THE REVEALING OF THE SONS OF GOD

A Sermon Preached by the Reverend Frank L. Janeway, Pastor of the College Church, the First Sunday of the Academic Year

For the earnest expectation of the creationwaiteth for the revealing of the Sons of God.Rom. 8:19.

One of the greatest evidences of the grandeur of the Bible is found in the fact of the permanence of its teachings. Those teachings have come to us set in the frame of the opinions current at the time of their origin. As time goes on the setting becomes antique, but the teaching is as vital as though it were born but yesterday. It shines as a brilliant jewel set in gold cut after the fashion of ancient designs and burnished with the use of years. This text which we have chosen is such a truth. Its setting is ah ancient and now abandoned world-view; but it itself is as true to this day as to the apostolic age.

The Jewish view of the world was naively simple. The world was an artificial creation, whose form was flat, whose birth was comparatively recent, and whose consummation in a fervent heat was not far remote. Above the earth were the heavens - seven of them at least. To the primitive Hebrew these heavens had windows whose opening caused the rain. Below the earth were "the waters under the earth;" on each side of it, defining its ends, was the sea. The characteristic of this cosmos in the eyes of the Apostle Paul, was its tendency to corruption. "The creation is subjected to vanity," he writes to the Romans. It was under the bondage to corruption. The grass always withers, the flower invariably fades. It seemed to Paul that this was the will of the Creator, and apparently the ephemerality of things perplexed him. It was a sign of evil, and the redemption of the world would include the deliverance of nature from the clutches of corruption. The occasion of that redemption would be the revealing of the sons of God. To this end the whole creation was "travailing and groaning in pain together till now." Even the Apostle and the first Christians also groaned for the redemption of their bodies, that they might be free from the trammels of the sinful flesh and released into the liberty of the Spirit as sons of God.

It is hardly necessary to point out how different our cosmology is from this. Instead of a flat earth bounded by a surrounding sea we have a round globe whose size is after all only that of a speck in the infinitude of space. Instead of the seven heavens overhead, we have the unmeasurable distances of space, with the stars so distant as to be measurable in light-years rather than in miles. There are for us no waters under the earth in the ancient sense. The origin of this system of suns and stars lies farther in the past than we can think, and we anticipate no early catastrophe which will terminate the process. We believe in some "far. off divine event, toward which the whole creation moves," but we do not expect it soon; it is far off. Surely in almost every respect the world of the twentieth century is very different from the world of the first century. It is bigger, it is differently shaped, it is many centuries older, it is even more wonderful and mysterious, it is organic rather than mechanical, it looks farther into the future. But in one respect it is the same as the ancient world. It is earnestly expecting and persistently waiting for the revealing of the sons of God. To be sure the form of the expectation varies from that of old. We have learned to see the working of God by the gradual process of growth,— for our world is organic,— whereas the teachers of old saw the working of God mainly if not exclusively in catastrophes, for their world was mechanical. But the fact remains triumphant: we can find no other culmination to the world process than Paul found. The end of it all is still the same. There has appeared no more transcendent aim in the experience of men than the manifestation of God-like character. Probably to the apostle this revelation of a company of the sons of God was to come as the final event of the world's history, at which time as of old the creation would be delivered from corruption and "the wilderness and dry land should be glad and the desert blossom as the rose, and the glowing sands should become a pool and the thirsty ground springs of water." We today can not define the mode or the time, but we affirm the fact. The earnest expectation of the creation is for the revelation of the sons of God. The need of redemption is as urgent now as ever and the way of deliverance of the world from evil is by the revelation of the sons of God. Read in the light of these considerations our text sounds like an excerpt from an essay of some modern moralist. It was much the same teaching as this that President Roosevelt gave forth at Provincetown about a month ago; and it is peculiarly applicable to our day, for our day is peculiarly an age of revelation. In the last century the.process of revelation was exceptionally rapid and successful. The spirit of research and investigation took hold of men afresh and they have been busy drawing the coverings from off the face of the world. The archaeologist has been busy with his spade revealing ancient cities with their hieroglyphic tablets and memorial stones. The historian with critical skill has been scraping the encrustations of tradition from the many narratives of the past, and has revealed to us the actual facts. The chemist has been at work with retort and test-tube revealing the new elements of the material world, and trying to reveal that they are transmutable. The physicist has been at work in his laboratory and has revealed to the world the electrons of the atom, rays of light which will penetrate flesh and bone and thick boards, and waves of the atmosphere which will carry without the aid of wires the messages from mid-ocean to the shore. The physician has taken his microscope and revealed to the world the germs which carry disease. The biologist has patiently taken various species of animal life under his observation and the geologist has scraped and tested the rocks and fissures, and they have revealed to the world the process of evolution. Other men have gone out into the poorer districts of the city and have revealed the conditions in which thousands of men work and those in which they live. The age has been the age of disclosures.

And the investigator has turned his scrutiny also to the affairs of men as well as to the facts of nature. Have we not had revelations enough in the last five years to startle us? First of all the investigator pulled the covering off the face of our city governments and we saw fresh revelations of the shame of the cities. But the revelation disclosed few if any of the sons of God in the seats of municipal authority. Then the management of the insurance companies was laid bare and the world waited all but in vain for the revelation of the sons of God here. And another one turned the limelight on the methods of some of our industrial corporations. Another one has brought to light the commercial conditions in the Congo region, and while doubtless sometimes the investigator was merely a muckraker, yet the fact remains that the revelations were too seldom those of the sons of God, but rather they disclosed the sons of Satan. The world rejoices in the revelations of the scientist and the astronomer and physician, but under the revelation of the moralist of today it weeps. Great as are the revelations of new powers of the air and new facts of the earth, the world is unsatisfied — it will be content only with the revelation of the sons of God. What shall it profit us if we gain the whole world by research and investigation and have only those men who will use new knowledge and revealed power principally as aids to covetousness, greed, and wrongdoing ? Despite the rich revelations of the scholar the earnest expectation of the Creator waiteth per. sistently (such is the force of the word in the Greek) for the revelation of the sons of God.

II

If this is the earnest expectation of the world, we must feel the more deeply penitent for the concealed wickedness of our own lives. There is not a man of us here who has not a horror of selfrevelation. This does not mean that we are hypocrites. Rather it indicates the contrary. Each one of us feels that there is within him another self whose baseness the outside world never sees. Some of our newspapers advertise themselves as containing "all the news that is fit to print." How much of our biography is fit to print ? How much of our inner life could stand the light of the scrutiny of divine justice? Up at the hospital the physicians use the apparatus of the Roentgen Rays, by which the defects or disorders of the body are brought to light. In the light of these rays the fracture or the dislocation of the bone is revealed. Everyone of us would dread such a spiritual exposure of our hearts. We know too well how ugly the photograph would be. Inspired by our faith in God and our fellowship with Jesus Christ we hope to attain unto the prize of the high calling of God, and to qualify to be conformed unto the image of His Son. But who of us would endure having his thoughts of the past week, his vain ambitions, his evil desires, his deceitful compromises, his inner life — spread out before this pulpit exposed to the gaze of our fellow worshippers in this church? Would the revelation indicate that we were sons of God, as our Lord in his guiltlessness was a Son of God? Perhaps we would be astounded at the way in which we take wicked advantage of our privacy.

Let us not carry this line of thought to any morbid extreme. We insist that we are not hypocrites, but we must ever remind ourselves that we are sinners. By the grace of God we are endowed with self-control whereby we can offset our inherent wickedness. We can keep evil purposes from manifesting themselves in bad deeds, and we can by force of will keep the lid on the seamy side of ourselves. It is by this constant discipline of self-control that the sons of God come to' be revealed. Bat the "test of our success comes when the self-control is removed. We all have to be tolerant of our friends for what they may say when they are coming out of ether. There is some truth in the saying of a certain type of sporting man, that "You can tell whether a man is a gentleman or not by the way in which he behaves when he is drunk" - though it is a poor sort of gentlemanliness which is not apparent till its subject becomes intoxicated.

Fortunately we can keep our baser tendencies hidden, but it will steady us as well as solemnize us to remember that there is an eye which looks not on the outward appearance but upon the heart. The Christian conscience has testified to its instinctive conviction that the deception of character can not be eternal by its doctrine of the judgment. The Marriage Service of the Book of Common Prayer charges the parties to truthfulness in view of the day "when the secrets of all hearts shall be revealed.'' One of the most familiar collects describes God as him ''before whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid." The Scripture teaches us that we must all be made manifest before the judgment seat of Christ. The earnest expectation of the creation waits for men who can meet these tests of revelation and come out of them unquestionably true sons of God—holy as He is holy, merciful as He is merciful, pure as He is pure, perfect as He is perfect. The processes of life conspire to train men to that end, and the needs of the world cry out for the sons of God to deliver it from the clutches of corruption.

It is reported that when one of our most gifted American musical composers was stricken with paresis, his physicians asked his wife to let them remove him to a sanatorium, that she might be spared the sight of her husband after the disease had worked its ravages upon him. One of its characteristics, we are told, is to break down the inhibitory powers of self-control and so to give free scope to whatever vulgar, bestial and disgusting instincts the man may have, which he in his devotion to purity has bravely and successfully been repressing. Language may become vulgar and foul, and love may become coarsened into lust. But this wife refused the request in spite of the insistent urgings of the doctors, preferring to spend her remaining days with her husband in ministering to his needs, rejoicing in his companionship even in his decrepitude, and freely pardoning whatever in his weakness he might say or do that was unworthy of his former self. And those who have seen the. patient as the disease fastens itself more and more upon him say that none of the fears of the doctors have been realized, and that in spite of weakened faculties and failing strength the spirit of the man shines even more beautiful, that his thoughts seem sweeter and his love for his wife even lovelier and truer than before. The disease has been stripping the covering from his soul, and the revelation is that of a son of God.

III

We have chosen this line of thought for the first Sunday of our new College year, because it seems to us to be the heart of all true education. Education is, after all, largely self-revelation. The derivation of the word reminds us that it is a process of leading someone out from one condition to another. Socially, this process leads masses of men out of ignorance into knowledge — out of a state of helplessness into a state of self-reliance and ability. Personally, is it not the bringing out of a man that which is potentially in him ? We speak of a man who has had new responsibility laid upon him and say that such an experience was just what he needed; it "brought him out.'' Great crises bring out great men. The Revolution gave us Washington, and the Civil War gave us Lincoln. The ordeal of those crises developed those great souls. It brought them out. The school and the college does the same thing for the student. They reveal him for what he is. If good — we say that it brought him out; if bad, we sneer that it showed him up. It is the question of what kind of a "him' is to be revealed.. And that is the question which comes to each one of us at the beginning of this year. What sort of a "him" is this process of our education going to reveal? The lesson of this morning insists that you persist in expecting the revelation by this process of education of nothing short of a son of God. I beg of you solemnly that you will not be satisfied with yourself if at the end of your course you are revealed to be simply a famous athlete or a popular fellow. It is hardly necessary to beg you not to be satisfied with yourself if the years reveal you to be simply a brilliant scholar; unfortunately too few of us American undergraduates feel this temptation. We are generally only too ready to sacrifice good scholarship for the sake of good-fellowship. The world rejoices in good sportsmen and good social leaders and in good scholars, but it earnestly expects and persistently waits for the sons of God — the men who esteem virtue above wisdom and power, and who enrich knowledge with reverence. Such men are those which the world waits for the college to bring out. The college graduate should have the stamp of godliness upon him. That should be your ambition for your education, that it should reveal to the world the potential son of God which is in you and every man.

Is it too much to say that the world today is travailing and groaning in pain as the apostle conceived it to be years ago? Has not our political and commercial world been in convulsion in the past few years because of corruption? When the insurance investigations were on, did not the world breathe a sigh of relief when the investigation found a company where there was no dishonesty? Have we not heard the groans of cities struggling to free themselves from the clutches of this same corruption? We have seen San Francisco travailing and groaning in pain under the curse of the sons of iniquity and greed, and persistently hoping and waiting for the revelation of sons of God who shall deliver the city. Have we not heard a similar groan, just recently from the state of Pennsylvania, swindled by corruption out of $8,000,000? Can you describe the situation in Congo Free State otherwise than as the groaning of a people, crying for deliverance from greed? Have we not watched the meeting at The Hague with the earnest hope that it might reveal that men were becoming sons of God and were willing to trust each other in good faith as becomes brothers under the same Father in Heaven? The world suffering beneath the curse of corruption groans, being burdened, and its earnest expectation still persistently waits for the revelation of the sons of God — men of righteousness and of faith — full of grace and truth — and it refuses to cease to expect them. From such men alone comes the redemption of society and the Kingdom of God. And where else should the world look with truer confidence than to the colleges, and to Dartmouth College as much as any, and more than many, for the revelation of the Sons of God? It lies with us to say whether or not the earnest expectation of the world is to wait in vain.