Liberty UMC, Sunday, May 29, 1994
I want to share with you some Scripture before I begin my remarks, and the Scripture that I want to share with you is found in the 11th Chapter of Genesis. It begins with the first verse, and I’ll read several verses of that Chapter:
1 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar;
4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
6 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.
8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
9 Therefore was its name called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
When I received the call from Brother Healey yesterday, I was proof-reading the final proof of a book that I have written entitled Conscience and Command. I don’t know if you know anything about publishing; but when you get down to this stage, you have to push things through real fast and so I had spent a number of hours Friday night and yesterday proof-reading so that I could send it back and say that it was all alright. So, I was rather tied up then and I had to push on through and finish that; and to make a long story short, I didn’t have a whole lot of time to prepare for this talk. But that’s not a problem because I have found that my greatest problem is not figuring out something to say, but figuring out how to cut it off; figuring out how not to say too much before I get through.
As Bobby mentioned, it was my pleasure to serve is the president of the MYF Subdistrict here in this area. Do you know it’s been 35 years since I presided over sub-district meetings here in this church. Time does have a way of getting on. We were talking before the service started about my glasses. I was trying to get them cleaned up a little so I could see well enough to read the Bible, but I’m not going to have to read the other stuff because I didn’t write a speech for you.
Anyway, I’ve had a long time to study about what I might say when I get invitations to speak–a whole lifetime. I won’t have any trouble thinking of the things to say, even without having it all written out.
Each of us is called to our own vocation as a Christian. We read in the Bible about the Body of Christ. But always there is the danger that the Body of Christ, or the society–the group of people–will become so intent on themselves–on building on their own powers–as they did on the Plain of Shinar–that we lose the commonality. And that’s what I want to visit with you about this morning. I know very little about the things that you as individuals do to make a living. I suspect that you don’t know a great deal about my work as a judge. Yet, it is extremely important that each of makes our contribution to society and that we do it well. Because that’s the plan of the New Testament. That’s the plan of the Body of Christ. We as Christians must go about our vocations doing the things that we are called to do. Merely coming to church is not what the Body of Christ is all about. The Body of Christ has to do with what we do in our everyday affairs and in our calling.
This morning I will be visiting with you from my perspective as a judge. My calling is the law. And I can tell you after eleven years on the bench that the process works all right. We don’t have a whole lot of problems with the way the court system works. In our circuit, we are current with our dockets—just as current as we reasonably can be. People don’t have to wait a long time as they do in other places. And I can honestly say that I conscientiously apply the rules to the controversies that come before me. I’m not always right, but at least I’m always honest; and I always try to do the right thing; and I call things according to the best judgment that God gives me to call the shots with. But nevertheless, when I look at our world, I don’t see the quality of life in our circuit being a great deal better today than it was eleven years ago when I took office. In fact, if anything, things may be a little worse off. Why? I’m going to suggest to you that that is the problem that confronts the church. While the process of law works all right, the results are disappointing. The reason is that you have got to have the right formulas…you have got to have the right relationships…you have got to have the right beliefs in society in order for any system to work.
I can tell you this for a fact: if everybody decides that they are going to do what they want to….do you remember in the Old Testament when things disintegrated after the children of Israel had moved into the Promised Land, at the end of the period of Judges, and before the advent of Kings, there’s a passage of Scripture that says, “In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes” It’s right at the end of the Book of Judges. That’s anarchy. We can’t all do as we see fit. In the last eleven years, I’ve watched as the family has further disintegrated; I’ve watched as the schools have not really improved. The glue that seems to hold us together seems to become weaker and weaker.
In the area of law, we’ve seen the decisions about prayer in public schools. Now, the Constitution of the United States says Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or preventing the free exercise thereof. That’s the clause. That’s the Establishment Clause; that’s the Freedom of Expression Clause; and the right to gather and to worship is a tremendous privilege on this Memorial Day. There are people who laid down their lives so that we would have the opportunity to be here today. Now, I don’t disagree violently with the court decisions about prayer in public schools. We need to be teaching people to pray right here in this church. I do disagree, and I say that the Supreme Court over-extended its authority to the extent that it said that people can’t pray in school if they want to. People are not making a law respecting the establishment of religion when they pray in public school. If the Legislature were to pass in act saying what prayer needs to be prayed, now that would be a fairly major problem as far as the Constitution is concerned. While I disagree mildly with the Court’s approach, I think that as church people we need to be more concerned with what we can do with the freedom that is ours.
I see a lot of opportunity right here. I see a lot of empty seats in this church; and if they were full, we might be having some greater impact on the world than what we are having. So the problem might not really lie in the legal system; it might lie in our society. It may not be that our Legislature doesn’t represent us as well as they should; it could be that they are the spitting image of us–that they represent us too well–that the values we hold are the values that are ultimately reflected in our legislatures and courts. The values that we hold are ultimately the values that are reflected in our Legislature and that come to bear on the problems that we share. We have the opportunity through our religion to come to one mind–to follow one God–to worship one Christ; and if we do that, then we arrive at common values on which law can dwell. Without those things, then we can’t hire enough policemen. It won’t work that way.
We need to concentrate on family values. We need to restore the power of our churches. We need to restore the integrity of our schools and to arrive at a common language in which we can discuss the problems that confront us. We need to have morality in all of those places and in our places of employment. There is nothing to keep us from worshiping God as we see fit. Why don’t we do it, I wonder? Why don’t we understand that the only answer is to turn to God and lay the problems that we have at His feet.
Part of the problem is, perhaps, that we make our God far too small, as J. B. Phillips suggested. In order for Christianity to have any meaning in the world in which we live– and you may chuckle when I say this–we’ve got to believe in a God that understands computers. We’ve got to believe in a God that understands nuclear physics. We’ve got to believe in a God that understands sparrows and a God that understands kittens. From the top to the bottom. From everlasting to everlasting. Alpha and Omega. Beginning to end. The whole works. The created order. The highest abstractions to the lowest central theme. We’ve got to believe in a God that created those. We’ve got to believe that He sent His son who suffered and died in order to atone for our sins. He was raised from the dead on a powerful Easter morning and 40 days later, a week ago today in our church calendar, sent the Holy Spirit into this world and we can commune with that Holy Spirit.
All of our efforts to achieve justice through our courts, through our own machinations, amount to nothing more than what those people who tried on the Plain of Shinar to do it on their own were doing. Because our tongues are confounded. We don’t know how to talk with the Black folks who surround us. We don’t know how to talk with the engineers that are around us. We don’t know how to talk to the people in occupations that are different from ours. We live in a world of confounded tongues. We live in the Tower of Babel; and that is the reason we can’t put it all together, because we are not any longer speaking the same language, because we tried to do it on our own, and we did not incorporate the Almighty God. He sends Jesus Christ in the form of the Holy Spirit into the effort.
Now what would happen if we just relied for a moment on that Holy Spirit? The Bible provides an answer to that too. And I’ve always been intrigued by the way that the Tower of Babel compares to the Power of Pentecost. In the New Testament, in the Book of Acts, Chapter Two:
1 And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place.
2 And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.
3 And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them4 And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.
5 And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven.
6 Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language.
7 And they were all amazed and marvelled, saying one to another, Behold, are not all these which speak Galileans?
8 And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born?
9 Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judaea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia,
10 Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes
11 Cretes and Arabians, we do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God.
12 And they were all amazed, and were in doubt, saying one to another, What meaneth this?
13 Others mocking said, These men are full of new wine.
I think that as we set about finding orderliness, we have got to understand that our own efforts lead us always into the Tower of Babel. What we need is the Power of Pentecost that comes through the church. Now, there will always be those who mock. There will be those who laugh. The scoffing little dogs will laugh every time the cow tries to jump over the moon, but that is not any reason why through the Grace of God it can’t happen. I think that in the message that I have brought to you this morning there is a way to understand the problems that we have encountered in our efforts to deal with the world on our own. There’s a way to understand why our courts are not more effective.
Now, the law is my calling. I suspect that if you will take what I have said this morning and lay it up against your own calling–the things that you do every day–I suspect that you will find that it has meaning and application for you and your calling just as it does for me and my calling. The Spirit is involved in the relationships that we have with each other. We are called on to love the Lord, our God, with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and our neighbor as ourself; and we don’t do that.
Let us pray. Most gracious Heavenly Father, we come before you today convicted of sin. We come to you directly from the Tower of Babel. We come to you from the world that is torn and hurt and broken and bleeding; a world that is in need of the Great Physician. We ask for the Power of Pentecost to be substituted for the Tower of Babel in our own lives. We ask for Your grace, so that we can find solutions to our problems on our own, but at the same time that we not forsake what You have given us in terms of talent; that we turn our talents to Your use in the building of Your kingdom, for it is in the holy and powerful name of Jesus Christ that we pray. Amen.
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