Sunday, September 29, 2019 | 4:00 p.m.

To Build, Break, and Rebuild

Joseph L. Morrow
Minister for Evangelism, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Revelation 21:1–5
Jeremiah 29:1, 4–7

We begin our sermon series entitled “Remembering Our Past, Inspiring Our Future” with perhaps the most elemental of questions: Why is Fourth Church in this place? On this corner of Chestnut and Michigan Avenue? How did God plant and root us here? Why do we continue to stay?

To respond to those questions, I want to take us briefly back to Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century. I invite you to imagine yourself there, in the thick of it all with the words of the poet Carl Sandburg.

Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroad and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders. . . .
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning. . . .
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action . . .
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning
Building, breaking, rebuilding.
(Carl Sandburg, “Chicago”)

And in that city of building, breaking, and rebuilding a great multitude of wanderers gather from southern farm towns and the overcrowded eastern cities, streaming in from as far as Norway, Poland, and China. Some are exiled or refugees. Some running from unspeakable loss, and others sprinting toward their fortunes. Hear some of their voices.

From Chicago, Illinois
My dear Sister: I was agreeably surprised to hear from you and to hear from home. I am well and thankful to say I am doing well. The weather and everything else was a surprise to me when I came. . . . Please remember me kindly to any who ask of me. The people are rushing here by the thousands and I know if you come and rent a big house you can get all the roomers you want. You write me exactly when you are coming. I am not keeping house yet I am living with my brother and his wife. My son is in California but will be home soon. He spends his winter in California. I can get a nice place for you to stop until you can look around and see what you want. I am quite busy. I work in Swifts Packing Co. in the sausage department. My daughter and I work for the same company. We get $1.50 a day and we pack so many sausages we don’t have much time to play but it is a matter of a dollar with me and I feel that God made the path and I am walking therein. (Letters from Black Migrants, Chicago Defender 1916–1918).

From Chicago, Illinois
Many thanks for the letters. . . . It is cold here now, but we have had a lovely fall. The fall is almost the best time here in America. Lillegutt is very well, and he eats well too. We hope he is getting used to the climate. He does not go to kindergarten anymore. He went for two weeks, but apparently the children laughed at his Norwegian clothing, so now he is very particular about what he puts on. His language has deteriorated. He mixes Norwegian and English and has a wonderful American accent. . . . We are fine. The days go so quickly. Karl leaves here at 7:30 in the mornings and isn’t home before around 6:00 in the evening. I always have enough work to do. Monday, washing, Tuesday, ironing, and every day enough to do. Three lodgers make a lot of work even if they only get breakfast. But they are nice, kind young men, and they seem to like it here. . . . Yours Bergljot. (Solvig Zempel, In Their Own Words: Letters from Norwegian Immigrants, pp. 164–165)

What did you hear and see with your mind? Did you hear the footsteps of a worker in faded and well-worn clothes shuffling into a brick building with smokestacks rising into the sky? Did you see a cramped boarding house with a woman ironing her clothes?

What did you hear and see with you heart? The joy of those experiencing newfound wealth and freedom? The fatigue of those with barely enough time to do anything but work and sleep?

Those who stepped off trains or walked off ships into turn-of-the-twentieth-century Chicago found themselves in a landscape of contrast and contradiction. Turn a corner or walk down a grand boulevard and one could find both squalor or great riches, ramshackle homes and apartments or splendid Victorian mansions. Thriving industries sat alongside a den of death and corruptive deal-making. A frontier for some. A home stolen for others. A crossroads for all.

The voices you just heard from the poet Carl Sandburg and from African American and Norwegian migrants bookend the experience in some important ways. For them and those of their ilk, Chicago could be a city of promise with more freedom of movement and money to take care of family than they could have imagined.

But for these same wanderers and observers, it could also be a city of lament and suffering. They came expecting streets paved with gold and found stone walls covered with the soot and pollution of nearby factories. They came expecting spacious living arrangements. Instead, they were lucky to cram three kids in a one-bedroom tenement apartment. They came expecting freedom of movement after being subjected to a brutal and confining racial caste system. But they found it impossible to walk into downtown department stores without harassment. Indeed, the city was a place of contradiction that could build dreams, break dreams, and, if you were fortunate, potentially rebuild them.

The church knows something of cities and those wanderers into them because of our own spiritual heritage. At the beginning of the biblical account of humanity we find Cain, son of Adam and Eve, exiled from home after the murder of his brother Abel and wandering the earth until he becomes a builder of cities. The children of Abraham and Sarah, keepers of a covenant with God, find themselves building cities, used as storehouses, to stockpile wealth for Egypt’s pharoahs. Finally freed from the bondage of building for others, they wandered forty years in wilderness, until crossing the Jordan they took over the home of the Jebusites and built a city for themselves: Jerusalem.

While Jerusalem served as the biblical ideal of a city, as you might guess from the narrative I’ve described, scripture as a whole is ambivalent about, even weary of, cities. On the one hand, a city could be a place of order and beauty, a symbol of power and the sacred. Jerusalem’s towering temple on Mount Zion became an illustration of that potential. In marble and stone, it told the story of a people’s redemption and a way of life as described in Torah—one of Sabbath, equality, justice seeking, generosity to the marginalized and downtrodden. The city was the metaphor for a faith realized, accomplished, preserved, and fully lived.

But on the other hand, the Bible recognized cities as places of material inequity and questionable morality. Theologian Walter Bruggemann tells us “the conventional narrative of the city is a thin tale of acquisitiveness and scarcity that produces violence” (Walter Brueggemann, The City in Biblical Perspective). Jerusalem reflected both these realities. The prophets of the united kingdom and later the Judean kingdoms railed constantly against the extravagance and waste, the willingness to worship other gods, and neglect of the poor within the city.

So eventually the city of promise, Jerusalem, fell, and the exiled Israelites found themselves brought in defeat to the capital of their enemies and captors: Babylon. On the march to Babylon, the wealth of Jerusalem evaporated behind them as their grief materialized.

By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and there we wept as we remembered Zion.

The city of promise gave way to a city of pain as these wanderers stepped into an unknown future, unsure of how they would cope or find stability.

When the members of Fourth Church decided—at the encouragement of their Pastor, John Timothy Stone—to lay the cornerstone for this campus on Michigan and Chestnut in 1912, you have to wonder if they had in mind these sacred stories of wandering amid the cities of scripture.

As the teeming masses streamed into Chicago, as the stories of their hopes and miseries mounted, how did members of Fourth Church attend to the wanderers in their midst? The congregation’s building was in a beachhead of diversity and division, with board houses for those living paycheck to paycheck to the west, factories promoting industry to the south, and mansions, bankrolled by economic expansion, to the north. The proximity of these different and sometimes competing interests shows how messy it was to forge community in a city like Chicago.

But Fourth Church decided that, no matter the complexities, it was necessary to seek God’s presence as a light in this diverse crossroads in the city. They discerned the great theological question, Where shall we live? Where shall we build and plant? And by doing so they offered an alternative account of life in the city.

That was especially the case for the many young adults who lived in the boarding houses and frequented the taverns, brothels, and back alleyways. Fourth Church offered them, through building and hospitality, a reminder of God’s power to anchor many aimless and anxious lives. The church was by no means the only one in this effort or always the most engaged. But Fourth Church did strive to be a faithful part of a broader ecosystem that surrounded newcomers. They helped lonely, transient individuals and families put down roots and build up a life in this city.

When the exiles arrived in Babylon, the story was not finished. While the Jerusalem of old would never return, even when their progeny eventually returned to Judea, prophets like Jeremiah and Isaiah pointed the people toward a new Jerusalem, a city yet to come. A follower of Jesus called John the Seer picks up that vision of a future city in Revelation. It is a city that fulfills the unfinished promises of the Jerusalem of old, of Babylon, Rome, and even the Chicago of today. Similarly, Fourth Church’s mission is unfinished. We, like our spiritual forebears, still search for the outlines of the city yet to come. And we wait with generation after generation of Chicago’s residents for the qualities of that future city to emerge in our midst.

As we await that future, it is worthwhile to note that the New Jerusalem described in Revelation is a curious place. By that I mean that it is not all concrete, marble, and steel. It is a city in which urban life is enjoined to nature and nature’s God. In chapter 22 a river is described, filled with the water of life flowing down the New Jerusalem’s great street. And the river is flanked by trees whose leaves are meant to heal the nations, inviting the nations in through gates that never close and are always open.

Maybe that’s what city founders were searching after when they gave Chicago the motto “Urb est Horto,” a city in a garden. Of course, both historically and in the present day our city has sometimes felt like a tree in a garden whose branches shoot out in every direction, as if its peoples all bound by circumstance and zip codes want nothing more than to leap out from the trunk and escape each other—injustice, prejudice, and differences of custom and disposition being the primary irritants.

But there is another reality and hope. Like a tree in the garden, we who have our life in this city also have roots. Roots remain intertwined as they spread, all seeking to be nourished by the same waters even as they strengthen the same soil. As people of diverse age, cultural, social, and economic backgrounds, we have the capacity to grasp and hold each other like roots. We can comfort and protect even as we tangle and tussle. Perhaps that’s an apt metaphor for the way Fourth Church and the city of Chicago have and can continue to grow together. The city is not only a place for the church to emanate light, but also to collect it. As the pain of the boarding houses once taught Fourth what is meant to be in mission, so do the pains, but also the resilience and values of the city teach us how to better become God’s people. Indeed, in the welfare of the city and its wanderers, the church has found its identity. As an agent of God’s redemption. May the city continue to build us in faith, break us in our prejudices, and rebuild us again in hope. Amen.