You Tube Theology

A service of worship in Duke University Chapel. The Reverend Dr. Samuel Wells delivers a sermon entitled "I May Not Get There With You." Opening excerpt from the sermon:(36:23) "Last Sunday I talked about taxes. So this Sunday I thought I'd talk about death. The death of Steve Jobs, the man who gave the apple the most attention it's received since the Garden of Eden, and the inventor of sleek devices modeled around the letter "i," brought renewed attention to a famous commencement address he made about his own illness. The speech included these words. "No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new." Closing excerpt from the sermon: (55:25) "I want to tell you about two men who together gave us a picture of the cross and resurrection, the tragedy and the hope, of facing death in God. Joachim Neander was a seventeenth century German Calvinist. Like Moses and Martin Luther King, he was on the brink of death, in his case at the tender age of 30, when he wrote the famous words, "All my hope is firmly grounded in the great and living Lord." In another translation the verse ends, "Me through change and chance he guideth, only good and only true. God unknown, he alone calls my heart to be His own." A short time later Neander was dead, a victim of tuberculosis. God alone had called his heart to be God's own. Two hundred and fifty years later, almost to the day, the English Poet Laureate translated Neander's hymn and sent it to the famous composer Herbert Howells. Howells was deep in grief after the death from spinal meningitis of his 9-year-old son Michael. Howells received the hymn text at breakfast time and he didn't move from his chair until he'd composed the tune that we sang as our processional hymn today. Howells was profoundly moved by what these words said about the interplay of tragedy and hope, of cross and resurrection, in the face of death. He was overwhelmed by how these words described his grief and yet faith in the face of the death of his son. And so, looking into the unknown, like Moses on the mountain-top, in gratitude to the faithfulness of Joachim Neander, in tribute to his 9-year-old son, and in praise of the God on whom all his hope was founded, Howells named this tune,--Michael" Sermon begins at 36:23. Deuteronomy 34:1-12 Bulletin: http://bit.ly/pqTODu