FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, ATLANTA, GEORGIA
Sermon by Dr. George Bryant Wirth
Founders’ Sunday
January 8, 2006
FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION
Scripture: Psalm 145; Luke 2:22-40
INTRODUCTION
In his massive and masterful two volume biography of Winston Churchill entitled “The Last Lion,” author William Manchester re-traces the history of one of England’s most distinguished families going all the way back to the first Winston Churchill who was the great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather of the future Prime Minister of Great Britain. The first Sir Winston was born in 1620, died in 1688 and was the father of five children, including John who became a fierce and famous soldier and won a decisive victory over the French at Blenheim on the Danube River in Bavaria.
Queen Anne was so grateful and impressed with Sir John’s military success that she made him the Duke of Marlborough and gave him, actually built for him a palace, which is named after the place where he had been victorious in battle – Blenheim – and which is one of my favorite spots in the United Kingdom. (From “The Last Lion” by William Manchester, Little, Brown and Company, 1983, page 93)
Not long after all the accolades were heaped upon him, the Duke of Marlborough, who originally came from a humble background, was asked by one of his peers at court, “Your Grace, whose descendant are you?” To which the Duke replied with a not-so-subtle smile, “Sir, I am not a descendant. I am an ancestor.”
I
The truth is, each of us and all of us are both – descendants of those who have gone before us and ancestors of those who will come after us. So it was, so it is and so it shall be, From Generation to Generation.
And we in this congregation have a tradition of remembering our ancestors, our Presbyterian forbears, every year on Founders’ Sunday, that day in January which falls closest to our founding date of January 8th, 1848, when 19 men and women launched this church with a vision to become all that God called them to be.
This morning, we honor 16 members who joined our community of faith prior to 1935 and their names are listed in the bulletin:
Mamie Lowe Hubbard – 1908
Ruth Allen – 1915
Ruth Pratt – 1920
Joseph Hilsman Jr. – 1924
Betty Young – 1926
Virginia Blandford – 1928
Bessie Boeke – 1930
Robyn Walsh – 1930
Francis Jones Jr. – 1930
Bettie Savell – 1931
Louise Allen – 1931
Dorothy McClatchey – 1932
Rhett Sanders – 1932
Susan Daugherty – 1933
Mary Rooker – 1934
Caroline Bethea – 1934
Most of them, our matriarchs and patriarchs, are here in worship today, and with thankful hearts, profound respect and a sense of celebration, we recognize these long-time members and their families who have helped to build upon the foundation and lead the way in Our Journey of Faith - from Generation to Generation!
And there are others with us in spirit who once sat in these pews and have gone on to join the church triumphant. We call them “The Cloud of Witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1), the “Communion of Saints,” and we can see them in our mind’s eye, picture them in our memories, even as we lift them up from our hearts to the heart of God in heaven!
I told you more than fifteen years ago in one of my first sermons how the Christian author Joyce Landorf described them as “Balcony People.” Listen again to the way she envisioned their presence with us:
“Think of it! All around that sphere of clear air in our conscious minds runs a balcony filled with people who are not merely sitting there, but practically hanging over the rail, cheering us on…My mother is there, already in heaven’s balcony since 1966…She had always told me I was special and that God would give me a unique ministry…and now she is leaning over the railing, smiling at me and saying ‘I told you so!’…Ah, that cloud of witnesses in our balcony past and present. (Where and) what would we be without them?” (From “Balcony People” by Joyce Landorf, Word Books, 1984, pages 34-36)
Exactly so! We stand in a long line today, together with those members who joined this church family before 1935, and all those who worshipped here back when this sanctuary was built in 1917 – 1919, and all those who belonged to this congregation when we were located down on Marietta Street, and those who were there on the day when we were founded in 1848.
But the line goes back farther than that, including our forbears from Scotland and Northern Ireland who brought the Presbyterian Tradition to this land in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the Reformers who laid the foundations of the Protestant Church in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the Eastern Orthodox Christians whose capital city Constantinople was built first in the 6th century, and the Roman Catholic Church with their headquarters in the Vatican down through the years, all the way back to the early Christians and the original band of disciples who followed Jesus and committed their lives to Him. That’s how the Psalmist envisioned it when he wrote: One generation shall praise Thy works to another and shall declare Thy mighty acts! (Psalm 145:4)
My friends, the line stretches out far beyond what the human eye can see, and it extends from generation to generation for all those who have believed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and have been baptized through their faith in Him.
II
Now, according to our worship calendar, this is Founders’ Sunday. But the official liturgical calendar also names this day “The Baptism of Our Lord.” We know that Jesus was baptized in the River Jordan as He began His ministry around the age of thirty.
However, there was an earlier event in our Lord’s life which was far more similar to the celebration of infant baptism. I’m speaking about the day when Jesus, as a little child, was dedicated in the temple in Jerusalem.
Luke tells us that two older adults were there in the congregation, a man named Simeon and a woman named Anna, both of whom recognized that this little boy was the long awaited Messiah. And when Simeon saw Him, the Bible says that he picked the Child up in his arms and exclaimed:
Lord, now let Thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation which Thou hast prepared in the presence of all people, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to Thy people Israel. (Luke 2:29-32)
In that sacred moment, one generation shared and passed God’s blessing on to the next generation, which is what we have been doing in this congregation since 1848, and what the Christian church has done for almost 2000 years.
You see, the baptism of an infant or an elementary aged child or a teenager or an adult is the way that we say “This person belongs to the Lord!” So it was for Mamie Lowe Hubbard, one of our members whom we honor today, when she was baptized in the First Presbyterian Church of Atlanta in 1908. And so it has been for you and for me.
I was baptized at the age of 8 in the summer of 1955 out on eastern Long Island. A storm had stirred up, and my mother told me years later than when the water was sprinkled over my head, thunder rolled in the sky and she said quietly, “Look out Lord, here he comes!”
To be sure, we all have our stories, and as we tell them, we are remembering how many of us were raised in the faith, just like Rufus Jones who was brought up in the Quaker tradition and wrote these words later in his life:
“I am most of all thankful for my birthplace and early nurture in a spiritually minded home; thankful indeed that from the cradle I was saturated with the Bible, and immersed in an environment of religion. I was born into…faith, and I can never be grateful enough for what was done for me. I became the heir of a vast invisible inheritance and there is nothing I would exchange for that.”
Many of us can claim that same kind of Christian upbringing, while others of us remember a moment of decision and conversion at a summer camp or a weekend retreat or a youth mission trip or a Young Life rally or a Billy Graham crusade or a crisis event which brought us to our knees and showed us the way to salvation. However, whenever, wherever it happened, that’s how you and I joined the long line of those who have committed their lives to Jesus Christ from Generation to Generation.
CONCLUSION
In a few minutes, we are going to do something different before the Benediction. During the Affirmation of Faith, we will invite all of you to re-affirm your baptismal vows. This is not meant to be manipulative, neither are we wanting to leave anyone out who has not been baptized. So as we come to that moment at the end of this service, on a voluntary basis, we will invite you to say the Creed in a responsive manner, closing with the question: “Do you re-affirm your baptismal vows as disciples of Jesus Christ?”
But before we do, I want to read you this short story from our history book “A Church on Peachtree,” published during our 150th Anniversary Celebration in 1998:
“In 1910, Dr. William J. Ellis, a newspaper writer from Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, visited the Greek city of Ephesus, said to have been settled before 1000 B.C, site both of the ancient Greek temple of Diana and one of the earliest churches of Christendom, the Double Church of Saint John the Divine. During his visit, Ellis came upon a stone on which a cross was carved in relief. The stone would later become a valued part of First Church.
It was the Apostle Paul who brought Christianity to Ephesus during his missionary journeys, and to the congregation there was addressed the New Testament Letter to the Ephesians. Tradition suggests that John the Elder also spent time in the city during the latter part of his life and wrote the first of the letters in the Book of Revelation there.
At the time of Ellis’s visit, little remained of the Greek temple. But the white marble walls of the Double Church of Saint John the Divine still stood, albeit untended and virtually in the midst of a plowed field.
‘I found crude farming going on right up to the walls of the church,’ Ellis later said. ‘As I was leaving the church, riding over a plowed field that adjoined it, I noticed lying by a furrow, and just about to be turned under by the next plow, a small block of marble, containing a cross, which had been part of the walls or ornamentation of the church, and had fallen to the ground. As the block of marble was not attached to the walls . . . and as its loose condition would make it fair spoil for one of the lime-burners who have destroyed so many priceless marbles, I made signs to my horse-boy that if he would convey the block of marble to Smyrna (Turkey), I would pay him for it.’
In Smyrna, one of Ellis’s friends arranged for the marble to be shipped to New Jersey, and from there Ellis took it to his home in Swarthmore. After keeping the marble for several years, Ellis, on a lecture visit to First Church in 1917, gave it to Dr. Lyons to be used in the new sanctuary. Lyons, in turn, commissioned The Tiffany Studios in New York City to use the stone as part of a baptismal font, and they mounted it on a low, matching marble pedestal.
‘I am very proud of the skill with which Tiffany mounted the relic,’ Ellis later wrote First Church. ‘I had cudgeled my brains in vain to devise a mounting that would not be incongruous. . . I have always been glad that I gave it to you, and not to a museum.’”
Last summer, Barbara and I together with members of this church, others from Atlanta and different cities in the East, visited the church in Ephesus from which this stone came, and I thought to myself then and want to tell you now how amazing I think it is that we at the corner of 16th and Peachtree are connected to that ancient place and to Paul and John and all those who have gone before us in Our Journey of Faith.
That, my friends, is a divine mystery which belongs to the sacred history of this great congregation. So it has been, so it is now and so it ever shall be, From Generation to Generation!
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.