3/2/52

Scripture: Matthew 4: 1-4; John 6: 63-69.

Texts: Matthew 4: 4; “Man shall not live by bread alone.”

John 6: 68; “Thou hast the words of eternal life.”

It was an ancient saying of the faithful Jews, recorded in the book of Deuteronomy and remembered by faithful scholars, which Jesus quoted against his tempter: “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.’” [Deuteronomy 8: 3]. Obviously, man does need bread. If deprived of food and water, he dies very shortly. But man is not just to exist, by the regular use of food and water. To really live he must have the word of God, the acquaintance of good, the impelling presence and possession of a faith.

It is astonishing how inconsequential some matters become beside the need for a strong Christian faith.

When archaeologists were digging, some years ago, for bits of an ancient civilization that would open the doors of historical understanding, they discovered the tomb of a royal child. And as they uncovered it, they found an inscription upon it which, when translated, revealed this lament: “My life, my love, my little one; would God I had died for thee.” It was the same lament uttered at another time and place by King David over his wayward and traitorous son, Absalom, killed in battle, “O Absalom, my son; would God I had died for thee.” [II Samuel 18: 33]. Prominent status, mighty power, great wealth, all the external show and grandeur of royalty -- these had lost their glamour. The love of a father for his child remained the chief reality.

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Sixty years ago, in 1892, a strike occurred in the Carnegie Steel mills at Homestead, PA. In the violence that ensued, the management got the state militia called out and brought in Pinkerton detectives. The report is that the militia and the detectives killed ten men and broke the strike. A brilliant young lawyer was very deeply stirred at the spectacle of organized employers using what seemed to him a private army to slaughter organized laborers for daring to resist an arbitrary wage cut. Louis D. Brandeis, later justice of the US Supreme Court, then recently married, asked his bride if she were willing to live simply in order that he might enjoy the luxury of devoting his time and talent to the securing of justice for American working men. Small wonder that a man who chose such devotion as his “luxury” came to be held in such high regard in the nation.

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In a distant city there occurred a strike in the composing room of a certain publisher. The publisher told an interviewer that one of the printers, Bob Blank, “is just a fool. On the piecework basis which I am determined to introduce and against which this strike is called, he can make $9 a day, and he has walked out to win the privilege of making $6 a day!” When Bob was asked about it, he said: “Yes, because I am blessed with steady nerves I can make $9 a day at piecework. But if I make $9 a day on that basis it will mean that another man whose wife and children need the same food, clothing and educational opportunity as mine will make only $3. I had rather make $6 a day and let him make $6. With both of us doing our best, our employer will not suffer and all of us will live more like human beings.”

The motive expressed by that workman sounds not unlike the kind of attitude which motivated early Christians. And it meant more to him than a 50% increase in earnings.

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A 19-year-old boy was killed in a drunken brawl on the porch of a three-room so-called hotel. Three family groups, totaling twelve people, made those three rooms their home. Poverty and squalor surrounded the mothers and their children. The only beauty there was what might have been latent in those people’s hearts. A kindly neighbor dropped in the next day, not knowing of the tragedy, and bringing two new little dresses, one pink and one blue, for a couple of the little girls. The children’s eyes opened wide in hungry appreciation of the color and cleanness of the dresses.

Four days later, at the funeral of the boy, which had been delayed until some money could be raised to defray expenses, there was one bunch of flowers tied with pink tulle. When the grave had been filled, the mother took this piece of tulle to keep with the few treasures she could call her own. A hunger for beauty grasped at the simplest of satisfactions.

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These widely-spaced incidents bear a common testimony that people have needs which are not satisfied by the necessities purchased at the grocery store; testimony that men do not live by bread alone; that there are “words of life” to which people listen eagerly and to which they make impressive response. The realities around which much of life centers, the “words of eternal life” that stir the human heart, include at least these four: love, beauty, freedom and faith. By these people find life. For these, they live and die with a will.

1) Love and appreciation are elemental necessities. People hunger for them as acutely as they hunger for meat and bread. Distinct personal qualities are called into play in response to them. When lives are brought into intimate relationship with love absent or subordinated, tragedy occurs. This is true in war or interracial strife just as it is in the family or neighborhood. No substitute for love exists. Love creates the reality called the home, whether it is housed in a shack or in a mansion. Sooner or later, mankind must discover what Jesus saw so clearly, that love is the only valid foundation for a stable society and a peaceful world.

2) Beauty is essential if life is to be richly lived. The majesty of hills, the strength of a river, the brilliance of stars, the color of a sunrise, minister to man’s spirit. Architecture that combines usefulness and beauty performs a spiritual function. The hosts of people who visit art galleries, as well as the expression of the artists, testify to the importance of beauty for life.

3) Men desire to live their lives with a degree of spontaneity and under self-direction. Implicit in their desire for freedom is the need for creative participation and having something to say about the conditions under which they work. Lack of freedom explains much of the unrest around the world. It offers communism an undeserved opportunity for its deceptive propaganda. The urge to freedom requires recognition, not suppression. It is a divine urge. Truth, justice and the achievement of some kind of equality depend on it.

4) Man’s deepest yearning is for God. And finding God is his deepest satisfaction. The secret of the remarkable power in the preaching and ministry of Dr. Peter Marshall, sometime chaplain of the US Senate, lies in the assurance that he had found God; had chosen, amid severe hardship, to follow the will of God for him; and was sure that he was doing what God wanted him to be doing.

Sylvester Horne had come from abroad to deliver the Beecher lectures at Yale University. Standing with his wife on the deck of the ship, together enjoying a magnificent sunset, he remarked: “A scene like that awakens in me a mood of longing like homesickness; not for our dear home across the water, but for the home that lies beyond the seas of time; our final and eternal home of the spirit.” It happened that he was fatally stricken almost at that moment, and that his life thus did go home to the Creator who gave it. But quite apart from that circumstance or coincidence, his utterance illustrates man’s unceasing quest for God.

The most significant journeys of man have been not the geographical trips from town to town or land to land. But they have been the ventures out of the material into the spiritual; from the visible and tangible into the eternal.

Now our religion must be concerned with spiritual aspects of man’s life. But it must also be concerned with other aspects as well. Precisely because it has to do with the spiritual, it must also have a concern with the material. The struggle to live the higher life is paralleled by the mundane aspects of the senses and the material with their allure. Our religion must effect an adjustment of the two in our mortal existence. The adjustment must avoid the extremes of proposing to live without bread, or else to live “by bread alone.”

Jesus shows the way. He repudiated asceticism. He ate, drank, dressed, studied, worked, mingled with friends, like anyone else may do. He recognized the propriety of man’s material wants - not that man gets all of his wants satisfied (Jesus did not always have a place to lay his head comfortably in sleep). But there is no wrong in having these needs nor in having them satisfied honorably and without harm to others. And a portion of society’s efforts are properly directed toward meeting the needs.

On the other hand, no man’s efforts - no society’s efforts - ought have to go entirely to the meeting of material and sensory needs. For the needs of the spirit are just as real and are more important. Both are relevant to other aspects of man’s existence.

Stanley Jones had a searching word to say on the subject when asked how much a missionary needs in order to get along. Jones replied: “Just enough to be able to forget it!” I suppose that much -- no more and no less -- every person needs. An ideal Christian society would be one in which each Christian, and every Christian, could find his needs so met. Nobody needs to assent to the fallacies of communism nor of pink socialism, to commit himself to this Christian truth.

There is a sense in which both insecurity on one side, and luxury at the other side, create material-mindedness. Both ought to yield to a way of life exemplified by Jesus and commended to men as God’s will for mankind. This does not mean any dead-level identity of possession or status for every person. For no two persons, or their needs, are identical. But it does mean a common concern by each for all; and a concern for spiritual reality quite beyond material comfort and concern.

In a world of vast inequalities, Christianity proclaims God’s love for all people -- the “in favor” and the “out of favor”; the “lost” and the “saved;” the prominent and the inconspicuous; the sinner and the saint. It proclaims the impartiality of God. In a world of hunger, it is also concerned with bread. It sees that people live their lives, morally and spiritually, in a society largely created by the way in which people supply their physical necessities. In the interest of the moral and spiritual well-being of people, our Christianity is insistently concerned with the Christianizing of society and the democratization of the economic systems that supply our bread.

A glance at the globe will show what the real bulwark against communism is. Lands in which authoritarian churches have interpreted religion in terms of dogma and ritual are the ones whose people have sought atheistic remedies. Stalin and some of his associates had training for the priesthood of the eastern orthodox church and threw it over for its lack of service to human need. Lands in which socially-minded churches have made plain Jesus’ teaching about the worth of persons, here, now, upon this earth, are the ones which have resisted, and will continue to resist, the inroads of all sorts of materialistic “isms.” Here I think the contribution of Protestant Christianity is most highly significant.

To function best in a world of “bread” and of “every word that proceedeth from the mouth of God,” our Christian lives must be dedicated to some such propositions as these:

1) We must never be wholly identified with the status quo; nor with every change that comes along simply because it is change. The world is not a static world and one function of our religion in our lives is to help us and our neighbors to make the right kind of change.

2) We must constantly and insistently assert the worth of persons. The natural resources of the earth must be exploited for the welfare of persons. There is one thing that stands above the sanctity of property rights, and that is life itself.

3) We ought to manifest a genuine trust in democracy -- the vigorous kind of democracy in which all take a real part. This is true in the life of our churches and in the life of the state as well. Results may sometimes turn out differently than we expected. But the soundness of a form of life that involves willing participation by all guarantees the ultimate outcome.

4) We must regard our religion not only as a refuge (it is) but as a resource (it is!) to be used in daring achievement and sacrificial service.

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, March 2, 1952.