Scriptures:
Deuteronomy 26: 1-11 -- Matthew 25: 31-46 -- Psalm 89 (selections) -- Mark 8: 31-38
One hundred and twenty-five years ago this very month, 70 Pasadenans gathered to
formalize a decision to which they had given much thought and prayer. That day, as we are
doing tonight, they dedicated themselves to God's work in Pasadena and the world as they
signed a charter to become the first church of any type in Pasadena: The Pasadena
Presbyterian Church.
As did many of our ancestors (and many of us), they had left family and friends in the
Midwest to settle in this land of milk and honey. Now, they were dedicating their lives
and their resources to the God who had brought them safe thus far on the way.
Tonight we rededicate ourselves and our resources to that God who, through earthquake,
wind and fire, through good times and bad, through conflict and controversy, through joy
and celebration, "has brought us thus far on the way." (Lift Every Voice and
Sing, James Weldon Johnson)
This is a night to look back and celebrate 125 years of witness to the gospel of Jesus
Christ in Pasadena, more than 100 years of support for world mission, a century of
national and international religious leadership coming from this church, a century of
caring "for the least of these", a century of prophetic ministry and
proclamation of the gospel when it was anything but comfortable to do so.
Tonight we will physically move through our history as we move from place to place. We
will rededicate ourselves to God in this magnificent sanctuary, erected in the turbulence
of the 1970s. We will be led from this sanctuary to Fellowship Hall by bagpipes, reminding
us of our roots in the Protestant Reformation of Scotland and the strong Scottish
influence on this church by Dr. Malcolm MacLeod, Dr. Robert Freeman, and the Reverend
James Leishman. Then we will dine and celebrate in a portion of the church built in the
1950's, when PPC was the third largest church in our denomination. This is a night to
remember and celebrate our rich heritage.
It is also a night to remember that wandering Arameans were our ancestors, slaves in
Egypt brought out by God's mighty hand. It is a night to remember that we are not called
to self-aggrandizement or pomposity for our past but to faithfulness in the present. It is
a night to remember our future lies not in trying to be great and famous, or in making
this church once again into a mirror image of the halls of power, but rather in welcoming
into worship and governing boards and onto the staff of this church those who, by the
standards of this world are poor or weak or outcast. For when we do, we minister to and
with Jesus Christ, and we are faithful to the God who called us and cared for us when we
and our ancestors were poor and weak and outcast.
The times when this church was its strongest in the past are precisely the times when
it was faithful, no matter the cost, to God's call to care and advocate "for the
least of these". As we imagine our future with a strong and powerful ministry, we can
do no less.
Those who founded this church and those who served God through it faithfully through
the generations as members, leaders and pastors have made it possible for us to be a
strong ministry and advocate for the least of these today. Those who founded our faith in
Scotland and Geneva and Judea are urging us on even now. Those wandering Arameans who
first followed the God we now know through Jesus Christ have provided their shoulders for
us to stand upon as we discern the road ahead.
Our future lies in our faithfulness to Jesus Christ whom we meet in the least of our
brothers and sisters, and in the faithfulness of our God, whose love is steadfast from
generation to generation. As that mighty hymn, "Lift Every Voice and Sing," by
James Weldon Johnson, says so eloquently:
God of our weary years, God of our silent tears,
Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who hast by Thy might led us into the light;
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee;
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world,
we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand may we forever stand,
True to our God, true to our native land.
Last night was a glorious evening. We worshiped and we sang. We remembered the past and
saw pictures of old friends. We received proclamations from city, county, state and
Congress, and from the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A). We laughed and
laughed some more, and many even danced. The Pastoral Ensemble who sang were told to keep
our day jobs. Together we gave thanks to God who called this church into being 125 years
ago and sustains us still.
Now we continue our celebration, surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses who urge us
on.
There are the 70 faithful who gathered 125 years ago tomorrow with a vision of Pasadena
in their heads and a vision of a Presbyterian Church in their hearts.
There are the pastors who gave faithful service to God through PPC, the elders and
deacons, church school teachers and members of the women's society who encourage us teach
and preach the gospel in ways that will comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
There are choir directors and organists and thousands of choir members who raise their
heavenly voices with our choirs this morning, reminding us that music lifts our hearts to
God in ways mere words can rarely fulfill.
Pasadena was founded by wealthy Midwesterners who bought land here to escape the cold
winters of home. These are the same people who founded this church. From that day forward,
PPC has always had within its congregation, persons of wealth and community stature who
are grateful for their bounty and remember that of those to whom much has been given is
much required.
Pasadena Presbyterian Church has always had within it, as well, those of small
financial means whose faithfulness and widow's mite are the sinews that have held this
church together through thick and thin. This mix of successful American capitalist and
ordinary citizens has provided the yin and yang within which PPC has struggled throughout
its history: pulled on the one hand to maintain the status quo and on the other towards
the radical claims of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Today C.E.O. and gardener sit in the same pew and share a hymnal. Professor and
custodian, blueblood and homeless, first-grader and octogenarian, gay and straight,
Republican and Democrat, Latino and Asian and African and Anglo and Native American all
dip our communion bread into the same chalice, as one body of Christ. The creative tension
continues. Whenever we try to be faithful to the gospel, that tension must exist.
PPC is a living testimony to the on-going struggle between stationary comfort and
social righteousness. Listen to the witness of our past:
In the 1920s when Forest Lawn Cemetery asked Dr. Robert Freeman to preach at the
dedication of a chapel from which Japanese American could not buried, Freeman at first
refused, then was convinced by his colleagues to use it as an opportunity to preach
against discrimination and to proclaim the love of God for all people.
In the great Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy in the 1920s, Dr. John Willis Baer,
elder at PPC and President of Occidental College, became the first non-clergy Moderator of
the General Assembly, the highest elected office in our church. He played a pivotal role
in keeping our denomination from the hands of fundamentalists who denied the advances of
science and decried modern biblical scholarship.
In the 1940s, when Dr. Eugene Carson Blake refused to sign a racially restrictive
neighborhood covenant and preached that blacks and whites are equal and should live
side-by-side, some members of this church put white crosses on other member's lawns. In
that highly-charged context, the message of Blake's preaching and ministry were so
powerful that the church became the third largest in the denomination.
At a time when people stayed within their own denominations and distrust between
Protestants and Catholics was high, Dr. Blake also became a leading voice for what we now
call "ecumenism." The fact that this church's membership is filled now not only
with persons reared as Presbyterian, but also those from Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopal,
Baptist and Catholic backgrounds is due in large part to Eugene Carson Blake, the leading
voice for a united Christendom in the past three centuries.
In the '50s and '60s, Dr. H. Ganse Little, at first politically careful, grew in his
prophetic voice and commitments until eventually an elder of this church placed a
full-page ad in the newspaper saying he disagreed with everything Dr. Ganse Little
preached. But Dr. Little persevered, helping to desegregate Pasadena and to shape our
denomination's Confession of 1967, which calls the church to work for racial equality,
nuclear disarmament and reconciliation within humanity and between humanity and God.
In those years, Wee Kirk Children's Center opened as a cutting-edge program to care for
children, and the church began providing meals to shut-ins, known as Meals on Wheels.
In the 1970s, when many people wanted to write off downtown Pasadena to urban blight
and move out to the suburbs, Dr. Vahe Simonian provided pastoral leadership to keep this
congregation in the midst of the city. In so doing, this congregation became a beacon of
hope in the effort to revitalize Pasadena. This sanctuary was designed with clear glass
doors so that the life of the city and the congregation at worship would be visually
connected to one another. At a time when many people were afraid to walk through this part
of town after dark, members of this church helped create a shelter for the homeless.
In the 1980s, Dr. Dean Thompson, turned his focus to reconciliation within this church,
and to rebuilding this congregation. With Fuller Seminary right across the street, Dr.
Thompson also cared so much that there be a Presbyterian seminary in Southern California,
that he worked with Dr. Jack Rogers to start the San Francisco Theological Seminary
Southern Campus, right here at PPC. SFTS Southern Campus continues to grow and provides a
solid reformed education to ministerial candidates in Southern California, including our
own Steven Neuder.
Now we come to the present and the future. In the midst of our anniversary celebration,
Jesus says that our glorious heritage and a buck-fifty will buy us a cup of coffee in the
reign of God. Being a faithful church isn't like inheriting a family business in which
Father or Mother made a fortune and all we have to do is manage the investments wisely.
It's much more like farming, where every year, in sunshine or hail, rain or drought, you
plant the seeds, tend the fields, and harvest the crop that the people of God may be fed
each and every year.
Jesus puts it this way, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny
themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For 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. Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this sinful generation, of
them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in glory with the angels."
Today we imagine a future for Pasadena Presbyterian that begins right now, a future
with a powerful, prophetic, life-giving, life-changing ministry. Standing on the solid
foundation of our past, but without our feet chained to it, we are called to move forward.
What will that future be? The seeds are already here.
First: The church is a laboratory: a laboratory where people of diverse life experience
and perspective model for the world that it is possible for us to live together in peace
and unity, to respect one another and learn from one another, to reason and argue together
before and with our God, to care for one another in joy and in sorrow, and to struggle
with each other, in this community and in the world for that day when all God's children
will live in a land of milk and honey where justice rolls down like water and
righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
There are those who say the church is best when it is homogenous all conservative or
all liberal or all white or black or Latino. I say to you that such homogeneity is
contrary to scripture. Christ called Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female,
rich and poor. It is a sin that Sunday morning is the most segregated time in of the week
in the United States, and we are called to model a different way right here at Pasadena
Presbyterian. Let this be our warning: expanding this church beyond its Anglo-Saxon roots
will be uncomfortable as we experience the tension between the status quo and the radical
claims of the Gospel. But Jesus warns us in advance that following him means giving up our
life as we know it to find a new life in Christ.
Second: The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is once again engaged in a struggle internally
that reflects the turmoil of our society, not unlike the battles in which John Willis
Baer, Eugene Carson Blake and H. Ganse Little played significant roles. The boundaries of
ordination is the stage in our day upon which we will anguish and debate the love of God,
the nature of creation, the limits of human knowledge, styles of biblical interpretation
and the continuing revelation of the will of God in our day.
This church will once again be given the opportunity for courage and conflict for the
sake of the Gospel.
Third: The gap between rich and poor is growing greater with each year. Tens of
thousands of our neighbors children, youth and adults are kept from the fullness of life
God desires for them and from the full expression of the gifts God has given them.
We are blessed with enormous resources: buildings, land, finances, people skills and
life experience, faith and love, commitment and courage. The time is coming and is now,
when we are called to rally our resources for the least of these, our brothers and
sisters, in education, housing and employment.
As we turn the page to the next chapter of our history, let us reach out to our
neighbors in both spiritual and tangible ways with the love and mercy of Jesus Christ.
Doing so will take us outside our comfort zone, but then, I don't believe a cross is ever
comfortable.
Albert Einstein wrote in 1940:
"Being a lover of freedom, when the revolution came in Germany, I looked to the
universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the
cause of truth; but, no, the universities were immediately silenced. Then, I looked to the
great editors of the newspapers whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed
their love of freedom, but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short
weeks. ... Only the church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for
suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the church before, but now I feel a
great affection and admiration for it because the church alone has had the courage and
persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced thus to confess
that what I once despised, I now praise unreservedly." (Time Magazine, 12/23/40)
Our past is prologue, the foundation on which we stand, a source of inspiration as we
move forward into a future as bright and challenging and exciting as our past. For the
times when Pasadena Presbyterian Church was its strongest and most vital in the past were
precisely those times when it provided support and care for the personal dimensions of
life, and proclaimed in word and deed, the prophetic, radical claims of the Gospel of
Jesus Christ.
Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a cloud of witnesses, let us run with
perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus Christ, the pioneer and
perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the faith that was set before him endured the
cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of
God.
