THE FOURTH CHURCH PULPIT

Why I’m Still a Presbyterian
October 31, 1999

John M. Buchanan

We are consecrated and dedicated to God in order that we may thereafter think,
speak, meditate, and do nothing except for his glory.... We are God’s; let us
therefore live for him - die for him. We are God’s: let his wisdom and will therefore
rule all our actions. We are God’s; let all the parts of our life accordingly strive
toward him as our only lawful goal. O, how much has the man profiteth who,
having been taught that he is not his own, has taken away dominion and rule from
his own reason that he may yield it to God!

John Calvin
The Institutes of the Christian Religion

1559
FOURTH
PRESBY
TERIAN
CHURCH
A LIGHT IN THE CITY

Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago
126 East Chestnut Street, Chicago, IL 60611-2094
(312) 787-4570

WHY I’M STILL A PRESBYTERIAN

JOHN M. BUCHANAN, PASTOR
FOURTH PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
October 31, 1999

John 8:31-36
Romans 12:3-13

“For as in one body we have many members . .. so we, who are many, are one body in
Christ .. .” {Romans 12:4,5)

Startle us, O God, with your fruth. And remind us that it is your truth and not ours. On
this Sunday, as we remember our heritage, remind us that our faith, our religion; our
creeds and hymns and rituals, are our poor ways of responding to the mystery of your
Jove and your amazing grace, in Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.

In the fall of 1959, I walked into the sanctuary of the First Presbyterian Church of Chicago
and fell in love. It’s a lovely English Gothic building on the corner of Kimbark and 64"
Street in the heart of Woodlawn, just a few blocks south of the University of Chicago. I
was a student, a more-or-less Presbyterian, Presbyterian by birth, but at that particular
time, intentionally unencumbered by religious affiliation. It seemed enough to be reading
and thinking about and endlessly discussing the religious thinkers of the day, most of
whom didn’t have much good to say about the church, by the way. In fact, in those days,
it was academically fashionable to disparage the church as an anachronism. The issues
that mattered were political integrity, justice, peace, a frightening prospect of new conflict
in Southeast Asia, and at home, race relations, the smoldering fires of racial conflict,
segregation in the South, discrimination in the North—none of which seemed to have
much to do with the church.

The problem was what to do with Sunday morning. Something just didn’t feel right to me
about sitting at home reading. It was the wife of a friend, who landed a job in the church
office, who knew I was a more or less Presbyterian and told me about First Church, and so
I visited one Sunday, around this time of year, and fell in love.

It was a big congregation in those days, with lots of people from the University
community. I was shocked to see a few professors who weren’t very enthusiastic about
the institutional church in their classrooms, sitting in the pews, singing hymns, saying
prayers, putting money in the plate, looking pretty institutional. It also drew people from
the suburbs who were committed to its vision of an interracial church. I had never seen
anything like it. Black people and white people, in roughly equal numbers, sitting
together in church. Furthermore, the church itself was modeling the vision in a very
striking way—it had two ministers—Charles Leber who was white, Ulysses Blakley who
was black. They shared responsibilities for preaching and worship leadership. The more
I discovered about that church, the more impressed I became. It was involved, deeply, in
the neighborhood, which was at the beginning of a radical transformation. It’s church

school and youth program reached out to its mostly African American neighborhood

children. I signed on as youth director; we learned about racism from wonderful high
school students who patiently taught us.

Later, that church would put its life on the line, literally, by inviting the Black Stone
Rangers in, allowing the gang to meet in the church, convincing the gang members to
deposit their guns in the church safe. The city government and police department took a
very dim view of that, raided the church, broke into the safe and confiscated the guns.

Whatever else could be said about First Presbyterian, you couldn’t say it was boring, or
irrelevant, or uninteresting.

Every Sunday morning I put a collar on and these peculiar bands of cloth and at least part
of the reason is that I first saw them when Blakely and Leber wore them in worship at the
First Presbyterian Church of Chicago. And part of the reason is that they are called
Geneva Tabs because they were worn by the pastors in 16" century Geneva when a man
by the name of John Calvin laid the intellectual and institutional foundations for what
became Reformed Protestantism, Presbyterianism.

The question is: does any of this matter? Are Protestant denominations important at all
any more? This is Reformation Sunday, characterized recently as the day Protestants
used to get together and say bad things about Catholics. We had the truth and they didn’t.
They thought the same thing about us.

Some sociologists of religion are calling it the post-denominational age and we know, for a
fact, that American people don’t care much about brand name differentiation when it
comes to churches. There was a time when denominations helped preserve ethnic
identity. Scots were Presbyterian, Episcopalians were English, Lutherans were German
and Scandinavian. But the melting pot of American culture dissolved European ethnicity
as a meaningful category and denominations took on a social and economic function. In
the 1950’s, Vance Packard wrote a book, The Status Seekers, which observed that
religious denominations were a way to place persons in the social hierarchy—“from
Pentecostal to Episcopal,” Packard called it. Episcopalians owned the company,
Presbyterians managed it. Baptists worked for it. That too is gone.

People choose churches for many reasons other than brand name: the music, the
architecture, the Sunday School, the variety of programs, the preaching, the parking. Not
many choose a church because of its brand name.

A Wall Street Journal writer did a tongue and cheek piece on religious marketing that has
become a classic.

“My strategy,” he wrote, “is to consolidate the various name brands, even the
strong, flagship brands like Southern Baptists, into one identifiable Exxon-like
identity. (He might have said B.P. or Bank One!) The target audience here is Mom,
Dad, Butch and Sis—solid, suburban Americans who want a little God in their life
and a place to go before brunch. And, after test marketing various possibilities, I

have decided on the name—Middle American Christian Church, or MacChurch, for
ad purposes.” {Jack Cahill, Wall Street Journal, 7/30/85)

These institutions which have been around for 450 years are changing before our eyes.
God, I believe, is in the process of creating something new—a new church, I believe, for a
new age. And I believe part of the current dilemma of the mainline churches in our
culture, the old denominations, is that we’re having trouble keeping up with the new thing
God is doing and to which God is calling us.

I believe God is doing a new thing with the church—Presbyterian, Lutheran, Methodist,
Baptist, Roman Catholic. I believe we are called to be flexible, loose, responsive and, at
the same time, I hope we will hold tightly to those particular traditions that produced
congregations like this one and the one on the corner of 64" and Kimbark where I fell in
love.

It began in the middle of the 16" century, just a few years after an Augustinian Monk by
the name of Martin Luther, marched up to the castle church in Wittenberg and nailed 95
theses to the door, outlining what he thought was wrong with the church. Today, we
celebrate the 482™ anniversary of that event. The Protestant Reformation exploded in
Germany and quickly moved to France and the low countries. A brilliant French lawyer
by the name of John Calvin, adopted Reformation theology and became a political refugee
fleeing persecution in France. He settled in Geneva and there went to work, thinking,
writing, teaching and preaching. In Geneva he produced a brilliant work—which is still
studied carefully, The Institutes of the Christian Religion.

Calvin was a humanist scholar. His ideas were revolutionary. In church and state, he
taught, individuals have the right to participate in their governance; to elect pastors and
leaders in church, and magistrates in the city. That was an entirely new way of thinking
in an age that assumed that God gave authority to both church and political hierarchies
who ruled over everyone in the name of God. In fact, it was revolutionary and sounded a
lot like heresy, or treason, which it was. It was the seed-bed for what became the
republican form of democracy; individuals blessed with the right to choose their own
leaders. The Declaration of Independence reflects that thinking. So does the Constitution
and Bill of Rights.

And because individuals have political rights, there are limits on the right of the state—or
church—to coerce the conscience of the individual. “God alone is Lord of the conscience,”
is the way Presbyterians put it, and even though Calvin was responsible for this radical
idea of personal liberty, he did not always honor it. When a notorious heretic by the name
of Servetus—already condemned to death by the Catholics and Lutherans—came to
Geneva, he was arrested and Calvin agreed to his execution by burning—a sobering part of
our history. But the heirs of Calvin down through the centuries will be found on the front
lines of the struggle for individual political and spiritual liberty—in Nazi Germany, in the
American civil rights movement, or the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa.

And because citizens were to be responsible for their own political and ecclesiastical life,
education became a priority, not just for the privileged elite, but for every man and
woman, every child. Public schools, public education, the responsibility of the whole

community for the education of the children—those are Presbyterian ideas. And so
everywhere Presbyterians went, they built schools—in Scotland—along the American
frontier. The majority of early colleges and universities in this country were established
by Presbyterians, and many of our great public universities were the products of
Presbyterian influence—the University of Michigan, University of North Carolina,

Georgia, Tennessee, Ohio State, University of California, organized by Presbyterian clergy
and laity.

After the Civil War, the states of the former Confederacy were devastated, broke, with
industry and agriculture ruined, and in the midst of it all there were several million newly
emancipated slaves, most of them unskilled and illiterate. The most urgent need, after
food and shelter, was education. It was the Presbyterian Church that responded most
aggressively, organizing more than 120 schools in the South to provide basic education to
the children of newly emancipated slaves: elementary and secondary schools, Junior
Colleges and Colleges. Most of those schools were absorbed in time into public school
systems. Many continued into the 20" century. A few survive teday—Knoxville, Mary
Holmes, Barber-Scotia, Tusculum, Stillman. It was my great privilege, two years ago, to
address a Reunion of Reunions of those precious institutions: to witness elderly African
American Presbyterians—teachers, doctors, lawyers, business professionals, carrying the
old banners of those schools and academies they attended and where they learned that
they mattered, that they could live in freedom, could thrive in freedom. It is a great
chapter in American Presbyterianism.

And John Calvin believed that it was the rele of religion to move out of the church and
into the world: that the content of the church’s creeds and confession is expressed not only
liturgically—inside—but socially and politically and economically. So ours has been the
most political of all the religious traditions. In Geneva, Calvin was responsible for the
enactment of the first labor laws, regulating child labor. And ever since Presbyterians
have been expressing themselves about politics and economics, often to the chagrin of
their own members. A Presbyterian minister, and President of the College of New Jersey,
John Witherspoon, was the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence.

When the Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia in 1787 to write a constitution,
the Presbyterian church was holding it’s first General Assembly down the street and
several people were delegates to both bodies. The first thing the new General Assembly
did was address itself to President Washington.

We’ve been doing it ever since. John Mulder quips that Presbyterians simply assume that
they are responsible for the life of the world—even when the world would prefer that we
mind our own business. So every year we look at the world and speak our mind and even
when it makes us uncomfortable, even when our own political and economic assumptions
are being challenged, it is quintessential Presbyterianism. We believe that the point of the
Incarnation was personal—and social transformation: the salvation of individuals and the
building of God’s new commonwealth on earth.

And Calvin was ecumenical. From the very beginning, this church has known that it is
one part of the Holy Catholic Church of Jesus Christ—not the only part.

There is about Presbyterianism a modesty about our truth claims. Perhaps the memory of
Calvin's lapse, agreeing to the execution of Servetus, has made us hesitant to claim that
ours is the only truth. I’m a Presbyterian because of the awareness that truth is larger
than our own understanding of it, or anyone else’s, for that matter That idea, that truth is
bigger than our version of it is so very fragile, and so absent from much of the religion that
captures the attention of the media; the cults, the megachurches, the televangelists, all
beating the drum for the absolute truth they know is theirs.

Part of the dilemma and pain of our own church at this moment is a deep divide between
those who think they know the truth about the mind of God on the subject of sexual
orientation and those of us who disagree and dissent and want our church to live a little
more humbly, a little more openly; a lot less exclusively. People on both sides of this issue
are suggesting openly that it is time to split the church. The head of the Presbyterian Lay
Committee, a right wing organization of Presbyterians, is calling for a “bloody holy war”
to drive out people who disagree with their position.

Pm still a Presbyterian because I believe our church has room for diversity and
disagreement on this issue. I believe ultimately, our church will work this out, will
change as it has changed its mind about slavery and divorce and the role of women, has
changed its mind about what the Bible means. I’m still a Presbyterian because I want my
church to hold together as we continue to talk and study and discern, to hold together to
be part of the new church God is creating, the new thing God is doing.

There is, deep in the heart of Protestantism, and particularly Presbyterianism, a sense of
limits, a sense of self-examination and self-criticism, a sense that since God alone is
ultimate, nothing else is—not even our very best ideas about God, our very best rules, our
best institutional structures—all of it falls under the authority, the judgment, the love and
the grace of God. Paul Tillich called that “the Spirit of Protestantism.” God alone is
ultimate—everything else is open to Reformation.

That’s what Jesus meant once when he said “You shall know the truth and the truth shall
make you free,” and later, in a variation on that theme, “I am the way, the truth and the
life...” He, we believe, is the truth: not ideas about him, not creeds written to confess
faith in Him, not church hierarchies which claim to represent Him, not ecclesiastical
paraphernalia, constitutions, Books of Order, Amendments on this and that, judicial
processes.

None of it is the truth. He is the truth. He is the truth in whom is peace and wholeness
and freedom.

That’s what Luther meant when he defied the church authorities and the power of the
Holy Roman Empire to take his brave stand.

It’s what John Calvin meant when he wrote those beautiful words:

“I greet thee, who my sure redeemer art,

My only trust and Savior of my heart .. .No harshness hast Thou and no

bitterness...

Our hope is in no other save in Thee”

He is the truth that makes us free.

I’m a Presbyterian because our tradition has remembered that and reminded the rest of
the church that He is the truth and then has gone into the world to give its life away, its
love, its resources, its knowledge, its heart, its hope, to give its life away.

It happens all over the world wherever there are these peculiar people called
Presbyterians.

It happens here—in our tutoring program, at the Center for Whole Life.

It happens in Korea and Cuba and Croatia; in China and Japan and Indonesia; in
Edinburgh and Geneva and Paris, in Cairo, Hararwe and Nairobi.

We heard this week from Bob and Dalia Baker, two Presbyterians, members of this
congregation, who were touched deeply by the crisis in Kosovo; like two others from
Fourth Church, Jack and Joy Houston, who live and work in Guatemala, the Bakers quit
their jobs, sold their condominium and volunteered to go—and to somehow help. The
Presbyterian Church found a way to put them in the field in a matter of months.

A few weeks ago, a UN worker was killed in Pristina. Then the Kosovo Liberation Army
kidnapped three Serbs who haven’t been heard from since. Missionary friends of the
Bakers were visiting families in the village when this all happened.

This is how Dalia told it;

“Having said all their good-byes, at ten in the morning, Ellen and Dave and Agim
were on the small village road for no more than fifteen minutes when they
encountered a roadblock. Almost immediately the doors of their van opened, and
they were forcibly pulled out and thrown onto the ground. The attackers were
yelling in Serbian. Dave tried to say they were Americans, which infuriated the
Serb attackers even more. They kicked them and finally ordered them to get up.
At gunpoint, they forced them to walk to a small farmhouse nearby. They were tied
and blindfolded. The Serbs began beating them with fists, sticks and electrical
cords used as whips. After about five hours, they were all dragged back to the van.
Everything was gone: suitcases, money, cameras.

Ellen and Dave have had time to reflect on their experience. Once they were taken
from their van, neither of them expected to survive the attack. Dave said he prayed
for calmness and endurance. Ellen told me that she prayed for help to control her
fear, and that at one point during this ordeal, she suddenly felt a sense of peace.
She said that God had sent them to Albania to do work and their work was not
finished. God wanted them to finish what they had started.”

That’s what it means to know the truth that makes us free.
The simple fact that those missionaries are there: that Bob and Dalia Baker, nurtured in
this Presbyterian congregation, are there, that our denomination has the machinery and
know-how and resources to put them there—where this broken world seems most
broken—all that happening at the same time we’re wringing our hands about the plight of
mainline churches and fighting about this and that—is why, finally, I am still a
Presbyterian and always will be.
About our church—about the Bakers—about all of us we might say:

“Through many dangers, toils and snares,

I have already come;

Tis grace has brought me safe thus far,

And grace will lead me home.” Amen.