A Fourth Church Sermon by Joanna M. Adams

April 21, 2002 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

A Message for Our Time

Joanna M. Adams
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 23
John 10:1–10
Acts 2:42–47

“They broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.”

Acts 2:46–47 (NRSV)

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen. (Psalm 19:14)

Two weeks ago, I received a very thoughtful and loving letter from a longtime member of Fourth Presbyterian Church. The first paragraph welcomed me warmly to Chicago. The second paragraph prescribed watching the sun rise over Lake Michigan as a perfect cure for homesickness, should such a thing occur on a cold April day. (For my friends from out of town: A day like today is considered to be spring in Chicago.) It was the last paragraph of the letter that truly caught my eye, because it contained as moving an expression of hope as any new preacher could possibly receive. It read, “May you lead this world toward peace. In view of the terrible conflicts we see all around us, I wonder if we can ever be wise enough to find the common ground to live together as we must.” I cannot imagine a more urgent challenge than that for Christian leadership today.

Here is an irony of the first order: at a time when religion and its leaders ought to be showing the world the way to common ground, ought to be about building communities that are hospitable to life, ought to be about enhancing civility and tolerance—exactly the opposite is happening in many quarters of the world. We read every day in the newspaper about the destruction that religion and self-righteousness can do. In the Middle East, fundamentalist clerics call for holy war, and sacred texts are used to justify all manner of violence and injustice against those deemed to be the enemy, the outsider, the interloper, the other. In India, followers of one faith last week set fire to a train carrying passengers of another faith. Sixty people were killed, more than a dozen of them children, burned to death in the name of religious self-righteousness. And in this country, thousands of lives were lost last fall as religious zealots on suicide missions crashed their airplanes full of people into buildings full of people. Not long after September 11, someone scribbled these chilling words on the wall of a building in Washington, D.C., “Dear God, please save us from the people who believe in you.” (1)

Surely similar sorts of prayers have been prayed by the children who have been sexually abused by parish priests and who then, along with their families, have had to struggle against the systematic cover-up of that abuse. Violence comes in many sinister forms.

In our own Presbyterian denomination, we are in a time of fractiousness and conflict. Judicial charges by the dozen are being filed in church courts accusing ministers and sessions of violating constitutional standards regarding ordination. Around the country, Presbyterians are dividing up over matters of theology and arguing with one another as to whose Christology is more faithful, whose interpretation of the Bible is better. We are shooting volleys at one another from behind bunkers when we should be finding common ground.

How can religion help, not hurt the human family? Isaiah Berlin was one of the great moral visionaries of the twentieth century. In 1981, he scribbled a quick note to a friend that recently has been published. The note reads, “Few things have done more harm than the belief on the part of individuals or groups that he or she or they are in sole possession of the truth, especially about how to live and what to be and do, and those who differ from them are not merely mistaken, but are wicked or mad. It is a terrible arrogance to believe that you alone are right. You alone have the magical eye that sees the truth. That no one else can possibly be right if he disagrees with you.” (2)

I think of the longing of the writer of the letter to me. Can’t the church help us find common ground? Can’t religion enable people to defeat those forces that bring out the worst in human nature, rather than encourage those sinister forces?

I am fascinated by the tradition here in Chicago of inviting the entire community to read the same book at the same time. As many of you know, this spring’s book is Night, the memoirs of Elie Wiesel, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. He spent a large portion of his childhood as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps, first Auschwitz, then Buchenwald. In his memoirs, he recounts a conversation he had with the man who was the leader of the cell block. The conversation took place as Wiesel’s father was close to death from hunger and dehydration.

“This is your father, isn’t it?” asked the head of the block

“Yes.”
“He’s very ill.”
“The doctor won’t do anything for him.”
“The doctor can’t do anything for him, now. And neither can you.”
He put his great hairy hand on my shoulder and added:
“Listen to me, boy. Don’t you ever forget that you’re in a concentration camp. Here, every man has to fight for himself and not think of anyone else. Even of his father. Here there are no fathers, no brothers, no friends. Everyone lives and dies for himself alone.” (3)

I can think of no words that capture the spirit that would destroy the human community more quickly than those words: “Everyone lives and dies for himself alone.” Surely God has given us the capacity to move to a different way of being that respects the life and dignity of others, that cares about their welfare as much as our own. This is what keeps us human and what saves the world from destruction.

I have for many years been inspired by a story from the Hasidic tradition of the rabbi who was asked one day by a student, “How can one tell when the new day has come?”

The rabbi reversed the question and asked his student, “You tell me how you can know.”

The student guessed, “Is it when the rooster crows to signal a new dawn?”

“No,” the rabbi answered.

“Is it then perhaps when one can discern the silhouette of a tree against the sky?”

“No,” he was told. “The surest way to know when the night is over and when a new day has come is when you can look into the face of a stranger, the one who is so different from you, and recognize him as your brother. See her as your sister. Until that day comes, it will always be night.”

In these terrible times, I can think of no more important mission for Fourth Presbyterian Church than to mobilize ordinary people like you and me to take a stand against the darkness, to create zones of light and spaces for conversation where it is safe for people who are genuinely, even profoundly, different from one another in background and outlook to tell the truth about who they really are. This is the spiritual leadership for which the world longs today. And who better to offer it than this church that sits at the crossroads of one of the most richly diverse cities in the world?

The book of Acts offers a picture of the church in its infancy: worshiping together, teaching, learning, praying, eating peacefully at table, and manifesting a spirit of goodwill that was apparent to everyone. Remember, the location of this community was Jerusalem, and the early church was made up of devout Jews who had come from literally “every nation under heaven” (Acts 2:5). The Jerusalem church sat at the crossroads of cultures and civilizations. One has to wonder if the great miracle of Pentecost was less the tongues of fire and the rush of mighty wind and more the creation of unity and understanding among people who were different from one another. (4) That is, to my mind, the clearest mark of the Christian community. Not arrogance or self-righteousness or exclusion in the name of Christ, but generosity, hospitality, and compassion in the name of Christ. “For he is our peace,” Paul wrote. In his flesh, he “has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us” (Ephesians 2:14).

And it was Christ himself in his signature sermon who said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they are the ones who shall be called the children of God” (Matthew 5:9).

I understand that we are to have a distinguished visitor at Fourth Presbyterian Church on May 4. U.S. Representative Carolyn McCarthy, who was elected to Congress following the shooting death of her husband and the severe injury of her son on the Long Island Railroad, will be here leading an interfaith initiative against gun violence. This is exactly the kind of leadership that is needed today as we do what we can, as well as we can, as often as we can, to witness to the one who is our peace and who commissioned his disciples to help maintain a world that is hospitable to life.

Here is a question that has been on my mind these first weeks here. How can we know as a congregation and as pastors whether we are on the right path in our mission and priorities? What standard should be used to distinguish between Christian leadership that is faithful to God and leadership that fails God? (5) Today’s lesson from John’s Gospel has genuinely helped me think these things through.

“I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved” (John 10:9).

Though you might be accustomed to hearing words like that as exclusivist, I have tried to hear them this week with a different set of ears.

“I am the gate for the sheep. Whoever enters through me will be saved.”

Who is he, this one who is the gate? What did he do? How did he live? What is his way? His way is the way of love; his way is the way of truth. He ate with outcasts and forgave sinners and advised all who would hear to turn the other cheek and to love their enemies. He was not naïve about evil or the appeal of false prophets, but he knew there was a better, more excellent way. He embodied it; he died for it.

“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10).

Christian leadership, if it is to measure up to the gate of Christ, will be about redemption. It will be about showing the world the way to peace and to safety. It will be about joining God in God’s mission in the world. It will lead people out of the hell of living for one’s self alone. It will be about freedom. (6) The sheep are able to “come in and go out” at will. Freedom from fear. Freedom to grow and to change. Redemption is not about harnesses and hair shirts; it is about a new lease on life. It is about trusting that because we all live in the fold of God’s great love, whatever happens, in the most important sense, we will always be safe, because we will always belong to God.

“Whoever comes my way will be saved and will come in and go out and find pasture.” This is what the Christian community should stand for: the abundant life Christ offers. We do not stand for hard-edged, gate-slamming dogmatism. We stand for the shepherd’s love for all the sheep. This is the message we have to offer to the city and to the world, to the children and young people who are a part of this parish. We put our hands on their shoulders and say to them not, “You must live for yourself alone,” but rather, “We find our lives by losing ourselves in our concern for our neighbor, for our brother, for our sister.”

Several years ago, on a trip to Chicago, I paid a visit to the Art Institute of Chicago, where I became quite taken with Seurat’s famous painting of strollers on the grassy shore beside peaceful water. L’après Midi sur la Grand Jatte, it is called. I loved the painting. I purchased a print of it, took it home, framed it, and hung it on the wall of the study. Over time, I came to realize why I loved it. The painting was not created by the artist picking up a brush and stroking the canvas. What Seurat did to create the painting was to cover the canvas with “thousands of dots of paint in different colors and sizes.” (7) Yet each is necessary for the whole magnificent, richly textured painting that makes you glad to be alive and glad to be a member of something as inherently splendid as the human family.

In my lifetime, I do not know anyone who has embodied Christian leadership in a more profound and prophetic way than Martin Luther King Jr., native son of Atlanta, Georgia, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Not long before he was assassinated, he began a sermon by telling a story about a famous novelist who had died and left a series of plots for novels in his desk drawer. One plot was summed up with this single sentence: “A widely separated family inherits a house in which they all have to live together.”

“This is the challenge for our time,” Dr. King said, “We must all live together, even though we are unduly separated in ideas, cultures, and interests, because we can never again live apart. We must learn, somehow, to live together in peace.” (8)

That is the message for our time. It is the message that I believe has been given by God to Fourth Presbyterian Church. Shall we show this city and the world the way to life, indeed, to the abundant life that is God’s will for us all?

Endnotes
1. As noted by Maureen Dowd in a column in the New York Times.

2. New York Review of Books, 18 October 2001, quoted in Context, 15 January 2001.

3. Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Bantam Books, 1960), 104-105.

4. William H. Williams, Acts (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1988), 40.

5. Thomas G. Long, “Shepherds, Strangers, and Thieves,” Pulpit Resource 27, no. 2 (1999): 20.

6. Ibid.

7. K. C. Ptomey Jr., “A Homily on 1 Corinthians 1:10-18,” Westminster Presbyterian Church, 27 January 2000.

8. As told by Diana L. Eck in Encountering God (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 228.