I know I wasn’t the only one who struggled with what to say in my sermon today. I chose the passage a few weeks back—Luke 6:39-49—and it gave me a good jumping off place this morning. As I prepared the sermon, I kept thinking about words from King Lear I first learned reading Frederick Buechner: “The weight of these sad times we must obey, speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”
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When I think back on Bible stories I remember as a child, one of the most enduring ones is the last parable in our reading this morning where Jesus compares building a house on the sand with building a house on a rock. Part of the reason is that it is a great image—you can picture it, even if you are not inclined toward housebuilding. And then there’s the fact that we learned a song to go with it, complete with hand motions (“The wise man built his house upon the rock . . .), which is probably the real reason it was cemented in my mind.
To live in Connecticut means to know what it means to build your house on a rock. The whole state is granite—sometimes so much so that foundations are hard to build.
Our coastlines might tell a different story. Last fall a video made the rounds of a house on the Outer Banks of North Carolina that collapsed into the sea because of beach erosion. Similar things have happened along the New England coast as well, thanks to the effects of climate change. You can bet I started singing the song as I watched the waves take the house apart (“The foolish man builds his house upon the sand . . .).
When we turn to Jesus’ use of the metaphor, which comes at the end of the sermon we have looked at for the last three Sundays, we need to look back to see what kind of foundation he called for us to build for our lives. He started off by saying that God’s Economy is built to make sure everyone gets what they need to thrive and that we all share what we have so everyone is covered, has their needs met, and is cared for. Aren reminded us that Jesus said not only should we love our enemies, but we should love one another in a way that does not demand reciprocity or repayment.
In today’s reading, Jesus challenges our arrogance with an image of trying to get a speck out of someone else’s eye when we have a small log in our own, and then switches to a say that fruit trees are known by the fruit they produce (people, too), and then he moves the person whose words and actions match each other in God’s Economy is like the one who builds a house with a solid foundation. It will withstand whatever storm is coming.
Our house in Guilford was built in 1795 as the schoolhouse for the town. It originally sat on the Town Green. Around 1830, it was moved from the Green and hauled by a team of oxen down the street to where it is now. They did not put it on a true foundation; they just stacked up some stones so it was secure and left it that way—much like the front steps of our sanctuary, which we repaired. Last year, Ginger’s church did what they could to fill in holes because of the number of critters who made their way in and out, but our foundation is not what we thought it was and that has had its consequences.
This past week, I spent the day at the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, along with a group from Ginger’s church on a civil rights history tour. The museum is the best I have ever seen. The Equal Justice Initiative, its founding organization, presents an amazing amount of information in ways that speak to different kinds of learners without totally overwhelming them, and also offering difficult and tragic information in a way that offers people a chance to respond with something other than just outrage or guilt.
One of the things that struck me most profoundly—perhaps because I knew I was preaching about building on good foundations—was that the foundation on which we have built our country is not as solid as we want it to be. Slavery was a part of the mix—a crucial part of the mix—from the beginning. The first slave ship arrived in 1619, over a hundred and fifty years before we became an independent nation. In 1730, half of white New Yorkers personally enslaved Black people. By 1776, one in four households in Connecticut enslaved Black people. Many of the big insurance and finance companies who are at the center of our economy made their initial wealth funding and insuring the slave trade. Of our first twelve presidents, John Adams and John Quincy Adams were the only two who were never slaveowners.
I know these are hard things to hear but hang with me.
They call it the Legacy Museum because they want us to understand and come to terms with what it means that this is a part of our story as a country. It’s not the only part, and it is a significant part. The domestic slave trade permanently separated half of all Black families in the United States. Think about the implications of that for all the generations that have followed. The National Peace and Justice Memorial, which gives a visual of the thousands of Black people who were lynched, naming both the people and the towns and counties that killed them, marks the last lynching in 1957, the year after I was born, though I’m not sure those were actually the last incidents of racial terrorism.
This is not ancient history. We are still living the story. We are still building the house on a foundation that has some serious issues.
Jesus talked about how well the houses could survive a storm. (“The rains came down and the floods came up . . .) The one on the rock—the one grounded in God’s Economy of compassion and mutuality—survived. The one built on the sand—on the shifting ground of power and wealth—washed away.
You don’t need me to tell you that right now our nation—our world—is caught in the beginnings of a storm of strife and division and uncertainty. What is going on right now is not sustainable because it is not unifying. Two weeks ago, I said that the oldest meaning of the word economy is “household management,” which has less to do with supply and demand than it does with making sure everyone gets what they need. And I asked you to remember that Jesus talked about poverty, hunger, grief, and reputation, calling us to never lose sight of the fact that what we say and do and spend and eat and feel affects those around us.
How we understand our foundation—how we tell the story about how we became who we think we are, whether we are talking about our nation, our family of origin, our church, even our faith—also affects those around us. If who we think we are and who we actually are, based on what our words and actions show us to be, then our foundation will crumble and our house will not withstand the storm.
And as a country, we have not done a good job at coming to terms with the longstanding cracks in our foundation. We have to figure out how to do to our nation, our town, ourselves, what we did to our front steps when we realized they were not as strong as we thought they were. We tore them out and rebuilt them.
I realize that is a huge statement that is easier said than lived out. I also remember the sinking feeling I got when I saw the front of our church after the steps had been removed and realized how bad things actually were underneath. In the same way that we could not left the stairs without suffering a bad accident, we can’t leave things as they are and expect that things will just keep humming along.
The side of the Legacy Museum was emblazoned with a quote from Maya Angelou that read, “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”
The root of the word courage means heart. To be courageous is to live with our heart in it, to mean it, to do what matters most. Our courage begins in this room where we have to continue to learn to talk to each other across our differences—to speak heart to heart—and then our courage moves out in concentric circles. How can we widen the scope of our compassion? How can we engage people outside of our normal patterns? We can make a point to shop at places owned by people of color. We can learn Spanish on Duolingo. We can check in with our LGBTQ siblings to make sure they know we are there for them. We can stack the stones of a strong foundation of love and belonging to build a better foundation. Let us take courage. Amen.
Peace,
Milton
