The Ultimate Question
Sermon
EXIT: INTERSTATE 0
We have often heard it stated that a person's wisdom is measured, not by the questions that he answers, but by the questions that he asks. If I were to ask you what the ultimate question in life was, you might, because I am a clergyman or a theologian, reply that the most important question a person can ask is: "Does God really exist?" And you would have missed completely. We know, for instance, that if you ask that question of Americans, about ninety-five percent of them would affirm that there is a God somewhere. So what? That means nothing. Only armchair philosophers and confused theologians have the time or inclination to engage in such kind of idle chatter.
Quite frankly, modern man doesn't care whether God exists or not. That's not his chief concern. The basic question of man today, as it has been through the ages, is the question of the meaning of human existence. That question has taken many shapes in the heart of man. The struggle for love, the quest for power, the sense of guilt, the encounter with death. Am I accepted by others? Does my life have any worth at all? If a man dies, shall he live again? Is there any way out of the bondage of the law which restricts me, warps me, produces fanaticism, illusions and pride, from which I incur sickness of personality so that my hatred for others is exceeded only by my despising of myself?
The ultimate question then is not whether God exists. We already know the answer to that one. We are born with it. The ultimate question is:
"Why do I exist?"
For Isaiah, there was no question. He put it simply in our Lesson for the day:
Thus says God, the Lord, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread forth the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people upon it and spirit to those who walk in it: "I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand and kept you ..."
In other words, God created us for himself and filled us with his Spirit. We have, thus, become the object of his love, his very nature. There is no other explanation for the existence of man.
For a Christian to dangle before people the tantalizing fact that God exists, is sheer nonsense, unless that God has revealed himself as a God who cares, a God who redeems our stupid, meaningless existence, and shows us in Jesus Christ, himself incarnate, that our lives are ultimately purposeful.
The most modern of philosophies is, of course, existentialism. And existentialism concludes that it is exactly the opposite, that human life is absurd, meaningless.
I like these epitaphs from the collection of tombstone inscriptions that I have. One was suggested by Ogden Nash for his tombstone. It was stated merely: "Nash's Ashes." That took care of him. There was a man named "Thorpe." His inscription was: "Thorpe's Corpse." That took care of him. And then, I always love that one about the dear maiden lady who was born, grew up and died all in the same little town, and her inscription was:
Here lies the bones of Mary Jones,
Her death had no terrors,
Born a virgin, lived a virgin, died a virgin,
No runs, no hits, no errors.
But make no mistake about it, dear people, life can be like that. As the poet put it: "It can end in a whimper, instead of a bang."
The life of each one of us can be divided into two factors: the means by which we live, and the ends for which we live. And the quality of any person or any civilization is dependent upon our handling of these two factors. It is concerning this aspect of life that St. Paul unleashes some of his most vitriolic remarks as he addresses the Church in Philippi (Paraphrased to bring out Paul's point):
For many live of whom Ihave told you before and tell you now even weeping, that they are the enemies of the cross of Christ. Their god is their belly, their glory is in the shameful, their mind is set on earthly things, their end is destruction. (Philippians 3:18-19)
The means of life for the gratification of the sensate appetite and the end is destruction.
The fact that distinguishes our day from any previous time is obviously our mastery over the scientific means of life. One after another, the forces of the universe, from the power of steam to the unbelievable power of the fission of the hydrogen atom, have been harnessed for the service of humanity. But when we turn our attention from the means by which we live, to the ends for which we live, then we may well ask ourselves whether we in New York or Chicago or Des Moines have reached the point correspondingly as high as our forefathers.
We take a look at the Periclean Age in Greece. Around the acropolis, a relatively few people with crude and limited means produce a culture and a wisdom that have been an inexhaustible storehouse for civilization for nearly 2500 years. The means by which they lived were primitive, indeed, but when we think of the end for which they lived - Praxiteles and Phidias, Aeschylus and Sophocles, Plato and Socrates - then their day moves into a place much higher than our day today.
One remembers twelve men gathered around their Teacher in Galilee. The means were crude, indeed. The best home was a little more than a sun-baked mud hut. The fastest communication was a laboriously hand-lettered parchment carried by a man on a jackass. The means by which they lived were virtually barbarian, but when one thinks of the ends for which they lived, ah, my soul, what a difference!
Back at the very dawn of our scientific era when the first transatlantic cable was laid, author Thoreau, in protest to all of the popular enthusiasm that was aroused over this event, said that it would probably be used for the first time to inform us that Princess Adelaide of Europe had whooping cough. And at that time, he coined a phrase that has become prophetic for our day. He said: "It is an improved means to an unimproved end." And so we have seen that prophecy come true. Everywhere we see the amazing means in operation that science and technology have provided for us, and then we see the stupid, trivial, nonsensical, and worthless uses to which those means are put.
I think of the time when I attended a youth banquet, and the lad sitting across the table from me set a small, black box on the table between us, and I asked, "What is that?" He said, "It's The Thing." All there was, was a switch on the side of the box. He said, "Be my guest." So I flipped the switch, and some machinery started in motion. The cover of the box opened. A hand came out, reached down, turned off the switch, returned to the box. The cover closed, the machinery stopped. At last, we had produced a machine that had only one purpose - to turn itself off. Believe me, beloved, that was a sinister symbol of our day.
The means are there, but what about the ends? A few years ago, I remember visiting the bevatron, or as we commonly call it, atom smasher, at the University of California in Berkeley, that great electromagnet which took up about half an acre and used enough electric power to provide a city with heat and light for 25,000 people. I was being shown around by a nuclear physicist, and I asked him what they were doing at that moment in that giant electromagnet, and he said, "We are taking hydrogen atoms and we are accelerating them to almost the speed of light, and then we are hurling them against metal foil and photographing the fragments into which they are split." And I said, "What are you looking for?" He said, "We don't know. That depends on what we shall find." I said, "Tell me, do you think all of this will someday be used for the good of mankind?" And he replied, "Well, Reverend, I guess that depends on your religionists." Oh, no, you don't, Doctor! You don't sneak out of it that way. You don't divest yourself of that responsibility in that simple way. When a culture divorces its inventions from its intentions, then that culture is doomed, because it doesn't know where it's going.
Again and again, I have seen all of the resources of medical science mobilized to save the life of some aged person - oxygen tents, intravenous feedings, transfusions, miraculously skillful surgery, a host of injections, antibiotics, powerful drugs. And, lo and behold, glory be, grandpa lives! For what? So he can eke out a few more years perhaps, sitting in some nursing home, staring at the other wall, as we see thousands of them doing across the country? Oh, yes, we have the means to add years to our lives, but what about life for those years? We don't have that. So, again, an improved means to an unimproved end.
Clifton Fadiman reminds us that all of our efforts are directed toward our objectives in life, and five thousand high school graduates were asked what they wanted most out of life. Their five thousand answers were compressed into one sentence, which represented all of them. This is the sentence: "Oh, I don't know, have enough money, be secure, be happy, have a little fun." Isn't that marvelous as the objective in life that we are supposed to have?
Three Europeans were touring one of our modern industrial plants. One of them stopped to chat with a worker who was running a machine along the assembly line, a machine which turned out slightly curved pieces of metal about five inches long. The conversation went like this. The European asked: "How long have you been working at this machine?" "Six years." "Just what is it that you are making?" "U273." "Yes, I know, but what is the name of it?" "Name? It doesn't have any name - just U273." "Well, then, what is U273 for? What does it accomplish?" "How do I know?" "Well, then, why do you go on making U273?" "Why? Because this job pays me six bucks an hour, that's why! Hey, what's wrong with you? Are you a Communist or something?" The senselessness of our modern technological society, so much taken for granted that anyone who questions it is considered to be subversive.
Or take the interview that was recorded in Time magazine in a survey of our younger generation. One sunny morning, Professor Carr B. Lavell, sociologist of George Washington University, took out fishing the top student in the student body in the senior class, a straight "A" student, the president of his senior class, popular, brilliant, a big man on the campus who had or was
finishing a course in premedicine. As they sat out there in the boat fishing, the Professor began to question him: Why had he chosen medicine as a career. "Because medicine looks most lucrative right now." What did he want to do as a doctor? "Get into a speciality that has the shortest hours and the biggest fees." Didn't he think that a physician owed something to the community besides earning a living for himself and his family? "No, I'm just like everyone else," said the student. "I want to make the most in it for me in the shortest time possible, so I can retire and do what I really want to do." "And what is it that you want to do?" "Oh, I don't know. Travel, go fishing, take it easy." The means? Intelligence, a brilliant mind, education on the highest level, modern skills. All of a compilation of science of the centuries before, that was the means. And the end? Go fishing, take it easy! Beloved, we can't do it! We can't do it!
When someone says that the dominant interest of our day is not religion but science, he speaks the truth. The realm of science is more and more protective of the means by which we live. But let's get this through our thick skulls, that no scientist ever pretended to provide an end for life. Do you think our Lord was just furnishing Sunday School lessons for naive little children when he told us that we would gain the whole world of means, and yet lose our own souls in the process? We are not dogs to be satisfied with a few bones flung at us, even if those bones are automobiles, automatic dishwashers, color television, and jet air travel. There's a need in us that is the very essence of our humanity. We have to live for something. Let's pin it down - we have to live for someone, that Someone who created us to live for him and in fellowship with him, and the deepest hell into which anyone can fall is to have everything to live with and have nothing to live for.
You know, you have a lot of things to live with. The retailer will offer you 32,000 classifications of items, which will help you to live. We don't disparage this. We merely question it. Has it given meaning to life? Or is it in the prophetic words of T. S. Eliot that he includes in "The Rock?"
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, but ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All of our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death, not nearer to God.
Where is the Life we lost in the living?
Where is the wisdom we lost in the knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we lost in the information?1
1 From "Choruses from 'The Rock'" in Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1936, by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.; copyright (c) 1963, 1964, by T. S. Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
Or perhaps it could be summarized by the cry of a woman who was in my study when she said, "I have everything to live for, and yet I'm not happy. What's wrong with me?" Madam, you made a small but tragic mistake. You have not everything to live for. You've got a bunch of junk to live with. Now, tell me, what are you living for? You see, her mistake was automatic.
Beloved, you were meant for God, for fellowship with him. You were called to be a living witness to his truth, a light shining in the dark world. You were meant to be his hands of love, his voice of eternal faith moving and speaking in the human family. And he showed us all that in the Person of our only-begotten Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. In himself incarnate in human flesh, he showed us that life was eminently meaningful and purposeful.
What is the purpose of life? I like the answer of the old Westminster Catechism. It put it quite simply and profoundly when it answered, "The purpose of human life is to love and serve God and enjoy him forever." Isn't that delightful? Enjoy him forever!
Or as Paul put it, perhaps more succinctly: "For me to live is Christ," - I am living in the same life he lived, if he is in me - "For me to live is Christ, and for me to die is gain." That's the answer to the ultimate question.
Quite frankly, modern man doesn't care whether God exists or not. That's not his chief concern. The basic question of man today, as it has been through the ages, is the question of the meaning of human existence. That question has taken many shapes in the heart of man. The struggle for love, the quest for power, the sense of guilt, the encounter with death. Am I accepted by others? Does my life have any worth at all? If a man dies, shall he live again? Is there any way out of the bondage of the law which restricts me, warps me, produces fanaticism, illusions and pride, from which I incur sickness of personality so that my hatred for others is exceeded only by my despising of myself?
The ultimate question then is not whether God exists. We already know the answer to that one. We are born with it. The ultimate question is:
"Why do I exist?"
For Isaiah, there was no question. He put it simply in our Lesson for the day:
Thus says God, the Lord, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread forth the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people upon it and spirit to those who walk in it: "I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand and kept you ..."
In other words, God created us for himself and filled us with his Spirit. We have, thus, become the object of his love, his very nature. There is no other explanation for the existence of man.
For a Christian to dangle before people the tantalizing fact that God exists, is sheer nonsense, unless that God has revealed himself as a God who cares, a God who redeems our stupid, meaningless existence, and shows us in Jesus Christ, himself incarnate, that our lives are ultimately purposeful.
The most modern of philosophies is, of course, existentialism. And existentialism concludes that it is exactly the opposite, that human life is absurd, meaningless.
I like these epitaphs from the collection of tombstone inscriptions that I have. One was suggested by Ogden Nash for his tombstone. It was stated merely: "Nash's Ashes." That took care of him. There was a man named "Thorpe." His inscription was: "Thorpe's Corpse." That took care of him. And then, I always love that one about the dear maiden lady who was born, grew up and died all in the same little town, and her inscription was:
Here lies the bones of Mary Jones,
Her death had no terrors,
Born a virgin, lived a virgin, died a virgin,
No runs, no hits, no errors.
But make no mistake about it, dear people, life can be like that. As the poet put it: "It can end in a whimper, instead of a bang."
The life of each one of us can be divided into two factors: the means by which we live, and the ends for which we live. And the quality of any person or any civilization is dependent upon our handling of these two factors. It is concerning this aspect of life that St. Paul unleashes some of his most vitriolic remarks as he addresses the Church in Philippi (Paraphrased to bring out Paul's point):
For many live of whom Ihave told you before and tell you now even weeping, that they are the enemies of the cross of Christ. Their god is their belly, their glory is in the shameful, their mind is set on earthly things, their end is destruction. (Philippians 3:18-19)
The means of life for the gratification of the sensate appetite and the end is destruction.
The fact that distinguishes our day from any previous time is obviously our mastery over the scientific means of life. One after another, the forces of the universe, from the power of steam to the unbelievable power of the fission of the hydrogen atom, have been harnessed for the service of humanity. But when we turn our attention from the means by which we live, to the ends for which we live, then we may well ask ourselves whether we in New York or Chicago or Des Moines have reached the point correspondingly as high as our forefathers.
We take a look at the Periclean Age in Greece. Around the acropolis, a relatively few people with crude and limited means produce a culture and a wisdom that have been an inexhaustible storehouse for civilization for nearly 2500 years. The means by which they lived were primitive, indeed, but when we think of the end for which they lived - Praxiteles and Phidias, Aeschylus and Sophocles, Plato and Socrates - then their day moves into a place much higher than our day today.
One remembers twelve men gathered around their Teacher in Galilee. The means were crude, indeed. The best home was a little more than a sun-baked mud hut. The fastest communication was a laboriously hand-lettered parchment carried by a man on a jackass. The means by which they lived were virtually barbarian, but when one thinks of the ends for which they lived, ah, my soul, what a difference!
Back at the very dawn of our scientific era when the first transatlantic cable was laid, author Thoreau, in protest to all of the popular enthusiasm that was aroused over this event, said that it would probably be used for the first time to inform us that Princess Adelaide of Europe had whooping cough. And at that time, he coined a phrase that has become prophetic for our day. He said: "It is an improved means to an unimproved end." And so we have seen that prophecy come true. Everywhere we see the amazing means in operation that science and technology have provided for us, and then we see the stupid, trivial, nonsensical, and worthless uses to which those means are put.
I think of the time when I attended a youth banquet, and the lad sitting across the table from me set a small, black box on the table between us, and I asked, "What is that?" He said, "It's The Thing." All there was, was a switch on the side of the box. He said, "Be my guest." So I flipped the switch, and some machinery started in motion. The cover of the box opened. A hand came out, reached down, turned off the switch, returned to the box. The cover closed, the machinery stopped. At last, we had produced a machine that had only one purpose - to turn itself off. Believe me, beloved, that was a sinister symbol of our day.
The means are there, but what about the ends? A few years ago, I remember visiting the bevatron, or as we commonly call it, atom smasher, at the University of California in Berkeley, that great electromagnet which took up about half an acre and used enough electric power to provide a city with heat and light for 25,000 people. I was being shown around by a nuclear physicist, and I asked him what they were doing at that moment in that giant electromagnet, and he said, "We are taking hydrogen atoms and we are accelerating them to almost the speed of light, and then we are hurling them against metal foil and photographing the fragments into which they are split." And I said, "What are you looking for?" He said, "We don't know. That depends on what we shall find." I said, "Tell me, do you think all of this will someday be used for the good of mankind?" And he replied, "Well, Reverend, I guess that depends on your religionists." Oh, no, you don't, Doctor! You don't sneak out of it that way. You don't divest yourself of that responsibility in that simple way. When a culture divorces its inventions from its intentions, then that culture is doomed, because it doesn't know where it's going.
Again and again, I have seen all of the resources of medical science mobilized to save the life of some aged person - oxygen tents, intravenous feedings, transfusions, miraculously skillful surgery, a host of injections, antibiotics, powerful drugs. And, lo and behold, glory be, grandpa lives! For what? So he can eke out a few more years perhaps, sitting in some nursing home, staring at the other wall, as we see thousands of them doing across the country? Oh, yes, we have the means to add years to our lives, but what about life for those years? We don't have that. So, again, an improved means to an unimproved end.
Clifton Fadiman reminds us that all of our efforts are directed toward our objectives in life, and five thousand high school graduates were asked what they wanted most out of life. Their five thousand answers were compressed into one sentence, which represented all of them. This is the sentence: "Oh, I don't know, have enough money, be secure, be happy, have a little fun." Isn't that marvelous as the objective in life that we are supposed to have?
Three Europeans were touring one of our modern industrial plants. One of them stopped to chat with a worker who was running a machine along the assembly line, a machine which turned out slightly curved pieces of metal about five inches long. The conversation went like this. The European asked: "How long have you been working at this machine?" "Six years." "Just what is it that you are making?" "U273." "Yes, I know, but what is the name of it?" "Name? It doesn't have any name - just U273." "Well, then, what is U273 for? What does it accomplish?" "How do I know?" "Well, then, why do you go on making U273?" "Why? Because this job pays me six bucks an hour, that's why! Hey, what's wrong with you? Are you a Communist or something?" The senselessness of our modern technological society, so much taken for granted that anyone who questions it is considered to be subversive.
Or take the interview that was recorded in Time magazine in a survey of our younger generation. One sunny morning, Professor Carr B. Lavell, sociologist of George Washington University, took out fishing the top student in the student body in the senior class, a straight "A" student, the president of his senior class, popular, brilliant, a big man on the campus who had or was
finishing a course in premedicine. As they sat out there in the boat fishing, the Professor began to question him: Why had he chosen medicine as a career. "Because medicine looks most lucrative right now." What did he want to do as a doctor? "Get into a speciality that has the shortest hours and the biggest fees." Didn't he think that a physician owed something to the community besides earning a living for himself and his family? "No, I'm just like everyone else," said the student. "I want to make the most in it for me in the shortest time possible, so I can retire and do what I really want to do." "And what is it that you want to do?" "Oh, I don't know. Travel, go fishing, take it easy." The means? Intelligence, a brilliant mind, education on the highest level, modern skills. All of a compilation of science of the centuries before, that was the means. And the end? Go fishing, take it easy! Beloved, we can't do it! We can't do it!
When someone says that the dominant interest of our day is not religion but science, he speaks the truth. The realm of science is more and more protective of the means by which we live. But let's get this through our thick skulls, that no scientist ever pretended to provide an end for life. Do you think our Lord was just furnishing Sunday School lessons for naive little children when he told us that we would gain the whole world of means, and yet lose our own souls in the process? We are not dogs to be satisfied with a few bones flung at us, even if those bones are automobiles, automatic dishwashers, color television, and jet air travel. There's a need in us that is the very essence of our humanity. We have to live for something. Let's pin it down - we have to live for someone, that Someone who created us to live for him and in fellowship with him, and the deepest hell into which anyone can fall is to have everything to live with and have nothing to live for.
You know, you have a lot of things to live with. The retailer will offer you 32,000 classifications of items, which will help you to live. We don't disparage this. We merely question it. Has it given meaning to life? Or is it in the prophetic words of T. S. Eliot that he includes in "The Rock?"
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, but ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All of our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death, not nearer to God.
Where is the Life we lost in the living?
Where is the wisdom we lost in the knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we lost in the information?1
1 From "Choruses from 'The Rock'" in Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1936, by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.; copyright (c) 1963, 1964, by T. S. Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
Or perhaps it could be summarized by the cry of a woman who was in my study when she said, "I have everything to live for, and yet I'm not happy. What's wrong with me?" Madam, you made a small but tragic mistake. You have not everything to live for. You've got a bunch of junk to live with. Now, tell me, what are you living for? You see, her mistake was automatic.
Beloved, you were meant for God, for fellowship with him. You were called to be a living witness to his truth, a light shining in the dark world. You were meant to be his hands of love, his voice of eternal faith moving and speaking in the human family. And he showed us all that in the Person of our only-begotten Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. In himself incarnate in human flesh, he showed us that life was eminently meaningful and purposeful.
What is the purpose of life? I like the answer of the old Westminster Catechism. It put it quite simply and profoundly when it answered, "The purpose of human life is to love and serve God and enjoy him forever." Isn't that delightful? Enjoy him forever!
Or as Paul put it, perhaps more succinctly: "For me to live is Christ," - I am living in the same life he lived, if he is in me - "For me to live is Christ, and for me to die is gain." That's the answer to the ultimate question.
