Third Sunday after Pentecost, 06/01/2008

Sermon on Matthew 7:21-29, by Samuel D. Zumwalt

21 "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 On that day many will say to me, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?' 23 And then will I declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.' 24 "Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. 26And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. 27And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it." 28And when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, 29 for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes.

[This sermon is a revision of one preached in May 2005. This week I'm beginning a summer preaching series on the ordinary Christian life using 1 Corinthians 6:19-20.]

NO MORE SAND CASTLES

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

When we first moved to coastal North Carolina, we rented a house across the street from the beach. On pleasant evenings we enjoyed sitting on the deck watching the ocean between the houses directly built on the beach. We took many walks along the shore and collected dozens of colorful seashells. It was a joy to smell the ocean air, to hear the crashing of the waves, and to feel the breeze on our faces. And I have to admit that we had more than a few fantasies about the Publishers' Clearing House van pulling up to the door with a check that would allow us to buy a beachfront house.

But then again over the course of three years in Kure Beach all of that fantasizing was tempered by seeing pictures of beach houses falling into the ocean as a result of erosion - not to mention what happens to beach houses when severe hurricanes blow through every few years or so. Looking at some benign waves crashing very close to some soon-to-be-demolished condos, my dear wife remarked: "Well, it certainly gives a vivid picture of what Jesus meant when he said that the foolish man built his house upon the sand!"

Today's Gospel lesson comes at the end of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7. It is the first of five major teaching sections in Matthew (think of the five books of the written Torah or Pentateuch). Indeed throughout his gospel, Matthew pictures the Lord Jesus as the supreme teacher and doer of righteousness - the One that exceeds (more than succeeds) Moses the lawgiver. Some Bible scholars like to point out that Matthew first introduces Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, as Messiah in Word and then, in the next two chapters, as Messiah in deed.

So what does the Lord Jesus, God's chosen King, God's Messiah, the One that has all authority in the Church, expect of us disciples when He says that wise people build their houses upon the rock?

Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was martyred by the Nazis, says: "Humanly speaking, it is possible to understand the Sermon on the Mount in a thousand different ways. But Jesus knows only one possibility: simple surrender and obedience - not interpreting or applying it, but doing and obeying it. That is the only way to hear his words. He does not mean for us to discuss it as an ideal. He really means for us to get on with it" (The Cost of Discipleship).

That is not an easy word for Protestants that are used to confessing that we are not saved by our good works. That is not an easy word for post-Enlightenment Americans who relish our sense of personal freedom above all else. Talk of submission or obedience is antithetical to what many of us think Christianity is all about. Grace, mercy, love, and freedom - these are the words Lutheran Christians especially like to use - submission or obedience is typically something we attribute to fundamentalists.

Indeed it brings to mind the distrust many of us have of Islam. We know just enough about Islam to know that the word literally means submission. We can envision all those men bowing down on the floor on their prayer mats. But then we cannot help but think about the most radical of Muslims that submit to Allah and then highjack planes filled with Americans and fly them into the twin towers or strap bombs on their bodies and blow themselves up in crowds. Those seem to be the kinds of things that submission or obedience leads to in our minds. Totalitarianism - mindless violence in the name of God - demonizing those that don't think just like the ones that have submitted.

One doesn't have to resort to the worst caricatures of Muslims in order to find examples of religious extremism. Whether it's the preacher from Kansas that demonstrates with signs that say "God hates fags" or the sniper that kills a doctor known to perform abortions or crusaders that slaughter Jews on the way to the Holy Land, we can certainly find examples of people that claim to have submitted themselves to Jesus Christ and yet have done terrible things in His name that are antithetical to His teaching.

Not wanting to be tarnished by such religious extremism, many Christians (including a goodly number of pastors) seem to go to the opposite extreme picturing the Lord Jesus as the benign blesser of whatever people feel like doing as long as we think we are being gracious, merciful, loving, and free as we do it. Of course, you have to ignore a lot of Jesus' teaching - especially in Matthew - to arrive at that kind of antinomian extremism (ignoring Jesus' preaching against sin and living a life unbound by obedience to the Lord Jesus Christ).

David Yeago, one of our finest professors at Lutheran Southern Seminary in Columbia SC, has this to say about how Christians are to live: "As is obvious from Romans 6, one reason for rejoicing in our redemption in Christ is that under the rule of grace, we don't have to do evil anymore. Our bondage to sin expresses itself precisely in the commission of evil works (of thought, word, and deed): "For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do" (Romans 7:19).

"Romans 7 is so terribly Jewish. Our tendency is to read v. 20 and say, Oh, well then, if "it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells in me" then I am off the hook, the "real me" is innocent. But that is precisely not the conclusion Paul draws. It's the deed that makes the difference. I can delight in the law all day long in my inmost self, but as long as what I do is evil, I am a slave, I am wretched, and the state of my ‘inmost self' is meaningless. The contrary point is true too, of course: the worship of the hand without the heart is equally meaningless. But for Paul, it runs both ways: the heart and the hand make up a life, not one without the other, so that the renewal of the nous [the Greek word Paul uses for mind in Romans 12:1-2] is fulfilled in the offering of the body to God (Romans 12)."

Yeago concludes: "A righteousness has begun in us, but the point about that righteousness is that it is a cleaving to Christ and sharing in what is his. So we can never, unless we are fools, look at that new righteousness as something disconnected from Christ himself and think it sufficient. If we do that, we have just thereby turned away from reliance on Christ, the struggle with sin ceases, and we lose the favor of God. Progress in sanctification and persistence in putting our trust in Christ's mercy alone are the same thing: clinging to Christ. If we are clinging to Christ we are simultaneously relying on him and he is living in us, his righteousness flowing into us, so that the struggle against sin never stops until we are "fully transformed" into him" (an excerpt from a Lutheran Forum blog at http://www.predigten.uni-goettingen.de/verwaltung/aktuellp_edit.phphttp://www.alpb.org/ on May 27, 2005).

Now that was a long quotation and maybe a bit hard to follow in the hearing of it, but Professor Yeago's point is to draw us back to what discipleship means. When you follow Jesus, heeding His voice and submitting your life to the Triune God, you are not looking to your own obedience as the means of being made right with God. Rather God's Word convicts us in our self-centeredness and drives us to the grace and mercy of God in Jesus Christ. To cling to Christ is to cling to God's Promise given in Baptism.

In today's Gospel lesson, when Jesus says, "Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven," He is particularly attacking religious false teachers. Apparently their many good deeds and mighty works could (and still do) create confusion in the minds of Christ's disciples.

The children's song says it well: "The foolish man built his house upon the sand." It is foolishness for our lives to be built on anything other than the grace and mercy of God in Jesus Christ. We cannot make ourselves holy by our vain attempts at obedience. Only Christ can save us through our baptism into His death and resurrection. All we can bring to Christ is our sin and death. Only Christ can graciously give us His life and righteousness as a free gift.

It follows, then, that the baptized life is a matter of daily conversion, having the old sinner in us drowned through confession of sin, clinging to the grace and mercy of God in Jesus Christ in every moment of our lives in this sinful flesh of ours. It is not wisdom, then, to turn away from the Lord Jesus by saying "Lord, Lord" with our lips but saying "Me, Me" with our lives. How can Christ save us when we foolishly insist on abandoning Him to do the desires of our own sinful hearts and minds?

Where there is certainty of my own sinfulness and inability to save myself, there will be either a kind of despair that leads to nothing good if I focus on myself or there will be gratitude for the unmerited grace and mercy of God if I focus on Jesus Christ. One way is foolish, the other wise.

The grateful life of the redeemed does not mean foolishly turning back to our own longings or foolishly looking to our own works as sufficiently obedient to the good and gracious will of God. The grateful life of the redeemed means that we follow the Lord Jesus in the lives of humble service into which He leads us - heeding His call, forgetting ourselves, taking up our crosses, and going with the only One who can save us. There is no other way that leads to eternal life!

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Rev. Dr. Samuel D. Zumwalt
St. Matthew?s Evangelical Lutheran Church
Wilmington, North Carolina USA

E-Mail: szumwalt@bellsouth.net

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