One Way

I’m starting this sermon with a really old illustration because things have gotten so much worse that to introduce it with a contemporary example would take more than one sermon to adequately address it. So think yourself back a couple of decades, to 2002.

That’s when football coach Ron Brown was rejected by California’s Stanford University. He was an assistant on the staff at the University of Nebraska, and early that year was interviewed for the head coaching job at Stanford. After traveling to Los Angeles, Mr. Brown got no further than an initial round of questioning. The reason, according to an April 11 story in the newspaper the Daily Nebraskan: “It soon became apparent his religious views, among other things, were incompatible with Stanford’s liberal student body and active gay community.” This astonishing statement was not even challenged by the Stanford authorities. Mr. Brown told the student newspaper he was amazed at Stanford’s bluntness. “If I’d been discriminated against for being black, they would’ve never told me that,” he said. “They had no problem telling me it was because of my Christian beliefs.” [World, April 27]

Alan Glenn, Stanford’s assistant athletic director of human resources, admitted that: “[Brown’s religion] was definitely something that had to be considered. We’re a very diverse community with a diverse alumni. Anything that would stand out that much is something that has to be looked at....” If they’re so diverse, why is there no room for Christians?

A few years ago, the Williamsburg Charter Survey on Religion and Public Life found that 92 % of surveyed academics demanded a “high wall of separation” between church and state; 1/3 claimed that evangelicals are “a threat to democracy.” The big media in our society, along with higher academia, have habitually over the last six months compared conservative Christians to the radical Taliban. “When you’ve seen one fundamentalist,” these folks tend to say, “you’ve seen them all.”

If you think I’m exaggerating, look up the April 27, 2002 issue of World Magazine for chapter and verse.

But the point of my mentioning all of this is not to inflame anybody’s paranoia... although sometimes paranoia seems to be the only healthy response - but to ask the question, “Why?” Why are some people so afraid to expose themselves to the claims of Christ? Why are they so threatened that they cannot even allow the Christian point of view equal time in the national debate? If they really believed that they have either the high ground - either intellectual or moral - you’d think they’d enjoy poking holes in the people someone, I think it was H. L. Mencken - called poor, ill-educated and easily led?

I think the problem is that they know they’d lose. I think the problem is that the cold wind of reality has been signaling all too clearly that their emperor has been strutting around with no clothes on. Because the fact of the matter is that this passage from John, which contains one of the most frightening words in Scripture for the militant anti-Christian - I refer, of course, to john 14:6 “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” This astonishing claim, if true, would knock their entire foundational worldview into the dustbin of history, along with the rest of the destructive ideologies of the 20th century.

Anyway, as I was saying before I so rudely interrupted myself, this passage from John contains all the ingredients anyone really needs to live a life of more completeness, more wholeness, more satisfaction and fulfillment than any of the faddish philosophies which have dominated our cultural elites for the last century.

That’s a pretty all-encompassing claim, isn’t it. I better be able to prove it. But I think I can.

First of all, what do people need to be happy? Psychologists say that people need three things.

First of all, they need something to do. Not necessarily gainful employment, that is to be paid for their work, but to feel as though their time and labor somehow adds value to the world. Secondly, people need something - ideally some one - to love. People need to love even more than they need to be loved - all though by all means do try to direct your affections to someone who is likely to return them. It’s really a lot better. And, finally, they need something to look forward to. As the great poet Robert Browning said, “Man’s heaven must exceed his grasp, else what’s a heaven for?”

I think that psychologists have stumbled upon some real Scriptural truth here. But of course they’re missing a key ingredient. Real happiness, real satisfaction, comes from doing work that really does add value to the world. Real fulfillment only comes when what you love is worthy of being loved. And unless you are hoping for the right thing, you will be disappointed when - if - you achieve your goal. And so today’s passage (helped along by a handful of others) points us toward the right work to do, the right object of our affections, and the right aspiration.