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Sermon - The Third Sunday after Pentecost (A) - 1 June 2008
St Alban's Epping 7, 8 & 10am
Readings:Genesis 6:9-22, 7:24 Psalm 46, Romans 1:16-17, 3:21-28 Matthew 7:15-29
C.S. Lewis once wrote that when you lose your temper, you are tempted to excuse yourself by saying, “I’m sorry about that outburst, but I was really provoked! That situation just made me angry all of a sudden!” Alas, Lewis writes, the truth is probably more dire. For most people anyway the situation did not suddenly make you an angry person so much as it merely became the occasion that revealed what an angry person you just generally are.
At the conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount Jesus says something similar about Christian disciples. There are two kinds of people who claim to be Jesus’ followers: the wise and the foolish. From the outside looking in it may be difficult to tell the two apart. Both know about Jesus’ words, both have heard the Sermon on the Mount, both can talk intelligently about this great Sermon. Both appear to have built a pretty sturdy house of faith for themselves such that, on the surface of life, both the wise and the foolish look and sound pretty much the same. Maybe they even share the same pew on many Sundays.
Experience tells that in all of life storms come. Jesus does not specify the nature of these storms. In any event, storms come in lives of all of us. There will be turbulent periods when everything in life will seem hard and difficult, including the maintenance of one’s faith in Jesus.
These storms come to everyone, the wise and the foolish alike. True disciples are not promised that they will be spared. The storms are not what make believers either wise or foolish. The storms just reveal who is who. One group weathers the storms while the other group falls with a very great crash. Indeed, this most famous of all Jesus’ sermons ends with a crash. It’s not a terribly cheery or up-beat way to end! This great Sermon that began so wonderfully and gently with that string of Beatitudes now concludes with a warning. The last image Jesus gives is one we can picture pretty well. Picture the devastation to property caused by bush fires, cyclones and earthquakes, for example
Again, it seems like a funny way to end a sermon! Most preachers try to round things off nicely, tying off loose ends and maybe even concluding with some hope. Not Jesus. However the reason is obvious: what he has just laid out in the Sermon on the Mount is a blueprint for discipleship. This has not just been about flowery rhetoric, pretty words and memorable metaphors; this is about life or death! These are words that must be heard but they are words that also must be done!
That’s the difference between the wise and the foolish: they both hear and know the same words but only the wise make a concerted, lifelong effort to put them into practice. The fools hear, know and understand Jesus’ words but then they turn right around and forget all about them as they go about their business in the ordinary hustle and bustle of everyday life. That’s as foolish as getting a bottle of antibiotics from the doctor but never taking a single pill. Just putting the drugs in your medicine cabinet will not heal your infection! Buying books but never reading them will not make you smart. No one will judge your intelligence level merely by scanning the books on your shelves.
And so also it is with the Sermon on the Mount: you’ve got to go do these things and consistently live this way or Jesus’ words are as useless and untaken drugs or unread books. A supposed faith that hears but does not do is a faith that will one day be abandoned. The storms of life will come, push will come to shove and those fools who have not woven Jesus and his ways into the very fabric of their lives, those who have not made living like Jesus second nature, they will crash mightily, thus revealing to themselves and to all that their faith never really meant that much to begin with.
Matthew tells us that Jesus’ great Sermon on the Mount left the crowds amazed and astonished. They’d never met a teacher like Jesus before. He didn’t teach like the scribes and Pharisees. When the other teachers of the law spoke, they were always very careful only to make commentary on the Scriptures. But not Jesus! He said things and then used Scripture as a commentary on his words!
Jesus predicts future persecution of the disciples because of himself. Six times in chapter 5 he says, “You have heard it said but I tell you something else.” Then in a very dramatic move in this morning's reading Jesus places himself at the final judgment day as the very person before whom all people will appear! At the last day Jesus says that he will be the one to who people will appeal and he will be the one to pronounce the verdicts.
Of course, we hear these words and don’t bat an eye because we’ve got Jesus’ identity all sewn up. But not so back then! To those people this must have been as scandalous. Indeed, Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner once wrote that had he been on hand to hear this Sermon, he would have marched straight up to Jesus and said, “Hey, buddy! Who do you think you are? God!!??”
That’s why his words can never be taken as mere advice, as simple recommendations that we can take or leave with little or no consequences one way or the other. Jesus is God in the flesh telling us what life is really all about. If Jesus is who he says he is, then he has just presented to us some of the basics of what life in creation means and is meant to be.
We must live out what Jesus presents because apparently only this kind of lived-out faith can endure. Maybe it’s kind of like concrete. If you go to the hardware store and buy a bag of concrete, what you get is a bag of powder. It doesn’t look very strong and, indeed, by itself it wouldn’t hold up much. A child could kick the stuff around and scatter the grains to the wind. However, add the right amount of water to that powder and you get a substance that will soon set as hard as a rock.
Jesus’ words are like that: they’ve got all the ingredients needed for a solid foundation in life. It’s all there in the Sermon on the Mount like concrete powder in a bag. Mixing those words into your daily life is what adds the water that finally sets up the concrete. There’s just something about taking these words and then really living them that makes the difference between mere powder and durable concrete.
So how can we try to be among the wise whose faith is finally so strong and meaningful that it can withstand even life’s fierce storms? We need to make sure that we truly do try to fit all of life and its surprises, the good, the bad, and the ordinary, into our theology of life. The American Episcopal priest, Barbara Brown Taylor was chided by a poor person for whom she had prayed. Apparently the person didn’t much like being called poor and questioned whether he really needed prayer any more than anyone else. That set her to thinking, wondering how people would react if one Sunday there was a prayer litany printed in the bulletin that went something like, “For those in bondage to their assets, let us pray to the Lord. Lord, have mercy. For those whose success does not satisfy, for the entitled and well off and comfortable, let us pray to the Lord. Lord, have mercy.”
How well do we see all of life through the lens of our discipleship? How hard do we try to bring Jesus’ words to bear on every part of our life, including what we would regard as the good and lovely parts? These days we hear a lot about virtue and character, mostly unhappily enough from politicians. Politicians know however what the media and entertainment industry also know; namely, that image is everything and for many people “character” means little more than “personality,” being true to one’s own internal gyroscope.
True character does not emerge from what others can see on the surface of life. Character is what we develop on the inside through doing the right thing and thinking the right way and doing so repeatedly. As Aristotle once said, one nice day does not make an entire nice summer and so also an isolated act of virtue does not constitute good character. Good character and in our case good Christ-like character, emerges from a whole series of good habits cultivated over a lifetime. Character is how we think, what we say and how we act when no one else is looking or listening. Character is a habit. We have true character when doing or saying or thinking the right thing is what occurs to us automatically, what bubbles up unbidden.
In a way what Jesus gives us in the Sermon on the Mount, as well as throughout the course of all that Jesus said and taught in the gospels, is “The Answer”. It tells us who Jesus is, tells us who the true God of the universe is. It tells us how to live for that God in the Body of Christ in ways that will go with the way God set up this creation, in ways that will affirm the God-given dignity of each person, in ways that will put us on that straight and narrow path that leads to life. Jesus has given us “The Answer” and that’s precisely why only a fool would receive all of this and not do much if anything to enact it in daily living.
This sermon prepared using material from http://cep.calvinseminary.edu/