This almost seems to me to be Jesus' invitation by Satan to take the show biz route. Look at what the passage is saying. The devil takes Jesus up onto a very high pinnacle, which archaeologists say was about 186 feet above this dry creek, a river moat that surrounded Jerusalem. He says, "If you really want to be famous, Jesus, just jump off this temple, this immense height, and when you land unhurt -- the Karl Wallenda, show biz act -- people will gather around you and you will be instantly famous."

Jesus declines this. I think he declines it because he is far more interested in giving them an image of a Christ who wanted to touch people, to change their lives, to understand their hurts, to affirm them, to love them, than to give them a show biz, straw hat and cane routine. I guess I am left with that conclusion, especially when I look in Luke 10:29. A young lawyer comes to him and says, "Who is my neighbor?" The word neighbor is a wonderful word in English. It really comes from two old Anglo-Saxon words, "neah gebur," which means to live beside someone. Jesus said that living beside someone is not really what a neighbor is. A neighbor, said Jesus, is someone who hurts and someone you reach out to touch, not with a show biz act or with some kind of sequined toga or garment, but a neighbor is someone who hurts. You see their hurt and you reach out and touch.

To define the word, as Jesus so customarily did, he told a wonderful story, the story of the Good Samaritan. In this story, there are a couple of people who are very religious -- a priest and a Levite. They come by and see a wounded man and pass on without doing anything. The third person along is a Samaritan, a sort of half-breed person of that day and age, who had no esteem either in the gentile or Jewish community. Put together, these passages say to me that Christ has always called his church to be a church which cares about and touches people.

Yet, we do live in the middle of a show biz generation. Every time I think of this, I think of some words that Neal Postman used in a wonderful book that he wrote, a book that talks about amusing ourselves to death. He says, "We have become a couch potato generation. We have divided ourselves into creators and watchers." This is certainly true in the religious area as well. He says that all American history can be defined sociologically by looking at four cities -- Boston, which represented revolutionary America; New York, which represented immigrant America; and Chicago, which later represented industrial America. Today, he says, America's metaphor city is Las Vegas, whose symbols are a thirty foot cut-out of a cardboard slot machine and a chorus girl. This continual entertainment, a syndrome that has placed video shops on every corner in America, has perhaps deluded us into thinking that entertainment is what the church needs to do as well.

In the last little bit of American history, particularly the later 80's, the last years that the national cable television evangelists were on, those years were prompted by some six primary cable religious evangelists whose total income in any given year was around $700,000,000. Besides financing the show biz that was these cable channels, the real truth is the money didn't really support very much else. For instance, there were four schools supported by this $700,000,000, one hospital, three churches, a couple ministries for needy children, one home for the poor and six television shows.

The denomination which I serve -- and there are many like this which do some wonderful work -- also received about $700,000,000 that year. With that same amount of money, the local church was able to sponsor some 3,700 foreign missionaries, 3,600 home missionaries, some 1,000 state missions, 67 colleges, 6 seminaries, 23 hospitals. The list goes on and on and on. Perhaps the world is out there hungry to see again, not people who take our money and entertain us, but people who say, "For this money that I spend, there is so much need, so much work, so much touching that needs to be done."

I believe Jesus refuses Satan's second temptation because he doesn't want to be a show biz Messiah. I have to remember that the very nature of Satan himself, for instance, probably came because he started skipping his morning alleluias to sing, "I've Got to Be Me." The truth is, of course, that is what selfishness is all about. Show biz often has given us a very narcissistic picture, a very selfish picture of money and influence, and fifteen minutes of fame here and there. I think a wonderful thing happens when we begin to see this other thing, this new cry for the church not to put on a big show. We've had it with churches that put on big shows, and want a church which responds to people who say, "Hey, I'm hurting. My needs are immense. Could you come into my life and touch me with something very important and very real?"

I have a poet friend in Seattle who lives next door to an old woman. He has written a wonderful little poem about her. She is 88 and his need to touch her perhaps renovated his own life. In the renovation of his life, he discovered that Julia Todd was a reason he felt like living. She needed him as a Christian to reach out and touch her life. She lived alone; she needed someone to care. He wrote this wonderful little poem about her:

How wonderful it is to find someone who reaches out and touches those who really do hurt in the name 
of Christ.

I have a young friend who ministers in inner-Cleveland. I have always been a pastor in the suburbs and, honestly, I am not very much at home in the inner-city of these large cities. I think we who live in the suburbs see them as dangerous and unsafe places. Perhaps my young friend would have, too, except that he began to see the wonderful people who live there who are poor, often living on the street or in dire poverty.

One night he asked me to visit his parish and so I did. I will never forget that experience. Many of the homes we visited were very poor -- nothing in them but picnic tables that looked like they might have been bought at the K-Mart. Boxes of cereal decorated those tables. Whenever he walked into one of their homes, I discovered their faces would light up. He was their pastor and he cared about them. He cared about them enough to build grocery stores in the inner-city, places where they could come and, for the price of listening to a lecture against drugs or on the wonderful life of Christ, they could have a free meal or a free bag of groceries to take home. One man making a difference. He wasn't content to say, "I've got a program that is really going to show you how clever I am. I've got a show biz Jesus who is really going to make a difference in your life." He came to say, "I have someone living in my life, this wonderful Christ who cares about people like you."

I think the world is very hungry for the feeling that Christians really are there, that they really do help each other, and that we pull away from our very selfish tendencies. Of course, we all want the better car, the better house. We want all of those things, but when we come to church, so often we go in the back door, crying with needs that just explode us on the inside. As we walk by the pew, perhaps no one really reaches out to say, "I love you," or put their arm around you and say, "I care." We may even sit down in the pew, listen to a marvelous orchestra or a great dance team or whatever it is, putting on a great show. If we walk out and it has only been a show, the pain is still there; the hunger is still there; the need to be touched is still there.

I will never forget a woman who came to our church for groceries. We had a pantry and anybody could come to our church and get help. She came to receive groceries and she needed a little money to pay her next month's rent. She lived in a very poor part of town. When she came into my office, it was obvious that her front teeth had been broken out. I asked her what happened. She said that it was her boyfriend, Freddy, who had knocked her teeth out. I said to her, "He must not be a very nice man."

She said, "Oh, yes, Freddy is a nice man. He loves me and cares for me."

Then she asked me for half-a-month's rent. Our church happened to have enough money in the bank to pay her half-a-month's rent and I gave her the money. This surprised her. She said, "So often when I ask churches for money, they don't give me much help." Then she said something I will never forget, "You know, it is interesting to me how it is that mostly poor people help poor people and the rich people really don't."

The statement indicted me a bit. I thought of all the times we had spent vast amounts of money to put on huge choir programs and then said we didn't have enough money to feed the poor. I wonder if God was very impressed with this sort of thing. When she left my church that day and walked back out into the neighborhood, I felt a strange desire in my life to make the church a little better, to make it a place where people who came in could find help. We really can't live without each other. Oh, we can live without the show biz part. There are video stands on every corner in America, new movies issued every week, television never stops in this culture. The show isn't enough. We need to touch and to feel in a better name than our own.

I loved it when Edmund Hillary was at the summit of Mount Everest in 1953. He had climbed the mountain all the way to the top, the first man ever to do that. The thing that impressed me about the whole story was not that Edmund Hillary climbed the mountain, but that he had a companion who climbed the mountain with him. Nobody ever hears his name. His name was Tenzing Norgay. Tenzing, however, climbed the mountain with him and on the way back down the mountain, Hillary fell and was almost lost. He would have been lost without Tenzing Norgay. Tenzing Norgay literally pulled him back up the cable and saved his life and Edmund Hillary lived to tell a great story because of this help from an unknown man. When someone asked Norgay why he didn't make more of it, why he didn't brag about it, he said, "We mountain climbers help each other."

What a great model this would be for our church. We Christians have no need to be on television or make millions of dollars putting out a show. It is time we reversed the process and touched people and say very simply, "We Christians help each other. That's who we are."

Calvin Miller: You know, David, I have always had a wonderful love of students, particularly college students or seminary students. I guess at about mid-50, after 30 years of being a pastor, I began to feel that maybe a good way to use the last decade or so of my life, or however long I have to live, would be to use it trying to help equip young men and women as they go out to minister in missions or serve in churches.

Hardin: What were the surprises you got in going back to seminary?

Miller: When I was in a pastorate, I had friends, but now that I am in a seminary, I have colleagues. I like that because it really is kind of true. Colleagues are like friends, except they read books and they talk about ideas. It has been a big change, but I've loved that.

Hardin: It was a chance to really talk about issues and things, more than you had in a church setting.

Hardin: We've gotten into this church and politics things with the new presidency. There was a lot of religious stuff around this past election. How do you feel about the issues of politics and our churches?

Miller: I suppose that almost all of us have viewpoints and, of course, we have candidates that we prefer. Whatever our political convictions or religious convictions, I think the key thing is that we don't ever get to feeling so strongly about them that we can't receive each other with different viewpoints. I think the thing that I always hate most about people on either end, either the left end or the far right end of these discussions, is that there is a kind of intolerance of people who don't feel like they do. I don't think that is very much like Jesus. I think Jesus wants us to love everybody regardless of who they are, where they are, just to love everybody and to come together with strong convictions. Those convictions hold us upright in life, but never to resent anybody who happens to have another set of them.

Hardin: Yes. I personally feel that it is good. I see more consultation of religious leadership and I see in our leadership people turning to prayer and prayer meetings more often, which I find encouraging, but, as you say, you don't want to confuse the two.

Miller: That's true.

Hardin: What are you trying to say in your writing nowadays?

Miller: That's a big question. I have just finished a textbook on communication that I'll be publishing, but again I will be publishing a new set of novels in the spring of `94. I am looking forward to doing that again. I've been kind of out of creative writing. I think my last years in the church were so busy -- the parish got so large -- that I sometimes didn't give writing the space that I think it deserves. I am looking forward to getting back into a creative mode and putting some more novels and poems out there.

Hardin: Are you ever going to do another epic poem of any kind, and what topic might you take on if you did?

Miller: Boy, that's a great question. I have so loved Milton's Paradise Lost, but I think that its language often eludes the modern reader. I don't know if I have the stuff to do it, but it would be great to try to figure out a way to get the immense power of Paradise Lost into something that was a little more accessible to the modern mind.

Hardin: We just have a few seconds left. Are there topics that you would like to see people understanding more clearly through a poem or an epic poem?

Miller: I think that the thing I wish we could do would be -- I think Bill Clinton has called for this here and there -- a return to some kind of value systems and I think poetry and music do that. I think it does it very well, so maybe that would be an avenue.

Hardin: I hope we see some more of your writing because it has been wonderful. Thanks for being with us.