A Fourth Church Sermon by John Buchanan

October 30, 2005 | Reformation Sunday

You’re Not Still Protesting, Are You?

John Buchanan
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 96
1 Corinthians 1:2–9, 4:1–2

“Think of us in this way,
as servants of Christ and
stewards of God’s mysteries.”

1 Corinthians 4:1 (NRSV)

Rather than have imperial ambitions, it seems best to draw on motifs of Protestantism,
elements of community, scripture, tradition, memory, affection, and hope.
Mainline Protestants can address the basic public issues:
saving the environment; sustaining development;
addressing the growing gap between the over-fed and the ill-fed,
the rich and the poor; assuring rights; finding better ways than warfare for resolving conflict.
Their God is the Lord of history, the God not held captive in the sanctuaries,
but who in mysterious ways leads his people to address the world that unfolds before them,
a world in their ancestors helped to shape.

Martin E. Marty
The Protestant Voice in American Pluralism

Startle us, O God, with your truth. We come to this place this morning
eager for a word of hope and compassion and love.
So silence in us now every voice but your own,
and speak your word to us in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

I visited the Pentagon earlier this month. I’m a member of a group of Presbyterian ministers that meets twice a year in one of our churches. The host pastor and congregation plans an interesting program for us, which focuses on the life and priorities of that church. This fall we were the guests of a suburban Washington congregation in Saverna Park, Maryland, many of whose members work at the Pentagon or in one of the intelligence agencies. It was a fascinating program, and our visit to the Pentagon made me proud and grateful once again for our nation, for the dedication and devotion of the members of our armed forces, and for the many men and women who do the critical work of military and political intelligence.

One dimension of our Pentagon visit gave me pause. Our guides—one Army, the other Navy, wonderful young people—showed us around the massive building, a virtual city of 25,000 people. At the end of the tour we, came to the September 11, 2001 Memorial. It’s at the place in the building where the plane hit on 9/11, killing 180 people and all the passengers. There is a beautiful little nonsectarian chapel for prayer and meditation; a list, inscribed in marble, of those who died; a book visitors are invited to sign. One of the Saverna Park church members who has spent his entire career in intelligence and I had been talking on the bus, and he knew how interested I was. So he took me to the window and showed me the glide path where the plane had come in, the Sheraton hotel where the plane sheared off television antennas. He explained how the inexperienced pilot had pulled full throttle on the approach to maximize the impact and how that actually caused the plane to dip and hit the ground before it hit the Pentagon, significantly lowering the damage and the loss of life. He showed me the spot where Secretary Rumsfeld was pulling victims out of the rubble. It was mesmerizing and deeply moving. And then, on that window sill, I noticed a literature rack. It contained religious pamphlets produced by the American Tract Society, with titles like “Where Will You Spend Eternity?” and “Jesus Christ Is the Only Way.” I wondered about that—about that very specifically evangelical Christian message in a shrine to honor Americans of all faiths, and some of no faith, who died that day.

At the lunch that followed, the speaker was the civilian head of the Army Corps of Engineers. His first words stunned me: “Welcome to the Pentagon in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” And I began to wonder where I was, what country is this? After all, Americans are dying in a war to establish a form of government in the Middle East that does not use the power of the state to enforce a particular religion. I believe in Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior with everything in me. But the Presbyterian in me, the Protestant in me, becomes very nervous when public officials talk like that, when religion and political power get too cozy.

My lunch partner was the senior military chaplain for the Pentagon, a good man, an American Baptist who is a subscriber and regular reader of the Christian Century, so an immediate friend. I asked him about the religious material in the September 11 Memorial. “It’s an important issue,” he said. “We talk about it all the time. It’s a matter of freedom. This is public property, and people are free to practice their religion here. So they do.” He told me there are something like 350 independent Bible study groups that meet in the Pentagon, before work or at lunchtime, conducted by an evangelical organization related to Campus Crusade for Christ. I asked if other groups would have access to the windowsills of the Pentagon to promote their religion, and he said “Yes, of course. But the simple fact is that these are the people who are doing it.” And then being a good Baptist, he couldn’t resist: “When’s the last time you Presbyterians thought about doing something like that?”

It is Reformation Sunday, the occasion when we remember Martin Luther who, on October 31, 1517, the Eve of All Saints’ Day, nailed 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. Luther was an Augustinian monk, an ordained priest, and a professor of theology, blessed with a brilliant intellect and restless spirit. His personal search for truth, his longing for a sense of peace and salvation, drove him deeper and deeper into Christian theology and practice. Luther was a “wrestler with God,” Martin Marty calls him in his fine new biography of the reformer. He became almost fanatical in his practices: fasting, praying, going on pilgrimages, even flagellating himself. Nothing worked-—until, in his study of scripture, he discovered the promise that God’s gift of salvation is given, not earned; that the essence of religion is not all this frantic activity designed to produce a sense of salvation, wholeness, peace. Authentic religion, rather, is the grateful response of the human heart to the grace of God. His 95 Theses were his scholarly attempt to put his ideas into the public arena for discussion and debate. The result was the Protestant Reformation. Luther was excommunicated and found himself leading a huge and complicated religious, but also social and political, movement, the Protestant Reformation.

Protestantism began as a theological protest, but from the very beginning it was also about political power. The medieval Roman church was a very real power. The thirteenth- and fourteenth-century papacy, historians tell us, was among the most powerful institutions human beings have ever invented. And part of the success of the Protestant Reformation, those historians remind us, was that German princes were tired of paying taxes to Rome and wanted political and economic independence. Their support was absolutely essential for Luther to survive and thrive.

Reformation Sunday used to be an occasion for Protestant preachers to mount their pulpits to bash Catholicism. Remnants of that old tradition live on in Belfast, for instance, when members of the Protestant Orange Orders put on orange sashes and bowler hats and insist on marching through Catholic neighborhoods belligerently pounding drums. We have come a long way, thanks be to God, from the day when Protestants regarded Catholics as barely Christian and Catholics returned the compliment, when Protestant boys were warned against dating Catholic girls and Catholic children were instructed to cross the street rather than risk contamination by walking in front of a Protestant church. We have come a long way, and although Reformation Sunday does not show up on the Catholic calendar, a fair number of Catholic congregations are singing Luther’s great hymn A Mighty Fortress Is our God these days. And in high level conversations, Catholic and Protestant theologians agree now on almost all the important points of Christian doctrine.

Not long after the Lutheran movement in Germany, a slightly different form of Protestantism emerged in Geneva, Switzerland. Its leader was a French humanist intellectual, John Calvin, who had been attracted by Luther’s thought, cast his lot with the Reformation, was exiled from France, and landed in Geneva, where he developed a form of Protestantism that had embedded within it a very radical political notion. Calvin invented a form of church government strikingly different from the hierarchical model of medieval monarchies and the papacy. Calvin’s idea was that political authority begins with the people, who have a God-given right to decide who gets to exercise power in the church, but also in the political arena. It’s called democracy, and in the sixteenth century, it was a revolutionary concept. That people had the right to elect their ministers, that citizens had the right to elect their representatives to govern, was unthinkable, radical, heretical.

Adam Nicholson tells the story of the creation of the King James Version of the Bible in 1604 in his fine book God’s Secretaries. When Elizabeth died, James VI of Scotland became James I of Great Britain and among other things, to unify his kingdom, which had broken from Rome, commissioned a new translation of the Bible. The Church of England at the time was Anglican, but many of James’s subjects were entranced with democratic Presbyterianism. They represented two opposing worldviews: one hierarchical, the other democratic. The king, obviously, distrusted and feared Presbyterianism. “Presbyterianism,” Nicholson says, “represented everything the king loathed and despised. . . . Presbyterianism was a revolution waiting to happen” (p. 57).

And that is exactly what happened, briefly in Britain and decisively in the colonies in 1776, 170 years later.

Many of the earliest settlers in the New World were Calvinist Presbyterians, and they brought with them not only their theology of grace, but their suspicion of hierarchical political power. They came here to be free, and many, not all, but many became enthusiastic supporters of the colonial cause—so much so that William Pitt, in the British Parliament, referred to the war raging in the colonies as “that Presbyterian revolt.”

Well, we’re not still protesting, are we? And if we are, what in the world about?

Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall writes, “Protestantism, historically and classically understood, represents a polemic against all pretensions of finality of doctrine. . . . Our protest,” he says “is a protest against power masquerading as ultimate.”

Hall reminds us that the first creed was the simple statement “Jesus Christ is Lord” and that it was a political protest at the same time. It meant “Caesar is not Lord.” That is how the empire heard it. That is why Christians were called traitors and thrown to the lions—because at the very heart of their faith was a declaration that all earthly authority, ecclesiastical as well as political, is penultimate. God alone is God. The human spirit, the human conscience, is bound ultimately to no authority other than God.

That is a threat to every political power that regards itself as ultimate, every tyrant from the Emperor Nero to Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin.

And so we protest still, we Presbyterians do, when religion and political power coincide. We protest because history has taught us that when that happens, human freedom begins to fade, that when religion allows itself to be co-opted by the state, when religion allows itself to be manipulated for anyone’s political agenda, both religion and politics are compromised. We protest still when a politician declares in the name of God, as the President of Iran did last week, that “Israel should be wiped off the map and that anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation’s fury.” That’s political power co-opting religion for its own agenda and making the world a more dangerous place. And we protest when a White House presidential advisor calls an evangelical televangelist to vet a Supreme Court nominee.

If there is one clear lesson history teaches, it is that religious fervor combined with political power is the surest formula for tragedy and that the most precious freedom of all is in a system of government that does not allow that to happen, by respecting and carefully guarding the right of all people to practice their faith—or nonfaith—without the support, interference, or even comment of the state.

The Reformation, Hall said, is “a polemic against pretensions of finality,” politically, ecclesiastically, and theologically. There is a lot of theological finality in the air these days. “I’m right; you’re wrong.” “I’m saved and you’re not.” “Our way—my way—is the only way.” Reformed Christians, Cynthia Campbell is fond of saying, understand that nobody gets it right all the time, not even the church. The Reformed way of being Christian subjects everything to question and critique—institutions, creeds, statements of faith, the church itself—because only God is God. Everything human is subject to, indeed requires, constant reformation.

A mature Protestantism understands that no church, no theological tradition, is perfect; that our ongoing vocation of protest is perhaps no longer against Rome but is a lived principle applied to ourselves and our own institutions and certainties.

Our branch of Protestantism is the argumentative branch. Perhaps it is because we value so highly the individual conscience, the freedom of the individual, that we Presbyterians are better at fighting one another than anyone else in the Christian family, Protestant or Catholic. In fact, the way Presbyterians resolve their conflicts is to quit and start a new church. That is the unpleasant part of this business. But I do believe that in God’s economy, God’s Presbyterian children are assigned the responsibility of keeping alive the notion that God alone is God, that individuals have God-given rights, and that all power is penultimate and subject not only to critique but also ongoing reformation.

“To the church of God . . . to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus,” St. Paul wrote to the Christians in the Greek city of Corinth around 50 A.D., “called to be saints, together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. . . . Think of us in this way, as servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries.”

As I thought about this Reformation Sunday and this moment in the life of Fourth Presbyterian Church, I liked that reminder “We are servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries.”

As a Presbyterian congregation, we are stewards of that Protestant, Reformed, reforming principle so very precious not only for the whole church but also for the world.

As this Presbyterian congregation in this place, we are no less than stewards of the mysteries of God, stewards of the mystery of God’s reality, God’s love for all people, God’ amazing grace in Jesus Christ that reaches out in his name to all God’s children.

It is worth your attention, your devotion and your support, the church is. It is the one place where the ideas of God, God’s presence and God’s reconciling love, are kept alive and expressed tangibly in the world.

Good and healing and reconciling and life-changing, faithful things happen because this church is a steward of the mysteries of God.

On this busy intersection, one of the busiest in the world, our open door daily is a reminder of the mystery of God.

• The 120 who will gather here for a hot meal this evening
• The 2,700 served this year by our Social Service Center
• The hundreds who received flu shots last week
• The 16 scholarship students in Chicago area high schools
• The 400 youngsters who will come here this week, as every week, for Tutoring
• The 2,500 who come weekly to worship,

For all of them, and for all of us, this church and all it does in the name of Jesus Christ is an eloquent and precious reminder of the mysteries of God.

I love this tradition, the Protestant, Presbyterian way of being church. It’s not the only way, but it is a good way.

And I love something Sister Joan Chittister wrote about her church—and ours as well—God’s church: “Whatever we do, we do for a purpose larger than ourselves or there is no use doing it at all. The real purpose of our lives is not for ourselves alone. It is to co-create the world.”

The church of Jesus Christ is a way for each of us to live out that calling.

“Think of us in this way, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God.”

Amen.