My
God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Do you want
to travel that road? Freedom has to, if it's to be the freedom
that belongs to the servants of God.
SATURDAY
One often wonders whenever the choice is really ours,
what we would have done with it, had we too been
troubled with omniscience, as God is. His choices must not
be so simply made, or painless for him. To trust that
wisdom which is beyond our own, reckoning on the power
that in all things works for good with those who answer his
love with theirs what might that not make of life, the
life of which so many say they can make nothing at all?
Fifteenth
Sunday
After
Trinity
PRAYER
We are never lonely, Father, through any fault
of thine. Give us grace to yield ourselves, body,
mind, and soul, that we may be found of thee. For
Jesus' sake. Amen.
SUNDAY
God's textbook on economics starts out with the sup-
position that not only theoretically but very practically life
belongs to him. This world is not God's by human
courtesy: it's his by eminent domain.
MONDAY
Now and then a lawyer in the courtroom will call out
"Exception!" You can't do that to the judgments of God!
Jesus didn't say, to that crowd on the hillside in Galilee,
"I can see how it is that being hard-working people, horny-
handed sons of toil, you find it so difficult to be meek and
merciful and poor in spirit. Remember if you can though
that it's a good thing to turn the other cheek once in a
while. And whatever else you do, on Monday, Wednesday,
and Friday, at least, Judge not, that ye be not judged!"
TUESDAY
"What do you possess . . . that has not been given you?
And if it was given you, why do you boast as if it had been
gained, not given?" I sometimes wonder how we ever got
the idea that we own anything. Certainly we are living in
a world that does not belong to us. We do not own our
talents. Whatever the capacity we have, all of it came
straight out of the blue; and we have no sure and lasting
tenure on any of it. Maybe someday we shall quit acting
like proprietors and start behaving like guests.
'75
WEDNESDAY
The world isn't ours. We need not be afraid that God's
will is going to pull us around with a rope about our neck.
He's courteous, too. But it will be served. And if there is
any wisdom left in us at all, we'll serve it of ourselves and
consciously. Well not always know what he's doing; but
we'll know that great people may count for nothing in it,
or less, as he moves on down the years, keeping his mission
of love somehow within human history and yet forever
over it! And we'll stand up if we must, whatever the con-
sequences today and tomorrow; we'll stand up and defy the
whole drift of this transient life if that's the only way we
can maintain our firm hold on God's eternal ends!
THURSDAY
It was not creation that showed God great; it was Jesus,
this eternal light on the hearth of our poor earth, this
eternal love like the beating of blood behind a sleepless
brow: "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem! slaying the prophets and
stoning those who have been sent to you! How often I
would fain have gathered your children as a fowl gathers
her brood under her wings" think of God's remember-
ing that from the back yard at Nazareth! "How often! But
you would not." What was vast was "the fluttering of this
veil of silence" which rests over our hurt world: the glory
that stirred for a moment at last and then grew strangely
still again for little people. That was new.
And with it God pulled out the diapason stop on his
mighty organ.
FRIDAY
If Jesus means anything, there are tears in God's eyes.
It's a human way of speaking, but nobody from Genesis to
176
the Revelation was ever afraid of that! If there is no strug-
gle in God's heart to correspond with this that's going on
in the heart of Jesus, then the Old Testament and the New
have been at great pains to say nothing at all. Every time
these pages allow us to listen in on God, he's strangely like
his own Man of Sorrows.
SATURDAY
I find more awe in my soul when I come before Christ
with all my faculties alert, than when I stand on a hilltop
of a summer's night and gaze out into the fathomless space
between the stars.
Sixteenth
Sunday
After
Trinity
PRAYER
For all that we know of thee, O God, and for all
thou art which is beyond our knowing, we give
thanks. Do thou make plain to us each day thy will,
with so much of thy love as shall hold us, and so
much of thy strength as shall be level to our need.
Through Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. Amen.
SUNDAY
We are obsessed with whereases and therefores. The
Jews never were. They did not stick their thumb into the
cosmos like Jack Horner, with a huge sense of moral
superiority about them, and pull out the plum of a Divine
Artificer. They did not look at history and jump to the
conclusion of a moving finger that w r rites and having writ
moves on. They took God for granted, as you take the air
you breathe.
MONDAY
Man's pride will sooner justify itself in blasphemy than
surrender itself to sheer wanton, arbitrary power. And
properly so. There is something else in God besides way-
ward, contrary, captious might, and something other. Man
may assert his rights against man if there is nothing better
for him to do and so help to hammer out for his society
some kind of approximate justice. He may assert them
against nature, and out of her rough granite hew for him-
self a kind of progress. His struggles are chapters in the
history of civilizations. Always he wins, and always he
loses: his victories, almost incredible, every one of them
ambiguous, none of them final. But against God? What
"right" has being to assert against the ground of being?
What "right" has the mind to assert itself against the life
that animates it? Yet where there is no right against, there
may be claim upon. It is God who has himself acknowl-
edged man's created claim upon his love, fashioned hu-
manity's "rights" and honors them.
TUESDAY
Every man of us has his Egypt, and the odds against
breaking away from it are inside odds, not outside. We are
ourselves the odds! What else does the cross mean, and in
the shadow of It still this undaunted word, "Speak to the
children of Israel that they go forward 1"
WEDNESDAY
We have to remember that the things which have not
gone as we exepcted them to go are most often the very
things which show God to be God still
THURSDAY
"Why should I care?" For no reason, save for this: that
since Christ there is more surely than ever something in
the world that keeps taking off its hat in your presence, and
ringing in your ears the sound of an ancient voice which
says continually, Son of Man, stand upon thy feet, and I
will speak to thee.
FRIDAY
Our talk, individually and corporately, about safeguard-
ing these human rights is the kind of sense which nonsense
sometimes makes. We have an inalienable right. It's the
right to God; we can keep this clear, can't we? . . . and
he safeguarded it with a cross and a man stretched out!
180
SATURDAY
When all the questions are in, God himself becomes the
questioner. The ultimate dilemma of human existence lies
not in God's failure to answer man but in man's inability
of himself to answer God.
181
Seventeenth
Sunday
After
Trinity
PRAYER
Still this day thy steady hand is on our souls,
Jesus, Son of Mary. Of thy great might keep us
from falling; and of thy deep compassion, never
let us go! For thine is the kingdom, and the power,
and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.
182
SUNDAY
Come at history with the will of a holy and righteous
God in the forefront of your mind, and you'll see how
much sense it makes. So too with these lives of ours. They
aren't just something we're doing; they are also something
that's being done to us. Modern man thinks he's put upon
by God. The realities we call into question or bring into
contempt tell on us terribly. There are times when the
Almighty is one of them.
MONDAY
If I have created God, I can dispense with him: I shall
content myself in very deed with "the stable balance of the
natural world"; with "man's secure biological heritage";
with "the growing and conserving continuum of racial
experience." Must we be confronted both from without
and from within by Another who can never be understood
until he speaks to us, in whose very Being alone, and in the
Word that clarifies it, lies the stature of our freedom?
Whose impingement upon our wretched world Job so
impiously protested; yet found in it at last the only inclu-
sive, transcendent meaning which could gather up the
manifold discords of human life and transmute them into
"a total harmony"?
TUESDAY
The tragedy of our world is that men aren't content to
explore the kind of life for which they were intended:
aware of their true and exalted station on this earth, they
have set out to be God!
WEDNESDAY
There is something thrilling about life when you see it
whole something majestic: the sweat and the blood, the
joy and the tragedy. And to see yourself as part of it,
moving across this stupendous stage against the backdrop
of eternity! The challenge of that is like the challenge of
bugles. It's like the restless rattling of drums in the dark.
I like throwing myself into it. Not into a job; a man can
get sick of a job: but into God's own magnificent march,
and the thunder of his feet!
THURSDAY
We who are Christians stand on the perilous edge of
things, not knowing if God will be kind to us, as we say,
or to anybody else; take care of our feelings, see to it that
we profit or enjoy ourselves! We're here to be his people.
That puts every lower motive in its place, throws our
weight where it belongs. Who knows what well encounter
anywhere? And who cares if some gleam of that Eternal
Splendor comes to dwell in our faces, and God's creative
compassion for all the tired and battling souls of men begins
to find its way out through us into human life!
FRIDAY
H. G. Wells used to insist that the prospect of heaven,
with its pearly gates and golden streets, was altogether too
much of an enticement to righteousness. He preferred to
be good for nothing! And no man can be, in a world that
is God's world. There is always something. Virtue is its
own reward, but not its only reward. There is a harvest
to the sower. Friendship has its benefits. So does piety.
God makes something of the pious at cost.
184
SATURDAY
Portents are in reality promises. They are God's judg-
ment on the wicked and the assurance of his mercy to the
upright, to those who stand in faith, not fear. The dark
symbols of despair are to become the bright badges of
hope. Is it not strange that men say, "We have tried every-
thing, we must leave the issue now in the hands of God'?
They say it as if matters had indeed come to a pretty pass!
From the very first, where else was the issue? It is not he
who is guilty of the bungling; we are. Yet we insist on
thinking of him last, when all the rope is paid out, and
there is nothing left but to put our fingertips together and
roll our eyes heavenward.
185
Eighteenth
Sunday
After
Trinity
PRAYER
In thy will is our only peace: in thy will shall we
find thine. Against everything that gets in the way
of thy will, even against us, be thyself, O God, to
redeem us by such means as thou wilt, out of our
darkness into thy light. Through Jesus Christ, our
Lord. Amen.
zB6
SUNDAY
Miracles are altogether too embarrassing in a world
where by and large, exceedingly by and very large, they
have withdrawn from the scene. Men work them now
which helps to keep the world alive in this so-called post-
Christian culture of ours. Men work them with cyclo-
trons and luniks. Why raise the question about God's
knowledge of his universe or about his resourcefulness,
when all we need to do is to capitalize on our own?
MONDAY
God himself must find it hard to make any music of the
spheres, with this world looking up into his face, grinning
at him with its evil, doing him the distant honor of high
words maybe, then going about its business as if he did not
exist; fighting back at his goodness, venting its spleen in
plain nastiness its lust, its greed, its mad little power,
with never more than a few here and there to treat life
like a holy thing!
TUESDAY
The skeptic will tell you that faith makes no sense. He's
right about that. It makes no more sense than one of
Camus' characters makes in The Plague indeed not as
much! He has just looked on at the agonized death of a
little child, and he says, "I will never love any scheme
of things which permits that."
Observe, however, as a matter of some significance,
surely, what a strange sort of noise those words would make
on Calvary. "And when they were come to the place . . .
there they crucified him, and the malefactors, one on the
right hand, and the other on the left." Now let's try it: "I
187
will never love any scheme of things which permits that."
It isn't a "scheme of things," anyway, that the Christian
loves. And what loving he does he doesn't do because he
has scraped together all the evidence he could find in favor
of it, and chucked out the rest. You don't fall in love
that way.
WEDNESDAY
"God is faithful, by whom ye were called into the
fellowship of his son/' "No one who believes on him will
ever be disappointed/' If that is what the psychologists
mean by wishful thinking, I can only say that fairy tales
are not accustomed to do what it has done. Lies that
successfully masquerade as truth for twenty centuries are
indeed potent lies! It must be a muscular brand of non-
sense that subdues kingdoms, stops the mouths of lions,
quenches the violence of fire, waxes valiant in fight!
THURSDAY
I have a book on my shelves that's called The Logic of
Belief. I find it exceedingly helpful, now that I already
believe. It furnishes me with so many reasons for be-
lieving that would never have occurred to me! But my
faith didn't come by way of logic. Yours didn't either. It
came one day when I had to settle for what I had seen, and
a lump was in my throat, and nothing else for me could
ever take the place of that strange Man of Nazareth, and
God seemed to be moving toward me with the world in
his heart, and what he planned to do for it, however much
or little, as if he meant to do it with nobody and nothing
but me!
188
FRIDAY
Life is made up of details, and the judgments of God
turn on them. What else is there for him to use? What else
is there that has filled the whole stage now with war and
the crumbling of systems and the ruin of empires! Let him
tell you what matters: "I was an hungred, and ye gave me
no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: a stranger,
naked, sick, and in prison/* and you let it slide. That
sounds homespun; and it's history. They don't write it in
textbooks, and you don't study it; but it's the only history
God thinks it worth while to set down!
SATURDAY
The best that man knows is God's gift, and the gift must
be like the giver. It is wrong to assume that God and man
can have nothing in common. There is a transvaluation of
values, not a contradiction or a cancellation of them.
189
Nineteenth
Sunday
After
Trinity
PRAYER
Grant us, O God, to hear thy voice; and in hear-
ing thy voice, to love thy Word; and in loving thy
Word, to do thy will. Through Jesus Christ, our
Lord. Amen,
190
SUNDAY
The world o the Bible isn't the world of Abraham or
Isaac or Jacob or Moses or David or Isaiah. It isn't even
the world of Christ and his apostles. It is the world of God.
That's what the Bible is about. Not about men, not about
history, not about morals, not about doctrine: about God.
MONDAY
The Bible is not supposed to discover lost things or to
stop bleeding noses; or to decide who is right in a dispute;
or to suggest whose side God is on in some war; or to hold
out personal favors; or to provide us with proof texts for
prohibition or pacifism; or with the blueprints of a new
social order.
TUESDAY
The good news of God is that you are invited to meet
him. That's why the Bible reads like such a strange book.
The world of the Bible is a place of meeting. It isn't an
empty world like ours, where big is big and little is little
and 90 per cent of almost everything is nothing. It's a
place where you are forever running into an infinite mind
and coming upon the yearning of an eternal heart.
WEDNESDAY
The Bible knows that it isn't just a record, the story of
Israel, or the story of Jesus, or the story of the Church. It
knows itself only as God's story the History that becomes
history. Not just something he did once. I can get tired of
hearing about that. Why doesn't he do it again? And the
Bible keeps saying that even as we read he is doing it again!
Moving in on life now, as he moved in on it when he called
Moses, and brought his people up and away from their
bondage in Egypt; as he moved in on it when John the
Baptist went into the wilderness to tell everybody who
would come that something tremendous was about to hap-
pen. And it does! Men and women led out into a freedom
so strange it makes them afraid; and they run back, and
turn their religion into a set of rules, so that they can be-
come slaves again! But if anybody wants to be rid of any-
thing that cripples his life, he can be. He can have the
shackles struck off, as I saw them fall off of a young woman
who had been the leader of a dope ring in New York City.
It happens, and it happens of all places inside that book!
He has contracted to change these written words into his
living Word, the very offer of himself!
THURSDAY
Preaching is the announcement of what God has done,
and mark this: in the announcement he does it again! The
Word which is proclaimed is more than a message from
God: it's a living Word which reconstitutes what it re-
counts, will not return to him void, accomplishes that
whereunto it is sent. Who will dare to despise it? Preaching
is the mediation of that Word whereby God himself enters
the scene.
FRIDAY
Three crosses in all, and the issue of three lives. On one,
death came down with a taunt, like the world's last grin,
dark and sterile and hopeless. On another it came in a
sudden shaft of light, as of the sun striking its way through
the clouds to etch out of the shadows a face with a prayer
on its lips and a brooding glory in its eyes: "Lord, remem-
ber me." Between them, to divide the two this way and that,
as far as heaven is from hell, the Word of God, at its utter-
most become deed!
SATURDAY
That's what all those pages of the Book mean to me:
Love trying across the gulf to pronounce its own Name in
syllables never to be forgotten never never!
Twentieth
Sunday
After
Trinity
PRAYER
Grant us, O God, to hear thy voice; and in what
we think is thy silence, bring us still to listen.
Through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
*94
SUNDAY
Worship is itself the sacrament of meeting, where, as
William Temple has said, the conscience is quickened by
God's holiness, the mind fed with his truth, the imagination
purged by his beauty, the heart opened to his love, the will
devoted to his purpose; but only because it is not his holi-
ness, or his truth, or his beauty, or his love, or his purpose
that he reveals. It is himself that he bestows in that solemn
act of recognition "Father, I have sinned". . . . "My son,
my son!" which issues in the sudden shelter of those arms
and the kiss that stops the mouth of your poor little memor-
ized speech.
MONDAY
The God of the Bible will not lend himself to our
decoration. He is naked God! There are no devices by
which we can get him to fit in with our plans, no patterns
by which we can make him over into our image.
TUESDAY
The good life is the sharing of God's life. Behind the
willing to do God's will is the ministry of God's Spirit.
Behind the imperative, the indicative. To do or not to do
is by no means the choice in front of us: the choice is to be
or not to be. To be and not to do, however hard to relate
them in practice, is a contradiction in terms. The being is
sonship. The not doing is idolatry.
WEDNESDAY
The drift in human history is never away from religion
itself, but only away from a religion with God at the heart
195
of it toward a religion without any God at all except of our
own making. The central problem is not godlessness. It
never is. The central problem is always idolatry. "Der
Menschj says Luther, hat immer Gott oder Abgott." (Man
has God at all times: the true God or false god!)
THURSDAY
Take any page of the Bible and strip it of God, as we
strip our lives, down to the bone, until that infinite mind
is away somewhere, and the yearning of that eternal heart
is only a grand "perhaps," and you will be back in the
world with which you are already too familiar. A sower
sowing his seed will be just a sower sowing his seed; this
it is and nothing more. A dead sparrow by the side of the
road will be just a dead sparrow by the side of the road,
and who cares? Who in hell cares, or who in heaven? And
all of it is dull and stale and flat and unprofitable; it makes
people sick! What the Bible keeps saying is that we can
swap our w r orld for that other, where there are three
dimensions, and everything is a parable of the Kingdom
of God; and we can swap it whenever we like. Worship is
about that.
FRIDAY
The only authentic glory at the heart of all created
things is this love that stirs for a moment and is still; the
final majesty of the Eternal God, that lonely figure, with
his hands and feet pierced for such little people because he
thought they were great!
SATURDAY
A man has no love for his country if he is willing for
all he cares or does to let the state take God's place.
196
Twenty-first
Sunday
After
Trinity
PRAYER
Hear us, O God, in each unspoken prayer, as our
hands reach out toward thee, and we are still with
awe before the sureness and the greatness of thy
love. Open our ears that the deep silence at the
heart of life may be to us what thou wouldst have
it, the very sound of thy passing: and take the dull-
ness of our souls away. Through Christ, our Lord.
Amen.
SUNDAY
The silences of God are themselves vocal. When public
officials are pressed for their interpretation of events, they
often decline to commit themselves. "No comment" is all
that can be got out of them. God does no such thing. His
silences mean either that there is something the matter
with us an idea which scarcely ever seems to occur to
anybody! or that there is something in him his wisdom?
his love? that makes waiting necessary.
MONDAY
Certainly, among other things, we ought to call a halt
to all our loose talk about seeking God. Loose talk has
done Christianity incalculable harm. I have never heard
that God was lost. If he is, then space and eternity are
much too big for me to find him in either of them.
TUESDAY
God is often most where he seems to be least. Psalm 22,
for instance, was written during or shortly after the Jews'
captivity. There they were, praying for deliverance, with
everybody laughing at them. Fear stalked around naked.
Their hearts were like wax. Yet through those bitter, bitter
years, and firmer for them, came the world's most precious
heritage: this human faith in the God of human history.
It grew up into its own under the heel of a conqueror,
marched through fire, and was clean. Against the oncoming
centuries it set itself, against the ravages of war, and blazed
the way to Christ. God forsaken? God controlled! He had
been in front of them, and behind them, and all around
them helping them most when there was no help.
198
WEDNESDAY
The verb "to wait" speaks to us of our insecurity. It
speaks to us of a God we do not already know, and do not
already have. We do not already have him in some doctrine
or in some church. We do not already know him in some
book or in some experience. "Wait, I say, on the Lord." It's
a word which gives us solemn warning that we live all our
days on the dreadful margin between knowing and not
knowing, between having and not having.
THURSDAY
Paul's word for patience means in Greek a being under
some heavy weight, like Atlas, and staying there there's
not a flabby muscle in it! a stretching, straining, and
twisting, like a wrestler who won't let go, not even when
he's down, keeps grabbing for an arm, or a leg, squirming
out from under and on top! And it doesn't come of reading
a few pages, or having a few shining ideals held up in front
of you.
FRIDAY
The cross is the whispered word of a God travel-stained
and footsore, seeking someone, ever away from home, whis-
pering a name. They say the search began in a garden in
the cool of the day among the trees where a man stood,
trembling and ashamed, and a woman with him, listening
to a voice that seemed at first like the sad murmur of
leaves. "Adaml Adam! Where art thou?" It may be
that you spell the name of the garden Eden; but the God
who walked there will never be a stranger in Gethsemane!
SATURDAY
All that was wrong when Jesus came the loneliness,
the growing tumult of the nations, the world trembling
like a leaf: all of that was right, and an arm was over it,
bared to the elbow. What men saw as the symbol of their
forsakenness was itself the sign of the unsleeping Provi-
dence! Everything was where it had always been in the
might of God; and where it was, it was safe! That's why
Fm willing to wait even if I should never see the day for
which I'm waiting. There are hours when I'm glad that
waiting is my high privilege. It's a meager enough return
to make him for all that he has done my life long.
200
Twenty-second
Sunday
After
Trinity
PRAYER
Speak to us, O God, as thou wilt, and of thy
grace cause us to understand, and never be dis-
mayed by understanding, but always, upheld by
thy Word, to receive it and rejoice in it. Through
Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
2OJ
SUNDAY
"There but for the grace of God, go I," said Richard
Baxter, or so the story runs, as he saw a man led away
to execution. How much less than grace is it when the
murderer mis-shapes it? The grace that keeps the breath in
your nostrils, and the strength in your arm when you
raise it to wield a knife, or to pronounce a benediction! A
man by heaven's own power can make a hell out of heaven!
MONDAY
When you think that everything is going all right, that
you're thoroughly up to it, life is under control, the reins
are in your hands you're taking every bit of it for less than
it is, that's all: assuming that it's an easy mark. And you
were never wider of that mark! This is why the so-called
competent people, gorged with self-reliance, are in far
greater peril, and on the whole do far greater damage, than
the people who are incompetent and know it.
TUESDAY
Christianity is an allegiance fixed, moving about these
common streets with the stamp and seal of Forever on it,
haunted by the eternal Mind, bearing itself in this its
native place like a changeling, exiled from home, yet sure
of its kingly state, thrusting out today and tomorrow into
"some new and unclaimed and unconquered territory,"
going down from its rendezvous with God to have its fling
with him under the shadow of a cross at the shaping of
human history.
202
WEDNESDAY
The whole Bible, from cover to cover, is concerned with
this riddle . . . , whether or not the universe at its center
is or ever was intelligent and purposeful and kind; if it
means something still, and means that something in-
tensely; if as someone has put it, there is a great yawning
hole in the middle of things, through which all energy
and vision, all lives and prayers and sacrifice shall be
poured at the last and lost or if God is there! These
books from Genesis to Malachi gather all their things to-
gether, fill their lungs, and with a mighty shout proclaim
that he is: above this weird panorama of our little lives,
and there's power in his hands! Nothing that ever hap-
pens will make him look queer! It's the nub and point of
all the Old Testament has to say really; and the New Testa-
ment as well. And it's challenging the world now.
THURSDAY
I don't care what Mr. So-and-So says in his article about
how we should treat our enemies, or how we should use
our money, or how we should allot our time and energy.
What Mr. So-and-So says doesn't matter a bit. Mr. So-and-
So isn't running this world. God is! What matters now is
the hand which holds the scepter, and the Mind which was
in Christ Jesus. "He that is not with me . . ." so it runs
here ". . . is against me." That's what counts.
FRIDAY
"Bear ye one another's burdens." "Every man must bear
his own burden." In some deep sense you have in that
paradox the very gospel itself from start to finish. For this
203
is what God did, packed all into a single sentence: He took
up into his arms the vast weight of his creation, as he had
planned it back there when the morning stars sang to-
gether that weight was his own; but with it he lifted the
vaster weight still of our rebellion, which is always crush-
ing it out of shape. And he carried the whole incredible
thing to a cross, with the nails coming through as he came
through, clean out on the other side. His own burden, and
every man's.
SATURDAY
Around all you can remember these things which
you think and say are your life around them, as if they
were tiny boats on an untrammeled sea, stretches the in-
calculable business of God: memories, the beauty of the
earth, hurts healed, this painless breath, love, a star re-
flected in water, music . . . the ocean of God's love which
bears up the little islands of our pain!
204
Twenty-third
Sunday
After
Trinity
PRAYER
In the tumult and trouble of our lives, O God,
grant us thy peace: that we may be greater of soul
for all that befalls us, and better fitted by our very
sorrows for the uses of thy love. Through Jesus
Christ, our Lord. Amen.
205
SUNDAY
The pattern of life is far too complex and ambiguous for
any man to go about lugging with him a faith which never
grows up; has to be kept bundled tightly like a papoose in
God's "answers'* to his questions, and God's "answers" to
his prayers; cannot be set down to stand on its feet in the
hurly-burly of a world where success may be a curse and
failure a benediction.
MONDAY
One of the few things I really know about this myster-
ious place under the canopy of the sky is that somehow it
seems to be, beyond our explaining, set against God, and
after its own fashion against everybody who's like him! So
that if you want something to worry about, worry because
your life is too easy. When a man's faith is real, its road is
liable to be rough! That's the way of the world!
TUESDAY
It is when something happens to make men think God
has dropped them out of mind entirely that he most often
breaks through the crust of self-reliance and begins to hold
his serious conversations with the human soul. The worst
times are his times. It would be a pity to miss him, or to
suppose that any place is empty.
WEDNESDAY
Perhaps it would be just as well to say right off that such
a world for all its difficulties, indeed because of them, is far
more interesting and challenging than any other con-
206
ceivable kind; far more instinct not only with peril, on
which human life and the human soul seem to thrive, but
also with fairly limitless possibilities for mental and spirit-
ual growth: a God whose quiet strategy it Is to be away, but
not far, silent except for the footstep and the knocking at
a man's door; a place with the sin in it that we have to
fight, and the pain in it we have to suffer, and the trouble
in it that comes tearing along through the days, where
hardship, instead of leaving everybody flat, leaves so many
people so much taller than they were before; and a life to
be lived which is never willing simply to say what everyone
else is saying, wrapped in a shade more pious atmosphere
and tied together with but slightly devouter gestures, but
is intent on making another Voice heard, ready at the drop
of a hat to draw the lines so taut that they sing.
THURSDAY
Three times Paul asked to be rid of some crippling in-
firmity, and the only answer he got was, "It's enough for
you to have my grace." So please never call it rhetoric
when he says that in a world where nothing is yours, if
you are Christ's, then because Christ is God's life and
death, and things present and things to come, all are yours!
Over and over again he turned it into prose: five times
with the forty stripes he received save one, and the rods
with which three times he was beaten; stones and ship-
wreck, hunger and thirst, cold and nakedness! Poetry for
us, God pity us! Prose for him! A pageant, God's pageant,
in overalls!
FRIDAY
People tell me now and then, speaking of their life, that
they don't like the setup. What if the setup were a cross!
207
What if it should be God's purpose to conform you and me
to the image of his Son; and you know and I know where
his Son died. What if he were coming to you here on
Calvary out of eternity, through sin and defeat and suffer-
ing, all the very darkest things of life, to show you how
deep they are, and how ready he is, and how unappalled!
Calling to you for nothing but your own eager willingness
to be on his side against the world, to throw what weight
you have into those great scales for justice and mercy and
peace; and for the rest, to fix your sheer confidence where
Christ's was fixed, in that ultimate goodness like a Father's
care which is not only over history now but within it! And
doesn't give up and grow tired or lose heart; but holds on
and sees it through until the very valley of trouble, as an
old prophet has it, becomes a door of hope.
SATURDAY
Would you have God spell it all out safely, or do you
prefer a brave world? Like this: "When a strong man
armed keepeth his palace, his goods are in peace: but when
a stronger than he shall come upon him, and overcome
him, he taketh from him all his armour wherein he
trusted, and divideth his spoils/' Men have been sure of
that even when the tears wouldn't let them see, singing a
sort of crazy Te Deum in their hearts: confident that God
could never be absent anywhere if he wasn't absent the day
Jesus diedl
208
Twenty-fourth
Sunday
After
Trinity
PRAYER
O God, who didst send thy Son, that he who by a
tree in Eden once overcame might likewise by a
tree outside the city gates be overcome, speak thou
in Christ thy Word to us, and in him go with us to
thy triumph. Amen.
209
SUNDAY
The fundamental joy o the Christian religion isn't in
living a good life. I can imagine getting tired of that! The
fundamental joy of it is in standing with God against some
darkness or some void and watching the light come.
MONDAY
"Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of
the ungodly," says the first Psalm; "he shall be like a tree
planted by the rivers of water/* How about a tree, says
the New Testament, planted outside the walls of Jerusalem
with Jesus on it? Did the Psalmist say "Blessed"? What if
the only blessedness you can count on is the kind with
which the Hebrew word itself brings you to grips: the
blessedness of a man who steadfastly sets his face, as Jesus
did, to blaze some sort of trail with his life, and with every-
thing he has to give?
TUESDAY
In suffering and in sorrow, in failure and in despair,
there is One whose presence is a melody in the heart, and
his very will a song. There is a legend to the effect that
Satan, when asked what in heaven he missed most, replied
that he missed most "the sound of the trumpets in the
morning/' The whole ministry of God's redemption makes
music out of discord. Henley writes his poem:
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
210
and gets drunk. Paul, in prison, writes to the Philip-
pians, "Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Re-
joice!" and wins an empire for Christ. Such songs in the
night are the cradlesongs of every victory that God has
wrought.
WEDNESDAY
Let us withdraw, then, from good report and evil report
alike, and step inside, where we are saying something
about ourselves, giving it the deference of our own belief,
growing accustomed to the thought: puffing ourselves up
or running ourselves down, until bit by bit the very stature
of our souls responds to the constant suggestion. Nobody
on earth can make us feel so bankrupt there as Christ will
make us feel; nor can anyone so cover us over with his
hand, and set us down, by the grace of God, above the
stars among angels and archangels.
THURSDAY
Over and again when men set themselves deliberately to
"find the answer," to achieve happiness, to build Utopia,
the object of their quest turns out to be a will-o'-the-wisp.
Even "goodness" refuses to be pursued. Those who seek
after it, like the prodigal's elder brother, very often become
the reason why people leave home. Greatness and goodness
and happiness and peace simply are not proper ends for
any human soul to set up for itself. They are states of being
along the road. They are the by-products of a life that has
been held steadily, like a ship at sea, to some true course
worth sailing. Can it be that along the way of Christ's
presence solutions appear of themselves in parentheses?
211
FRIDAY
It makes me shiver to remember how often Christ has
stood up out of the ruin of ancient and time-honored
precedents. Though always at the risk of getting himself
lynched! And winning anyhow!
SATURDAY
The Word God sent us is a Word never to be possessed;
it is a Word to possess us: normative, but not in its highest
function; in its highest function creative, moving beyond
judgment into love.
Twenty-fifth
Sunday
After
Trinity
PRAYER
Grant us, O God, to serve thee with our lives,
wholly and gladly, that thy patient faith in us may
never be betrayed, nor thy brave and stubborn
hopes defeated. Through Jesus Christ, our Lord.
Amen.
SUNDAY
"The time is now " says the radio announcer, and
adds some figures from a dial. "The time is now/' says the
New Testament, and adds nothing but a period. And that
means nothing for the way we live but a revolution! It
doesn't just enhance our moral idealism, as someone has
phrased it, or underscore our Christian principles, or try to
make of us impractical perfectionists. It moves in on our
morals with the Kingdom of God.
MONDAY
When we stand on our two feet and say the Creed we
have hardly the leisure any more to add the Amen. "I be-
lieve in God the Father Almighty" we have only that
moment for hurling our defiance at the gates of hell. To
sit down afterward exactly where we were before, with
every resource of heaven at our beck and call, and yet
with nothing different, not even yesterday's pet grudge
that is irrelevant, all right, and with a vengeance. The
pagan cynics of Roman antiquity used to do infinitely
better: they thought themselves commissioned "to heal the
soul and free it from its bondage to passion; to be out-
spoken stewards of good, enduring hardship, living un-
spotted from the world." There is no point any longer in
talking about the kind of faith in God which so many of
us have known, or the possibility of its seeing us through
these critical years. It cannot be relied on even to see us
through the afternoon.
TUESDAY
The ultimate secret of the good life is not restraint. It
isn't to be found in the following rules, or in obedience, or
214
in loyalty; not even in the daily imitation of Christ: the
ultimate secret of the good life is hidden away the freedom
of a high and unbridled devotion.
WEDNESDAY
I have always remembered with some amusement a
woman of my acquaintance who after looking around for
something that would really interest her found a book, a
thick book, which bore the title About Ourselves. It stood
there on the table at her side, when 1 called on her; and she
was in bed, where it had helped to put her. It's no good
just to keep on feeling your pulse; it's no good feeling your
pulse at all if you're constitutionally unable to discover
anything but liabilities in your situation. Better look out-
side then with all your might, and leave the inside strictly
alone!
THURSDAY
Let nobody suppose that in order to be a Christian he
has to strain after certain moods that never do come
naturally to him. Christianity happens not to be a mood.
There is no call for any kind of exceptional piety, with
folded hands tiptoeing around absent-mindedly through
the traffic. What is asked of us is nothing more than the
normal response of the human soul, when that soul is un-
trammeled and free, to the deepest impulses and the high-
est hopes of its own God-inhabited being. Far from proving
to be a denial of life, it is the great, round affirmation of all
there is about living by which a man can grow. ... It is
not the will to avoid; it is the will to be: opening its arms
as Jesus did, that even sin and death might be sheathed in
its body like a sword in its scabbard.
2/5
FRIDAY
This death which we proclaim did not transform the
world into a place where we can whistle a jaunty tune, as
if every story were bound to have our kind of happy end-
ing, and everything at last could be wrapped up in a neat
bundle and put away on a tidy shelf. Rather is it a world
where tragedy and triumph are so interwrought that we
cannot disentangle them: except that in Christ we can see
now both the beauty and the terror of life, both the good-
ness and the severity of God, the fire of his judgment and
the solace of his wings, this madness down here held fast in
the splendor of that ultimate love.
SATURDAY
That is the moment of revelation, revelation is that
moment: when the deep of God calls to the deep of the
human soul, and there is answer, with the sound of many
waters rushing together.
Twenty-sixth
Sunday
After
Trinity
PRAYER
If ever the dark come upon us, O God, our God,
let it be thy darkness. And when we hope for the
wrong thing, let us wait in that dark until thou
canst make us ready for what thou hast promised.
Through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
217
SUNDAY
God moves ahead with great seven-league boots; and we
in bedroom slippers.
MONDAY
Religion is like riding a bicycle: the only safety there
is lies in riding! Otherwise you can't even stay on. Momen-
tum is the secret of poise. You'll spend all the days of your
pilgrimage being upset, until you learn to fling yourself on
such faith as you have, and instead of trying to put up
with the wrongs that people do you, swing out to set them
right!
TUESDAY
Prayer is the sign and torrent of our wanting!
WEDNESDAY
}oy surprises you in that place beyond the self and all
of its business where you quit supposing that things have
to go as you like, calling it a problem for faith when they
don't. "Why should this happen to me?" Let me put you
a tougher one: "Why shouldn't it happen to you?" You
remember what happened to Paul and to Jesus before
him. Joy can never surprise you until you quit tempting
the God you have to be the God you want, and begin
allowing him, as far as you are concerned, to be God on
his own terms.
218
THURSDAY
The only guarantee Christ gives us for tomorrow is
today, and the memories we are making. We are engaged
now in their manufacture; weaving the strands that will
hold us, or snap when we need them most! Leaving behind
us ghosts in this little house which is today and which next
week will be the past; with hands that will keep clutching
at us, pulling us back or pressing us on, as friends would.
I wonder just what we're doing about it: if the time will
ever come for us when we shall turn around and begin
making frantic gestures toward such an hour as this, per-
haps, begging it to run up with all the weight it has and
fling itself into some bitter fight for us!
FRIDAY
The stark misery that stalks this earth belongs not so
much to the will of God as to his Providence. Yet somehow
it belongs. It isn't an interruption. It hasn't defeated any-
thing. Maybe it has come because of God's love; because
he wants to give us something and can't. When our hands
are full and all goes well, he has no place to put it. I don't
know. I do know that our spirits are stiff like brocade and
self-sufficient when we are quite sure of our course and
have in our hands everything we want. When we don't any
more, and aren't sure, and there's nothing left to stand
between us and him, he isn't proud. I like that way of
putting it. He takes us even when everything else is shat-
tered that we preferred before him, and we come at last
only because there is "nothing better" now to be had. And
he has set a cross to guide us, on the spot where he himself
has been.
21 9
SATURDAY
Trying to read into that unknown eternity the conditions
of time and space which provide the framework of the
present is not only naive and futile; it may be thoroughly
disastrous. If you will, please explain to us what happens
in the interval between death and resurrection. And when
you are through, tell us where on earth or in any other
imaginable place there will be room for heaven, with
some two billion candidates every thirty years or so, to say
nothing of all the arrivals since Adam? Even in our day
there is no dearth of material at hand for those who, with
an irony which so often does no more than save a man's
face when he looks in the mirror how else can he bear
it? are inclined to reduce the whole fantastic notion to
wishful thinking, and beyond that to what is so manifestly
a logical absurdity.
And all because we are forever bent on reducing to the
familiar terms of our own experience what we do not, and
in the very nature of things, cannot, know very much
about. It is somewhat as if the unborn child, there in the
warm and sheltering dark, were asked to dream of what
might lie on the other side of the last convulsive shudder
which is birth: the glint of the sun on water, the snow
flying crazily in the wind, food, the hurly-burly of the
world, the flight of planes, flowers blooming, the sound of
words, rain dripping from the roof!
220
Twenty-seventh
Sunday
After
Trinity
PRAYER
Show us thy ways, O Lord; teach us thy paths:
thou who art always the same in thy coining, yes-
terday, and today, and forever. On thee do we
wait. Amen.
221
SUNDAY
The plain fact is, we just don't have the last word about
these things that happen, and God does! I wonder if you
remember Mozart's Requiem? He composed it shortly be-
fore his death, and said he wanted it played at his funeral.
But it wasn't. There was almost no funeral. A storm blew
up and nobody came. The few who were there carried
his body away like a guilty thing and laid it in a pauper's
grave. There is no certain knoxvledge to this day where
he was buried. When thirty-odd years had passed they
played his Requiem at Beethoven's funeral. How many
of us are capable of waiting for the last word? It isn't ours.
Capable of leaving what we have been accustomed to call
our liabilities where they belong to the future and to
God? Without fingering them all the time, as a man might
tell his beads. You don't know yet and you can't know
where to enter any of them in the ledger: credit side
or debit.
MONDAY
Strange we scarcely ever attend to the absurdities of the
proposition that "one world at a time" is enough! With
an eye to this world only, no man can read clearly the riddle
of his own selfhood. He sees himself now as the architect
of history, now as its pawn; now as the measure of all
things, now as an automatic reflex, a cosmic accident. He
is a house divided against itself, split wide open, and
hopelessly split. Nor can he read the riddle of what his
being here is all about: half of it looks like bread and
butter, with a little decent security, and a little decent
happiness on the way to it; the other half makes him think
now and then that he has missed something, and perhaps
ought to go to church and find out what it is. This is to
222
secularize both the Christian doctrine of man and the
Christian doctrine of man's mission under God.
TUESDAY
It's the Christian gospel that gives our lives their setting,
nothing else; stands them up against eternity, measures
their ways against it, their hopes and their fears; trans-
lates us out of an environment where we never were in-
tended to be at home, and makes us consciously what we
are in fact, citizens of another land!
WEDNESDAY
We are living in a world that doesn't belong to us. "The
earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof/' And I've not
yet found any evidence to the contrary! All I've ever seen
would indicate that it's going to be a dark day for anybody
who tries to snatch anything out of that eternal grip! I
don't know what it is that we own! This very existence of
mine is slipping away from me with every breadth! We do
look like guests, somehow, no matter which way we turn!
THURSDAY
This word "wait" is a disturbing word, and not only be-
cause so little seems to come of it. More than anything else
it's disturbing because it doesn't mean what we think it
means! In the Bible it keeps hinting that the postpone-
ments are not God's at all: they are ours. Maybe God
doesn't seem to be around because underneath everything
else there is something in our hearts which doesn't want
him to be, couldn't stand it If he were. Is that the name-
less evil which called for Bethlehem, and cost God
Calvary? One thing is very certain: we'll not sit things out!
In the face of all that we are, what the Bible means by
"waiting" can scarcely have much to do with patiently
letting the time pass. There is something in us which
makes the waiting necessary: something that forever insists
on getting between us and God; something we want more,
or like better, that keeps him at a distance.
FRIDAY
There is a road for a man to travel, and a day's work to
be done, and a death to overtake not as something that
comes upon you, as you wait there with your cup and your
pennies; but like a king's ransom that by the grace of God
you've earnedl Never wanting to get off, or be spared any-
thing that's how this epic ends!
SATURDAY
God is the God of life and death. Easter is the affirma-
tion of true life, at the expense of what we call life, which
is itself a denial of life. It sets me in a world which is not
self-contained, but open at both ends, and drafty: a world
far too small for my loyalties, where I am not to be left
comfortably alone, finding in running its errands and
shoving its furniture about the reason for my being here.
Now I have to pick up the stuff from its counters, and
take all its goods away from the glare of the artificial lights,
and bring them here, and look at them in front of an
empty tomb with an angel at the door: instead of just
holding fast to my bargains without ever seeing how
224
shoddy so many of them are. Mark says that the women
"went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; for they
were afraid." One can understand why he wrote that; but
I keep asking myself, "Afraid of what? Afraid of death, or
afraid of life?"
225
Sources of Biblical Quotations
PAGE DAY
2 Sunday
2 Monday
20 Jan. 2
23 Monday
25 Friday
29 Thursday
30 Saturday
32 Tuesday
37 Friday
43 Tuesday
49 Thursday
49 Friday
53 Friday
53 Saturday
57 Friday
65 Wednesday
67 Saturday
73 Tuesday
77 Tuesday
81 Sunday
85-86 Thursday
86 Saturday
90 Thursday
90 Friday
92 Sunday
96 Monday
97 Wednesday
97 Thursday
97 Friday
112 Saturday
120 Saturday
126 Tuesday
SOURCE
Rom. 13:11, 12
I Thess. 5:2
Matt. 2:3
Luke 11:28
Luke 2:29
Isa. 45:15
Gal. 3:26
Matt. 5:3-8
Luke 23:43
Matt. 5:45
Luke 10:27
Exod. 24:17
Matt. 27:29; Rom. 11:33
Matt. 23:27, Matt 5:29; Luke 12:20
Matt. 27:4
Job 38:11
Luke 21:25
John 15:5
John 10:12
I Cor. 1:9
Rom. 15:4; Luke 22:42
I Pet. 1:25
Matt. 10:39
Luke 11:21, 22
John 20:27
Job 23:3; Matt. 16:26; Hab. 1:2; Ps. 22:1
John 16:33
Phil. 4:4-7
John 20:2
I Cor. 11:26
John 20:21
II Cor. 12:9; I Tim. 1:14
227
PAGE DAY SOURCE
136 Saturday Isa. 46:9, 10
143 Wednesday II Cor. 12:9; Rom. 7:24, 25
158 Friday John 19:30; Luke 23:46
175 Tuesday I Cor. 4:7
176 Thursday Matt. 23:37
180 Tuesday Exod. 14:15
187 Tuesday Luke 23:33
188 Wednesday I Cor. 1:9
189 Friday Matt. 25:35
203 Friday Gal. 6:2
207 Thursday II Cor. 12:9
208 Saturday Luke 12:22
228
Additional Sources
The list below indicates selections quoted from the expositions
of The Book of Job and The Gospel According to St. Luke
prepared by Paul Scherer for The Interpreter's Bible: volume
and opening page number for each quotation are given in the
right-hand column.
PAGE DAY
SOURCE
PAGE DAY
SOURCE
3
Wednesday
3:1172
65
Sunday
3:908
6
Sunday
8:328
65
Tuesday
8:324
6
Monday
3:984
65
Wednesday
3 : 9 6 4
10
Monday
3:1080
66
Thursday
3:953
11
Friday
8:323
67
Saturday
8:371
14
Wednesday
8:362
?i
Saturday
3:935
15
Thursday
3"-909
73
Sunday
8:341
*5
Saturday
8=359
77
Monday
3:956
17
December 27
3:n73
78
Wednesday
3:987
18
December 30
3:1049
81
Wednesday
8:338
18
December 31
8: 353
82
Thursday
3:9^5
21
January 4
8:332
84
Sunday
8:337
28
Monday
8:349
85
Tuesday
3:981
*9
Wednesday
3:1165
86
Saturday
8:344
3*
Wednesday
8:365
89
Wednesday
3:9 8 9
44
Thursday
8:354
96
Sunday
3:99 6
44
Friday
8:367
96
Tuesday
3:1076
48
Tuesday
8:377
1O1
Friday
8:326
49
Friday
3:978
105
Friday
3:988
49
Saturday
3W8
107
Monday
8:343
5i
Sunday
3:1161
107
Wednesday
3:1161
5*
Friday
3:1174
114
Tuesday
3:958
55
Sunday
8:390
118
Sunday
8:335
57
Friday
8:391
122
Sunday
8:364
58
Saturday
8:389
122
Monday
3:958
229
PAGE DAY
SOURCE
122 Tuesday
3:923
123 Wednesday
8:35i
123 Friday
8:352
124 Saturday
3:909
126 Monday
8:385
127 Wednesday
3:1066
127 Thursday
3:932
128 Saturday
8:389
130 Monday
3:1168
130 Tuesday
8:383
131 Wednesday
3:1172
135 Friday
8:406
138 Sunday
3:1150
138 Monday
8:326
139 Thursday
8:424
142 Monday
8:363
153 Sunday
3:1166
153 Monday
3:1151
153 Tuesday
3 : 97i
154 Thursday
3^955
155 Saturday
3 : 93 6
158 Friday
3-"958
160 Sunday
3:956
PAGE DAY SOURCE
169 Saturday 3:9*4
171 Sunday 8:364
173 Saturday 3:927
179 Monday 3:980
181 Saturday 3:^74
184 Friday 3:914
185 Saturday 8:364
189 Saturday 3 :11 35
192 Friday 8:406
198 Sunday 8:396
198 Tuesday 3:1087
202 Tuesday 8:401
206 Sunday 3:1137
206 Tuesday 8:325
206 Wednesday 8:401
210 Tuesday 3:1152
211 Wednesday 8:324
211 Thursday 3:1154
212 Saturday 3:994
218 Sunday 3:1017
220 Saturday 8:352
222 Monday 8:354
230
Paul Scherer, Brown Professor Emeritus
of Homiletics at Union Theological
Seminary in New York, is a distinguished
preacher, teacher and writer. He is the
author of EVENT IN ETERNITY, FOR WE
HAVE THIS TREASURE (The Lyman Beecher
Lectures), FACTS THAT UNDERGIRD LIFE,
etc., and is an editor of THE INTERPRETER'S
BIBLE. For 25 years he served as minister
of Holy Trinity Church (Lutheran), New
Yoik City.
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