Pasadena Presbyterian Church Sermon Text
January 16, 2005

"A Sure Foundation"
Preached by The Rev. Dr. Jack Rogers

Dr. Jack Rogers is Professor of Theology Emeritus at San Francisco Theological Seminary.  He was Moderator of the 213th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA).

Scripture:  I Corinthians 3:4-11

(4) For when one says, 'I belong to Paul,' and another, 'I belong to Apollos,' are you not merely human?  (5) What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you came to believe, as the Lord assigned to each. (6) I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.  (7) So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.  (8) The one who plants and the one who waters have a common purpose, and each will receive wages according to the labor of each.  (9) For we are God's servants, working together; you are God's field, God's building.  (10) According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building on it. Each builder must choose with care how to build on it.  (11) For no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ.

- I Corinthians 3: 4-11

Our text for today is I Corinthians 3:11:  "For no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ."  Jesus Christ is a sure foundation for our personal lives.  Jesus Christ is the sure foundation for the church. 

The first section of the passage that I just read, from Paul's letter to the Corinthians, emphasizes the worth of each individual and our interrelatedness as a community.  No one in the community can lord it over the others, but all can be of service.  Apparently some in the Corinthian church were choosing up sides based on their relationship to former pastors.  Paul does not take personal advantage of that, but instead says, "What then is Apollos?  What is Paul?  Servants through whom you came to believe" (3:5)

It has been said that the Protestant Reformation truly began with Luther's teaching of the priesthood of all believers.  Some have thus blamed Luther, and the Reformation, for spawning a divisive individualism.  That was not Luther's intent.  Luther's position was "everyone a priest for their brother and sister."(1)  We are equal as persons, but we need each other.  Paul emphasizes his point by saying "For we are God's servants, working together" (3:9). 

Heinrich Bullinger is a name not as familiar to us as Martin Luther.  Bullinger was pastor of the cathedral church in Zurich beginning in 1531.  He was really the senior theologian and pastor to those Reformed theologians we call our theological fore-bearers:  John Calvin, and John Knox.  The Second Helvetic [or Swiss] Confession, one of the theological documents in our Presbyterian Book of Confessions, was written by Bullinger.  His wife and daughter died in the Black Plague and Bullinger expected to die as well.  He survived but attached this confession of faith to his will as his gift to the city of Zurich.

On the Priesthood of all believers, Bullinger wrote:  "To be sure, Christ's apostles call all who believe in Christ 'priests' ... Therefore, the priesthood and the ministry are very different from one another.  For the priesthood ... is common to all Christians; not so is the ministry."(2)  This idea may sound strange to us.  Bullinger is emphasizing both that all Christians are equal by calling them priests of God through Christ.  But there are still offices in the church whereby the different ministries that Christ commanded are carried out.

Today, we will ordain and install elders and deacons.  We will also install trustees, whose ministry historically was spun off from the deacons.  Trustees were given care for the temporal welfare of the church. Trustees are not ecclesiastical officers, but civil officers representing the church, as a corporation, in civil matters.

To understand why we ordain elders and deacons we have to pause for a few words about Presbyterian polity.  Polity comes from the Latin word, polis, meaning, "people."  Whenever you have a group of people you need some sort of order, or polity, by which people agree to live together. 

Presbyterians live by a Constitution consisting of two books.  First is a Book of Confessions, containing 11 theological documents from the Nicene Creed in the 4th century A.D. down to A Brief Statement of Faith adopted in 1991.  Second is a Book of Order containing a Form of Government; a Directory for Worship; and Rules of Discipline.  Both the Book of Confessions and the Book of Order, in our Constitution are intentionally based on that most important book, the Bible.  In that way we emphasize that Jesus Christ, the central character in the Bible, is our sure foundation.

Some Christians are impatient with all of the written processes and procedures in a constitution.  They assume that the Spirit will lead them in a spontaneous manner.  I remember when I was teaching at Fuller Seminary in the early 1970, we were still getting students from the Jesus Movement of the 1960s.  Some of them had never been inside a church building.  Their introduction to the Christian faith came through friends and small groups of Christians. 

One of these students came into my office and spent an hour telling me everything that was wrong with the institutional churches.  Finally I asked him what problem had brought him to see me.  He said that he and another fellow had started a church in the park.  The other guy had kicked him out and he didn't know what to do.  I assured him that we anticipate that such things can happen.  That is why we have such a big Book of Order.  We know that people will fight.  So, our polity has rules for fighting fair!

My friend, Bill Chapman, is a stated clerk and adjunct professor of polity at Princeton and New Brunswick seminaries.  He has written a wonderful book called "History and Theology in the Book of Order."  Its subtitle is "Blood on Every Page."  It came from a conversation with an elder who had just read through the Book of Order and realized that our Book of Order has developed from struggles to resolve painful conflicts in the church in the past.  It represents efforts to create better and wiser ways of approaching problems in the present.

Just as Jesus Christ is the sure foundation for our personal lives, so Jesus Christ is the sure foundation for the church.  When Christ is our personal foundation, then all of us are of equal worth, and we can be priests to one another.  With Christ as the foundation of the church then we develop a polity, or system of government, that affirms our equality as persons and utilizes the wonderful variety of gifts that God has given us. Paul says, "According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building on it" (3:10).  Presbyterians have drawn on Scripture and the history of the church to develop a way of organizing ourselves that is both egalitarian and efficient. 

There are basically three kinds of church government.  I will over-simplify them for purposes of comparison.  Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, and Methodists have an Episcopal system, where authority tends to flow from the top down.  They have bishops, at the top, invested with authority to guide the church.

Baptists and Mennonites want all authority to be vested in the local congregation. Authority comes from the bottom up.  It is like a New England town meeting where everybody gets to speak and vote on everything. 

Presbyterians are part way between these two.  For us, authority flows both from the congregation up and from higher governing bodies, like the presbytery, the synod and the General Assembly, down. 

Ours is a representative form of government in which we elect persons from our membership and invest them with authority to act on our behalf.  It is very much like the United States government.  Our first Book of Order was adopted in 1788 and the U.S. Constitution was adopted in 1789, the year of our first General Assembly.

There is one element of our Presbyterian structure that makes us different from all other Christian bodies.  All of the others have clergy -- ministers, who are ordained  -- and laity - members who are not ordained.  I served for two years on the national staff of our denomination at the Presbyterian Center in Louisville.  My first job was to staff a Task Force on Ordination.  Its members included some of the best history and polity minds in the church.  They taught me that we do not have clergy and laity.  We have officers and members. 

Today we will ordain two kinds of church officers:  elders and deacons.  These offices are not stepping stones toward becoming ministers.  They are permanent offices with their own authority. 

Ministers of Word and Sacrament -- like our co-pastors, Mark and Barbara -- have a ministry of preaching, teaching, and pastoral care.  Elders have a ministry of governance, organization and general supervision of the spiritual and temporal well-being of the congregation, along with the ministers.  Deacons have a ministry of service, especially to the poor and the sick.  All of these people are ordained by prayer and the laying on of hands.

Sharon and I had a vivid experience of our difference from systems emphasizing clergy and laity during my year as Moderator of the 213th General Assembly.  Exactly three years ago, on Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend in 2002, we were in Memphis, Tennessee to participate in the initial meeting of a new ecumenical organization called Churches Uniting in Christ.  It brings nine Protestant denominations with 22 million members into a special relationship of recognition and cooperation.  These denominations represent all of the kinds of polity I have outlined.  There are Episcopalians and Methodists with Episcopal forms of governance, and Disciples of Christ and United Church of Christ with congregational forms of government, and ourselves with a Presbyterian form of government. 

A valuable aspect of Churches Uniting in Christ is that it brings us into relationship with three historically African-American denominations.  Representatives of all nine denominations had two worship services together.  On Saturday night we worshiped in a very high-church, Anglo-catholic Episcopal service.  The incense was so thick that one of our former moderators, seated in the front row, became ill and couldn't carry out our banner in the recessional.

I felt more comfortable the next day when we worshiped in an African-American Christian Methodist Episcopal Church.  Sunday afternoon in that church we had a service of communion.  By some prior agreement, the Episcopalians and we Presbyterians got to choose the celebrants to lead the communion service.  The Episcopalians appropriately chose an Anglo, male, Episcopal bishop.  We chose a Chinese-American, woman, elder!  Thus we made our point that our elders are ordained as well!

On Monday morning, Sharon and I had the privilege of marching with a thousand others behind the African-American mayor of Memphis from the city hall to the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968.  We watched, in gratitude, as the leaders of the nine denominations, including our Stated Clerk, Clifton Kirkpatrick, stood on the balcony of that motel, and pledged to end racism in the nine denominations.  Then, Sharon and I spent the morning in the National Civil Rights Museum built beside that infamous motel.  We will never forget that Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday.

I mentioned earlier that I had staffed a Task Force on Ordination in the late 1980s in Louisville.  You may wonder why you have never heard of its work.  The Task Force was very clear about what it thought.  The members also decided that their conclusions were too radical for the church to accept them, so they never submitted their full report to the General Assembly.  At the time, I agreed with them as to the radical nature of their conclusions.  In retrospect, I wish the report had been submitted. Then we could have had a big fight over the nature of ordination itself, rather than having our current squabble over the ordination of people who are gay or lesbian.

Perhaps the most radical idea was that the model for all ministry should be that of the deacons, service.  For example, I am ordained as a minister of Word and Sacrament.  However, I do not often preach, and I rarely participate in administering the sacraments.  My ministry is one of teaching and writing.  So, if the Task Force on Ordination had its way, I would be a presbytery deacon.  I would be performing a service of teaching and writing on behalf of the presbytery.  That would suit me just fine. 

That emphasis on service would fit very well with Paul's admonition that "No one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ."  If Jesus Christ is our foundation, then we are freed from the danger of making absolute our importance or authority.  We can do all that we do as a ministry of service to our sisters and brothers.  It is also true that if Christ is our sure foundation, then we are empowered to do great things.

As many of you know, in retirement I study, almost daily, at the Huntington Library, a private research library that fortunately is only 4 1Ú2 miles from our home in Pasadena.  The utter quiet at my desk in the library provides a wonderful environment in which to read and write.  I do not exist, however, in total isolation.  At noon I go to the cafeteria and often have lunch with other researchers.  Usually, after lunch, some of us take a walk in the gardens. 

When I was working on this sermon I took a walk with my friend Paul Zall.  Paul is 82 years old and has been studying and writing at the Huntington for nearly 48 years.  He is an authority on Ben Franklin, has written biographies of U.S. Presidents, and has a book about the humor of Mark Twain among his many writings.  Paul asked me what I was doing.  I told him I was working on this sermon, and quoted the text to him.  Later, Paul stopped me in the hallway and said:  "You know, if I were preaching that sermon, I would quote Archimedes."  That gave me an additional research task.

It seems that Archimedes lived from about 287 to 212 B.C in Greece.  He was a mathematician, and an engineer.  He preferred pure theory, but on one occasion he had to solve a practical problem.  The King of Syracuse had commissioned the building of a huge ship to carry presents to impress the King of Egypt. But the ship was so heavy that no one could launch it off its dry dock into the sea. They turned to Archimedes. He made some calculations and standing on a firm foundation, using levers, he moved the ship off its dry dock into the ocean. (3)

From that experience came Archimedes' most famous saying:  "Give me a place to stand and a lever, and I can move the world." (4) 

The Apostle Paul understood that same principle, applied to the spiritual realm.  The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ provide a sure foundation on which we can stand.  The levers we need are the abilities and skills that God has given us, and through which God will work. 

Elders, deacons, trustees, members, and ministers of Pasadena Presbyterian Church: standing on the sure foundation of Jesus Christ, working together, we can change the world!  Amen.

 

(c) Copyright 2005 by Jack Rogers.  All rights reserved.  Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution.

(1) Cited in William E. Chapman, History and Theology in the Book of Order: Blood on Every Page (Louisville: Witherspoon Press, 1999), 31.

(2) Chapman, 31.

(3) E.J. Dijksterhuis, Archimedes, Translated by C. Dikshoorn, with a new bibliographic essay by Wilbur R. Knorr (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 14-15.

(4) The Works of Archimedes with the Method of Archimedes, Edited by T.L Heath (n.p.: Dover, 1897).