Click Here To Read Past Sermons  

Sermon for Proper 4A

June 2, 2002

Some years ago I was paying a pastoral call on a woman from my parish who was just returning home from an extended stay in a rehab facility where she had been recovering from a stroke. She had come a long way from the stroke; but she still had some mobility problems, and was no longer able to do easily a lot of the things that she’d always taken for granted doing for herself, and she was beginning to think about the difficult decision to sell her house that she had lived in for many years and move to an assisted living complex. We were sitting there in her living room, talking about all these things, when she said, “I just don’t know how I’d keep on going if I didn’t have my faith. It’s like I’ve been going through all the storms and trials, but my faith gives me a solid place to stand.”

When I read the Gospel lesson for this morning, I thought about that conversation. That woman was one of the people Jesus talks about in the lesson today, the wise people who build their houses on a rock, so that when the rains fall and the floods come and the winds beat upon them, they do not fall, because they are founded on the rock. The Gospel lesson is an invitation to us all to grow in that kind of faith, that faith that gives us a rock-solid foundation for dealing with all the difficult things that life and the world and experience can dish out to us.

And Jesus in the Gospel today tells us exactly how we can grow in that faith, exactly how we can build on that foundation: all we have to do is hear Jesus’ words and act on them. That’s all. It’s as simple as that.

At least, it sounds simple until we try to put it into action. It sounds simple until we start asking the questions: What actual things do we need to be doing in order to do what Jesus says? How, practically, can we take the words of Jesus that we hear in the Gospels and put them into real practice in our real lives?

Well, one way to do it would be to treat Jesus’ words as commandments, as rules or requirements, and to try to obey Jesus’ commandments in every instance of our experience. We could, in essence, treat Jesus’ words the way Moses in our First Testament lesson calls the Israelites to treat all of his words: we could put them in our heart and in our soul, we could bind them on our hands and write them on our foreheads, we could recite them when we get up in the morning and before we sleep at night, we could talk about them when we go out and when we come in, we could teach them to our children and require our children to obey them just as we feel we are required to obey them. We could treat the Good News about Jesus as a book of rules for playing the game of life, rules that will punish us, rules that will curse us, if we should fail to keep them.

That’s one way to understand Jesus’ call to act upon his words. There’s just one problem: it doesn’t work. We human beings are notoriously unable to stick to that kind of rule, to obey that kind of law. That’s what Paul is talking about in the Epistle lesson today: all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, Paul says; no one can be justified by works of righteousness prescribed by the law, Paul says, because that is a righteousness that comes from us, and the only thing that can make us right with God is the righteousness that comes from God. Self-righteousness is a very different thing from God-righteousness—and following the rulebook of the law might be able to give us the first, but it can never give us the second. And Jesus himself makes it clear that simply doing righteous things isn’t the kind of acting-on-his-words that he is looking for. Jesus says, there will be some who say, “Lord, Lord, we prophesied in your name, we cast out demons in your name, we did many deeds of power in your name—we did everything we could exactly the way we saw you do it”—and Jesus will declare to them, “I never knew you; go away from me, you evildoers.” Apparently, acting on Jesus’ words requires something more than acting out an outward imitation of Jesus’ deeds.

So if the acting-on-Jesus’-words that builds a faith of firm foundation is not just acting out in an external way, maybe it is something internal, maybe it is something in our own hearts and spirits. If it’s not action, maybe it’s attitude; if it’s not behavior, maybe it’s belief. That certainly seems to be the line that Paul is taking in the rest of the Epistle lesson. Paul says: The righteousness of God has been disclosed apart from law, so that everyone is justified by grace as a gift—not as something we earn by doing, but as a gift that we simply open up and receive. And the way we receive that gift is by believing, by assenting to the proposition “Jesus saves us,” by an internal disposition of the intellect and the will to accept the Gospel as true. As Paul says elsewhere in Romans, “For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved.” One way to understand Jesus’ call to act upon his words is to accept them as true and believe them with all our hearts.

But that way doesn’t really work, either. Jesus says, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven.” Believing that Jesus is Lord is not in itself enough to save us; as the Epistle of James says, even the demons believe that Jesus is Lord—and it makes them shudder. If we believe in Jesus, it is still something that we are doing: it is our belief, it is our intellectual assent, it is our mental effort to think that the Gospel is true. And we know only too well that our efforts to believe often fall short. We’re like the man in the healing story who says to Jesus, “I believe; help my unbelief!” If we look for a firm foundation in our own intellectual efforts and our own confessional statements, then we are bound to be disappointed. They alone are not enough to hold us up when the rains fall and the floods come and the winds beat against us. Apparently, acting on Jesus’ words requires something more than assenting to a merely inward belief in Jesus’ grace.

But what’s left? If neither outward action nor inward belief is enough to act on Jesus’ words in order to have a rock-solid foundation of faith, what else is there? Well, maybe, if it’s not either/or, then it’s both/and. Maybe faith is both belief and behavior, both action and attitude. And if we take it that way, then faith isn’t just what we do or what we believe, but faith is the way we offer all our deeds to God, and trust that God will take them up and make them good. Faith is knowing that, on their own, all our actions, all our doings, no matter how good we try to make them, all our deeds will never be quite good enough, there will always be in us some admixture of sin, some falling short of the glory of God; faith is knowing that we can strive for justice and peace and goodness and love all we can, all we are able, and that we will never quite get there. Faith is being that realistic about ourselves. But faith is also putting our trust in God, faith is also believing that the grace of God in Christ will take up our inadequate actions, will take up our not-quite-good-enough striving, and that God will bring forth good from us that we never thought we had it in us to give. Faith is knowing we can never do enough, but faithfully doing what we can, and trusting God to do the rest.

That was the kind of faith my friend had, recovering from her stroke. She knew she could never do enough to get well enough to have her life be just the same way it was before the stroke, she knew she could never do enough to get that life back. But she also trusted that God would be with her, that God would take up everything she tried to do, and that God would bring good things into her life, good things that at the moment she couldn’t even see, good things that in the long run would be more than she could ask or imagine. The faith that was her firm foundation, that faith that was the rock where she could stand amidst the storminess of her life, was her willingness to do what little she could do, and trust in God to do the rest.

And that is the kind of faith that we can have, too. We can be realistic about ourselves to know that we can never do enough: not enough to raise perfect families, not enough to have a perfect church, not enough to live perfect lives, not enough to make perfect justice in our society, not enough to bring about perfect peace in our world. We can never do enough. But we can do what we can do, we are called to do all we are able to do, and we are given a promise by Jesus in faith that God will take up all that we do and bring forth from us a good that is greater than we are. That’s what Jesus did, offering his very death to God, his ultimate failure on the cross, so that God could take it up and bring forth from it the resurrection. And that’s what we can do, too, as we offer our lives to God, so that God may bring forth new life in us. And that is a rock on which we can stand, in rain and flood and wind, in joy and sorrow and celebration, for this day and forever.

In the Name of God: the Holy One, the Holy Word, the Holy Spirit. Amen.