January, 1913. THE FORGOTTEN MAN, JESUS A Sermon by REV. ALBERT C. DIEFFENBACH in The First Unitarian Congregational Society Of HARTFORD, CONN. Published By SERMON BY MR. DIEFFENBACH Series of 1912-1913 October, 1912 OUR EYES SHALL SEE THINGS WHOLE November, 1912 EUCKEN AND THE SPIRITUAL NATURE December, 1912 SPIRITUAL AUTHORITY IN A FREE CHURCH January, 1913 THE FORGOTTEN MAN, JESUS Copies of these discourses may be had on application to the Sermon Publication Committee. TEXT: Jeremiah II. 31, 32;-Wherefore say my people, We We are lords, we will come no more unto Thee? My people have forgotten me days without number. Go back with me, will you, please, this morning, to an old setting for a new message. It will help us to sense the timelessness of human needs. It will aid us in seeing how aged we are and how young are the words, and how fitting, of this wise and fear less and outspeaking man. Jeremiah was regarded with a good deal of amusement and indulgence while he lived. After he died. he was considered the greatest of all the prophets. and when they spoke of him they called him "the" prophet. All that he uttered is good for modern usage, but we have chosen a few words from his undying speeches, because it is needful to narrow down our theme to a specific and concrete basis. It may serve to recall, however, that somewhat later than the sixth century before our Christian era began, the Jewish people, divided into two kingdoms, a northern and a southern, gave signs of final breaking up. When our text. was spoken, the northern kingdom probably had already gone to pot. The Assyrians came from without because of the weakness within, and did about as they pleased with the Jews, their chief enterprise being to destroy the racial unity of the people by making conditions easy for their intermingling. The Samaritans are a fruit of this mixture of races, which accounts for the contempt the Jews had for them. Down in the South, the time was also at hand for the Jews. The people were doomed. If you want to read literature which stirs the blood, go over carefully all of Jeremiah. Besides, his bemoaning the sure fate of his people in Judah,-albeit he made tremendous appeals that they repent, and his probing of the causes of their destruction, are not valueless even here in this cultivated capital of New England, as they were not for the forgetful and in many respects comfortable people of the Southern Kingdom. The great city of Jerusalem was "a ruin and a heap," and the triumph of Babylon transformed the feasts of the Jews into fasts, and their songs into lamentations. I. Self-Sufficient, They Had No Need of God. After all, it is summed up in the two-sided admonition contained in the text. First, they did not need God. The people, having prospered largely by virtue of what their hardy forebears had done: having inherited, that is to say, all of the triumphant virility of those numberless and unconquered generations who had set out eight, ten hundred years before because they would have no more of Egyptian masters, because they wanted their own land and freedom of communion with the God of their fathers these unmeriting later sons plumed themselves in that absurd pride which is much with us today, we sometimes feel, as it was with them. They got stuck on themselves a pretty figure of speech, by the way, which has a most interesting physical basis. Think of it a man stuck, impaled, on himself. Well, they were lords, self-sufficient, a law unto themselves. And so they forgot God, which is the second phase of it. Now when a man gives up Church, or God, or in any event that something without himself which is bigger than himself, and upon which he feels dependent and to which he looks up in aspiration, you can count upon it he is soon or late a gone human. We do not know why it is. We do certainly know that it is the fact. It may seem a sweeping, careless thing to say, and I do say it sweepingly, but not carelessly: You cannot point out a single |