A Fourth Church Sermon by John Buchanan

October 12, 2003 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

The Best Question in the World

John Buchanan
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 27
Mark 10:17–27

“Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

Mark 10:14 (NRSV)

There are critical moments in life—in my life and in your personal life—when huge questions are asked and huge decisions are made. Sometimes we are aware of the importance of the moment, but more often we are not, I think. More often it is later, sometimes years later, when we see how important that moment, long ago, was in the small drama of our lives. Those critical moments come, I believe, when we are struggling with life’s biggest and greatest questions: where to go to college, what job to take, whom to marry, where to live, what to do with the rest of my life.

Those moments can be difficult. We wish more than anything else for clarity, not ambiguity. Those moments take us out of what we like to call our comfort zone because they are not often clear, they present us with new alternatives, new possibilities, and new challenges. They move us out of our comfort zone, those critical moments do, because they invite us to become, in some way, a new person.

The young man in our text this morning is right in the middle of one of those important, challenging, uncomfortable, and promising moments. And so is the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. It is also in the middle of a great moment.

Over many years this church has grown. Its membership has almost doubled and is now at 5,100. There are four worship opportunities every Sunday. And with that growth has come a wonderful ancillary development: more families and children and young people than anyone in our history ever imagined. More babies! The babies sent us a delegation this morning: eleven of them this morning alone to receive the Sacrament of Baptism, to remind us that there are lots more where they came from. With today’s baptisms included, 104 children have been baptized at Fourth Church already this year. Seventy-two new births have been reported (so far) this year! The babies sent their delegation to be with us this morning to remind us not only that they are the future, but that we don’t have enough room for them today. Our Christian education minister, Donna Gray, never sleeps on Saturday night, worrying that all those babies might show up in the nursery in the morning. The preacher for that day worries that they will all be in the sanctuary. Come to think of it, that’s a great idea: 100 babies in worship to demonstrate what we’ve become.

So we are blessed with an abundance of babies and children, and young people, and young adults—more young adults than any other mainline church I know of—and young families, and single people, and middle-aged people, and older adults. And we are out of space. You might not be aware of that sitting in the sanctuary on Sunday, because we have three morning services. But the rest of the church is literally bursting at the seams, because there are many more people doing many more things than this building was built to accommodate.

At the same time, we have grown in mission and ministry. We have a counseling center, the Day School, a day care center, the Social Service Center, the Center for Older Adults, the Center for Health Ministry, a school cluster program for four Chicago Public Schools west of here, the Scholarship Program, the Job Readiness Program, and the Tutoring Program, which brings 500 urban children to this church weekly for a one-to-one experience with a caring adult. We provide wonderful music for the soul, worship for the heart, food for the hungry, clothing for the naked, and a home for the homeless. We are growing and strong, and I am convinced it is because this church has always known why it is here—namely to represent God’s inclusive, unconditional love, not merely in preaching, but in a life lived faithfully, compassionately, life that might claim for itself the phrase “A Light in the City.”

A man wrote me a letter and said, “John, we wouldn’t need more space and this Capital Campaign if we didn’t try to do so much and help so many people.” He’s right, of course. We wouldn’t have to do this.

But here’s what happened. As we continued to grow and push out beyond the walls of this magnificent building, we got all our leaders together five years ago and began what everyone knows as a strategic planning process. You know all about that. But strategic planning in a church has a critical add-on dimension. We do all the same dreaming, visioning that the symphony and the museums do, and we create mission statements and plans for the future, and we ask a critical question: What does God want? What does our basic faith commitment to be a faithful church of Jesus Christ tell us about our future?

And it is then that you know part of the answer to the question—and it’s not to step back from the promise of the future but to walk ahead into the future with confidence. And that takes us out of our comfort zone and into unchartered territory.

So we’ve been talking for five years. No impulsiveness here! Instead a long and careful gestation involving literally hundreds of people, and here is what the leadership of this church has come up with as a plan to be faithful to the future:

60,000 new square feet of program space here, on this site, in reconfigured space in the Manse, parish building, and a new five- or six-story building west of the sanctuary, on what is currently Westminster House, the parking lot, and the Counseling Center, street to street, Delaware to Chestnut; that building will meet our space needs and will accommodate further future growth.
Strength for our endowment to provide the security and also the inner strength to help us support our ministry and mission. Our endowment is a vital part of who we are and what we do. It is managed creatively and used carefully and wisely. I like to think of it as the way my predecessors—John Timothy Stone, Harold Ray Anderson, and Elam Davies—were privileged to extend their ministries beyond their own lifetimes and likewise the way thousands of faithful and generous Presbyterians before us extended their love and hope and commitment beyond their own lives into our own.
A generous gift to McCormick Theological Seminary, expressing our commitment to theological education. This congregation produces a lot of ministers. In recent years, we have always had a dozen or so of our members preparing to become Presbyterian ministers. Our gift to McCormick reflects that good tradition.
And a community center on Chicago Avenue, a mile from here, strategically located as a bridge between the public housing units that will remain in Cabrini-Green and the new market- and subsidized housing already creating a wonderful new and diverse urban neighborhood. A gym, a cafeteria, classrooms, and a green space will allow us to continue our long tradition of mission and faithfulness with our neighbors and serve as a sign of God’s presence in the midst of the city.
Price tag? It’s big. Bigger than we or anyone else I know has attempted: $52.5 million. We hope to raise $30 million of that through gifts and pledges from ourselves. We are asking each other to pray about this and to give generously and sacrificially. Members will receive two pledge cards in the next several weeks. One for the ongoing life and mission of Fourth Presbyterian Church in 2004. And one for the Capital Campaign, “A Light in the City: Sharing God’s Grace.”
At the same time, we are in the midst of an important conversation about the sale of a very precious asset: the air rights over the western part of our property, over a part of that five-story addition I described earlier. This is an incredibly important matter. It takes us well out of our comfort zone. Our immediate neighbors may not welcome another building—although there are several other major buildings in the planning stages on our block and adjacent blocks. This is a great urban neighborhood with lots of life and activity and people. We have a precious asset given to us essentially by those faithful people who preceded us. I am convinced that it is a matter of the highest stewardship to discuss the appropriate and faithful use of that asset. If and when a decision is made it will be made by this congregation in open meeting after a period of discussion and discernment in which every member will have an opportunity to voice his or her opinions.

So it is an incredibly important moment in the life of this church. And I want you to know how blessed I feel to be part of it. It has caused me to spend most of my time these days living outside of my comfort zone, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Important moments full of challenge and promise come, and this is one of them. Usually they come as we are asking important questions about the future.

A good friend of mine, Ted Wardlaw, the new president of Austin Seminary where Jack Stotts presided so admirably, was talking to a group of us recently on how it is we end up where we are in life. It was a variation on the theme of this sermon. Ted went to seminary in the 60s, right out of college. Now some people always know exactly what they want to do with their lives at that moment, but not many, particularly clergy, I think. Well, Ted went to seminary, and as soon as he unpacked, he began to have second thoughts. Maybe this wasn’t such a hot idea. He wasn’t at all sure that he wanted to be a minister, didn’t like his room, his courses, or the food—or the weather, for that matter. And so he began to do what you do in those circumstances: build the case for leaving. He shared his doubts and misgivings with everybody: fellow students, professors, counselors. It was the high holy days of what we used to call Client Centered Therapy, using the psychological theories of Carl Rogers. We all learned to listen intentionally and play back to the client or parishioner whatever he or she was saying; never, ever venture an opinion or advice. Ted would say, “I’ve been thinking about leaving.” His fellow students would respond, “You’re thinking about leaving?” “Yes, I don’t like it here.” “I see, you don’t like it here?” Finally, to find confirmation that he was doing the right thing by dropping out, he made an appointment with the senior faculty member, Dr. John Leith, who in his day was one of the most distinguished Presbyterian scholars and teachers. He had a well-deserved reputation for bluntness and abruptness. Apparently he didn’t know about Client Centered Therapy. “Dr. Leith,” Ted said, “I’m thinking about leaving.” “Skip it,” came the blunt reply. “But, Dr. Leith, I’m not happy.” “Skip it, Mr. Wardlaw. Skip it. H. Richard Niebuhr said there is an SOB in every life and right now you’re the SOB in your own life. Skip it. Go to the library. Study. Read. Eat right. Get a good night’s sleep. Go to work!” And so Ted headed for the library, his vocation, and the rest of his life.

We all have stories like that. I came home from college near graduation with the decision of what to do next looming. My minister, Leslie Van Dine, and his friend Harry Geissinger, another minister, took me to lunch. I simply asked, “How do you know what to do? I don’t have any clarity at all. What if this is all a big mistake. What if I get there and I don’t like it. This is really hard.” And I’ll never forget Geissinger’s response: “For most of us big decisions are always difficult, rarely clear,” he said. “In fact, maybe the bigger the decision, the less clarity.” He told me how on the day of his wedding, shaving, he stopped, sat on the edge of the tub, put his head in his hands and prayed. “O Lord, I’m not really all that certain that this is a good idea.” “Finally, you have to commit,” he said. “You have to go with your heart. Your mind will follow along.”

The young man in the familiar text this morning was asking the most important question in the world: “How do I inherit eternal life?” Translate that to what do I have to do to live fully, deeply, passionately, meaningfully, now, in this lifetime, and in a way that has the significance of eternity about it? The very best question—the question, you might say, that all philosophy, art, literature, and religion attempt to answer.

“Obey the law,” Jesus says. “I do,” the young man says. “Have obeyed all my life.” Then something very interesting happens. Jesus looks at him and loves him. Jesus loves this young man. Loves his integrity, his moral commitment, loves his question, I think, loves the fact that this man is asking the greatest question in the world. “Go, sell, give, come, follow.” Five imperatives. And the man is stunned, appalled, and slowly backs away, walks into history, grieving because “he had many possessions.”

It’s the only time Jesus issues an invitation and fails to evoke a positive response. In the meantime, the disciples are amazed. Amazed because Jesus has challenged one of their society’s fundamental assumptions: namely that money is a sign of God’s blessing. They are astonished, not because they are rich—because they are not—but because of the way he cuts through one of the most basic conceptual assumptions and invites people, all people—rich people, poor people—to think in new ways about their lives and what they are here for and what to do with their lives.

And so he might challenge us, might he not? The customary interpretation of this story usually leads the preacher to a critique of consumerism. Like the young man, we have a lot of stuff. We love our stuff. We think about, fantasize about, spend our resources to buy more stuff, maintain our stuff, and buy bigger apartments and homes to store our stuff. Like him we walk away grieving because there is no way we can live without our stuff.

I ran into a new way to think about it this week, though. The Lilly Endowment does a lot of research on how we relate to our money, our resources, and what exactly we derive from it. Lilly commissioned a project and paper “Thinking Theologically about Wealth,” which proposes that (1) the topic is notoriously difficult for most American Christians and (2) that it is more complicated than it seems.

Lilly’s surveys showed that even the mention of money stirs up complicated emotions and that when asked if they have enough money, Americans, regardless of their income level, responded by saying, “I need a little more.”

Now at this point the standard interpretation is that we are materialists, one and all, enslaved to the market dynamic of spend, accumulate, earn more, spend more, accumulate more, etc. But this time the Lilly researcher pushed deeper and did a study of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California, where most of the members have a great deal of money. What she found was surprising. Most people knew that money can’t buy happiness. Only healthy reciprocal relationships can do that. What most people want is abundant life, full, meaningful, happy lives and that they are asking essentially the greatest question in the world, “How do I get that?”

What the researcher found is that people weren’t driven by consumerism as much as by anxiety. They want more money to take care of their families. They experience anxiety “about having enough money to be secure, to have homes in safe neighborhoods, send their children to safe schools, pay extra for security systems, save extra in case of illness”—and the list goes on. The researcher called it SUV Theology. Her research indicated that people didn’t drive an SUV because of its size or status but for safety and security.

And so they and perhaps we are caught not so much by selfishness and consumerism as by fear and anxiety. “Hell,” the philosopher Jacob Needleman observed, “is the state in which we are barred from receiving what we truly need by the value we give to what we merely want.”

Jesus missed an opportunity to deliver a critique of materialism. Instead, he offered an invitation to a sincere and honest young man asking the greatest question in the world, an invitation to let go of the strong hold, driven by anxiety and fear, that he had on his resources and to trust God for his salvation. What Jesus offered this young man was the opportunity to discover abundant and eternal life in the freedom of God’s love and the privilege of living for something more and better and bigger than personal security. It is a great moment, full of challenge and promise.

Sue and I are going to give as generously as we can because we believe so very deeply in what this church means to the neighborhood and city and to the whole Presbyterian Church (USA), its intentional involvement in mission in the city, its openness and inclusiveness and hospitality, its welcome to all. We will give as generously as we can, and we hope you will too.

But there is a deeper issue here, and that is the answer to the greatest question in the world that you and I will give finally.

Jesus invites us to trust God with our lives, our futures, and our final salvation.

And Jesus calls us to follow him, by living for him, for those who need us—our families, our dearest ones, our neighbors—by living faithfully and generously in this wonderful world, by giving all we have—our love, our passion, our hope, our wealth—and discovering one day that in the meantime he has given the most precious gift of all: the gift of abundant, fully, deeply, joyful, meaningful, and eternal life.

Amen.