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Following the swift victory of the allied armies in the Persian Gulf, the allied commander was interviewed on television. "Do you think that God was on your side?" General H. Norman Schwarzkopf was asked. He paused a moment and then said, "When you look at the results, how can you think otherwise?"

Abraham Lincoln was not so certain of divine favor as was the general. In the closing months of the Civil War, he said in his second inaugural address: "Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained ....Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. . . . The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully."

Does God take sides in violent encounters? We asked ourselves that during the civil rights movement; it is asked in South Africa today. It is a question raised by the Gospel story of the cleansing of the temple, in which Jesus uses strong-arm tactics on merchants and money changers. On the face of it, the answer supplied by that narrative would seem to be affirmative. But let the question hang in the air while we examine Mark 11: 15-18 in some detail.

Literary critics say of a narrative that it works at several levels. Stories are like an archaeological dig: You remove one layer of meaning and find another layer underneath. The account of Jesus’ temple tantrum is like that, except that it is more helpful to think upward rather than downward. The progression of discovery is like a mountain ascent: Each new version of the story invites us to take a few steps further, and the terrain changes markedly as we progress - just as one passes through several climatic zones in climbing a mountain. And when we reach our goal, the view is panoramic.

Reaching the City

The cleansing of the temple can be told as a tale of the small-town boy come to the city. After a ministry among the villages in Galilee, Jesus comes to his nation’s capital. Nazareth and Capernaum give way to Jerusalem. Mr. Smith goes to Washington, the Maid of Orleans goes to Paris. What began in a regional theater now opens on Broadway. Jesus has moved not only to Judea’s capital, but to the heart and soul of Judaism - to the temple.

There he causes a ruckus. He is outraged by what he finds - commercial transactions, including the changing of money and the selling of birds, and the use of the temple grounds as a shortcut. He turns over tables, scattering money and birds, and chases out those who are involved in exchange. In the temple scene in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ Jesus smashes through the crowd like a linebacker knocking aside blockers, trying to get at the quarterback.

And when he has wreaked all that havoc, Jesus holds a teach-in. He scolds his fellow citizens for corrupting divine worship: You have turned God’s house of prayer into a den of robbers, he tells them. This invites the wrath and resolve of the religious authorities. When they see how popular Jesus is with the crowd, they take counsel with one another as to how to do him in - before he can do any more damage.

Internal Rot

What a wonderfully dramatic moment this is: the rough-handed rustic delivering a solid punch to the flabby body politic. There is something soul-satisfying about the temple cleansing; we like to see reformers go after corruption. Why should it be necessary for Jesus, as soon as he gets to Jerusalem, to go to the Temple Mount and start trouble? Because even the finest human institutions have a way of rotting from within. As Jesus teaches the crowd, the temple is intended as a house of prayer, but it has been turned into a den of robbers. Instead of a place of prayer and devotion, it is now devoted to profits. Instead of nourishing piety, it is being milked for money.

What happened to the temple has happened to every human institution, no matter how useful or inspired. If you visit our universities, you will find styles of architecture that are outright copies of Roman and Greek temples. The more-than-subtle suggestion is that they house sacred texts, that the chief priests and scribes of the nation are its professors, scientists, and archivists, and that students are worshipers at a shrine. But will anyone deny that many of these temples of learning have been corrupted by politics? Or that the primary business of higher education is now business? Ask students why they are in college and most of them will say that their education is a good investment; they are paying the extravagant tuition and other costs in order to make a good living when they graduate.

But education is too easy a whipping boy. Take another cherished American institution, major league baseball. Its claim as the Great American Pastime has rested on two pillars - tradition and sport. The true fan is horrified by innovation, just as the true patriot is appalled by suggested changes in the Bill of Rights. We like to think that when men in Civil War prisons played the game, it was very much like what we play today. And although major league baseball is professional, the game - the sport - is supposed to prevail over profits. When we were children, we used to argue about the comparative batting averages of Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb, of Joe Cronin and Jimmy Foxx. Sure, we knew the players made a good living. By Depression standards, some made a very good living. But we also knew in our hearts that the money was incidental. Today two things have changed: Tradition takes a back seat to profit, and so does sport. Heresies like the designated hitter have been introduced to lure more paying customers into the parks. What gets talked about in the "Hot Stove League" - during the winter months when there is no baseball - is whether or not a superstar is really worth $5,000,000 a year. Can anyone seriously argue that baseball deserves the worshipful reverence once afforded it?

Lest someone object that profits ought not always be blamed for social decay, then what of the downfall of the socialist regimes of Eastern Europe in 1989 and 1990? Because profits were subordinated to ideological purity, those political institutions folded under the pressures of technological culture. A perverse piety can be as corrosive as the love of money.

Perestroika, Anyone?

The state of universities and the plight of baseball may lead some to propose reforms for both institutions. Perestroika - that’s the answer. Bring in a zealous reformer to cleanse the temple. But there is yet another story to be recited - that of the tragic fate that awaits any reformer who sets out to cleanse a great human institution. Remember, when the chief priests and scribes saw what Jesus had done, they looked for ways to kill him. And that is what is going to happen to any young, zealous reformer - no matter how right her cause or pure his motives.

In December of 1990 a thirty-seven-year-old Roman Catholic priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was elected president of Haiti. He was an outspoken foe of corruption and tyranny, who had been removed from his parish by his superiors for his activism in social affairs. When the newspapers reported his election, one was put in mind of a young rabbi come to clean up the temple in Jerusalem. God knows it needed housecleaning, just as Haiti needs reform and renewal. But there was an element of sadness in the election of Aristide. Old and wise observers saw the first act of a tragedy, which had been played out so many times before. For every successful reformer there have been dozens who blazed like Roman candles - and then fizzled out. Some, like Castro in Cuba, were victims of their own success. Some, like Martin Luther King, Jr., were shot down in their prime. Some, like whistle-blowers in the Pentagon, were summarily dismissed.

The public does not love reformers. Ibsen’s play An Enemy of the People is a modern version of the temple story. Dr. Thomas Stockmann is the medical officer of the baths in a southern Norwegian town. He discovers that the baths are being dangerously polluted by water from a tannery. He tells the mayor and the newspaper editor that it may take thousands of dollars and several years of work to replace the conduit. They tell him that the news of the pollution and the proposed repairs might well ruin the town’s economy. And they set out to quash his report. Eventually a public meeting is called, at which the doctor is unanimously voted to be an enemy of the people.

Someone coming fresh to the cleansing of the temple can feel only pity, knowing that fierce opposition - and probable defeat - wait for Jesus. A reader who did not know the Gospels might surmise that Jesus would quickly pass from the scene and be forgotten.

Journalist Thomas Friedman quotes a shrewd observer

Streams in the Desert

Friedman’s friend suggests to us a fourth way to read the narrative of the temple cleansing - as the inevitable flowing together in the Middle East of piety, profit, and politics. They are like three streams running downhill, each seeking its own level, yet certain to combine into one larger stream at some point in their descent. There is no easy separation of church and state, statecraft and business, business and religion. They are co-mingled, as the following incident makes plain.

On October 8, 1990, a huge crowd gathered on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. It had been rumored that radical Jews were going to use that holy day to establish a religious presence within the confines of a Moslem shrine. Thousands of Arabs gathered in protest. Stones were thrown at Jews who came to pray at the Western Wall at the base of the Mount. Israeli border police fired into the crowd; twenty-one Palestinian Arabs were killed. What might seem a local scuffle landed in the lap of the United Nations. Not incidental to the incident is the $3 billion annually contributed by the United States to support Israel - and the greater billions at stake in Arab oil. In the Middle East one cannot separate prayer, politics, and profits any more than one can separate the interests of Jew, Christian, and Moslem in the city of Jerusalem. And that is what the story of Jesus’ temple tantrum is also about - the necessary interweaving of piety, politics, and economics.

Indeed, it is what all human history is about. No one of the three interests can be pursued without involving the other two. This is one of the reasons why Ken Burns’ television series about the Civil War so gripped the imaginations of many of us in the fall of 1990. A war that was fought for economic and political reasons was led by men and women whose words and deeds were almost biblical. Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln were the Fathers, whose respective houses needed to be purified. Grant and Lee were the temple-cleansers: One would rid the land of rebellion and slavery, the other would purge the South of the corrupt Yankee invaders.

The Civil War was a brutal, bloody affair. Novelist and historian Shelby Foote calls the battle of Shiloh "a murderous fist fight." The whole war could be called a murderous family fist fight - brother attacking brother in uncontrollable fury. How can one possibly think that God countenanced such unrestrained violence? Was not the very face of God turned away in pity and disgust? Our forebears did not think so. General Thomas Jackson, a devout Presbyterian, said, "It is a man’s entire duty to pray and to fight." Julia Ward Howe sang, "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; He has loosed the fearful lightning of his terrible swift sword." Lincoln wrote, "In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party; and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect his purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true; that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet" (A Meditation on the Divine Will). In his farewell speech to the U.S. Senate, .Jefferson Davis said: "We will invoke the God of our fathers, who delivered them from the power of the lion [England], to protect us from the ravages of the bear [the Union]; and thus, putting our trust in God and in our own firm hearts and strong arms, we will vindicate the right as best we may." Ex-slave Frederick Douglass urged Lincoln to accept blacks into the Union army, so that they might fight for the freedom of their race.

Ask these our forebears if God countenances violence; surely they will counter with the question: How can human institutions be cleansed except by violence?

A House for All

But surely the story of the cleansing of the temple is more than a case study in the use of violence. The ultimate meaning of the narrative is revealed in the words by which Jesus justified his action. "[God’s] house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations." The words "a house for all nations" might well be inscribed on every public building. They might well be displayed on every stadium, bank, theater, locker room, library, house of congress, factory, lecture hall, or temple. No human institution can survive that serves the piety, profits, or politics of one people, one sex, one tribe, or one region only.

The cleansing of the temple is the story of a God who will be known and worshiped by all people - Israelis, Iraqis, Kurds, Palestinians, Americans, Arabs, Egyptians, Russians, Northerners, and Southerners. God’s house is large enough for all; Emmanuel is the savior of all. God allows the prayers of all.

It is a short step from "God allows the prayers of all" to "God allows all prayers," be they voiced by Christians, Jews, Moslems, Baptists, Mormons, or citizens of the New Age. And from there it is another short step to "God allows all kinds of prayers" - for victory in battle, for the defeat of enemies, for the smashing of a corrupt political regime, for the removal of a hated social or economic system. What else are we to understand by "My house shall be a house of prayer for all the nations"?

Although Abraham Lincoln, while president, attended worship at a Presbyterian church, it was said by some that he had no religion. Writing in response to Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, Lord Charnwood wrote:

"When old acquaintances said that he had no religion they based their opinion on such remarks as that the God, of whom he had just been speaking solemnly, 'was not a person.' It would be unprofitable to inquire what he, and many others, meant by this expression, but, later at any rate, this 'impersonal' power was one with which he could hold commune. His robust intellect, impatient of unproved assertion, was unlikely to rest in the common assumption that things dimly seen may be treated as not being there. So humorous a man was also unlikely to be too conceited to say his prayers. At any rate he said them; said them intently; valued the fact that others prayed for him and for the nation; and, as in official proclamations (concerning days of national religious observance) he could wield, like no other modern writer, the language of the Prayer Book, so he would speak of prayer without the smallest embarrassment in talk with a general or a statesman. . . This man had stood alone in the dark. He had done justice; he had loved mercy; he had walked humbly with his God." (Paul M. Angle, ed., The Lincoln Reader, 1947, pp. 494 - 495)

Do you suppose that Lincoln prayed fervently for the success of the Union cause? Is there any prayer, from anyone, for anything, that God will not allow?

In January of 1991 a coalition of nations mounted a swift and terrible war against Iraq. The allies wanted to drive Saddam Hussein and his occupying troops from Kuwait. After several weeks of intensive air attacks, a ground attack was launched. It lasted 100 hours - not much longer than the hurricanes that batter our coastal states at the time of the September equinox. The operation was called, appropriately, "Desert Storm."

Sudden and violent storms are not uncommon in the Middle East.

In his fabulous Thomas Covenant narratives, Stephen R. Donaldson gives heroic names to his characters. A sea-loving giant is called Foamfollower; others are called Earthfriend, Hearthrall, and Farseer. The wonderful story in Mark 4:35-4 1 tempts us to borrow this literary device. Jesus - who has previously been seen as Painkiller, Breadbringer, and Truthteller - is now revealed as Stormstiiler. When he and the disciples are in danger of being lost at sea, Jesus quiets the wind and waves with a rebuke. The storm is suddenly replaced with a great calm.

The stilling of the storm has always tickled the Christian imagination. Benjamin Britten wrote a cantata about the fourth century bishop who in legend became Santa Claus. In one scene in Saint Nicholas the godly man is on the Mediterranean Sea, headed for the Holy Land. The ship sails on calm waters, under clear skies. While Nicholas kneels on the deck to say his prayers, the seamen gamble at cards. When Nicholas warns them that foul weather is ahead, the sailors mock him. A sudden and terrible storm does indeed burst upon the ship, and it seems that all hands will be lost. But in answer to the prayers of Nicholas, the storm ceases as suddenly as it began. All hands are saved.

In telling his sea story Britten may have built on an existing legend. Or he may have created a legend, drawing on the stilling of the storm. Perhaps he was inspired by the fable of Jonah and the fish. For it was also on the Mediterranean Sea that great waves threatened to overturn a sailing ship until Jonah persuaded the crew that he was the cause of their peril and should be thrown overboard. In Mark’s story there does not appear to be any human mischief for which the storm was punishment; it was just one of those sudden squalls that overtake inland lakes and swamp small boats.

Jesus’ calming of the storm has a predictable consequence: The terror of the disciples is turned to awe. They wonder out loud among themselves, "Who then is this ...?" The question does not invite an answer; it points to a mystery. What possible answer could satisfy the disciples? Nothing in their experience prepared them for the question. What could prepare them to understand the answer? They have been privileged to witness other marvels done at Jesus’ word and wave of hand. But miraculous healing and feeding are one thing; commanding the wind and sea to obey is quite something else.

The Peacemaker

This much is evident to us, who are the hearers of the story. Emmanuel means Peacemaker. "God with us" may mean much more than that; it cannot mean less. Jesus’ rebuke of the disciples, "Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?" echoes the more gentle rebuke on the mountain: "Why do you worry about clothing . . . you of little faith?" It is not fear, but faith that brings God close. God is not in the storms of life, but in the peace that follows. God is not Stormbringer. Rather God is Peacemaker.

While the tempest in the story is surely a real storm, the meaning of the story is not limited to why or how Jesus calmed the wind and waves with his "Peace! Be still!" The stilling of the storm is rich in portent. A scene so dramatic cannot be read as an anecdote. No composer sounds a trumpet call in the middle of a symphony except as a promise of what is yet to come. A smoking gun is not discovered in the middle of a murder mystery unless it bears upon the mystery’s solution. Neither is the stilling of the storm incidental to our Gospel narrative. It is no accident, like a car skidding on wet pavement. It demands not only attention; it demands interpretation. What is God up to?

As with Jonah and the fish, the stilling of the storm has been subject to varied expositions. It would be hard to find two preachers who would interpret the story in exactly the same manner.

"Two-Faced Mother Nature"

Suppose that you went to church on the fifth Sunday after Pentecost, when Mark 4:354 1 is an appointed Gospel lection. If the preacher happened to choose that scripture passage for exposition, you might hear the storm at sea used as a metaphor for environmental disaster. Depending upon the preacher’s point of view, this might be a natural catastrophe, such as a great earthquake caused by a sudden shifting of tectonic plates. Or it might be a disaster to which humans contributed, such as the superheating of the earth through the so-called greenhouse effect. Or it might be a nuclear storm triggered by the explosion of an atomic bomb, somewhat as the bombing of cities in World War II unleashed fearful fire storms.

If we think of humanity as sailing across a placid sea, under smiling heavens, in a ship steered by rational means, according to immutable laws, we are in for a rude surprise, the preacher might warn. For Mother Nature is two-faced. She is not always kind and beneficent. She can suddenly turn to us a wrathful, destructive face. Those of an earlier generation, who thought to see God’s face smile back from a pleasant meadow or a tranquil sea, reasoned from too little knowledge of nature. They did not know about tectonic plates or the greenhouse effect - much less about the horrors of nuclear holocaust. Had they known about such terrors, it is doubtful that Maltbie Babcock could have written:

"This is my father's world,

And to my listening ears

All nature sings, and round me rings

The music of the spheres."

As the climax of the sermon, the preacher might raise for the congregation this question: How, in such a world, can terror be overcome by confidence in the future? Where can we find peace? How can we ride out or avert the dreadful storms that hang just over the horizon? And the answer the sermon supplies is Jesus Christ. He who calmed the wind and waves of that inland sea is also our Savior. We do not know precisely how Jesus may save us from environmental disaster, any more than we can know how he rebuked the wind or calmed the waves. But we do know that hope in him is not misplaced. He is our peace in the storm. The preacher might end the sermon as Britten ends Saint Nicholas, with this stanza from William Cowper’s hymn:

"Do the Right Thing"

If you went to another church on that same Sunday in Pentecost, you might hear a quite different sermon preached on the same text. You might find the storm at sea used as a metaphor for social unrest. The preacher might describe in vivid detail the racial hatred, class envy, economic injustice, envy, aggression, and war-mongering that threaten the Good Ship Human Enterprise. The sermon might be designed to persuade you that the natural state of society is one of conflict and unending struggle, with destruction and death never very far away. If the preacher is given to historical illustrations, he or she might liken the terror of the disciples to that period during the French Revolution known as the Reign of Terror, when passions and politics spun out of all control. The Revolution began as a voyage to Utopia; people thought to find a new and better society. But things went haywire; and the best-intentioned cried out to one another, "Do you not care if we perish?"

Or the sermon might refer to contemporary problems. A highly acclaimed film of 1989 was Do the Right Thing, written and directed by Spike Lee. In the movie Lee plays the role of Mookie, a young black man living in an urban ghetto. Mookie works as a deliverer for a pizzeria owned and run by an Italian American and his two sons. Throughout the film, like a fuse that burns faster and faster as it approaches dynamite, resentment of the whites by young blacks grows. A minor incident sets off a fight between the store owner and the residents of the block. In trying to subdue one of the residents, the police kill him. When the police have gone, Mookie throws a garbage can through the window of the pizzeria, triggering the trashing of the store.

What happens in the movie could happen anywhere, the preacher might say - anywhere there are Catholics and Protestants, blacks and whites, Hindus and Sikhs, rich and poor, Jews and Arabs, Sunnis and Shiites. Explosive social unrest is not the province of one society or social system. Racial differences, economic imbalance, religious bigotry - all are recipes for rioting.

Once having painted this bleak picture of how human differences are recipes for disaster, the preacher might hesitate to offer a Christian blueprint for social reform. But he or she might very well point to Jesus, who stilled the wind and waves, as humanity’s only hope. And the sermon might end with the first verse of a hymn written when American Christians were more hopeful about social progress:

"Where cross the crowded ways of life

Where sound the cries of race and clan,

Above the noise of selfish strife,

We hear Thy voice, O Son of Man."

"The Lower Lights"

In still another church, you might hear a sermon in which the preacher used the storm at sea as a metaphor for the internal turmoil from which humans suffer. There are many who are torn apart and tossed about by emotional strains and stresses every bit as frightening as the storm on the Palestinian lake. If the congregation were quite sophisticated, the sermon might include references to Freudian psychology, which describes the self as threatened by emotions and memories that are thrust below the surface into the unconscious, from which they may break forth and destroy a fragile equilibrium.

And for those who either did not understand or pooh-poohed such notions, the preacher might tell the heartbreaking story related in Michael Dorris’s The Broken Cord. Dorris adopted a child who soon displayed serious problems in development and adjustment. By digging into the boy’s history, Dorris discovered that the boy’s mother was an alcoholic. The watery womb in which the fetus developed was no safe world, but one in which the unborn baby was slowly poisoned.

How are we to live at peace with a world where this sort of thing happens to an innocent child? More to the point, how are we to live at peace with such children, who are sometimes disruptive and difficult? No preacher with a heart would, of course, promise that God will heal such a child of his afflictions. Nor would the promise be made that God will heal the mentally ill. But the preacher might well ask that if Jesus could still a storm in Galilee, then might we not trust God to help us to live peaceably with problems that are beyond our solving?

Such a sermon might end with the following story, which is a favorite among preachers: Once there was a small child whose mother died. To help the child through the night, the father took the child into his own bed. In the middle of the night the father woke to find the child in deep distress. "What’s the matter?" the father asked. "I can’t see your face," was the reply. "But l am here," said the father. Even so, Jesus is God’s word to us in the darkest night and blackest storm, assuring us that we have not been abandoned.

Some might say that those three sermons don’t exhaust the possibilities of the stilling of the storm. What about Jesus as the Savior of the storm-tossed soul? Indeed, when I was a small boy, I often sat on Grandmother’s lap while she sang,

"Let the lower lights be burning!

Send a gleam across the wave!

Some poor fainting, struggling seaman

You may rescue, you may save".

God the Peacemaker

A perceptive critic may grumble that each of these sermons is a bit simplistic. After all, peace is more than environmental survival; peace is more than the cessation of tribal wars; peace is more than the resolution of inner conflicts; peace is more than the assurance of the soul’s salvation. Granted. However, taken together the sermons create a vector that points in a single direction. In all of them Jesus is proclaimed as one who brings peace. Both the storm and the fears of the disciples are calmed by the words of Jesus. Stormstiller is Peacemaker. In the context of this book, that means that God also is Peacemaker. God cares whether or not the human enterprise perishes. God works in mysterious ways to bring peace. The storm clouds above our heads are rich with mercy.

Operation Desert Storm was a sharp reminder of what a warlike people we Americans are. In time of war our great diversity suddenly becomes our strength; our idealism is annealed into steely resolution. Our defining moments, to use George Bush’s phrase, have been the Revolutionary War, Civil War, the two World Wars. And yet our most cherished national symbol is not a warrior, but a woman; she holds in her hand not a sword, but a torch; she was given to us out of friendship; and she faces the sea, to welcome those who have endured storm-tossed voyages. To millions of American soldiers, returning home by ship, she has been a gentle reminder that peace is indivisible from liberty and justice for all.

The Statue of Liberty is a kind of perpetual question, directed at Americans. What kind of people are we? What is the destination of that voyage on which we are together embarked? What does it mean to be "one nation, under God," when God is known as Peacemaker?

A classic movie - It’s a Wonderful Life - is about a man who runs a Savings and Loan. George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart, is the town’s favorite son; he gives up his dreams of adventure to stay home and take over the family bank. One Christmas season a large deposit of cash is mislaid; there is a run on the bank, and George faces ruin. He is saved from suicide by an angel, who shows George what the town would have been like had he not lived. His bank is saved from judgment by the generosity of the townspeople. The movie teaches us that friends are more important than money.

Jesus taught his disciples that friendship with God was more important than money:

Here we see Jesus in the role of charismatic teacher. His disciples follow him away from the crowds and up onto a mountain. And there he initiates them into the Way. He shares with them the secret of successful living.

Teacher of the Way

The Teacher of the Way, surrounded by devoted disciples, is for us a familiar figure. In every generation one or more such persons burst upon the scene. The signal of the arrival of a new Teacher is the publication of a best-selling book. In 1936 the country went crazy about How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie, a public speaking instructor. In 1952 the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale authored The Power of Positive Thinking - a wildly popular sequel to an earlier book, A Guide to Confident Living. In 1968 from psychiatrist Thomas Harris came I’M OK - YOU’RE OK: A Guide to Transactional Analysis. Today, any sale of used paperback books will include at least one of these.

Carnegie and Peale and Harris did more than write bestsellers: Each was - and remains - a Teacher of the Way; each attracted millions of disciples. People still subscribe to Guideposts, the inspirational magazine that Peale helped to found. Dale Carnegie courses in Effective Speaking and Human Relations are still well-attended. Many still join therapeutic groups led by disciples of Thomas Harris.

You may not be familiar with the teachings of all three of these men. When their books are encapsulated and cast in the form of Jesus’ teaching from the mountain, they read as follows:

Carnegie on "How to Win Friends"

You have vast personal resources that you are not using: Either you do not know - or you are not practicing - the basic principles of human relations. If you will learn these, you will increase enormously your capacity to succeed in work, in family life, and in society.

There are rules for handling other people: don’t criticize, condemn, or complain; give sincere appreciation; and arouse in the other person an eager want. There are ways to make others like you: become genuinely interested in them; smile; remember names; be a good listener; talk to others about their interests; make them feel important. Others can be won to your point of view if you will follow such practices as avoiding arguments, showing respect for the opinions of others, and trying to see the other’s point of view. Learn to lead by changing the attitudes and behaviors of others. You do this by such techniques as beginning with praise, calling attention to mistakes indirectly, and letting others save face.

If you will learn and practice these common-sense, life-tested rules, you cannot help but succeed in whatever you undertake.

Peale on "Positive Thinking"

Do you want to be successful? Then you must start thinking positively; you will then set in motion forces that will bring to pass positive results. This is the great law of life: If you think in positive terms you will achieve positive results. In short, believe and succeed.

But doesn’t the Bible teach righteousness? Certainly. But one of the meanings of righteousness is right-thinking. And if you think rightly, you will achieve happiness, health, prosperity, and peace of mind. Believe in yourself - have faith in your own abilities. You have within you what it takes to be successful.

Learn to live a quiet, patient life; take time for prayer and meditation and Bible study. You can reduce stress and tension. Also, there is within you a reservoir of boundless energy, waiting to be tapped - if you make spiritual contact with God, who is the source of Divine energy. You can have good health, if you want it. Faith is a powerful factor, both in overcoming disease and in keeping the body free from illness. Put your trust in God; purge yourself of the anger and resentment and other destructive emotions that contribute to illness; pray for healing and restoration. You can get others to like you, if you become a comfortable person, cultivate an interest in others, pray for them, and don’t harbor grievances and resentments.

The potential for a happy, useful, productive, prosperous life is within your reach and within your abilities. The key is your attitude: You must learn to think positively, thankfully, affirmatively.

Harris’s "I’M OK - YOU’RE OK"

You are unhappy because you think poorly of yourself. You think I AM NOT OK, while you think others are OK. From such an attitude come self-destructive games of life, in which you are always the loser. No wonder you are unsuccessful in your marriage, your work, your family life. You won’t be happy until you learn to think better of yourself.

What is the source of your negative self-image? Look into yourself. What do you find? - three states of being: a Child, a Parent, and an Adult. The Child represents how you feel about things; the Parent, what you have been taught as right and wrong; the Adult, your capacity to think for yourself. It is in the Child that the not-OK feelings were lodged when you were dependent upon parents and other adults.

Once you become aware of these states of being and what they represent, you can begin to respond to others in a more free, less self-destructive way. You can respond in ways that do not simply recapitulate encounters out of your past.

Get to know the Child, the Parent and the Adult within you. Then you can begin to work with and to love more freely the children, adults, and authority figures you meet every day.

Looking in a Mirror

To those of us who lived through the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s, reading those summaries from Carnegie, Peale, and Harris is like looking into a mirror. We recognize ourselves as those who want to be liked, who want to rid ourselves of negative thinking, who yearn to be more adult in our relationships. Carnegie, Peale, and Harris attack our basic insecurity; they treat the anxiety that hobbles and torments us. They show us how to live more creatively and successfully in our society.

That society, in turn, is mirrored in another book, written a couple of centuries before How to Win Friends or The Power of Positive Thinking. Without a knowledge of this book, the teachings of Carnegie and Peale and Harris are like snapshots not yet placed in the family album. The book is Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. It lays out the values and assumptions that underlie most of our day-by-day activities.

Smith reminds us that the wealth of our nation is the sum total of the necessities and conveniences of life, which are produced by our collective labors. It is from the distribution of that wealth to the various parts of society that we are fed, clothed, housed, and granted various services. What makes such wealth possible is the division of labor, by which the collective output of our nation is greatly enhanced. This division has come about through our propensity to exchange one thing for another. It is in this exchange that your work benefits me, and mine you; as each of us pursues his or her own advantage, the good of all is served.

It is to facilitate exchange that money has come into being. The natural price of any commodity is made up of three parts: the quantity of labor required to produce it, the rent due the owner of the land, and the profit which the stock or capital must have. The market price, however, is determined both by the supply of goods and the demand for it in the marketplace. Where there is free competition - with no attempt to monopolize production or to withhold labor - the market price will be the lowest possible price that allows landlord, capitalist, and laborer to subsist. Only as profits and capital increase, however, can wages increase: That is where the increase of the national wealth comes from. Wages can only rise as the national wealth increases. The promise of increased wages is the greatest incentive to the laborer.

Was Jesus Against Capitalism?

Does the Way that Jesus teaches lead us out of the system that Smith has described? Is Matthew 5-7 an appeal to us to drop out of society, to refuse to compete, to despise wealth? Does God care nothing for money? When Jesus told his disciples, "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth," was he attacking the economic system upon which our material security depends? Was he cutting the vital nerve between work incentive and work results? Was he pointing an accusing finger at the owners of the land, the holders of capital, or the organizers of wage-laborers?

Stored-up treasure drives our economy. Adam Smith said:

"Parsimony [saving], and not industry, is the immediate cause of the increase of capital. . . . It puts into motion an additional quantity of industry, which gives an additional value to the annual produce." To the high priests of commerce, which one sees on "Wall Street Week" on Friday evenings, these are sacred truths. In 1929 America saw what happened when the nation forgot these truths: Profits on the trading of stocks became more important than corporate profits. The economy went into a tailspin, people were out of work, the factories stood idle, mortgaged farms were lost, banks closed, futures were blighted. The nations of Eastern Europe are now being put through an economic wringer because, evidently, they thought Smith’s dicta about markets, profits, land ownership, and wage incentives were smoke and mirrors.

How are we to interpret Jesus’ teaching on the mountain? What is the effective, dynamic force of his statements about anxiety and money? How can we apply what he said then to the system of production and distribution in which we find ourselves now? If Jesus were writing a contemporary best-seller, what might it be called and what would be its thesis? Might it be something like this?

J. Emmanuel on "Stress-Free Living"

The Grand Illusion of our times is financial security: Everybody wants it, nobody gets it. It is like the horizon - the more eagerly you approach it, the faster it recedes. You say that you would be happy if only you could attain financial security, if only you never needed to worry about bills or taxes, or how to afford a new car. And so you try to earn all you can and to put aside all you can for tomorrow.

Foolish folk! That secure tomorrow never arrives. What comes instead? Inflation, recession, bank failures, crime, illness, environmental disasters, war, layoffs, takeovers, forced retirement. The harder you try for financial security, the less secure you are!

Why do you persist? Why do you court stress by seeking greater security? The effort only produces more stress, which in turn produces worry; and worry saps your ability to make good decisions and to work properly. So you are on a treadmill: The faster you run, the sooner you will have a heart attack and be unable to work, and then where will you be?

Foolish, foolish folk! Look around you at the world God created. Lilies do not work; birds have no savings banks. And yet they survive as well as you do. If God cares for them, how much more will God reward your work with enough to eat, to wear - and a roof over your head.

Look at the godless, who do not know your heavenly Father. They worship material success. And what is their end? But you know God and what God wants: Love for neighbor and enemy alike, justice, mercy, kindness, fidelity. If you will make these - and not wealth - your priorities, then food and clothing and shelter will be there for you in sufficient supply. Let God worry about money; that’s God’s business.

No Heavenly Bird-Feeder

Generations upon generations have read into the Sermon on the Mount a description of a divine Provider - a kind of heavenly Bird-Feeder. This God daily scatters food for us - God’s creatures - much as some of us put out seed for our feathered friends in winter. Well, it may provide some of us with a feeling of God-like omnipotence to feed the birds in winter, but the face of God that is reflected in Jesus’ teaching from the mountain is not that of a kindly Feeder of Birds. That image may have been acceptable in a hunting and gathering culture, or even an agricultural one. It seems hopelessly sentimental for the twentieth century.

What Jesus teaches is this: If the birds of the air and the flowers of the field - who know nothing of purposeful work - manage to survive, then what is the source of our pervasive insecurity? Is it not that we are mistrustful of the Creator, that we seek to pile up wealth, even when we know it is perishable?

Trust in the Creator does not mean that we do not have to labor to provide food, shelter, and clothing. Trust expresses itself in obedience to the will of the Creator, whose aim for the created order is justice, mercy, and truth. If our trust is expressed as obedience, then we will not worry unduly about food, shelter, and clothing. If we take care of the things God cares about, God will take care of the money. God really does care for money - in the most practical, matter-of-fact sense.

A Field of Dreams

Field of Dreams, a favorite movie of 1988, is a companion piece to It’s a Wonderful Life. Jimmy Stewart is replaced by Kevin Costner; Amy Madigan replaces Donna Reed as the faithful wife. But the message is the same: Money isn’t everything. Costner plays Ray Kinsella, an Iowa farmer who plows up part of his farm to make a baseball diamond. He says that voices have bid him to do so. And, in due time, angel-like baseball players appear to play on the field. Ray persists in keeping the field, even though he comes within an ace of losing his farm to the bank. In the climactic scene, his father appears to play the game; reconciliation with his father is the key to the dream.

What is your field of dreams?

In 1943 in a tuberculosis sanitarium near London a young Frenchwoman lay dying. Her name was Simone Weil - teacher, philosopher, writer, and political activist. The only known therapy for tuberculosis was bed rest and hearty meals, but Simone refused the rich diet. Her physician was quoted by a local newspaper as saying, "I tried to get her to take some food. She said she would try. She didn’t have any, however, except for some tea and water. The reason she gave r not eating was that she couldn’t eat when she thought of the French people starving in France." To her friends Simone must have seemed one more victim of the madness then ruling the world.

The scene shifts to a wilderness in first-century Palestine:

In those days when there was again a great crowd without anything to eat, [Jesus] called his disciples and said to them, "I have compassion for the crowd, because they have been with me now for three days and have nothing to eat. If I send them away hungry to their homes, they will faint on the way - and some of them have come from a great distance." His disciples replied, "How can one feed these people with bread here in the desert?" He asked them, "How many loaves do you have?" They said, "Seven." Then he ordered the crowd to sit down on the ground; and he took the seven loaves, and after giving thanks he broke them and gave them to his disciples to distribute: and they distributed them to the crowd. They had also a few, small fish; and after blessing them, he ordered that these too should be distributed. They ate and were filled; and they took up the broken pieces left over, seven baskets full. Now there were about Jour thousand people. (Mark 8:1-9)