Fulfilling Our Human Potential: Selected Homilies of Fontaine S. Hill, M.D.

By Fontaine Hill, Jr.

This is a collection of homilies that are aimed at correlating the Gospel message with current scientific knowledge and sound psychological concepts. They are focused on understanding where the personalized love of God can be found in interpersonal relationships that we experience in our day-to-day lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483584089

Book preview

2016

PART I

An Overview: Knowing God, The Bible, The Holy Spirit

Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is one element of faith.

~Paul Tillich

CHAPTER ONE

Knowing God

September 24, 1978

This morning, let me begin by reading to you a few excerpts from the fourth chapter of the I Epistle General of St. John:

Everyone who loves is a child of God and knows God, but the unloving know nothing of God. For God is love and his love was disclosed to us in this, that he sent his only son into the world to bring us life. Though God has never been seen by any man, God himself dwells in us if we love one another. His love is brought to completeness within us. Here is the proof that we dwell in him and he dwells in us. He has imparted his spirit to us.

I want to explore with you some ideas related to knowing God, which is a prevalent problem for many of us. Do you really believe, as St. John says, that God’s spirit of love has been imparted to you and it’s brought to completeness in you? Do you trust in this spirit that has been shared with you and me?

Many of us, at one time or another, doubt that there is love, that we can be loved just for ourselves. We sometimes feel that no one cares, or that they will not care unless we reach some level of perfection in what we do. All too often, we feel that our mistakes will not be forgiven. We do not have faith in the love that has been given to us. This is based on past experiences that set the pattern for our expectations. Even our newspaper cartoons convey apprehension about our behavior. A message given to Ziggy from Dial an Inspiration said, Today’s inspired thought is do whatever you feel like doing today. Heed your innermost desire. But remember — God will get you for it! Many people accept the absence of love as their reality because they have known nothing different. Some have not even known deeply a warm loving kiss or tender embrace, the most natural symbols of affection. This disbelief in love can be so profound that we may be smothered by pervasive feelings of unworthiness. As a result, we do not believe in ourselves. We become afraid of ourselves and are unable to accept that we too have been given the spirit of love. This disbelief, this lack of knowing love, may cause us not only to fear ourselves, but to construct a defensive shell of anger and fear of others. There is a feeling that we must protect ourselves, that others do not want what we can offer and the feeling of loneliness ensues. Someone has defined loneliness as the fear of love. Certainly, one cannot know God if there is fear of love. Even when acceptance is experienced, there may be the disturbing thought that the acceptance surely will be taken away. Indeed, the depth of disbelief may be such that we may try to pretend that love is not around us, because once we admit that love is around us, that other people really do love, we must give up the anger and fear. We must give up the protection. We must face a new reality, and change from disbelief to belief — all the while becoming open to being hurt again. Someone has called this the terrible freedom of love. It seems to me that the central theme of the New Testament message has something to say about our disbelief and our not knowing God. The core of the Gospel message is that we need not defend ourselves. There is no need for irrational fear and anger as defensive protection. We can change to a life of belief because love was and can be triumphant. Love is alive! This is what was shown by Jesus’ death and resurrection. Again, to quote St. John’s Epistle: For God is love and his love was disclosed to us in this, that he sent his only Son into the world to bring us life. But the Epistle further says: He has imparted his spirit to us.

I am reminded here of something said recently by the Reverend Mr. Jesse Jackson, of the People United to Save Humanity program and I quote: All alone, all by myself, I am somebody. It seems to me that Mr. Jackson made a profoundly theological statement because regardless of our experiences, each one of us has an inherent value as a person. Each one of us can love, can be self-giving, and can believe in ourselves. The spirit of love has been imparted into each one of us. In order to feel that we are somebody, we need to feel worthy as persons, to feel that we can give to others. A few months ago I made a statement from this pulpit that bears repeating: By subjecting himself to crucifixion, Jesus made a commitment to the self-worth of each one of us. It is as if Jesus set out to prove for us that the love shared with him and shared with us cannot be put to death. To quote Saint John’s Epistle again: He sent his only Son into the world to bring us life. Witness the two thousand year history of the Christian Church of which each one of you is an integral part.

In order for us to feel that we are somebody, we must make each other feel worthy of loving and being loved. We can feel others to be loving only as we feel ourselves to be loving and self-giving. Valuing ourselves, we are able to value others. But I can value myself only as you give me unearned acceptance. This is the only way in which I can develop trust in the spirit of love that has been shared with us. Each of us must believe in him or herself in order to trust, in order to live, in order to be whole persons. Does a person really live life fully until he or she deeply knows love and acceptance, until he or she knows his or her own capacity for loving and acceptance of others?

Now what do I mean by unearned acceptance? I mean the kind of love that gives of yourself, the love that understands, the love that is accepting of me as I am, the love that forgives over and over. These qualities are inherent in each person because the spirit of love has been imparted to us. This has been called our birth love.

And so, because of what has been built in each person, we cannot instill love in others. We can only help others find their own love. Yet, too many relationships have an attitude of the good that you are I gave you.

As I see it, we are here today to find the spirit of love that has been shared with us. To phrase this another way, the purpose of the Church is to help us to discover love, to bring us life, to help each other share the love that has been shared with us. At the root of this is the basic integrity and dignity of each person. As St. John says, His Love is brought to completeness in us. Another aspect of what I am talking about is the acceptance of love. Dr. Paul Tillich has put it this way: We must help people accept themselves as being accepted. I guess we would call this the bottom line. To repeat an earlier statement: Many of us, at one time or another, doubt there is love, that we can be loved just for ourselves. Yet, when one accepts him or herself as being accepted, trust and faith are developed. The shared spirit of love abounds and life is full. The presence of love rather than the absence of love becomes one’s reality.

In closing, I think that too often God’s love shared with us has been understood in a negative light, namely that we really are not worthy of this sharing, but it was imparted to us anyway. Of course, there can be no true sense of self-worth in this viewpoint. If I may, let me use a parent-child analogy. The point of view that proposes that love has been shared with us despite our unworthiness, is like the guilt-stimulating parent who condescendingly accepts the child, all the time feeling that the child in no way deserves acceptance. In contrast, we can understand God’s imparting love to us as an affirmation of the inherent value of each one of us. This view is like a healthy parent-child relationship in which parents naturally accept the child because he is their child and they love him. The child knows he has the parent’s love. He knows there is no need to earn it. He knows that he is fully accepted and the child grows in the light of this love. Such a child knows God! This kind of relationship, whether between the parent and child, husband and wife, friend and friend, allows each of us to feel that he or she is somebody and allows each of us to believe that God’s love has indeed been imparted to us. This kind of love allows us also to know God.

CHAPTER TWO

Interpreting The Bible

(No Date)

The solution of accepting every word of the Bible as literally and infallibly true has considerable appeal, but it is unworkable. Even if the Bible were a totally infallible source of God’s revelation, each person would still read it from the point of his or her own experience which would inevitably color his or her understanding of its meaning.

During the past century, biblical and historical scholarship has further shown that the Bible itself cannot be looked upon as an infallible source of revelation, devoid of the human experience of those who wrote it. Although we might wish otherwise, the Bible is the work of many people over many centuries, each of whom experienced God’s revelation at a given point in history and expressed that experience in the language and thought patterns of their own time.

The fact is that everyone who reads the Bible must interpret it according to his or her own experience. The unfortunate fact is that many of us tend to interpret it to suit our own pet interests and ideas rather than by means of some clear and consistent set of interpretive tools.

To affirm the necessity of interpretation in no way diminishes our respect for the Bible as the source of God’s word. Nor does it lower the status of the Bible to that of just another book. The Bible remains as the Christian’s primary source of knowing God’s will and purpose for man. In it, we discover all that is basically essential about the nature of God and nature of man.

We can discover in the Bible something of the nature of life itself. This does not mean that our own experiences and knowledge do not contribute to what we discover. Indeed, we live in an experiential world and we can know and feel only what we have experienced. There certainly is a difference in knowing or feeling something compared to giving an intellectual assent to it. The latter is so often true about our response to the content of the Bible.

In the lesson for today, one of the themes is misunderstanding, and then the lesson moves into the message and procedures St. Paul used for sharing the Gospel. This morning I want to share with you some of my own thoughts and feelings about how I understand some theological concepts; especially, I will talk about basic ideas and a few ideas on the good news of Jesus. It may be that we will misunderstand each other. Personally, I prefer to look at any differences we may have as differences of understanding — differences based upon the fact that each one of us has experienced life from different viewpoints.

In reading the lesson for today, the first Epistle of St. Paul to Thessalonians 2:1-13, I was struck by the fact that in the thirteen verses, Paul used the word God twelve times, and I am still not sure of his concept of God. Seeing this, I thought that I might talk about the concept of God and some of the reasons why I feel that we need a new theology that broadens our concept of the old — a new theology that offers us a new vision.

It seems to me that the traditional imagery of God to which we are accustomed simply succeeds in making God remote and distant from millions of persons today. To question this traditional idea of God is not with the intention of denying God, but to put God into the middle of life — into the middle of life where Jesus showed us God belongs. If Jesus Christ means anything at all, He means that God belongs to this world, that God is implicated in our lives where we stand today.

The reality is that, in the man Jesus, the clue to all life was seen. To say that he was the Son of a supernatural being sent to earth from heaven may help to bring this reality home to some of us. But for others, this idea may take the reality of Jesus out of their world all together and make the events of Christmas and Easter only religious fairy stories.

If the traditional way of putting the idea of Jesus as God incarnate makes Jesus Christ real for some of us, well and good. There is no wish to destroy anyone’s image of God but to expand that image. I am reminded here of a book published several years ago and entitled Your God Is Too Small.¹

To me, the concept of God as a being, a person, is our way of making real and vivid to the imagination, the conviction that reality at its deepest is to be interpreted in personal categories such as love, trust, freedom, responsibility, and purpose. The real question about God is not whether a being exists that embodies all these qualities in his person. The real question is whether the truth about the ultimate meaning of our lives is based on love, trust, freedom, responsibility, and purpose.

Yet, we so often continue to visualize God as being outside of our world, which certainly would lessen our belief and faith and increase our doubts about the existence of God. It has been said the creed of the English people is that there is no God and that it is wise to pray to him from time to time.

It seems to me that this projection of God as a being in another realm outside of our world has succeeded in making God marginal to vast numbers of people today. They cannot recognize the reality of God in life’s experiences because the image, which should be making this reality vivid, locates God in an area in which the people no longer live. God is banished to the edges of life, to the supernatural, just something we humans cannot understand or control — the so-called acts of God; or God is banished to the afterlife. Utilizing this traditional imagery of God, people seek God when they are at the end of their rope or only on Sunday morning, rather than seeing God as involved in the ordinary course of human affairs. When we seek God only periodically, God, by definition, ceases to be God.

So in looking at some of the living stuff of which Christian truth is made, let’s not start with a heavenly being located out of our world, but let’s start from what actually is most real and important to people in everyday life and find God there.

What is most real and important for us? What matters most to us? Is it money and what money can buy? I doubt it deep down. For we know that we can’t take it with us and money seldom brings any real happiness.

Is it love that matters most to us? That’s a good deal closer to what is real and vital because it has to do with persons, not things. We all need, more than anything else, to love and to be loved. By this, we mean that we need to be accepted as persons, as whole persons, simply for our own sake.

And this is what true love does. It accepts people without any strings, simply for what they are. It gives them worth. It makes their lives.

And this is precisely what we see Jesus doing in the Gospels, making and remaking men’s lives, bringing meaning back to them. In Jesus, we see love at work in a way the world has never seen before or since. And that is why the New Testament story sees God at work in Jesus — for God is love, as it says in St. John’s Gospel. If we, as Christians, accept Jesus as our man, then we see His love as the last word for our lives. His love is, for us, quite simply the ultimate reality. For us, that love is God. It is interesting to note that the people of His day referred to Jesus as the Son of God because of what they saw in his life, not because of what He said about Himself. Jesus referred to Himself as the Son of man.

It is only love that gives us the deepest clue to the universe. Indeed, it is the individual response of love that gives our world its meaning and makes it possible for us to speak in terms of God at all. It is with this realization that life takes on new meaning and new vision.

I do not believe that this love is exclusively for Christians. Everyone has the capacity for love. Everyone has the capacity to know God.

You know, belief in God is the one thing about which we have no choice, because if we, in any degree, know and believe in love or trust or kindness as realities, we know and believe in God. Whether we like it or not, our lives are grounded in a love which will not let us go. It has been given to us as something completely unconditional.

I would propose to you this morning that in order to broaden our perception of God, when we think of God, we think of all of life itself, rather than thinking of an invisible personality. Indeed, if God is total creator, then God must be all of life. No one of us can grasp completely such an abstraction as all of life. It is easier to personify all of life and to apply human qualities to God, such as He speaks, He loves, He gets angry, etc. Of course, God is neither He nor She, neither masculine nor feminine. Is this what Moses did when he brought the commandments to his people — give a voice to life itself and all its ways? If God stands for life, then we can understand the Ten Commandments as commandments to take life seriously. If one wishes to live life fully, then the commandments are literally ways to act in order to maximize life — not just to maximize life for the individual, but to maximize life for all those with whom the individual lives.

Two questions we might ask ourselves at this point are: First, have we been taught to be so afraid to take hold of life in all its fullness that we continue to accept old concepts which take man’s potential for evil, place it outside ourselves and call it Satan? And likewise, do we take man’s potential for love, place it outside ourselves, and call it God? Certainly, God is more than love. If God is all of life, then for us to see how some ways of life are destructive, and others are sustaining; is for us to know, in part, what is meant by God. Certainly, God is more than love and to think of God as more than love is to know that God is in everything and everything is in God. The Nicene Creed states, Maker of Heaven and Earth and all things visible and invisible. God is left out of nothing, material and spiritual, evil as well as good.

The second question is: Does not true religion mean to take all life with ultimate seriousness? Dr. Paul Tillich calls this ultimate concern. To the medieval scholastic philosophers, God stood for the most real thing in the world. The word God related to what is most deeply true and real, to what is of ultimate concern and significance. Is not a truly religious person one who is always concerned with what makes life of maximum beauty and maximum richness possible? One cannot do this and negate the existence of the human potential for evil. And one cannot see the potential for a life as maximum beauty and richness and at the same time negate his own potential for good, for love, for concern, for hope.

And so it seems that to think of God as all of life can make perfect sense. The commandment Thou shalt have no other gods becomes a commandment not to confuse money or idols or persons or institutions with life itself. If we are to give life human meaning, we must live for God. We must live for all of life itself. To live the way of the Lord is to live the way of life. To devote the Sabbath to the Lord is to give life itself time to rest, time to renew, time to be replenished. To say, God is within you, is to say, life is within you. To address God in our worship is to address life so that one worships all of life. One also worships God by entering into a dialogue with other persons. Bishop John A. T. Robinson speaks of this as seeking the unconditional in the conditional.

This means that one reveres life in its totality by revering it concretely in every bit of life that is before us now at the immediate moment. Living or being in this world, means always being with others, not in a sense of company, but in a sense of awareness that one is never completely alone and one is never completely outside all human contact. The essence of one’s being in the world is caring, having a general concern for another person. I might add that nothing is more difficult than to live in the world now in the immediate present.

When we learn how to understand life and how life is possible in its utmost richness and variety, we learn to understand what is happening in a human world, in a human way. We are so afraid of humanism, but isn’t this what we see in the person of Jesus Christ, all of life itself and its human fullness? John 1:4 says: All that came to be was alive in his life and that life was the life of men.

So in closing, I am reminded of what one author has said, Progress is made, not by finding answers to old questions, but by asking new questions; new questions not to destroy the old, but to fulfill the old. Jesus himself amazed the teachers with his new questions. Jesus himself said that he came, not to destroy, but to fulfill. If Jesus Christ is the light and life of the world, if we call him Lord, are we to do less?

¹ J. B. Phillips, Your God Is Too Small, New York: Simon & Schuster Inc., 1997.

CHAPTER THREE

The Holy Spirit

(No Date)

The sermon this morning will be about the Holy Spirit, ideas about which may be some of the most confusing in all of Christian teachings and theology. Certain disciples in Ephesus told Paul, We didn’t know there is a Holy Spirit. As you are aware, one of the Christian symbols for the Holy Spirit is the dove. There’s a story you may have heard about a potential convert saying to a Christian missionary, the Father I know, the Son I know, but who is this holy bird?

Let me make a general statement about the Holy Spirit and then, as we go further, the statement can be broadened in concept. The Holy Spirit is the personal power within each of us, indeed, within all people, which allows us to respond to the revelation of God’s action in this world in which we live. Needless to say, this response requires movement and action on our part, which is, of course, to say the response is a human response. But let me emphasize that the response to God’s action is our response made through the working of the Holy Spirit within us. The last two ideas may seem repetitive but I purposely made them so, because all too often language about the Holy Spirit makes it seem that it is like a dove that flies around but then lights on us once in a while, all the time forgetting St. Paul’s words: You are the temple of the Holy Spirit. Paul’s conception about two thousand years ago would fit perfectly into modern psychological concepts, despite different language being used today. We need not repeat the well-known events that reflected the response of the early Christian community to the power of God’s love shown in Jesus Christ in a way never before recognized. I would propose to you that the Holy Spirit that was there in Jesus’ followers, waiting to be released, and it was released in a human way by the action of God’s love in the life of Jesus. Early on, the Christian community spoke of the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, indicating that this power in them had a unifying force.

But what is the meaning and significance of the Holy Spirit for us today? First, it is important that we recognize that the personal responsive work for the Holy Spirit is not confined to the Christian fellowship. Just as the human expression of God is not confined to Jesus, but most fully defined in Jesus; so the human response of the action of the Holy Spirit is not confined to the Christian community, but is defined in the action of this community and fellowship. If this concept were not true, think how narrowly limited would be the power and action of God’s love in the world.

And just how is the responsive work of the Holy Spirit defined in the human experience? It is defined in countless ways: attempting to live one’s life sharing love with others, showing deep concern for justice for all people, searching for the truth, expressing compassion, offering hope to others, and living our own lives with hope based on faith, are all evidence of the action of the Holy Spirit and the response of the power of that Spirit which is within us. So often, we overlook the fact that the Holy Spirit is also at work and we are responding to that Spirit when we recognize the absence of shared love, the absence of justice, the failure to find truth, the lack of hope in ourselves and others. In fact, we will not recognize love, justice, truth, compassion, and hope unless we know their opposites. Dr. Carl Jung has called these opposites the shadow side of life. The shadow side of life is also evidence of God’s creative power at work, just as this creative power made the world so that we experience both light and darkness. In fact we could not know one without knowing the other.

Probably we all, at one time or another, would say, like the new converts at Ephesus, We did not even know there is a Holy Spirit, because, for the most part, the Holy Spirit within us is working gently and quietly. However, the purpose of this work is for us to reflect more and more in our own lives, the love, goodness, righteousness, and truth of God. The more fully each of us fulfills his or her own humanity, the more we fulfill this divine purpose. In the human life of Jesus, we discover this purpose most clearly defined and fulfilled. The same Holy Spirit that we find within ourselves is to be found in Jesus.

Always, when talking about the Holy Spirit, it is not easy to explain clearly in words that will let us conceptualize the working of the Spirit in a way that makes it all seem realistic. So let us look at some evidence of the human capacity for love, as we know it. Each of us knows that it is not when we are self-centered and concerned with only doing what we please that we will find our deepest happiness or realize our best human fulfillment. We find this fulfillment when we lovingly give of ourselves, not only to those for whom we care, but to those who we may not even know. Examples of the latter are the giving of our material gifts or striving for justice and freedom to be available to all people. All of this is what will unite us into the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, as was mentioned earlier. It is obvious that this uniting is never complete but always in the process. This process involves the continuing determination of whether or not the expression of the Holy Spirit at work, as found in Jesus, is expressed in our own lives. All that is uplifting, all that is expressive of love and tenderness, all that is eager for right to prevail, all that is concerned for justice, all that manifests beauty and speaks of truth; is the working of the Spirit of God most fully represented in Jesus’ humanity and also to be represented or represented, if you will, by us. Alfred Whitehead, the main proponent of process theology, has said that we are human becomings rather than human beings.

It is apparent, at this point, that the Holy Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit at work in Jesus’ human life, and the Holy Spirit at work in our lives; is one and the same Spirit. It is this Spirit that unifies us with God and Jesus, and allows us to be Christ in the world today.

PART II

A Trilogy: What It Means to Call Ourselves Christians

That Christianity should be equated in the public mind, inside as well as outside the Church, with organized religion merely shows how far we have departed from the New Testament. For the last thing the Church exists to be is an organization for the religious. Its charter is to be the servant of the world.

~Bishop John A.T. Robinson

CHAPTER FOUR

To Call Ourselves Christian (I)

(1979)

John 16:4, Jesus said of himself,

I am the way, I am the truth, I am life.

From time to time it seems appropriate for us to take a look at what it means for each of us to call ourselves Christians and to ask ourselves, Where do I stand? And, as a Christian, what do I stand for?

Perhaps this will require that we rethink our identity as members of the body of Christ. Perhaps it will require personal searching. Most of all, it may necessitate a willingness to change. A willingness to change may be the most difficult requirement, since each of us, although desiring change, strives for the maintenance of stability and sameness. This conflict of change versus stability is inherent in the process of maturing, and thus, for all of us as Christians, the nagging question, Where do I stand? constantly arises. Also, a willingness to re-examine ourselves may be blocked by the fact that so many of us like the old-time religion that tells us what to believe, what to do and what to expect.

Dietrich Bonheoffer, in one of the letters he wrote before his death, while imprisoned by the Nazis in World War II, said this: "To be a Christian does not mean to be religious in a particular way, but to be a man; not a type of man but the man that Christ creates in us." When Bonheoffer used the word man, he was referring to the true dimension of humanness in each of us, male or female. He was referring to that dimension of humanity that potentially we each have in us to become, when we take for ourselves the full statue of humanity of the man, Jesus, who showed us Christ.

One of my favorite quotes is from St. Irenaeus, who lived over fifteen hundred years ago: The glory of God is man fully alive. Or to put this another way: The glory of God is each of us living up to the full potential of our humanness; to be the full, free, mature human beings that the love of Jesus Christ can make of us.

How can we be fully human now, today? This question may indeed be underlying everything we do. And I want to state at this point that if the Christian message is to have any relevance at all, it will be because in that message is the answer to the personal question: How can I be fully human now?

Jesus said of himself, I am the way, the truth and the life. What does this mean: the way, the truth, the life? This morning I want to take one aspect of Jesus’ statement and explore this with you. What did Jesus mean when he said, I am the way?

If we look at the early history of the Church, we find that Christianity was known as the way before it was known as anything else. The way was primarily a style of life, a pattern of living; but let me add here that behind that style and pattern of life was a belief in what someone has called an interior life. The way refers to how we go about our daily business, how we relate to the world, our family, our friends. What I’m talking about here is a way of being human each day of our life. I am not talking about living a separated existence. Jesus himself mixed with the people. He dealt with and shared their common problems. He was one of them. His style of life shocked the Pharisees, whose name simply means separatists. But this way of being truly human is not one thing for Christians and another thing for non-Christians. In case you want to object to this statement, let us not fall into the trap of thinking we are exclusive or better — that our humanity is special. Let’s not be like the Episcopal bishop who had on his calling card: Drive carefully, you might hit an Episcopalian. If Christianity is the truth about what it means to be fully human, then it is for all people for all time.

Let us look at one of the more basic human relationships, that of marriage. We often hear of Christian marriage and non-Christian marriage, Christian marriage tending to be equated with church weddings, non-Christian marriage tending to be equated with marriage by a justice of the peace or some other secular official. The fact is there is only marriage, entered into by Christians and non-Christians. The Christian aim for marriage is the same for all persons entering into marriage, that aim being the greatest possible fulfilling of the human potential for mutual love and self-giving and in the awesome responsibility of having children. It matters not whether we are talking about parenthood or the law or morality or politics, the end is the same for all Christians and non-Christians alike, that all life be more deeply and truly human.

I am not saying that being a Christian makes no difference, for certainly, in the light of the humanity of Jesus Christ, there is a difference in our estimate of