Preacher

David H. C. Read's Sermons at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church

Read, McTavish

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781532605758
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book introduces David H. C. Read to a new generation, through sermons that are not merely elegantly worded and biblically grounded, but packed with life experience that included a five year stint as a prisoner of war during World War II. From amongst the almost 1500 sermons that Read preached during his ministry in Manhattan, John McTavish has selected forty enduring messages that show David Read, justifying Time magazine's assessment that "Read is not merely elegant and literary; his words carry authority… through his thought runs a strain of deep feeling and faith capable of convincing others."

The Season of Easter

Easter Day: Resurrection! Why I Believe

Editor’s Introduction

Jesus rose from the dead and is alive forevermore. That’s the Easter message in a nutshell. But why believe it? What gives this message credibility? David Read himself came to believe the message, he tells us in this confessional sermon, simply because the risen Christ encountered him one day. There came a time when, “without argument and without any emotional crisis,” his adolescent agnosticism dropped away and “religion from being a duty and a bore exploded within as the living Christ came to take possession.”

This Easter sermon was preached forty years after that watershed moment. Another thirty years slipped by before Read went to his grave still believing that Jesus was his one lasting hope in life and death, and in life beyond death.

“Subjectivity is truth,” said Kierkegaard. So it is with the truth of the Resurrection. We believe it, if we believe it at all, because the subject of the Resurrection, the living Lord Jesus Christ, has spoken to our own inner self, summoning us to faith and hope and love. It’s as simple and mysterious as that.

Easter Day: Resurrection! Why I Believe

A Sermon preached by David H. C. Read at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church on Easter Day, March 30, 1975

“ . . . If Christ has not been raised from death, then we have nothing to preach, and you have nothing to believe.” 1 Corinthians 15:14

Readings: 1 Corinthians 15:12–20; John 20:1–16

Since this is the twentieth Easter sermon I have preached from this pulpit, I looked for the strongest text I could find. Here it is. It goes straight to the point and hits both you and me in the spiritual solar plexus. “If Christ has not been raised from the dead, then we have nothing to preach, and you have nothing to believe.”

If these words strike you as a wild exaggeration let me remind you that Paul is speaking within the Christian community. He’s not saying that all religious speaking or writing by those who don’t believe in the Resurrection are worthless, or that apart from this particular belief there’s nothing worth believing. He’s simply declaring that the Christian Church stands or falls by the truth of the Resurrection story. It is a matter of historical record that the Church came into being because a number of ordinary people were convinced that Jesus had risen from the dead, that it spread across the world by the dynamic of this belief, and that its strength and weakness in every generation, including our own has been in direct proportion to the vitality of the conviction that the crucified Jesus was seen alive again and is alive for evermore. Remove this item from the Christian creed and the whole structure collapses. We have nothing to preach, and you have nothing to believe—as Christians. Paul goes so far as to say that if we subtract this element of eternity, this supernatural dimension from the Christian story, and attempt to live by the memory of a Jesus who is dead and gone in the expectation that we too shall soon be dead and gone, then the Good News becomes Bad News. “If our hope in Christ is good for this life only, then we deserve more pity than anyone else in the world.” In other words, it’s better to be a pagan with two feet on the ground than a Christian hobbling on one leg.

If this sounds like saying that if you have difficulty in believing that Christ came alive from the dead, you should not be a member of the Church, hold on! Remember Paul was writing to members of the Church and was not about to throw anybody out. Does it surprise you to learn that some of these Corinthian Christians openly denied the Resurrection? At least they denied that there was going to be any resurrection for them. It might have happened to Christ, they said, but as for us there’s no hope of anything beyond the grave. Funnily enough, we have reversed this way of thinking. Many today assume that there will be some kind of resurrection, some form of eternal life for them, but doubt that it could have happened to Jesus. One way or another there was as much doubt and confusion among the very first Christians as there is today. And nothing that I am going to say about my own belief must be interpreted as implying that unless you can say Amen you should say Goodbye. I am grateful for the fact that during my own period of doubt and rejection nobody suggested that I should withdraw from the family of the Church.

Let me add this too before I come to my own testimony. This one central belief has been held by an astonishing variety of people, brilliant and simple, sceptical and credulous, practical and mystical, and each one has understood it in his or her own way. Even among the clergy there is no uniformity about our beliefs as to what exactly happened on Easter morning even among those who are radiantly convinced that Jesus was seen alive again after his crucifixion. There have been only three regular preachers in this pulpit since the year 1905. Anyone senior enough to remember them all will agree that Dr. Coffin, Dr. Buttrick, and I did not come out of the same mould, that we had different backgrounds, experiences and temperaments. Yet, Easter by Easter, the word has sounded here across these years that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead and is alive and present with us now, and I feel totally at one with my predecessors in its proclamation. Hallelujah, Henry! Hallelujah, George!

Resurrection!—not Resurrection? This morning I say: Damn those question marks that have wriggled through too many sermons in recent years. I’m not raising a question but declaring what I believe to be a fact. And you have every right to ask: Why do you believe it?

Perhaps you have your own answer. It always astonishes me that many seem to think that I believe in a doctrine like the Resurrection because I am a minister. It’s as though they think that a certain number of curious beliefs are tied around one’s neck like a clerical collar, and that the collar itself was fitted on at birth. Every clergyman, you know, was once a layman—and if you have any complaints about the quality of the ministry, remember that we have only the laity to draw upon! No, I don’t believe in the Resurrection because I am a minister. I became a minister because I came to believe in the Resurrection.

Why did I come to believe in the Resurrection? Again you may have an answer ready: “You believe in the Resurrection because you were raised in a Christian tradition.” Right. I have no desire whatever to wash away the fact that I was baptized as an infant, nourished in a family that accepted the faith without being particularly “churchy,” and exposed through childhood to the main tenets of Christianity. I’ve no use for the kind of Christian testimony that dismisses the influence of home and Church and claims that the great discovery was mine alone. Whatever you profess today from atheism to fundamentalism, your parents and others had a lot to do with it. The great theologian, Karl Barth, when asked by a professor of philosophy how he, with his broad culture and penetrating mind, could believe in Christian doctrines like the Resurrection, answered simply: “Because my mother told me.” Sure, one of the reasons I believe is that my mother told me. And to this day a strong element in my belief in the resurrection is the number and the quality of the people who told me.

The apostles told me—people like Peter and John and Paul. I still find it an anchor of my faith whenever doubts creep in (and without doubts there is no true faith) that such very human characters not only wrote down their solemn conviction that the Jesus they had seen crucified was alive again, but were willing to die rather than deny it. I find it hard to conceive that men like that would risk their lives for a hoax or a delusion. Then there are the others who told me—what a cloud of witnesses they are—brilliant intellectuals, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Pascal, Schweitzer; poets like Chaucer, Milton, Donne, Blake, Hopkins, T. S. Eliot; novelists from Bunyan to Updike; the artists and architects who have celebrated the Resurrection in paint and stone; and who can forget today the music of Bach. I think also of the wits and most of the really hilarious people I know today. Then there are those we call the saints, men or women whose sheer goodness left its mark upon the world. They all believed that Jesus rose from the grave—and they are not all dead.

After that orgy of name-dropping (as a prominent minister in Scotland was reported to have said the other day: “If there’s one thing the Queen and I have in common, it’s a dislike of name-dropping.”) you may be tempted to say: “Granted the impressive roll call of those who believed in the Resurrection, I still want to know why you believe. Or is your faith really second hand?”

For answer I take you to a time when, in my late teens, I realized that Jesus is alive. Don’t ask me to explain it, but it was like the difference between reading a manual on swimming and jumping into the deep end, between reading about World War I and being in World War II, between being a spectator at a play and being on the stage, between looking at Jesus through the different lenses I had been offered, by believers and unbelievers, and suddenly finding him looking at me. Without argument and without any emotional crisis, my adolescent agnosticism dropped away and religion from being a duty and a bore exploded from within as the living Christ came to take possession. I don’t remember having any serious questions about what happened on Easter morning. After all, I had come to believe in the Resurrection in the same way as the first disciples did—by meeting the Risen Lord. The empty tomb didn’t convince them. They ran away afraid but, we are told in Matthew’s Gospel: “Jesus met them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’” Jesus met them—and he had met me.

Yes, I know all that can be said about teenage religion and the fantasies of youth. Don’t think that I haven’t analyzed, criticized, and sometimes discarded things that I believed then. This vital experience of the living Christ has been bombarded by the doubts that arise from psychological insights and historical and literary investigation (a seminary sees to that!) and—much more severely—by trials and tragedies of which I never dreamed in my boyhood. Through them all, even when the clouds came down and seemed to blanket all faith and hope, I can only say that I was conscious of being held—held by a power of God which had the shape of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. The fact that it was Jesus who rose from the dead came to mean more and more for I knew that the One who held me had been himself through the worst any of us can know. I learned what Christian experience teaches—that my faith is not in my faith but in him; or, as the old hymn has it: “Let me no more my comfort draw from my weak hold on thee; In this alone rejoice with awe—thy mighty hold on me.”

Yet belief in the Resurrection has been for me much more than this rescuing power in times of distress. It has given the sparkle of eternity to the beauty, the joy, and the moments of exhilaration that come to us all. It’s as if the Risen Christ throws his blessing into the radiance of love and friendship, the splendor of the universe, and the laughter of every day. He tells me that the sound of joy is echoed in the heart of God and that the end of the human journey is neither a bang nor a whimper but a Hallelujah chorus. When you share today, no matter how simply, in that song of the angels, how can you not believe that “on the third day he rose again from the dead?”

Today, more than ever, I believe in the Resurrection for, above all, it stands for the triumph of life. As a generation we are being swamped by the tidings of death, as if the suicidal impulse was taking possession of the human soul. The forces of negation are in the saddle—violence is embraced as a friend, life is an expendable commodity, anger and hate are celebrated as liberators, and despair is the god of the stage, the screen and the novel. In the middle of all this the Risen Christ calls again for the affirmation of life and hope. “Because he lives, we shall live also.” That is not just a promise of heaven but of life, freshness, and vitality here and now. The touch of Jesus is the touch of life, and never was humanity in greater need of it.

Across the nation today a forest of TV antennae are tuned in to the news of death and destruction. This morning the towers and steeples of the Christian Church rise up to catch again the news of life and hope. For me this news is not just a whiff of optimism we try to look on the bright side. It is anchored in a piece of solid news, news of an event that happened when the dark side was all that could be seen—the coming alive of the One who had died and descended into our hell. He is for me today the Lord of all life-giving forces because I see in him the God who had conquered the brutal negations of sin and death, the one who answers our suicidal “I am not” with his tremendous I AM. That is the Bible name of God, and the Word of Jesus is “I am the resurrection and the life.”

That’s what puts the exclamation mark for me and...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• The Season of Creation
• The Season of Advent
• The Season of Christmas
• The Season of Epiphany
• The Season of Lent
• The Season of Easter
• The Season of Pentecost
• Epilogue
• One Last Sermon
• Acknowledgments