“The merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones,

 and of pearls, and fine linen, and the bodies and souls of men.”

(Revelation 18:12-13)

When you go Christmas shopping, how do you go about it? What is the Christmas shopping of any of us these early December days but a survey of all the merchandise offered in the shops and stores and catalogs, a selection of an appropriate gift from all the articles on sale, and then a dispatching of the package when purchased?

And oh, the infinite variety of the articles offered for sale this Christmas time. Manufacturers and merchants become more ingenious with each returning Christmas season. In the home of a friend the other day, I picked up a Christmas shoppers catalog from Nieman Marcus, and there on the first page, in brilliant inviting colors, was the picture of a suggested little Christmas remembrance — a diamond and emerald necklace with earbobs to match — advertised at the Texas bargain price of $345,000.

President Eisenhower, you know, was in Rome yesterday. Wonder what articles for sale he saw in the shop windows to tempt the Christmas shoppers of Rome?

St. John, in the Revelation, rattles off a long list of items for sale in the proud and powerful Rome of his day. It was a far richer and more influential Rome than the city our President is visiting this weekend. Listen to John’s inventory of articles offered for sale in Imperial Rome when Christmas rolled around in the year 95 A. D.: “Gold and silver and precious stones, and pearls and fine linen, and silks and ivory and perfumes . . . and the bodies and souls of men.”

Does it offend our sensitive ears to hear mention made in a listing of articles for sale these items: the bodies and souls of men? Henry Ward Beecher shocked his Brooklyn congregation one Sunday morning just 100 years ago, by selling at auction in the pulpit of the Plymouth church, a Negro slave girl. Max Lerner complains that people are shocked with what he writes today of: “morals, crime, punishment, sexual behavior, the waywardness of adolescents, prostitution, abortion, the role and fate of women . . . These things might be discussed by preachers, judges, doctors, and psychiatrists,” he says, “but by journalists they are out of bounds.”

The merchandise of bodies and souls of men is not a very heart-warming item to appear on any Christmas shopping list. But these are articles for sale, even in these Post-Civil War days. And the discerning eye can find them in the shop windows of our culture.

Whenever a nation becomes a center for world trade, the temptation is always there to substitute commercial standards for permanent human standards. Whenever human labor is bought and sold as a commodity, wherever profits are sought and wealth accumulated with carelessness or callous unconcern for the rights and welfare of the men and women and little children whose days and destinies are caught up in that total commercial enterprise, then the bodies and souls of people are become merchandise. Whenever in any business deal, any personal encounter, we treat another human being as something to be used for our enrichment or selfish pleasure, we are in the business of merchandising human bodies and souls.

How much of our commerce is practically a traffic in the blood and bones and nerves and souls of men? Any business enterprise which has no higher standards than commercial success inevitably puts character itself on the counter and sells it as a commodity. Many a man has confronted the test which came when he knew that by selling himself he could make his fortune. “The merchandise of the bodies and souls of men.”

Now, John the Revelator says that it was this business of trafficking in the bodies and souls of men, which was at the bottom of Rome’s destruction. Rome dealt delicately, deliciously, but immorally and inhumanely in commerce and politics. She grew rich and powerful at the expense of the life and liberty of her subject peoples. Her merchants and rulers pampered themselves with every luxury extorted from the suffering and misery of enslaved people. But then came the day of God’s reckoning. He branded as sin, Rome’s trafficking in the souls of men. This the Eternal saw. He recorded it. The moral laws of His universe are set against treating bodies as less than sacred and souls as anything but immortal. Finally her time ran out and Rome fell, because her fate had already been decided upon in heaven.

Death and destruction came suddenly last week in that peaceful village in Southern France, when a dam broke and 50 million tons of water swept as a wall thirty feet high through the valley to the sea. But there was a reason for the break, a cause of the destruction. Five years ago, during the dam’s construction, there were charges of cheap and fraudulent building. Specifications were disregarded; laws of strong and safe building were transgressed.

In the city of man’s life, there are moral and spiritual rules for the building of every social structure. Amos saw God standing in the midst of the city of his generation with a plumbline in his hand. Everything that is not built on the square with God and man is doomed. It will give under the strain of the impounded waters of time. Injustice, cruelty, oppression, and disregard for human rights and human dignity will burst the wall and destroy the fairest structures of man’s building.

Now it is the peculiar peril of city life that it puts in close proximity and in dear dependence man and man, so that one human being can more easily, diabolically, prosperously, prey on his fellow. Wherever people are gathered together, the Tempter uses their propinquity in his attempt to debauch, not only their individual characters, but also the whole social system — to bend spiritual values to become subservient to material values, to beguile people into using other persons for their personal gain.

The fast climbing, young business executive in the big organization is tempted to strive for not only handsome salary raises, but also an illicit relationship with a pretty secretary. The T. V. producer sees how, for profit’s sake, the gullible public can be corrupted and manipulated to boost sales. The phenomena of city life and the accessibility of mass media in communications raise to gigantic proportions man’s capacity to deal in the merchandise of the bodies and souls of men. This is the peril and scourge of city life.

But the particular glory of city life is this. It places man in close proximity to his brother so that he may more easily and poignantly perceive the spiritual needs of his brother and begin to enter with this brother into a mutual service in spiritual things. The city of man’s life offers him his widest opportunity, as well as his most harrowing temptation.

For the man or woman with dawning religious inclinations, it is the alluring temptations of city life, its sin and shame, its crass materialism, its cold humanity, which are at first most apparent. The initial inclination of the newly born religious soul is to flee the city of destruction. Escape the snare of its temptations by retreat to rural haunts or in cloistered seclusion remain uninvolved in the city’s sin.

There are those who maintain that American Protestantism has never really acclimated to city life. It has remained rural and individualistic in its thought about and practice of religion. It has never understood this Big City and is mortally afraid of its intricate social framework, which is tainted with sin to the core.

We are all acquainted, of course, with the citizen who has become horrified at the evidence he has found of corruption in politics. He knows there is some graft, some deal, some chicanery in all politics. Therefore, he says: “Since I can’t be absolutely lily white in my political purity if I get involved in politics, I just won’t get involved. I’ll stay out. I’ll wash my hands of the whole business. I’ll leave it to others.” And when all the better citizens leave politics to the conscienceless, those who are involved up to the hilt in the sinfulness and graft and tyranny of politics, the situation grows worse and worse.

Is not the meaning of Christmas, the meaning of the Incarnation, just this — that God decided He would not remain aloof from the mess of human sin; that the impeccable purity of the absolute holiness of the Eternal God got involved in the sorry spectacle of man’s sin — individual, social, yes, every religious sin? That involvement meant for God incarnation. “The word became flesh and dwelt among us.” So the angels announced one frosty Judean night — “There is born to you this day in the city of David, a Savior, which is Christ the Lord . . . He who knew no sin, was made sin on our behalf, that we might become the righteousness of God through Him.”

That was the only way salvation could come to our uproarious, ridiculous globe. So now, also, for the city of our life, where much is bought and sold, even spiritual values, and the souls of men, we must move in realms and circles and atmospheres where our souls are put in jeopardy, that temptation endured may be overcome and redemption may become a possibility through our participation in life by Christ’s spirit and His love. There is then the glorious possibility of the continuation of the incarnation through us.

What we must never forget is that every city is at once, two cities — a city of destruction and a city celestial. Dickens wrote his Tale of Two Cities about London and Paris in the days of the French Revolution. One is the symbol of order and peace and the conservator of the noblest values of the human heart. The other city is a symbol of chaos and destruction and hatred and murder. So John’s Revelation is a tale of two cities: Rome, the merchandiser of the bodies and souls of men, marked for destruction, and the Heavenly Jerusalem, which is always coming down out of heaven to earth when men of good will incarnate the Christ-spirit in their dealings with each other, resolved to reverence, respect, and wherever possible, redeem the lives of their fellow citizens rather than deal with them as objects to be manipulated for personal profit and pleasure.

William Stevenson writes that John Calvin found Geneva a “cesspool of licentiousness and immorality, and made it a Protestant Sparta which attracted men from all over Europe who loved truth and hated a lie.”

So, there are in our beloved city, Memphis, two cities. There is a Memphis where the bodies and souls of men are bought and sold, where sympathy is short, and terms of business transactions are cold and hard and sharp; where the dollar mark hangs high and human flesh is cheap and chastity is something to make a joke about and every man has his price.

But there is another Memphis, where a man is a man, a miracle beyond compare, and souls are not for sale at any price, and every child — be he black or white or red or yellow or brown — is an immortal soul, a child of the eternal Ancient of days, just another of His beloved ones for whom Christ died, and for Christ’s sake is really accorded all courtesy and respect and honor.

This is the Memphis that over-subscribed its Community Chest Fund goal and abundantly financed every civic humanitarian agency that serves spiritual values: the Memphis that is on the march to being the very headquarters and center of the World Literacy Movement; the Memphis whose Realtor’s Board president writes as he sends the Board’s thousand dollar contribution: “We don’t feel this is a contribution. It is an investment in people. We can think of nothing more important than helping people who cannot help themselves by lifting them from the darkness of illiteracy to the light of education.” It is the Memphis of that poor widow who, when sending her small contribution for the Mile O’ Dimes, wrote: “I am sending my little bit to help someone. I was helped once when I couldn’t help myself.”

With which Memphis are we associating ourselves in this city which is two cities? Are we with those who are buying and selling the souls and bodies of men, or with that Memphis which is redeeming human life: setting people free from poverty and despair and ignorance and slavery to sin? The real Pilgrim’s Progress for every serious Christian is not an escape from the city of destruction to the celestial city, but rather a living of the life of that city celestial in righteousness and concern into the very hours and experiences and personal relationships of this city of our present abode. This is the heavenly life — now and forever.

Which way are we traveling today? Deeper and deeper into the city of destruction or higher and higher into the city celestial?