A Fourth Church Sermon by Calum I. MacLeod

November 5, 2000 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

The Art of the Possible

Calum I. MacLeod
Interim Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Jeremiah 26:1–8
Mark 12:28–34

“You are not far from the kingdom of God.”

Mark 12:34 (NRSV)

I think I shall go mad if the Student Christian Movement produces another book on Christianity and Communism, Christ or Chaos, Deliverance or Doom. Everything that can, need, or ever will be said has now been said, a hundred times over, about the superiority of Christianity in theory. We have enough theories to last a generation. The modern world knows quite well what our theory is, what they are interested in is whether we are prepared to show the vaguest signs of putting it into practice.

George MacLeod
Speaking the Truth in Love (1936)

“Remember, remember, the fifth of November, gunpowder, treason and plot.”

A little rhyme that will be said often today in my homeland in Scotland and in England. A rhyme that recalls a very important event in British history that happened on November the fifth, known as Guy Fawkes Night. Guy Fawkes was a Catholic conspirator against the Protestant king of the United Kingdom in 1605, King James the First of the United Kingdom, the Sixth of Scotland—he was a good Scotsman, King James. James oversaw a number of repressive acts against the Catholic minority in Britain, and a conspiracy emerged to overthrow the Crown and the government by blowing up the Houses of Parliament in London. At its center was this man Guy Fawkes, and November 5, 1605, was the day Fawkes arrived in the Houses of Parliament crypt underneath where the Lords sat. He was arrested because someone had given the game away. Guy Fawkes and his coconspirators were executed for treason. And that event is remembered in Britain by fireworks and bonfires and burning the effigy of this man, Guy Fawkes.

I was thinking on that event and this time of year; what a rich season this is for reflection. We are coming up to Thanksgiving, that important and joyful holiday, here in the United States. We’ve just had Halloween at the end of October, that fine pagan festival that all you Americans seem to enjoy so much. You do love getting dressed up and going trick-or-treating. For me, Halloween brought my annual visit to the opera, to go and see The Great Gatsby, my one visit of the year. It being my annual visit, I decided it would be good to put on my kilt and my black tie, so sure enough, I wore my kilt and my black tie and put my overcoat on. As I left the apartment, there were some kids dressed as ninjas or Pokemon characters. They were trick-or-treating and were waiting at the elevator. As I arrived at the elevator, this kid looked at me and he said, “You’re dressed as Dracula, aren’t you?” (This is a true story.) I said, “Dracula never wore a kilt.” And tried to explain to him that I wasn’t really dressed up for Halloween, I was just dressed up nicely to go out. But this kid wouldn’t believe me; he kept saying, “What are you dressed as?” So I finally gave in and told him I was dressed as Braveheart, which seemed to keep him happy, and indeed, I got a packet of Raisinettes from his mother, so I had a good Halloween trick-or-treating.

Halloween, of course, is celebrated because it’s the eve of All Saints’ Day, November 1, a day that is very important in the Catholic calendar, very important in Mexico and the Hispanic countries where they celebrate the Day of the Dead. It’s a day that has, in some sense, been recaptured by our own tradition, our own Protestant heritage, and today we recognize All Saints’ season, giving thanks for those who lived and died in the faith. We do that this morning through our hymns and our psalms and anthems, and this evening Duruflé’s Requiem will be sung during the Vespers service to give thanks for those who lived and died in the faith.

A rich season. But an added layer this year. At this time, we are in the middle of, and indeed coming to the climax of, election season. You will, I hope, be exercising your right to choose your leader, your president. I say “you” because I am unenfranchised here. I don’t have a vote. But I trust you will be there on Tuesday to put your mark down for your preferred candidate.

The pulpit, in some sense, is a difficult place to be at a time like this, the Sunday before Election Day. Preachers and politics have not often had an easy time in our tradition, and indeed in our scriptural tradition. We heard read this morning a text from Jeremiah, chapter 26. Jeremiah goes to the middle of the city to the Temple to speak to the people and to the authorities with the word that God had given him. There is an earlier telling of this scene in Jeremiah, chapter 7. There we read Jeremiah saying that you can’t come into the church, into the temple of the Lord, and claim your allegiance and your belief in God if in your daily life you are oppressing aliens; if you are not looking after the widows and the orphans—if you do not care for social justice and break the commandments. In Jeremiah 26:8 we hear what the outcome of that is for Jeremiah: “You shall die,” the people tell Jeremiah.

My Old Testament lecturer in Glasgow, in the class when we were looking at this text, had a few words for us who hoped to be preachers. He said, “Remember that you know a good sermon not when people come up afterwards, shake you warmly by the hand, and say ‘Thank you for the message.’ You know a good sermon when you can hear the sound of gallows being built outside the church.”

I had an experience just last week of some of that tension of preaching and politics. We hosted the Moderator of the General Assembly of our denomination last week. I know a number of you were here to hear Dr. Syngman Rhee preach from this pulpit. He’d just come back from the Middle East, and his sermon was one rooted in the biblical precepts of peace and justice. He spoke about that in the context of his recent visit to the Middle East. I was standing at the back of the church, and about halfway through the sermon a woman came up to me, and she said, “I came here to hear the word of God, not to hear politics from a pulpit,” and she left. I was so taken aback that I hadn’t gathered my thoughts in time to engage her in a conversation before she had left the church.

I realized how, for that woman, there would seem to be a dichotomy between her spirituality, her faith, and the life of the world that she lived in. A dichotomy that has never been the case in our Christian tradition, or in our history, and indeed this fifth of November the remembrance of Guy Fawkes and the conspirators is exactly that, a remembrance of men of faith who acted upon their convictions, their beliefs.

Our text from Mark, from our Gospel this morning, takes us deep into that territory. We call it the Great Commandment: a scribe, a teacher of the law, an expert, hears a discussion happening and asks Jesus a question. Now when this happens in Mark’s Gospel, it is normally because the Pharisees or the scribes or the teachers of the law are trying to trap Jesus. That is not the case this time. The text is clear that the scribe is being inquisitive. He’s really interested to hear what Jesus’ take on this is. “Which commandment is first of all,” the scribe asks. That question of “first of all” I think is not necessarily asking which is the highest ranked. Rather, it’s a more philosophical question: which of the commandments undergirds the others that are in the Torah, the law of God. Which is the commandment that runs beneath them all?

Now Jesus, being a good Jew, quotes Scripture. To be precise, he quotes Deuteronomy 6:4–5. And he answers the scribe with the foundational prayer of Judaism. Which is the first commandment? “Hear O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength,” the prayer called the Shema, from the Hebrew word “to hear,” “Hear, O Israel.”

But Jesus doesn’t stop there. “The second is this,” he says, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Now this wasn’t something that just came to Jesus at that time either; Jesus didn’t make it up. Again, he’s quoting Scripture, again he’s reciting from the Torah, from the law of the Hebrew scriptures, from Leviticus 19:18, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” “There is no other commandment greater than these,” says Jesus.

Douglas Hare, in his commentary on Mark, writes about how these commands take us to the heart of what the Gospel is. And he goes on, “In this way, Jesus teaches that it is not enough to love God; those who love God are obligated to love their fellow humans also.” If in some sense the commandment about the love of God takes us into a place of metaphysics, of abstracts, of theology, then the second commandment, the commandment to love our neighbor, is the practice of that. Hare, in this commentary, is standing firmly in the tradition of the New Testament scriptures. 1 John “God is love and those who dwell in love dwell in God and God dwells in them,” and “wherever we see love we see God.”

The scribe replies to Jesus in an affirming manner. He says, “You’re right these commands are more important than the sacrifices of burnt offerings,” living out the Great Commandment is more important than our worship.

“You’re not far from the kingdom of God,” Jesus tells him.

“You’re not far.” It’s a kind of riddle. What does this mean? Does it mean that the scribe is not far from the kingdom but not close enough—and will he reach it? We do not know. Or is it in some kind of a double meaning in which our belief that Jesus Christ is the incarnation of the kingdom of God, the reign of God’s love in our world, in our lives; and that indeed the man, the scribe, is standing physically not far from the actual kingdom? Perhaps it’s both. Or perhaps a third meaning. Let me suggest that Jesus is saying to the scribe, “You understand in theory, now live it.” Remember the rich man, who earlier in Mark’s Gospel comes to Jesus and asked, “What must I do to inherit eternal life,” and Jesus says, “Follow the commandments.” “I do that,” says the rich man. “In that case give up all your possessions and come and follow me,” says Jesus. And the rich man can’t do it. He can do the theory, he understands the commandments, but he doesn’t live it out.

It’s not just our scriptural witness that tells us of this. Is not our whole tradition of faith that tradition of understanding the theory but holding back from putting it into practice in our lives? Thomas Hardy, the English novelist and poet, wrote a poem some years after the First World War, around Christmastime. It is a favorite of mine, called “Christmas 1924.”

Peace upon Earth was said, we sing it,
and pay a million priests to bring it.
After two thousand years of mass,
We’ve got as far as poison gas.

Paul Tillich, a German theologian of the middle of the twentieth century, taught for some time here in Chicago. His theology came out very strongly in his sermons. He has a sermon on John 10:21 entitled, “Doing the Truth.” In it, Tillich says, “Christianity is rooted in the concept of truth in which no cleavage between theory and practice is allowed . . . because truth means, that truth which is done.”

Truth is not an abstract or philosophical concept; it’s real in our lives. And we see that, perhaps nowhere more truly in recent Christian history than in the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer, the convinced pacifist, who took it upon himself to become part of a conspiracy against Adolf Hitler in Germany. Bonhoeffer wrote about that dilemma and about the need for standing firm in the faith. In a letter that he sent from his cell in Tegel, where he was imprisoned by the Nazi regime: “Claiming to stand firm in the faith is a sham, unless accompanied by concrete action to overcome systematic injustice.” Bonhoeffer was executed by the Nazis for following through with that statement. In his classic The Cost of Discipleship, he writes about how following Christ, discipleship of Christ, is costly in our lives. Those who follow Christ “have an irresistible love for the lowly, for the sick, the suffering, for those who are demeaned and abused, for those who suffer injustice and are rejected,” and they are willing to take their place.

I came across an affirmation of this truth this week, in a story I read from a Middle East report on what’s happening there. In the center of this story is a person who is not a follower of Christ, but one who knows the cost of the love of neighbor. The news report printed a letter from the parents of an Israeli soldier:

Our son, Noam Kuzar, a conscript in the Israeli Defense Force, was sentenced to twenty-eight days in military prison for refusing to participate in current Israeli Defense Force operations to oppress the protest activity of Palestinians. When his unit was informed of a change in current plans, so as to reinforce the Defense Force troops engaged in putting down the Palestinian revolt, Noam told his commanding officers that he could not, in good conscience, participate in such actions. He simply refused to get on the bus.

He simply refused to get on the bus.

The great German statesman of the ninenteenth century, Otto von Bismarck, coined a now well-known phrase: “Politics,” said Bismarck, “is the art of the possible.” I want to offer you a rephrasing of that this morning during this election time, this political time, and suggest that we might say that “faith is the art of the possible.”

“You are not far from the kingdom of God,” said Jesus to the scribe. “It is possible for you to truly enter the kingdom.” Is not that our faith stance? That it is possible that God emptied God’s self of all power and glory and came to earth in human form. To say it is possible that God’s own self died on a cross and then through that suffering and death defeated death and evil and rose again to bring new life. Is not our faith to stand and say it is possible that love is the most powerful force in our lives and our world? That peace and justice can be real, not just vague ideals. To say it is possible for us to reduce the gap between rich and poor in our nation, in our world. That it is possible to offer debt relief to the poorest countries.

Our faith is to stand and say with Desmond Tutu that it is possible that goodness is stronger than evil, that love is stronger than fear, that light is stronger than darkness.

In a recently published book called Renewing the Vision, some modern-day Presbyterians are writing about what it is to be a follower of Christ in the Reformed tradition in the twenty-first century. The man who normally stands in this pulpit, our pastor John Buchanan, has an essay in the book, and in it he says this: “Learning to be a faithful follower of Jesus means living more deeply in the world.”

And so when Tuesday comes around, it’s my hope that you will exercise your democratic right, that you will take that opportunity to be more deeply involved in the world. And it is my prayer that as you enter that polling booth and make your decision and cast your vote, that the command of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ will be present for you. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul, with all your mind, and all your strength. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Amen.