PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER

Matthew 7:21-29                                                 Is There Still a Rock Anywhere?

Sermon June 1, 2008:  People's United Church of Christ, Dover, DE:  The Rev. Dan Griggs

 

            Jesus said:  "Whoever hears my teachings and does them … is like a man who built his house on a rock."  My question today is one that a lot of people are asking:  Is there still a rock anywhere?  Let's go looking for a rock. 

 

            Most of us can still remember a time when things held together.  If you were a church-goer then you also had a spiritual faith and you lived by the expected standards of behavior—which were more or less based on the Bible.  These three things went together:  morals, church and faith.  But we're now living in a whole new era—some people call it the "postmodern" era—when all the individual pieces of culture have been set apart, and nothing necessarily goes with anything else.  You can pick and choose as you please.  So you meet people who go to church but don't believe much of anything, and people who are moral but avoid church, and people who go to church but ignore all the ethical teachings of the Bible, the church and the community.  This is why I want to go looking for a rock. 

            Almost all Americans today are united in honoring our military personnel.  Those who are wounded in the wars receive some of the best medical care in the world.  Those who die in combat are returned to their loved ones in private for burial—no more body-bags on the evening news.  Even the senators and representatives who oppose the war vote to pay the bills in order to protect our military personnel.  America hasn't been this united in support of our troops since 1953.  But there are some other pieces that used to go with troop support, that are no longer part of the package.  The Veterans Administration has been closing VA hospitals for years:  many vets who used to be able to get low-cost medical care for life are no longer able to get to the VA facilities that remain; and this most recent scandal about Walter Reed Hospital came about because they're getting ready to close Walter Reed and didn't want to waste money on upkeep.  Another piece that used to be part of supporting our troops was education when they got home.  Nowadays when our military personnel are mustered out, they go back home and look for work:  that education component is so small it doesn't pay for college anymore.  All the little pieces of supporting our military personnel have been pulled apart, and even with some of these pieces being debated by the presidential candidates, that era of real support for the troops is gone.  The world has changed.  A lot of people nowadays are looking for a rock. 

 

            Not having a good foundation beneath our lives makes us feel vulnerable and maybe even confused.  Some people react to this uncertainty by picking out something very clear and making it absolute.  The Bible gets used this way a lot.  If you take the literal words of the Bible out of context and apply them to today, and say "this is the absolute foundation," you can feel better; you've laid a foundation.  But like plaster of Paris, this rock cracks easily—as the Apostle Paul wrote to the Christians in Corinth:  "The letter of the law kills, but it's the Spirit of God that gives life."[1]  The Christians in Colossae had become convinced that if they could just set up some rules to follow, they would be okay with God; but Paul wrote these words to them:[2]

 

 

Using the Bible as a rule-book doesn't uncover any rock foundation that will last. 

            But neither does the opposite reaction to moral confusion and uncertainty:  that is, doing what feels good.  Ernest Hemmingway summarized this philosophy of "good" and "bad" this way:  "It's good if you feel good afterward, and it's bad if you feel bad afterward."  Talk about building a house on sand!  We're looking for a rock. 

            Another trap in our time is to align my definitions of "good" and "evil" with my favorite political party.  Until recently this has been almost exclusively the move of what we may call "liberal religion":  if it's "politically correct" then we support it.  Unfortunately "conservative religion" has found a way to do this, too; so now it looks like the American political parties are setting the moral tone for our life together; and that's scary.  In my opinion the church needs to be the institution that's out front, at the cutting edge of defining the moral issues of our time and doing the hard work of theological thinking to find "what the Spirit is saying to the churches," because I believe that "God is still speaking."  We may still disagree about what we hear, but our differences would then be within the sphere of the Spirit's activity, and we would discuss them theologically, not politically.  But even the UCC has sometimes fallen in step with "political correctness."  Can we Christians stop thinking of ourselves as "liberals" and "conservatives" and start thinking of ourselves as the people Christ sends into the world in our generation for the redemption of everybody and everything possible?  We're looking for a rock. 

            Another place people look for life foundations is to the new idea, the new moral proposal, the new economic approach, the new answer to the world's chains that bind us.  For example, we need food, clothing, housing, health-care and love to survive.  To secure the good life back in the 1970's it was the savings and loan boom; then came the junk bond boom of the  '80's; then came the dot-com explosion; and then came the housing-mortgage balloon.  All these looked like they would make us physically comfortable in our lives.  What's next?  Last week I heard an analyst say that the coming boom is going to be in commodity futures—oil, corn, soybeans, cotton, anything that's produced for consumption:  and what is that doing to the prices?  You've got it!  In economics each one of these booms has looked like a rock-solid investment, and not a one of them can hold water back in a storm.  Nevertheless we seem never to learn—booms are always followed by busts.  We're looking for a rock. 

 

            This is the world's wisdom—law, what feels good, political power, the current growth boom.  And we flock after each one in turn, looking for a rock foundation on which to build our lives.  This is the way of the world.  The New Testament scholar Marcus Borg says that what Jesus proposes is a wisdom to subvert the wisdom of the world.[3]  I tried to describe it last Sunday as a "Way" of life; the "road" was a metaphor for Jesus' wisdom teaching; the metaphor this week is the "rock"—same point:  Jesus gives us something solid to stand on.  Have you ever really listened to Jesus' subversive words?[4] 

           

            Yes, Jesus is speaking in metaphors:  this is wisdom, not law.  He points us in a direction where we will find that rock we're seeking. 

 

            We are indeed living in a new, postmodern era, and all the standards have changed—not necessarily for the better.  That simply means that our world has found a new set of methods to hold people and God's creation in bondage and dominate us.  Jesus came to set the captives free—captives of the old domination, and captives of the new domination, too.  Christ sends us into this strange new world to interrupt how it chews people up.  The ancient Greek inventor Archemedes said, "Give me a place to stand and I will move the world."  All we need is a place to stand outside this captive world.  And that place to stand is a rock, the teachings of Jesus.  Looking for a rock, we've found it.

AMEN