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https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/1ee725ca2a820f86005d9d46472f1d69.pdf
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Is It Enough To Be Human?
From the series: Can I Honestly Believe?
Text: Luke 15:20; Psalm 103:14; Genesis 2:17
Richard A. Rhem
Christ Community Church
Spring Lake, Michigan
August 16, 1998
Transcription of the spoken sermon
I’m going to say something radical for a change. I’m going to say this morning
that you are very beautiful people, that humankind is amazing, marvelous, and
wonderful, and I think that in the church we’ve given people a bum rap.
If you’ve grown up in the church as I have, and spent your whole life in the
church, you won’t have a terribly high impression of your human nature. Oh, the
church has not only had bad news to tell about the obstreperousness of the
human person; it has had good news, too. Good news about the fact that, in spite
of how bad you are, there is hope for you if you heed the word of the preacher and
bring your offering envelope every week and support the institution loyally and
follow the code of conduct that the community communicates to you. Now, you
understand that this is all of grace, but there’s a lot of effort involved in it.
I believe that in the church we have been concerned for you. We wanted to keep
you safe. Knowing the beast that rages in your breast, we’ve tried to hedge you in
and keep you going down that straight and narrow path. For your own good, you
understand. But, also, it’s been good for the institution, of course, since we
mediate grace, kind of hold the spigot, and might have some influence upon
whether or not you ultimately, at the end of this vale of tears, find heaven’s gate
open for you.
Well, perhaps you say that’s a bit of a caricature, and it is, of course. But, there’s a
lot of truth in it, too. In the church, human nature has been brushed with a stroke
of somber hues. We have not celebrated the human person. We have tended, on
the other hand, to put the human person down, to be very clear about the
potential for evil, to point to the load of guilt, and to indicate the end thereof,
which is destruction.
This morning I want to say that, being human, you are amazing, wonderful, and
miraculous. That, being human, you represent the movement of that whole
cosmic drama that has been unfolding for fifteen billion years. That it was the
intention of the Source of all being, that ultimate Mystery of all things, that this
© Grand Valley State University
�Enough To Be Human?
Richard A. Rhem
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whole drama should emerge eventually in someone like you that was thoroughly
rooted in the earth, but also conscious and aware, knowing a measure of freedom
and responsibility. As the statement on the inside of the cover of your liturgy by
David Tooland, a Catholic scholar, states, you are the soul of the universe. You
are the voice of the universe. You are the black box of the universe. In you this
cosmic drama has come to awareness, to consciousness. Although you are and
remain thoroughly rooted in the earth, your physicality being very much with
you, nonetheless, that physicality, that body, is the bearer of spirit, and spirit
doesn’t exist apart from its grounding in the physicality of the person, and with
that human being there has come this amazing, miraculous creature that is you. I
dare to proclaim that, even in church.
Now, saying that, I don’t want you to hear this as a whitewash of the human
creature. One of the dangers of making statements like that is that someone is
going to go out of here and say, "Well, today he denied original sin," or "He
doesn’t think that human beings are sinful." Let me read you a little statement
that I have read you before but which I think is eloquent in its recognition of the
potential for disaster that lives in the soul and heart of all of us. These are the
words of a great preacher of a former generation, Carlyle Marney. He said,
Man is the most dangerous and savage of the beasts. His bite is poisonous,
his hand a club, his foot is a weapon. Knives, clubs, spears are the
projectiles to bear his hostility. Nothing in nature is so well equipped for
hating or hurting. Confuse him and he may lash out at everything. Crowd
him and he kills, robs, destroys, for his crime rate increases in proportion
to his crowding. Deprive him and he retaliates. Impoverish him and he
burns villas in the night. Enslave him and he revolts, pamper him and he
may poison you, hire him and he may hate both you and the work, love
him too possessively and he is never weaned, deny him too early and he
never learns to love. Put him in cities and all his animal nature comes out
with perversions of every good thing. For greed, acquisitiveness, violence
were so long his tools for jungle survival, that it is only by the hardest
effort that these can be laid aside as weapons of his continued survival.
Well, that’s not a very pretty picture of the human person, and who of us would
deny that it’s true? We see it every day, played out in our society and, to the
extent that we are self-aware, we see the seeds of it all within our own hearts and
our own souls. So, don’t hear me whitewashing the human being as though there
is nothing negative to say. But, what I do want to say is that, in light of our
understanding of human nature, in the light of our understanding of the human
person coming at this point in that cosmic drama, in the light of our
understanding of our animal nature being the ground of our spiritual nature and
symbiotic living in tight union with it forever, in the light of all that, we can come
to some new appreciation and understanding of our human condition. Part of the
problem, I think, in the Church’s understanding in dealing with human nature is
that biblical paradigm that begins with an understanding of the human being
© Grand Valley State University
�Enough To Be Human?
Richard A. Rhem
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created perfect, given the gift of freedom, then in proud revolt falling from that
perfection into a state of alienation from God, and therefore having to be
redeemed by the grace of God. That’s the biblical paradigm. We find it in the
stories of Genesis. We find it in the theology of Paul, articulated explicitly. The
creation of the person in perfection, the fall of the person through revolt, the
redemption of the person by grace.
Let me suggest to you, in the light of our understanding of human nature and
human history, of social development, let me suggest to you that we try to find
another paradigm. Three years ago I suggested that the word emergence has a
better image for who we are, from whence we have come, and whither we are
going. Emergence rather than fall and redemption. Emergence as being a part of
the whole evolutionary development of the totality of reality. If we were to take
the 15 or so billion years of the cosmic reality and condense it down into one year,
then the human being would have appeared in the last minute or two of that year.
We are relative newcomers to the scene of history and cosmology and, in the
statement that I printed also for you today to which I referred last week from U.S.
News & World Report, the suggestion is that if we are the youth movement of the
human story, then with the infinite resources in the star factories of the universe,
who knows what further development there will be? Who would say that we are
the acme of God’s creative act? Who would say that we are the pinnacle; that we
are that to which all creation was pointing? Who knows but what there are stages
and dimensions of which we have not yet dreamed, and who knows whether or
not we, the human family, have not been the instrumentality through which the
universe has turned the corner? Because it has: we are really something!
With the human person, the universe has become conscious. With the human
being, the universe has a voice, the universe has become aware of itself, is able to
celebrate itself, is able to reflect on itself and on the other and on the Source and
resting place of all. To be human is to be an amazing, marvelous, miraculous
creation. But the idea of emergence indicates to us that we bear the marks of our
past, and how did we come to where we are, if not by the exercise of instincts for
survival? How did we get to this point, if not through the utilization of that
instinctual nature that enabled us to continue to move in the continuum of the
creative process? And if it is true that spirit is grounded in flesh, then that flesh
still bears all the marks of that long evolutionary climb.
We didn’t get here by being innocent children. We didn’t get here by the careful
exercise of human reason. We got here clawing our way. We are jungle bunnies.
And although we have moved to a point where we become conscious of that, and
where we become conscious of another way to be, crowd us a little bit and we very
easily slip back into that survival mode, that instinctual response.
The miracle of the human being is that we can talk about that. We can look at our
behavior. We know when we are denying our best insights. We know when we are
acting against love and compassion and justice and care. We know when it is
© Grand Valley State University
�Enough To Be Human?
Richard A. Rhem
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selfishness, when it is fear, when it is jealousy that is driving us. We have that
awful capacity to be able to jump out of our skin and take a look at ourselves.
That’s the amazing thing about being human.
If I suggest that that biblical picture of perfection and fall and redemption can
better be replaced by an idea of continual emergence, that doesn’t mean that
there are not profound insights in the scripture about the human condition. We
can understand the Genesis writer not wanting to blame God for all of the hell on
earth, and so the explanation is that God created us good, we revolted, we are
responsible for all of the evil. But, in the midst of portraying that picture, there
were some very, very deep insights. The writer did understand our rootedness in
the stuff of creation, being made, formed by God out of the dust of the ground,
the mud. David Tooland says out of stardust. The recognition remains, however,
of our oneness with creation. The Hebrew poet, understanding that, was able to
give us a sense of the compassion of God for us in our condition. God knows our
frame, he writes. God remembers that we are dust. Like a compassionate parent,
God has mercy on us. I think what the poet was saying is that it’s all right to be
human. God knows you’re human. Whatever the creative process has produced in
us, it is a process that has integrity and authenticity and we are part of the whole,
and that’s all right. God knows our frame. God remembers that we are dust.
Oh, we beat ourselves up. We’re so hard on ourselves because there is that
struggle between that ideal toward which we aspire and the actual performance
which we put out. We get down on ourselves because we fail again and again and
again. We despair, we get discouraged. The Psalmist says, "Look, God knows who
you are, and God intends you to be who you are, and God embraces you as you
are." I believe that Jesus, standing in that tradition, was trying to say something
like that in the beautiful story of that son who went into the far country who
declared his independence, who went through the separation process, who came
upon bad times, came to himself, became aware and then, still with a bit of
manipulation, thought, "You know what? I think I could talk the old man into bed
and breakfast." He came back with his rehearsed speech, only to be overwhelmed
with a father weeping, kissing him, embracing him, smothering his wellrehearsed story. It seems to me that Jesus was saying that all the Creator God is
waiting for is the creature to become aware and finally to be home in the embrace
of God. At home in the wonder of the universe, at home with the tensions of being
human.
Oh, good grief, it’s not easy to be human. We are so fragile, so vulnerable. Jim
Essebaggers goes to the doctor and the doctor says, "Cancer." A candle burns for
Beth Cresse, who in a moment has her life wiped out, leaving husband, children
and parents and a community mourning this marvelous person. The flowers at
the table celebrate the sprite of a life, an angel of six years old who dies! So
fragile. So vulnerable. So perilous. And yet, and yet in those very experiences, in
those very moments in the darkness of the valley, in the light of our fragile
© Grand Valley State University
�Enough To Be Human?
Richard A. Rhem
Page 5
existence, in the pain and the loss of it all, there comes forth from this human
person love and care and beauty that defies the darkness! How can it be?
I want to tell you, you are really something, human crowd! You have your life
rooted in the dust, even if it’s stardust, and you have all of the animality of your
physical nature that’s alive and well. You carry with you all of those instinctual
patterns that can be triggered in a moment, creating hell on earth, and you can
sing and you can laugh, and you can dance, and you can love and embrace.
God, what it is to be human! What a wonder and what a marvel you are! And how
good it is to be here together for just a few moments, to become aware of it again
and to feel the embrace of grace once again, and to sense that inspiring spirit that
lures us with love and beckons us with grace, and embraces us in the wonder and
the worry of being human.
© Grand Valley State University
�
https://digitalcollections.library.gvsu.edu/files/original/4b20cef3aa7cbd922f5dbeae166217aa.mp3
af947abdc3976622a4f18c4251912130
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Richard A. Rhem Collection
Description
An account of the resource
Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar.
Subject
The topic of the resource
Clergy--Michigan
Reformed Church in America
Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.)
Religion
Interfaith worship
Sermons
Sound Recordings
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Rhem, Richard A.
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a>
Publisher
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives.
Contributor
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Kaufman Interfaith Institute
Rights
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Language
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English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Sound
Text
Identifier
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KII-01
Coverage
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1981-2014
Format
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audio/mp3
text/pdf
Sound
A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.
Event
Pentecost XI
Series
Can I Honestly Believe?
Scripture Text
Luke 15:20, Psalm 103:14, Genesis 2,17
Location
The location of the interview
Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
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KII-01_RA-0-19980816
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1998-08-16
Title
A name given to the resource
Is It Enough To Be Human?
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Richard A. Rhem
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Subject
The topic of the resource
Clergy--Michigan
Reformed Church in America
Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.)
Sermons
Relation
A related resource
Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/
Language
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eng
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Sound
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
audio/mp3
application/pdf
Description
An account of the resource
A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on August 16, 1998 entitled "Is It Enough To Be Human?", as part of the series "Can I Honestly Believe?", on the occasion of Pentecost XI, at Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI. Scripture references: Luke 15:20, Psalm 103:14, Genesis 2,17.
Consciousness
Emergence of Human