Fourth Presbyterian Church: A Light in the City

Sunday, February 13, 2022 | 10:00 a.m.

For the City

Celebrating the Sesquicentennial of Fourth Presbyterian Church

John Buchanan
Pastor Emeritus, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Jeremiah 29:1, 4–7
Mark 8:34–35

Thank you. Thank you, Shannon Kershner, Session members, and planners of the yearlong celebration of this church’s 150-year history. Thank you for the very gracious and generous invitation to be the preacher for this important occasion. And congratulations for the way the year was celebrated, with delightful reminiscences from former staff members and dear friends and well wishes from ecumenical and denominational leaders—all in the midst of the COVID pandemic, which radically altered the way the church could go about being a church.

Who will ever forget Shannon Kershner preaching from her living room in front of the fireplace mantle? As I watched weekly on my iPad, I offered up a quiet prayer of thanksgiving that it was happening to her and not me. And John Sherer playing the piano in his family room and individual morning choir members singing their parts beautifully, alone, in their own homes and somehow it all coming together. And when the pandemic continued and it was not advisable, or responsible, to gather together for worship in this much-loved space, congratulations on the expertise with which technology was employed to see, before the service began, architectural details in and around the church that, even though I was in the building almost every day for twenty-six-and-a-half years, I never noticed before. It was a real gift.

It takes imagination to celebrate an important anniversary like this one. Frederick Buechner was invited one time to preach at the 200th anniversary of a church in New England. Colleagues of mine—I think it was either John Wilkinson or Calum MacLeod—occasionally observed that, apparently, I could not get through a sermon without a Frederick Buechner quote. So, in the interest of consistency, here’s a good one for this occasion.

Buechner said:

Happy Birthday to this church. Happy Birthday to all of you. Because more than an organization, more than a building, a church is the people who come to it to pray and sing and fidget and dream, to shed a tear or two if a word strikes home, to try to keep a straight face if the soloist strikes a sour note [something that never happens here] or somebody’s hearing aid starts to buzz. Happy Birthday to all of you who listen to some sermons and doze through other sermons [again, something that never happens here, these days at least. But I do remember Saints who could be counted on to fall asleep about five minutes into my sermon, every Sunday]. (Frederick Buechner, A Clown in the Belfry, pp. 107–108)

Buechner read through the church’s history and made a remarkable discovery. It seems that in 1831 repairs to the building were made and additions added. One of the additions was a new steeple and a bell. The people were very excited to finally have a real steeple and bell. The church historian in 1831 wrote, “[On the date the work was dedicated] one agile Lyman Woodward stood on his head in the Belfry with his feet toward heaven” (A Clown in the Belfry, pp. 115–116). I won’t try that too, but, again, thank you.

Presbyterians have been in Chicago from the very beginning . . .

The Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago was founded in February 1871 as a result of a merger between two Presbyterian churches in the same North Side neighborhood. They moved into the larger of the two buildings on the corner of Grand and Wabash—a large, handsome church that seated 1,100. The first worship service of the new Fourth Presbyterian Church was on Sunday, February 12, 1871. That summer, the congregation vacated the building while it was renovated and expanded, and on October 8, 1871, they worshiped for the first time in their renovated and lovely church.

There was an evening service too, and when the benediction was declared and the congregation gone, fire broke out on the South Side—the Great Chicago Fire! By 3:30 a.m. the next day, October 9, Fourth Presbyterian Church’s building was ashes and rubble. What a way to begin!

The congregation met two weeks later in the Plymouth Congregational Church and voted to rebuild, showing the faithful resilience that has characterized Fourth Church over the years. The new, larger building on the corner of Rush and Superior served the congregation for forty years until this building was dedicated.

Resilience and intentional, creative responsiveness to the city have been common themes. From that brave decision two weeks after the fire to the equally brave decision, in 1909, to purchase a piece of property on muddy, unpaved, unpromising Pine Street before it was renamed Michigan Avenue: rooming houses, a tannery, and a tavern were neighbors. A new pastor, John Timothy Stone, had arrived in 1909 with energy and aspiration. He urged his new congregation to “a larger work and a new and better equipped edifice.” And so the decision was made to hire the leading English Gothic architect, Ralph Adams Cram, and to build this wonderful church. Stone knew that the church was more than the building and wrote, “The great mission of Fourth Church will be to grapple with the conditions by which it is surrounded,” for the city.

Faithful, creative responsiveness to the city. During World War II, in the midst of anti-Japanese hysteria, a congregation of Japanese Christians was evicted from its building. This church, with its pastor Harrison Ray Anderson leading, invited that Japanese congregation to use this building for its worship services and other activities.

And in the turbulent 1960s Elam Davies led this church in recommitting to being a church in and for the city rather than selling and moving to the safety of suburbia or locking its doors to keep the city out. Davies and Fourth Church did the opposite. They threw open the doors, invited the city in, and provided concrete help and support in a Counseling Center, a Social Service Center, tutoring for children and young people and much more.

When terrorists attacked the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, September 11, 2001, and religious paranoia, hostility, and outright hatred began to emerge, Fourth Church reached out to the interfaith community, inviting Roman Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim neighbors to join us in worship and fellowship.

Fourth Presbyterian Church has been clear in its commitment to live in and for the city. It’s actually one of our oldest and most precious Judeo-Christian traditions.

The year is 586 BCE. God’s people are in exile. Their army has been routed by the Babylonians. Their beautiful city, Jerusalem, with its shining temple—leveled. Many of the people, including leading citizens, have been marched across the desert to Babylon to live in a kind of captive house arrest—the Babylonian version of the “Final Solution.” It’s a monumental crisis for the exiles. How to carry on? How to live as God’s people when you are violently uprooted from the land God promised you? How to survive in a foreign land, an alien culture, a strange city? One of their poets expressed the profound depths of their suffering:

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

For there our captors
and our tormentors asked for
mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
How could we sing the Lord’s
song in a foreign land? (Psalm 137)

Understandably they hunkered down and had as little to do with their alien environment as possible. It’s common sense: keep to yourselves, practice your unique customs and rituals, speak your own precious language, teach it to your little ones. Keep apart from Babylon, self-isolate from the alien city.

And just then a letter arrived in the exiled community, a letter from home, written by one of their prophets, Jeremiah, who had managed to remain in what was left of Jerusalem. It contained surprising advice. Instead of offering words of comfort and solace this is what the prophet wrote:

Build houses and live in them. . . .
Plant gardens and eat what they produce. . . .
Take wives and husbands, have children. . . .

And then this surprising, powerful mandate. It’s more than advice. It’s an order:

Seek the welfare of the city. . . .
Pray to the Lord on its behalf,
for in the city’s welfare you will find your welfare.

Think of that! Your welfare, your thriving, is all wrapped up in the city, it’s health and welfare. The city is your agenda. That ancient word sounds relevant, contemporary, a word, I believe, for this outpost of God’s people in this city in this year 2022.

One of the things I love about Presbyterianism is that we have always understood that—that the city, the world, is where God calls us to be. It’s in our Presbyterian DNA.

In preparation for this sermon, I revisited some of our Presbyterian history, even read a little John Calvin—not exactly light entertainment!

Please indulge me for a little trip through history. Calvin’s influence on the city of Geneva was profound: new regulations to assure that the scales in the marketplace were accurate and fair; child labor laws; and— my favorite—an ordinance that prohibited taverns from opening for business on Sunday until church was out.

Calvin led the sixteenth-century Reformation in Geneva and there worked out the Presbyterian way of being a church. In April 1564, very sick and near death, he called the ministers of Geneva together to say farewell, and this is what he said: “Let everyone consider the obligation he has—not only to the church, but also to the city which you have promised to serve” (T.H.L Parker, John Calvin: A Biography).

Calvin’s disciple, John Knox, led the Reformation in Scotland, (by the way, preaching from the pulpit in Edinburgh’s St. Giles’ Cathedral, where Calum MacLeod is pastor.) Knox helped establish a public school system in Scotland that became the model for publicly funded education for all the children, a new and radical idea in the sixteenth century. Presbyterians have been establishing schools ever since.

Two centuries after Calvin, a distinguished scholar and popular Presbyterian Church of Scotland preacher, John Witherspoon, was being recruited by the trustees of the College of New Jersey—later Princeton—to come to America to be the college president. I discovered a fascinating detail: Witherspoon’s wife, Elizabeth, did not want to leave Scotland. An American medical student at the University of Edinburgh, Benjamin Rush, attended Witherspoon’s church, liked what he heard, and became Witherspoon’s friend. (That’s the same Benjamin Rush for whom Rush University Medical Center is named.) Rush had contacts with the people at Princeton and, when he heard that Elizabeth Witherspoon did not want to move to the colonies, visited her in the Paisley manse. Rush must have been very persuasive, because Elizabeth finally agreed to pack up and, with her husband and five children, sail across the ocean—for eleven weeks—and begin life anew in the British Colony of New Jersey.

The year was 1768, and the cause of independence from Great Britain was already roiling the colonies, particularly New Jersey and Princeton. Witherspoon was immediately attracted to the cause and became personally involved. In time, he was appointed to several public positions and eventually elected to the Continental Congress. On May 17, 1776, he was in the pulpit at the College Church in Princeton and declared himself. A large congregation crowded the church and heard Witherspoon say, “At this season it is not only lawful but necessary [to speak out], and I willingly embrace the opportunity to declare my opinion without any hesitation, that the cause in which America is now in arms, is the cause of justice and liberty.” British soldiers posted nearby hanged Witherspoon in effigy.

After that worship service, he got on his horse and rode from Princeton to the state house in Philadelphia where the Continental Congress was meeting. He arrived just as John Adams was concluding his eloquent argument for independence. A week or so later, John Witherspoon joined his friend Benjamin Rush, also a member of the Continental Congress from Pennsylvania, in signing the Declaration of Independence, the only clergy to do so.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

The Declaration concludes, “For the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred honor.” (See Martha Lou Lemmon Stohlman, John Witherspoon: Parson, Politician, Patriot.)

And so Presbyterians have always understood that God cares about what is going on in the world and calls God’s people to be in the world in God’s name. And so we Presbyterians have been involved in every major issue and cause in American political history, because we believe the truth of Jeremiah’s mandate—that in the city’s welfare is our welfare.

I happily confess that my own sense of call to ministry began to emerge when I witnessed, firsthand, Presbyterians working for, advocating, demonstrating for racial justice. I was a student volunteer, as Youth Director, at the First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, in Woodlawn, on the corner of 64th and Kimbark. We worshiped at that church and saw something we had never seen before: a racially integrated congregation with co-pastors, a white minister and an African American minister.

Pray for the city, seek the welfare of the city. When the Pastor Nominating Committee from the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago contacted me in 1984, inquiring if I might be interested in being considered for the position of pastor, I was stunned. Talk about being startled! I was beside myself. The city! The city we fell in love with the first time we saw it, arriving from Pennsylvania, in our ’57 Ford, loaded with all our earthly possessions, driving up Lake Shore Drive during rush hour on a September afternoon in 1959, scared, excited, Sue pregnant with our first child, to matriculate at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago and Chicago Theological Seminary. And I think we both knew that this is where we wanted to be, where we needed to be.

So years later when I learned about the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago and what it was doing in the heart of the city—serving, feeding, tutoring, clothing, counseling, helping, praying, welcoming—I knew where I wanted to be for the rest of my ministry, a congregation that knew and lived out Jeremiah: ”Seek the welfare of the city, for in its welfare is your welfare.”

I pray for the city and for this wonderful church in the city. Beyond the city, I find myself praying for the nation as never before—the nation for which John Witherspoon risked his life, property, and sacred honor by signing the Declaration of Independence; the nation for which Witherspoon’s own son James, a volunteer in the Continental Army, died in the war for independence. The nation, far from perfect, nevertheless was founded on the still radical idea that all people, created by God, are equal—that each is valued by God, dignified by God’s love, which is for all, equally.

Pray for the city. These are important, fragile days for the American experiment. Not alone (I’m sure) I’m worried about this experiment in republican democracy. We have watched in horror an outright attack on the most basic, sacred right guaranteed by the Constitution and for which so many have died, namely the right to vote in free and fair elections, a concerted and apparently well-planned attempt to deny the will of the people by overturning a presidential election. And since then, more than twenty-five state legislatures have passed laws making it more difficult for all people, particularly people of color, to vote.

The President of Union Theological Seminary in New York City, Serene Jones, wrote an essay recently, “If We Don’t Counter Far-Right Christianity, January 6, 2021, Will Just Be the Beginning” (Religion Dispatches, 5 January 2022). She wrote, “Mobs of Trump backers, carrying crosses, Bibles, signs with religious messages, [pictures of Jesus] stormed the Capitol [in an effort to overturn an election]. A man in a fur hat led a prayer in the Senate Chamber, thanking Jesus for allowing them to be there.”

Jones continued, “As a theologian, the idea that insurrectionists terrorizing the Capitol could claim the moral force of God is horrifying. The actions of the rioters were the furthest thing from the values of compassion and love that I have taken from the teachings of Jesus.”

She concluded, “The time to aggressively push back is now. To save our democracy, we must reclaim our faith as a force for good and for love.”

That is exactly what is so very important about this church and what it means and does—a force for good and for love. If ever there was a desperate need for a “force for good and for love,” it is now and the days ahead.

Seek the welfare of the city, in its welfare you will find your welfare.

You know that is not far from something Jesus said once. He’s telling his friends and followers that there is a good possibility that he will face suffering in the future and that he might die. They push back immediately, particularly his close friend Peter. “God forbid, Lord. That’s not going to happen. We won’t let it happen.” And then Jesus says the most remarkable thing, maybe the most important thing: “Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”

There it is . . . the Christian secret. If you love something—or someone—enough to live for it, to give your life to it, to die for it, you will discover real life, true life, full life, joyful life, life more alive than ever. He promised you will save your life.

It’s why this church thrives and is so alive, because for the love of God and in the name of Jesus Christ, it lives for the sake of the city, for the world. This church knows in its heart of hearts that its welfare is all tied up with the welfare of the city around it. It’s not only about the church as an institution; it’s about us, personally, individually.

The invitation to you and to me is to love so much that you live for that love—for your God, your church, your nation, your spouse, partner, your family, your community.

So, dear friends, do love—do love God, love your church, and, as a church, give your love and your life to this city, your city, and I know that 150 years from now there will another anniversary, another grand and wonderful celebration.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.