The herald., 1897-04-05
CHRIST, THE CARPENTER
An Impressive Sermon at the First
Presbyterian Church


the First Presbyterian church yesterday
morning. The speaker said in part:
Poor. blinded souls, whose philosophy
we have all of us been sharing! They
could not see how anything that moved
on the level of their own lives could De
divine. Their skepticism was not because
they could not understand Jesus; 1t
was just because they thought they
could understand him. 1t was just
| because he was commonplace and IA
miliar that they doubted him. These
men had not learned the SacrednesS OF
| human life That the Christ should be
king over men they believed, but tnat
he should be carpenter, living as
kingly man in the midst of their trou-
bled lives they could not appreciate.
Because he was carpenter they thought
that he could not be the Christ. Because
he was the son of their own humanity
they could not believe that he was
the anointed of God.
Jesus could not have been king over
men and Gods Christ at the same time
And no one knew it better than him.
self. Had he come in the spirit of Mo-
ses to give laws to the world, then
might he have occupied the throne of
the Caesars. But coming in the spirit
OF God to give light to the world, his
place was on their streets and in their
homes. He must work on the same
plane where their life was exploited.
There must be no walls of partition di-
viding him from the lowly and the
mean Wherever a human soul bent un-
der the burden of misery or sin or op-
preston, there was a clear call FOR
Christ's deepest fellowship. There, in
the midst of life's stress, where human
sorrows meet, and the yearnings and
defeats, the hopes and disappointments,
ha and madness of sin. the
wistful search for righteousness and the
heartache for God all move restlessly
to and fro, there was the place for the
Redeemer- Christ, the Son of Humanity.
Inspiration is synonym for great hu-
man sensitiveness. All the prophets OF
the world, the fine souls that have
brought something of God into touch
with the lives of men, whether they are
written in the sacred books or in the
larger record where SLOWLY the Bible
of the race is writ" all the true prophets
of the world have been men of great
humanness. They have been sons of
God because they have been sons of
humanity. Standing not aloof from men,
but in the very core of the worlds life,
all the winds that blow from the deeps
of human experience have swept through
the open aisles of their soul: all the
waves and pillows of human misery, of
human longing and achievements and
failures and hopes have gone over them,
and they have found their prophecies
not in books or in the mountain solitude,
or in the dimly shadowed cloister but in
the heart of human life-in the living
temple of the Living God.
"Is not this the carpenter" 1t is the
incarnation challenge that calls out in
the question. 1t was the question that
Jesus met there in the wilderness: Shall
l be the kind of Christ the people ex-
pect and want-a King Christ, receiving
the piping plaudits of little men on the
tinsel throne of Caesar? Or shall 1 be
the Christ of God-just a carpenter
Christ, living God into the world, in
fusing the commonplace things of COM
monplace men with the infinite? The
problem of life, the Christ problem, the
lingering struggle whether to be king
or a carpenter with the kings SOUL
meets all of us who are touched with the
spirit of God-which Is the feeling of the
worlds infirmities.
AS Gerald Stanley Lee beautifully puts
it: When our hearts are cast down
the incarnation challenge comes. When
the day is over, when our brother has
returned US hate for love, dullness for in
sight when he has cursed the dearest
we could give, we shall go forth to the
calm and absent-looking skies. We
shall say: 1t were simple to be a God
safe beyond the stars From the vast
TeSllHS pldctS III lHt uStp tne WluuS
shall come to us. They shall blow upon
the fever in our faces and we shall say:
1T were simple enough to be a Cod
off where the winds begin; to be a
God alone, to be a monkGod with a
universe for a hermitage, with worlds
for infinite retreat; but to be God here
to have a Gods desires and a mans
chance-to be mockingly eternal and
be riveted to the ground-to have wings
Of love and be fastened to hate, and we'd
ded to blindness and mingled with
beasts and harried hitner and thither
in the great unseemly shaplbles, where
men think they live and do not even
learn to die, and where they curse and
cast their souls into the filth and trample
their brothers under their feet for the
filth itself, and burn their heroes at the
stake!
Safe In infinity, with all space in
which to be Himself. shall a God who
made the worlds as he wished them to
be require man to be a god in world
which he did not make, a world which
he did not choose, a world where to un-
dertake to be a man is more than a
god would care to do? Thus the incar-
nation challenge comes. 1t were easy
to be god thus, or a god with gods
but to be god with men? The problem
of every soul when the sons of God go
forth to live-therefore Gods problem
Tie SlIuSBit WIN environment. Inc
Messianic answer was the conviction of
history, the gathered voice of the human
race, exalted into the utterance of one
who prophesed the Messiah because to
him a God who would ask of his crea-
lures more thin he would do himself
would not be God at all. Thus came TO
pass the tremulous gospel-the writing
of John across the soul of Isaiah: In
the beginning was the Word and the
Word was S.jth God, and the Word was
God, and the Word was made flesh, and
dwelt among men,
The problem of Jesus is the problem
of men-to live God-life in mans en-
vironment; to pervade life's pettiness
with the breath of the infinite-the prob
lem of the Carpenter Christ. Our life
is to be lived on the level of the ordi-
nary, where God is trying to work with
ordinary men and women-trying to
weave his nfinity into their finiteness.
To him that hath eyes to see all life is
worship, and every commonest thing
fame, a trysting place with the Di-
vine. 1t is in our friendships and loves,
our sacrificial yearning over men, our
deep human sensitfveness to the woes
of our brothers; it is in the wounds that
are made in our hearts by the sorrows
and Sufferings of the world-yea it is
in our closeness to the great bleeding
side of stricken and broken humanity
that We manifest the Christed spirit,