On Missing The Boat 2/28/42

Scripture: Galatians 6: 1-9

It is entirely appropriate that the last day of a nationally observed “Brotherhood Week” should also be observed as “Red Cross Sunday.” The work of the international Red Cross and of our own American Red Cross is a work of practical brotherhood. Wherever major disaster appears, there the Red Cross appears with people and supplies to bring relief and encouragement to stricken folk. Year in and year out its mission is one of practical mercy.

This year the need for Red Cross service is vastly increased by the demands of war conditions. Sixty five percent of the National Red Cross funds are needed this year for services to the men of our armed forces. Red Cross workers are the one official link between civilian and military, mingling freely with officers and privates alike wherever there is need for their services. They are our representatives of mercy and help to the soldiers and sailors and marines of our fighting forces.

In our own state of Wisconsin, the Red Cross Home Service handled nearly 5,000 cases among active service men during the past fiscal year - nearly ten times the number handled durinng the previous year. Volunteer workers have put in 3 times the number of hours worked the previous year. They have produced hundreds of thousands of surgical dressings and garments from Red Cross materials, for Red Cross distribution. Canteen Corps have been organized. Nearly 1500 nurses aides were trained in our state alone. Tens of thousands have been given Home Nursing and First Aid training. Safety and accident prevention are still stressed in the Red Cross program.

For this great work, our nation should raise 125 million dollars this year. South Wood County’s share is $11,600, one third of which is to stay right here for the work to be done in this district. The other two thirds goes to the national office.

These are the facts for us to bear in our minds as we make our decisions as to the contribution we want, each of us, to make during the coming week. Listen to the radio broadcast at 3:15 this afternoon by the President and others, and be prepared to respond generously when called upon.

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Now, for the rest of our time together this morning I want to talk on “Missing the Boat” - or catching it! The British speak of “missing the bus,” and have told Mr. Hitler that he missed it when he failed to get across the English channel after Dunkerque. I don’t know why they should not have told him he’d missed the “boat!” In the island community where I lived before coming to Wisconsin we used the word “boat” with more meaning. If your letter, or your suitcase, failed to catch a certain boat, it might have to wait a week for another!

Hugh Stevenson Tigner, author of books entitled “Our Prodigal Son Culture” and “No Sign Shall Be Given,” gave a pointed chapel talk to a university congregation not long ago in which he did not pull any punches on the nature of the tragedy through which we are going in our world just now. He said that it is a tragedy of human character.

A tragedy in literature is a drama in which certain terrible things happen as a matter of logic and necessity. A Macbeth is destroyed because he has the seeds of destruction in his own iniquitous being. In the same way, our world is in tragedy today because of the way in which people have behaved in the past. “Men are getting out of history today what they put into history yesterday.” And the same principle will be working tomorrow; we shall reap 20, 50, 80 years from now what we sow today. it is an old fashioned law that no one has ever been able to beat, and no one can change. When Paul was writing to the Galatian people he put it with terrible directness: “Be not deceived; God is not mocked; for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” It is just as clear as the cause and effect with which the physicist deals; it is just as true in the moral field as it is in agriculture.

Twenty or 25 years ago, men had a chance, so many believed, to build a new world - a world which would contain a new degree of freedom and peace and justice. We are all familiar with that fact. Just as our leaders now talk about “peace,” “freedom,” “justice” in the middle of a war, people of 25 years ago spoke of those same meanings and used the very same words.

But when the boat left, they seem to have missed it! Why? Of course it does us no good to get mad about it; to run up and down the shore screaming over it. That is hysterical and uncreative. If a boat was missed it was missed and even though it be a tragedy, that is that, so far as we are now concerned.

There is a good deal of point in knowing what has gone on in the past, if we use that knowledge in searching our own motives and techniques for the future. It isn’t our business to spend futile worry over the past. It is our business to worry over, and plan for the future, for we can do something about that - if we do it today!

One reason why men missed the boat after the last war, was that they had no real disposition or desire to travel on it. Who wanted to take a long hard voyage after the rigors and strains of war? People were tired of sacrifices, of crusades, of ideals. They wanted to dump their heavy burden of tension. They wanted fun! They wanted to be “normal” - whatever that is.

Sobered by the grimness of our present situation, we can now see, more clearly than we apparently saw before, the temper of life during the last two decades. During that time, there went on a moral rebelliousness, an undisciplined expression of selfish appetites and unholy whims which is characteristic not of liberty but of decay. Nearly everybody had a hand at the great game of “getting by,” of “having fun,” of seeking pleasure, position, wealth, luxury - all material satisfactions. Philosophically speaking, we were engulfed in rankest materialism on the practical side, and on the intellectual side in cynical discrediting of every moral principle, every noble aspiration, every conscientious scruple. We got interested in Washington’s false teeth and the debunking of the cherry tree story until we seemed to have reduced his stature in our nation’s history. If Lincoln told any stories with barnyard humor, we wanted to know them -whether we knew his inaugural speeches anyy more or not. The Puritans were pilloried as abnormal; perverted sadists and bigoted prudes. The difference between right and wrong, between moral good and evil, became blurred - and wasn’t considered primarily important anyhow. The leadership and statesmanship of the world reflected these attitudes and values of common folk.

Some years ago I knew a fellow who was a splendid chap in many ways. He had an intelligent mind and a desire to serve in various ways. He was well educated and in fact had a complete theological seminary training from one of the finest schools of the east. He should have been a powerful force in the active ministry of his Christian denomination. He came of a fine family and an excellent background. He had married a splendid wife.

However, he leaned back somewhat on his father’s material resources, confined his efforts to relatively inconsequential and easy kinds of service, declined to enter the ministry, or any other established profession of business. I spoke with appreciation one day of the fine contribution his wife was making to the life and work of a neighboring church. It was not of their denomination, but they had both given a hand there for a while. He had just dabbled at it and soon quit. She continued for some time. When I mentioned her service he smiled with condescending cynicism and said: “Yes, she seems to think it is her duty to do something of that sort.” The very word duty seemed, judging by his tone, to be the ultimate in inadequate motivation. I think he was an extreme example of a prevalent mood. If you and I can’t recognize some duties, may God have mercy on our prodigal souls!

Of course there were a few people who, like prophets of old, recognized our situation for what it was and who were concerned about it; who recognized that we were, to use one of their phrases, “playing golf across the hills of hell” and who pointed out that we lacked any basis of high hopes for the future on the basis of the kind of lives we were so unconcernedly leading, who pointed out that a hopeful future must always be built on a more solid foundation than selfish ambitions, trivial pursuits and cynical attitudes. And like the prophets of old, they were not widely heard in their time. But they were right.

An Englishman named C. E. Montague, writing in 1922 in a book which he called “Disenchantment,” pointed out that the advanced architecture of civilization is built out of the countless bricks of humdrum human decencies, of plain rightness in action, of simple devotion to established principles, patiently and devotedly practiced through millions of undistinguished and inconspicuous lives. “And now,” he added simply, “just when there seems to be such a babble as never before about these grandiose structures, bricks have run short.” With truth so simple that practically nobody noticed it, he wrote, “There won’t be any grand new structure without the bricks to build it with.” We have to fall over that kind of truth, and get bruised, before we recognize it.

Lest we become bitter and futile again over the bruising we now endure, I would like to leave this thought with you this morning. A new order of things that may add up to a better civilization will certainly have to be built out of the human material of our own hearts and minds and wills and souls and persons.

What was that moral-spiritual movement which historians call “The Reformation” that saved Western civilization after the Middle Ages? Simply a movement of return, on the part of millions of people, to moral principles. It is no accident that the American forefathers who brought forth this land of promise to mankind were “Puritans.” The building and maintenance of freedom takes stern stuff. If our descendants of the near future do not face a new Dark Age, it will be because millions of common folk, like you and me here this morning, decide within our souls to be new and better people - much better than we have been in recent years. That is the number one plank to be laid in the plans for a better post-war world.

One who knew how to live, as no one else has ever learned the art, said so simply and so truly to a few listeners nearly 2,000 years ago, “Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees [who know all of the law with punctilious accuracy] ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.” [Matthew 5: 20]. And you may take it from me, if you will, that when the Teacher said “kingdom of heaven,” he was not discussing the subject of bliss or punishment after physical death, but that he meant the better life we all want to establish beginning here and now.

Any hope for a better post-war world will have to be born now, and continue, in the determination of a sizable body of us common folk. There will have to be a new dedication to moral principles. There will have to be more people who realize that there are moral laws which cannot be flouted without self-destruction; who recognize that righteousness is more valuable than riches; who do not regard “duty” as a horrid word; who find joy in the fulfillment of responsibility; who have become self-disciplined; and who have come to seek something higher than their own pleasure.

The boat we ought to catch - must catch if we are to be saved - is headed for stormy seas. If we should let it go, and clamber aboard another craft that seems headed for placid pleasure, we need expect nothing but bigger and better calamities for our world. Life is in the struggle out on that ocean!

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dates and places delivered:

Wisconsin Rapids, February 28, 1943