BUILD THE HOUSE STRONG

May 14, 1989
8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Luke 6:43-49

"Every one who comes to me and hears my words and does them...is like a man
buiiding a house, who dug deep, and laid the foundation upon rock;..."
~Luke 6:47,48 (RSV}

What a day this is! There are, frankly, more things to cheer about
this morning than time will allow. And there are more preaching themes
floating around than even the most skilled homiletician could weave into
one sermon.

It is Pentecost, the day we remember and celebrate the coming of the
Holy Spirit into the lives of the discouraged disciples of Jesus, their
strengthened faith and the immediate beginning of the growth of the
Christian movement. It is the birthday of the church... And it is another
birthday as well. Seventy-five years ago this week, thé.week of May 10,
1914, this building was dedicated. Was it only historic Sagnoidence or was
it divine providence that just three weeks béfore the new Fourth Presby-
terian Church was dedicated in 1914, another cathedral structure on the
North Side of Chicago was consecrated — an institution where thousands of
people would be lifted to the heights of jo¥ful bliss, and also stand
shoulder to shoulder sharing the dark night of despair; a spacious place
for the celebration of eternal verities and common virtue? Wrigley Field
opened on April 23, 1914.

It is not an altogether unlikely concurrence. Grantland Rice was
only the first of many lovers of the game who see oaseball as a metaphor
for eternity. Standing on the wonderful, mysterious diamond in "Field of
Dreams" a player says, “Is this heaven?" I digress, but I cannot resist.

And Mother's Day, certainly a variation on the birthday motif.
_ Finally, Confirmation, a very significant occasion for the whole
church and particularly for the young people who this day are confirmed and

commissioned as disciples of Jesus Christ and members of the church.

The text is a familiar one, made memorable for many of us by the old
Sunday School song about the men who built houses upon the rock, and upon

the sand and in the latter case, adorned with all sorts of hand gestures -—
“the rains came down and the floods came_up and the house came crashing
down." It's a powerful image, one that has the feel of authenticity to it;
people knew its inherent truth. And it came from a man who was a builder,
who knew about stresses and weights and pressure and load-bearing. Build
the house wisely and strong, he said, or it will not survive the inevitable
storms. The story occurs at the conclusion to the Major body of ethical
teaching in Luke's Gospel. We know it as the Sermon on the Mount in
Matthew. It includes the Beatitudes... "Blessed are the poor... the meek,
the peacemakers" and "Love your enemies... Judge not..." The solid
foundation for life rests on these words of Jesus.

My suggestion is that the same wisdom is applicable to the building
of a church. Make the foundation Strong, get the fundamentals right and
the church will stand for a very long time. Now what we really must do
this morning is recover and recall something of that foundation laying
process.

Part of every birthday celebration is remembering and retelling the
story. So if you are visiting with us, Please indulge us as we remember
and retell. It took about three years to Plan and build, but before that
there is a wonderful story.

Fourth Presbyterian Church was organized out of a union of two other
congregations in 1871, Old North Church and Westminster Presbyterian
Church. The new congregation used Old North's building at the corner of
Indiana and Cass, closed it for renovation and moved in for its first
worship service on October 8, 1871. Shortiy after the evening service that
day, the great Chicago fire leveled the city and Fourth Presbyterian
Church. Of its 800 members all but five families were burned out,
including its pastor, David Swing, who lost everything he had, his entire
library and 700 sermons. Afterward Swing commented that at least the fire
had delivered him from the preacher's ultimate temptation of turning to his
barrel of old sermons. A new church building was erected on the corner of
Rush and Superior and the congregation occupied it on January 4, 1874. The
church thrived and in 1909 called to its pulpit John Timothy Stone. Within
three years the congregation made the most remarkable and courageous and
farsighted decision in its history. It purchased a piece of land on Pine
Street, now Michigan Avenue, before there was a bridge over the river and
with the lake shore where the Hancock Building stands. And then they had
the vision and courage to hire the pre-eminent Gothic architect in America
to design a Presbyterian Church building. Ralph Adams Cram from Boston was
also a designer of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan and
was the supervising architect for Princeton University. Cram joined with a
distinguished Chicago architect, Howard Van Doren Shaw, for the project.
Cram designed the Sanctuary - the other buildings are Shaw's... Shaw was so
enamored with the project and committed to it that he gave the church the
lovely children's fountain in the Garth. The new building was acclaimed
immediately. The September 1914 issue of The Architectural Record devoted
a major article to Cram's new church, called the church unigue, “a living,
breathing, spiritual thing... a marvel of grace, beauty, dignity."

5/14/89

One of the wonderful links with the past exists in a very real way
teday. Mr. and Mrs. Louis Sudler sit in pew number 103, next to the south
wall, about a third of the way back. Mr. Sudler's father was a Quaker from
Philadelphia, became a Presbyterian when he moved to Chicago, was a close
friend of John Timothy Stone, an ardent and generous supporter of the
church, and was deeply involved in planning and financing the new building.
While it was under construction, Mr. Sudler used to bring his young son,
the current Mr. Sudler, on the way home from church over on Rush and
Superior, into the partially completed sanctuary and walk around admiring
it. During those inspection tours Mr. Sudler decided on the best place to
sit to see and hear his friend Dr. Stone... and that is where Mr. Sudler is
still sitting on Sunday mornings.

It is a wonderful church building, remarkable in its power and grace
and serenity; visited everyday by people who are drawn in, people who sit
to think, pray, to enjoy the quiet and who sooner or later look up
at the angels, singing Psalm 150, going on overhead perpetually; or the
exquisite details from Coats of arms, to Scottish thistles, and carved
turtles and lizards on the arms of the chairs.

However, the fact of the matter is that we modern Christians are
somewhat ambiguous about grand church buildings. When we travel in Europe
we are torn between our admiration for the great old churches and our
concern about the fact they they are empty. We find that we cannot help
ponder the irony cf the burden of their upkeep and maintenance. American
concern for the balance sheet and our consequent ambiguity about church
buildings, is evidenced, some suggest, by their mediocrity. American
churches are obsessed with doing things as inexpensively as possible, and
trying to be democratic, are usually governed by committee - that wonderful
invention which can be the enemy of creativity... that group someone said
produced a camel while intending to design a thoroughbred... So American
churches are designed to offend the fewest, which means to meet the least
rigorous demands for creativity. And they are full of cast-off furniture,
hand-me-down toys for the nursery and paint .jobs done by. the Bible class on
four Tuesday nights and finished by the minister and his wife. Now when it
reflects economic necessity, or better yet,a spirit of fellowship —
wonderful. But mostly I think it reflects our ambiguity about buildings;
we love them and hate ourselves for loving them - what some wag called our
"Ediface Compiex."

Sam Portaro, Episcopal Chaplain at the University of Chicago, wrote a
wonderful article in the Christian Century about aymajor renovation the
Episcopalians have done to their building in Hyde Park and speaks for many
of us. "Nurtured in the spiritual cradle of the sixties, I was wary of
sinking precious treasure into temporal timbers. How could we justify the
energy and expense? Like Judas, I wondered if it would not be better to
sell the precious ointment and give the proceeds to the poor." {The
Christian Century, 10/7/87]

It is an old, old tension built into our faith tradition. The
prophets of Israel were very suspicious of the religion of the Temple. The
people traveled lightly during their formative years, carrying their
religious equipment with them in a box. It's the religion of the Temple

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that finds Jesus threatening and when young Stephen is stoned, it's partly
because he criticized Herod's favorite buiitding project, the reconstruction
of Solomon's Temple. In order to raise money to complete St. Peter's, the
Vatican pushed the sale of indulgences which as much as anything else set
off the Protestant Reformation. There is built-in tension about the
business of erecting elaborate religious buildings, not to mention the very
real dilemma created by huge church buildings no one attends anymore. Who,
after all, will pay to maintain them if nobody is using them? An aside:

we Protestants should avoid simplistic solutions and express real sympathy
for the dilemma our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters are in with those
gorgeous, expensive and empty buildings...

There is a willingness today to listen to a wisdom which is slightly
older than the 1960s. Jesus, after all, rejected Judas' suggestion that
the perfume be sold and the money given to the poor. He allowed the woman
to pour the ointment on his feet in a gesture of pure aesthetic generosity
and extravagance. Since the first time I saw the Cathedrals of Britain and
concluded that the money could be used more faithfully elsewhere, I've
changed my mind. There's still not much yoing on in them — but I'm glad
they are there, not simply because of their massive and soaring beauty but
also because they remind a world grown suddenly secular and somewhat sad,
of another reality. They stand as reminders of the holy, the transcendent,
in a civilization which needs that reminder desperately.

Roger Kennedy, Director of the National Museum of American History at
the Smithsonian Institution, has published a gorgeous book, American
Churches. In a chapter on cathedrals, he says “Any visitor to New York who
stands on Fifth Avenue between Rockefeller Center and 57th Street can see
that, in the glassy shadows of the skyscrapers, there lurks an older way of
stating reality..." referring to St. Patrick's and St. Thomas. Cathedral
builders, says Kennedy, knew things we do not know, namely the correspond-
ence between music and architecture and mathematics: "the mathematical
dimensions of many cathedrals were deliberately and painstakingly derived
from the same cadences of harmony and order that appear in medieval music
and poetry." [p. 79]

rr

The uniqueness of this building is here, I believe. It reflects an
earlier way of stating reality. And the simple fact is that we are either
incapable of or unwilling to make that investment in religious buildings
any longer... which means that to be the church in this building carries
with it a very real responsibility. |

Oj.

Friend and neighbor, Bill Granger, who writes for the Chicago Tribune
said in a column about the old churches of Chicago and their uncertain
future, “if those lovely and sad monuments of faith in another century are
not upheld for the price of a roof, what will be upheld a century from now
when churches look like fast food stands and mass (worship) has been
standardized into television-sized segments."

What will be left? What we are willing to invest in, what we are
willing to adorn with symbolism and extravagance are retail stores,
cathedrals of commerce, banks, corporate headquarters. Sam Portaro talks
about the aesthetic. experience of a LaSalle Street bank: lavish solid wood

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doors, polished brass, stone slab and real marble floors, barrel vaulted
ceilings with real gold leaf four stories_overhead. This is not to
criticize, in fact, we are enriched by businesses who enable architectural
creativity and aesthetic experimentation. It would be a grim world if
efficiency was the only objective. But it is to observe that the culture
is constructing cathedrals of commerce, not religion, and that, in turn, is
to say that this particular building, this gift given to us, is a gift we
must keep strong and enhance and maintain and give again to the generations
which will follow us. :

“The great old churches were really prayers of our ancestors, made
into plaster and stone and cement and brick." said Bill Granger.
Episcopal Bishop John Shelbey Spong, whose Diocese is Newark, writes about
the dilemma of the church in the city. “Money spent to beautify urban
houses of worship is not wasted. Urban church structures need to shine as
centers of beauty, symbols of hope, signs of the Kingdom. They need to be
living parables of God's caring." ["The Urban Church, Symbol & Reality,"
The Christian Century, 9/12/84]

I'm not sure the Chicago Historic Landmark Commission ever fully
understood how deeply this congregation feels about its building - how
deeply and how spiritually, and that because it is a spiritual matter for
us, there is no question of our ever selling it to anyone or neglecting its
upkeep, preservation and maintenance. We will remain here in this unusual
and demanding and always challenging outpost of God's kingdom as a sign, a
symbol of hope, and gesture of caring and love and generosity.

On the evening of May 12, 1914, James McClure, President of McCormick
Theological Seminary delivered the dedicatory address from this pulpit. I
was very deeply moved this week to read his words, as eloquent as that era
was.

"My soul's desire and prayer to God for this church is that its heart
may be like unto the heart of God... that heart that loves every child of
earth.

i

"Oh... that this church may be bigger than any one creed, sect or
class or race or color. May be so big that any human being may feel at
home here, may draw nigh to God here.

"May it be the mission of this church to tell every man in
unmistakable terms how dear he is ~ preciously dear; - to God, and then to
live those words in the magnanimity of its welcome, the warmth of its
fellowship and the generosity of its devotion."

Dr. Stone responded with appropriate remarks and introduced Thomas
Jones, Chairman of the Building Committee, who remarkably anticipated the
ambiguity we sometimes feel about our buildings. “Whether this large
expenditure which has been made here, whether all the skill and labor that
have been expended on these structures shall prove to have been justified,
time alone can answer! And the answer when it comes, will be in terms of
service, the lives that shall be built here, the spirit that shall go out
from here and enter into the life of the community."

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Well, Mr. Jones, Dr. Stone, Dr. McClure, here we are, 75 years later,
on Pentecost Sunday - as strong as you hoped we might be and engaged in
that mission of presence, service, evangelism, and compassion in ways I
dare say you wouldn't have imagined. But that, too, is what you hoped for
us.

Build the house strong Jesus said... and part of what that means in
the 20th Century is build in some flexibility, some give, some ability to
move a bit, so that the foundation will not be broken and the structure
ruined. What a shock it was for me (and moment of terror) to be making my
first pastoral call on the 90th floor of the Hancock Building and to notice
that the chandelier was moving. But also, what a valuable lesson. For
that building to survive the inevitable storms, it has to move a little
bit. And so we have a Long Range Planning Committee engaged in the
important exercise of discovering how we can act today so that 75 years
from now the sesqui-centennial of the church will be celebrated. That plan
will include the restoration of this sanctuary. It will address new
concerns and realities such as accessibility and unexpected traffic
direction. It will look at our programs, propose new directions for the
future and new strategies to get us there. All of which is very much in
the best tradition of the church.

Build the house strong Jesus said. I have used his parable of two
houses as a way to address the matter of building and Maintaining the
church. But our Lord told his disciples about the twe houses at the end of
a sequence of remarkable material, including the Beatitudes, the law of
love, the commandment to be merciful. Do these things, he told his people,
and your life will be like a house built on rock. Neglect it and it will
be like the house that collapsed under the force of the storm because its
foundation was inadequate.

We know now the realism of those words. If you have lived long
enough to have weathered a few storms you know that. being at something more
than a casual arm's length basis with God's love and forgiveness and grace
in Jesus Christ can be a matter of nearly life and death. If you have
faced death in any form you know the life-sustaining power of the
resurrection. If you have been sick, or in'‘profound pain, or deep fear,
you know the redemptive and healing power of the cross of Jesus Christ.

And if you have a concern beyond yourself for the well being of the
community, the health of the city, the survival of the race, you may be
concluding, as I have, that we will only survive if we learn about
mutuality, and forgiveness, and bearing one another's burdens and
sufferings, and the power of hope. "For no other;«fgundation can anyone lay
than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ," St. Paul said. And that,
I propose to you is the most accurate, commendable and realistic
observation anybody ever made.

That doesn't happen in the abstract, by the way. It's the doing that
brings the ethic of Jesus to reality, not the thinking about it, the
praying about it, the admiring it from a distance. And that means church -
the place where people join one another in the great task of loving and
serving the world in his name.

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So the conclusion is a simple invitation to be part of it: here, if
this is where you are, to rededicate yourself to the mission and future
vision of this church; or wherever you live and move and have your being.
To find the church, to get into it, to love it, agonize with it and give it
your time and money and hope and prayers - because it is there, here, and
wherever people join one another in the adventure of being the church, that
Jesus Christ is remembered, that his love is celebrated, his kingdom comes,
and the foundations of life are built strong.

All praise to hin.

Amen.

Oj.

5/14/89