You Tube Theology

A service of worship in Duke University Chapel. The Reverend Dr Samuel Wells delivers a sermon entitled "The Mind of Christ." Opening excerpt from the sermon: (37:48) One of the greatest privileges I have at Duke is to be invited to teach undergraduates for one course each Fall semester. The course is in Public Policy and it's called "Ethics in an Unjust World." I tell the students I call it "Everything I was cross about when I was 19." I assume that the students are distressed about the unfairness and injustice and suffering in the world. I expose them to helpful texts, challenging site visits, provocative interviews and several lectures. I seek to pass on to them such wisdom as I've gleaned in the last 25 years about how to address social disadvantage. I then invite them to spend the rest of their lives going deeper and doing better than I've done. At the start of the semester I ask the whole class, "How many of you have done an extended service project, like a mission trip or summer internship for a non profit?" Of the 120 or so students I've had in class, almost every hand has gone up. And then I ask, "And how many of you have done a 10- or 15-page class paper reflecting on the experience?" No hands -- or maybe one or two at most." Closing excerpt from the sermon: (55:54) "So this is the secret of wisdom: Jesus. Jesus wasn't a wandering sage who sat cross-legged and uttered epigrams; he wasn't a distant genius who was so wrapped up in his research that he only had time for opaque monosyllables; he wasn't a member of a privileged elite who demanded leisure to converse and contemplate with others like himself. Jesus' life is the shape of wisdom. It has ordinary, homespun, pragmatic, earthy humility. It has wrought and etched consolations chiselled from shameful suffering. It has delight beyond words, and power beyond imagining, bathed in effervescent joy. This is what Paul is describing in 1 Corinthians 2. And he has a phrase that draws all this wisdom together and names where it resides. He calls it "the mind of Christ." But here's the astonishing part. He says, "We have the mind of Christ." Not "We've seen it," or "We've heard it," or "We read it somewhere," or "We thought about it for a while," or "We need to get round to it someday," or "We respect it," or "We admire it," or "We like it": "We have it." We have it. We have the mind of Christ. We've been given this wisdom." 1 Corinthians 2:1-16 Bulletin: http://bit.ly/gwKCMX Sermon: http://bit.ly/h3a8Ds