Week 51 Sunday
Week 51 Sunday
The Hand of Grace and the Hand of Judgment
Ezekiel 33:7-11
What are the prospects that people will choose the Way? Well, if people will not choose the Way deliberately by intelligent choice, then they will be driven to it by disillusionment. God has two hands—the Hand of Grace and the Hand of Judgment. If you won’t take life from the Hand of Grace, you will have to take it from the Hand of Judgment. A passage says, “When judgments come” (Ps. 1:5 Moffatt)—not “if” they come but “when.” They are bound to come; judgments are taking place now. And slowly but surely people are bound to judge life as God judges it.
An African American woman was asked to get up from a car and get into a Jim Crow coach. She slowly gathered up her things and said under her breath, “God is getting mighty tired of all this.” That was the pronouncement of a prophet, the sentence of doom on a wrong; God’s getting mighty tired of it.
Take this matter of racial superiorities. To bolster it up, I have heard the passage of Scripture quoted where God is supposed to have cursed Ham (the black man) and made him the slave of Japheth (the white man). But if you look up the passage in Genesis 9:25-27, you will find God had nothing to do with it. It was Noah who pronounced the curse—and on Ham’s son Canaan, not Ham—and he did it when he was drunk. “And Noah awoke from his wine . . . and he said.” To take a drunken man’s pronouncement as the code for the treatment of a race! Moreover, those who use this passage must acknowledge that Ham and Japheth had the same father and mother, so Ham and Japheth and their descendants are blood relations. And they are! God is getting mighty tired of religion that would lay hold on an obscure passage uttered by a drunken man to bolster up unchristian racial attitudes. If God had decreed that black people should forever serve white people because one man told his brothers that their father was in an undignified state in his tent, I should lose interest in such a God. That God would be my devil.
The authentic voice of God sounds in these words, “What are you more than Ethiopians to me, ye Israelites? The Eternal asks” (Amos 9:7 Moffatt). God is getting mighty tired of these injustices.
O God, I thank you that you are lifting the lid from our underlying paganism. You are showing us our unchristian depths. Help us to clean them out. Only thus can we be on the Way. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Today I shall be color-blind and class-blind—I shall see people.
Week 51 Monday
“God Is Getting Mighty Tired”
Isaiah 59:1-2; Ezekiel 21:27
We saw yesterday that God is getting tired of many things and that weariness of God with them is their doom. A marker put up by his comrades on a South Sea island reads, “Here lies a black man who died fighting the yellow man that the white man might be free.” God and humanity are going to get progressively tired of that kind of freedom—freedom for some and not for others. An African American minister said, “I’ve lived for thirty-six years as an American citizen in the American democracy, and for the first time I’ve lived these two weeks without fear and tension.” That in a democracy!
In a contest in Cleveland on what punishment should be meted out to Hitler, the prize answer was this one, “I suggest that Hitler be wrapped in a black skin and be made to live out the balance of his days in the American democracy.” The girl who gave it was African American; she knew. God is getting tired of that kind of democracy.
And science is speaking more and more the Christian position in regard to race. The two chemicals that produce color in the skin are carotene and melanin. A preponderance of carotene makes the yellow skin, and of melanin the brown or black skin. But all races have both. It isn’t that some have them and others haven’t; all races have both. So superiority founded on color is ridiculous.
A United States senator started an investigation of a teacher who taught in a teachers’ college “the equality of races.” She was found to be “innocent” of that “crime”! Someday we will lay that alongside witch-hunting as a reminder of where we have come from.
Science and the Christian faith are converging on seeing humanity as humanity, and the differences between races as cultural, not inherent. Take the development of electricity: Marconi was Italian; Ampere was French; Faraday and Joule were English; Ohm was German; Edison was American; Volta was Italian. The first blood shed in the American Revolution was African American blood. Washington said, “Some of the bloody tracks at Valley Forge were from Negro [sic] feet.”* The most decorated portion of the American Army in this last war was the Japanese American unit.
O God, you are teaching us the hard way that people are brothers and sisters; humanity is one. We wouldn’t have our race prejudice cleansed by the blood of your Son, and now we have to have it cleansed away in the blood of our sons. Forgive us. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: One blood for us—the Blood of Christ. One blood in us—the blood of humanity.
*No published source was found for this direct quotation, but accounts of the winter include references to African American involvement and the bloody tracks left by barefoot soldiers.
Week 51 Tuesday
God Is Getting Tired of Racialism
Mark 11:15-18
When God gets mighty tired of a wrong, God uses any instrument available if God’s own people won’t respond. The Christian Church in South Africa was filled with racialism. Gandhi, being brown, could not get into one of them. He was repelled, started a movement for the liberation of millions, discovered an essentially Christian power—the power of soul force, and became the father of his country. Gandhi as a Hindu is used of God to do what he couldn’t do through the Christians. God got tired.
I asked an African American porter in a train why he was reading a Baha’i book, and he replied, “It teaches me brotherhood.” When I asked him if Christianity didn’t teach him brotherhood, he replied, “Not this kind; this kind transcends race.” God got tired waiting for the Christians to be Christian regarding race, so God uses the Baha’i movement to teach the Christian to be Christian.
I asked a Jewish woman in Russia why she preferred living in Russia, and she replied, “I was treated well in England, but I was always conscious of being a Jew. Here I am treated as a person and not as a Jew. Here I am not conscious of race.” God got tired of an unchristian Christian society and used an atheistic culture to teach the rest of us about the oneness of humanity.
And God is using atheistic Russia in another way. God is using Communism as a mustard plaster to make individualism change, as God is using individualism to make Communism change. The thesis is individualism; the antithesis is Communism, and out of the clash of opposites a synthesis—a third something—is being born. That third something is the kingdom of God. God gets tired of our being so slow to change through the teaching of our faith, so God uses the dialectic of history to make us move to a higher level and a more just order—the kingdom.
Jesus offered the kingdom of God to his own people; they would be the agent of the coming of the new Order. They were bound by prejudice and ritual and wouldn’t respond. God grew tired and raised up the church out of the nobodies. God’s own people were left standing behind a Wailing Wall.
O God, are we as a church now going to be left behind standing at a Wailing Wall? We know the Way is going to have the right of way, through either us or others. Help us to be the responsive channels. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Today’s alternative: Disobedience and a Wailing Wall, obedience and an open vista.
Week 51 Wednesday
God Is Getting Tired of Unequal Privilege
Matthew 20:1-14
Another thing both God and people are getting mighty tired of, the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few and the impoverishment of the many. The excuse cannot be given that one represents frugality and ability and the other represents prodigality and inability. Of course, there is some truth in that in some cases. But where society is so organized that a great deal of wealth can be passed on without regard to ability or frugality or character, the excuse goes lame.
There is no excuse for the spectacle of millions alongside misery. We must learn to distribute our wealth more widely to raise the level for all. If we do not, then we will have to put up with an unstable situation. For where there is lack of equality, there is lack of equilibrium. If you have an unjust society, you will have an unstable society. As long as society has wide differences in distribution of wealth, we are going to have strikes, lockouts, and wars. When we come to a closer approximation to equality, then and then only will society become more stable.
This more equitable distribution can be carried on through: (1) profit sharing, (2) cooperatives, or (3) revolution. We must make our choice. I vote for the first two. A leading industrialist in Canada said this to me at the close of an address, “You’re right. My factory was a feud. I was giving as little as possible, and my employees were doing as little as possible. We were tied in knots. Then I saw that the basis was wrong, and I said to my employees, ‘Hereafter you are going to have the right of hiring and firing. Moreover, we are setting aside 23 percent of the profits for labor above wages. We are going to work this out together.’ Immediately the spirit of the factory changed. The men weeded out slackers, for now they were slacking against labor as well as capital. It was to the interest of everybody to work harder and more intelligently. Everybody did more and got more. The spirit of the factory changed almost overnight. We are no longer a feud; we are a family.” “Profit sharing works like magic,” said an able management engineer who straightens out sick businesses.
O God, we know that you are teaching us to live as brothers and sisters, not only in church but in the factory. You are teaching us the hard way. We should have learned it through our gospel; now we have to learn it through our tied-up economy. Save us from our stupidities. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Our alternative: Profit sharing for everybody or problem sharing for everybody.
Week 51 Thursday
Plenty for All—Poverty for Many
Matthew 15:32-37; Luke 3:10-11
We saw yesterday that profit sharing would change employer and employee from competition to cooperation. Cooperation is a higher principle with a higher result. A management engineer puts it this way, “If a business ensures the security of its employees by profit sharing, it automatically ensures itself.” That same principle of cooperation must be applied to community relationships. Cooperatives may not be the final answer, but they are a step on the road to the final answer, for they distribute wealth widely through cooperative effort.
They tell us that bees live through the winter by mutual aid. They form into a ball and keep up a dance. Then they change places; those that have been out move to the center, and those at the center move out. Thus, they survive. Should those at the center insist on staying there and keeping the others at the edges, they would all perish.
An economy where the privileged insist on being kept warm by those on the edges of privilege is a doomed economy. Privilege must be distributed to all or be taken away from all. When Eisenhower was asked how he managed to keep the diverse elements together in the battle of Europe, he replied in the famous words, “Sir, it is one team or we lose.”* In a larger sense, “It is one world or no world.”
That laws of changeless justice bind
Oppressor with oppressed;
And, close as sin and suffering joined,
We march to Fate abreast.**
Someone reporting the saving of a woman and a child said, “It would be difficult to say it was the woman who saved the child or the child who saved the woman. For it is one of those unexpected miracles of living that when we protect another we often save ourselves.” Miracle? No, a deeper-embedded law. You cannot hurt another without hurting yourself, and you cannot help another without helping yourself. An ancient saying, “What has happened to you is poison to me.” Any hurt to another is poison to me, and any help to another is food to me.
O God, you are teaching us through flood and dust and depression and war that we cannot live except in the Way. We see your awful hand at work in human affairs. Its message, “The Way or the way of death.” Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I lose to live; I renounce to realize.
*No published source was found of this quotation, although it is widely attributed to Eisenhower.
**John Greenleaf Whittier, “At Port Royal,” Complete Poetical Works (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894), 328.
Week 51 Friday
“A Faith of Equal Privilege”
2 Corinthians 8:15; 9:6-8
We saw yesterday that God is getting tired of people exploiting people. Imperialism in economics, in politics, in international relations, anywhere, has the doom of God upon it. God is making it work out wrong; it adds up to tension, conflicts, war, impoverishment, and hell. William Hard speaks of nations “all inspired by the suicidal idea that if we can only sufficiently impoverish foreigners, then we ourselves shall be rich.” Suicidal? Yes, for the Way is against it. Hard further adds, “By such non-imperialistic actions the U.S. has won what no other power in all the world has won, the confidence of its small neighbors.”* But the moment we become imperialistic, we will lose that confidence overnight. “The next century is the American century”—of decadence, if we embark on imperialism of any kind. For God is mighty tired of imperialism. Every imperialistic country has decayed.
Peter speaks of “a faith of equal privilege” (2 Pet. 1:1 Moffatt). The corollary of a faith of equal privilege is a society of equal privilege; one is root, and the other is fruit. And this is founded in the nature of God as revealed in Christ: By the equity of our God and Savior Jesus Christ. Any society that is founded on unequal privilege anywhere is against the nature of God—against the Way—and hence it is doomed. God has simply gotten mighty tired—that settles it—nothing can save it except repentance, complete and absolute.
And God got mighty tired of selfishness in the individual. Humanity has thought it could make itself and its desires the center of the universe, thought people could become God and be happy. It has turned out badly. Someone has said that the history of the prodigal son can be summed up in three stages: sick of home, homesick, home. But the reason for the homesickness was self-sickness; he was sick of himself. “Give me” was his first step down. “Make me” was the first step back (see Luke 15:11-32). To be self-centered is to be self-loathed. We wanted ourselves; now we have them, have them on our hands, as problems, problems that we frantically try to unload on doctors and psychiatrists. What’s the matter? God’s gotten tired, mighty tired of our acting as God.
O God, we see your Finger pointing again, “weighed . . . and found wanting” (Dan. 5:27), and again we are afraid. Help us to cease our ways and take your Way. Your Way is our way—we are made for it—and if we rebel against you, we rebel against ourselves. Forgive us, forgive us. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: You cannot revolt against God without revolting against yourself.
*Reference to William Hard agreeing with these statements is found in “Peace ‘Must Be Endurable’,” The Examiner (Launceston, Tasmania: June 28, 1944), 4.
Week 51 Saturday
You Cannot Live against the Great Design
Isaiah 59:3-8
We ended yesterday in saying that humanity is not God and to act like it brings naught but self-knighting. This is true when we set up a portion of humanity and make that the center of life. For instance, sex. Sex is not something to be feared. It is God’s gift, by which we share creatorship with God. But make it a law unto itself, make it God, and it will be a worm-eaten god.
The secular doctor or psychiatrist who recommends sex license as a remedy for sex problems is recommending to you to go straight to hell—hell now—on the inside of you. You will jump from the frying pan of sex difficulties into the fire of an inner conflict, “where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:44 KJV). If you won’t listen to me, then listen to one who has tried it, a young woman who went through an extramarital experience, “Much is talked of the evils of frustration in the case of the woman who denies herself the physical experience of love. In my opinion that vague and periodic torment is as nothing compared to the frustration suffered by the woman who seeks happiness in love outside of marriage. With all the latent instincts of her sex released and intensified by the mating experience, awake for the first time to the full design of married love, she realizes, with a sense of dumb defeat, that for her the fulfillment of that design must remain, perhaps forever, an unaccomplished thing. It is a trapped, blind-alley feeling that only one who has experienced it can appreciate. The conflict set up as a result casts its dark shadow over an experience which one had expected to be all light and freedom.” In other words, the judgments of Christ and the judgments of life are the same. The Way is written in the Bible but also in the blood. It is written in the Incarnation and in the instincts, in our flesh and its relationships. It is written everywhere and operative everywhere, and every way that is anti-Way is anti-life.
God is mighty tired of our trying to live anti-Way, and the results are registered in a disrupted humanity. This disrupted humanity is also getting mighty tired of living against itself. It may choose the Way through disillusionment.
O God, your two hands are outstretched. Help us to take the Hand of Grace offered to us in Christ, instead of the Hand of Judgment offered to us by life. For outside of you is naught but sickness. Help me. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: To have myself on my own hands is hell; to have myself in God’s hands is heaven.