A Fourth Church Sermon by Adam H. Fronczek

June 1, 2008 | 6:30 p.m. Vespers

Vespers Communion Meditation

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 46
Matthew 7:21–29

Let me ask if you’ve ever been in this situation: Two of your friends who know each other get in an argument, and each one of them, on their own, comes to you and tells you how that argument went. Having heard both sides of the story, you realize that what your friends have in common is that they are both upset and frustrated about the argument they’ve had, but when you hear them tell you what the argument was about, it’s two different stories. The same thing happened to each person, but because they care about different things, the emphasis in the story is different from one person to the next.

This kind of a story is so true to life. So many of our frustrations and our troubles are over misunderstandings, times when we communicate poorly and talk past one another. And much of the real truth is found not in one account or another of the story, but the truth is really found in the listener, that third person, who hears both sides and tries to bring them together.

One of the reasons why I think so much truth is found in the pages of the Bible is because often the same story is told more than once. Just like in our day-to day conversations, in our arguments with friends and spouses and coworkers, the story is essentially the same, but when different people tell it, the details in how the story is told often shape the meaning or the truth held in the story. In the Bible, this happens a lot in the Gospels, and tonight’s passage is an example of that. This short parable of the two builders appears in the seventh chapter of Matthew and in the sixth chapter of Luke.

I already read you the account of the story as Matthew tells it, so I now I want to read you the account in Luke:

“Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I tell you? I will show you what someone is like who comes to me, hears my words, and acts on them. 48That one is like a man building a house, who dug deeply and laid the foundation on rock; when a flood arose, the river burst against that house but could not shake it, because it had been well built. But the one who hears and does not act is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation. When the river burst against it, immediately it fell, and great was the ruin of that house.”

In Luke’s story, one man (who is not described) digs deeply into rock and lays a foundation, while another builds a house on the ground without laying a foundation. The story is essentially about work. Who does the best work? The man who digs deeply into solid rock and works hardest to build his house.

American Christians in the nineteenth century would have loved the way Luke tells this story. It’s about that good-old Protestant work ethic. It makes me think of the first pastor of the Presbyterian church in which I grew up. That church was founded in the 1840s, and it’s first pastor was a man named Henry Ward Beecher. Beecher became one of the most well-known preachers of his age, and his fame was largely built on this Protestant work ethic. Beecher was famous for moral statements such as “The poor man with industry is happier than the rich man in idleness.” As you might guess, Beecher was adamantly opposed to gambling, but even more than that, at the time when the market economy as we know it was taking shape, he didn’t like the idea of the stock market. It wasn’t that Beecher hated money; it was just that, as far he was concerned, you should only make money by actually creating something. The stock market appeared to him to be little more than a kind of gambling. For Beecher, the one who works the hardest, who builds the best foundation, is the one after God’s own heart.

One hundred and fifty years later, it would be hard to become one of the most popular preachers of the day without some attention to the way that money is made and saved and lost apart from the simple sweat on our brows. Even if you like Luke’s telling of the story, it raises some questions. The shortcoming, perhaps, with Luke’s telling of this story is that we all know people who have worked terribly hard with few good results. We know people who have worked very hard on building the house, only to lose it. And that’s one of the places where Matthew’s account of the story comes in.

When Matthew tells the story, it’s not about one man whose house has a foundation and another whose does not; Matthew tells a story about a wise man who lays the foundation of his house on the rock and a foolish man who lays the foundation of his house on the sand. It’s not just about the hard work anymore; it’s about the thoughtfulness that goes before the work.

If you think back to the illustration I opened with, you can almost hear Matthew and Luke, these two historical friends, arguing over the meaning of the story. “It’s about hard work,” says Luke. “I knew these two builders: one laid a foundation; the other didn’t bother. We all knew what would happen.” And Matthew replies, “No, you’ve got it all wrong. I saw the houses. The foundations were the same, but one of builders just picked a bad location. They both worked hard, but you’ve gotta think.”

Which one is it? Is building a good house about working hardest or about being the wisest? Is goodness about our actions or the foundation or purpose of those actions? Is it about the means or the end?

Well, maybe both. And maybe neither one. These stories of two builders have special relevance these days. Our newspapers have been filled in recent weeks with the stories of houses that have been lost. Some were lost due to weak foundations and others to bad construction, but other times the storm was just too great. Sometimes the solutions we come up with just don’t solve all of the problems.

I was flipping channels the other night on television, and I found the old movie Wall Street that came out in the 1980s. If you don’t remember it, the plot is essentially that a small airline is struggling financially and is about to be bought out. Martin Sheen plays the role of the father, the union chief of the airline, who believes that hard work built the airline and hard work will save it, but his son, played, of course, by Charlie Sheen, is a young stockbroker, and he comes up with a plan to try to be clever enough to save the airline with some smart business moves. In a famous exchange in an elevator, the father blames his son for forgetting the value of hard work, and the son spits back that his father is just stubborn and upset because he never had the guts to go out and stake his own claim. In the end, neither one of them really wins. In the process of trying to save the airline in the short term, the son goes to jail for fraud, and you get the sense that eventually the airline will be bought out anyway and the father and his friends will lose their jobs.

Hard work or clever work? A house with the best foundation or a house built in the right place? Is either one the answer? Some things are just beyond our control.

When I come to a place of not being able to reconcile two sides of a story in the Bible, the place I often look for an answer is the table where we share the Lord’s Supper. The reason I do that is that sometimes words and even stories fall short of helping us to understand, but the tangible symbols of the bread and the cup that God has provided for us seem to carry a truth all their own.

You see, this table is the sure foundation, its food and drink the most basic things we need to live. And the table is also a reminder to go out and work. At this table, there is always supposed to be enough for everyone, and in the same way that everyone sits at this table as equals, we are called to go away from this table at the conclusion of the service and make the whole world look that equal. This meal is about choosing to come and accept the right foundation, and it’s about going out and doing the work.

But even more than that, at this table the foundation and the vision for the work come not from our own understanding but from Christ, who provides the meal. Christ is the foundation of the wisdom and work that is here. And even as Christ provides the great strong foundation, the meal that feeds and strengthens us, we are reminded in this meal of the weakness that the human Jesus once shared with us. The bread gets broken. We are sent out to do our work in the world, but as we go out to do it, we are still much less than perfect. We are invited to this table not just for wisdom and work, but because there are places in life where our wisdom and our work will come up short, and we will need to lean on Christ as our foundation in hope that one day we will understand more.

Tonight we were met by two different ways of telling a story. The point of the telling of the two stories may be that, like in an argument between two people, when we hear both sides of the story we see how important it is for the two sides to communicate with each other and how important it is to listen. We see that sometimes we need to be reminded to go out and work, and other times we need to be reminded to sit back and think, and other times we need to be reminded that so many things in life are just beyond our control and the best thing we can do is put our faith in God to show us the way when we have lost our way. This table is not about getting it right. It’s about coming and being fed and going out and giving it another try. And God cares for us so much that the story will continue to be told in a thousand different ways until we get the point.

Amen.