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7335637
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Sermon by Reverend William Dols [Speeches by Others]
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7335637
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Sermon by Reverend William Dols [Speeches by Others]
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White House Press Releases (Ford Administration)
Press Releases
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1974-08-11
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1974
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SERMON DELIVERED BY REVEREND WILLIAM L. DOLS, JR.,
RECTOR OF IMMANUEL CHURCH-ON-THE-HILL
AUGUST 11, 1974
REVEREND DOLS: Our Heavenly Father, we pray that
Thou will give us the courage and the patience and the
wisdom to seek always after the truth, come whence it may
and cost what it will. Amen.
For everything there is a season and a time for
every matter under Heaven; a time to die, to pluck up what
is planted, to break down, to weep, to cast away stones,
to rend, a time for war.
As a Nation we have been living through such
dying seasons. No matter where our allegiances or our
investments, wherever our hearts may be, there are none
of us who have not been touched by the plucking up of
planted things, the breaking down, the rending and the
warfare of these recent days.
There is a time for such things. What happens
in such seasons is decided by people like ourselves, even
some of us who are here, people who, seeking after the
truth and praying for patience and courage and wisdom,
make public the truth as we find it from wherever it may
come and whatever the cost.
I would suggest to you that the issue of this
day is not the guilt or innocence, though that will be
debated through history. The business of tomorrow is not
the rightness or the wrongness of the rending, but it is
what we will now do with the pieces.
Each of us in our hearts, before God, must answer
for the part we have played or declined to play, which
is really the same thing, in the breaking down and the
plucking up.
Digitized from Box 1 of the White House Press Releases at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library
- 2 -
The question at this hour, before all of us,
is where we will go from now.
Friday was one of those moving, dream-like, even
bizarre kind of days. As a President flew high above the
heartland of America, headed far away in the other direction,
another nearby was following in his steps. It was almost
mythic, archetypal, hearkening to the ancient symbol of
the Old Testament and even before, that symbol of one lamb
bast out into the darkness, bearing far away the sins
of the many.
The greatest danger of this hour, I believe,
is the temptation of the rending and casting away that
it will allow us to make of Richard Nixon the scapegoat
for us all, to believe that by sending him into the wilderness
that he will bear the guilt of us all and that we will be
free from blemish.
Scapegoats are the way people like us put the dark
and shadowed side of ourselves on to the other and by destroying
the condemned one, justify and cleanse ourselves.
Scapegoats serve a real purpose. That is, they
help people avoid having to contend with self. They are
a way of keeping us from being aware of the brokenness
and owning up to the pieces that are ourselves. Unless
we are willing to face up to the darkness that we are,
and how each of us have colluded with each of them to bring
our Nation to this crisis, we will have missed the point
of the dying and will ensure that we remain in the grave.
There is also a season and a time to be born,
to plant, to heal, to build up, to gather stones together,
to seek, to keep, to sow, a time for peace.
Forty-two years ago one of the great dramas of
our century began with the kidnapping of the 20-month old
son of Charles Lindbergh. "I am going to write you this
first afternoon," Anne Morrow Lindbergh was to write to
her mother-in-law, "I am going to write and tell you all that
I know, and some you may discover in the newspaper. I
will write everything as I would like it told to me.
- 3 -
"At 7:30, Betty, the nurse, and I were putting
the baby to bed. We closed and bolted all the shutters
except one window where the shutters are warped and won't
close. At 10:00 Betty went into the baby, shut the window
first, then lit the electric stove, then turned to the
bed. It was empty and the sides were still up. Evidently
they got about one and one-half hours start. You know
the rest."
Then there was for the Lindberghs the awful
waiting. By March 18, another letter: "I realize nothing
emotionally except when some other small immediate annoyance
sets off the blaze. It is possible," she writes, " to
live here and realize nothing about the baby. This is all
so removed from him. Does that sound hard and unfeeling?
I feel that I am willing to barter anything for my self-
control."
On May 12 Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote in her diary,
"The baby's body was found in the woods on Hopewell Mountain-
rose Road, killed by a blow on the head. I feel, strangely,
a sense of peace; not peace, but an end to restlessness, a
finality, as though I were sleeping in a grave."
In recalling the months and years that followed,
Anne Morrow Lindbergh writes: "I do not believe that
sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all
the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering
must be added learning, understanding, patience, love, open-
ness and a willingness to remain vulnerable."
Well, that is a story about a woman afflicted
by a devastating kind of sadness and loss and how she
survived it all by being willing to barter anything for
self-control. And somehow, that is the way she stayed
glued together and got done what needed doing. And when
the end came and she was already hurt and fragile, she
entered into a kind of sleeping in the grave that numbs
and deadens feelings but allows people like us to keep
going and not just stop.
- 4 -
But having survived the agony, she concludes,
"If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise.
The real work of growing," Anne Morrow Lindbergh writes,
"does not come only by the suffering and the agony, but
by adding to the suffering the reality of mourning, the
painfulness of understanding, the endless exercise of
patience with self, not boarding up all the windows and
doors, but letting them stay open and the willingness to
remain vulnerable," which I think means hurtable, bruiseable
and knowing that broken pieces are all we are.
In Eugene O'Neill's play, "Great God Brown,"
Brown says to little Margaret, "Everything is all right,
a little paste, Margaret; life is imperfect, brothers;
men have their faults, sisters; but with a few drops of
glue much may be done, even broken hearts may be repaired
to do yeoman's service." And he puts his finger to his
lips and leans over to Margaret, "Shh," he says to her,
"this is Daddy's bedtime secret for today: Man is born
broken. He lives by mending."
The grace of God is glue. The Gospel of Jesus,
as I know it, as I have experienced it in my life, as I
have shared it deeply with some of you who are here today,
is about how out of death can come new life, how out of
weakness is born a courage and selfhood that is beyond
strength; that it is in the graves of broken marriages
and violated trusts and not-kept promises and failures
that people and families, and I have to believe, nations,
can be reborn.
The question is, what do we do with the pieces?
Our choice is to remain in the grave, to gloat and glower
and grimace, to stay in the tomb and make our diet skepticism,
pessimism, remorse and a course of "I told you so's,' or
it is to hear the call that Lazarus once heard, to rise up,
to return from the dying season, to awaken to a new day
filled with other possibilities, to join together and turn to
an agenda of hard needs in our land that have been waiting
these many months to be addressed and to be met.
- 5 -
We can relish the brokenness and feed upon the
death that is all around us, or we can gamble, taking
the greatest risk of all, that risk which is about climbing
out of the grave, rolling away the stone and picking up the
broken pieces, with God's help and some honest talk
with one another, in fear and trembling, to take the next step
toward life.
Let us pray.
0 Lord of Lazarus, Lord of the dead being
called out of their graves, Lord of the tombs were the
likes of us are made new, Lord of death, where life
is born, bless the brokenness that is our Nation and
that is each of us, and grant us, Lord, the grace to
not feast upon the suffering, but to pick the pieces
up again so that they might become that wholeness that
comes to us only as it came to your Son, Jesus Christ,
by first being broken. Amen.
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