GIVE _TT ALL
September 9, 1990
3:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicaga

Scripture
Romans 12:1-13
Matthew 16:21-28

“J appeal to you...present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and
acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship" Romans 12:3

Tt is no puipit hyperbole to tell you how good it is to be back. The
only thing better than leaving the city for a while is coming home to it.
It fs also instructive. When we left here in tid-sunmer, there was a
substantial seven-story building acrass Chestnut street. In a matter of
weeks it is gone, “history” as they say. There's a lesson in that about
urban change, the impermanence of human institutions, etc., etc. There is,
as well, if you happen to live across the street from it, a lesson in what.
it's like to reside in the midst of a kind of non-stop, low-grade
earthquake. Things have been quivering and shaking and rattling every time
the huge ball hits the ground, which was about every seven and one-half
seconds while I was trying to write this sermon.

It is, in spite of that, good to he home. Some quiet time allawed me
to do the extended and strenuous reading 1 need to do. In addition to the
traditional family migration to the heach, I taught a one-week doctor of
ministry course at McCormick Seminary, preached at the Tnstalltation Service
of a friend of mine at the First Presbyterian Church af Greensboro, a large
church that does not have to contend with an ongoing earthquake, and, of

course, the choir trip to Great Britain, difficult and demanding duty, but
someone on this staff had to do it!

T really must say a word about it. Twenty members of the Morning
Choir sang in four Rritish churches: the Cathedral of St. Giles,
Edinburgh's High Kirk, the Cathedral Church at York, Yorkminster, one of
the largest and most dramatic Gothic Cathedrals in the world; the Chapel of
Jesus College at Cambridge, and Evensong at Bath Abbey. Thirty others of
us accompanied the choir and were privileged to he the audiences and
congregations in those wonderful places, to hear the music we hear every
Sunday, sung with such discipline and grace. We were proud, obviacusly. We
gloried in the raised eyebrows of unsuspecting tourists at St. Giles,
strolling through the Cathedral and encountering this extraordinary music.
We loved the association when the evening tourists at Yorkminster sought
us out to tel] us how moved they were. And at Bath, in Evensong, we were

all filled with a sense of history and mystery and the palpable fact that
here we were, Presbyterians from Chicaga, adding our music, our voices, our
worship to the conversation hetween God and the church, which has heen
going on in that place for 1,000 years. It was a worshipping congregation,
our thirty and another one hundred or so. The three Fourth Church ushers
in the group were pressed into service and were posted in the center aisle
of Rath Abbey greeting and seating people. Dr. Simmong directing, Mary
playing the organ, our choir singing. It was a moment T will never forget.

On the days we were on the road we had morning prayers on the bus.
And we prayed daily - far the church universal and our church at home. On
Sunday morning, August 19, we were in Cambridge, worshipping at the parish
church of Greater St. Mary's, the Anglican church across the street
from King's College. We heard a woman preach - a deaconess: women are not
yet priests in the Anglican Communion, and we participated in the
Eucharist, we contributed the money our ushers had collected one morning an
the bus, and when, in bidding prayer we were asked to pray for the church
in foreign lands, we al] - I am sure — were praying for that helaved
community of faith in downtown Chicago, where it was 3:30 a.m., but which
in a few hours would he taking up its part of the never-ending universal
praise of God hy the church.

So, thank you to my colleagues on the clergy staff who more than
adequately filled this pulpit in my absence, and to musicians and singers,
who kept the conversation going, and to all of you who were here, keeping
the faith and this church relevantiy alive in this our own great space in
the heart of this remarkable city. It is very good to be back.

MATTHEW 16:21-28

“Why did they spread this scandalous document before our eyes?"
author Annie Dillard asks. It's in a wonderful new book, Incarnation,
Contemporary Writers on the New Testament. Some of the most distinguished
modern.authors were invited to contribute an essay on one of the books of
the New Testament. Dillard is writing about Luke, actually. “When | was a
child," she recalls, “the adult members of Pittsburgh society adverted to
the Bible unreasonably often. What arcana! Why did they spread this
scandalous document. before aur eyes? If they had read it, I thought, they
would have hid it. They did not recognize the lively danger that we would,
through repeated exposure, catch a dose of its virulent. oppasitian to their
world. Instead they bade us study great chunks of it, and think about
those chunks, and, commit them ta memory, and ignore them." [p. 35]

Sometimes, FT think, these words we have heard sa frequently that they
are worn down, all the sharp edges and corners smaathed by constant use,
these words, T think, should stick in our mouths. And it helps when
someone like Dillard, exposed to the church and its Bible reading and Rible
quoting, as a child, not much of a church person now, testifies to the
power and lifelong inescapable influence of these explosive words.

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"This Bible, this ubiquitous, persistent black chunk of a best
seller" she writes, "is a singularity, a black hole into which ovr rich and

muliiple world strays and vanishes. We crack open its pages at our peril.”
[p. 26]

For instance, on page 17 of that persistent black chunk of a best
seller... “If anyone would come after me, let them deny themselves, and
take up their cross and follow me... For whoever would save life wil] lose
it, and whoever loses life will find it," or on page 149, "I appeal to
you...to present. your bodies to God...as a living sacrifice."

Take up a cross? Lose your life in order to find it? Present your
body as a living sacrifice? During the pre-season games, there are young
football players, frantically trying to win a permanent job, who are what
are called special teams, play with such utter abandonment that insiders
sometimes say, “they are offering their bedies"... but. me? You? Really?

Nowhere is the Christian faith seen more clearly than in these
radically demanding passages. In both Matthew and Paul's letter to the
Romans, strenuous demand follows immediately on the heels of some very
eloquent theology.

Peter has just confessed his belief that Jesus is the Christ. “Who
do people say that I am?" Jesus asked. “Wha do you say that I am?" It is
Peter who confesses. “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God." And

then Jesus goes on. There is suffering ahead. Death by crucifixion.
Peter doesn't want to hear about that: wants faith without suffering,
religion without sacrifice, wants cheap grace, Dietrick Bonhoeffer said.
And that is so utterly wrong, Jesus turns on him — “Get behind me Satan.”
Peter the Rock has become Peter the stumbling block. Why this harshness?
Why does Jesus so directly attack his strongest disciple? Is it not
because Peter says it. for all of us? We want supply side religion - aj]
profit and no taxes. All love and no demand, ail theology, no ethics, all
comfort and no responsibility.

A few years later, his most eloquent apostle, Paul, was trying to get
the whole thing down on paper for some new converts in the capital city.
And in the process writes eleven chapters of scholarly, systematic theology
about. grace and justification and sin and law and then turns it around.
“Therefore, present your bodies as a living sacrifice. Let love he
genuine, hate what is evil...contribute ta the needs of the saints."

The first people to read these words confronted a religious sitnation very
different from ours, claiming Christianity as your religious preference is
not a difficult thing for most of us. Going to church this torning,
September 9, 1990, means sacrificing a cheese omelet, coffee and the Sunday
paper. (In the interests of research 1 took a bike ride along the lake one
Sunday morning this summer, saw some church members, had an omelet at
Brett's at Waveland, saw some more.) Tf you worship at eleven, you'll miss
part of the first quarter of the Rear's game. But, by and large, most -
not all - but most of your peers will think well of you for being here this
morning. But in the latter part of the first century, when Matthew, Mark
and Luke wrote down their recollections of Jesus and what he said, going to
church could get you in a lot of trouble, dead even. "Take up your cross
and follow" - some scholars say — comes not. only fram the words of Jesus but

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from the ghastly practice under the Emperor Nero of forcing practicing
Christians to parade through the streets of Rome earrying the cross beam of
the instrument upon which they would be nailed publicly for the Emperor's
and the crowd's amusement. They are, as T think ahout that, unspeakably
poignant words.

They are not appropriately employed to descrihe life's little
annoyances — which we sometimes call our cross to bear. We are not talking
about: neuralgia, or an impossible supervisor, or an irritable aunt who
comes ta dinner too freqnent)y. We're talking, in the first century,
about the very real possibility that associating with Jesus will end you up
on a cross. And in the twentieth century we're talking about the challenge
to change the fundamental] way we look at life: to be converted. We're
talking about a radical] notion that the greatest good, the greatest
happiness, is in letting go, giving, committing, loving, dying, rather than
the logical and universally accepted notion that the preatest pood and

greatest happiness is in getting, clutching, accumuJating, protecting and
preserving.

a The trouble with the new materialism, the “entitlement culture,"

someone called it recently, is not that the things of this world are evi},
ov that it's morally wrong to enjoy life. Wetve been consistently
misunderstoad on that point. What's wrong with selfishness is that it
doesn't work. It doesn't make you happy.

We are beginning to learn that. We can move beyand attacking the
narcissism of the 80s because it didn't wark. Tvan Boesky appeared in
court to testify last month and I was reminded that it was five years aga
that he made the speech in which he said, “Greed is healthy. You can fee]
greedy, and still fee) good ahout yourself." We tried it. We bonght. it,
made a movie about it. And it didn't work. It didn't work, not because
money and RMWs, and Rolexes are bad, hut because if you live your life jin
order to enhance, adorn, decorate and indulge yourself, you're missing a
truth butlt into the nature of things. The whims and wants of self are ton

small. The horizons of your soul - al! alone — are foo restricted. Tt
\ doesn't work.

We seem to have learned that. Tt's why religion is getting another
laok at the very moment in history when we with our quaint notions of
scrifice and altruism and compassion are supposed to be disappearing. The
Tribune gave this discovery an international twist recently with a feature
article on the new interest in spirituality in Japan. For the first time
in history Japanese workers are earning more than their American
counterparts. And discovering that money does not produce happiness. A
Japanese artist was quoted: “The only message you hear jin Japan these days
is work, cansume, work, consume. Tsn't there more to life that that?"
[Chicago Tribune, 7/8/90]

The wisdom of the world is that. yon must look out for number one
because nobody else will. It's always been there, but it was only in the
last. decade that selfishness got haptized with respectability — academic,
philosophic, political. The wisdom of the world is that you must take care

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of yourself. The everyday wisdom of the world is that you can and ought to
be your own best. friend: you deserve a break today, give yourself a gift,
do yourself a favor, he nice to yourself, indulge yourself.

Jesus said that if you want to live you must give your life away, If
you want to be fully alive in the only life you're ever going to have,
you have to loosen your grip on it a bit and Start giving it, investing it,

spending it. for something other than your own amusement, enhancement or
security.

If you are fortunate you have something or someone for wham you live
and therefore for whom you would die if necessary. And if you do not, yau
are not fully alive in the only life you are ever going to have.

Sametimes history and circumstance put the issue dramatica}}ly: those
first century Christians, for tnustance, who could protect themselves hy
recanting, or give their lives away. Lesslie Newbigin wrote recently, "It
was not the superiority of the church's preaching which finally disarmed
Roman imperial power but the faithfulness of the martyrs."

[The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, p. 137]

Or Father Maximillian Kalbe, stepping out of line at Auschwitz and
volunteering toa die in the place of another prisoner, father of five. Or
for that matter, those precious young people sitting in the desert of Saudi
Arabia, prepared to die if need be. Whether the cause is the right one or
not, there they are this morning, with life on the Jine.

Sometimes the losing of life is dramatic and public. Bot mostly it
is not, T think. Mostly it is the mather or father who learn daily that
life is no longer simply the pursuit of personal agenda, that there is a
joy - quite indescribable — in the investment of self in the life of
someone else. Sometimes the taking up of a cross is the quiet faithfulness
to convictions and loyalty to persans who need you when you really could
find a way out: the mentally handicapped child, the spouse with
debilitating disease, the parent with Alzheimers. Sometimes fit is not
giving up on the youngster in trouble with the law, or the man addicted to
alcohol or the woman hooked on cocaine.

Jesus said — take up your cross and follow... find your tife hy
losing it...claim your life hy giving it away...

We saw “Shadowlands” in London, the play based on C. S. Lewis!
relationship with Joy Graham, their marriage, her death of cancer shortly
thereafter, and then his grief. Tt was a play that asked all the questions
of suffering and tragedy and God - directly and without nuance. T will
refer to it again, 1 am sure. But the stirring thing about the play, T
thought, was the way human Jove summaned life, commanded life, made life
suddenly possible in all its ecstasy and profundity and all its pain and
tragedy. Lewis was a confirmed, middle-aged hachelor, Professor of
Literature at Oxford at the pinnacle of his career with an international
reputation as a scholar and author; comfortable in that wor}d -— teaching,
lecturing, writing, sipping sherry in the evening with his fellow Tons,
when he was aceosted by life in the form of an American divorcee. Ta the
horror of his academic colleagues, he stowly opened himself to love, which

ca

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also meant vulnerability and inconvenience and pain. They tried to
persuade him not to. But Jove is compelling, you know. And sa they
married. And after she was afflicted with cancer, she died. And he felt

pain Jike no pain he had ever experienced or imagined. Lewis does not.
answer the ancient dilemma of suffering.

But he did write like a disciple of Jesus:

“Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly
broken. Tf you want. to he sure of keeping it intact, you must give your
heart to no one, not even an animal...Keep your heart in a coffin," Lewis
said, “and it will not he broken" — after his own heart was broken. There
it will be safe, wrapped up in luxuries, hobbies - and it will not break.
Tt will become unbreakable. “The only place outside heaven where you can
be perfectly safe from all the dangers of love is hell."

Rack when T was sent toa church camp every summer, we used to sing a
camp song with great gusto and childish innocence... "Do Lord, oh doa Lard,

oh do remember me. You take Jesus as your savior, T'll take him tao...”

There was a verse T never thought about much and if T had thought.
ahout it, would not have understood -

“Tf you don't: bear the cross
you can't wear the crown"

T didn't understand that at the age of twelve, but T think T do naw.

It's what C. S. Lewis meant when he wrote ahout the vulnerabitity of
Tove.

Tt's what Jesus meant when he said, “take up your cross and follow...
Whoever would save life will Tose it, and whoever loses life for my sake
wilt find it."

And it is the issue befare the house this morning...

The issue before you and me... about which we are called to deride...
to declare, to choose, to take up, as it were.

The invitation is ta live for him, and the shape of it will he
different. for each of us, except that it will mean, in some way, laying down

your life, offering your body, taking up a eross

That. is the invitation and T invite you, in the privacy of your awn
heart, to say yes to that, to Give it All.

The promise? Whoever loses life for my sake, will find it.

Amen.

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