HABITS OF ‘THE HEART

Qctober 25, 1987, 11:00 a.m. Worship Service

John M. Buchanan

Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Matthew 16:21-28

“Rhat profil is there if you gain the whole world - and lose your soul?"
-Mattheew 16:26

The best commentary on our text I know of is a play by the late
T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party (1949). Eliot was a great poet and man
of letters. He was deeply concerned about the values which were emerging in
in post World War 12 culture.

The play begins at a party in the London flat of Edward and Lavinia
Chamberlayne. Edward is having an affair with Celia who is also at the
party. Lavinia has discovered the affair and has, that day, left Edward.
She is having an affair with Peter who is also at the party. But Peter
really has eyes for Celia, etc., etc. The conversation is stilted,
trite,... as it wears on interminably, Celia emerges as a main character.
Devastated by the end of her ilove affair with Edward who really wants to
remain with Lavinia, Celia sees a psychiatrist.

“Even if I find my way out of the forest," she says, “I shall be left
with an inconsolable memory of the treasure I went inte the forest to
find... and never found, and which was not there... and perhaps is not
anywhere... I want to be cured of a craving for something I cannot find
and of the shame of never finding it. Can you cure me?"

The doctor Cells her she must choose her own treatment. She can
“avoid excessive expectations - find a husband with whom to breed children
they won't understand and who won't understand them." Or, “there is
another way, if you have the courage... it requires faith. The destination
cannot be described, you will know very little until you get there; you
will journey blind. But the way leads toward possession of what you have
sought for in the wrong place."

Two years later there is another cocktail party. All] are present but
Celia. They learn that shortly after the Jast party Celia joined a nursing

order and was assipned to a remote Pacific island to take care of native
people who were dying of an incurable disease. There, while ministering to
them, she died. Because of ignorance and misunderstanding they had killed
her.

Eliot's point is forcefully made. The contrast is striking. Celia,
among all those petty, self-indulgent people at the party, has chosen life
by deciding to live for something other then self. It was her cure. She
had found life by giving life away.

This is Stewardship Sunday. And stewardship is a euphemism church
people sometimes use to describe fund-raising. But this is not a sermon
about money. This is a stewardship sermon about saving your life by losing
it. Now, before the Stewardship Committee of this church has a corporate
seizure, let me say, simply and clearly, that there is nothing wrong with
money. In fact, Jesus talked more about money than he talked about heaven,
perhaps not as relentlessly as the television evangelists do, but then
again, he didn't have the overhead they do.

But he did taik about money... and he did talk about following him in
a world where money often represents our skills, hopes, our energy and our
faith.

How we use our money is the basic way we express who we are and what
we believe. Regardless of what we say in creeds and hymns - our personal
credo is written in our check stubs. This church attempts to be the body
of Christ on this busy intersection of modern, urban life. We attempt to
gather up the best faith of all of us and express it - to this city, to the
world, and for the world. It takes a lot of money. And I am confident
that the members and friends of this church will continue to support it
penerously as it moves into the future.

In fact, doing that, supporting the church responsibly and
Faithfully, is a part of that larger, radical commission of our Lord's - to
save life by losing it.

That radical saying of Jesus', didn't come out of the blue. It was
precipitated by a famous incident which involved the disciples - and Peter.
One day - he asked them what people were saying about him. They told him
they had heard some suggest that he was John the Baptist - others thought

he was one of the old prophets... He brushed that aside and redirected the
question to them: “Who do you say that I am?" Peter surprised everyone —
including himself by blurting out an astonishing statement: "You are the

Christ, the Son of the Living God,"

And then, in light of that moment of truth, Jesus begins to explain
that the meaning and purpose of his life will be in giving it away...

Earlier this fall I preached on that wonderful interchange between
Jesus and Peter... IT told how important that passage had been to me...
How I had wrilten my Senior paper on it, and in the process had read
everything anyone ever wrote on Jesus' famous question and Peter's famous
answer...

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I told how I had chosen that text for the first sermon I ever
preached in my home church, the Sunday afler I was ordained. That sermon
was preached to a congregation which incelnded my friends, and all my
relatives. Actually I had prepared a homilcelical masterpiece to meet the
standards of the faculty of the Divinity School of the University of
Chicago. Unfortunately, none of them were present. Nevertheless, I
dazzled them with my footnotes. Afterward, Dad sat me down, Ltold me how
proud he was, complimented me and said, "You told us what Karl Rarth and
Paul Tillich thought about who Jesus is. When you preach on Chat text
again, leave some time at the end for what you think.”

That was good advice. There is a time when each of us must let go of
academic speculation and say what it is we believe. There is a moment when
we know that one mere resource, one more theologian on the topic of the
nature of Jesus of Nazareth, is irrelevant because it's time for us to say
what we believe. But, true as that is, if we stopped here with our
personal testimony, if we defined our faith as the answer to the question -
“Who do you say that I am?” - we would end up back where we started, with a
truncated, retarded religion which consists of theological formulas, or
personal testimonies about Jesus. And this text wan't allow for that.

There is incredible energy and momentum here. The incident keeps
moving ahead, past personal theological reflection, past personal
testimony, to personal life. Jesus himself won't allow it to vet bogged
down in a seminar on Christology. Peter's answer, theologically correct
ard personally honest, is not enough. It is not really the point.

"Tf you would come after me, take up your cross." Not ~ get your
theology straight; not even accept the Lord Jesus as your personal savior,
but, “if you would come after, take up your crass.’

And... "whoever would save life wil] lese it, and whoever loses life
for my sake will find it."

That is so powerful, so profoundly radical, that I fear we don't hear
ic. It is the essence of Christianity.

if we look at that statement from the point of view of secular
disciplines, it would seem to be unnatural, a denial of our fortuitous
instinct for survival and self-preservation. We have within us magnificent
involuntary responses that allow us to flee from threat, avoid danger and
if necessary. fight for our lives. We are programmed to save our own
lives. Startle us and an incredible natural dynamic is set off -
adrenaline pumps, muscies tighten, pupils widen, hair stands up, digestion
stops, - to protect life. If you have had the privilege of being with
someone during the last hours of life you know that we do not relinquish
life easily.

And, yet, we are never more alive than when we are investing
ourselves so thoroughly in an activity, a pursuit, a person, that for a
glorious moment we lose ourselves.

When have you been most fully alive? My guess is that your answer
will be those times when you were so thoroughly involved in something other

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than yourself, that you lost yourself. Some activity that demanded so much
of you, called so much out of you, that you didn't have time to be aware of
self. We have, I would suggest, each of us, experienced the truth that to
find life you have to lose life, in the simple denial of self which is part
and parcel of ~ having a baby, for instance, in caring for an infanl, or
practicing the piano, or running a race, or making love, or aryuing a case,
or teaching a class or fretting about a teenager.

ft is the essence of Christian faith. It is the radical allernative
Christianity offers the world. It is the most powerful thing Jesus ever

said. And ~ it is a revolutionary idea because it. confronts, head on, the
most powerful motif of our culture, which says quile the opposite ~— that
the best way to live is not to give life away but to enhance jt, to
celebrate it, protect it, make it secure, preserve it, indulge it... "Be

your own best friend. Go on, you deserve it..."

The book everyone has been talking about for the past several years
is Habits of the Heart, by Robert Bellah and four other University of
California sociologists. The purpose was to get at the prevailing belief
system in our culture - our "habits of the heart." fhe authors interviewed
aud analyzed and concluded that the prevailing value in America at the time
is "individualism"; not the old fashioned kind that was pointed to the
public good, but a new, nasty form, that is pointed at the individual.
Today's individualism, Bellah argues, is a freedom from constraints in
order to do whatever it is I want to do. It is greed, baptized with
political orthodoxy: selfishness becomes fashionable, covetousness becomes
economically viable. It is a new morality... [It is Sammy Davis, Jr.
wailing “I Gotta Be Me“; and Sinatra's "I Did It My Way." Its philosophic
vision seems to be - "more next year than last."

its political expression works hard to protect privilege and the
opportunity for wealth to generate more wealth, while relegating concern
for the poor, hungry, sick and homeless to a private sector which simply
cannot cope with the enormity of the problems.

Just last week Washington announced an effort to reduce public
assistance to the poor by the value of charitable assistance given to them
by churches and other benevolent organizations. That's individual freedom
turned inward. That's individualism which has become selfishness.

Former U. S. Senator, John Culver, was talking with a Senate aid who
hoped to run for office. "I asked him why he wanted to go into politics.
What was it about conditions in the country that he would like to see
changed for the better." He answered: "Senator, that just isn't the way
you get elected any more." [Washington Post, 6/14/87]

There are signs that we are learning that the "new narcissism"
doesn't work,

In anew book on spirituality, the author, a Catholic priest, reflects
what many of us know deeply... "This is the human condition... we wake up
in the middle of the night, or in the middle of our loneliness, and we feel
we need to add something or someone to our life." [see Martin Marty,
Context, 9/15/87]

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The psychological disciplines confirm that need and our emptiness
when it is ~being met.

Bric Erickson taught that in maturity what we need is something he
cal led\"generativity" - the caring for and nurturing of the next
generations. ~The danger, he taught, is that if we don't find someone or
something to call that "generativity,"” that nurturing out of us, we
stagnate and experience personal impoverishment. He taughl Chat “such
individuals often begin to indulge themselves as if they were their own -
one and only child." {see James Fowler, The Stages of Paith, p. 85]

Jesus declared that the greatest happiness is in giving rather than
gelling, Jetting go rather than protecting, opening one's hands rather than
clutching tightly. Jesus said you have to learn to lose your life, if you
want to have it.

You won't find that taken seriously im many places in this world.
Peter, theologically orthodox, confessionally - right on the money -
stumbled all over that part. He learned it later. He learned to live
by giving his life away and the simple truth is that we limit our own lives
if we can't hear this.

If we are so afraid of getting hurt that we can't Jove another
person, We are already dying, according to Jesus.

If we are too afraid of coming in last to enter the race, we are
already dying.

If we are too concerned about job security to tell the truth, we are
already dying.

If you're too busy - to lose yourself in a child, in a social
problem, the pursuit of justice, or in the building of a better world
you're not really alive fully.

If we are too afraid of public opinion to risk contradicting it, we-
are already dying.

If we are too worried about the future, our security, to open our
hearts and vive something precious - in a moment of passionate
extravagance, if our hold on life is too tight for that, we're already in
trouble, accurding to Jesus.

Some, of course, have learned it. Celia, in T. S. Eliot's play,
chose life. Those who know it and live it are our saints. And because
they gave life away, they live forever. And sometimes, thank God, we learn
it too. Less dramatically than our saints, but sometimes we learn that
when we love deeply and selflessly, the life we give away - is given back
to ous.

Jesus ~ the one who said the words - proceeded to live them. Given a

variety of alternatives, he chose not to think first of his own security.
At the age of thirty-three he decided Lhat there were some things more

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terrible but beautiful drama, which

important than survival. And in that
that this precious pift of Life -

ends on # cross, you and I see the truth,
which God has given us - is meant to be lived fully, without holding back,
given away ta the peaple and dutics and hapes whieh God also has given us
aml to which God calls us.

"Pick up your cross," he said, “follow ma... Find your life hy

lasing it.” Amen.

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