Biography
Dr. Ernest Campbell is Professor of Worship and Preaching at Garrett Seminary in Evanston. For twelve years he was Senior Minister and then Minister-At-Large for the renowned Riverside Church in New York City, where he continues to preach from time to time. Dr. Campbell is the author of several books and the publisher of Campbell's Notebook, a quarterly for preachers.  [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"Tolerable Hypocrisy" 
I've long been impressed by the quiet conscientiousness of the lay people who are behind this particular program. It's an honor to be here tonight. This is one of the programs that goes out in the name of God that has some tone and some class and makes us proud of our faith heritage.

Can any good thing come out of Wall Street? Wall Street - where last October 19th a new definition was given to the term, "The Fall." Wall Street -where insider trading and fiscal "hanky-panky" in high places are comfortably at home. Wall Street - referred to recently by a wag as "the world's largest casino." Can any good thing come out of Wall Street? Come and see.

Come meet a man who for years was a flourishing attorney in that investment community. As the plight of the poor moved in upon his consciousness, this man began to distribute sandwiches in and around Grand Central Station every evening on his way home to the suburbs. Then one day God spoke to this man in a life-changing way. Robert Hayes resigned his lucrative law practice and founded the Coalition for the Homeless. He and his friends are engaged in a hands-on ministry to the poor that involves the distribution of food and clothing, securing jobs and housing. They have helped to make one of our major cities understand that there is more to life than tall buildings and bright lights; that what matters is what we can do and care about for those who cannot do and care about themselves.

This man has something more going for him than compassion. He is also a man given to uncommon sense and street wisdom. He was accosted one day by a critic who said, "If you and your friends really cared about the poor, you would sell your houses and your cars, you would liquidate your stocks and bonds, and give the proceeds to the poor and go out on the street and live among them."

Here was Robert Hayes' reply, "You need not be a saint to help. We operate on the theory of tolerable hypocrisy." What I hear him saying is that if Toyohiko Kagawa showed up, or Mother Teresa or Jane Addams or Albert Schweitzer, we would receive such with open arms. But in the meantime, given the world the way it is, we will do what we can with what we have. Tolerable hypocrisy - the ability to function as imperfect people in a less than perfect world. This isn't optimism, this isn't pessimism, this is realism and Biblical realism at that.

Tolerable hypocrisy. With that term in mind, I should like to propound three rhetorical questions. The first is this: How will we ever enjoy other people without a tolerance for hypocrisy?

True story: A lady was about to decide upon a retirement home. She went out to visit several in her general area. In one particular home, operated by her church, she was taken into a room shared by two people. Right down the middle of the room was a thick chalk line and the interpretation was quick in coming. Said one feisty little resident of that room, "I made that chalk line. Everything on this side is mine and everything on that side is hers and we don't cross over." Well, when this visitor got outside she turned to her guide, who happened to be the Director, and she said, "I don't understand this. A Christian operation and we have this going on?"

"Well," said the Director, "Everyone who comes here is allowed one sin."
"What sin is that?" was the question.

"Well," she said, "We give each member her own choice." Tolerable hypocrisy.

Jesus had the ability to take people where they were and start with them at that level. When he had dinner that night in Zacchaeus' home, Zacchaeus was still a miserable tax-collector. That day, when they were about to take stones and get after the woman taken in adultery, Jesus said, "Whoever is without sin cast the first stone." The only one who could have cast the stone did not do so. When we think of the twelve disciples, we tend to cap them with halos and to imagine that they were all saints. But the fact is that every one of the disciples, without exception, was a project that Jesus took on. Mark you, he did this, not because he was naive about human nature, but because he understood our human nature quite well.

There's a verse over in John that talks about the Holy Spirit that I believe deserves more attention. Jesus said, "If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in Heaven give good gifts to them that ask Him?" God made us in the Divine Image, but it is not given to us to make others over into our image.

There's a man who gets up every morning at 5:00 on Staten Island, boards a ferry, comes across and works in the City Hall area of New York. The man always has with him a bag of sandwiches for the poor - the street people - who are always congregating in that part Manhattan. He was asked one time, by a cynic, why he did it. The critic said, "You know, you are just encouraging these bums. They'll expect you here again tomorrow."

This Roman Catholic layman replied, "That's right, and I won't let them down."

Shakespeare put this into the lips of Hamlet, "Use every man after his dessert and who shall 'scape whipping? Use them after your own honor and dignity. The less they deserve the more merit is in your bounty. Take them in." Tolerable hypocrisy. How will we ever enjoy other people without a tolerance for hypocrisy?

There's another question: How will we ever enjoy the church without a tolerance for hypocrisy? To expect perfection in any of our institutions is folly, but to expect perfection in the church is fatal. From the very beginning of the human enterprise, religious longings have required institutional form. We need each other: the uplifting of a shared liturgy, a shared fellowship, a shared service. However personal our faith may be, it cannot possibly be private and survive. Let it be remembered that Jesus was not a spiritual Lone Ranger going off on His own. He was a product of the Old Testament church and one who heralded the dawn of the New Testament church.

A friend was on an airplane one day, traveling incognito as a preacher. Somehow the subject of religion came up and his new-found friend said, "I don't believe in organized religion."

To which my friend replied, "Do you believe in disorganized religion, or unorganized religion?" There are no values that we believe in that can succeed in history without institutional form. But there's the rub, you see. We have to get in there with other people.

I had a man sit opposite me in my study one day and he said, "You know, the thing that puts me off about the church is that there are so many characters in it." He had a menacing way of looking right at me when he said it.

But I took that as a compliment. The church is the only institution I know that dares open membership, "Whosoever will may come." And they do come and some of them may not always be to our liking. Let me make a confession. I have never pastored a church in which I would have chosen all the members. But let me add to that, that I have never pastored a church in which all of the members would have chosen me. So we get involved in what Heidegger called the "thrown-ness" of life, we are in this strange mix that the Holy Spirit brings together under the Providence of God. In the Scripture for tonight (Matthew 13:24-30), the instinct to divide the wheat and the tares is recognized by Jesus, but He goes on to say, "Let the wheat and the tares grow up together until the end." A tolerance for hypocrisy.

The local church, faults and all, is the central entity of the Christian enterprise. This local church has been somewhat lost in the shuffle in recent years with the advent of the so-called "television church." Perhaps it's time that someone got up in a high place to point out that the term "television church" contains a contradiction. If it's televised, it's not the church. The reason being that, in the New Testament especially, every church has a local identity. In an authentic church members have access to each other and to their spiritual leaders. Pastors of authentic churches have a local street address, not a post office box in some distant place. Members of authentic churches have a say in the church's mission and a part in its ministry. In authentic churches pastors are accountable to their congregations.

Flawed though the churches may be, it takes a mighty bad local church to be worse than none at all. The church you know down on your corner, around your block, may not yet be free of spot or blemish but, as Carlyle Marney used to say, God rest his soul, "The church is still the best thing God's got with which to get the job done." It may not be perfect, but it's there and it's there for you. How will we ever enjoy the church without a tolerance for hypocrisy?

And there's one last question: How will we ever enjoy ourselves without a tolerance for hypocrisy? The saddest legacy of the perfectionist is not that she makes life miserable for others, but that she makes life miserable for herself. Now part of the problem here stems from unrealistic expectations. The only reason we can ever be disillusioned would be if we were previously illusioned.

I have a line here from a man that I should like to meet sometime - Tommy Bolt - he used to play golf with a mad, uncontrollable temper. Tommy was known to throw clubs up in the air, some of which never came down. He knew what it was to "turn the air blue" as he talked to a ball that strayed off the fairway. Then somehow or another, Tommy got hold of himself and this is what he says now: "Every time before old Tom goes out to play I tell myself, 'I'm going to miss at least six shots this round.' So when I miss them I don't get mad; I know beforehand."

Consider the way we deal with ourselves when it comes to diets. Is there anything in our common life that instills more false hope than the first four hours of a diet? We passed up the pie at lunch and went instead for grapefruit. Then before we know it, it's pretty much all over. We do have such a way of getting down on ourselves. We may have been rigorously faithful for weeks and months and then comes someone's birthday, and we reach out for a piece of cake. Then on the way home we are in the beginnings of deep depression. Someone who has studied this has made the point that this suggests "light bulb thinking" - it's either on or off, there is no middle ground. So one little slip leads into a lapse and the lapse leads into a relapse and eventually a collapse. Why are we so hard on ourselves? Why did we ever believe, to begin with, that we could follow a diet flawlessly day in and day out?

The larger part of our problem, I believe, comes from an unfortunate understanding of God. Leslie Weatherhead, years ago when he was pastoring City Temple, delivered a sermon that bears this abrasive title, "The Church's Obsession with Sin." I believe the church has been guilty of inducing excessive thought about sin - guilty of concentrating on the single axis of sin and forgiveness - to the neglect of growth and development.

Bear in mind that the Bible doesn't start with Genesis 3, even though most Christians think so. It begins with Genesis 1 - that we were made in the image of God. In the Eden story of the "fall," as it is called, bear in mind that it wasn't God who ran, it was Adam and Eve. Why, to hear some preachers tell us, God would have just taken off from there and washed His hands. But God hung around, it was Adam and Eve who felt the distance. God was nearer to them than they were to God.

And what about Jesus, our Master and our Leader. He used the word "sin" only seven times. Why some preachers use it seven times in their opening paragraph. I'm going to hazard a public guess that this deep sense of guilt and sin can be attributed to basically four people in the life of the church: first, David, who had a man sent to the front so that he could take his wife - he should have been wrought up about his sin; St. Paul, who had Christians persecuted before he became a Christian; St. Augustine, in whose presence the virtue of no woman was safe until the man was salvaged by God; and Martin Luther whom, we all know now, was pathologically concerned about the state of his soul before God. Because of this legacy, you and I go around with deep forebodings and one slip, one failure, becomes monumental. Sin matters, my sisters and brothers, but it doesn't matter all together or even most.

I like that line in the Psalms, "God knows our frame, He remembers that we are dust." What a pity that we don't know and remember.

So I've come here this evening to invite you to lighten up. We are harder on ourselves than God is. I like the statement of the young Jewish ne'er-do-well. He hadn't settled down at all, and was accosted one day by an Orthodox Rabbi, who put the question to him straight, "Have you kept all the commandments, my son?" And the young Jew looked at the Rabbi and said, with a twinkle in his eye, "Not yet." That's what we're thinking about. God understands.

John Claypool puts it well when he says, "Life isn't like a spelling bee -one miss and you're out." C. S. Lewis puts it this way, "No amount of falls will really undo us if we keep on picking ourselves up each time." I can love all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but God can love all of the people all of the time - including you, my friend, and including me.

Tolerance for hypocrisy - we act imperfectly - for imperfect people in a less than perfect world. Would we have it any other way? G. Studdert Kennedy gave us this poem some years ago when he reflected on what he would do with a million pounds:

If I had a million pounds
I'd buy me a perfect island home
Sweet set in a southern sea.
And there would I build a paradise
For the heart of my love and me.
I'd plant me a perfect garden there,
One that my dream-soul knows,
And the years would flow
As the petals grow
That flamed to a perfect rose.
I'd build me a perfect temple there
A shrine where my Christ
might dwell;
And then would I wake
To find my soul
Damned deep in a perfect hell.

Let us pray: Of Thy mercy, Lord, forgive what we have been, correct what we are and order what we yet shall be to Thine everlasting praise, through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Interview with Ernest Campbell

Dave Hardin: Let me start by asking you a little bit about preaching. As a professor of preaching, what do you tell your students to try to do in their preaching?

Ernest Campbell: I try to begin by instilling confidence in preaching itself - confidence in the Word that is going to be proclaimed and exegeted. I think we have to understand that the Biblical word is what some have called a "perfomative word," it's an active word. There have been instances across the years where someone just read a scripture verse and lives were changed. It has that potency. I think sometimes young ministers don't realize that it has that potency. I think about Nicholas Berdayev, the Russian Orthodox man of another day, who said, "The church handles dynamite as though it were dead leaves." We don't understand the volatility that is present. I think once we have people believing in it then the techniques are rather easy to communicate.

Hardin: Preaching has been said to have gone out of style. Comment on that if you will.

Campbell:  Well, I think preaching was, shall we call it, a loyalty under fire for awhile. But I think it was an inside job that put it away. We began to believe that dialogue was more important than a monological form - the round table and the forum and that kind of thing. I think you'll find architecturally that the church in the round, which is now, I'm glad to say, a vanishing breed, was really built at that time so that ministers wouldn't be central and up front. It was thought that everybody's word on any subject is as good as anyone else's. But I think now we understand that the authority is not in the person but in the office and lay people have a vested interest in good preaching. We get letters from lay people asking us why we don't do better at it - so I understand that.

Hardin: Are preaching styles changing as times change?

Campbell:  I think there is a strong emphasis today on narrative preaching - where you try to get a point through, shall we say, obliquely. Fred Craddock, a master communicator, likes to say that it's not what we hear that changes us, but what we overhear. So Jesus talks about a father with two sons and we overhear this and we make deductions on our own. So there is an emphasis today on narrative preaching. I salute that as long as it stays within bounds.

Hardin:  Earlier, you mentioned how important it is in preaching to take where we are today, like you did with the Wall Street scandals, and bring that back into what Christ was trying to tell us in those times and those circumstances. I just wanted to say that meant so much to me. Let me digress, Ernie.

Campbell:  You'd make a good preacher if you know how to digress. Go ahead.

Hardin:  Why do you take trips on freighters? What's that all about?

Campbell:  I enjoy reading and I don't like the heavily programmed cruise ships; they also cost a lot. We talked about diets in the sermon. It's very hard to go on a cruise ship, pay your money and then not eat. That bothers my Scottish nature. Anyway, I like the simplicity of a freighter. I used to take a laundry bag filled with books of varying degrees of intensity, and I took a skipping rope. Did you ever try to skip rope on a the deck of a freighter? It's good exercise. I'd meet some fascinating people and brush up on my Spanish, if I were down in down in Honduras. I lament the fact that these containerized ships don't have much place anymore for people to sign on as passengers.

Hardin: I've heard of people taking tramp freighters or steamers. Is it a small number?

Campbell:  Yes, the ones I was on - 7, 8, 9 passengers. You get to know each other well. If you have a bad draw and there's someone there that really doesn't mix, it's a long time that one has to practice the tolerance of hypocrisy.

Hardin: Or the art of conversation in a difficult environment. I've heard of a lot of cruises, but I didn't realize you substituted jump roping for swimming.

Campbell:  There aren't many pools on many freighters so you have to get down to what is possible. That's another sermon, you'll have to have me back for that.

Hardin:  I would love to have you back. Not many of us know much about this.