February 5, 2012 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Keep Calm and Carry On

Calum I. MacLeod
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 147:1–11
Isaiah 40:27–31
Mark 1:29–39

“For that is what I came out to do.”

Mark 1:38 (NRSV)

The Gospel of the God of life
To shelter thee, to aid thee;
Yea, the Gospel of beloved Christ
The holy Gospel of the Lord;

To keep thee from all malice,
From every dole and dolor;
To keep thee from all spite,
From evil eye and anguish.

Christ himself is shepherd over thee,
Enfolding thee on every side;
He will not forsake thee hand or foot,
Nor let evil come anigh thee.

Carmina Gadelica (Songs of the Gaels)

The staff of Fourth Presbyterian Church received a nice gift on Wednesday morning, February 1, the first day of the rest of our lives. John Buchanan, of course, retired on the thirty-first of January, and so a nice surprise it was for the staff to receive a mountain of bagels and doughnuts, gallons of freshly squeezed orange juice, more coffee than we knew what to do with—people were delighted. It came from one of our good and generous and thoughtful members. There was a note with it and the note read this: “Dear Pastor MacLeod and Staff of Fourth Church, Thanks for all that you do.” Signed with the member’s name and then this: “P.S. Don’t mess up the transition.” (It was actually another word than “mess,” but I didn’t want to say it from the pulpit.) The sentiment was very timely, actually, I thought.

We, I think, did well in the first part of our transition as a community. We celebrated John’s ministry and gave thanks for him and Sue and the family, and we transitioned him into retirement with grace and love. We had the right tone, I think; we had the right number of events, and they were inclusive. I know that John and Sue felt loved. And now we move into the next phase of our transition together as a congregation, to an in-between time as we do the work of preparation, so that we are in good shape to welcome a new pastor once the Pastor Nominating Committee that we will elect next week has brought a candidate to us sometime between a year and eighteen months perhaps from now.

So the question before us: how do we not mess it up? I have one initial suggestion for you this morning, although I am sure we’ll return to this question as we go through this time. The one suggestion: there is in the Pastor’s Office here at Fourth Church a framed poster. It’s bright red with white writing. At the top of it is the crown of King George VI of the United Kingdom, the current queen’s father, and under that in bold white letters it reads, “Keep calm and carry on.”

Now, some of you might remember that a couple years ago during Advent, John Buchanan preached a sermon entitled “Keep Calm and Carry On.” I told him some weeks ago that I wanted to use the title for this first Sunday after he’s gone, so he kept away from it. John, in that sermon, spoke about the origin of that poster. It was produced in 1939 by the British Ministry of Information. It was a time that the industrial centers of the United Kingdom were being bombed by the Nazis during the Blitz. Everyone, including the British government, expected that an invasion by the Nazis was imminent, and so the government produced this poster that would be distributed in the event of invasion to try and keep people from panic: keep calm and carry on. That invasion of the German forces never happened, and subsequently the posters were destroyed, and I believe that there are only two of the originals that are still in existence. One was found in early 2009 by a used-book seller in the northern part of England. This man was rummaging through boxes, and at the bottom of one of the boxes found this bright red poster. He took it out and liked it, so he framed it and hung it in the window of his shop. It created great interest and became really something of a phenomenon. Thousands of copies of the poster have been sold. You’ll find it in all different places. I once got a birthday card with this, the crown and “keep calm and carry on,” with a martini glass in the corner, which is probably a good way to be able to do that. Keep calm and carry on.

We have in the text from Mark’s Gospel that we read earlier what I think of as Jesus’ own “keep calm and carry on” moment. We are early in Mark’s Gospel, the first chapter. Remember Mark has no birth story; he simply announces in the first verse “the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ” and very quickly Jesus is calling the disciples and healing and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom.

We learn this morning of a singular healing, the healing from fever of Simon’s mother-in-law. It’s an extraordinary story: Jesus heals the mother-in-law and then we’re told she began to serve them. The word for “serve” in the New Testament, the Greek diakonai, is the word from which we derive the word deacon. The Deacons in our congregation are those who serve in many ways, so it’s pointed out that we encounter in this text the first deacon. People hear about the healing; more come; Jesus has a full day of healing—many people, crowds.

And then there’s a shift in Mark’s Gospel. We move to the morning; this morning we are told is very dark. Jesus, in darkness, steals away in order to have space, we’re told, for prayer. Jesus goes to a deserted place. Remember that the writers of the Gospels are giving us hints when we learn that there is darkness. We know there is something of a spiritual struggle going on here. The deserted place is always a liminal space, someplace where you find yourself on the edge, and so Mark is hinting to us in this text that Jesus is engaging in a spiritual struggle, praying, seeking God’s will. There is almost in this a prefiguring of Jesus’ struggle in the garden of Gethsemane. “What is the way forward for me?” Jesus is asking in prayer.

And then this extraordinary moment where the disciples who have been searching for Jesus turn up and almost because of their presence there is this incredible clarity of mind that Jesus experiences. Jesus very quickly says, “Let us go on to the neighboring towns so that I may proclaim the message there also, for that is what I came out to do.” He’s almost saying to himself, “Keep calm and carry on, Jesus.” Do what you came to do; you know what you came to do—to proclaim the good news of God’s kingdom of love, to bring healing and restoration to people who are broken and hurt. And I believe that there could be a word for us, for this congregation, in this.

How do we not mess up this transition? Let us do what we always do. Let’s do what we know—to be community for each other. That’s our natural stance, I believe. There’s a great poem called “Rally” that was written by Elizabeth Alexander, an African American poet. She wrote it after seeing Barack Obama attend a pre-election rally the October before he was elected president. And it’s a meditation on what it might mean for Barack Obama to be elected president. Elizabeth Alexander reflects on this, but finally, in the end, says this profound sentence in her last line. She writes, “Human beings ever tilt toward we.” Tilt toward we—that’s what we’ll do as a congregation; we will be community, for we know, in the words of Roger Gench, pastor and writer, that “our individuality is always fulfilled in community.” We know that we tilt toward we.

I think I shared one time before with you, from my youth, that I attended a high school group in my church but also a group that was a national Christian group that was very important to me in my faith development. It believed that we encountered God through the relationships that we developed with people. And this group, called the SSC, had a motto, a Latin motto. It’s these words: Teneo et Teneor. That means “I hold and am held.” That is what it is to be community to each other, to commit to holding and to being held. Like the words of that beautiful, modern hymn:

Brother, Sister, let me serve you.
Let me be as Christ to you.
Pray that I may have the grace to
let you be my servant, too.

So keep calm and carry on. Be the community that we are. Support the community. Hold and be held. As in the last couple of years, we as a church face big financial challenges. We are a large and complex and ambitious institution with many large programs reaching out into the wider community. So support us in that work. If you’ve not pledged for the Annual Appeal, give a pledge. We know that we have a new building to prepare to live into, the Gratz Center. So let’s find new ways of deepening our discipleship in giving of our time and our talents and our money. If you’ve been coming here for months or years and signing the “Regular Attender” box on the pew pad, why not think about joining the church; throw your lot in with us. And if you’ve been sitting in the pews for years, what about finding a new way to get involved, to deepen your relationship with this community?

So Wednesday the first of February, after our lovely breakfast, I had a two-hour meeting on the budget. It wasn’t that much fun, I can assure you. That was followed by two subsequent meetings with individual members of the congregation. It so happened that they were both women in their early to mid-twenties, a couple of years post-graduation from college. The first person I had lunch with had been a student in my confirmation class, the first one I taught fourteen years ago. She and I had lunch, and she spoke about how she wanted to get involved in the Chicago Lights Tutoring program and find ways of deepening her commitment to the mission and outreach of the church and just how much the church had meant to her in her life. And the second young woman was exploring her sense of call and discerning whether God was calling her to ordained ministry in the church or to other forms of service. And I came back from that meeting and I gave God thanks for the promise and hope that these two young women symbolize about the future, not just of this congregation but of Christ’s church.

So hold each other and be held. Pray for each other and for the staff and leadership. Practice a generous form of Christianity which we have so learned from John Buchanan. Do what we’ve always done. Do what we come to do. Tutor the kids who come in from the Cabrini area and other housing projects. Continue to feed people who are hungry and clothe people who are cold. Nurture our children in Sunday School and youth group. Care for one another. Live in the world faithfully at the intersection of faith and life and always, always do it in love. So covenant with me together this morning to “keep calm and carry on” all to God’s glory.

Let us pray.

O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come,
be present in our midst during the season of change.
Inspire our life together; call us to new expressions of faithfulness.
Imbue our hearts with love
that we would continue to be faithful as your body in the world,
fed with bread from heaven and the cup of salvation,
loving, caring, emboldened to be your people
in the name and for the sake of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior. Amen.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church