Founded on Rock
(Rutgers, May 17, 1998; 6th Sunday of Easter p.m., Year C;
Celebrating the 200th Anniversary of Rutgers Presbyterian Church)
Psalm 62:1-2; 27.4; 62:5-7 (OT, pp. 581, 555); Ephesians 2:19-22 (NT, p.
205);
Matthew 22:35-40; 7:24-27 (NT, pp. 25, 7)
In the 7th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew,
Jesus concludes his Sermon on the Mount,
by telling a parable about two builders:
a wise one, whose house was founded on rock,
and a foolish one, whose house was founded on sand.
Well, once upon a time, long, long ago, in the year A.D. 1920,
when the Rev. Dr. Daniel Russell was the pastor of Rutgers Church,
and none of us here today was yet affiliated with it,
and the congregation was still worshiping in
the large Romanesque sanctuary that opened off of Broadway,
where the Chase Bank and Rutgers Office Building now stand,
there was an up-and-coming young Bohemian poet
who lived and worked in Greenwich Village,
far downtown on the #1 subway line.
Her name was Edna St.Vincent Milay.
Milay had just published her second volume of poems,
which contained a number of irreverent observations on life
that she'd called, provocatively, A Few Figs from Thistles.
This title of hers was calculated to tweak the nose
of pew-sitting Christians, like those, I suppose,
uptown along the #1 subway line at Broadway and 73rd St.,
for her title Figs from Thistles satirized a vs. from Scripture,
one that occurs earlier in good old ch. 7 of Matt.-verse 16.
There Jesus speaks about being able to discern people's true nature
by observing the fruit that they produce.
And Jesus asks, rhetorically.
"Are grapes gathered from thorns,
or figs from thistles?"
And in our minds we answer, "Of course not!
Figs don't come from thistles;
good things don't come from bad people."
But in Milay's book, she was seeking to present herself
precisely as a thistle who did have a few figs to offer, and
the 2nd Fig her pen offered was intended as a satirical rejoinder
to Jesus's parable about those houses built on rock and sand,
That fig of hers read like this:
"Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:
Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!"
Well, some 78 years later,
it's my turn to offer a bit of a rejoinder to Ms. Milay.
So let me begin by assuring all of our guests
at this service of rededication
that we certainly have not meant to invite you here to:
"Come and see our ~ houses safe upon the rock."
Neither have we meant to invite you here to.
"Come and see our shining palace built upon the sand!"
No, rather we've meant with a deep sense of humility to invite you
here to: "Come & experience, we pray, two temples founded on rock!"
first the grace-filled temple of God that is this renovated sanctuary
and second the grace-dependent temple of God,
under perpetual construction, that is our congregation.
Once upon a time, long, long ago, around the year B.C. 920,
when Solomon was still the king of Israel,
and none of us here today was yet alive,
there had come to stand in the city of Jerusalem
a grace-filled temple of God founded on rock.
This was the temple celebrated in many of the Psalms-
for example, Psalm 27, which we heard this afternoon:
"One thing I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after.
to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life,
to behold the beauty of the Lord,
and to inquire in God's temple."
A visitor to Jerusalem today will surely include on the itinerary
the Muslim shrine called "the Dome of the Rock," which
stands on the same site as the Israelite temple built by Solomon.
As the name "Dome of the Rock" suggests,
the focus of the shrine is the massive outcropping of bedrock,
of living stone, which many scholars believe to have also been a
prominent feature of the Jewish Temple built by S, millennia ago.
One can well imagine an ancient Israelite worshiper coming to the
Jerusalem temple, that grace-filled house of God founded on rock,
and there reciting the words of Psalm 62:
"For God alone my soul waits in stillness,
for my hope is from God,
who alone is my rock and my salvation,
my fortress; I shall not be shaken.
On God rests my deliverance and my honor;
my mighty rock, my refuge is in God."
For the ancient psalmist, the rock on which the temple was founded
served as a powerful metaphor for the bedrock of all existence,
that on which the whole of one's life must be built-God.
And the psalmist's longing
"to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life"
bespeaks, again through a powerful metaphor,
our aspiration, our desire to live every day of our lives-
regardless of where we may physically be-
to live every day of our lives in perpetual
communion with God, the ground of our existence.
Jesus, as a pious Jew, prayed the Psalms regularly, and worshiped at
the Second Temple,
which had been built after the first one had been destroyed,
and which, like the first, had been founded and focused
on that same massive outcropping of living stone,
of bedrock, that can still be visited today.
And I believe that when Jesus taught
about the need to build our house on rock, rather than sand,
he was, like the psalmists, alluding to both
the house that was the temple of God in Jerusalem
and the house that is the daily lives of God's people.
Jesus taught that
in order to experience God as the foundation and focus for daily life
one must go beyond simply hearing God's word and will
to actually doing God's word and will.
And what is the word and will of God to be practiced in daily life?
w ell, in our other passage from the Gospel of Matthew , chap. 22,
Jesus offers his own summary of God's commandments, quoting
from two different Books of Moses, books of Torah, namely
Deuteronomy, chapter 6, and Leviticus, chapter 19:
"'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
and with all your soul, and with all your mind'
and 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself,"'
Now, as Jesus knew only too well,
to practice a wholehearted loving of both God and neighbor
is not to live safely.
It is to live fully exposed to the storms in life;
it is to live at maximum risk,
as can be learned, for example, from the
life+loss-of-pulpit of the Rev. Jimmy Creech of Omaha, Neb.
and the life + death of Bishop Juan Gerardi of Guatemala.
But it is when we are seeking to practice in our daily lives
a wholehearted loving of both God and neighbor-
it is then that we are founded on the rock of God + God's grace;
it is then that we are anchored
in the gift of an eternal life impervious to storms and risks.
What was it that Edna St. Vincent Milay said about:
"Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand"?
Oh no, that observation of hers is no fig from thistles.
For the truth of the matter is different from that + more like this:
"Fully exposed upon the rock the at-risk houses still stand."
It is when a congregation of people is committed to being fully exposed
to the storms in life and to putting itself at risk
by practicing a wholehearted loving of both God and neighbor-
it is only then that it can offer an invitation to an event like this
that has no danger of sounding like
the Second Fig of Edna St. Vincent Milay:
"Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!"
Only when a congregation is committed
to practicing a wholehearted loving of both God and neighbor
will guests hear its invitation to an event like today's to be saying:
"Come and experience, we pray, two temples founded on rock!"
first the grace-filled temple of God that is this renovated sanctuary
and second the grace-dependent temple of God,
under perpetual construction, that is our congregation.
It is the New Testament Letter to the Ephesians
that specifically describes the community of faith by using
the powerful metaphor of a building bonded together in Christ
and growing in the Holy Spirit into a dwelling place of God,
into a holy temple in the Lord.
What a remarkable image-
this image of the community of faith as a kind of
"organic" building under a perpetual process of construction,
growing into a holy temple,
into a dwelling place of God.
This passage offers us a remarkable insight into
how to properly define the term "church growth."
Here we learn that "church growth" is really about developing
into a company of people in whom God's Spirit dwells,
about being built up into a holy temple whose liturgy
is the wholehearted loving of God and neighbor.
In this spirit, then, let us now proceed to the rededication
both of our sanctuary and of ourselves.
to our rededication as temples founded on the rock of God
and on the rock of God's gracious word and will,
made known in Christ.
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