Sunday, May 21, 2017 | 9:30 a.m., 11:00 a.m., and 4:00 p.m.

A Church, Not a Shrine

Hardy H. Kim
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 66:8–20
Acts 17:22–31

May it be the mission of this church to tell each person in unmistakable words how dear they are—preciously dear—to God and to live those words in the magnanimity of its welcome, the warmth of its fellowship, the generosity of its devotion. Here may all find the full, sweet answer to their souls’ needs.

James McClure, President, McCormick Seminary
Dedication Week (May 1914)

As someone who has spent the past ten years of ministry serving as an associate pastor for church growth and for evangelism and young adult ministries, pondering biblical accounts of the missionary efforts of Paul is a regular practice. The passage of scripture we just heard—about Paul’s visit to the city of Athens—is among the most interesting for those of us whose task it is to engage in outreach for the church, and it has been pored over by church evangelists ever since Luke first penned the text of Acts. It’s about an encounter between Paul (the bold bearer of new truths about God, revealed in Jesus) and the philosophers of Athens (a cosmopolitan cohort of intellectuals and religious pluralists, a seasoned audience of that has heard every take on the path to higher truth).

Church scholars have long admired the tenacious witness to the good news that Paul displays in this episode. They’ve pointed out how Paul carefully examines every aspect of the culture around him, identifying creative ways to connect his message to concepts and conventions already familiar to his listeners. They see wisdom in the way Paul starts by complimenting the practices of the Athenians, lifting them up as exemplary. This, they argue, is a good model for respecting and honoring others’ truths before trying to present our own. We’ve even been told that in this story Paul, ardently committed to bringing people to faith in Jesus, is still capable of seeing value in non-Christian traditions. He acknowledges the work of Greek poets who realized that it is in the divine that we “live and move and have our being.” This is an important concept that, thanks to Paul, was brought into our Christian understanding of our relationship with God and has shaped the thought of Christian leaders from St. Augustine to Paul Tillich and Marcus Borg.

Admiring his careful cross-cultural analysis and his inventive use of the local context to support his argument, many of us church-growth advocates have made this story a heroic chapter in Paul’s outreach. This view is especially strong in these times when so many are skeptical of the claims that Christianity makes. In fact, I’m now a little embarrassed to admit that recently Rocky Supinger and I wrote an article for the Presbyterian Outlook magazine in which we invoked the tired cliché of Paul as savvy, inter-cultural communicator.

I say embarrassed, because while I was preparing for this sermon I read the text more closely, and it’s now clear to me that Paul was not trying to flatter his hearers or affirm their practices as a way of being heard. In fact, earlier in Acts we’re specifically told that Paul took a good look around Athens and was “deeply distressed to see that the city was full of idols.” So I can no longer believe Paul was positively inclined to the faith practices of the Athenians and can’t assume his compliments about their religious practice were sincere.

When he says, “I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god,’” it’s unlikely he was praising them. The word translated “extremely religious” can also be rendered “excessively religious,” perhaps even “superstitious.” Paul goes on to argue that the God who created the world, and even all the Athenians, could not possibly dwell in the shrines they were so “religiously” keeping, that they were groping for God (even though God was all around them), and that they were living in an age of ignorance for which they would have to repent.

Now this sounds like a great strategy for reaching out to the growing population of our spiritual-but-not-religious neighbors who connect to higher truth via nature, science, or the arts, right? Let’s mock their devotion to cherished pursuits and convince them they couldn’t possibly find transcendent meaning in the things of this world. Clearly something different is going on, compared to what we’ve traditionally seen in this passage.

I first started teaching classes for those interested in membership at Fourth Church about ten years ago. I did this as a part of my pastoral residency while being supervised by Calum MacLeod. He shared with me important perspectives on, and a deep commitment to, welcoming new people into the life of the faith community.

I just taught the new member class at Fourth Church—called the Inquirers’ Class—for the last time yesterday. This marks, for me, a close to a chapter in ministry that has been a true joy. I’ve worked alongside dedicated staff and lay colleagues to help connect people to the many resources and opportunities here at Fourth Church. One of the best parts about this work is that I have had the privilege of telling the story of our grand and vibrant church family to give people a sense of how we see ourselves and of the parts of our history that we value.

Now even though I just told you that I’ve already taught my last Inquirers’ Class, I might actually have one more Fourth Presbyterian Church story to tell. And, lucky for me, today is the third Sunday in May which, the bulletin tells us, was declared by the pastor of this congregation in 1914 (Dr. John Timothy Stone) to be Dedication Commemoration Sunday. This is a perfect time to remember and celebrate the establishment of the church buildings around us—their dedication to service in the ministry of Jesus Christ—with the telling of a good story.

So even though many of have heard at least one version of the story of how Fourth Presbyterian Church came to build this glorious building you’re sitting in right now, I ask you to indulge your associate pastor for evangelism this one last time, for I think our own church’s story can give us insight into how we should regard Paul’s message to the Athenians about our relationship with God.

Prior to the construction of this campus, Fourth Church occupied a building on the northwest corner of the intersection of Rush and Superior. You can see a picture of it on page 7 of your bulletin for today. This sturdy stone structure was built following the loss of the first church building in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

As you can see, it was certainly fireproof. Yet new city codes can’t completely be blamed for its squat, imposing, and unwelcoming exterior. This and other pictures of the second building allow us to get a sense—reflected in the architecture of the space—that the community wanted a church that was a safe and secure refuge from a city that was rapidly changing and often dangerous. Fourth Church’s community was composed of some of the wealthiest and most influential members of Chicago society. Though the congregation was engaged in mission and charitable efforts in surrounding neighborhoods, the church building was still very much an exclusive space, meant for the well-established congregants.

In 1908, when this congregation decided it was ready to move into a new chapter of prominence and public witness, a search committee identified a preacher in Baltimore, named John Timothy Stone, as the right person to lead the community. In one of their first conversations with Reverend Stone, he “challenged them to ‘a larger work and a new and better-equipped edifice.”

In response to his challenge, and to overcome Reverend Stone’s reluctance to leave Baltimore for Chicago, prominent members of the congregation quickly gathered funds meant to provide for an even greater facility than they already possessed. However, it wasn’t until Stone arrived and conferred with congregational leaders that the true nature of the venture he proposed became clear. Fourth Church historian Marilee Munger Scroggs describes it this way:

The church undertook in 1912 an exhaustive survey of their community. . . . The survey pointed to the existence of several distinct neighborhoods. The church stood between two: the neighborhood known as the “Gold Coast,” where Chicago’s social elite were building their new brownstones, and the neighborhood that same elite had left behind, now a community of crumbling mansions that had been converted into furnished rooms. In the latter area, the survey found twenty thousand young people between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. Two slum areas lay to the south and to the west—areas of extreme poverty, overcrowding, crime, and prostitution.

It was for the sake of persons in the crumbling boarding houses, in the overcrowded and poverty-stricken nearby neighborhoods, that the new facility would be built. The old building, sturdy as it was, would have been sufficient for the continuing needs of the elite currently in the church, but its foreboding façade and closed-off entries could never welcome in 20,000 young adults. A local Chicago religious journal, struck by the scope of the building project, spoke to leaders of this congregation and published the following remarks:

The great mission of Fourth Church will be to grapple with the conditions by which it is surrounded. If Fourth Church can make an impress upon the life of this community, and if it can lead the way in demonstrating that a thoroughly evangelistic appeal may be coupled up with a distinct social message, it will perform one of the greatest services for the church at large that has yet been rendered.

At the bottom of page 7, you can see what resulted from the project that this church undertook. Though we rightly marvel at the grandeur of the sanctuary in which we sit, what is almost more meaningful is the set of buildings making up the rest of the campus, which Scroggs tells us, “included a Sunday school building (also with a capacity for 1,400), a courtyard with a fountain, and an elegant three-story manse. . . . The plan was [also] to build for the church’s ministry to the community. Specifically, the church’s vision was to provide a ‘home away from home’ for the single young working people in the rooming houses—an alternative to lonely rooms and dance halls—so the new complex also included a clubhouse, complete with gymnasium, dining hall, classrooms, and club rooms for men, women, boys, and girls.”

Imagine how this beautiful, inspiring, open, and welcoming facility might have been experienced by the throngs of young, newly arrived clerks and factory workers who populated this neighborhood. This was not some stuffy old fortress, meant to protect the people inside and to keep the wrong sort out. This was not some bastion of pure and holy propriety, where only talk about God’s divine nature was allowed. This was a gathering place for people of all ages; a place where energy and enthusiasm could be expressed, where laughter and friendship sprung forth. This, then, was a living, breathing, church, not some carefully preserved, lifeless shrine.

All those years ago, on the Areopagus where Paul made his case before the Athenians, Paul was arguing against a religion that made it seem as though our relationship with the divine was simply about observing the proper rituals, maintaining the proper forms. He argued against the idea that faithfulness to God should be about ordering and taking care of things, such that the powers above would be pleased with us and show us favor.

Instead Paul argued and implored us to be faithful to a God who was far greater and more powerful than an idol that needs our care. The God Paul described was the very ground of our being. Paul’s God didn’t require ritual sacrifices. In fact, the God Paul knew in Jesus Christ was so powerfully alive in the world, that Paul was freed—by that God—to challenge the systems of religion that bound people up in patterns that kept the poor impoverished, the sick suffering, the prisoner confined, the widow, orphan, and refugee marginalized, Jew and Gentile divided against one another.

A little over 100 years ago, John Timothy Stone partnered with leaders here and challenged a whole community to give up a nice, neat, safe space of worship, to trust that if they were willing to open themselves up to the community around, they might indeed witness clear signs of God’s power in the world. And so this congregation grew in ways hardly anyone had imagined possible.

Seventy-five years ago, when the nation was at war and, out of fear, demonized and persecuted Japanese Americans, Harrison Ray Anderson, the pastor of this church, along with the superintendent of the Sunday School helped the congregation move beyond its fear of the stranger to welcome in a gathering of Japanese American Christians to worship in the chapel just behind this sanctuary. And this community again learned to broaden its understanding of the scope of God’s power—how it calls us not just to welcome strangers into our midst but also to stand up against injustice and evil in the wider world and to be an example to the city around us.

Fifty years ago members of this community—particularly young adults—once more stepped beyond the bounds of what was safe or proper and worked with the pastor at that time, Elam Davies, to join together with communities in public housing projects in nearby neighborhoods. Instead of simply seeking safety from urban poverty and violence, members of this community entered into the very reality of the daily lives of those who were suffering. What started out as a neighborhood program called Partners in Education has now blossomed into the education and enrichment programs of Chicago Lights.

And twenty years ago, as changes in society and culture were testing the boundaries of Christian welcome, as some congregations were leaving our denomination, floundering in turmoil, or were being torn apart by differences in opinion on matters related to human sexuality and identity, leaders like our own John Buchannan were risking judgment and condemnation from religious authorities in order to preach a message of love—love for all, not just some. And so many in this city heard, for the first time from a faith community, that God loves even them, just as they are.

What we celebrate today is not just the completion of a building. On this Dedication Commemoration Sunday we celebrate the story of the community of Fourth Presbyterian Church: a family of faith that has heeded the true meaning of Paul’s challenge. A gathering of God’s faithful that understands that God does not need us to take care of God’s presence in the nice, neat trappings of a shrine. God, the power who created all that is, God, who is the very ground of our being—this God calls us ever out into the world, to leave the safety of our shrines and to reach out to the world in love. Can we not see how, in the story of this church, every time we have risked the shrine to be true to the living God, that same God has made us more fully and more vibrantly the church God has called us to be?

So consider the ways that God has been calling us, Fourth Presbyterian Church, to (once more) step out of our lovely, safe shrine and to be the church of Jesus Christ. Under our pastor Shannon Kershner’s leadership we have started grappling with the reality of violence against black communities and the call of activists to stand with them against injustice. We’ve learned much about the plight of refugees and immigrants who are suffering on account of harsh policies initiated by our government. We’ve entered into the beginnings of even deeper talks with members of other faith traditions as we seek to work toward peace in a world that claims we can never be reconciled.

In all these things we face, I hope that we will remember Paul’s argument: that God is not an idol that we need to carefully preserve, that God is the power that grants us the freedom to live in the world with courage.

And I pray that we will remember our own story—the story of a community that has constantly stepped out of its comfortable place to welcome and to meet those who are in need, suffering, or marginalized. Let us remember that each time we did, we were blessed to witness the power of God at work!

Friends, today, on this Dedication Commemoration Sunday, we are called to remember that we are not some timid keepers of a shrine, afraid that something might break the idol in our care. Today we give thanks that we are the church of Jesus Christ, called to serve the living God in the world. May we recommit ourselves in God’s service and find the courage to risk revealing the power of God to this world that desperately needs it. Amen.