I
love the story of the college sophomore at Princeton University who was
working as an assistant in the library late one night to earn some extra
money, and as the library was about to close for the evening, he discovered
one very old man way in the back of the stacks, pouring over science books,
taking notes furiously, as fast as he could write. The young sophomore
was amused that somebody that late at night and that old would be studying
so furiously and feverishly and he came up to the old man whom he didn¹t
recognize as Albert Einstein. And he said to Albert Einstein, "What
are you studying so late at night?" And Einstein said, "Oh,
I¹m a student of physics." To which the young sophomore shrugged
and replied, "Oh, I took physics last semester."
I pray that every person at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church would have the same voracious appetite for learning and discovery and knowledge as Albert Einstein did for learning physics. For you see, the genius of Einstein is not just what he learned in the past, it¹s what he was learning every day...he updated his understanding so that he was constantly, continually, daily being renewed. My prayer for us as a church is that every one of us would be like Einstein. That we would not try to live on stale grace, we wouldn¹t live on an experience of God we had in the sixth grade or junior high school or college or young adulthood, as meaningful as those experiences might have been. You can't live today on yesterday¹s experience of faith.
Unless
I miss my guess, there's someone here this morning who doesn't know as
much about the bible or theology as you would like to know. Unless I miss
my guess, there's someone here today who once heard a sermon about John
or about Matthew or about Paul but you're not really sure how John and
Matthew and Paul all fit together. Unless I miss my guess, there¹s
someone here today who would like to know more about Christian theology,
the nature of God. Why did Jesus Christ die on the cross, and what difference
does that make for me? And I have a hunch, someone is wondering, is there
a difference between God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit?
Is there a heaven, and is there a hell in this world today?
All that is going to be dealt with in the Center for Christian Studies.
Hermeneutics: Introduction to the Bible. But don't stop with the introduction.
Then we're going to offer, and you'll see all this on the fifth floor
immediately after worship, 200 level courses where you will go on under
the tutelage of a Charles Dougherty, a wonderful Bible teacher in our
church who will teach you the book of Ephesians, and then on to a 300
level course taught by Brian Blount from Princeton Theological Seminary
(the finest Seminary in the world) who will teach more advanced Biblical
study, so that over some time
if you were in this
church for two years, you could take 100 level, 200 level, 300 level,
400 level, and at the end of that time you would say, "You know,
I'm learning something about the Bible and I'm applying it to my everyday
life." But it's not just Biblical study or theological study, this
is practical to the core. We're going to offer a course at the Center
for Christian Studies on managerial leadership and ethics, taught by a
Christian professor of business at the Columbia Graduate School of Business
and the former president of Union Theological Seminary, a friend of Dr.
Oscar McCloud and myself for many years, and they're going to team up
to teach this wonderful course. I hope everyone in management in our church
takes the course in what it means to be a manager who has ethics and integrity
and morality.
Our 
own
Dr. Westenburg is going to teach "Music as the Spirit¹s Wings."
Someone said, "Music is the velvet against which the diamonds of
the word of God are displayed." Dr. Westenburg's class is going to
meet right up in the choir loft, so he feels at home. He's going to teach
that class up there on hymnology. What do the hymns mean? Have you ever
wondered about the words of the hymns and the music? What do the anthems
mean, and what is the difference between sacred music and secular music?
Dr. Westenburg's going to be offering that class this fall, "Music
as the Spirit's Wings."
Our own Janet Gibbs, Clerk of Session, a gifted scholar in her own right,
not only our Clerk of Session, is going to be teaching a course "Dealing
With Depression." It's the Number One illness in America today. How
do you deal with depression if a friend or a family member or a child
or a parent gets it? How do you deal with it? What do you do, and what
do you avoid doing? All of that will be covered in that class, "Dealing
With Depression." I hope everyone after worship today will go to
the fifth floor and get a booklet and pour through it and sign up today
or during the summer for these very exciting classes that are being offered
this fall.
Now, you may wonder, why spend so much time on this? Why do we need to do this? Do I want everybody to enroll in this school so we can have the largest Center for Christian Studies in the United States or to get everybody in class? Why do we do this? We¹re not doing it for ourselves. We¹re doing this for a world in need.
