First Friends Meeting
Matthew 7:24-27
‘Rock?’
Doug Gwyn

new song – last spring – not sure whether it’s about the economy or global warming – maybe both – but this morning’s parable made me think of sharing it this morning – called ‘Higher Ground’ – to the tune of the old revival hymn by that name --

Higher Ground
Doug Gwyn, April 2007

the waters are rising, I wonder why
is it national debt or that hole in the sky?
but one thing’s for sure, the broad, fruited plain
is quickly becoming a bounding main
well say what you will about human rights
all power is theirs who command the heights
and the prayer of millions, all milling around
is “Lord, plant my feet on higher ground!”

now health care goes boom as the nation goes bust
the stock market zooms as factories rust
the media feed our commodity lust
and the dollar bill smirks, “In God We Trust”
the poor tread water as common sense teaches
preyed on by sharks and all manner of leeches
while middle-class folks stand by and frown
praying, “Lord, plant my feet on higher ground!”

Katrina was just a toe in the water
wait til it gets a little bit hotter
when some die of flood while some die of drought
and Washington keeps on messing about
and the President swears with one hand in the till
while millionaires sit up on Capital Hill
and the electorate votes yet one more round
of “Lord, plant my feet on higher ground!”

some say the bell rings from the church steeple
to sell opiates to desperate people
but the drug that works on the ninety-nine sheep
just won’t seem to put that last one to sleep
‘cause you cannot cheat that one honest soul
so ask not for whom that bell sweetly tolls
the Son of Man came for the lost and the found
to plant all our feet on common ground

I have to confess I probably suffer from a ‘Chicken Little’ complex. For more than 30 years, I’ve had serious misgivings about the future of our nation, our planet. I’ll be happy if I’m wrong, and so far, things have gone better than I could have imagined. At least for us among the comfortable classes of a rich, powerful nation. But, as the song starts out, the waters are rising.

I remember a conversation I had with the Quaker economist Kenneth Boulding some years ago. His outlook was much more optimistic than mine. But he admitted that it might just be the result of his good digestion. Maybe I’m just dyspeptic. I have to admit, I’ve eaten more than my share of Rolaids over the years. But I think my outlook results partly from studying the teachings of Jesus all these years. Jesus said many beautiful things, left us with many reassuring words. We’ve been enjoying some of those in our series on the parables, which finishes this morning. But Jesus also warned his people of a coming crisis, a catastrophe. I think he recognized his people’s collision course with Rome coming in the not-too-distant future. He didn’t know when or how it would happen. But when it finally came 40 years after his death, the Jewish revolt and Roman retributions were terrible. Thousands slaughtered, Jerusalem destroyed, many more thousands dragged off into slavery. I believe the dire, apocalyptic warnings in Jesus’ teachings have to do with that coming crisis. He wasn’t talking about events 2000 years later, as many Christians speculate today. Jesus preached the coming end of a world – the Palestinian Jewish world in which he lived. But when it’s your world, it’s the world. And the warnings he gave in his time can still teach us important things for the crises we face in our own time.

The parable Carrie read describes a coming storm. This parable is the final piece of the Sermon on the Mount, the main body of Jesus’ teachings in Matthew. Jesus summarizes, “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like the wise man who built his house on rock.” So he’s saying there’s a solidity, a rock-like coherence in his teachings that – if we actually follow them – can give us the foundations to survive the storm, whether its a personal crisis or something much bigger. As I pondered this parable this week, I looked back over the whole Sermon on the Mount. I must say, it’s a bit of a hodgepodge. It’s a group of isolated sayings from the years of Jesus’ ministry that Matthew organized into this body of teaching. There are many nuggets of truth here, but solid rock? Maybe composite or conglomerate rock. Or concrete, if there was something to bind them together into a solid body. Hmmm….

Let’s look at some of those nuggets. First, there’s the Beatitudes. For example, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Last Saturday, at our Care Team workshop, Stephanie Ford led us through a very helpful guided meditation using these Beatitudes. She helped us see how, whenever we reach out to one another with compassion, humility, and practical help, we can see these Beatitudes coming true in our lives. It’s true, whether we are reaching out to one another at First Friends, or to others beyond our meeting. Maybe working at the Food Pantry, supporting our Good Samaritan Fund, our continuing our ties with the Catholic community in Richmond. In many different ways, we make connection. We form the cement that holds things together through these, well, concrete actions.

Jesus teaches us to love our enemies and pray for those who would persecute us. If we love only those who love us, what good is that? We just make our own separate peace with a few other people. That creates cliques, in-groups, parties, power-blocs. Those become the shifting sands of political intrigue and power plays. Not a foundation that survives the storm. Jesus says that when we help the poor, he says, don’t trumpet it around. God sees and rewards you. The same with prayer – don’t make a big, public deal of it. Pray intimately. His sample prayer, what we call the Lord’s Prayer, is a great model. Jesus knew great intimacy with God. He invited us into that same kind of intimacy. And he urges us to be bold in asking God for what we need. God is ready to help. We are limited mainly by our unreadiness to ask, and our unwillingness to trust in God to provide. As we strengthen those bonds of intimacy and trust with God, we will learn greater intimacy and trust with others. Jesus urges us to trust more, risk more. Don’t store up treasures on earth. Don’t worry too much about tomorrow. Trust God and your fellow human beings a bit more. We start doing that by judging one another less. Typically, we judge one another because we don’t know ourselves very well. Often we judge something in another person that we unconsciously recognize it as something we don’t like in ourselves. That’s the plank in our own eye that Jesus warns us to deal with first.

All these things Jesus taught are ways we form solidarity together – we get solid with each other through these ‘concrete’ ways of loving one another and trusting in God to help. That solidarity began to grow among the thousands who followed Jesus during those three short years of his ministry. Jesus was building the foundation for a new society, one that could have averted the terrible disaster that came 40 years later. Of course, it was controversial. Of course, it raised lots of questions that reasonable people were bound to have. In the end, it was only the chief priests, the collaboration government working with the Romans, who put an end to Jesus and his movement. And in so doing, they unwittingly put their people back on course toward disaster.

Jesus called himself the Son of Man – your common, universal human being. He preferred that over Messiah, the Son of God, because he was trying to help everyone know themselves as the sons and daughters of God. As my song concludes, “the Son of Man came for the lost and the found, to put all our feet on common ground” – not higher ground. There’s not enough room at the top. If we keep with this winner-takes-all mentality, we will continue on a collision course with some kind of disaster. I don’t say that happily. But I say it with confidence.

some say the bell rings from the church steeple
to sell opiates to desperate people
but the drug that works on the ninety-nine sheep
just won’t seem to put that last one to sleep
‘cause you cannot cheat that one honest soul
so ask not for whom that bell sweetly tolls
the Son of Man came for the lost and the found
to plant all our feet on common ground

The Church, we who profess and try to follow Jesus, are in a particularly delicate position. Are we helping build those new foundations? Or are we selling opiates to desperate people, as Karl Marx famously said? Are we distracting ourselves from the reality all around us? Or are we helping each other face up? How are we at First Friends working to build on the solid rock of Jesus’ teachings? It begins with worship, with renewing the bonds intimacy and trust with God. And that brings us closer together as human beings. From there, we reach out to build solidity and solidarity where we can. We have an ad hoc Sustainability Committee looking at ways we as a Meeting and as individuals can live more sustainably on the earth. Missions and Social Concerns is looking at ways we can respond more effectively to the rising waters of poverty and need in Richmond. In the coming months, we will continue connecting with the local Catholic community. We will keep growing in interfaith conversation with our Muslim and Jewish neighbors. Some of these things develop very slowly. And sometimes that’s unavoidable, even appropriate. But let us not lose our sense of urgency. The waters are rising.