Homebuilding

Matthew 7:24-27–

24 “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. 25 The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock. 26 And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. 27 The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell—and great was its fall!”

The tenor and tone of this year’s presidential election is one of anger—an angry voting public is supporting an angry candidate whom they see as hearing their rage and who will act on it to bring justice to their cause. 

For us in the church, this state is nothing new. One of the truisms of the church is that if there are more than one person in a room, there will be conflict. The church fights over doctrine, polity, and personality with alarming alacrity. Seemingly, it has been eternally so, if scripture is any witness to humanity’s attempts to create a community of faith before God. In righteous indignation, tribe rose against tribe in Israel, often with disastrous results as more than one tribe faced extinction at some point or another. In anger, rulers rose against prophets, chasing them into the wilderness (e.g., Elijah), who, in turn, in holy rage turned on their rivals (Elijah, again). We would like to think that in the New Testament communities things were different, but we hear angry squabbling even within the Twelve as the sons of Zebedee seek to be the preeminent disciples. Even as the earliest church formed, anger led to major shifts and conundrums. Read Galatians, and there it is—St. Paul angrily denouncing St. Peter, wishing him real and actual bodily harm that he hopes will hurt a lot more than existentially! And on through the ages—in fits and starts, fired by holy animosity, the church morphed, divided, and rose up to slay the heretics (whose identity depended entirely on which side of an issue one was). Here we are today, with hundreds of denominations, faith communities, and organizations, all of whom can trace their origins at some point to someone in a fit of pique denouncing someone else and then angrily driving them out or taking their doctrine and leaving. 

To be utterly honest, it is one critique leveled at the church in the 21st Century that has real and actual legitimacy—the church—the body of Christ—remains in far too many places an angry mob. We wonder why folks are put off by the church, somehow deaf to someone within the church declaring another human beings subpar, substandard, or, God forbid, subhuman. We seem to miss that many observers only see us when we splash across the pages of a newspaper, having torn ourselves apart at a denominational meeting or said something utterly hateful about another denomination or even someone within our own denomination. We wonder why visitors do not come back for a second visit, somehow not understanding that a sermon that blasts the church structure, leaders, or social justice stance turns folks off. We do not comprehend it when anger results, not in a move toward a necessary reform, but in a schism, sending two or more factions stomping off from one another, sure they are right, yet somehow leaving Christ at his table alone with no one accepting his invitation to all. 

St. Matthew records this parable, and within it comes a reminder of the more excellent way of Jesus.

I remember as a child at summer church camp singing with great gusto the little ditty about the wise man and the foolish man building their houses. When it came time to have the floods come up, with wondrous glee we fell all over ourselves as the foolish man’s sand castle came crashing down. 

Now, as a presbyter, it is with much less glee that I continue to see sand castles collapse all around the universal church. Anger is no foundation on which to build the kingdom.

The far more stable foundation is that of grace that flows from the love Christ embodied. 

Because the church is human, it means there are going to be a multiplicity of views of what God is doing and what we are to do in response to what God is doing. Ask a group of people who witness the same event what they see, and the one guarantee is that you will hear a whole bunch of different versions of what happened. Does that mean that everyone is wrong but one true seer? Does that mean that contradictory statements cannot stand together? Does that mean that one group needs to rise angrily against another to prove the right view? No, of course not. A good investigator will listen to all versions, realizing the truth is probably somewhere in the weave of the threads, rather than wholly contained in one string. 

So it is with us in the church.

The event of Christ with us is no simple, black/white event. Jesus with us is complex. How Jesus interacted with one person was at times completely different from the manner in which he spoke to another. How what Jesus said and did impacted other people was as varied as the people themselves. This truth is especially the case with parables—there is no one, single interpretation, but, rather, the beauty of a parable is that it speaks to us as we need to hear it, and how we need to hear it varies on what is happening to us, what we are doing, whom we are with, and what needs to be done. Hence, sometimes we need to be the foolish man, and other times, we are the wise man. Being one does not utterly contradict being the other; instead, it means the story can meet us in the full complexity of who we are. 

The church needs to be home to many viewpoints, some quite contradictory of one another. The church needs to hear from many voices, not only one voice. The church needs to gather again at the table of Christ from all the many directions from which we come if our communion is to be what Jesus intended it to be. No one has more right to be there than another. No one has more direct access to God than another. Rather, all are welcome as all are God’s children.

So, we need to lay aside our anger. It does nothing, but hurt ourselves and others. Our house will soon collapse, and rightfully so.

Build instead on Jesus’ welcome. Hear one another. Seek to understand what you are hearing. Ask questions, not to judge, but to seek to see who another is. That house can stand and withstand all else.