Luminescence, Volume 2. C. K. Barrett
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broken for you, the new covenant.”
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“GROWING UP”—1 Corinthians 13.11
[Preached five times from 9/28/67 at Northern Counties College to 6/16/81 at St. Andrews]
The chapter that you have just heard is at least in part about education. It deals with the process by which we stop thinking like a child and begin to think like an adult. This of course is your business, to lead children on from their narrow experience and their immature thinking into the wider world of grown-up life. The process is one that is never complete, and you, if I may venture to say it, are yourselves today at a milestone within it. For on entering this college, in today’s enrollment, you start out of the narrower environment of home and school and into the world of men and women where you find your own way, and stand on your own feet.
What does this process of developing maturity mean? You ought to know, for this knowledge is part of your professional equipment. Two things are involved: 1) the child’s knowledge has to be broadened, and 2) he has to learn how to use his knowledge. I do not mean by that that whereas he knows how to add and subtract, he must then learn to divide and multiply as well that whereas he knew what happened in 1066, he must now add 1666 too, (the two dates I could always remember). I mean that his experience must extend beyond the narrow limits of the family, that he must taste a wider and wider range of experiences. And he must learn how to reflect upon his experiences, and draw out links of logical inference, that will lead him out of the past, through the present, and into the future. All this is involved in growing up, and when I no longer act and when I no longer speak, and think, and feel as a child, I am reflecting in maturity upon an adult’s experience.
But what has our chapter to say about this? That if you yourself are really going to leave childhood behind, to become adult men and women, if you in turn are going to lead new generations of children into mature and intelligent experience, then you must keep your eye on these following things. The first is faith. Please note what that does not mean. It does not mean a body of doctrine summed up in the creeds, and ready there to be learnt by heart and swallowed whole. I am not myself despising the historic creeds. There is a lot of hard thinking in them, and the more you study them the more you are likely to find that, though they are not perfect, it is not easy to do any better. But they are not at the moment in the picture. Faith is the conviction, the growing experience, that there is much more to life than the eye can see.
The real trouble with materialism is that it is narrowing and immature. It does not take into account the whole breadth and sweep of human experience. It is faith that gives coherence to scientific thought, for faith means that behind the infinite variety of phenomena, there is no mere haphazard association of chances, but purpose and mind and reason. Christians ought to be the first explorers of the universe, for they know that it is the expression of personal consistent will, and that therefore it does make sense. Of course that does not mean that to be a Christian is automatically to know all the physics, and biology, and astronomy there is. To suggest it would be silly. It does mean that the way to personal and intellectual and true maturity is not to turn your back on Christianity but to take it seriously.
The second thing is hope. This too is needed by you and by those you teach, if you and they are to acquire a mature and balanced life. If faith means believing there is a purpose running through life, hope means believing there is a future. I am not for the moment talking about heaven, I mean that I for one have a future. This is not easy to believe. I have bungled most of the important things in life, what I am now is at most a veneer of success, riddled with failure, and if I could not believe there was some sort of future for me, I should throw up the sponge.13 Far more important, hope means that the world has a future. I agree that it doesn’t look like it. That Vietnam and China and Rhodesia and Nigeria and the rest may well make you think we have reached the end of our tether. Well if we have, there is no more development, no more growth. Hope too is a necessary condition of growing up to a sane, mature, balanced understanding of life and the world.
The third thing is love. Perhaps I have over-intellectualized faith and hope. I don’t regret it. They have an intellectual element, and at a time when Christians are apt to run away from their intellectual responsibilities, and non-Christians to deny that Christians have any, it is no bad thing to point out that Christian freedom includes and demands freedom to think, freedom to experience the world’s intellectual pleasures, and to bear the world’s intellectual burdens.
And so long as you remember the trio, faith, hope, and love, you will not go wrong, for the greatest of these is love and no loveless person will ever really grow up. Love means giving yourself away to others. And the only way to find yourself is to give yourself away. The person who has only lived within the narrow world of his own acquisitive nature, who has never known the laughter and the tears of self-forgetfulness, is a narrow selfish child, who has missed and will go on missing the deep and mature experience of life.
One thing more. I think that as Paul wrote this chapter, he became more and more aware he was not writing about abstractions but about a person. Faith, hope, and love in personal terms that means Jesus of Nazareth, and if growing up to the full stature of human maturity means faith, hope and love then it means Jesus. For Jesus means faith in the sense which I have described it. Here was the most worldly of persons, always concerned to feed the hungry and heal the sick, and yet convinced he had been sent into the world and represented in it a Kingdom which was not the kingdom of this world.
And Jesus means hope for he shows us that real life is not an empty dream but a concrete possibility, and this means that however badly I have failed, there is hope for me, and hope for the corrupt society of which I am a part. And Jesus means love, unsentimental self-forgetting service, of one’s fellow human beings, worked out to a measure whose only limit is the Cross. This is love. People who don’t want to be Christian discovered long ago the best way out of it. They fix their gaze on the forbidding figure of the pastor, and perhaps even more the forbidding figure of the Scripture mashers, and say, “God forbid I should ever be like that.” But this is the conjurer’s trick of misdirection, and you should not look at us, but at Jesus. You will not be worse men and women, but better, you will not be worse examples of your profession but better if from this day on you keep your eye fixed firmly on that man from Nazareth.
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13. Editor’s Note: This is a British idiom. The American equivalent is “throw in the towel.” Interestingly both come from boxing apparently, and refer to quitting.
“FAITH, HOPE, AND LOVE”—1 Corinthians 13.13
[Preached eight times between 2/24/74 at St. Chad’s College to 5/9/93 at Harrowgate Hill]
Up to a few years ago, I used to pride myself on the fact that, Dissenter though I was, I knew my way around the Church of England—Prayer Book, Psalms, lectionaries, and the like as well as most Anglicanisms. I have known and used them for some time. But since the new lectionaries, and Series 2, and Series 3 and all the rest came in, I have lost all my confidence, and though I researched it, I had to make inquiries before I could be sure that I could have 1 Corinthians 13 read in this service. And when in fact it was confirmed I did not know whether to be glad or sad. What I did know is that it was a passage I could not run away from. When I was an undergraduate, one of the “in” books (not that one used that term) was Rudolph Otto’s The Idea of the Holy. It was Otto who, more or less, invented the word “numinous” and to define it by invoking the Latin mysterium tremendum ab fascinaus, expressing both repulsion and attraction, terrifying and fascinating. To a preacher, 1 Corinthians 13 is like that, not only because it presents an ideal one knows one ought to follow, and yet cannot hope to achieve, but also because it is possible to talk about it such unmitigated bilge.
Clearly one could say a good deal about it. One could even say a good deal that was sensible and true. The question is how to approach it on any give occasion. This time, circumstances drive us to approach it this way. In these days we are witnessing in schools and universities a flight from theology