Matthew 7:21-29
Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount found in chapters
5-7 of Matthew’s Gospel presents a picture of human life on earth,
as God would have it be. Some would say that the world it portrays is
an impossible world, an idealized world, but faithful Christians believe
it is the way of living that Jesus Christ intended for his followers,
and that we are to claim it, to live it, with all our soul, strength,
and mind, by faith, hope, and love. The world Jesus proclaimed on the
mountainside is God’s world, the world where true blessedness
can be found. By living the precepts laid down by Jesus in this phenomenal
sermon, we can live the life of God in our world, and thereby become
partners in God’s work, saving and transforming human lives on
earth to reflect God’s kingdom in heaven.
Jesus ended his famous sermon with a warning. He said, “Not everyone
who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of
heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.”
He then offered the story of two men who built houses, one on the rock;
the other on sand. When the storm came, the house built on rock stood,
but the one built on sand fell, “and great was its fall!”
Jesus prefaced this little story with the words, “Everyone then
who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man
who built his house on rock.”
When we hear the word “rock” in the New Testament we cannot
help remembering the following incident: “Now when Jesus came
into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, ‘Who
do people say that the Son of Man is?’ And they said, ‘Some
say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or
one of the prophets.’ He said to them, ‘But who do you say
that I am?’ Simon Peter answered, ‘You are the Messiah,
the Son of the living God.’ And Jesus answered him, ‘Blessed
are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this
to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and
on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not
prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven,
and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever
you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” (Matthew 16:13-19)
Protestants and Roman Catholics have come to different understandings
of what Jesus meant by calling Peter “Rock” or “Rocky”.
Roman Catholics have interpreted this to mean the beginning of the Apostolic
Succession, Peter himself being the first Apostle, whose authority would
be passed from one generation to the next. But Protestants have interpreted
Jesus’ naming to mean “the rock of faith”.
For today’s purposes I want us to stay with the Protestant interpretation
and hold to the idea of the rock of faith. In Jesus’ parable at
the close of the Sermon on the Mount we find that only the house built
on rock can withstand the mighty storms of life.
The application for building on the rock, on faith, can apply to virtually
any righteous human endeavor. It holds special meaning on the Sunday
before Memorial Day, as we ponder the high cost of gaining and holding
onto human freedom. This came home to me powerfully the other day during
a Rotary meeting when the speaker of the day, a retired Army Colonel,
described his experience as a prisoner of war of the Japanese in the
Philippines during WW II.
It was a story of untoward suffering, the dimensions of which stagger
human sensibility. It was the story of cruelty, inhuman degradation,
and for thousands, death. Somehow it was also the story of survival
for some, including our speaker that day, who had been forced, along
with many others, to take the famous Bataan death march and in so doing
had suffered many other terrible indignities, including nearly starving,
going without drink, and witnessing the brutal murder of comrades, unprotected
by modern conventions for the treatment of prisoners. It was interesting
during this program to look around the room at a number of our Rotary
Club members who were veterans of that war and wonder what they were
feeling. I sat next to one of our church members, Johnny Fox, who leaned
over to me at one point with tears in his eyes and shared that he had
been part of the force that liberated the Philippines.
I trust Johnny will not be upset with me for mentioning this. It clearly
was a powerful moment for him to remember the horror of war and the
joy of victory when it finally came. I remembered visiting the Bataan
Memorial on a mission trip to the Philippines a number of years ago.
Sadly, it had fallen into disrepair and was actually being used to dry
rice. I recall stories from a distant cousin who also was part of the
Bataan death march, stories of survival, eating maggots for protein,
and any grain of rice that could be found. To this day my cousin suffers
the effects of his interment, having lost his eyesight due to poor diet,
and bearing forever in his psyche the scars of events that cannot be
forgotten.
I recall visiting the fields of the dead in Manila and walking around
the memorial to those from our country who died in the Philippines.
When I came to the memorial for the state of Virginia, it was staggering
to see the vast number of names that had been inscribed on the wall,
as tribute to their sacrifice. But even more so, I could not fully grasp
the awesomeness, the length and breadth, of those fields. There were
thousands of markers, many with crosses, over the graves of those who
never made it home.
Keep in mind that the Philippines were just one theatre of the war.
It was a world war that grew out of another war, the so-called “Great
War”, whose armistices had not resolved the conflicts that inevitably
broke out again in World War II, a war that took 55 million lives throughout
the world.
Living as we do in a time of war, we still ask, what causes war? We
are not the first to ask. The book of James in the New Testament asks,
then answers the question: “What causes wars, and what causes
fightings among you? Is it not your passions that are at war in your
members? You desire and do not have, so you kill. And you covet and
cannot obtain; so you fight and wage war.”
It is interesting to read some contemporary accounts of the effects
of these wars on the modern world. Robert Kagan’s national bestseller,
Of Paradise and Power, is an excellent analysis of the differences between
the United States and Europe in their approach to world events. On the
opening page he says, “Europe is turning away from power, or to
put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained
world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation.
It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity,
the realization of Immanuel Kant’s ‘perpetual peace.’
Meanwhile, the United States remains mired in history, exercising power
in an anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are
unreliable, and where true security and the defense and promotion of
a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might.
That is why on major strategic and international questions today, Americans
are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus: They agree on little and
understand one another less and less. And this state of affairs is not
transitory – the product of one American election or one catastrophic
event. The reasons for the transatlantic divide are deep, long in development,
and likely to endure.” (p. 3-4)
We cannot begin to unpack all the reasons for this in a sermon, but
Kagan fairly presents how this state of affairs came to be. Europeans,
so scarred by war, want never to have another war, while at the same
time want to build a utopian world, a paradise of laws and international
means of operating in the world, all the while depending heavily on
the power of the United States to keep them safe. What worries them
the most is that the United States, clearly having all the power, may
not exercise it wisely, and even more significantly, may not consider
their views in the exercise of power. In other words, they feel very
disrespected in their weaker role in the world. By the same token, however,
Kagan makes it clear that the evils that still are rampaging throughout
the world will not adhere to laws and to courts, and international agreements.
All they understand is power.
This is our world. A world scarred by a century of terrible conflicts,
still looking for the path to peace. Another writer, George Weigel,
the brilliant biographer of Pope John Paul II, has written an amazing
little book, which draws in some part from Kagan’s book, but he
goes much deeper into what went wrong in the last century, particularly
spiritually, that allowed so much tragedy to occur. His book is entitled
The Cube and the Cathedral, Europe, America, and Politics Without God.
The book contrasts two monuments to human endeavor on this planet, one
being the church, which for good or ill has shaped history for two thousands
years; the other, a monumental cube built in the city of Paris, known
as La Grande Arche de la Defense, a project of French president, Francois
Mitterand, which stands as “a human rights monument, something
suitably gigantic to mark the bicentenary of the French Revolution and
the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.” (p.2) This
humongous cube, which houses the International Foundation for Human
Rights, is so immense that “the entire Cathedral of Notre Dame
– towers and spire included – would fit comfortably inside
the Great Arch.” (Ibid.)
George Weigel writes of the questions that came into his mind during
his first experience seeing the Great Arch or cube, as it is referred
to in his book: “Which culture, I wondered, would better protect
human rights? Which culture would more firmly secure the moral foundations
of democracy? The culture that built this stunning, rational, angular,
geometrically precise but essentially featureless cube? Or the culture
that produced the vaulting and bosses, the gargoyles and flying buttresses,
the nooks and crannies, the asymmetries and holy ‘unsameness’
of Notre-Dame and the other great Gothic cathedrals of Europe?”
(Ibid.)
What he is probing in essence is whether it is possible to do what he
says many Europeans are trying to do, to build a secular world on human
wisdom without reference to God. Again, time will not allow us to explore
all the dimensions of this, but suffice it to say that the evils of
the last century serve as clear indication of what can happen when the
transcendent dimension is lost to the human race. Unbridled, power lusting,
godless humans run amuck, tyrants seize power, ethnic populations suffer
genocide, humanity falls prey to less than animal behavior.
The idea of the perfectibility of man has been around for a long time,
but there is no evidence that man can come into an even long-range view
of perfection apart from the saving grace of God, who fills the gap
between our flawed human achievements on the one hand, and the demands
of heaven on the other, that have been met only once, through the work
of the Incarnate Son of God.
We live in a world where power is necessary to protect the weak, but
it is a world where the guardians of peace must always be guarded, held
to account, to prevent the intrusion of sinful instincts that can take
away freedom through the abuse of power. The danger is so true and has
been proven again and again as stated in the famous adage: “Power
corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
If war has taught us anything it is that we must be vigilant and not
stick our heads too deeply into the sand of idealism. But we must also
recognize that power must be held in check; there must be constraint.
Power must be held on a short leash and used only for the greater good.
It is tragic that wars must be fought, but it may also be true that
our great nation has a peculiar role as the so-called “indispensable
nation” who will take the responsibility for freedom in the world
and not allow tyranny ultimately to prevail. But is it that we are an
indispensable nation, or rather a nation that refuses to dispense with
God?
Were we more willing to live the life taught by Jesus Christ we would
discover that God’s plan would make for a safer, more wonderful
world. We still live in a dangerous world, and as long as we do, we
must work to build within nations a love for the good informed by God
with a concomitant intolerance of evil, along with an inherent desire
to hold leaders and nations to a higher standard.
There is a great warning from what is happening in Europe, where some
leaders are trying to build a secular union of nation the European Union,
with no referent to God at all, “no reverence or gratitude for
those on whose shoulders we stand”. (Weigel, p. 131) The clear
exception to this effort is that of Poland, a nation that relied upon
God to free it from communist oppression through the Solidarity movement
(and we must add, by the encouragement of Pope John Paul II, a native
son).
There may actually be a kind of cynicism at work in certain European
quarters, barely perceptible, but present in the fact that Europeans
are not replacing their population. This trend is making it increasingly
difficult for the workforce to sustain the growing cost of health care
and pensions, with the estimate that by 2050 one fourth of the population
will have to support the care of the other three fourths! Add to this
the alarming reality that immigration is bringing a higher and higher
percentage of Muslims and other faith groups into those countries, who
may eventually dominate: “Rising tides of immigration from North
Africa, Turkey, and other parts of the Islamic world (have brought since
1970) some 20 million (legal) Islamic immigrants – the equivalent
of three E.U. countries, Ireland, Belgium, and Denmark.” (Ibid.
p. 133) Phillip Longman in his book, The Empty Cradle, offers this sobering
thought: “If Europe were a woman, her biological clock would be
rapidly running down. It is not too late to adopt more children, but
they won’t look like her.” (p. 67)
Obviously, this topic as well, is much too broad for one sermon, but
the warning is for us in the United States as well as for them –
it is the warning of growing secularism and the need to believe not
only in ourselves, but in God enough that we might want to at least
reproduce our own kind in our own world, believing that there will be
a future, a great future with the real possibility of peace and abundant
living for our children. With concerted efforts by some in this country
to take God out of our history, out of our Constitution, out of our
schools and the workplace, we run the risk of a totally secular world,
which brings about as much comfort as hiding out in a closet, while
the house is being blown away. Of course we will not have a world that
is totally either/or. Secularists and people of faith must learn to
live together, never forcing their values upon one another, but at the
same time not erasing the contributions of either, or disallowing recognition
of the importance of naming and claiming our values, especially our
spiritual underpinnings.
Millions have died in the cause of freedom. Freedom ultimately is from
God. The highest freedom of all is the freedom that comes through Jesus
Christ, but with this kind of freedom there comes responsibility, the
responsibility not to forget where our freedom comes from, nor to forget
the high cost of freedom. The sacrifices of war are tragic in that to
repel the evils of sin that drive war, a terrible toll is exacted. It
costs the defenders of liberty the blood of their young men and women
in the prime of their lives, but those sacrifices made in defense of
nation and love of freedom are not in vain for they are made that tyranny
will not be allowed to run unchecked. These sacrifices are made in virtue
and receive our honor. Today we honor those who have served, who have
laid down their lives for freedom’s sake. We thank God for them,
even as we thank God for Jesus Christ who laid down his life and took
it up again so that all who believe in him might be saved for eternal
life.
Let us again pledge to build our world on godly principle, never allowing
the history of God in our midst to be ignored, erased, or forgotten.
Let us uphold and give glory to the Lord of life, even Jesus Christ,
who brings all nations to judgment at the end and holds all accountable
in this present moment. Let us live the life of God in this world to
the end that the world might be saved and live in peace.
Prayer: God of the nations, forgive us when we have
tried to live without you. Let us conform our lives and the life of
this great land to your will and purpose that we can be a shining light
of liberty for many ages to come. Let us not abuse our power. Grant
wisdom to those who lead, and when power must be exercised let it be
done with restraint, offering protection to the innocent and release
to the captive. Forgive our excesses, heal our brokenness, let us learn
from our mistakes and failures, give us gratitude for the divinely given
liberties we now enjoy, and let us work for the freedom of all, building
on the rock of faith that no storm can destroy, through Jesus Christ
we pray. Amen.