“Building on God’s Word”

(The Gospel lesson for this sermon is found in the book of Matthew, Chapter 7: verses 21-29)

Pastor Stan Larson

Central Presbyterian Church, Russellville, Arkansas

Sunday, June 1, 2008

 How many of you stopped by here a few years ago when Knox Hall and all of the other parts to it were going up. Did you stop by and see it being built?  Most of you did.  How many of you have built your own homes? Lots of you have done that as well.  Now, where do you begin when you build a building or house? Now in these days and times there is the pre-work that goes into it, like putting the utilities in.  Now back in Jesus’ time you didn’t put in utilities, you started with the very basic part, which is the foundation.  It all begins with the foundation; if you don’t have a good foundation, you have problems.  Where my parents lived in Seguin, South Texas, they had to have a company come in and lift their foundation because they had drought over the years and they had a water problem in their house; and they had to have the foundation lifted and leveled.  If you’ve ever had that job, it’s not fun to do.  There are all kinds of problems you can have around a foundation, but if you have a good foundation, you know that is a good place to begin.

The lesson today talks about building on that solid foundation.  For us as Christians, we know that foundation is God’s love for us.  God’s love that is announced at our birth, at our baptism, where God says, “You are my child. You are my beloved. With you I am well pleased”.  But what happens when someone doesn’t hear that, if they don’t hear that word from God or from their family.  My wife and I were having dinner with some other couples just the other evening, and they talked about the fact that they had adopted a daughter.  When they adopted her she was five years old and I think she was from somewhere in Europe; and she had not heard those words.  She had not heard that she was loved, or that anyone should love her.  When they adopted her, they didn’t realize that; and after a couple of years they had to, not give up, but to put her into an institution where they could begin to deal with the problems that come from not hearing that very foundational message that we take so much for granted.  We take it for granted that we will tell our children that they are loved, that we hear that ourselves from God and from others around us; and on that foundation we are able to reach out and do many many things.  But this young woman had not heard that message. 

We need that solid foundation as we begin our life, serving in God’s name.  We hear in the first reading today from Genesis about Noah and the building of the ark; and it seemed as though in his generation he was the only one who had heard, or listened to the fact that he was a child of God.  When God came to ask for someone to build an ark because everything was going so badly that God said, “I am going to destroy everything except for Noah and his family,” the only one who heard was Noah.  Now if you’re from my generation, you have heard Bill Cosby in one of his routines on Noah.  It’s kind of like Noah is out there working and he hears, “NOAH!”; and he looks around, trying to figure out what in the world is going on. Noah’s reaction is (and this is from the 60’s) “Am I on Candid Camera”?  Today, he would be saying, “Well, am I being punked” or “Am I going to end up on You Tube?”  He’s wanting to find out who is playing a joke on him.  Who is asking me to do this craziest of things which is when it is dry and beautiful outside, to build a massive ship on dry land. 

We have to remember that Noah was starting to build when there was no reason to build.  There was no sign that anything was going to happen.  He didn’t have the long-range forecast that says, “now in 30 days it’s gonna come down in buckets”.  He didn’t look at the national radar and say, “Now the storm is coming our way and I need to get inside, I need to build a ship”. No, God came to Noah and said, “Noah, I want you to build an ark”.  And again, one of those lines that Bill Cosby has,… “What is a cubit”?  How many of you know what a cubit is?  That’s on one of those tests.  A cubit is the distance between your elbow and your fingertip, about 18 inches.  That’s kind of like, “What is a foot”?  That came out from one of the kings, and then they made it into inches, and so on.  We have all those wonderful measurements. 

It is a huge undertaking that Noah is called to do.  But he had heard from God; he listened to God; he knew that he was a child of God and that he was loved by God.  So when God asked something of him, Noah said, “Sounds crazy, but I’m going to do it.”  You can imagine his neighbors ridiculing him as we have seen in all these comedy routines, because it took him years; he didn’t do this overnight; he didn’t call for a pre-packaged plan to put it together.  He had to do it himself, with his sons.  His sons were probably saying, “You know Dad’s really gone off the deep end.  He’s having us build this; all of our money is going there”.  But Noah listened because he had that wonderful foundation of knowing that he was a child of God and that whatever God asked of him was going to be okay. 

When we get to the Gospel reading in Matthew where Jesus is talking to the crowds and he is talking about what it means to hear, to listen to what Jesus is saying and then to actually do it.  That’s what Jesus is saying.  When we hear those words that I am a child of God and I am loved by God, Jesus and God is expecting some kind of response.  Something has changed in our lives, something that says, “Well I’ve heard it and I’m actually going to do something.”  Now I won’t go on and on about how in the Zits comic strip, the teenage boy says, “Well I heard you, but it didn’t mean that I would respond.  It didn’t mean that I was going to do anything before the 10

 If you’ve been very much involved in the building industry, you know there’s a lot of ways to build once you have a foundation.  Some are good; some are bad.  One of my summer jobs was working for a company that build grain bins.  This was in farm country in Kansas and they built Butler buildings.  Now you have the foundation, but the rest of the way, you build it from the top down.  Now that sounds strange, but you have a bunch of jacks and you build a couple of rings, then you put the top onto the grain bin and then you lift it up and put another ring on, then you lift it up and put another ring on until you get it the right size.  Even when they are huge, because that job brought me to Hope, Arkansas where they were building huge grain bins for Kroger.  I didn’t know who Kroger was at that point in time.  They were building grain bins that were 60 feet in diameter and about 45 feet high, and they did it the same way. Had a foundation, put a couple of rows on, put the ceiling on, the top on and then you jacked them up—a strange way to do it. When we have that solid foundation, we can do that; we can begin to do things in different ways. 

Sometimes we go astray.   My sister lives in Tulsa, and one of the things I have seen through the years, when we would go through the eastern part of Tulsa, was this shopping mall that was not finished.  It had been started about in the 70’s.  In the 70’s the model for the shopping malls, from the North, not for here, was that you had all your deliveries underground, so that it was built so that you could get semi trucks underground.  There’s one problem, Tulsa has bedrock in lots of places, about two feet down, and so they had to blast and blast and blast and they had the basement and the first level and no windows in, and they ran out of money; and it sat for 20 years.  And you can imagine the people laughing at it, just as there must have been something behind the story that Jesus told about someone who built their house on sand, and it fell apart.  Now 20-25 years later, somebody took this mall over and finished it.  It’s a beautiful wonderful mall, but no one in their right mind would build a mall like that in Tulsa, except that they did; and they lost their shirt. 

We have to build listening to God. We have to know that solid foundation is ours, of our relationship with God, that we are loved, that we are cared for; and then hear what else God has to say to us, to say this is the way we should be living our life.  This is how we should be building on that foundation.  Some people are going to build very very differently, like those grain bins, building from the top down.  Others are going to be very conventional because it’s going to be a conventional problem.  You’re going to build a house like you expect it to be built. You’re going to put up the walls and then, the roof, and then you complete it,

We are called to hear, to open our hearts and minds to hear that God loves us, then to be open to hearing God’s voice as we go through life, as more of what God has for us is spoken to us. God expects us to hear and to be changed, to hear and to act.  Jesus keeps saying, “Those who hear my word and do them.”  You know that with your children; you know that when you’re teaching.  You love those who hear what you say and do it.  Now there are some who can’t hear the first time and you have to put it in different ways the way Jesus does.  Jesus tells us over and over again so that more and more of us can hear in the ways that we hear, because we don’t all hear the same things at the same time.  But Jesus keeps finding new and different ways to remind us and tell us that God loves us, and that this is what God has for us, and then looking to say, “Now what are you going to do with it? What are you going to do now that you have this foundation?”  We are called to build on that foundation of God’s word, God’s love for us, and out of that we can do such wondrous things. 

We know in our own lives.  We know in the people around us.  We know people who are solidly grounded in their life of faith, who are solidly founded in the love that God has for them, and they can do almost anything, even through all kinds of troubles; because Jesus says its not just if trouble comes, but when problems come.  If you’ve lived long enough, you know it’s not if problems are going to come, it’s when.  You prepare for them, and if you have that solid foundation, then you can weather those times of trouble, those times of discord when everything doesn’t go just as you planned it.  God is there to be that support, to help us in those times of trouble to be that foundation out of which we can reach out and care and share and love one another in God’s name.  But we need that foundation.  We need to hear amidst all those other voices, and sometimes for us who had been baptized early on, to hear again those words every Sunday from God: “I love you.  You are my beloved child.  I am glad to be your parent and I want you to go out in my name and do wondrous things, even when it doesn’t look remotely possible. 

We’re not all given the task of Noah, to build an ark out in the middle of nowhere, not anywhere near water. You know there are people who build boats in their basements, and then try to figure out how in the world they get them out.  Noah built his ark outside, where it was supposed to be, and God helped him to fulfill those things.  God is there to help us.  Let us build and base our lives on that foundation, on God’s word, which says to us, “I love you. You are my beloved child.  Now, go out in my name and do the things you know that I would have you do everyday, both inside and outside the church, with all of God’s people so that all people hear that good news, that wonderful foundational identity that they too, are a child of God, and loved by God so that all of us can live out of that foundation and not be the ones who build on sand, not lose our shirts by building the wrong way, but build on the solid foundation of God’s love and concern.  Then we can move out into wondrous things in God’s name. Amen.

One of those ways that we gain strength is by coming together and to realize that we are not alone and not the only child.  Sometimes we would like to be the only child, the only one that God loves; but we know that God loves all of us and God brings us into a family, into a community, into a congregation so that we can gain strength from on another from our witness and our experiences of God.

 And now let us affirm our faith together using the words of the Apostle’s Creed.

I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth,

 and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord,

who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary,

suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried.

He descended into Hell.  The third day He rose again from the dead

and ascended into Heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God, the Father Almighty,

from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints,

the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.  Amen