A Fourth Church Sermon by Deborah F. Mullen

June 20, 2004 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

The Power of Place

Deborah F. Mullen
Associate Professor and Dean of Master Programs,
McCormick Theological Seminary
Director, Center for African American Ministries and Black Church Studies

Psalm 42
1 Kings 19:1–4, 8–15a
Galatians 3:23–29

Never put a period where God has put a comma.
Gracie Allen

Father’s Day is one of those special occasions that always falls on a Sunday, like Mother’s Day, which means churches have to figure out what to do with it. Unlike Mother’s Day, however, Father’s Day seems to fly just under the radar in most places. Customs vary widely. Some congregations plan for the men of the church to play special and more prominent roles in the service. Sometimes, if one exists, the men’s chorus sings especially fatherly hymns. Some congregations only make mention of it in the bulletin. Others have a long-standing tradition of putting on special events, like a father-daughter pancake breakfast or a father-son camping or fishing trip. Preachers are all over the map on this, too. Some preachers devote the morning message to the biblical images of fatherhood that mirror how they see God as a loving parent who is always ready to welcome the prodigal son or daughter home. Clearly, it is a message worth hearing almost any Sunday, any Sunday but this one in this place.

But don’t despair. Rather than totally disappoint those of you who came thinking you were going to hear some good news in the spirit of Father’s Day, my brief message before the message comes from everybody’s favorite father, The Coz. R..I..G..H..T… So for the next few minutes, think of Bill Cosby as your guest preacher.

This short meditation is taken from “In from the Cold,” found in Cosby’s number 1 best seller entitled Fatherhood (see pp. 157-158).

. . .

And now that Rev. Daddy Dr. Bill has warmed you up, I’m ready to deliver the message I came to share with you this morning. It’s also about belonging, loving, and what it means to be “stuck with each other” in Christ Jesus.

“For in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. . . . There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

In our time remaining, would you think with me on the theme “the power of place”? What does it mean to be in Christ Jesus all children of God in faith? Let us pray:

Dear God, place your spirit within our hearts that we might experience your word afresh and as good news for this new day. Bless us to praise and glorify you as we strain to hear your voice beyond our thoughts and turn toward your truth. Show us the way you would have us to live and serve you, not only in faith, but in hope for the freedom that is ours because of the high price paid by your beloved Son Jesus Christ. For it is in his matchless name we pray. Amen.

In Christmastimes past, he would have put his carpenter’s pay into wine and cognac, heroin and cocaine. And if he had already spent the money, as he so often had, then he would have charmed some sucker into a loan or a free taste.

Even now, clean and sober for several years, he respects the temptations of what he calls “the threefold”—Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve. And he worries not only about himself. Having been saved, Robert came to understand the reason why: so that he could help rescue others. They call themselves the Wounded Healers, and they meet every Saturday
at Saint Paul. (1)

Robert Sharper is a member of the “Church Unusual,” a slogan coined by the Reverend Johnny Ray Youngblood, pastor of Saint Paul Community Baptist Church in Brooklyn, New York. Youngblood and Saint Paul are the subjects of one of the finest books about being the church that I have ever read. And I commend it to you. Samuel G. Freedman’s book Upon This Rock beautifully records a year in the life of a pastor and his people. Freedman’s writing is graceful and revealing in a way that invites the reader to participate vicariously in the miraculous recovery of community through the faithful efforts of a church with a vision and a dynamic leader whose mission is nothing less than victory for Jesus’ sake. Once called by a visiting mayor “the beginning and end of our civilization,” the neighborhood surrounding Saint Paul, the community that has grown up around it, and the congregation have much success to commend to three things: faith, hope, and love.

To these three, I will add three more: location, location, location—words all too familiar to those of us gathered here in this magnificent sanctuary situated on what is now arguably one of the most expensive parcels of commercial real estate in the country, if not among the most pricey in the world. By comparison, imagine Cabrini-Green and its environs one mile west of where you are now seated, imagine it some forty years ago when Fourth Presbyterian Church seeded its first outreach programs in that community under the dynamic leadership of its pastor Elam Davies. In its day it was a bold mission venture, to be sure, into a place which in many ways epitomized the worst-case scenario in a history of race and class conflict supported by public policy that upheld segregation of African Americans into public housing in the city of Chicago.

James K. Wellman’s book The Gold Coast Church and the Ghetto provides a fascinating analysis of this period in the life of Fourth Church. Jim and I were doctoral students together at the Divinity School at the University of Chicago while he was working at the church and completing the research and dissertation that became the book. Boy, was I jealous! He got done way before I did!

Wellman is candid in his critique of the church’s mission to Cabrini-Green. Of course he is right in pointing out that while Elam Davies successfully challenged Fourth Presbyterian Church, then an upper-middle-class congregation, to extend its boundaries into the places where lower socioeconomic class families of African American and Hispanic youth lived on the Near North Side, some of whom would eventually become church members, the culture of social inequity across class and race would continue to prevail. Economic opportunity zones in and around the Loop areas of downtown needed space to grow—space, according to Wellman, that was freed up by segregating poor folks outside of the places where upper-class markets were being targeted for expansion.

Although Fourth Presbyterian Church would offer no challenge to segregated public housing at the time, ironically, the church’s prophetic mission to Cabrini-Green that began in the early 1960s would survive until this present day as a ministry of transformation and community partnership that has changed both the life of this church and the lives of many on the Near North Side.

The power of place is faith in that which is unseen and yet to come in Christ Jesus!

Now imagine Saint Paul Community Baptist Church planted in the middle of what also was a place that had been all but abandoned, except by the debilitating forces of poverty, and neglected by city, state, and private economic development initiatives; where people were regarded as social refuse, treated as disposable, and crime was so rampant, reports Freedman, that precinct police wore T-shirts that announced “The Killing Fields.” (2) And imagine those who lived as though they were imprisoned by their surroundings, by the seemingly endless cycle of devastation as a result of record numbers of murders, rapes, robberies, and assaults committed where they lived, and who were drug addicts, pimps, prostitutes, and as kids were caught up in youth gangs. Imagine them sitting alongside of sister and brother church members who once feared and despised them because of what their lives had become and who now embraced them because of who they were becoming in the new lives in Christ Jesus!

The power of place is hope in that which is promised and yet to be fully realized in Christ Jesus!

In Christ Jesus, at least at Saint Paul Community Church, all had become children of God through faith and had been set free from whatever imprisoned them so that they might receive what God had promised them through faith in Jesus Christ. In Christ Jesus, at least at Saint Paul Community Church, there are no distinctions of class, race, and gender that superceded whose they were as a child of God through faith in Christ Jesus. This is the scripture lesson and the gospel truth found in the third chapter of Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Hear it again: Paul declares that there is freedom, where? In the power of place. That place is in Christ Jesus and through him all are children of God.

The power of place is in love that is accepting, welcoming, and freely given in Christ Jesus!

Perhaps more than any of Paul’s letters, other than Romans, his letter to the Galatians stands out as a manifesto of freedom for the church of Jesus Christ to exercise the power of place in new and liberating ways in the world. New Testament scholar Cain Hope Felder, author of Troubling Biblical Waters, says that what we find in Galatians 3:28—“There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus”—represents a “spiritual ideal within the church,” that Paul is urging believers and the church to make it real in the world. (3)

At the heart of our faith as believers is the conviction that in Christ Jesus we possess the power of place. That place is freedom, a freedom that the world can’t give or take away. In Christ Jesus, God with us, we are stuck with each other like the family Bill Cosby described, and we are given the freedom in spirit and in truth to dismantle any humanly created barriers in church and society that marginalize, exclude, or dehumanize other children of God in ways that prohibit them from receiving the full benefits of belonging and becoming all of who God intends them to be.

Paul’s letter to the Galatians was written for a community that was being traumatized by teachers who were trying to pass off bad news as good news, which for Paul was nothing short of perverting the gospel. These teachers were trying to divide the new believers into separate and unequal categories of Christians. Paul’s own experience likely made him especially passionate in the situation. Before his own conversion and coming to faith in Christ Jesus, Paul likely would have followed those whom he now sought to discredit. But in Christ he was now a new creation. He was no longer free to persecute believers in Christ in order to destroy the liberation movement Christ Jesus had begun. Christ’s death and resurrection had flipped the script of ancient law that required strict separations among classes of people deemed to be locked into life stations that restricted their freedoms as Gentiles, slaves, and females.

The power of place is the power in Christ to make all things new!

Little has changed or so it seems. Divisions among the churches and between Christians over race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual identity and orientation, and theological disagreements of every kind are no less threatening today than were the real and near disasters of Paul’s day. And yet we have the same opportunity that Paul and his contemporaries had to use our lives in Christ Jesus to serve the mission and ministry of inclusion and equality Jesus Christ began while on this earth.

The power of place is to continue Christ’s ministry of sharing his radically inclusive kin-dom as we work for justice and freedom for all God’s children!

We can choose this day how we will live in Christ as God’s children through faith and how we will serve God’s people as bearers of news that is truly good for all of God’s children. Not only in faith or in some spiritual ideal of the church, but in the reality of the world where hope for the freedom that is ours in Christ is to be shared with others because in Christ Jesus the high price for that freedom for all of God’s children has already been paid in full!

Thanks be to God!

Amen.

Notes
1. Samuel G. Freedman, Upon This Rock (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), p. 7.
2. Freedman, p. 3.
3. Cain Hope Felder, Troubling Biblical Waters (New York: Orbis, 1994), p. 114.