Conference Address

CHURCH OF THE AIR Sermon ¶

Friends of the Church of the Air: ¶

The account of the transcendent event which signalizes this day and entitles it to rank among the first of all memorial days is brief and simple. ¶

The Record of the Resurrection ¶

Jesus of Nazareth, who had proclaimed himself the Son of God, had been crucified and his sorely tortured body entombed in a borrowed sepulchre. At the dawning of the third day, "at the end of the Sabbath," certain devoted women returned there to perform some unfinished offices for the dead. They found the tomb empty, and his burial clothes folded together. Their agitation was quieted by a heavenly messenger who, announcing that he knew they had come seeking Jesus, gently reproved them asking: ¶

. . . Why seek ye the living among the dead? ¶

He is not here, but is risen: remember how he spake unto you when he was yet in Galilee, ¶

Saying, The son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again. ¶

And they remembered his words. (Luke 24:5-8.) ¶

The record adds little to that epoch-making story except that the risen Lord identified himself to Mary, one of the women; then, on various occasions, to his intimate disciples, and finally to a considerable body of people as he took his earthly leave of them. ¶

According to accepted reckoning, all this happened more than nineteen hundred years ago, but that simple account, widely spread, and accredited by millions, has persisted without interruption down through all the intervening centuries. Today, betokening the depth of its penetration into the pattern of their lives and the far-flung extent of its dominion, people, over that whole broad section of this earth comprising what is called the Christian world, will flock in multitudes to their churches, or have already done so, to pay homage to him who crowned his earthly ministry of mercy and redemption by triumph over death, giving assurance of the indestructibility of life and its perpetuation beyond the grave for all the race of men. That is the meaning and the message of the empty tomb. ¶

Achievements of Jesus Throughout His Life ¶

But the story comprehends more than a mere recital of the incident of the resurrection. That, standing alone, likely could not have prevailed over the opposition raised against it. It had to be coupled with the life and works and teachings of him whose body came forth out of the stone-covered, guard-protected sepulchre. Neither would the life alone nor the teachings alone have sufficed. They had to be crowned with the sanction of immortality which came from victory over the grave. All these — the life, the teachings, the death, and resurrection — are inseparably bound up together, into one whole and may not be considered as severable parts. ¶

The integrity of the unified account is enormously fortified by subsequent happenings, for it has profoundly changed the course of the world's history and has been the determining influence that has for long made western man dominant among the peoples of this earth. ¶

Clearly this phenomenal consequence was not attributable to the worldly rank or earthly possession of Jesus. He had neither. I do not, however, wish to dwell upon the humble circumstances of his birth nor the lowly station of his life. All this has been immemorially the subject of eloquent discourse. ¶

I do, though, want to emphasize that the life of Jesus was not lived nor his doctrine propounded among a benighted or naively credulous people. He lived and wrought among, and, following his death, his disciples carried his message to peoples boasting a twothousand-year-old civilization. The banner of Rome spread out over all the lands whose shores are washed by the waters of the Mediterranean. There were converged the learning of the ancients; the record of the laws and theistic beliefs of Israel with its noble literature and the majestic messages of the Hebrew prophets; the art, literature, poetry, and music of Greece; the fruits of the organizational and governmental genius of Rome. There, in the heart of the world's culture, Christianity was born. That is where, among the peoples who had created that culture, the Church found its early adherents and sent down its firm-bedded roots. There it won its place and got itself accepted as the worship of the majority of the people of the erstwhile persecuting empire and spread itself over all the nations of the western world, stamping them with the very name of Christ. From thenceforth it has influenced and shaped the course of nations, supplying them, to this day, their noblest ideals, their best standards for evaluation of behavior according to which conduct is extolled as being right or condemned as being wrong, introducing the concept of human brotherhood and of the individual worth and dignity of man. History furnishes no parallel to the power and influence of Jesus the Christ. In all the achievements of the nineteen centuries since his death, nothing has been produced to challenge this preeminence. In this marvelous day when study of physical forces has seemed to bring knowledge about them almost to its very pinnacle, there is in all our learning, physical or metaphysical, mystical or philosophical, nothing to grip the hearts of men as they have been gripped by the compelling power of the Man of Galilee. "Whence hath this man his power?" ¶

Spirituality Emphasized in the Teachings of Jesus ¶

In all his teachings Jesus emphasized the supremacy of the spirit. The message he committed to his disciples was a spiritual message, whose power was inherent in itself and not derived from any materialistic source or dependent on the caprice of human favor. ¶

That is the secret of its conquest. He came teaching not a mere code of ethics, but a religion. ¶

That is what he commissioned his disciples to spread everywhere. His charge to them was, ¶

Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: ¶

Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you. . . . (Matthew 28:19, 20.) ¶

The reality and directive authority of God, he made the central theme of all his teaching, declaring that he had come from the Father to whom he would return and whose will alone he had come to do. He prayed fervently to the Father and taught his disciples to do so. It was to those who believe in the Father that he promised eternal life. The last words he uttered as he died upon the cross were: "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit." (Luke 23:46.) Implicit in all this is the doctrine that he lived premortally with God and is his Son. He distinguished man, too, as an eternal being, a child of God, thus bringing him into direct relationship with the Father and the Son. Nothing else so dignifies man or stabilizes him in his behavior once his soul is pierced with that conviction. ¶

That concept, basic in the Christian religion, shaped the thought processes of men and expressed itself not only in their forms of worship but also in the secular affairs of their lives and in the very frameworks of civil governments themselves. It is at the foundation of the whole civilization and culture of the Christian nations of the world. ¶

Present Disordered Condition of the World How stands that civilization, if we pause to assess it, this Easter day? ¶

It is sick, terrifyingly sick, the whole world is, and everybody knows it. Hate, suspicion, envy, covetousness, and lust for power, stalk the earth, keeping the whole globe in turmoil. Gripped by fear, the nations are congealed with terror. Christian civilization has suffered a tragic moral collapse. No thoughtful person disputes that. But it is very doubtful if we have correctly diagnosed the malady. Rather does it seem that we are toying with symptoms while the root causes of the disease are left to flourish and propagate, administering palliatives instead of cures. ¶

Commonly we attribute our ills to the war. That is an explanation so ready at hand. War is ugly anyway, and the source of so much evil that it is easy to lump onto it the sole responsibility for all our afflictions. But it is clear that the war is not the root cause of our disorders. It is only a symptom, evidence of a basic ailment which produced it. If the war had been the cause, then the cause would have been removed when the fighting stopped, and we should have had only to convalesce from the sickness. That is not what happened. We seem further from peace now than when the battle was raging. The pressure of the conflict had some cohesive, unifying power which is now wanting. Many small nations seem merely to have changed masters, and their lot is not improved. They seem to have lost all immediate prospect for controlling their own destinies. War is rightly recognized as an evil scourge, and there is a feverish desire to prevent its recurrence. But war arises out of antecedent causes, and the only way to prevent it is to remove those causes. ¶

Destructive Influences at Work ¶

The truth of the matter is that our problem is a spiritual problem, and unless that is solved, our civilization is lost. The cure does not lie, as so many fondly believe, entirely in technical and economic reconstruction. I have already said that the civilization of Christendom is founded on belief of God. You will destroy that civilization if you let its basis perish. To live, it needs constant nourishment at the source. The Nazi youth were cut completely off the Christian practices which had been the basis of man's living for centuries. They were trained to deny Christ's teachings; so were the Fascist youth. You know the result, and it was not good. Unfortunately the undermining of Christian faith has not been confined to Nazidom, or to Fascist controlled lands or to Bolshevik revolutionaries. True, the same methods have not been used in most parts of Christendom, but destructive influences have nonetheless been long, at work all over the Christian world. ¶

Jesus is reduced from Godhood to the status of a mere moralist, and his teachings from a religion to a code of worthy ideals without binding force. The man-centered humanistic creed by which it is sought to supplant the God-centered Christian religion is thus stated by one high in the realm of educational thought. ¶

The cosmos as a whole, out of which human life emerges, gives no evidence of being, or wishing to be, intelligent. The human spirit is alone in an otherwise nonhuman, nonspiritual universe. Whatever it has, or may ever have of sensitiveness, of wisdom, of generosity, of freedom, of justice, it has made, and will make, for itself (Alexander Meiklejohn, Education Between Two Worlds.) ¶

Over against this humanistic atheism I set the confession of a doctor of philosophy, teacher in one of our large universities, who was sent to Germany to record the emotions and reactions of the defendants at the Nuremberg trials. As he went through his experiences there, and after having witnessed the desolation of that ravaged land, he is reported to have said: ¶

I was one of those smart boys who at my university used to ridicule the idea of God and who helped my students mock him. But now as I stand in this place of utter ruin and see the judgment of God which has come upon this city, and this people, and which is crushing these defendants, the leaders of Germany, I am going back to America and cry with the loudest voice I can muster: "It is time that we turn back to God, lest a worse fate befall us." ¶

The Weakened Condition of Christendom ¶

It cannot be forgotten that the scourging war, which has just devastated the earth, broke out right in the heart of so-called Christendom. Christian nation destroying Christian nation. The degradation left in its wake, the tragic collapse of morals, the earth-searing desolation spread everywhere, and the tottering of the whole social order among peoples who have forgotten God, should teach us lessons in humility and make us know that puny man, of himself, standing in the midst of this universal wreckage, "is no more capable of saving the world than he was of creating it in the first place." ¶

It is high sounding to deny divinity and to say that man must make for himself whatever he has or may ever have. Men may profess to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher and his doctrines as comprising the best code of ethics the world has known. But his ethical and moral teachings derive their influence over the lives of men out of the majesty of divine authority with which Christ's gospel invested them. There they have their roots. They cannot support a civilization if severed from their nourishing roots any more than the bloom of a flower can be kept after cut from its parent stem. We have been trying to maintain faith in a Christian ethic without faith in the religion that produced it. That cannot be done! True, a civilization and its culture may go on after a fashion after it has lost faith in the power from which it rose, carried on its acquired momentum. But unless it is nourished at the roots, it will ultimately exhaust the surplus on which it draws. You can no more go on drawing indefinitely on moral reserves without replenishment, than you can go on drawing from a bank without keeping the account current by new deposits. For too long now, the civilization of Christendom has been living on the remnants of a discarded faith. Its weakened condition is apparent in the lack of moral direction which characterizes these times. It is the teaching of history that moral decay follows upon the withering of belief of God. ¶

A committee comprising the most prominent clergy of England, after prolonged study, reported: ¶

... a sharp decline in truthfulness, personal honesty, an alarming spread of sexual laxity, and of the gambling fever. Magistrates have expressed their anxiety at the rise of juvenile crime. Schoolteachers complain at the difficulty of impressing upon their young charges the abomination of lying and stealing which they copy from their elders at home. ¶

The sorriest part about it all, is that the most debasing vices are practised without shame or remorse. But these things, too, are but symptoms of a blighting distemper bedded down deep in the souls of men. The committee found: ¶

Depravity is the sure symptom of spiritual disease. The idea of man as a responsible person is in danger of disappearing with the loss of belief in a Living God. ¶

You have only to read our own press to know that conditions in our country closely parallel those deplored by the English clergy. If you do not think so, read the column in the Los Angeles Times giving the list of crimes for a day in that city. ¶

Faith of the Early Disciples of Jesus ¶

It should be remembered that it was the religion Jesus brought — the gospel — that won over Rome against such overwhelming odds. The men whom he picked and left behind to represent him, and whom he commissioned to spread his gospel all over the world were lowly men, without political power or armed might. The only resource they had was the message the Master had left them and bidden them proclaim. They had to fight every step of their way forward against the unleashed fury of the mightiest empire on earth. They believed to the depth of their souls in the truth of what they declared. Their strength was their unyielding faith in the Living God and in the redemptive mission of Jesus the Christ. ¶

Our observances of this Easter day, though we may have thronged to our churches, will be futile unless we come from them refreshed in that faith and strengthened in the will to restore it as the power that can save the world. ¶