Dr. Tony Campolo Chapel Address

Chapel-October 9, 2001

If there was ever a time that we could say, "These are the best of times and the worst of times," it would have to be right now. You're living in an incredible time because it is the best of times and the worst of times.

The best of times because I can't remember a time when I have seen so much heroism. As those people were rushing down the steps to get out of the world trade building, there were 300 policemen and fireman running up the steps, into the building to see if they could save lives. I don't know where that kind of courage comes from, but they did it and they lost their lives in the process. That is heroism that has to be respected.

My friend Gordon McDonald spent a week at Ground Zero after the buildings collapsed, ministering to people. The stories he tells about the heroism, the self-sacrifice, and the ostracism that he saw. He said he's a Calvinist but he has a hard time being a Calvinist because he is not convinced about the total depravity of human beings anymore. He saw so much goodness in that place.

The best of times, but also the worst of times. Profiling has reared its ugly head again. We're profiling people. And I have to tell you that this has dangerous implications, and we better be on guard against this because it seems like everyone is in favor of it now that we are in a time of an emergency. We're fighting against terrorists, but the truth of the matter is, Nietzsche had the answer when he said, "Beware, beware when you fight a dragon, lest you become a dragon." We have to be careful that in fighting those who would threaten liberties, we don't get rid of liberties; that in standing against those who would do away with freedom, we don't do away with freedom.

It's going to be a hard time for you as young people, figuring out how to balance things in the days that lie ahead, so that we're not foolish on the one hand, but the ugly face of racism doesn't rear itself in the disparaging ways that it has already reared itself in the last few weeks. We must not allow resentment to overtake us.

When Bill Clinton met Nelson Mandela for the first time, there was an incredible conversation. Bill Clinton asked Nelson Mandela, "When they released you from prison, I got Chelsea up at three in the morning because I wanted have her see this. I knew it was a historic moment and I got her out of bed to see you released from prison.

"As you walked across the courtyard, from the cellblock to the gate of the prison, the television cameras focused in on your face. I have never seen such anger, such animosity, and such hatred. I mean, you usually can't see that so clearly revealed. It was all over you. It was intense hatred, intense resentment. President Mandela, that is not the Nelson Mandela that I know today. Could you explain what was going on?"

Nelson Mandela says, "You're the first one that brought that to my attention. I didn't know that anybody noticed that. But as they released me from the prison block and as I walked across the courtyard to the gate, I thought to myself, 'They've taken everything away from me, my family is destroyed, my cause has been crushed, my friends are dead, anything, anybody, that meant anything to me, they've destroyed it all,' and I hated them with a fiery hatred. And then God spoke to me, and said, 'Nelson, for 27 years, you were their prisoner, but you were always a free man. Don't let them make you into a free man, only to turn you into their prisoner.'"

We have to be careful when we fight the dragon, lest we become the dragon. When it comes to profiling, I can only think of one friend of mine who talked about racism in a way that really made sense to me. As I got off the airplane at O'Hare, I thought of him because that is the last time I saw him. You may remember Peter Arnett from CNN. I ran into him one day in O'Hare and I said, "Peter, I'm out of stories. Speakers live my stories. Do you have any good stories?"

He said, "I've got one for you. Last week I was on the West Bank, and a bomb went off, a terrorist bomb went off. Bodies were flying through the air. There was blood all over. A man came running up to me, holding in his hands a girl that was badly wounded, bloody from head to toe. The man holding this little girl in his arms said to me, 'Mister, the soldiers have sealed off the area. They won't let anybody in and anybody out. If I don't get her to a hospital, she is going to die. You can see that-that she is going to die if I don't get her out of here. You're the press; you can get us out of the lines. Please, please will you help?'"

Peter told me, "What could I do? I put them in the back of the car, I covered them with a blanket, and we made our way through the lines. And on the way to Tel Aviv, he kept on saying, 'Go faster, please, mister, go faster,' and then he started moaning, 'I'm losing her, I'm losing her, I'm losing her!'"

Peter said, "When we got to the hospital, we rushed the girl into the operating room, dropped her on the table, came out, and sat on the bench outside the operating room totally dissipated and exhausted because of the tension that we had just been through. I was taking a deep breath when the doctor came out of the room and said, 'She's dead.' The man convulsed in tears. He screamed and he cried, and I put my arm around him and tried to comfort him. I said to him, 'I don't know what to say. I don't have any children. I don't know what it's like to lose a daughter.'

The man looked up at me and said, 'Oh, that little girl isn't my daughter. That Palestinian girl is not my daughter. I am a Jewish settler.' And then he said, "But maybe the time has come when all of us must learn to look on every child as a son and as a daughter. Maybe the day has come when we must discover what it means to be part of the family of God.'"

That day is here and that day is now. We have to overcome the racism that is inherent in this present crisis. We must go beyond the resentment and the hatred that can easily be generated in such a setting. And we must learn from history. I don't know how many of you have friends and relatives who have gone out to the mission field to Muslim countries, but its almost impossible to win converts away from the Muslim faith to the Christian faith, because the minute that we confront them with Christianity, immediately to the minds of Muslim people comes the Crusades. You say, but that was a thousand years ago, I hardly know much about the Crusades-how many of them, where, who led them where. We don't know much about the Crusades, but there isn't a Muslim in the world that doesn't know about the Crusades. Where, in the name of Jesus, we slaughtered how many hundreds and thousands of innocent people, a lot of them women and children. And because we did not behave well at a particular juncture of human history, the cause of the gospel was set back immeasurably for a thousand years. We cannot let that happen again.

Osama bin Laden would love to turn this into a Holy War of Christians against Muslims. We must not let that happen. We must do everything we can in these days to reach across the lines, to learn who Muslim people are, what they believe, what their convictions are. There must be a time of rapprochement.

I am an evangelical. I want to win every Muslim to Jesus Christ, but until they become my neighbors, until they know that I love them, I am not going to have a chance to do that. We cannot live out the Great Commission until we first live out the Great Commandment. We're all want to go out and preach the gospel to all nations, but we don't want them to be our neighbors. They've got to be our neighbors before we can convince them about the Christ who dies for them.

Just remember what Martin E. Molar (sp) said at a time of conflict like this. He said, "What I must recognize is that my nation's enemies are not God's enemies and even those that declare themselves as God's enemies are not God's enemies."

We have to affirm some things in this day and age. When you come to a mess like this, immediately people want to know the answer, "Why?" It was intriguing in the weeks following the tragedies in New York and in Washington-how many ministers were on CNN, were on Larry King Live-and they were all asking the same question, "Why? How could this have happened? If God is all-powerful, if God is all loving, how could this have happened?"

Now I know a lot of you are deeply in a reformed tradition and say, "Well, it is all part of God's plan." I am afraid that your mind and theology don't agree. I don't believe in a God who sends airplanes into buildings to teach a nation a lesson. That is not my God. I contend when those planes hit those buildings, God was the first one who cried, and that God's tears continue even with us til this day and time.

I don't think that we have taken evil seriously enough. We are inclined to say that God controls everything. There is an evil force in the universe. I don't know when it was, but the scriptures let me know that there was a rebellion of Satan and Satan's cohorts. There was a rebellion against God before the foundation of the earth. Satan may be a lot of things, but Satan is not stupid. Satan would not have rebelled unless he believed that there was a good chance of winning. Satan would not have rebelled if he was not convinced that he could pull it off.

Zoroastrian people knew that there was a struggle throughout history between light and darkness, but they weren't sure who would win in the struggle, which side would triumph. They called upon people to join the side of light so that the balance of power would be on the side of righteousness. That was the essence of their religion.

In Judaism, there was the hope that God would triumph in history, that God would be victorious. The Hebrew prophets lived in the expectation that God would triumph in history. But it wasn't until Jesus came that we moved beyond hope to reassurance. When Jesus died on the cross, when he was resurrected from the grave, we then knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, how the struggle between light and darkness, between good and evil, would turn out.

Satan knew that if ever there was a chance to destroy God, it was there on Calvary-God incarnated in a human being, God wrapped up in human weakness, says the scripture, in the form of human weakness-now spread eagle to a Roman cross. If ever God was vulnerable, it was in that hour. When he hung on the cross outside the city wall, God in the most vulnerable condition possible. And at the end of the day Satan must have been dancing and singing, convinced that God had been defeated; that God was dead. Satan must have thought, "I am in charge of the universe now. My dominions will rule over the universe now."

And then three days later, God staged a coup. Up from the grave he arose, with a mighty triumph for his foes. And from that day on, there would never be any doubt that Christ's victory would be a reality, and that Jesus would win.

Oscar Kungman (sp?), one of the greatest theologians to come out of Switzerland during World War II, wrote a book called Christ in Time. He wrote about two days in World War II that have crucial significance, D-day and V-day. He points out that in any war, there is a battle that determines the outcome of the war. In the Civil War, it was Gettysburg. In the Napoleonic Wars, it was Waterloo. After Waterloo, it was over. I mean, the war wasn't over, but it was over, everyone knew that Napoleon was defeated. After Gettysburg, it wasn't over, in the sense that they continued fighting, but there was no doubt as to how the war was going to end.

And on that day in June when the Allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy, everyone on both sides knew that this was the day it would all be decided. They made a movie called The Longest Day. The Nazis knew that if they could drive the Allied forces back into the oceans, they would win the war. Contrarily, the Allies were convinced that if they could establish the beachhead, they would win the war. And at the end of the day, the good news was that the Allies had established a beachhead. It was at that point that Rommel, the head of the Nazi forces, secretly joined the plot to kill Hitler. The head of the Nazi army joined the plot to kill Hitler because he knew that Hitler would never ever give up, and he knew that the war was lost after the longest day. That day determined the end of the war.

But this should be noted, students, that between D-day and V-day, the day that the war actually ended, more people died; there was more suffering, more death, more devastation than at any other time. The point being what?

Oscar Kungman said, "We live between God's D-day and God's V-day." On Calvary and with the resurrection, the decisive battle was fought and won. Satan is defeated. Satan is a paper tiger now. There is no way he can win. He lost the decisive battle. If ever he had a chance, it was there and he blew it. And now we know how it will end. For those of you who are English majors, throw T.S. Elliot out the window. He didn't know what he was talking about. He sounds heavy and every sophomore that is into existential angst loves to read T.S. Elliot. "This the way the world will end," you know the couplet, "Not with a bang, but a whimper."

No, that's not it, because with Calvary and the resurrection, this is the way the world will end. The kingdoms of this world will become the kingdoms of our God and he shall rein forever and ever and ever. Alleluia, alleluia. We live in that anticipation of victory. So when we see evil rear its ugly head, when we see the horrors of the World Trade buildings, we recognize the setback. We recognize the evil that was at work there. But we know that those evil forces have won a battle in a cause that they will ultimately lose.

And I am here to declare that it is better to lose a battle in a cause that ultimately wins than to win a battle in a cause that ultimately loses. Do you not agree? This is the good news of the gospel.

And in the context of all of this, we have to make sure that certain things are changed. If we are going to wipe out terrorism, it is not going to be because we are lobbing bombs or rockets into Afghanistan, and it will not even be because we send the troops in to weed out the terrorists in those caves. It will be because we changed the situation in the world today. You know very well that if we kill Bin Laden and every terrorist alive today, it will only be another couple of years before a new group of terrorists rise up to take their place because we have done nothing about the conditions that create terrorism.

This may seem unpopular in America, which is so pro-Israel, especially among evangelical Christians, who are more pro-Israel than most of the Jewish people in this country. You listen to evangelical fundamentalists on television and they're all for the restoration of the state of Israel, who gets run over in the process. I find that my Jewish friends are much more sympathetic to the word justice. We have sat back and said absolutely nothing as Israeli tanks that we provided, guns that we have issued, have been used to level the houses of Palestinian people. We have gone into lands that belong to Palestinians. By law, by right, by UN declaration, that land belongs to the Palestinians. Israel had conceded that that land belongs to the Palestinians and then after conceding, that they sent troops in, leveled the land, and built Jewish settlements there, and when boys and girls threw rocks at them, they couldn't quite figure out why, and call these kids terrorists.

There is anger out there, and for all the evil of an Osama Bin Laden, you've got to say this, "There will be no peace and justice and safety for Americans until there is peace and justice and safety for the Palestinian people."

Please, we must be committed to the preservation of the state of Israel, but we must be equally committed to justice for the Palestinians. May I point out now to you that the word justice appears in the Bible more often than the word love? That's because there is no love if there is no justice.

We have to understand Islam. I don't know much about Islam, do you? Do you really know that much about Islam, except that they pray five times a day and that they take this pilgrimage and walk around a black stone? I am not even sure what the stone represents. Do we understand why having a military base in Saudi Arabia is a sacrilege to Islamic people? We say we need to respect our Islamic brothers and sisters, but Saudi Arabia has been designated since the time of Mohammed as holy land on which infidels should not live. And when we establish a base there, it is affront to everything they believe.

If we are going respect other people's religions, then we have to pay the price for that. I know that base is important for keeping tabs on Iraq, but we've got to find another way of doing that without creating sacrilege. I am sure that most of us don't even know that we are creating sacrilege as a nation. We've got to understand these brothers and sisters.

We have to deal with the whole issue of poverty. You know that poverty is what breeds terrorism in the ultimate sense. I'm horrified, you're horrified, we're all horrified with this incredible tragedy, greater than Pearl Harbor. More than 5,000 lose their lives in these acts of terrorism. We're shocked. We're depressed. We're in mourning. But let me remind you of something: while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 children under the age of 12 died of either starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Let me repeat that. Thirty thousand children under the age of 12 died of either starvation or diseases related to malnutrition, and we weren't shocked over that. We're not depressed over that. We're not crying over that. And it happens everyday, everyday, everyday.

I contend that, as Christian young people, at a school that has a vision, your responsibility is to rise up and say, "I don't know what other schools are going to do with their students, but I am going to be a student from North Park University that is committed to the elimination of that world hunger." It can be done, you know. It has been projected by Christian aid in London that we can cut the present level of poverty exactly in half in 15 years.

We've already made tremendous progress. Twenty years ago, only two out of every five people had decent drinking water. Now it is four out of five. Twenty years ago, only four out of every ten children had a chance to go to school. Now it is seven out of every ten. We are making progress. The prophets of doom have conned us into thinking things are getting worse and worse and worse, but I am here to tell you that it is just not so. The same Jesus that rose again from the dead, that same Christ, is in us and working through us, driving back the forces of evil.

Let me just cite two things. Some years ago, a man by the name of Al Whittaker (sp) came down for breakfast. He was then the CEO of Crystal Myers Corporation, a large multi-national corporation. Receiving breakfast, his wife looks across the table and says, "Al, is this what you want to do the rest of your life? Do you want to spend the rest of your life making rich people richer? Because that is what you are doing. You are making us rich. You're making the stockholders rich. But I am not sure that producing men's cologne is a great contribution to humanity."

He thought about that all day long. That night over supper, he said to his wife, "The question you asked troubled me. So much so that you should know that as I left the office today, I handed in my resignation." He started an organization known as Opportunities International. This was an attempt to get at people like you to get the vision to go into third world countries, among the poor and the oppressed, and start small business and cottage industries that the people can own and run themselves.

I remember starting the first of those, the very first. It was in the Dominican Republic. It was part of your missionary enterprise that we got connected with them. We started a little factory in a slum area called Guachapeta. Twenty women got together and started this little factory. They were making sandals out of old automobile tires. They told the boys and girls in the village, "Every time you bring us a discarded, worn out automobile tire, we'll give you fifty cents." It wasn't long before they had every old automobile tire in Santo Domingo. Then they started getting a lot of new automobile tires. And they began to realize that God works in wondrous ways.

In Philadelphia, we started a wonderful little company where we got the telephone company to give us their old telephones. Nobody fixes things anymore; they just throw them away. Something breaks, and the cost of labor is so high that they don't fix them. So the telephone company ended up with thousands of telephones that were broken but not useless. They gave them to us with great appreciation because they got a tax write off for thousands of phones given to a charity.

And you say, "I know what you're thinking, Campolo. You got those kids to fix those phones. We're not that smart, we don't know how to fix things. But if you're from the city like I am, you are good at one thing: taking things apart. Oh, how we know how to do that. We took the phones apart, tested the parts, and when we found working parts, we packaged them, wrapped them up, and we sold the parts to phone companies. It was a good deal. The business doesn't exist anymore because they were subject to a buyout by the phone company, who bought them out for a quarter of a million dollars, which wasn't bad for a group of 10 guys who had previously been on the corner selling drugs and who knows what else. A quarter of a million dollars was divided up between them, but more than that they were given a deal where they ended up working for the phone company doing the same thing at $17 an hour.

You've got to attack poverty. Poverty breeds terrorism. Injustice breeds terrorism. We've got to address those issues as Christians. We must work for justice. We must work to end poverty. I can't say it strongly enough.

In the midst of all that's going on right now, let me give you the really hard thing to swallow. Of all the things I should not mention today in this chapel, I shouldn't mention Jesus. Now that's a shocker. The last thing we want to hear right now in the midst of your present conflicts is Jesus. When down deep inside, we all know what Jesus said. And the question that I have is, "Do you hold onto Jesus when it not a problem? Is that when you hold onto to Jesus, when it is not a problem?

I want to tell you, it is a problem to hold onto Jesus right now. I am pleased that the president of the United States decided to drop food in addition to bombs, but I have got to tell you this. It is about time we take seriously what the scriptures say. If your enemy hungers, feed him. If your enemy is naked, clothe him. You return good for evil.

Does Jesus mean this for all places, all times, all peoples, all circumstances, or just when it is convenient? What does it really mean to follow the one who said, "Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God." We all want to be children of God, but we don't like the conditions. What do you do with a Senator McCain who says, "I hope God shows them some mercy, because they're not going to get any from us."

I've got news for you. The beatitudes say that if you refuse to be merciful, then don't expect to receive mercy. Blessed are the merciful, for they are the ones who will receive mercy. I thought that the best prayer I heard in the midst of the praying that has gone on this month came at that wonderful prayer meeting in the Capital Dome as the Senator for Maryland stood. When Ms. McClusky got to the microphone she prayed, "Dear God, bring those who have committed these horrible deeds to." and I am waiting for her to say justice because that is what America was talking about, but she prayed, ".to repentance."

There is the Christian prayer. I don't wish the destruction of my enemies, I wish my enemies to repent, even as I need to repent. There needs to be repentance on both sides of the line. After all, we need to do some repenting, do we not? We're 7 percent of the world's population and we consume 43 percent of the world's resources. We have lived lives of affluence. Everybody loves to talk about the sins of Sodom and Gomorra. I've heard these evangelists say, "The reason why this is happening is because we are committing the sins of Sodom and Gomorra!" You've heard that line haven't you?

It is about time you read the Bible. If you go to Ezekiel 16: 49-50, these are the words you will read: "And this was the sin of Sodom, that it was an arrogant people who lived with indifference to the poor. A people that had affluence and cared not for the oppressed." Read the Bible. The thing that is wrong with most fundamentalists is they are so busy arguing the infallibility of scripture that they never ever bother to read it.

The truth of the matter is this: the sin of Sodom and the sin of Gomorra were much more than sexual improprieties, which they were, but much more than just that. We get fixated on that. You know if we don't commit fornication or adultery or any of the other sexual sins, then we somehow think that we're pure, that we're holy, and the Bible is clear on this one.

To care about the poor and the oppressed is at the core of the Christian gospel. May I say, there are more than 2000 verses of scripture that call upon us to minister to the poor and the oppressed. No other scripture passages can measure up to the passages on poverty. And this is our calling.

I have to ask you as students: What you are going to do because our task is not to get people saved into heaven when they die. I am glad that I am a Christian because when I do die, I will be with Christ. The older I get, the more comforting that is. I am getting old. My idea of a happy hour is a nap. I am over the hill, so that part of the message of the gospel is of crucial significance for me.

But you're young. I remember when I was a kid. When I was 12 years old. I was sitting in church and my pastor said, "Are you ready to die?" I'm 12 years old. I can still hear him say, "You don't think you're going to die, but you could leave this church and walk across the street and get hit by a truck. Then where would you be?" That didn't get me saved; it made me very careful about crossing the streets.

And then there was always threat number two, left behind. In our day, it was another movie, Thief in the Night. You don't have to die; the trumpet could sound and the Lord returns. That was used in everything. "Pastor, is it all right to go to movies?" "What if you are in the movies and the trumpet sounds and the Lord returns?" The next time I went to the movies, I was scared to death. I was sure I was going to get halfway through the flick and the trumpet would sound and I could just see myself going through eternity, shaking people, saying, "How did it end, how did that movie end?"

I believe in the second coming. I don't when it is going to happen. I don't feel bad about that. Jesus didn't know when it was going to happen. They asked him, "When will you return and set up your kingdom?" He said, "I don't know when. You're going to have to ask an American Evangelist for the answer to that one."

I have news for you. I believe in the second coming for a very important reason: the God who is in work in us and through us is coming back, and what we do not complete, which is most of it, and what we do not achieve, he will come and join up with us and carry us to victory. Once again, Oscar Kungman said, "If you had talked to the French Underground during World War II and asked them what they were doing, they'd say, 'We're overthrowing the Nazi army.' They'd say, 'You're a ragtime army with a few grenades, and a few rifles. You're going to take on the huge Nazi military machine and beat them? The answer would have been, 'You don't understand. Across the English Channel, there is a huge invasion force assembling, even as we speak. We don't know when the signal will be given, but one of these days, that huge invasion force will sweep across the English Channel, join up with us, and carry us to victory.'"

That's my message. As we struggle against the forces of darkness, as we work to overcome poverty, as we bring justice as best we know how into the world, people will laugh at us and say, "You can't possibly win. You're too weak, your forces are too feeble." But I am here to declare the good news. Beyond the skies, there is a huge invasion force being assembled, and I don't know when they are going to sound that trumpet, but one of these days, that invasion force is going to come into our historical situation and join up with us and carry us to victory. That is why we do not labor as those without hope.

That's why I call upon you as students. Listen, I beg of you, don't waste your lives. Lay them on the line for the work of the kingdom. You say, "What do you want, everyone to become a missionary?" Yes. What is there that's interesting to do anyway? Going to work for American Airlines, you'll be out of a job next week.

People, there is so much to be done. And you know and I know that you have dreams and visions of doing good. You have had them, haven't you? I don't know where it hits you. At a Baptist revival in the 50th verse of "Just as I Am" or at a Presbyterian revival at the 50th verse of "Kumbaya." I don't know. But somewhere, some place, be honest, God spoke to you, and you had a sense that you could do something splendid, something miraculous, something incredible with your life.

In 1987, I spoke at the Urbana Conference and Billy Graham stepped aside and let me be the one that gave the invitation for missionary service. They only do it once in that weekend, and he said, "I want you to do it." It was an incredible response-thousands and thousands of young people committing themselves to missionary service.

Afterward, Billy Graham said, "That was wonderful. I bet we come away with at least a couple of hundred missionaries out of this meeting."

I said, "There were thousands."

He said, "Yes, there were thousands, but they'll go home and they'll be talked out of it. And you know who will talk them out of it-their parents."

Jesus wasn't kidding when he said, "When you get a vision of doing incredible things for God, the first opponents will be those in your own household. Think not that I have come to bring peace." We listen to Focus on the Family and think, "If you just become Christians, it's all going to become well in the family. Jesus says it's not that way. When you become Christians, mothers will be set against daughters, daughters against mothers, fathers against sons, sons against fathers. When you stand up and say, "Mom, my life belongs to Jesus," like St. Frances, your own father will probably turn upon you and say, "Look, I didn't send you to school to go traipsing off to some place and accomplish nothing. There is a lot that you can do right here at home."

You've heard it, haven't you? I know what your parents tell you and they're wrong. They said, "Go to a university. Go to North Park. It's a good university and you will get a good education, and if you get a good education, then you will get a good job, and if you get good job, you will make a lot of money, and if you make a lot of money, you will be able to buy a lot of stuff."

That's what it's about people, stuff. The sizes of American houses have increased 20 percent in floor space in just 10 years. Why? Because we have more and more children, bigger and bigger families? Is that why we are building bigger houses? No, we need bigger houses just to hold all the stuff. When it's Christmas, your parents have to go up to your rooms and shovel half the stuff out to make room for all the new stuff. That's what it's about.

Many of you aren't here for an education. You just want that credential that will enable you to get you the position that will get you the money to get the stuff. How many of you could pass your exams from two years ago? Let me ask you the next question: what did you do with your textbooks? Sold them. You forgot what you learned, you sold the textbooks, and you call this higher education.

You need to get some perspective on things. God has called every one of you here to lay your lives on the line and become "living sacrifices," which is the only reasonable thing to do with your life. I don't how you are going to invest your life. You've got to take a good look at your talents and the opportunities available to you. But I call upon you to optimize your life for Jesus Christ.

You've got to ask yourself, "In what way can I contribute to changing the world into the kind of world that God wants it to be?" We are called upon to be world changers for the kingdom. And when we pray the Lord's prayer, we pray, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done." Where? "On earth."

I don't know what this war is going to accomplish, to tell the truth, because my Bible says that those who live by the sword die by the sword. We don't want to believe that right now. We want to believe those who live by the sword triumph and live happily ever after. Jesus didn't know what he was talking about.

We have got to face up to what we call real politics, and I contend that Jesus was the only real politician that ever lived. He understood what it was all about. I contend that as a Christian college, we look beyond the existential situation and ask, "What can we do to alter the course of history?"

I brought along some friends today. They started a program called Mission Year. They call upon young people to take a year off from school, perhaps between college and graduate school, perhaps taking off a year just to get some perspective. Ideally, I think it is great between sophomore and junior year to take a year off. What we do is put these young people together in small groups, six to a group, five groups to a city, 30 young people there in the city. There are about 25 of these young people starting up a program in Chicago. They rent a house. They live together in community. They connect with the church, but they don't exercise leadership in the church. They sing in the choir maybe or they go to the services, but they don't exercise leadership because they're going to be gone at the end of the year. They spend about 15 or 20 hours a week at soup kitchens, AIDS hospices, old folks homes, tutoring, going into schools and saying to the principal, "I have 15 hours a week. I can come in here and help any teacher you want during the school day."

They impact the community with a presence. Then, they spend 20 hours a week getting to know people in the neighborhood. Knocking on doors, saying, "Hey, we're here in the neighborhood. Don't get nervous, I am not trying to a lay a trip on you or convert you. I just want to pray with you. Will you let us pray with you? Pray God's blessing on you."

Whether the people are Jewish of Agnostic or Islamic, it doesn't make any difference. Nobody says no to a prayer. Usually you'll get, "If it makes you feel any better, go ahead." "We don't have to come in. We can do it right here on the doorstep."

Then we ask the next question, "Do you have any special needs? Anything we should hold before God as we pray?" It is amazing what people will say. "My husbands lost his job. Will you pray he gets another one?" "My son's on drugs. He gets worse every month. Could you pray for him?" "I've got a daughter who is pregnant for the second time and we don't know what do to with the first one." And then we pray.

You say, "That's it. You pray?" When we all get back to the house, we go over the cards of the people we visited. "Here's a guy that needs a job. The YMCA runs a job placement service. Let's call them and tell them to do something, to send someone over that house. This girl is pregnant. The Catholics run the crisis pregnancy center. Let's tell them about this girl and have them send someone over to visit. That boy that's on drugs, let's call Team Challenge." We find that if you work in the city, you don't have to invent new programs. The programs are already there. The problem is that the people who desperately need the programs don't go.

You know seminaries, without exceptions, have a Field of Dreams mentality. Remember the movie Field of Dreams? "Build it and they will come." Build the building and the program and they will come. And that is all they do, tell us how to design programs. They never tell us how to market.

In reality, you've got to go out there and connect people with the ministries and that's what we do. You see, you can't fail because you can never say the program didn't work out well. It's not your program. And it is a win, win situation. White kids get along great in black neighborhoods, as long as they don't come in to compete with the programs that already exist. As long as you are there to feed people into the programs that the indigenous people have already created.

Praying with people. I got off the Bart Transportation system in Oakland, trying to find the teams that are in Oakland. There are six of them in Oakland and I wanted to meet with them. They were all getting together this Methodist church and I couldn't find the church. I asked these two ladies, "Can you tell me where the Methodist church is?"

One of the ladies said, "Yeah, just up the street there." The other one said, "No, no, no. He's talking about that other church around the corner." Then she added, "He's talking about that church where they pray for everybody."

What an interesting concept, a church that prays for everybody. I have heard them say about church, "They have great preaching." I've heard them say about a church, "They have a great youth program or a great social action program or a great music program." You've heard all those things about churches. When was the last time you heard them say, "There's a church that prays for everybody in the neighborhood." Maybe it's time to clear out a lot of the stuff and make room for a house of prayer.

Maybe it's time to get into that kind of ministry, so I am inviting you, I am begging you as best as I know how, that you take seriously giving a year of your life to mission. If after all, Mormon kids will give two years of their lives, I want to know why North Park kids won't give one year? Maybe the Mormons know what commitment is all about and we don't, even though we talk about it all the time. Could you give a year?

You say, "But I am going to medical school." You'll be a different kind of doctor. You say, "But I am going to law school." You'll be a different kind of lawyer. "I am going to be a teacher." You'll be a different kind of teacher. You need what they can do for you. Why do you think Jesus said to the rich young rulers, "Sell everything you have and give to the poor." Because he wanted to eliminate poverty, which, of course, he does.

That isn't why he said to the rich young ruler, "Sell everything you have and give it to the poor." He said it to the rich young ruler because he knew what would happen to the rich young ruler when he went among the poor. He knew that in that world, the rich young ruler would be transformed and become a true disciple.

Whenever we send people into the inner city, they always say "Is it safe?" They probably said that to you when you told them you were coming to North Park University. "Is it safe?"

And I always ask the same question. "Is it safe to live in that affluent suburban neighborhood? To live out your life in shopping centers? Is that safe?" Because my Bible says this, "More dangerous than those who destroy the body are those who destroy the soul." And I am looking at a generation of young people whose souls have been eaten up by an affluent spoiled way of life. You need to get to the poor people so that your head can be put together again.

The best way to end this thing, in this day of dismal despair, is to end with my favorite story. It is tough to be a preacher who's made his whole living on one story. Even people that don't like me say, "He's got one good story. And we'll have him speak if he tells that one story because we don't like anything else he says."

I belong to a black church. I didn't join one. It was a white church and black people moved in and the white people left, and we didn't move. We're Italian, we don't move. The church became all black and it's a great church. I am the last white. I would have done much better today if I had had my congregation here, because white people (and most of you are white), are hard to talk to. Black people are easy. Even when you are not doing well in the black church, they'll let you know.

One time I was halfway through a sermon and some lady in the back yelled, "Help him Jesus, help him Jesus." I knew it wasn't going well. Likewise, in my church, when you are pumping all cylinders, my deacons would be right here with me, right up front, and anytime I said something good, they say, "Preach, preach man, preach." That's what I needed today, I needed my deacons.

The women in my church, when you are pumping all cylinders, they don't say "Amen" or "Hallelujah." That's white. They do this, one hand in the air. You say something good, they'll say, "Well," that's it. That doesn't sound like much. You get 50, 60 women saying "Well," and your hormones bubble. And the men in my church, when you are delivering the gospel, they're up on their feet yelling, "Keep going, man, keep going." I don't get that from white North Park students. I don't get "keep going;" I get "stop."

Once a year, we have a preach-off in our church. You don't even know what they are, do you? You get 5-7 preachers back to back to see who's best. You never say that. You say it's for the glory of God.

It was my turn to preach and I do not want to brag, but I was good. I knew I was good because the deacons were yelling "Preach" and the women were saying "Well" and the men were going "Keep going," and I feed on that stuff. The more they did it, the better I got. The better I got, the more they did it. I got so good, I wanted to take notes on me.

When I ended, that place exploded. There was shouting; there was screaming. It was incredible. It was just ballistic. I sat down, and I said, "Pastor, you're next. You going to be able to top that?"

He said, "Son, sit back, because your old man is going to do you in." I was so hot that day, I didn't think anyone could do me in, and he did me in. One line. "Friday but Sunday's coming."

That's it, one line. Didn't sound like much, but you weren't there. It was Friday and he was spiked to that Roman cross, and he was dead, but that was Friday. Sunday's coming. Somebody yelled, "Keep going, keep going." And that's all he needed. He took off. "Friday, Friday people are saying, as things have been, so they shall be. You can't change anything in this world, but they didn't know it was only Friday. Sunday's coming."

Now, I thought I would get something from this crowd by now. We have to "de-honky-tize" this crowd. I will give you one more chance.

It's Friday, and they're saying, "A bunch of students in a small Christian college at the edge of Chicago-they cannot alter history, they cannot end poverty, they cannot stand against injustice and win." But they don't know it's only Friday. Sunday's coming.

I can still remember the end of that sermon. He just yelled at the top of his lungs, "Friday." Without hesitation, the crowd yelled back, "Sunday's coming."

That's the good news. When we hear the gospel and respond to it, not just with our heads and our hearts, but with our will, with our lives, when we give ourselves to the kingdom of God on earth to create the kind of world that God wants for it to be, we've got the good news. And the good news is this: It's Friday, but Sunday's coming.