GREAT RIVERS PRESBYTERY MEETING
PEORIA, ILLINOIS
AUGUST 27, 1991

JOHN M. BUCHANAN, PASTOR
FOURTH PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

" VES "

Scripture
2 Corinthians 1:12-22
John 21:16

Why? it might legitimately be asked, Why us? Why now? Why
in the world is the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) talking about
raising an enormous amount of money, $150 million, now, of all
times?

The American economy is flat, at best. We may be emerging
from a recession but it is not a dramatic emergence. In fact it
is not visible among most of the people who sit in Presbyterian
pews these days. Why now?

Furthermore, we Presbyterians are not exactly at the top of
our game these days. Like the baseball team which plays closest
to the neighborhood where I live and move and have being, and to
whom I have given my heart - in spite of common sense and the
harsh schoolmaster of history, the Chicago Cubs and the Presbyte-
rian Church look better on paper than in real life: both exist
with high hopes, noble aspirations and inconsistent pitching.
Both live with the dreary recent past by way of an undying escha-
tological focus - "wait till next year!" That's about as far as
that metaphor will go, I suspect.

And yet we Presbyterians and the Chicago Cubs have been here
from our respective beginnings, charter members of the league.
We are part of a former establishment with most of its glory in
the past. We play in old facilities, not nearly as glamorous and
efficient and attractive as the newer franchises. When the media
wants a story about a super-church in Chicago it's Willow Creek
Community and not Fourth Presbyterian... which it seems to me is
the ecclesiastical equivalent of playing a world series in some
place God did not mean for baseball to be played - like Toronto.

For twenty years we have been lamenting the slow decline of
the mainline churches in our culture. We have been engaging in
corporate hand-wringing for as long as I've been an ordained
minister. We are reduced to cheering whenever the rate of de-
cline slows a bit. So why a church-wide campaign to raise $150
million?

And on top of it all, when we finally found ourselves back
in the center of things recently, the subject of front page
newspaper attention, and even the network evening news, it wasn't
because of our commitments to peace and racial justice, or our
good works and brilliant theology, but because we were talking
out loud about sex. You'd think we'd lie low for a while, lick
our wounds, get our act together and reorganize ourselves a few
more times, before we stuck our corporate neck out on a potential
disaster like this $150 million adventure.

Why now?

The answer has something to do with our faith at its deepest
and most profound, at a level so deep in the soul of this church
and so deep in your heart and mine that there are no words elo-
quent enough to express it. It is our basic attitude, our funda-
mental world view: what the Germans call "weltenshaung": as men
and women whose lives have been touched, whose very being has
been reshaped by God's love in Jesus Christ. It is best ex-
pressed perhaps in one three-letter word - YES.

St. Paul, clearly struggling to say what he means with
clarity and not getting the job done very well, I think gives up,
puts his systematic, Pharisaical logic aside, and says it this
way, finally:

"the Son of God, Jesus Christ, was not 'Yes and no,' but in
him it is always 'Yes.' For in him every one of God's promises
is a 'Yes.'" [2 Corinthians 1:20]

We were sitting in my study talking about the Bicentennial
Fund with an advertising man who is employed by one of the large
Chicago agencies: a concept and design man, who among other
things created the "Nut and Honey" TV ads.

He's a good churchman, knows the Bible. We asked him to
help us with our Chicago Campaign. Roy said he didn't know much
about church fund raising and wondered where to begin... So he
went home and of all things got out his Bible and wrote down the
New Testament, passages that struck him and related to this ef-
fort. When we met next we sat in my study and the ad man read us
verses from his New Testament, and he said "this is what I have
been thinking - and this is what I propose our campaign theme
ought to be, and he pulled out two small posters- One said -
"Yes, we can" and the other simply said "Yes."

We have set ourselves to the task of raising $150 million
for the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. We have set out to
give this church of ours the opportunity to renew and rebuild
itself after decades of diminishing numbers, diminishing hope,
diminishing confidence. We have set out to do some new things,
to fix up some existing projects and to think anew about being
God's Presbyterian people in a new century. In the Bicentennial
Fund we have set out, in the face of a persistent, negative
chorus of "no's," "what if's," and "yes but's," to say "YES" - we

can do something in our day that will provide a Presbyterian
witness for our children and their children, for our country and
our world... which I am Presbyterian enough to believe would be
infinitely poorer without the feisty faith of Presbyterian men
and women.

You have set out to raise $1.2 million with a challenge goal
of $1.6 million within your own family in the Presbytery of Great
Rivers.

What an exciting prospectus - balanced, but ambitious! The
money that will remain here in this Presbytery will do some very
good things, some creative and innovative new ideas, which look
to the future with hope, and which express the very best of our
Presbyterian tradition: a caring and compassionate spirit, an
educated laity, with a major commitment to shelter the homeless,
to visit the prisoner and to stand squarely in the name of Jesus
Christ in the midst of human need.

And the fact that the Presbyterian Church nationally, and
you, here in this Presbytery, have dared to dream a little, and
hope a little, have dared to stop wringing our hands over the
deplorable state of the church and actually spend a little of our
time and energy asking about what new things God may be calling
us to do, is in itself a life-renewing, life-giving enterprise.
We have, I believe, responded to the Spirit of God - who always
calls us to think about the future.

And you are setting out today to ask every Presbyterian in
every congregation to help - YES = you can do it!

But it won't be easy. It is not an easy time in the church
to say "Yes" to the future. It is not an easy time to say the
kinds of things I have been saying and to be taken seriously in
the world.

A Jules Feiffer cartoon in the Chicago Tribune this morning
illustrated: A man and woman drawn in that familiar brittle
style of his, are talking:

He says: "There is no hope."

She says: "There is no compassion."

He says: "There is no reason."

She says: "There is no future."

He says: "There is only chaos."

She says: "There is only isolation."

He says: "There is only despair."

She says: "I could talk to your forever!"
He says: "You really turn me on!"

The editor of a major newspaper wrote an editorial recently
on the pessimism and depression he senses in the American spirit.
The newspaper editor calls it the New Cynicism, after the new
narcissism from which we preachers got so much mileage. He

writes: "As America mopes and the economy falls in the nineties,
cynicism soars."

Echoing the late Bert Giamatti's thesis that the best way to
understand a culture is to observe how it "plays." This commen-
tator proposed that popular entertainment always reflects the
spiritual health of a culture - and he finds ours to be over-
whelmingly pessimistic and ugly. "Hard Copy," "Unsolved Myster-
ies," "Good Fellows" - which was one of the best movies last
year, about a mobster with no conscience in a world with no
rules, no punishment, no regret, and no hope.

"The Simpsons" with belch jokes and bathroom titters.
"“Roseann" who cynically proclaims that we can't change the world,
we can only scoff at it.

Yes we can? Not an easy word to say and be taken seriously.
But the saying it is, I believe, critical. It is what I believe
God calls us to say - Yes, Yes we can.

President Henry Copeland at the College of Wooster began a
fine opening convocation last fall by telling the Aesop Fable -
Belling the Cat:

"Long ago, the mice held a general council to consider what
measures they could take to outwit their common enemy, the
Cat..." The discussion waxed and waned until they finally agreed
that their life would be much safer if they simply had some
warning when the cat was about. Someone should affix a small
bell around the cat's neck. When the cat approached, the bell
would ring and the mice could hide. The proposal met with gener-
al applause. What a wonderful notion... "Belling the Cat."

But there is an unhappy ending to Aesop's Fable. A wise old
mouse gets up and says: "What an admirable notion, but who will
bell the cat?" The mice looked at one another and nobody
spoke... No one was willing to take the risk of assuming respon-
sibility.

Copeland observes that the notion of responsibility has not
fared well in our time. "On a personal level, given a choice,
many of us prefer narcotic pleasures that dull the mind and quell
the search for meaning."

And then, for me the crux, "Toward our institutions we
cultivate a stance of ironic distance and to the extent possible
avoid becoming responsible for their well-being." The "politics
of blame" has become the predominant mode, rather than caring for
our institutions."

I was reminded of Juergan Moltmann's devastating analysis
that "over the developed and affluent Western societies, there
seems to hang a banner which says "No Future..."

And of Lesslie Newbegin's recent caveat that "when religion
loses its ability to hope for a different future all its energy
disappears into private eschatology" [The Gospel in a Pluralis-
tic Society] And of current thought-shapers - Sally McFague,
Models of God, and Douglas John Hall, The Steward, arguing elo-
quently and passionately for a new ethic of responsibility.

I was reminded of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's observation that
"the sin of respectable people is running from responsibility"
and the way he personally lived out the truth that Christian
people are called by God to accept responsibility as citizens of
the world were God places them.

And I was reminded of how easy it is to look at the state of
the church and blame the people in Louisville, or the people
before them in New York City, or Angela Davis, or the Presbytery,
or the seminaries, or the liberals, or the conservatives, or the
social activists, or the evangelicals, or the members of the Task
Force on Human Sexuality.

I conclude it is time to stop and to assume responsibility
for this church of ours; to stop blaming others, to stop wringing
our hands - not to stop arguing and discussing and studying,
that's what we do best... Maybe in the broad ecology of the Holy
Catholic Church, asking and exploring the tough questions is our
particular Presbyterian assignment. In any event, we've certain-
ly become expert at it!

It's time, not to stop arguing, but to stop blaming and in
the blaming backing away from responsibility for this precious
institution.

Did you read in the paper last week about the 47-year-old
Russian geology teacher who joined the younger people building
and standing on the barricades protecting the Russian parliament
from Soviet tanks? After it was over a reporter asked him why he
had done it - put his life on the line, starring down the barrel
of tank guns and automatic weapons. He said "a man sooner or
later has to decide who he is. I decided who I was a long time
ago, but just now had the chance to show it."

In Dag Hammarskjold's diary, Markings, there is an entry for
Whitsunday 1961 - which continues to be one of my favorites and
has sustained me over the years:

"T don't know who - or what - put the
question. I don't know when it was put. I
don't even remember answering. But at some
moment I did answer 'Yes' to someone or
something - and from that hour I was certain
that existence is meaningful and that, there-
fore, my life in self surrender, had a goal."
[p. 205]

The issue finally is a personal one... For each of us who
has been asked to do a job, for each who has been called to
ministry; it is a faith issue finally. Jesus Christ is God's
"Yes" to the world and to the church and to you and me. "In
him," St. Paul wrote to the Christians at Corinth, "everyone of
God's promises is a 'Yes.'"

That same Jesus - standing on the beach, in the early
morning, confronted Peter and asked the ultimate faith question -
the only faith question really - "Do you love me?"

And Peter's answer was a "Yes, yes, Lord. You know I love
you."

And Jesus said - "Feed my sheep."

So - "Yes." Yes we can do it. Yes we can actually love one
another. Yes, we can love the world and feed the lambs of Jesus.
Yes - by our personal responsibility - for church and world -
you and I can make a difference... And in our doing, be part of
his ongoing task of redeeming and renewing the Church and the
whole creation...

YES. YES LORD.

ALL PRAISE TO HIM. AMEN.