September 22, 2013 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Living Stones

Calum I. MacLeod
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 113
1 Peter 2:4–10
Luke 16: 13

“Like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house.”
1 Peter 2:5 (NRSV)

Dearest Lord, teach me to be generous. Teach me to serve you as you deserve; to give and not to count the cost; to fight and not to heed the wounds; to toil and not to seek for rest; to labor and not to seek reward, save that of knowing that I do your will.

Ignatius of Loyola

The Luke 16:13 text—”No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth”—is the end of the set reading for this morning in the Gospel, and I thought it apt to lift that verse, as this Sunday in the church calendar is the Sunday when we reflect on our giving: the giving of our time, our talent, and our money to the life and work of not only this congregation but the church in general. And so I’ve been reflecting this week on what it means to preach what is traditionally known as a stewardship sermon.

I find myself remembering back to just a month or so ago when Missy and I were in Scotland visiting my family. We spent time on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides with my father and then spent a long weekend in Glasgow visiting my family there in the city I was brought up in. While we were there, we went for dinner one evening to a restaurant in the west end of Glasgow near the university where I studied and in the area where I lived for some years. We went to a restaurant called Cottiers. Now Cottiers is a very special place, because I used to work there when I was studying for my divinity degree. I worked in the restaurant as a waiter and also served behind the bar. The interesting thing about this—and I shared this story with my colleagues this week—is the day that I was introduced to the Presbytery of Glasgow as a candidate for ministry, there was a reception afterwards and we were greeted by various elders of the church. One very eminent elder in the Presbytery of Glasgow, a professor of medicine, came up to me and introduced himself and I introduced myself, and he said, “Ah, I was looking at the CVs. Are you the MacLeod who works in the pub?” I hesitatingly acknowledged, “Yes, I am.” And he replied, “Well, that’s very good. You’ll get better training for ministry working in a pub than you will at Glasgow University.” There is actually some deep truth to that.

The other interesting thing about Cottiers restaurant in Glasgow is that it is housed in an old church, a beautiful, architecturally significant church. The sanctuary is not unlike this: neo-Gothic, beautifully decorated by a very famous interior designer by the name of Daniel Cottier (which is how the restaurant got its name). That sanctuary is now an arts space; it’s used for theater and dance. The old church hall is where the bar and restaurant are because the congregation had to close its door twenty years ago. A foundation was set up to save the building because of its architectural importance in the city of Glasgow. Glasgow, Scotland, Britain are not the only places with empty churches. There are empty churches here in Chicago, congregations who have had to close their doors because of lack of attendance and support and life.

Our text for today in our reflection is from the first letter of Peter written to a Diaspora Christian community in Asia Minor. People who are marginalized. Who are, in the letter, described as “resident aliens” where they live. People who have nothing. They were probably slaves. They certainly didn’t worship in churches. They worshiped in homes if they could or out in the open where they broke bread together. And the writer of the first letter of Peter says this: “Like living stones let yourselves be built into a spiritual house.” In many ways this is a sermon not to be preached by a preacher in the pulpit, but it is a sermon to be lived out by each of us gathered in church this day.

It is a great morning at Fourth Church having all the children in, commissioning the Sunday School teachers. It’s always a bit crazy when we have all of the kids up in the chancel. As Joyce mentioned, this is also our annual volunteer fair, our opportunity to share with you opportunities that you have to give of your time and your expertise for the life of the church, and it’s amazing the array of groups that are represented—groups from within the church, groups from outside the church, all who are seeking to do work for the common good of our church and our community and our city. And it’s also, as I said, the day when we do our stewardship appeal, our annual appeal, for the congregation to support the church in its operating funds for the coming year by reflecting and praying and then making a pledge of the amount that you feel you’re able to commit to the work of the church. And so I will, of course, be asking you to think about all of these things this morning, but first I want to thank you.

I want to thank you for how you have continued to support me and my colleagues on the staff here at Fourth Church. How you have continued to support and uphold each other as we’ve been living into this transition time as the congregation searches for a new pastor. The Pastor Nominating Committee, of course, is working hard at that task. And I am grateful for how you have continued to come to worship, continued to support the church with your prayers and with your giving. We are in a relatively healthy position financially according to our budgets, which is good news in a transition period. Often churches find it difficult in transition periods to do that, but again, I’m very grateful to the way that the whole congregation has come together and kept this place strong during that time.

Now when it comes to reflecting on stewardship and giving, it’s really very apt that on this day we have our volunteer fair because it is good Christian tradition to reflect on giving not just in a narrow financial sense, but in reflecting on how we give fully of ourselves, of how we live into that call to be “living stones building the spiritual household of God.” And so do take seriously the call, the opportunity to give of your time to the church in this coming year. I encourage you to think about how you might be involved in tutoring a child or helping to welcome people to the church, to think of all the various ways there are of giving of our time.

Now this is a big year for our church as we look forward to 2014 when we will celebrate the 100th anniversary of being here on Michigan Avenue. The congregation, as you may know, is older than 100 years. The congregation actually was founded in 1871. I know that many of you will know this story, but I think it’s important to tell it and to reflect on this. The congregation of the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago was founded on October 8, 1871. They had the first service of worship in a newly refurbished church, which became Fourth Presbyterian Church on that morning. And that, of course, was the day of the Chicago fire, and so by that evening the congregation had lost its building.

But they kept worshipping. They kept meeting. They were like “living stones.” And I believe that’s deep in the DNA of this congregation—to recognize that we’re not just about a building, this building, as beautiful as it is. Even the Gratz Center, as beautiful and exciting as that is, that’s not what we are about. Buildings are just buildings as I know from working in Cottiers, the closed-down church. We love our buildings and rightly so; they give us the opportunity to live into and do the kinds of ministries that we seek to do and to be faithful in doing—here, in this place, with the Gratz Center giving us space, we believe, for the next hundred years on this site.

When it comes to thinking about stewardship and giving the stewardship of our time and talent and money, there is a little bit of a debate that happens here at Fourth Church. How best do we engage our congregation, our community, in reflecting on this topic? Are we better to use theological language and understanding of what we’re called into being? Or should we use the more secular approach that fundraising teaches us when we’re talking about money? Now, for me, as I’ve reflected on this, it seems it is a false dichotomy. Thinking about how we use our resources is something that lives not in either a theological world or a secular world, but rather a part of the whole being of who we are.

Some years ago we went to the congregation and said, “How best can we help you think about how you give and what you give and when you give?” And you, the congregation, came back to us and said, “Be honest with us. Tell us what the need is and then let us reflect on how we can engage and participate.”

The reality for us is that as a church, both Fourth Presbyterian Church and Chicago Lights combined, we have an annual budget north of $9 million, between $9 and $10 million, combined, aggregated. Unlike many churches, we are lucky that we have invested funds that are tended very carefully by our managers and our congregation, and the income from those funds comes in at around 18 percent of the total that we need to raise annually. Another 20 percent comes from fees that we charge—for example, to outside groups who use the space here and in the Gratz Center—and also from foundations giving to the Chicago Lights budget. What that means is that we depend on our members to give 60 percent of our annual operating budget. In dollar terms that is around $5 million in pledges and gifts for 2014. That number might seem daunting, but it’s only a little above what we asked the congregation to give last year and the congregation came through with that.

So there is an “ask” this morning, an ask that each of you pray, think about your commitment to this congregation, to what you can give to support not just the bricks and mortar, but the ways in which we are living stones in this place.

I was reading Kathleen Norris recently, a popular writer on spirituality and Christianity. She was reflecting on the meaning of the word community: “When I hear the word community,” she writes, “I often suspect that people have little sense of what they mean by it. It’s easy even for Christians to forget that to be a faithful follower of Jesus requires us to seek the common good.” And that is what I am asking of all of us this day and will write to the congregation and ask all of them—to be a part of what it means to be community in this place. Be a part of what it means to give to the common good here at Fourth Church so that we might continue to proclaim the mighty acts of God and be a light for this city, which knows so much hurt and brokenness and darkness.

So I am asking of you, give the gift of your time, give the gift of your expertise and your knowledge, and serve God in the giving of your money by pledging your gift for the annual appeal. Be a living stone in the life of Fourth Church. Be a part of the spiritual household of God, because once we were no people, but now we are God’s people. So let us pray in the words of the hymn:

God, bless your church with strength wherever we may be.
Uphold your servants as we work in common ministry.
Urge us from fledgling faith to venture and to soar
through open skies to sing the praise of Christ whom we adore.
Amen.

(Prayer text from the hymn “God, Bless Your Church with Strength!” by John A. Dalles)

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church