The Fourth Church Pulpit

THE HIGH COST OF BELIEVING

October 20, 1996

John M. Buchanan

Every evening we sit in our living rooms and watch on the flickering screen what has
gone on in the world that day. What we choose to do about it, you and I— what
worthy causes, if any, get our time and energy, what political candidates get our
votes, how much money we give away or could afford to give away if our hearts were
really in it — these are all issues of the greatest and most far-reaching importance not
just for the saving of the world but for the saving of our own souls.

Frederick Buechner
The Longing for Home

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CHURCH

A LIGHT IN THE CITY
126 East Chestnut Street Chicago, I] 60611-2094
Phone: (312) 787-4570
John M. Buchanan, Pastor

Scripture:
Matthew 22:21
“Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s
and to God the things that are God’s.”

At a meeting in Louisville, one of what seems like hundreds I’ve attended recently in the
offices of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the proceedings began with
what we have come to call “Sharing Joys and Concerns.” People in the group that is meeting,
often strangers to one another from different places in the country, are made into a little more
cohesive working unit in the simple ritual of introducing themselves and then saying something
aloud which they are very happy about — a joy, the birth of a grandchild, for instance — and also
something about which they are concerned — the illness of a friend, for instance.

When my turn came, I had an interesting reaction. It was a Monday morning. The day
before, I had preached in another city and returned to Chicago in the early evening. I went to the
office and asked the receptionist and housemen how things were going. I expected to be told,
“not so good since you're gone.” Instead, J learned that all was not only well at Fourth
Presbyterian Church, it was very good. The Kiev Symphony and Chorus had been in worship
that morning. Jack Stotts had preached a great sermon. All the programs seemed to be up and
running. The enthusiasm level was high. The staff was happy and content.

“My joy and my concern this morning is the same thing,” I told the group the next
morning in Louisville. “My joy and my concern is that the Fourth Presbyterian Church of
_ Chicago is doing so well without me.”

T can’t tell you how glad I am to be home this morning and how much I miss, not only the
high moments in the life of this congregation, but also the daily routine. I also can’t tell you and
my colleagues how very grateful I am that things are going so well. There are many benefits
which come along with the opportunity to serve as Moderator of the General Assembly of the
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), but chief among them for me is the daily confirmation of the
blessing of my ministry as pastor of this congregation.

It is a busy and full life. In a typical week I preach twice on Sunday morning, lead an
adult forum between services, attend a reception or lunch afterward and then head for the airport
for another engagement before heading home. On weekdays I leave early in the morning to
address a presbytery or synod or organizational meeting somewhere and return once, sometimes
twice, again arriving late at night and heading out in the morning. I try to schedule a day or part
of a day in Chicago once a week to at least stay even with mail and appointments and then on
Saturday afternoon it’s back to the airport to visit another congregation on Sunday morning.

The purpose is to give some tangible expression to the unity and the connectedness of the
Presbyterian family. We are a big and diverse denomination, with 2.7 million members in 11,400
congregations. And it has always been important for us to be reminded of the fact that when you
become a member of a Presbyterian congregation, you are also becoming a member of this larger

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diverse and very interesting family called the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). The Moderator is
one of the few symbols a lot of Presbyterians recognize and welcome as a reminder of this
broader connection with the whole family.

The purpose of the visits is to report to and encourage the congregations and presbyteries
in their mission and ministry, to build up and cheer on the church — and to lift up the fact that
there is a dimension to this whole business that connects us with other people. In more
theological terms, to remind us all that the Gospel of Jesus Christ puts us in a new relationship
with other people, that there is a new humanity created in human history by Jesus Christ and that
the church is its witness and its example whether it knows it or not, whether it wants to be or
doesn’t want to be, which increasingly these days seems to be the case.

This is a critical year for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). The subjects of human
sexuality, responsible moral behavior and, in particular, whether sexual orientation should be the
determining factor in the election, ordination and installation of a man or woman to ministry or
church office, is before us still. People disagree, deeply and strongly. So deeply and strongly
that many believe there will be no way to stay in this family if the issue is not resolved one way
or the other. And the job of Moderator, this year particularly, is to try to hold it all together, try
even to persuade folk that they belong together even if they cannot stand one another’s position
and opinion, because that’s the nature of this phenomenon called church.

One of my heroes, saints and mentors in the faith, even though I never met him, was Henri
Nouwen, Dutch priest, theologian, author, with a deeply spiritual and pastoral way about him.
Nouwen died two weeks ago. One of his most popular books is The Wounded Healer, which

included a wonderful story. He used to tell about his first parish; there lived, side-by-side, two
~ racial/ethnic communities between whom there was no love lost. Sure enough, on his first
Saturday night, at a church bazaar, a fight broke out. The pick-up trucks circled around and the
combatants began to slug away. The way Nouwen told it, “the older priest was beside himself,
walking from truck to truck telling people they were going to hell.” Nouwen decided something
had to be done, so he stepped in between the two men, told them to stop, whereupon one of them
hit him in the nose and knocked him down. There’s something like that in being Moderator.

But there is also the privilege of witnessing first hand the liveliness and vigor of
Presbyterianism as it exists all over this country and the world. And there is the privilege of
witnessing and participating in the mysterious miracles of grace that happen in congregations
everywhere, urban and rural, large and small.

At a big suburban church, a young father told me about how much the church’s ministry
with his hearing-impaired son had meant to him and his family, how the father had reclaimed his
faith. The congregation, in order to support the family, had launched a program, a class, to teach
signing to other members of the church. Now there was a community around the little family,
sitting together in the front pew on Sunday. Another hearing-impaired youngster, a teen-age girl,
had become part of the group. Sitting in the church, I watched as she and her friends “sang”
Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee in sign language, with all the fervor of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, and
as three signers “sang” the anthem to them, I thought, “Where but the church would there be so
much effort, so much grace to be inclusive, to embrace this little boy, this teen-age girl who live
~ mostly in a world that does very little to include them?”

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In San Rafael, California, the pastor, Norm Pott, surprised me by asking me to come down
and sit in the middle of the children for the children’s sermon. Norm told the story of the
Moderator’s Cross, how it is really three crosses symbolizing the three branches of our church
and how the three are now one. And then he told them about me and asked them to all stand
around me while he prayed for me. And at the end, instead of shaking my hand, he told them to
give the Moderator a “high five” and then not to wash that hand for the rest of the day. I don’t
know what the parents thought, but I thought I had been anointed!

The next day, after I preached in their chapel, the students of San Francisco Theological
Seminary gathered around Sue and me. As President Don McCullough prayed, they laid their
hands on us and once again, we felt something of the mystery and majesty of this church.

Last week we visited the Presbyterian Reformed Church in Cuba. Today we fly to Brazil
and then Argentina and Chile to visit and bring greetings and encouragement to our mission
partners and to Presbyterian churches, mission workers and volunteers.

The church of Jesus Christ matters a lot to the life of the world. I have seen it. And being
away from Chicago has reaffirmed for me how very much this church matters to our part of the
world.

It is no coincidence that I wanted to be in this pulpit today, Stewardship Sunday. It’s the
time when people who love their church and care about its existence here in this incredible
location, who believe in the way it gives itself to making a difference in the lives of thousands of
people every week, who think it all makes a profound difference in the life of the city, it’s the
_ time for all of us to step up, to accept responsibility and to support this church with our financial
pledges.

But I also wanted to be here today because over the years I have come to know in my heart
that the ritual we call stewardship, the process of persuading people to give money to the church,
is really about living life as a Christian, an individual trying, in the context of his or her
particular life, to follow Jesus. Stewardship is about the life of your soul. It’s about purpose and
meaning and faith and hope.

“If you simply want to raise money,” one of my mentors used to say, “raffle a Pontiac.”
You can’t lose. Or organize a lottery. There is no easier way. But we know, don’t we, that the
issue has to do with our deepest faith, our deepest being as men and women trying to be faithful,
trying to live as intentionally and purposefully as we can? It’s why Jesus talks more about money
and giving life away than about heaven, hell or sin.

One time he was asked a very difficult question — about money. It is part of the running
verbal skirmish he is having with people who are trying to embarrass him, discredit him, or trap
him into saying something that will get him into trouble with the authorities. “Is it lawful to pay
taxes to the emperor?” they ask.

It’s a very good question. The head tax on all citizens of a Roman province was a vivid
reminder of Israel’s humiliation and oppression. Some zealously patriotic Jews held that the tax
~ was illegal. No Jew should pay it. If Jesus said “Yes, the tax is legal. Pay it,” he would have

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been dismissed as a collaborator. If, on the other hand, he said, “Do not pay,” he would have
been arrested for insurrection. Either way, his opponents would have succeeded in discrediting
him.

He asked for a coin. The head of Caesar was inscribed on it. It was, in fact, his property.

The emperor owned the currency. “Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to
God the things that are God’s.”

They are amazed, the ones who heard it. They know exactly what he has said and what it
means. Caesar is given his due; thrown a crumb, actually, a coin. God, the sovereign Lord of
creation, the creator God from whom the beautiful mystery of the world comes, the creator God to
whom St. Francis wrote his magnificent hymn of praise, God is the giver of all you have — your
life itself. You owe everything to God, all you are, all you ever will be, all you have.

At the heart of this faith of ours is the acknowledgement, the confession, that everything
that matters most to us — the love of dear ones, beauty and grace and friendship and joy and
passion — all of it comes to us not because we have created it, or earned it, but as a gift. At the
heart of our faith is a reminder ultimately that we are here by grace, that this day is a gift, that our
lives themselves are God’s precious gift to us. At the heart of this faith of ours is the
acknowledgement that you and I start to live life as God intends it to be lived: full, joyful, free,
exuberant, passionate, human life — when we know that it isn’t ours to be hoarded and saved
and squeezed and kept in the bank, that it’s a gift and that its highest, holiest and most noble
purpose is to give it away. Sometimes we lose sight of that fundamental Christian position
because it is so easy to be a believer here and we have so much. It is not so everywhere.

I thought about the high cost of believing for some this week as I signed a letter to
Ayatollah Ali Khamani and President Rafsanjani of Iran, on behalf of the P.C.(U.S.A.), expressing
sadness at and protesting the death of an Iranian Christian pastor who disappeared and was
hanged two weeks ago. It is not easy to be a Christian some places in the world.

I found myself thinking about that a lot in Cuba last week. We were visiting with people
who had made a very costly decision. When the Castro revolution turned sharply to the left and
when state-sponsored atheism began to make life very difficult for all churches and individual
Christians, many Cuban people decided to leave. Most of them live in this country. Many have
participated fully in the economic growth of the past 35 years. The ones who stayed have paid a
steep price. If they were members of a church they could not be members of the party. They
could not run for office. They were prevented from assuming positions of responsibility.
Professional careers were ended. All many had left was the church and one another in the
church.

We were dinner guests in the apartment of the Moderator of the Cuban Church General
Assembly and his wife. When I was assured I could ask anything I wished, I asked about how
the state applied pressure to believers. The Moderator’s wife told me about her son, a good
student at the University of Havana and a fine athlete and basketball player. Because the team
represented the university and the nation, he was thrown off the basketball team and allowed to

return only if he quit the church and renounced his faith. The young man did. What parent

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could not understand and feel deeply this Cuban family’s agony? There was a lot of pain in her
voice when she told me he had moved to Germany and they had not seen him for a long time.
“We have talked about our faith for years. Now we have had to learn how to live it,” she said.

I thought about how the whole matter of living a full life by opening our hands and
learning to give is brought into perspective in a society where nobody owns much of anything.
In a marvelous worship service in Cabaiquan, a city in the central interior of Cuba, a large
congregation crowded into the Presbyterian Church to wait for the American Presbyterian
Moderator who was, at that point, one hour late, and very hot and very tired. But children sang
and young people played wonderful hymns with a salsa beat and there was a liturgical dance and
solemn candlelight procession. As I stood up to preach, I noticed people on the sidewalks trying
to see in the church and to hear. And at the offering, as I fumbled with my wallet to find a dollar,
I saw arms extending through the windows from the congregation on the sidewalk, placing pesos
in the offering plate, and I was terribly aware of how relatively easy it is for me to be a public
Christian and how little demands are placed on me and how little I have to give.

Henri Nouwen understood the essence of the Gospel when in the midst of his very
distinguished academic career, in demand as a lecturer everywhere in the world, he decided to
become part of a L'Arche Community in Toronto, a worldwide organization of communities
devoted to the love and care of severely handicapped adults. He wrote “Whatever form the
Christian ministry takes (and by “ministry” Nouwen simply meant the life to which all of us are
called), whatever form it takes, the basis is always the same: to lay down one’s life for one’s
friends.” [See The Christian Century, 10/16/96, p. 957]

The high cost of believing . . . “Give to God what is God’s,” Jesus said, not because Cod
needs what we have, but because we need to learn and live like that, need to learn, that is to say,
that we don’t “have” anything until we know it is a gift — a trust —a stewardship, to be given,
spent, used.

Frederick Buechner wrote: “The more you give away in love, the more you are. It is not
just for the sake of other people that Jesus tells us to give rather than to get, but for our own sakes
too,”

And so today — members and friends of this church — visiting members of other churches
— there is a decision to be made. Its form is mundane, to be sure ... a pledge card. But it
represents something far more profound. It represents your determination to follow Jesus and to
begin to experience the life of faith he promises.

I have come to love one of the wonderful new hymns in our hymnal, “God, Whose Giving
Knows no Ending”

Open wide our hands in sharing...
As we heed Christ’s ageless call...
Healing, teaching and
reclaiming...
Serving you by loving all.

“Give to God what is God’s,” he said. That means offering our lives — offering everything
we have, everything we are, and everything we will be — to God in gratitude. It means being a
steward. Amen
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