“Concupiscence;
Liberating You from Your Money;
Of
Birds, Flowers, and God; Now Is the Day of Salvation;
Don’t
Worry, Be Happy; and a late entry –
On
What Foundation Will You Build Your Life?"
Matthew
6:24-34 and Matthew 7:24-29
First
Presbyterian
The
Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
February
27, 2011
Today’s gospel passage is so rich
that I had a hard time this week deciding what facet of it to preach.
So, as those of you know who subscribe to our midweek email, I kind of
playfully listed five possible sermon titles representing five different
directions the sermon could take and invited you to register your preference.
The five titles, as you can see in your bulletin, are
“Concupiscence,” “Liberating You from Your Money,” “Of Birds, Flowers,
and God,” “Now Is the Day of Salvation,” and “Don’t Worry, Be
Happy.” Thank you to those who
played along and voted. Each of the
titles garnered at least one tally and the voting was close but, in the end –
I am a little surprised to tell you that the most votes were cast for –
“Liberating You from Your Money.”
But, but…I sent the email on Tuesday
and by the end of the day Wednesday I wanted to add another option.
Here is what happened. The
liturgical calendar is movable depending on the date of Easter.
In a year when Lent begins as late as possible, there are eight Sundays
in what we call “ordinary” time between the Baptism of the Lord Sunday and
Transfiguration Sunday, the Sunday before the start of Lent.
This year, though, because Lent is not quite as late as it can be, there
are only seven Sundays. The eighth
Sunday’s gospel lection is the very last section of the Sermon on the Mount,
the Sermon having been our topic across these recent weeks.
Now, if it were me, I might have preached on that passage next week even
though it is Transfiguration Sunday because it does not seem right to preach
through the whole sermon and then to forego the climax.
But Don loves Transfiguration Sunday so much that he begged, beseeched,
and cajoled me all week to let him preach next Sunday about Transfiguration,
every preacher’s favorite topic. So,
in reading what would have been next week’s gospel passage if it were an eight
week year – are you getting all this – I found it offers an excellent way of
making sense of this week’s.
Let me read that concluding section of
the Sermon on the Mount:
“Everyone
then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who
built his house on rock. The rain
fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not
fall, because it had been founded on rock. And
everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a
foolish man who built his house on sand. The
rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house,
and it fell – and great was its fall!”
So, a late entry in the sermon title
menu – “On What Foundation Will You Build Your Life? – and, since because
I am preaching I can rig the voting, I declare this one to be the winner though,
indeed, I shall touch on all of them before we are finished.
This parable with which Jesus concludes
his Sermon is called a two-story parable. He
tells two stories side by side. In
two-story parables, we compare what Jesus is teaching in both stories and then
our interpretation arises out of the comparison.
So, first, we ask what is the same in
the two stories? Well, each man
(though it could also have been two women, but in the parable it is two men)
builds a house. That is not a
variable. Everyone builds a house in
which to live. Jesus means by that
to say that everybody builds a philosophy of life by which to live.
Everybody builds a way of life that the parable calls a house.
In both stories in the parable, a man builds a house.
Second, both houses face storms.
One builds his house on rock and the rains fall, the floods come, and the
winds blow and beat on that house. The
other builds his house on sand and the rains fall, the floods come, and the
winds blow and beat against that house. Both
houses face storms.
The parable is not about whether to
build a big house or a small house. It
is not about whether to build a
So, what is the variable in the
parable? The difference has to do
with us. It is a parable about the
hearers. It is about those who hear the Sermon on the Mount.
“Everyone who hears these words
of mine and does them is wise – like a man who builds his house on rock, a
safe place that will not give way in a storm.
Everyone who hears these words of
mine and does not do them is like a foolish man who built his house on sand…and
when the storms come, that house falls, collapses, crumbles.
So the variable is that one hears the words of Jesus and acts on them and
the other one hears his words and does not act on them.
This two-story parable is about the
durability of the foundation on which we choose to build our houses, on which we
choose to build our lives. Jesus
says, “If you hear MY words and do MY
words…” Jesus, the Christ of
God, is claiming to be the faithful and trustworthy rock on which you can build
your life. Conversely, if you do not
build on this rock, he says, you are building on sand.
What are some of the foundations, if
not on Jesus the Christ, on which we choose to build our houses, our lives?
Where are we going to get the meaning and motivation for our lives if not
from the Christ?
Some of us make our careers the
foundation. We give everything to
our work. Even preachers do that
sometimes. Early on, to my regret, I
was guilty of making my career the foundation of my life.
Not God. Not Jesus.
But my work. The thing is,
for those who build their foundations on their careers, when a storm comes –
and the winds of downsizing or illness or obsolescence beat against it and your
career is gone, or your family goes because you have not been there for them,
what happens then? A career is a
wonderful house, but it is a bad foundation.
Some of us make our families the
foundation. We make our family the
most important thing in our lives. But,
again, a family is a great house but a poor foundation.
If you look to your children to give meaning to your life, if you worship
or idolize them, you are asking too much of them.
If you ask your spouse to provide the meaning for your life, you are
asking too much of him or her. When
your children leave home to start a life independent from yours, or if something
happens to your spouse or your relationship, your foundation becomes as shifting
sand and great will be your fall.
Some of us make money the foundation of
our lives. Here is where we get back
in touch with our original text of the day and the five sermon titles.
In our culture, we need money in our lives.
Money is a necessity but it
is a terrible foundation on which to build or base a life.
Here, Jesus uses a different metaphor
when he said, “No one can serve two
masters...You cannot serve both God and wealth.”
When money is our master, it does not let go easily.
Our pursuit of it easily becomes insatiable and determinative.
As we make a certain amount of money, we find we want to make more.
Money becomes the primary factor in decisions we make about our lives.
How ironical that the phrase “in God we trust” appears on our money.
We wish we had more of it and we long for what money can buy.
We think that the more of it we have, the greater that peace of mind will
come to us. Concupiscence
describes our attempts to fill the God-space in us with something other than
God.
Concupiscence tells us that many other
things, like money and what it can do for us or get for us, seem more attractive
or immediate or useful than God and thus we go after them, but all of them
finally frustrate and disappoint.
Twenty-some years ago I embarked with a
few other people on a mission and study tour of
With stones for pillows and cornhusks
for blankets, there we were, strange bedfellows, under the stars in a faraway
place and, as both of us had a hard time getting to sleep, Herb began to talk to
me. I was a young pastor then and
Herb was a veteran pastor and he said to me, with the feel of a mentor imparting
wisdom to an apprentice, “The primary
task of a pastor is to liberate people from their money.”
He did not see stewardship campaigns, for instance, primarily as
fundraising but faith-raising. But
what Herb really meant is that worshiping at the altar of wealth is an insidious
and thoroughgoing enslavement. It
ruins relationships and robs us of righteousness since in such servitude we
cannot be rightly related to anyone or anything and both we and those around us
suffer on account of it. Helping
people to loosen their attachment to money frees people to live more God and
community centered lives and thus the ministry of liberating people from money.
Jesus then points to birds of the air
and flowers of the field to say that God’s care for us is complete.
Jamestown’s own Roger Tory Peterson, the greatest birder who ever
lived, wrote in his book called Birds Over America that “To
say that people are attracted to birds because of their color, music, grace,
vivacity and that sort of thing is superficial rationalization.
I suspect a more fundamental reason is that birds suggest freedom and
escape from restraint.” That
sounds right to me. To be sure,
birds forage for food as every animal does, as we have to do, and if no food is
found, they die. But Jesus does not
mean to draw his illustration too tight. He
wants us to move to a higher consciousness, to a freedom that sees life as more
than an anxious project of survival. He
wants us to see it as a gift of God on whom we can count.
Eugene Peterson, in his paraphrase of The
Bible called The Message, captures the essence of Jesus’ preaching about birds,
flowers, and God, writing, “What
I’m trying to do here is to get you to relax, to not be so preoccupied with getting,
so you can respond to God’s giving.
People who don’t know God and the way he works fuss over these things,
but you know both God and how we works. Steep
your life in God-reality, God-initiative, God-provisions.
Don’t worry about missing out. You’ll
find that all your everyday human concerns will be met.”
Now
is the day of salvation. There
is perhaps a bit of dark humor when Jesus says, “Do
not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own.
Today’s trouble is enough for today.”
Do not pre-occupy your life by concerning yourself overmuch about the
future that may or may not happen the way you think it will.
When you fill your life with “tomorrow thinking” you miss out on the
fullness of today and what it offers and holds.
God is present with you now and becoming more fully cognizant of
God-with-you alters the way you experience and engage both the present and the
future, rendering your endless worrying pointless.
God will be with you in whatever the future brings and will help you to
deal with whatever comes.
So don’t
worry, be happy. God does want
us to be happy…happy in the sense of knowing God-blessedness which is why
translations of the Beatitudes early in Jesus’ Sermon sometimes substitute the
word “happy” for the word “blessed.”
The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus’
interpretation of the law, of the Torah. He
said that he did not come to destroy or to abolish the law but to fulfill it, to
complete it, to open it up. In many
respects, the Sermon mirrors Psalm 1, the most important of all the Psalms to
the Hebrews because it is the law Psalm. The
first word of that Psalm, like the first word of the Sermon on the Mount in the
Beatitudes is “blessed – happy.” Note
the similarities for Psalm 1 also is a two-story parable:
Happy
are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that
sinner tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers; but their delight is in the law of
the Lord, and on his law they meditate day and night.
They are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit
in its season, and their leaves do not wither…The wicked are not so, but are
like chaff that the wind blows away…”
And from the Sermon:
Everyone
who hears these words of mine (I have preached in this Sermon) and acts on them
will be like a wise man who built his house on rock.
The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that
house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock.
And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will
be like a foolish man who built his house on sand.
The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that
house, and it fell…
So, dear church, will the foundation on
which you are building your house, your life, hold strong when storms come your
way as inevitably they will come? There
are many good things in life, many ways to live, many houses to build, but there
is only one firm foundation – God the solid rock whom we best know in Jesus
the Christ. All other ground is
sinking sand.
Amen.
Copyright
© 2011 First Presbyterian Church