Solid Rock

Psalm 62:5-8; Ephesians 2:13-22; 2 Thessalonians 2:13-15 

We are gathered as people of faith, believing in Jesus as the Christ, our hope and our salvation. We are gathered as people of the world, beset by all the normal stresses, stuff, and stirrings of being a normal human being faced with a world that more and more reveals its inherent nature as ordered chaos. we would like our faith in Christ to help with the walk in the world, but the truth is that such a combination is not as easy it seems it should be. 

So…how to make it so?

The first thing to do is to reacquaint ourselves with Jesus as his, not as we have heard him to be, assumed him to be, or as we would like him to be. That means delving deeply into the Word, rereading the Gospels with minds wide open to what is actually there. Brian McLaren, a wonderful contemporary theologian committed to making awareness of Jesus as the Gospels present him the focal point for spiritual reawakening, argues in The Secret Message of Jesus that all of us who grew up in the Church are actually at a disadvantage because we approach Jesus through the image the Church created of him. Routinely, the Church reduces Jesus to a calm, comforting presence with healing in his wings; or the Church makes him solely the Lord of Heaven into whose welcoming arms we will fly upon death; or we make him a moral judge who demands strict obedience to a set of rights and wrongs that we construct. We do not hear Jesus preached very often as he was. Begin with one point all four Gospels agree upon—other than one instance when Jesus preached in a synagogue, Jesus never preached in a house of worship! At the Temple, he stayed outside, except the time he cleaned house. Moreover, never once did Jesus demand that anyone worship him, but rather that they follow him—i.e., pattern their lives on his. Jesus was about life praxis, not liturgy. Furthermore, Jesus radically welcomed anyone and everyone. For our summer Bible study, I walked through what Jesus meant when he thought of everyone, using only John’s gospel as an example. The results were startling—

1:36: the seekers

1:43: a bigot

3:1: a Pharisee

4:7: a Samaritan woman

5:2: the broken

6:1; 12:20: Gentiles

6:60: the wavering

7:53: an adulteress

9:1: the blind

11:1: the dead!!

13:1: anyone in the world

18:33: a Roman oppressor

20:1: friends

20:24: the skeptics

21:15: the deniers

In each case, Jesus fully welcomes someone into his presence, engaging with them, and offering them transcendence and transformation. “Everyone” means everyone for Jesus! Jesus did not wait for them to come to him, but he went to them. He did not hit them with a list of qualifications, preconditions, or expectations—he simply met them. The Gospels agree that this is no less than the Kingdom of God. 

As we reacquaint ourselves with the Word revealing Jesus, we see we all have some work to do. We have to continually allow Jesus to stand on his own terms, freed from our traditions, assumptions, and prejudices—and, yes, we all have a set of those from which we work. It is how we order a disorderly world. Jesus transcends them all. Jesus empties them all. To set Jesus as the foundation for life, then, we need to take him as he is. Read and reread the story—take it as it speaks without superimposing your own filters and predilections on it. 

Second, trust Jesus to be efficacious despite existing for us in Word and hope. What I mean by that is that most of us will have no tangible experience of Christ. Most of us will not have an experience like Paul who was literally blinded and knocked to the ground by Christ’s presence. We are left with our practice of prayer and consideration. We are left to find the revelatory glimpses and glimmers in our day to day experience of the Jesus the Word tells us about. The story reveals him, hope finds him in our experiences within the world. 

For instance, I coached my son, Perry, in Y League basketball. As luck would have it, that team was a collection of 9 and 10 year olds who had never played basketball before, except for Perry and one other little boy. Needless to say, we had a perfect season—perfectly winless! Our successes were more basic—one little boy finally learned to dribble with one hand; another learned that shots are best taken at least from this side of  half court from the basket; and so on. We had one little guy who, bless his heart, was probably a future Nobel Laureate in physics because athletics were not in his future—he could never get anything to work. He got the ball, the other team scored; he tried to rebound, the other team scored; he tried to dribble, the other team scored—you get the picture. Well, in the last quarter of the last game, he finally managed to be in the right place at the right time. He was suddenly all by himself a foot from our basket. Perry saw him, fed him the ball—he miraculously held onto the pass, he turned, and he heaved the ball toward the basket—the gym, and I am not making this up, paused in wonder as the ball arced up. Up, up, up it went and glanced the rim perilously, but flew over and through the net. HE SCORED! The place erupted! We still lost 43-6. Now—I am convinced that was an experience of Christ—everyone in the gym, for a moment, was fully united, all separations erased, and all hopes fixated on one thing. It remains one of the best moments of communion I have ever experienced.

You have to have eyes to see Christ in everyday moments, everyday places, and everyday circumstances. That’s the final lesson in seeing with whom and where Jesus spent his time—not in the sacred, mystical confines of cathedrals, but in the world with real people doing real things. Seeing this way opens before us the assurance and the affirmation of all we believe. Christ is here; Christ is now!

Knowing that with every fiber of our being reveals the rock on which we can stand. It will never be moved. It will never fail us.