Full Transcript

M. Shoemaker. Brother Jim and Bishop, who said more in a few minutes about AA than I’ve ever said in a long time, and friend Henry, who said entirely too much about me. You can charge most of it up to Henry’s good-heartedness rather than to the facts. But this is always a joy. I was with a gang like this in Baltimore last Sunday night, and I never feel quite as much at home as I feel in an AA meeting. After I had spoken down at the gathering in St. Louis six years ago, a gal came up to me and said, Dr. Sand, you may not be an alcoholic, but you certainly do talk like one. And I said that was one of the compliments that I’d had in my life. And my association with this thing has been one of my joys and privileges. And it still is a wonderful thing to see this great tide of the spirit, really, rise and go higher and higher, not only in the number of people that are being touched, but I believe in the growth in the older people that have been touched for a long time. Because as the Bishop says, unless there’s that kind of growth after, we don’t stand still. You don’t get hooked back on a ratchet someplace where you just stay sober. We’re meant to go, because this is life in the spirit. I had a call the other day from a friend of mine down here, a little embarrassed that there wasn’t going to be any honorarium for coming. I said, as far as I know, there’s never any honorarium in connection with Alcoholics Anonymous. And I think one of the best things about it is that the finances never got mixed up with it. There aren’t any dues. If you want to give, you give out of your own heart.

The thing doesn’t run on air anymore, and churches run on air. But this is not the financial, this financial business is not primary. The commitment is primary, and you do what you want out of your heart afterwards. And I wanted that understood, and to say that I was thankful and happy to come on that basis, of course. I don’t ever want to see that mercenary motive get into it. My goodness, if that had ever gotten into the thing in the early days, what a shambles it would have made out of AA. I think this group has, by the grace of God, avoided more pitfalls and mistakes than pretty much any group of people setting out to do a particular thing like this that I know about in history. And it’s not a very long step for any of the rest of us. I don’t see any difference between getting drunk on whiskey or gin or beer and getting drunk on temper and lust and resentment and fear.

I often tell about a woman in my old parish in New York who was a very old-fashioned right-hand top drawer lady, colony club, and I guess a good Republican, and social register and all the works. Been a member of my church about 50 years at that time. One day she said to me, I wish you would talk to a friend of my daughter-in-law. I said, so why do you want me to see her? She said she gets drunk. She’s an alcoholic. I said, why don’t you talk to her?

She said, well, you see, I’ve never had that problem. I said, neither have I. But you’ve been saying to God for about 50 years every Sunday morning of your life that you were a miserable offender. Did you mean it or didn’t you mean it? Because if you’re a miserable offender along one line, you can understand a miserable offender along another one, and it isn’t so much of a jump. And I said, I guess, my friend, you get drunk sometimes, too. She was horrified.

Wanted me to tell her how I thought she got drunk. I said, no, you wouldn’t want me to tell you. She said, yes, I would, but that time she was full of curiosity. I said, well, sometimes a few of us get a little drunk on self-righteous. That’s why I think the church, as the bishop has suggested, has got a whale of a lot to learn. Not from us individually so much, but from the incredible gathered experience of a would-be God that those things were happening in every church, that are happening pretty steadily and consistently in this fellowship of concerned and committed and beginning-to-be-changed people.

Not saints, but beginning-to-be-changed people. That’s what all of us can be and ought to be. And if we think we’re too much past that, we’re in real danger. It’s fun meeting in a Methodist church. I just was sitting here wondering how many of you ever thought you’d wind up in a church at all, let alone a Methodist church. I always tell the Methodists I wish that they and we Episcopalians had never gotten separated

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because they had the fire and we had the fireplace.

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Some Methodists have gotten so terribly respectable and liturgical these later years that I don’t know whether they don’t need a little firing up too. Sam Jones used to give it to them. He was one of them. Sam Jones was talking at Baltimore a great many years ago. He was lamb-based and a Methodist. He was a Methodist himself. Somebody says, Sam, why don’t you take out after the Episcopalians and the Roman Catholics and some of the rest of them?

Sam says, when I get through with the Methodists, it’s time to go to bed. Well, it’s great to go after our own crowd. Now, there’s just a couple of things I’d like to go into a little bit with you this afternoon. And this first part may be carrying codes to Newcastle, but it may not be. It concerns a little bit of the early history of AA. You may have read it all and you may not have read it. But I took these notes one time when Bill was talking in New York and I’ve kept them.

He says this thing started in Zurich in 1930. I’m going to look at these notes a little bit carefully. But a fellow named Roland Hazard went to see Dr. Jung, the great psychiatrist who died not very long ago. I knew Roland Hazard well. He became a member of my church later in New York. There’s a little window just inside the front door of Calvary Church in his memory. He stayed for a year under Dr. Jung’s care, at the end of which he felt it was possible to be released, and he went out, and in a few weeks he was back again drunk.

He went to Dr. Jung and he said, is there nothing I can do? And Dr. Jung said, I’ve got to be frank. I never saw one alcoholic of your kind recover under my care, and I can’t do anything for you. And Roland was shattered. And he said, isn’t there anything I can do? Dr. Jung said, sometimes alcoholics have a conversion that liberates them. And Roland said, where can I find such a thing? And Dr. Jung said, if you look, maybe you’ll find.

In those days, the Oxford Group was using our parish house in New York as headquarters. It was the earlier and, I believe, better days of the old group, days when I was closely identified with it and learned a great deal from it. And he began to come down and listen to ordinary people talking, in much the way you all talk, about what had happened in their own lives. He heard about the All-For-Absolutes.

The great Presbyterian layman, Dr. Robert E. Speer, once said the summary of the Sermon on the Mount was absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness, and absolute love. And he heard those four principles expounded, and he listened to them. And he began to experience the liberation that he has often told me about himself personally. He got a hold of an old book called For Sinners Only.

He read it on a train once from New York to Detroit, and he says it converted him cold sober. Then a fellow named Shep Cornell and another one named Sieber Graves joined him on his farm up in Glastonbury. And these fellows had known Ebby Thatcher, and Ebby had been raising cane in the old ways. I remember hearing Ebby tell the story about driving a car between two trees that no sober man would try to get between with a car, and stabbing the front of the car into the corner of a lady’s house, and tearing down the corner of the house.

She was in the kitchen, she was perfectly terrified, upon which Ebby said, Hello, I just dropped in for a cup of coffee. And she took him to law, not because he tore the house down, but because of his impertinence. And Roland Hazard had made a tremendous impression upon these people. And he’d begun to find an answer in God. And Bill says that the first step in Alcoholics Anonymous was that the God of science had spoken doom.

Those were his words. The second factor was Dr. Silkworth. I never knew Dr. Silkworth, though I had his funeral in Calvary Church. Bill went to town’s hospital in the summer of 34, and Dr. Silkworth thought he might be one that would recover. And Lois, his wife, said to the doctor, he wants to stop, why can’t he? And the doctor said, Bill’s habit is now an obsession, his will can’t do it. No physical help alone can be brought to bear on the situation.

She said, what next? Dr. Silkworth, he said, I think you have to lock him up or he’ll go mad or he’ll die. Well, he left town sanitarium and he was going all right for a while.

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Then, Bill says, it was on November 11, 1934, Lois went to work, and Bill set out to go over to Staten Island to play golf. There was a bus accident, and they had to stand on the sidewalk in the cold. And a fellow standing beside him said, let’s go in and get a drink. And Bill said, I order ginger ale. The man said, don’t you drink? Bill said, no, this is an obsession with me and I can’t do it, so I drink ginger ale, but you go right on.

They got back on the bus, and on the way to the golf course, the bus stopped again. The man said, let’s go in and get a sandwich. They were talking about shooting and fishing and reminiscing about the armistice in France in 1918, about how good the champagne was in Bordeaux. Along came a bartender and put on two glasses in front of him, and the waiter said to Bill, this is armistice day, have one on the house.

And Bill said, all right. The other man said, are you crazy? But Bill drank, and that was the end of that. And the next day, he was back in the area way of 182 Clinton Street, Brooklyn, which was the house in which they were at that time living. Then two weeks later, Herbie Thatcher came in to see him, and he offered Herbie a drink. Herbie said, I’m not drinking. Bill said, what’s got into you? Herbie said, I’ve got religion.

Bill said, then I knew he was crazy. But Herbie began talking to him about the Oxford group and about Rowland Hatch. And from the old group in its earlier days, Bill says that AA learned the idea of moral inventory, and then of confession, and then of restitution, and then of carrying it out to others, and of dependence on God and God’s guidance. Those five factors came into AA from the old Oxford group.

Herbie was talking to Bill over the kitchen table. Bill said, where did you find these things? And Herbie told him. And Bill began to come over, and he said he never could get out of his mind the face of Herbie across that table. Herbie had had problems for a long, long time, and it looked like he’d begun to find the answer. Bill says, at that time, I was being made ready. We had a rescue mission in connection with my parish in New York, a cavalry mission down on East 23rd Street in what was called the old Gas House District.

It was a place in those days when the elevated coming down 3rd Avenue went across 23rd Street for a while and then went down 2nd Avenue. It was an awful tough old neighborhood. And my parish owned a loft down there on the bottom floor of which there was a little chapel. It wasn’t much use. And the old Harry Hadley, whose father, Sam Hadley, you read about in William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, himself an alcoholic until his father’s death and then converted largely through his father’s death, was the wonderful superintendent of that mission and did a marvelous job.

Did all that you could do, I think, in a rescue mission. And I thought it would be nice to kind of run a little annex to the rescue mission up in the parish house. I had a lot of nice gentleman drunk friends that had been schoolmates and college mates of mine. I thought it would be nice to get a bunch of them together. They could help each other. We got them together and they helped each other all right, but they helped each other down and not up.

I didn’t realize how badly we were doing until one Sunday morning I went down into my church that was over the altar of the church, a great empty cross, the cross without Christ. And what was my horror to look up at that thing and see that shining right through the middle of it where the two cross pieces were, the moon face of an alarm clock. And some of my boys had gotten gay on Saturday night and the parish house was right jammed up against the church.

It wasn’t very far to throw it. He got mad at his alarm clock and that’s where it stopped. Now, we were doing some good things, I think, for the stumble bums down on 23rd Street and I’ll always be grateful for it. But I believe Bill and others saw that that was not the way to reach the ordinary alcoholic and I’m glad for the mistakes that we made so they didn’t have to make them. Bill went back to town after a while.

One day he lay there in a great depression, utterly agonized in spirit and desperate. And he said to God he was ready to do anything if he could find the answer. And he said suddenly the place went electric. It was as if he was on a high mountain. It was as if he was on a high mountain with a high wind blowing in another world. He said it was ecstasy. And his assurance was complete. And he was deeply aware of a presence that was doing for him just what he was asking be done. And that was the change in him that made him realize that change could come to other people.

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Another factor that added into AA was the effect of William James’ great book, The Variety of Religious Experiences, I referred to a moment ago. Bill read that book and found out that when people are in great need, these transforming experiences come to people who surrender, not people who say they surrender, but people who let go, people who are desperate enough to give up faith in themselves and say without God the situation is hopeless and with him it is not hopeless.

Scientists said you can’t do it yourself. The Oxford group had come in to bring the spiritual side of it. Dr. Silkworth had talked about the medical and physical side to it. And then William James fortified the spiritual as that great book did fortify the spiritual when a great psychologist understood and in a sense described in psychological language what religious experience is. Bill said after that for a while he felt he was the messiah, he had to get this thing across to all the drunks in the world. Well all I got to say is I’m glad he did. You and I wouldn’t be here today if he hadn’t.

Sometimes God can take the mistaken and egotistical good drives of a person and slowly refine those things until they become of great use to him and of great use to humanity and that’s what happened. And you remember that the first group of AA was not in New York, it was in Akron. Bill went on to say that it was a proxy row that took him out on behalf of his firm to Akron. He said he hoped to get control, Bill said, mark the word, in a certain company that he worked for.

He was in the Mayflower Hotel one Saturday afternoon with ten dollars in his pocket. The bar room was filling up and he felt afraid. He said I was in a fair way to get drunk again. He felt the need of another alcoholic with whom he could talk so he’d forget his own troubles and try to help him. He hit on a church directory, and if you think those things did much good to stand on a counter in a hotel lobby, but he just weaved it around and ran his finger down and came to St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Walter F. Tunks Rector, and he took a chance and he called up Walter and Walter caught on very quickly.

He said I’ve got just the person to meet you, and he called immediately on Mrs. Henrietta Seibling, who was the daughter-in-law of old Seibling, the head of the entire company. Bill said she wouldn’t want to bother with a drunk Saturday afternoon, he said yes she would, and they got together. While Bill was coming out there, she called Dr. Bob, who had been referred to a minute ago, and his wife Ann, and said I’ve got a man down here I want you to talk to. Dr. Bob said I’ve got to see my patients, I’ve got five minutes. He came and spent five hours and he said Bill was the only fellow he’d ever seen that had the pitch.

And pretty soon they asked Bill to come over and stay in their house, which he did, instead of staying in the hotel. Pretty soon they began to go to work, went down to one of the city hospitals and got a hold of the fellow who’d been there for about six months. So bad they had to strap him down, they talked to him, saw his name was Bill D. He was profoundly changed and never left. And Bill said there were three candles lit in Akron that stayed lit.

I want to just put one footnote of my own into that story to set the record straight. There has gotten going in a kind of a rumor that I had a lot to do with the Twelve Steps. I didn’t have anything more to do with those Twelve Steps than that book had. Those Twelve Steps, I believe, came to Bill by himself. I think he told me that they came to him in about forty minutes. And I think it’s one of the great instances of direct inspiration that I know in human history.

Inspiration which doesn’t only bring material straight down out of heaven, but brings rather, I think, from God the ability to interpret human experience in such a way that you distill it down into transmissible principles. I compare it to Moses going up on a mountain and coming down with ten tables of the law. I don’t think that’s the first time Moses ever thought about righteousness. But I’m glad he went up there and got to his ten and brought them down and gave them to him. And I’m glad Bill got quiet for those forty minutes until he finished off these Twelve Steps. And I believe they have only been changed by about one word.

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Bill said at the end of this talk, who invented AA? It was God Almighty that invented AA. But this is the story of how we learn to be free. And he closed by saying God granted AA and the program of recovery and unity and service be a story that continues into the future as long as God needs it. Praise be to God for it and for the life of that fellow and all those who were with him in the beginnings of this incredible movement. I want to go on to say a little bit about the idea of practicing this in all our affairs.

Because I’m convinced that while AA has been guided and entirely right, I think, to confine itself officially and for the most part to helping other alcoholics, I think there is wisdom in AA for everybody and it ought to have a profound effect upon the churches and upon people outside the churches, upon anybody that wants to get straightened out. And find a real way of life in the midst of all the subtle and open idolatries on which a lot of our modern Americans base our lives.

So I’m going to tell you some stories a little bit later on of some other people besides alcoholics and some of the things that they’re doing. But I want to say first I think there are four things that we face today which are your concern and mine and had better be our personal concern from here on out. And the first is the communist specter. My old friend Sir George McLeod of the Iowana community has been over in this country lately. He said somewhere not long ago, civilization is four days away from chaos.

He doesn’t mean that chaos is going to be here four days from now. I think he does mean that if the right factors were loosed, it would only take four days for what we call civilization to crumble and crack up into chaos. And I’m afraid that is true and we do not know to what degree communism has got our communications, what other agencies, we have no idea, already wired so that a takeover would be possible.

I hope that’s not true, but so did the people in Czechoslovakia and Poland and North Korea and the other places that have been taken. And wishing and hoping the other fellow would do it was not enough. How diabolic that thing can be, it seems to me, keeps coming out. I saw the other day that Major Titov said we are very proud Premier Khrushchev called Gagarin and me heavenly brothers. I must let you in on a secret. We cosmonauts and many Soviet people call Khrushchev our heavenly father. Now ain’t that something? The hell of it is, they believe it.

They believe it a lot more than a lot of us Christians believe our stuff. And here is the old revealed truth about life in that book. And it’s free and it’s wide open and we can all find out about it and we can all live that way if we want to. And here these fellows come along with pure materialism, unadulterated atheism, with all the methods of chicanery and mendacity that they’ll use to gain their ends, and we sit by and wring our hands and say, isn’t it awful?

Next thing is the enormous number of underprivileged people in the world. I mean hungry people and unlettered people and half-sick people. We ought to have been concerned about them long before. They always were God’s children. Our Lord’s been telling us for 2,000 years, inasmuch as you did it or did it not, unto one of the least of these, in the islands of the Pacific, in the ends of the earth where you can’t see them, people of all kinds of colored skins, at home and abroad, inasmuch as you did it not, you did it not unto me, inasmuch as you did it, you did it unto me.

They’re his folks, they’re his people, they’re his children. We ought to have been getting at this thing long ago, but today the situation is acute because they’re going to follow one thing or the other. They’re going to follow some way of life that we in the so-called Christian West show to them, or they’re going to follow the other way that communism promises and then does not perform.

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Which way it goes is pretty largely up to us. We hear about this thing, but we don’t do much. I want to say a little about that in a minute. Third thing is a largely unawakened America. Honestly, the number of people that are still thinking that the main thing is whether you drive a better car than the fellow in the next bracket down below you in the business, and for gals, whether they finally get that mink coat, whether that hair really looks quite good enough for this reception, these are the things that really seem to make us tick.

We’re burning up, and these are the values. A lot of us are sitting in church, listening to it, letting it pretty well go over our heads. Made up our minds a long time ago just about how far we were going to go, about how far we were going to let the Lord take us, and we stopped going way back, 5, 10, 15, 20, sometimes 40 years ago. Now, the fourth thing is a half-awakened church, because the church itself is more concerned with hundreds of thousands of dollars put into gorgeous edifices and parish houses than it is into missions.

My church is a status church, according to the Status Seeker book, and we stand, I believe, 39th in the list of missionary giving. It’s a scandal. It’s not a problem. It’s a scandal. We just don’t care, and we don’t care because we’re not anywhere near half converted. That kind of a church, pushover for communism. Anybody that’s got a real concern about the world is not going to take a church like that very seriously. Oh, I know we’re very historic, we’re very correct as far as all that’s concerned, but you’ve got to be more than that in this day.

Now, what are we going to do with these things? Any answer to them? Let me give you some things I think we might do. First thing is, I think we had better learn a great deal more about the relation of freedom, which we all enjoy and all want to keep, to faith, which we put a good way down the line of our priorities. I want to read you an old quotation I’m very fond of. This came from James Russell Lowell when he was ambassador to Great Britain way back in the, not much past the middle of the last century, but it’s as timely as if it had been written yesterday.

He talked about these skeptical fellows that can get along without God. He says the worst kind of religion is no religion at all. And these men living in ease and luxury, indulging themselves in the amusement of going without a religion, may be thankful that they live in lands where the gospel they neglect has tamed the beastliness and ferocity of men who, but for Christianity, might long ago have eaten their carcasses like the South Sea oxen.

Or cut off their heads and tanned their hides like the monsters of the French Revolution. When the microscopic search of skepticism, which has hunted the heavens and sounded the seas to disprove the existence of a creator, has turned its attention to human society, and has found a place on this planet ten miles square where a man may live in decency, comfort, and security, supporting and educating his children, unspoiled and unpolluted, a place where age is reverenced, infants are respected, womanhood honored, and human life held in due regard, when skeptics can find such a place.

Ten miles square on this globe, where the gospel has not gone and cleared the way and laid the foundations and made decency and security possible, it will then be in order for the skeptical literati to move with and ventilate their views. I think that’s a doozy. I’d like to see that every newspaper in the country. That’s got some philosophy in it. And America needs some philosophy about as badly as anything I know.

Let’s get to pitch. Freedom, as we know it in the Western world, is largely a derivative of the Christian heritage. The root is faith and the fruit is freedom, and if you want to keep the fruit, you better

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look for the root. William Penn said what? If men refuse to be governed by God, they condemn themselves to be ruled by tyrants. I don’t believe you can put the real option in history any better than that, and the option is not between a society that tries to put God at the top and some nice liberal idea where you can bow God out and just live on the nice principles that we’ve learned in a democratic society.

They won’t stand up. The real alternative to the thing that you and I know in the free world is what you’ve got in the communist world, and you just take your choice. When the Archbishop of Canterbury was over in this country a few years ago, he said that a man today is a convinced Christian or a convinced communist or else he’s an ambivalent entity. Theoretically that isn’t so, but practically that is so, and if you want to do something about freedom, you just be dead sure that you’ve got free churches, churches free to speak the word of God, churches open to all people, churches where human beings are human beings.

It may be the last place on earth where there are human beings. I’m not sure how much longer education is going to stand up and be counted in its evaluation of human personality as religion seems to leak away from our modern education. As for the church, let me give you two quotations. Here’s one from Amy O’Brien. Amy O’Brien says the church exists by mission as fire exists by burning. The noun and the verb are the same thing.

What it is and what it does are inseparable. There is no fire without burning, there is no burning without fire. The noun and the verb are the same thing. Church and mission are one thing, they’re not two things. You don’t get a strong church and then go out to evangelize. If you’re Christian, you go out to evangelize and that’s the way you get a strong church. There’s a wonderful prologue to J.D. Phillips’ translation of the Acts of the Apostles, best critique on a modern church I’ve ever read.

There’s a sentence in there that goes this way. These early Christians were led by the Spirit to the main task of bringing people to God through Christ and were not permitted to enjoy fascinating sidetracks. That’s what’s right about our churches, fascinating sidetracks, bake sales, and I don’t know what all crosses in heaven knows what. It’s all very nice if you’ve got time to do it, if you’ve got the main thing done first, but sometimes when you’re doing these things instead of the main thing, they don’t do so well.

There’s a step between paganism and the church that I think the church itself little understands. It’s really the step of rebirth. We take a person who’s been a pagan and we make an Episcopalian of it, we make a Methodist of it, we make a Roman Catholic of it, we make a Quaker of it, something else. This is a quick process. Is that what should happen? Or should the first step be, look, are you going to become a Christian at all?

After that we’ll discuss the minutiae. Decide whether you’re going to the service first, then we’ll talk about which regiments. And a lot of us got in on false pretenses. Did you ever find yourself painting the side of your house on a board fence, going up and down, and a bug flew into the paint, and you tried to get him out, turned the paintbrush around, tried to get him out with the end of it, that wouldn’t work, and you tried your fingernail, that wouldn’t get him out, and you decided to paint him in.

That’s what a lot of us did when we got inside the church. And that’s what the ministers did, God have mercy on us. They painted it in too. Now, it isn’t that we’re going to wait until people get perfect before we take them into the church. But there’s one thing about being perfect, there’s another thing about being honest, and really trying to get there. I knew a theological professor once who got converted after he’d been teaching theology about 25 years, he was about 50 years old when he got converted.

He said the trouble with him was he got starched and ironed before he got washed. All of us in the church just need a little going over, my friends, you know that? And the longer we’ve been in there, the more we need a going over. The more we sit in that pew and just take an attitude on what the man says up here in the pulpit, instead of getting out there and sweating our shirts out like you fellas do for your people.

And what we ought to be doing for the needy people on the outside everywhere, if we were doing that, we wouldn’t be in quite so much trouble.

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Let me just say this too. People are going to listen to us just about in proportion as they find in us joy in our faith, and relish in doing the work that we believe God wants us to do. That’s true about laypeople, it’s true about ministers. My friend Lawson Young, Red Cap 42 in Grand Central, who was one of the great forces for Jesus Christ in New York City, not so much numerically as qualitatively.

Twenty years has that fella been reaching people in Grand Central Station, about as impossible a thing to do as anybody can do, but he does it. He was turned in the direction of Christ by an old colored lady who lived in his apartment and used to come each Sunday and take a child to church. And I listened to Lawson one day when he was talking, described that old lady, and this is what he said about her.

She had the gaiety. She was a live wire. Buoyancy, that’s what I mean. It’s bubbling. Never a dull day. You that kind of a Christian? Or are you one of these Christians that’s always kind of having a little trouble? I met one the other day. She’s perfectly happy when she’s just a little bit miserable. And she never kind of understands why these things happen to her because she’s always been such a good woman.

What are you going to do serving a man on the cross, giving his life for the world at 33, and then you wonder why would you have been so good that it should happen to you of all the fantastic ideas. Listen to this verse. This is Phillips’ translation of St. Luke 734. The Son of Man came enjoying life, and you say, look, a drunkard and a glutton, a bosom friend of the tax collector and the outsider.

Those are Jesus’ own credentials. That’s what he said about himself. The Son of Man came enjoying life, and you say, look, a drunkard and a glutton, a bosom friend of the tax collector and the outsider. Not much room for self-righteousness in that, not much room for gloom either. One of the things we need is small groups. One of the greatest things that’s happened in AA, of course, is the fact that you get together in companies that are not large companies like this where two or three people have got to have it all their own way, but little companies where everybody gets to say.

This trains people. They find out what it is. They find out how you say it, how you put it so another person understands it. You get some guy or gal that talks too long, and you kind of pull them down. You get another one that’s kind of shy and doesn’t want to talk, and you pull them out. And they learn. And sometimes, as the bishop suggested, you’ve got your pitch in a matter of a few days or hours, and Christians are sitting around, golly, I demand my church.

I said, why don’t you win in people? Why don’t you win in people? It’s sort of on my vestry. Oh, he said I’d have to make a long study of the matter before I ever did anything like that. I said, would you please tell me what in H you’ve been doing in Calvary Church for four years? I don’t know who those sort of janitors and jammers were, Bishop, maybe you can tell me, but I like what it says about it.

They’re always learning and never coming to a knowledge of the truth. Church is full of folks like that. Always learning, always listening, never coming to a knowledge of the truth. Those new AA fellows get it sometimes in a week. You get the pitch. You find out what it is. You don’t know all about it, but you know enough about it so you can be relevant and intelligent when you’re talking to somebody on the outside and begin to follow the track of it yourself.

The cell group is of major importance. We’ve got a great professor out there in Pittsburgh named Achenheim, University of Pittsburgh, a man in business and also a teacher. He put a lot in one. When he wrote the sentence that I put down the other day, the cell group is the way to get and dispense information on God and country. I like that one. The cell group is the way to get and dispense information on God and country, and those cell groups are in many places the sign of awakening, just as definite a sign of awakening as it is when some of you hook up with an AA group.

Now, practicing these principles in all our affairs, I read a piece quite not long ago that came from the Department of Laity of the Royal Council of Churches in which there was this sentence. Is something happening in the name of Jesus Christ in your sector of the activities of this world? Is something happening in the name of Jesus Christ in your sector of the activities of this world?

[00:40:03]

It’s a great thing to sit up and sing Like a Mighty Army Moves the Church of God and all these wonderful hymns and listen to scripture and pray in church, but what do you do when you’re outside? Can you talk to people naturally about it? Not in such a way it drives them off, but in such a way that it gets their attention. The president of Harvard University said to his undergraduates when they graduated three years ago this month, the finest fruit of serious learning should be the ability to speak the word God without reserve or embarrassment.

That, coming from the head of the greatest institution in this land, I think is something. That man’s a Christian, no bones about it. The finest fruit of serious learning should be the ability to speak the word God without reserve or embarrassment. Can you do that? Or do you pull a long face? You AAs don’t do it because you’ve learned not to. I’m talking about you church members in the AA. Do you do it?

Because you know, it’s possible to come through a gladsome experience, tough time first, and then a gladsome experience that gets you into AA, and then get in church, and then get kind of solemn and holy. And then neither the Lord nor the devil’s got any use for you. Bring your humanity with you. Don’t forget your joy and your humanness. But with that, you and I’ve got to reach this non-Christian part of America, this part of America that doesn’t care anything about the kind of thing we’re talking about right here, isn’t aware that they have anything to do with his safety, or what kind of a world his children and grandchildren are going to grow up in.

I love to watch laymen when they get started, get started doing it in and through their daily jobs, in and through their daily… I’m not trying to make preachers out of laymen. That’s fake. I don’t want to see them find my professional habits. I want them to let the Lord Jesus Christ come through their professional media and techniques and obligations, routines, 95 Monday to Friday kind of business.

I’ve got a great friend up in Canada who’s a doctor. His name is Overton Stevens. He lives near Toronto. Comical stick. Good doctor. He wrote me not long ago. Had a perfectly grand time last night down at the university. Spoke to about 200 medical and nursing students. Gave them my Ben Casey routine. I give them some case histories I’ve seen in my practice, present the problems to them and ask, how would Dr. Ben Casey or you deal with this?

And then finally give them the solution, that is, how God solved the problem. Amazing how one can sneak in the gospel message when their guard is down. I wrote back. I said, Steve, give me a little more about your Ben Casey business. And he wrote back my Ben Casey routine simply this. I give several case histories from my practice. I give the problem involving the person or persons. This is a problem that has to be diagnosed and treated.

What would the great Dr. Ben Casey do in this situation? What would he do? Then I tell them what I would have done at one point in my career as an M.D. Then I tell them that some characters got their hands on me. That’s what a bunch of us have gotten to know about 15 years ago. And I became different in every way. Then I wind up telling them what actually happened in the lives of these people when I was able to call in the great physician in consultation.

I choose cases that are entirely different and varied. And in telling the stories, I’m able to bring in a lot of straight gospel truth. I guess it’s sort of sneaking up on people. This is sort of sneaking up on people. But they seem to take this medicine as if it were hidden in jam. Of course, almost everyone who hears the stories has had the same problems in varying degrees. Good old Ben Casey. Wish I had him in my clinic.

Now there’s no separation between that fellow’s Sunday business and his Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday business. He lives it in all one life. He practices principles very much like the ones you and I know in his daily affairs. Here’s a young businessman in New York. I met him at a college where I was speaking about three years ago. We were in a fraternity that’s not famous for its piety. But they gave me a hearing for about an hour and a half, at the end of which God had worked an amazing miracle in that little group of people.

I can’t quite understand it, but it happened. So there’s a quote that I said, Boys, I don’t know what you like to do, but I’d like to pray. I’d like to pray, and I don’t want to do the praying myself, and if any of you fellas feel like praying, just say what you’ve got on your heart in about a sentence.

[00:45:01]

Twenty-seven of those guys prayed right in the living room of their fraternity. This is one of those. He came up to Pittsburgh six or eight months later, and he hunted me up. We had a talk. We got on to what his needs were, what his problems were, and he made a kind of a decision. Then he didn’t follow it up. And you can have an awful nice baby, but if you don’t feed him and keep him warm, he’s going to die.

And he just didn’t feed him or train him or do anything with his own soul, and it left. He came back again. We talked some more. Finally, he began to get started. Here’s a couple of letters from him. I found the Lord has been a great help to me both downtown at work and at the apartment with the other roommates in guiding my life. It may take some time, but I think we’ll eventually have four Christian roommates and a real group down on Wall Street where the Lord’s guiding some help.

He went out on a team of about 85 people who went from all over the East, really, up to one section of Pittsburgh on a recent Sunday to just infest that whole town. And we need some more of this. I had a letter from him. He said, Pittsburgh was a marvelous experience, not only worthwhile but wonderfully enjoyable. I never felt so much part of God’s work and so secure and happy in his hands. Bruce put me on as part of the faith at work team, and I ended up witnessing and leading a number of group meetings with other members of the team and even speaking to two Sunday school groups. It was thrilling and real, and God directed the whole thing.

I’m presently thinking of getting involved with teaching a Sunday school here in New York and taking part in a young adult group meetings during the week in an effort to do more and become more fully a part of God’s work. I feel this need to know that if I don’t, what little I am doing now will not be enough to keep me in the stream. It’s funny the way God works. The more I say yes to God, the more I do and the more I become involved, the more I feel and know that I must do these things or lose everything. It may be selfish, but it makes me move. The whole 12-step business, you see, works with the rest of them just exactly like it works with you.

One more story and I’m done. In your congregations there are some unwilling people. You may see them sometimes and you may not see them very often. They may come under pressure. Some of them have been burned over. They’ve had too much when they were young. It was of the wrong kind. We had a kid in my parish out there in Pittsburgh, no longer a kid, he was a grown man by the time I got to know him. He’d been a choir boy and an acolyte. He said he’d had enough to last him the rest of his life. Now, what happens with a fellow like that? I guess somebody was praying for that boy because he fell in love with a gal who was a Christian gal. She wasn’t a member of my church, but she was a Christian.

Charlie’s a great big guy about that big and Emily’s a little gal about that big. How are they going to work this out? She was wise enough to make some plans about religion before they got married. What a foolish thing it is for a husband and wife to get married. Never talk about these matters of the spirit at all until after they get in it. Then nobody’s got any leverage over anybody else. They talked about it. Charlie said, I’ll tell you, I go to church with you 50% of the time. If you stay away and stay home with me the other 50% of the time. Emily said, all right, she’d agree to that. Charlie said, my time includes weddings and funerals too. She said, all right, I’ll take you up on that.

So after they were married, I began to see this couple come to church on Sunday morning. Looking like nothing so much as a small girl with a great big unwilling St. Bernard puppy on a leash. Charlie looking absolutely wretched, more wretched with every step as he came down the aisle to sit down. Now if something happens under those conditions, it gets better or it gets worse. One Sunday morning, Charlie got up, right in the middle of the service, he was about halfway back, and he stood up and in a whisper that everybody could hear, he said, I’m leaving this damn place and I’m never coming back.

Now you know I don’t ever want to do that. Then go out of the door and hand me a limp hand like an oyster and say I enjoyed your sermon so much. I say to them, now if you enjoyed my sermon, you didn’t understand it. It wasn’t meant for enjoyment. Now I know sometimes they mean that in all good faith. Don’t let’s be too hard on him, but in other words, give me a fellow with some fight in him. You can do something with him.

Well, he did go out, but he made his agreement with Emily and a couple of Sundays he was back, looking still very miserable. In the meantime, Emily said, Charlie, look, there’s a couple of groups meeting over in Edgewood. Let’s go and find out what they’re talking about.

[00:50:15]

What are they talking about, Charlie? Talking about God, said Emily. Charlie began to tear his hair. He said, isn’t it enough to go to church on Sundays? You’ve got to go on Wednesdays, too. She said, Charlie, what do you think those people do? He said, I don’t know what to do. I suppose they roll on the floor and tear their hair and speak in tongues. I don’t know what to do. She said, you crazy idiot, you know those men downtown in business. You play golf with some of those fellows on Saturday. Do you think they’d just go crazy when they’re talking about faith? Come on, give it a try. Leave the car running outside and go out and get in if you want to, but give it a try. And Charlie tried it. And he found a lot of sensible people talking about life and God, and he stayed. And he went back.

Not long after we began a course that I like to give, to get some of those bugs out, a course on how to become a Christian. We tried to give it to all our people before they were confirmed. One thing, teach them about the Episcopal Church. Another thing, teach them about Jesus Christ. They’re not necessarily antithetical, but they’re not necessarily the same. And she thought it would be good for Charlie to come. She asked him to come. But this time, Charlie wasn’t quite so hard to get. And he came. Second time in, after the session was over, Charlie said to me, could I talk to you sometime? I said, I’d love it. When are you coming?

Saturday afternoon, I said, all right. We took two hours off. We sat down and talked it out. He said, how do you start? You know, I’ve been bluffing all the way through. I said, I know all about it. I said, I started by trying to face what there was in my life that God didn’t like. Somebody said, why don’t you take hold of God by the handle of our sins? Just as many of you have taken hold of God by the handle of alcohol. Wouldn’t have known it if it hadn’t been for this. And in that sense, thank God for what you’ve been through. Because you’ve learned how to live, but find out how not to live.

Charlie told me what some of his sins were. We got on our knees, and Charlie gave his life to Christ in a very simple decision. And before that night he got off his knees, he turned sideways to me. He said, when can I go somewhere and talk about this? Wasn’t he going through a great long stint of studies or something or other? He was different, and he knew it. And he was ready to try to talk about it, just like you all are. I said, Friday night over at Chatham College, you and Emily come. They came. And they both spoke. They both witnessed. It was great stuff.

Lovely stuff. Human. Natural. God just all through it. Conviction in it. Challenge in it. But no pride. I suppose those two youngsters have talked sixty times together since then. I had Charlie with me down at a mission in Houston just two or three weeks ago. He and his witness, as I was talking down at church one night, talking about what had happened to him. Who do you think was in my church on Laman Sunday speaking in my pulpit one year to the day that he went out saying, I’m going to leave this deep place and never coming back? Who do you think was in my pulpit? Charlie and Emily were in my pulpit. Charlie had taken up about that much of it, and Emily had taken up about this much of it. But there they were.

It can happen. Charlie and Emily have been moved down to New Orleans now. People say to me, oh my, what a sad thing. Wonderful couple like that, and then you lose them. They haven’t lost them. They haven’t lost anybody. Not if they really changed people. If they’ve got the fire of God in them, they’ll set the fire alight somewhere else. Did you ever try to burn along a line of leaves, and you got tired of the thing kind of burning along very slowly, and you picked up a rake full of them over here and put them down over here, and then you took some of them and put them over here, and you got the whole business burned? Yeah. If you’ve got fire, you can do that. You’re not worried about the place. It’ll burn anywhere. And they weren’t there any time until they had a group going, and still going.

People like that multiply themselves spiritually, like the early church did. Church exists by fire. Church exists by mission, and fire exists by burning. Are you that kind of a Christian? Have you let this thing get out into all of your life? Yes, there’s a quarter of your life that’ll be forever AA. Thank God for it. It’s one of the things that ties you down to reality and keeps your feet on the ground. Great. But you’re citizens, you’re housewives, you’re businessmen, you represent all sorts and kinds of people, you’re members of communities and on all kinds of boards.

Let’s let this thing down into hospital boards and community agencies and not just welfare kind of things, business things. So the spirit of God doesn’t only get at the alcoholism in us. It gets at the need and the selfishness and the bewilderment and the materialism and the bad judgment of people that can well take this country off its course.

[00:55:17]

And get us back again going in the way we’re in we should go. God help us to do it. What a man. To say in AA that I have not grown would be ungrateful in gratitude. To say that people have not influenced me would be a lie. To say three things to give these three men three, give them part of m