Last weekend I delivered the installation charge of my old friend Scott Black Johnston as he officially assumed the position of senior pastor of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City. A minister and member of the Presbytery of New York in the congregation that day suggested I share it with other colleagues so I decided to make it this week’s BLOG.
Scott, your charge started with the death of John Leonard, the critic and former editor of The New York Times Book Review. While I was reading Leonard’s obituary in The Times, it occurred to me that his collection of essays, Private Lives in the Imperial City, might make a suitable gift for you on this occasion. New York is, after all, the most imperial of imperial cities. When I ordered your copy, I ordered one for me too. I’d never read this collection, and as soon as my copy arrived, I started in on it. That’s when it started.
At first I was just charmed and fascinated by Leonard’s wit and humanity. Then I grew envious, to paraphrase Shakespeare, “of this man’s art and this man’s scope.” Gradually, however, I became aware of a more focused, charred irritation rising within me, a feeling of fury and lamentation combined, not at John Leonard, but at those of us who preach and on behalf of those who mostly sit and wait for our sermons to end.
I am astonished, Scott, at the faith of those people who continue to come to church. Dr. Samuel Johnson once marveled that second marriages are “the triumph of hope over experience.” His observation could apply equally to those who keep coming to church. Their willingness to forgive us our digressions amazes me.
And this is where John Leonard and other astute observers of life come in. Lots of Sundays, I feel that I am entering into a battle with my own will, to make myself leave the comforts of my home, a large leather chair, dark, rich hot tea with milk, the consolations of Maureen Dowd, Thomas Friedman, and (for a long time) John Leonard, to make my way to church where – well, to be frank – I am seldom surprised, seldom deeply engaged, seldom delighted or brought to a state of wonder. And I confess, many Sundays, I do not win this battle of will, but run up the white flag to the forces of Dowd, Friedman, et al, and enjoy a third cup of tea.
I had already (weeks ago) written your charge, and it was serviceable. But when I read John Leonard’s Private Lives in the Imperial City, and came upon an essay titled simply, “Good News,” I felt compelled to charge you on behalf of those who make their way to the doors of this church hoping to hear Good News. I know that charging you with these words is an exercise in preaching to the choir, but even the best choirs can be reminded from time to time of what’s at stake when they sing.
Leonard tells the story of receiving from a friend this friend’s contemporary translation of The Gospel According to St. Mark, and how the translation arrived at just the right moment, with Christmas around the corner, and Leonard’s fourteen-year old son having just declared his atheism.
Leonard confessed that their home is a pretty secular household guided by the precept, “What Would George Orwell Do?” At the edges of this rational, fragile world, original sin gnaws unnoticed, and his child mercifully has not yet had occasion to be confronted by “the irrational that, with a bloody claw, scatters all axioms.” In fact, Leonard realizes that it is his and his child’s thin rationality that renders them defenseless in the face of the dangers of this world. Church is a place you go for funerals, he notes; but, he asks, “in forgetting how to worship, have we forgotten [even] how to grieve?”
Then Leonard makes his grand admission. He writes of himself in the third person:
“He has neglected to talk to his son about final things…. [he] hasn’t dared admit that the standardized ethics of his household have a history; that the cross in his imagination might be a growing tree; that sacrifice and reciprocity, grace and mercy, love and justice, are more than just ideas or deductions or theories waiting for proofs. They are dreams that have survived our knowledge of ourselves. They are scales on which we measure our worth. They have even outlasted a church of inquisitors and clerks…. Just as there are tools that we trust, that are true, so there are symbols that are sacred, in which our hopes repose, true, too, and enduring…. How does one begin a conversation with one’s https://pres-outlook.org/wp-content/themes/presoutlook? The Good News According to Mark is a start…. And one’s https://pres-outlook.org/wp-content/themes/presoutlook, a cat among proofs, knows suddenly that there is a document … and [this document reports] ‘a great thing happened in the presence of human witnesses who, however slow to comprehend, eventually did so and survived to tell the tale.’ And one’s https://pres-outlook.org/wp-content/themes/presoutlook wonders too.”
Here is my charge to you, Scott. It is a charge I know you will keep because I know you: Preach the Good News with as much wit and style, pathos and gravity, wisdom and love and humor as you can muster, so that your people can put flesh on the hopes that get them out of bed on a Sunday morning, and come here with the experience of having heard the Good News in this place and the expectation to hear it again.
Scott, take your people, all these children of God, to a place of wonder; by hook and crook, metaphor and story, take them to a place of wonder where witnesses still speak, and symbols still signify, and truth still matters, so they will know that they live every moment of their lives in the presence of God. Sanctify their lives with laughter and wisdom and the Word of God. The Good News has taken hold of you, you are its herald in this place, that it might illuminate them.
Amen.
