Transcript

In the fifth chapter of John is the simple story of the man who had been by the pool of Bethesda for thirty-eight years, and to whom Christ addressed the question, Will thou be made whole? The increasing need in our nation for the services of the psychiatrist is an alarming fact facing us today. It reveals a lack of wholeness in personality, and the presence of a sense of failure and frustration. Vast confusion abounds in human lives. Eyes are blinded, ears are heavy, minds set or unsettled, emotions seared, and men grope in their darkened world like lost children crying for the light and with no language but a cry. We recall that in our college days an erudite guest speaker would tell us how necessary it was that we become integrated personalities. He did not make his meaning very clear, and it was long afterward that I truly comprehended what he had said. The way I learned it was by going back to my grammar school arithmetic, finding the word integer, and discovering anew that it means a whole number and not a fraction. Then it came to me that an integrated personality is one that is whole and not one that is fractional. I turned again to the moving story of Jesus in the temple and read those revealing words, and Jesus increased in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man, and I was sure that in him are the fundamental characteristics of the completely integrated life. The integrated person, then, is one who honors his body, knowing it to be the temple of the Holy Spirit. During the recent world war, the operation of the Selective Service Act revealed a startling state of the physical unfitness of millions of our young men. And indeed, in all ages of life, devastating habits, utter neglect, and wanton wickedness have taken a terrific toll. The sins of the body are largely the wrong or excessive use of otherwise legitimate functions. Health habits, then, are of the first importance. In what Dr. Sorokin describes as a sensate civilization, one is under necessity to follow the example of St. Paul, who declared that he kept his body under strict moral disciplines. The body is to be the servant and never the master. The mind and the spirit must hold the reins and compel the body to do their bidding. Nevertheless, there have been many notable examples of people who refuse to let physical handicaps prevent them from becoming completely integrated persons. Helen Keller, blind and deaf and dumb from childhood, threw off these invidious bars and became more than master of the fell circumstances of her life. Robert Louis Stevenson, with a body wracked by pain and suffering, became great and winsome notwithstanding. Dr. Walter Scott, the victim of infantile paralysis, was a preeminent man of letters. Time would fail me to name them all, but after due acknowledgment of those who bravely overcame their handicaps, it remains true that a sound body is an essential requirement of a completely integrated person. A mind fully developed and used for its highest function is indispensable to a life that would be whole. There has not been an era in the long history of our race when there was quite as much need for creative and independent thinking. Propaganda has come to high tide in our day, all of it making a bid for the minds of men. From every quarter we are being subjected to thinking already wrought out and handed down. Radio commentators, educators, columnists, editorial writers, and preachers too are bombarding us with enticing words. Every ideology is making a bold effort to command the minds of men. The call is most insistent for clear and discriminating thinking so that we may arrive at logical conclusions around which we may build our convictions and upon which we may safely take our stand. In our day, men must think with their minds and not simply with their emotions. It is imperative that they think without bias or prejudice or bigotry. They must see to it that their minds are not poisoned by hate and vindictiveness. Their thinking must be vastly more than a rearrangement of their opinions and prejudices. Mob thinking will lead to enslavement and never give the truth that makes men free. Every area of life calls for constructive thinkers. Only such people can lead our confused world out of its wilderness onto the highway that ends in the fulfillment of man's fondest dreams and highest hopes. Demagogues, either political or ecclesiastical, cannot rise among a people who think deeply, logically, creatively, constructively, and independently. As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. The completely integrated person keeps an open mind and a growing mind. He will entertain new ideas and enlarge the ones he has. He is oriented in the world of truth and is unafraid of the light from any quarter. He hungers for larger knowledge, constantly pushes back the horizons of his mind, and becomes more and more at home in the realm of rational thinking. Another feature of the completely integrated life is that of social adjustment. By this, I mean learning the art of living together wholesomely and successfully with other persons and groups. The cause of most of our trouble and tension today is the lack of adjustment in the social area. This maladjustment appears in every phase of life where people are thrown together. Since modern science and inventions have caused our world to shrink so much in our day, the problem of living together in peace and goodwill with others is intensified. A major reason for the enormous and appalling increase in broken homes is this matter of social maladjustment. Two people meet at the holy altar of the Church and make a solemn pact that they shall live as one to build a beautiful and abiding home. Most of them, because they have learned the way of love, honor, loyalty, and understanding, keep this pact inviolate until death. But an alarming number that has been steadily increasing until recently are not able to live successfully with one another, and their marriages go on the rocks, all too often bringing the greatest woe and misery to the innocent children of their broken homes. The secret of a successful marriage is for the two involved to respect one another's personality and to walk in loyal devotion and continuous understanding. Racial tension runs unusually high today. Our nation has been called the melting pot of all racial groups wherein they live together in mutual respect and cooperation. It should seem natural for each individual to be very proud of the race to which he belongs and to do all he can to maintain its integrity and solidarity. Those of all races who are themselves whole and complete will strive to build bridges across the chasms that divide so that all races may live together without fear and without tension. A morally mature majority race will never take advantage of any minority race, but rather will undertake to guarantee educational, judicial, and economic fairness and justice to that race. Racial hate and prejudice have no place in a Christian society. A holier-than-thou sectional attitude will not solve our racial problems. Each section must meet the racial problems peculiar to its own area and work them out on the Christian level. No solution less than Christian can stand the judgment of time or the judgment of God. In our economic life today, we face the peril of a breach between management and labor. We believe in the system of free enterprise which has brought our nation to unparalleled heights. The welfare of the man who labors and the man who hires him is equally involved. And so a bridge must be built across this widening breach so that labor and management can sit down together with sympathetic understanding and work out their common problems in the atmosphere of mutual goodwill. So soon after the most destructive war in human history, the international air is filled again with tension and suspicion. The rattling of the sword is heard above our heads, and our uneasy world today calls for completely whole individuals in the places of government who can turn the points of friction among the nations into occasions of friendship to the end that a world of many nations may become at last one world that will beat its swords into plowshares and its spears into pruning hooks, thus transforming all armaments of destruction into constructive implements for the blessing of mankind. I repeat, the biggest problem facing the world today is that of learning to live together happily as individuals, races, groups, and a nation. And I think this leads naturally to the last word for this hour. No personality is finally complete until it is properly related to God and is transformed by the spirit of God into a new creation. This is the keystone and the arch of the building of an integrated personality and an integrated world. Man, to reach the noblest proportions, must know a supreme being to love, to worship, and to serve. This gives him a sense of moral responsibility and places him under inescapable moral control. God is his highest authority and gives him a compelling reason to keep under the base demands of his flesh, to think God's thoughts after him, to respect human beings as such wherever he finds them, and to learn to live peaceably and constructively with all men. We may assert, therefore, with finality, that our only hope is to bring the world to recognize God, to submit to his will and to walk in his ways. Man cannot live by bread alone, nor by thinking alone, nor by social adjustment alone. Man is a living soul and is incomplete apart from God. For a long time the preacher has been making the bold declaration that God alone is sufficient for this hour, but sometimes he has felt that he was only a voice crying in the wilderness. But of late he has been joined by some valiant allies. As I mount my pulpit on Sunday again and again, I feel someone tugging at my sleeve. When I look around, I find it to be an eminent educator who is saying, Let me preach to your congregation today. When I move over, I hear him saying with intense earnestness, With all our learning we shall be lost if we do not enter the school of Christ and acquire his spirit and project his teachings into the hearts of men. On another Sunday morning it is the renowned scientist saying, Let me speak to your people today. And he says with the deepest concern, We have laid hold upon the secrets of God and have found such power that the world can be blasted into bits. I exhort you to hear the awful truth that unless God controls the findings of science, we are near the end of our civilization. Likewise, the editor, the commentator, and the professional warrior are uniting their voices with that of the preacher to call men to join the fellowship of all true disciples of Jesus Christ, to save the world from disaster, and to set it upon a holy quest again. Jesus stands over our troubled world in its failures and frustrations, its warring madness, its growing tensions, and all its ills, and cries again today, Wilt thou be made whole? Then he says with deep winsomeness, Come unto me, and I will give you help for your sickness, hope for your despair, faith for your doubts, comfort for your sorrows, and salvation from your sins. To the nations, he says, come unto me, and I will give you trust for your suspicions, unity for your discord, and the way of peace, for your ways of war. To all, he cries, come unto me, and I will be the center of your lives and the anchor for your souls. Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. I will make you whole again, for lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.