What do you believe?

In the fall of 1957, when both Elvis Presley and Billy Graham were often in the news, my Meredith College Old Testament class’s esteemed professor, Dr. Ralph McLain, asked our class, “Does it matter what you believe if you are sincere?” One after the other, four or five students replied, pretty much in agreement, that sincerity was the important matter. To my astonishment, Dr. McLain looked toward me and asked, “Elizabeth, what do you think?”

What I thought then is what I think now. I respectfully answered Dr. McLain, “More matters than sincerity. We can be sincerely wrong.”

Last week, I wrote of Elvis’s mention (as the movie “Elvis” depicts it) that Captain Marvel, Jr., his boyhood comics hero, had sought a “rock of eternity” which he, Elvis, also believed to hold his dream. Elvis sang, “As long as a man has the strength to dream, he can redeem his soul and fly.” Another popular hit song expressed a similar aspiration, “To Dream the Impossible Dream.”. Both of those songs are sincerely wrong. Here is why.

Both aspire to ultimacy. Finite beings were not created for ultimacy. Finitude and ultimacy are attributes, on the former hand of us and other finite entities, and on the latter hand, of the Creator of all, of God, Who alone is Ultimate. Adam and Eve’s ancient craving for ultimacy is our primal error, our original sin. As the elemental stuff of self-deception, it can disguise itself as nobility but eventually betrays itself as idolatry. A dream of ultimacy aspires to be god for oneself.

No matter how strong the dream is, we cannot redeem our souls and fly. The Bible teaches it. Redemption of our souls is God’s ultimate work. Shakespeare exposed the defeated imposter: “Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Speaking tragic words of hopelessness in a life stripped of meaning, Macbeth sensed that he had bootlegged ultimacy; knew that he had murdered to gain the throne; had courted violence and coveted power obsessively; and had reaped damnation. His finite dreams of “flying” had been lies.

Let’s turn the page. Billy Graham was God’s called and anointed Preacher and Prophet for the 20th. Century. For several weeks now, I have watched and listened to his crusade sermons, archived and offered by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association under the leadership of his son, Franklin Graham. I have watched and listened to “for the first time again.” In the 1970s, Billy Graham and his evangelistic team came to Carter-Finley Stadium in Raleigh, and I participated as one of the hundreds of volunteers who assisted in the Raleigh area’s and Cary First Baptist’s part in that crusade.

The half-century gone by has suffered a stunning loss of faith in God, a hardening of the conscience and human spirit, unimaginable fifty years ago. Our nation’s motto was then “In God we trust.”. Today, little survives to validate that claim. The ancient error told in Genesis of humanity’s fall into original sin parades, unashamedly now, the very “mystery of iniquity,” to use Billy Graham’s words. Iniquity, once hidden in shame, now struts proudly and sins boldly “on the front porch with the lights on,” as my three children’s father, Rev. Lalon Barnes, Jr., preached in his attention-grabbing, of-sin-convicting words. He was good at it.

Sometimes, it seems that Shakespeare and Macbeth called it right. (Iniquity with an AR-15 in both hands is as idiotic as Shakespeare himself could have imagined.) But that is a life lived with Satan and without God. The life of a believer, lived in communion with Christ’s close Presence through the Holy Spirit, even in times of testing, and especially in times of testing when we must walk by “sheer faith,” is life redeemed and given as a gift by God.

In one of his crusade sermons, Billy Graham preached, “Oh, I want to tell you that there are times that I feel Christ so very close, that I feel like standing up and dancing a jig! I feel like shouting, ‘Hallelujah!’ And then, there are other times when I can’t even touch Christ; I don’t even feel Him at all.”. He then rejoiced, “My mother is here tonight,” and the television camera panned to where she sat in the stadium. He continued telling of a time when he had written to his mother from school, years before, and had told her that, “in the last few weeks, I haven’t been able to get anywhere in my prayers. I don’t feel Christ.” She had written back to him, “Son, you have accepted Christ as your Savior, and whether you have a feeling or not, the moment that you don’t feel anything at all, maybe when He may be the closest, because that’s the moment you must walk by sheer faith, and God may be testing you.

This century needs another Billy Graham. There will not be another. But God can call another preacher and prophet who will respond, “Here am I, Lord. Send me.” We can pray for the Lord to send that called and anointed one for this century.

Thanks be to God.