I apologize for the lag in posts!
Below is the sermon from Sunday, February 20. It was also the baptism day for Marley Elizabeth Herman, child of God! Pastor Tom McKee, Assistant to the Bishop, joined us for worship and presided at the baptism. It was a glorious day.
Vicar Brett Wilson – Epiphany 7A – 1 Cor 3:10-11, 16-23 – CELC, Lancaster
Where were you on February 18, 1990? I'll give you a hint – it was a Sunday . . . You might have been sitting – right where you are now. . . Twenty-one years ago. . .
That was the last time these readings were read in church. And yet, they are foundational ones, perhaps ones we have often thought of over the years. We recall that Jesus says, “Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.” We remember Paul's words here to the Corinthians – “the foundation is Jesus Christ. Do you not know that you are God's temple, and that the God's Spirit dwells in you?”
We know these verses, but it was 1990 that they were last read in church. And of course there's other ways that we learn and share scripture – through devotional bible reading, together or alone, through hymns like “the church's one foundation,” or through our conversations. There have been all too many occasions, individual and social, in the last 21 years to remember Jesus's command to love our enemies.
Words, music, stick with us - on Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand . . .
Sometimes, sinking sand seems all around. This month protests, unrest have been in the air. From Tunisia, Egypt, now Bahrain, and many other places, we're not sure, especially from the outside, where solid ground is. News changes every day as crowds gather, governments fall, and all of a sudden, everything seems shaky. Seventy thousand protesters gather in the streets around a capital building – in this country, in Wisconsin. The issues – freedom, worker's rights, unions, taxes, they aren't far from home. It can feel like the foundation has been shaken to the core. This can happen personally - waves of layoffs, an accident or a diagnosis, can make us feel that we are on shaky ground, that the rug has been pulled out from under us.
When it seems the foundations are crumbling, it can be hard to imagine anything looking up for us. “But I think the crux is this – no one can lay any foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ.” We may think we are on shaky ground, but maybe we're thinking of a false foundation.
Last week we read Paul's question – are you not merely human? Yes, and for you as a human there is only one foundation – in the God who made you, knit you together in our mothers' wombs, who as Jesus reminds us in Luke, has counted every hair on your head. There can be no other foundation than our baptism, which reaches back to the very foundations of the earth, as we pray at a baptism, “in the beginning your Spirit moved over the waters and you created heaven and earth. By the gift of water you nourish and sustain us and all living things.”1
Everything our world offers you to root yourself in is temporary, can be shaken, and fall apart. Jesus, our Savior, is our true foundation, and offers something different. But it's in that difference that our foundation in Christ gets its strength. Though these verses from Jesus' sermon on the mount, about offering the other cheek, or not resisting evildoers, can be heard as passive or insensitive to victims of abuse, this is not Jesus' foundation. Our foundation in Christ is strong because it stops the cycle of violence, of aggression and revenge that we so easily get stuck in. Walter Wink writes, “Jesus, in short, abhors (rejects) both passivity and violence.”2 Jesus offers a third way, and breaks everything that would say otherwise, sin, death, and the world's wisdom, in the cross.
Our foundation is strong because it is build upon the unchanging love of God. Your foundation was poured, when the water was poured and splashed over you at your baptism. That foundation God laid in Jesus for you, for a full life. Jesus says, “be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect.” Perfection doesn't mean straight-A's or six figures. The word, telos, better means whole, complete, and related, finished. The foundation God pours for you at your baptism is for a full life in Christ, one that is complete, built on the savior, on love. And it is finished, and God loves us enough to encourage and strengthen us to build upon this foundation each day, in the outline that God made, like a blueprint for a house, that Jesus laid out for our lives.
I never thought I would be someone to do yoga, but I've picked it up off and on lately. I'm not into the spiritual undertones of it, but I find it calming. I've been struck this week by one line one of the instructors in a yoga video I do says, which is, “there is a principle in yoga that in order to go up, you must press down.” This is the heart of what Paul is saying.
You are God's temple. God's spirit dwells in you. You, yes, you individually, baptized child, Marley Elizabeth, whose foundation is poured today, but each of you, every day of your lives, you are God's temple. God's spirit is in you. But this is not a singular “you” - a clearer translation would be – “Don't you know that you all are God's temple, and that God's spirit dwells in all of you?” So to build up, press down, as I see you doing here, pushing your feet deep into your foundation in Christ to build up, to invite others to church, to reach out into the community. This foundation is clear here at Christ Lutheran, and as you live outside these walls as God's temple, the body of Christ. It's the foundation we'll always have, and strikes us to the core, and we remember the words and live them out. Jesus says – love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you . . . The church's one foundation is Jesus Christ her lord . . .
All belong to you. You belong to Christ. Christ belongs to God. God loves you that in simple water, this spoken word, and that table God poured the foundation in Christ, a blueprint for a full life.
