All material copyright 2005.
Westminster Presbyterian Church
Durham, North Carolina
(919)489-4974
For staff e-mail call # above
or e-mail Gail
Comments, corrections and suggestions about this website are welcome.
E-mail Web
assistant
IN PRAISE OF ALBERT SCHWEITZER
We are surfeited today with stars and superstars. We suffer an acute shortage of heroes. A star is largely of human manufacture. He or she is un-payably indebted to press agents, good public relations, and the constant coverage of CNN or ESPN.
Heroes and heroines, on the other hand, bear the marks of authenticity. Their claim upon our admiration is natural and voluntary. They win us by meeting life head-on, as it were, and rising triumphantly over what is tragic in it. While stars and superstars are invariably local and hot for a brief time, heroes are universal and timeless in their impact.
In the summer months I like to take an occasional Sunday and focus on a significant figure from the story of the church. Individuals who have made major contributions to who we are, and give us reason to sing, as we did in our first hymn, "Come sing, O church in joy, come join O church in song, in bold accord, come celebrate the journey now and praise the Lord."
I speak this morning of Albert Schweitzer, physician, theologian, musician, and philosopher, all in one lifetime. But most simply and most accurately, a human being who lived out his life in touch with the spirit of Jesus Christ.
I will assume today that we are all familiar with his immense contribution to life and the church. By way of broad outline, in the field of music he was a scholar and organist, and authority on the music of J. S. Bach. In the field of theology, as a young man he published The Quest of the Historical Jesus, still a classic. In the field of medicine, he attended medical school in order to become a medical missionary at Lambarene, in Africa, where in the first nine months he and his wife had about 2,000 patients, some traveling many days to reach him. In the field of philosophy, Schweitzer's worldview was based on his idea of "Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben," Reverence for Life, which he believed to be his greatest single contribution to humankind, writing that Western civilization was in decay because of gradually abandoning its ethical foundations, the affirmation of life. He was born in 1875 in Kayserberg, Alsace-Lorraine, and died in 1965, at age 90. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952.
What I would like to do this morning is single out for our attention those aspects of his experience that seem most worthy of our admiration, and do that in the order of ascending importance.
ALBERT SCHWEITZER WAS INDIFFERENT TO CREATURE COMFORTS AND CONVENIENCES. Though a son of the West, he never succumbed to the western notion that the good life could be measured by possessions. The son of a Lutheran pastor, there was a Spartan quality about Schweitzer that might well serve as a model in our times of expensive energy, expensive food, and a tumbling stock market. With Schweitzer it was ideas more than things, and people more than ideas. When asked one time why he traveled Third Class on the railroads he was quick to answer, "Because there is no Fourth Class!" When Queen Elizabeth offered him the highest honor the British Crown could bestow, the Order of Merit, he came to London and there stayed in a modest tea chop rather than a fancy hotel. He made his quarters in a small back room, to which the likes of Bertrand Russell and Ralph Vaughan Williams came to pay their respect and convey their esteem.
This disdaining of personal comfort and convenience was more than a puritanical streak in his make up. Albert Schweitzer had a sense of indebtedness to life. He said once, "While at the University and enjoying the happiness of being able to study and even to produce some results in science and music, I could not help thinking continually of others who were denied that happiness by their financial circumstances or their health. Then one brilliant summer morning there came to me as I awoke, the thought that I must give something in return for it."
It was a vital part of Schweitzer's philosophy to be as easy on life as possible. He was more conscious of responsibilities than rights. Not what he could consume enthralled him but what he could create and contribute. Like St. Paul of old, his aim was to use the world but not abuse the world.
MOREOVER, ALBERT SCHWEITZER HAD THE COURAGE TO BE HIS OWN PERSON. He dared to be different. This, of course, is the prerogative of genius, but such singleness of purpose and self-assurance is more within our reach than we are generally inclined to believe. There is a snatch of street wisdom which rightly observes that "those who run with the pack will look like the pack." It has also been said on more than one occasion that no horse ever won a race by following in the steps of another horse.
Schweitzer refused to allow his life to be directed or restrained by the caution of his friends. By the time he was in this twenties he had made a name for himself in theology, philosophy, and music. Then, as from God, he entered into a dramatic decision to become a medical missionary. His friends could hardly understand this. No less than Charles Widor, the celebrated French organist, who had made Schweitzer his prodigy, tried to dissuade him. As Schweitzer put it, "Charles Widor, who loved me as if I were his own son, scolded me as being like a general who wants to go into the firing line with a rifle."
Schweitzer was quite aware that when one decided to do something in obedience to Christ, friends would not come along to roll stones out of the way. Indeed, they are more likely to come upon the scene and roll some stones in the way. He wrote, "In the many verbal duels which I had to fight, as a weary opponent with people who passed for Christians, it moved me strangely to see them so far from perceiving that the effort to serve the love preached by Jesus may sweep a person into a new course of life."
He admirably set his course and stayed with it. In his 29th year while sitting in his study he noticed near at hand a copy of the monthly bulletin of the Paris Missionary Society. Some soul who deserves to be better known had placed it there with what intent we do not know. Schweitzer was familiar with the periodical because his father would frequently read missionary letters to his congregation from that journal. His eye was taken by an article entitled, "The Needs of the Congo Mission." "The writer expressed his hope that his appeal would bring some of those on whom the Master's eyes already rested to a decision to offer themselves for this urgent work. The conclusion ran: Men and women who can reply simply to the Master's call, "Here I Am, Lord, I will go, Lord," those are the people whom the Church needs. Then," said Schweitzer, "the article finished, I quietly began my work. My search was over."
ALSO, SCHWEITZER BELIEVED AND PRACTICED DIRECT HUMAN SERVICE. So far as I can tell, he was the originator of that term, in addition to the terms, "creative suffering" and "reverence for life." Direct human service. Some lives show very little human service at all. Other lives show forms of human service that are indirectly rendered through institutions, organizations, and agencies. But here was Schweitzer's genius: At once he could be at home in the world of complex and abstract ideas and be at the beck and call of human beings in need.
Norman Cousins, in his book Dr. Schweitzer of Lambarene, writes of his visit to Schweitzer's hospital and was anxious to get the great doctor to speak out against war and atomic proliferation. The doctor was not an easy man to maneuver conversation, his time was so well spent. Eventually, an occasion for discussion materialized. Schweitzer began to open up and expound on the dangers of global conflict. Then, reports Cousins, "Dr. Margaret, an associate on the staff, rapped on the door. She apologized for interrupting, but there was an emergency. A woman with an extra-uterine pregnancy had just been brought to the hospital. An immediate operation was necessary. Dr. Schweitzer stood up to leave. "La Doctoresse has come at just the right time," he said. "It is good to be reminded now and then that even in a world struggling with the momentous issue of war and peace, the individual has problems. We will talk further."
He was always concerned to better those about him. Long before he went to the University or Divinity School, much Medical School, he was concerned. He was burdened at one time for deprived children right in his hometown. In another period he was anxious about the well-being of transients who were broke. At yet another time his interest was in the lot of the discharged prisoner. Direct Human Service.
It did not seem to bother Schweitzer that a life of work in Africa would hardly make a dent in the overall problems of the world. He believed that one could not refuse to serve because the scale of need was so incredibly vast. On this point he wrote: "Only an infinitely small part of infinite being comes within my range. The rest of it passes me by like distant ships to which I make signals they do not understand. But devoting myself to that which comes within my sphere of influence and needs me, I make spiritual inward devotions to infinite being a reality, and thereby give my own poor existence meaning and riches. The river has found its sea."
Finally, ALBERT SCHWEITZER UNDERSTOOD HIMSELF AS A SERVANT OF JESUS CHRIST. One is aware of the various ways in which the humanist tradition has sought to claim Albert Schweitzer. But none of them will wash. Schweitzer was indebted to the Bible, to the church, to his Christian parents, to the service music of Bach, to the missionary tradition that he ennobled. There can be no arguing the fact that the decisive and sustaining influence of his life was Jesus of Nazareth.
The reason why we read in the New Testament today from Luke 16, the story of Dives and Lazarus, as was said in the introduction to the reading, is because in one insightful moment it occurred to Schweitzer that just as the beggar in that story sat at the gate of the rich man, so Africa sat at the gate of Europe. It was, in part, under the impact of that analogy that he determined to spend his days and years in Africa.
The Christian character of his work at Lambarene was more oblique than some might wish. Frankly, I rather admire Schweitzer's indifference to saccharine piety and what he jestingly referred to as "the sugary language of Canaan." Scripture verses were not posted all over the place on the hospital grounds. It was a quieter kind of witness. The presence of Jesus was found more in the general ambience of Lambarene than in any outward signs. But there was grace at every meal. There was the doctor rising up from the table after dinner each night, going to his lead-lined piano to accompany the singing of the evening hymn. There was the weekly service each Sunday, which, until the latter years, he conducted himself.
I think Joseph, a native of Lambarene, a tall, lean handsome young man who later became Schweitzer's assistant, summed it up rather well when he said, "The doctor is the slave of God, and I am the slave of the doctor."
I find it impossible to leave this subject without placing before you those surpassingly moving words with which Schweitzer ends his major work, The Quest of the Historical Jesus.
Speaking of our Lord, he wrote, "He comes to us as one unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, he came to those men and women who knew him not. He speaks to us the same word: 'Follow me!' and sets us the tasks which he has to fulfill for our time. He commands, and to those who obey him, whether they be wise or simple, he will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they will pass through in his fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience who he is."
To sum it all up:
In an age caught up in the pursuit of material gain, he lived a restrained and simple life.
In an age that valued conformity he dared to live out a dream that was different.
In an age that saw men and women harden their hearts towards the hurts of others, he reverenced life and freely took upon himself the sufferings of people who could scarce pronounce his name.
In an age that knew the form of religion but little of its power, he provided a dazzling illustration of what one God-intoxicated soul can do.
When Albert Schweitzer died on September 4, 1965, in his 90th year, it was like a mountain range being lifted off the earth. But oh the trumpets on the other side!!
PRAYER
Lord, where we have hearts of stone, teach us to care.
Where we have given up on ourselves, fix our attention on Him who said, "Behold, I make all things new."
Where we are weary from sensing that needs multiply faster than we can address them, remind us whose world it is and keep us faithful.
Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.