Endowed Presbyterian Churches Conference
Worship Service
Friday, October 4, 1991, 8:30 a.m.
THE VALUE OF YOUR SOUL
John M. Buchanan, Pastor

Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago, IL

Mark 9:34-37

Some time ago I was part of a seminar in Washington which
brought together a group of Presbyterian ministers and government
officials who happened to be Presbyterians. There were twelve of
us. We were in a van, waiting at the gate of the White House. A
Secret Service man asked us for our driver's licenses in order to
do a security check. Mine was lost; more accurately, it had been
stolen. In any event, all I had on my person with my name on it
was a church business card and the church credit card. I tried
the business card. The Secret Service man disappeared into his
office, returned with security badges, the kind you wear around
your neck, with the licenses clipped on. When he came to me, he
said, "Mr. Buchanan, may I talk with you?" I climbed out of the
van amidst the laughter of my colleagues who were telling him
that I was indeed a very real threat to national security. He
asked if I didn't have anything which would simply assure them
that I was who I claimed to be. Apparently I had lost more than
my wallet and some money... my identity was at stake, Sof
pulled out the church American Express Card which does have my
name on it. He seemed to be greatly relieved. I was approved.
American Express got me in the White House when my word, the
assurances of my distinguished colleagues and my employment at
the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago were brushed aside.
I'm glad I had not left home without it.

| Shortly thereafter, I encountered a John Updike short story
entitled The Wallet. It is about Fulham, a retired broker, who
had assembled a nice life after thirty years of marriage,...
handtiome white house in the older suburbs."

ulham spends his time managing his own investments and
those »«f a favored few o1d clients in an upstairs room. Every
morning he goes to his room with the Wali Street Journal, a
second cup of decaffeinated coffee, to make phone calis, look out
the window at his neatly manicured lawn, to survey and enjoy the
world he has gained.

And then disaster strikes. One morning he can't find his

wallet. Now, {f you are not a compulsive, obsessive person you
may not understand what this story is about. ff you are, if you
spend as much time as I do in a state of agitation because you
can't find your keys or pen or glasses... you may find it funny
and provocative. Fulham looks everywhere: under chairs, beds,
he even goes through pockets of suite he hasn't wern for months.
He goes a little berserk... His wallet was "a friendly adjunct
to his person, a reminder, in its delicate pressure upon his left
buttock, of his new stage of life ~ containing charge cards for
Bay Bank, Brooks Brothers, Hertz, Visa, Amoco, American Express,
Master Charge, The Harvard Co-op, Massachusetts General Hospital,
plus his plasticized driver's license and cards signifying his
membership in the Museum of Fine Arts, country club, Biue
Cross/Blue Shiela, social security and various sentimental memen-
tos and pictures."

After several days of searching, Fulham announces to his
wife that someone, ebviously, has slipped into the house and
atoien his wallet, punctuating his proclamation with obscenities.

His wife says: "I've never seen you like this."
"How am [?"
"you're wild."

"Tt was my wallet. Everything is in it. Everything.
Without that wallet, I'm nothing."

Fulham finds his wallet. In fact, his grandson finds it
folded up in a blanket on the couch. And Updike closes with him
“squeezing the beloved bent book of leather between his two palms
and feeling very grandpaternal, fragile, wiser and ready to die."

‘without that wallet, I'm nothing,” Fulham said. Jesus
said, "What shall it profit a person to gain the whole world and
to forfeit his or her life?" He said that in the context of one
of the most familiar, quoted and preached-on incidents in the New
Testament. Everyone agrees that it is pivotal...

Jesus had just asked his disciples who they think he is.
Peter has answered for them: "You are the Christ." Jesus has
told them that he must suffer and die. Peter has argued with
that, plainly not understanding who Jesus is. Jesus has rebuked
Peter severely, and now this powerful sequence. "If anyone would
come after me...deny self...take up a cross and follow. Whoever
would save life will lose it. Whoever loses life for my sake
will save it. For what does it profit a person to gain the whole
world and forfeit life...lose his or her soul?" It is a theme
Mark will return to time and time again.

"Have we been so successful at inculcating a culture of
economic individualism that we are losing our capacity for ethi-
cal citizenship?" asks a former vice-president and General Corpo~
rate Counsel of General Motors. [Can We Keep Our Glorious Market
in its Proper Place?, Elmer Johnson}

Matthew Fox says we have become compulsive consumers, walk-
ing garbage cans espousing the philosophy, "I buy, therefore, I

am." [A Spirituality Called Compassion,, p. 193)
ivhat does it profit?" Jesus asked.

I chuckled at Sam Keen's throw-away line that the world is
divided between nations who suffer because their economies have
collapsed and nations who suffer because their economies have
succeeded. And I stopped chuckling when I realized that the
newspaper on the same day I was reading Keen documented the
truth of that observation. Page two told about unemployment and
the utter lack of consumer goods because of the failed economic
system in Eastern Europe. Page three told that the United States
leads the free world in every measurable category of
poverty...education, per cent of population hungry, health care,
life expectancy. Page four told how hopeless it is to be young
and ambitious in Yugoslavia. Page five told how the teen preg-
nancy rate in Illinois increased more this year than in any year
in the past two decades. Page six toid about children abandoned
and starving in the Horn of Africa. Page seven told about the
children who died in the most recent "drive~by" shooting in

Chicago.

So maybe it is time for the culture, the nation, to ask
about soul, who we are, the basic definitions of men and women
which are operative here, about what we choose to be as a people.

Even religion, in the age of Narcissism, became intensely
individualistic and personalized and consumer oriented. The most
popular varieties continue to market personal salvation like soap
powder and take a strict "hands off" policy about the great
societal issues which confront us and which challenge us and make
demands of us. The church has followed suit - or has wanted to,
it seems. We Presbyterians are obsessed with our declining
market, wringing our hands over the fact that numbers are down:
that we aren't mainstream or mainline anymore: that we are not
keeping pace with competing groups or with the secularism of our
culture. We must be concerned, but sometimes our concern is
expressed in ways that raise significant questions of theological
integrity and identity and soul.

The Wall Street Journal published, and Roof and McKinney
reprinted, a delightful article by a Kansas City advertising
executive who, with tongue in cheek, has come up with a marketing
plan for "revitalizing America's major religious faiths."

And it is a particularly relevant topic for our day. We are
asking strong and tough and courageous questions in a renewed way
these days. Perhaps the notoriety of the television preachers
has embarrassed us into taking our religion more seriously,
inspiring us to an inquiry as to what exactly this stuff we say
we believe is all about. For sure, their financial indiscre-
tions, while not as interesting as some of their other indiscre-
tions, have forced all of us to look carefully at how we collect
and manage and use the resources our people give us. Perhaps the
challenge of the naw biology, the environmental crisis, tha
continuing tragedy of urban deterioration... Rosemary Radford
Reuther says that all the accumulated and neglected problems the
world has ignered for centuries are demanding attention in the
next decade. In any event, IT am convinced that there is a new
integrity and urgency of spirit alive in our culture. We want
substantial religion. We want religion that can assume a place
of respectable dialogue in the university. The most popular
course at Harvard recently, is Harvey Cox's basic Christianity
and Culture. We want a faith capable of conversation with the
world about the graat issues confronting us. We are embarrassed,
resentful in fact, when our faith becomes a caricature, a reac-
tionary bastion of worn-out and irrelevant moralisms.

We're ready for tough, courageous religion - which doesn't
hide behind pious gestures and cliches.

For another thing, we now know that the "new narcissism,"
the whole gospel of happiness through materialism, acquisition,
accumulation, "whoever dies with the most toys wins" is a lie.
It doesn't work. It isn't true.

In the current bestseller, Fire in the Belly, about men, but
not exclusively for men, Sam Keen talks about how we tie identity
to work and income and consumerism. Our rites of passage in-~
clude the games which prepare men for the battles of business and
life...the first full-time job...and then getting a credit card.
"The credit card," Keen says, "is for the modern male what kili-
ing prey was to a hunter... The Visa Card is an insignia of
membership, a sign that the system trusts you to spend what you
have not yet earned. In modern America going into debt is an
important part of assuming the responsibilities of manhood and
womanhood. Debt, the willingness to Live beyond our means, binds
us to the economic system that requires both surplus work and
surplus consumption. The popular bumper sticker 'I owe, I owe,
so off to work I go,' might well be the litany to express the
commitment of the working man." [p. 51-53]

Sam Keen and other writers are joining a growing chorus of
voices suggesting that our models are wrong and that if our soul,
identity, is defined in economic terms alone - profits, consumer-
ism, acquisitions, security - we are working with a very low and
inadequate view of our humanity.

“My strategy is to consolidate the various name
brands, even the strong flagship brands like
Southern Baptist into one identifiable. Exxon~like
entity. The target audience here is Mom, Dad,
Butch and Sis - solid suburban Americans who want
a little God in their life and somewhere to go
before brunch. After test- marketing various
possibilities, I have decided upon the name Middle
American Christian Church, or MacChurch, for ad
purposes. I will not be sure of MacChurch's
theology until focus groups are run, but I plan on
following the promotional path blazed so success-
fully by Holiday Inn. In other words, this will
be your ‘no surprises' church. When Dad brings
the family here, he can be sure that they will not
be asked to speak in tongues, handle snakes or
give money to the Sandanistas."

Now, no one is guite that bold about it, but there is among
us the sense that if we were a little more market conscious, if
we stopped asking people to give and started giving them what
they want, we might be more successful. And there are plenty of
success models to emulate.

However, just at the moment we begin to be convinced that
the market strategy is correct, just when we inquire seriously of
the super suburban churches booming with growth, just as we shift
the weight of our theology to the supply side of the ledger, here
comes Jesus ~- saying things like:

"If any comes after me and does not hate his own life -
renounce all that he has...he cannot be a disciple..."

and

"What does it profit to gain the whole world and lost one's
soul..."

and

"Whoever would save life will lose it and whoever would lose
life for my sake will save it..."

and

“Tf one would come after me - deny self ~ take up a cross
and follow..."

The psychiatrists and psychologists know that the more we
give away the more we have. The more we hoard, save, protect and
squeeze - the less we have and are. The issue is our own souls.

The heart of Christianity is the teaching of Jesus that ‘in
order to live you must love, and in order to love you must die.
Put another way, the bold and radical proposal of the Gospel is
that learning to love means learning to die. But in that process
you gain something infinitely precious - your own soul.

If you are fortunate you already know that and are doing it.
If you are blessed you have work to do; something for which you
live, something or someone so important to you that you forget
yourself and die a little or a lot. If you are aiive fully - you
are giving yourself to a child, a friend, your students, your
parents, your patients, your clients, or a stranger, the help-
less, the homeless, the sick, the prisoner. The very essence of
Christianity - the essence of what he taught and lived and died
expressing is just this: if you lose yourself for his sake, you
will gain your soul.

When you give your life to him, or when you give it to
others, which is always very close to giving your life to him -
something mysterious and incredible and very good happens te you.

You get something back, It's called your self ~- your life - your
soul.

Jesus, the Christ, promised that one day.
All praise to hin.

Amen.