“What God Desires From TEMC: Look Ahead! People Under Construction”
"Unless the Lord builds the house..."
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, October 2, 2005
Text: Psalm 127
A number of years ago, in order to improve my driving skills and learn to drive defensively, I took a winter driving course. After so many hours of going around the track with a specialist and a teacher, I was supposed to become a better driver for the experience. So, on one cold, snowy day, with nine other people, I went to a race track to become a better driver.
Now, the driving program went very well, and we learned all the technicalities around what happens when a car skids, and how to avoid getting into a skid in the first place. But then, the instructors staged a surprise to see if we were competent. We all had to go around the track, but unbeknownst to us, right in the middle of the track, over a hill and around a corner, they had parked a great, big truck. Around the truck was a padded rubber ring, the idea being that if for any reason we couldn't avoid the truck, we would hit rubber and not steel. So, around we went, and eight out of 10 people actually ended up skidding into the rubber barricade that was right in front of the truck. For your information, I was one of the eight!
Now, the theory was that if we had actually been looking ahead, rather than just immediately at the road in front of us, we would have seen the truck and slowed down accordingly. We would have braked properly on a slippery surface and driven by safely. However, eight of us were looking just a few meters in front of our noses, and when it came time to get around the truck, it was too late. We hit our brakes, and we skidded into it. No damage was done to the cars, and no one was injured in the process, I might add. But my ego was injured, and so were those of the other seven. Evidently, this is the most common mistake that drivers make: They do not look ahead. If only we would look ahead, we would probably avoid 99 per cent of all accidents. But we don't! We only look as far as our noses, and then it is too late to make adjustments.
I have been thinking a great deal about that recently, because this week's sermon is about the need for vision, the need for looking ahead, the need for planning. Now, all of you who have driven around here over the last few weeks, know that this whole neighborhood seems to be one big construction site. If the road is not being dug up, someone is knocking down a home or some church is knocking down part of its building. Everywhere we go, there is construction! And it seems to me, as I have been driving along St. Clair Avenue, that one of things that you need to do these days is look ahead to see where the construction is, so you can alter your route or make adjustments so that you do not get caught up in heavy traffic or dangerous situations. The need to look ahead, especially when there is construction going on, is very important. What a wonderful message, what a wonderful theme that is for the living of the Christian life!
Over the next three weeks, I will be preaching about what God wants from Timothy Eaton Memorial Church; what kind of vision should this congregation have as we go through construction. I don't just mean construction in terms of the building. I don't mean just knocking down walls and putting up elevators and atriums; I am talking about the construction of our congregation as a whole. You see, throughout the Scriptures, references are made to buildings all over the place. In the Old Testament, they are many references to the building of the Temple, and very specific instructions are given to the people of God as to how the Temple should be constructed. Even when the people of Israel were wandering in the desert, and specific instructions were given for how to build the tabernacle.
However, more often than not, when you look at the notion of building in the Bible, it is about the Kingdom of God. It is about the building up of the people of Israel. It is about the nurture of the Church. What concerns God then, more than physical buildings, is the building of the body of Christ, the building of the people. That is what is on God's mind and in God's heart.
In our text this morning is Psalm 127, a psalm that was probably written originally by Solomon, who also wrote other passages in the Bible, and influenced Ecclesiastes and Lamentations and others. In it, Solomon is giving some practical advice about building. He says, “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labour in vain.” Now, Solomon was eminently practical, and his advice was down-to-earth. He was talking about building a home; he was talking about building a nation; and he was talking about building a life and a family. More than anything else, though, Solomon was talking about building up the people themselves, in order that they might be faithful to God. At the heart of all of this, then, was faithfulness. He gives this forceful warning to them: If the people of Israel want to be built up as a house for the Lord, unless the Lord builds that house, they labour in vain.
In October 1943, after the Blitz had destroyed so many of the buildings in London. Sir Winston Churchill gave a speech to Parliament. In it, he made a very provocative and a very powerful plea to be careful how they rebuild. He said, “We shape our buildings, but thereafter, they shape us.” In other words, what we build, what we erect (to use a classical term, “edification” - to build on an edifice), will therefore in the end build us and influence us. As a people of faith, if we are going to be built up as a church, if we are going to be built up as a people, if we are going to be faithful to God, we must make sure that the building process begins and ends with this creed: “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labour in vain.” The source, the strength and the inspiration is the Lord.
Very often, ministers use this passage in Psalm 127 at the beginning of marriage ceremonies, for we see the building of a marriage as very similar to the spiritual building up of a people: It is a relationship that begins with vows, and lasts for the rest of your days. We read, “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labour in vain.”
Very often, when counselling couples who are getting married, I suggest that there are four things in the building up of their marriage and their household that they should consider, and apt these four things are for us today.
For the first thing anyone who is building realizes is needed is a foundation. I believe the foundation for any church, for any life for that matter, must be worship. Our worship is a response to a recognition in all that we say and do of the cornerstone of the building, and the cornerstone is Christ. Whenever we get together and we hear the Word, or whenever we come to the table, we reaffirm our belief in that cornerstone. From our belief in that cornerstone, we then build our community together on a foundation that is firm and solid.
Like any foundation, if you take away one part of it, one stone, even one brick, then the building is weak, and it is as if it is built on sand. That is why, as a community of faith, we cannot continue to allow the Lord to build this house, for the Lord in his Spirit to do this work, unless we are first and foremost, above all else, a worshipping people. This means a commitment, a burning desire in the heart to be part of the foundation as a people who worship God first and foremost.
Last week on television I saw the most pathetic sight I think I have ever seen. It was a soccer match in Europe, between, Inter Milan and the famous Glasgow Rangers. These two teams were playing in the San Siro, the most famous of all the soccer stadiums in Italy. Now, normally, such a big game in Europe, you would have between 80,000 and100,000 people in attendance. Everyone gets crazy: The Scots in their kilts start throwing pizza at the Italians, who throw it back to the Scots, and there is a great big hullabaloo, and there is a tremendous sense of occasion, and everyone is excited, and it is a marvelous, marvelous event.
However, last Wednesday, no one was in the stadium. They had banned the fans because of all the violence that had taken place at a match a few weeks before. So Glasgow played Inter Milan in front of 30 people and four ball boys. That was it! Can you imagine what an anti-climax it was? When Inter Milan scored, three players hugged each other and that was it. There was no cheering. The Scots went home depressed. It was just a classic, classic non-event. It was horrible. My friends, this is what worship is like when you are not here. Oh, you might have great prayer, great preaching, great music, a wonderful event taking place, but if the worshippers aren't there praising their God, it is as if it were a non-event.
Subjectively, the foundation needs its worshippers. It needs their commitment to that worship. It is that worship that elevates us, and lifts us up to great heights; it is also that worship that sometimes brings us down to the depths. George Vanderman tells a beautiful story of a novice climber who wanted to go up a mountain in the Alps. With two local guides, he climbed through snow and ice and treacherous crevices, and finally, they got to the very top. There the two guides decided to let the visitor ascend to the summit first. Just as he was about to do so, one of the guides grasped him by the ankles and said, “No, sir, you cannot stand up there, because there is so much wind and ice that you will be blown down. You have to go to the summit on your knees, for you will only be safe at the top when you are on your knees.” Sometimes, worship brings us on our knees before our foundation. It lifts us up and it inspires. It causes us to have a vision. It also causes us to be humble before the one who builds the house.
But any good house not only needs a foundation, it also needs a door. A door is something that is either open or closed. There are times in which any church, any community of faith must open its door: It must let others in, in grace and in charity, the poor and those who have suffered injustice, the lonely, the seekers, those who need Christ, but don't know they need Christ until they enter the door. The door must be open! Any church that is going to be powerful, any church that is going to have a ministry truly in Christ's name, must allow its doors to be open. I don't just mean the physical doors, I mean the spiritual doors, too. There must be a welcome, there must be openness. There must be a generosity and a spirit of kindness. Like Christ, the Church is approached by the lost and the lepers, those who are hungry, those who are naked, those who are imprisoned, those who were the enemy: so open the door of God's grace and say “Come in.” The doors must be open!
However, there is also a time when the doors need to be closed, when the fellowship of the church needs to support one another in private. The church needs to develop, as we are doing now quite vigorously, smaller fellowship groups where people can feel safe with one another and can pray and can study and can grow. There is a need for the door to be closed. This is not to say that others are not welcome, but that what takes place behind these doors is a privilege. It is a kindness. It is us being together. Take advantage of the closed door. Use it. Allow yourself to grow with others as a result of it. The door must be open, but the door must also be closed for any house to have meaning and purpose and richness.
Any house must also have, without a doubt, a window. All the designers will tell you that it is the amount of light that is let into a house that determines how beautiful it looks. No matter where you place your furniture or how beautiful and exquisite your possessions, unless the light hits it at the right time and the right place, and does not create too many shadows, then no matter what you have in that house, will not seem as beautiful as it can be. The inspiration of the Holy Spirit is like a window, and we need to open the windows of our hearts and the windows of our churches to allow the glorious power of God's Holy Spirit to shine through and to reveal God's will and God's purpose.
So often, the perception of the church is that it is a dark place with more shadows than light, a place that seems to have more restrictions than it has grace. Yet, we know the opposite is true. My hope and my prayer is that when this atrium is finally built, magnificent light will pour in through the ceiling, and people will go into the middle section of our church and they will feel the warmth, and the glow, and the beauty of an open place, and that it will be matched by an openness of the spirit of the people who dwell within it: openness to the light and the inspiration that comes from God's Holy Spirit.
I realize that none of us builds on this foundation alone. We have in this great church received a great heritage and a great tradition, and we must never be so arrogant as to think that we are the only ones who open the doors or the only people who have worshipped, that we are the only ones who let the light of the Holy Spirit in: Nothing could be further from the truth. I love the words of Bernard de Chartres:
We are like dwarfs seated on the shoulders of giants. We see more things than the ancients, things more distant, but it is due neither to the sharpness of our sight, nor the greatness of our stature. It is simply that they have lent us their own shoulders on which to stand.
If we have a vision, then, if we as a people under construction look to the future, we look to the future standing on what we have been given in the past, for the kingdom of God does not begin or end today. The building up of the church is not something that is in our hands, because unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labour in vain. We need to open the windows and let the light of the Spirit in.
One last thing needed in a home - it is not complete or safe without it - is the roof. The roof is like trust. If you look at the Latin for “faith,” one of the words that describes it is the word fiducia and this literally means “trust.” What faith is, really, is trust. It trusts the promises of God. It trusts the covenantal relationships that we have with God in Christ. We trust in what Jesus said in the words of the Communion service today. We believe the word of God to be true and trustworthy, and God to the one to be trusted. We need that trust, because building can be dangerous.
A few months ago, before we began construction here at Timothy Eaton Memorial Church, I went to another church that was under construction, on Bloor Street. The minister there took me on a tour, and he said, “This is what you will get used to, Andrew: rubble and dust and everyone complaining that they don't know where to go.” He continued, “You will live through it, you will survive, but when you go through it, you have to be very careful.”
He took me on the tour, and the dust was falling, electrical wires were hanging down, and people were screaming at one another. I thought, “Oh boy, what are we getting ourselves into?
Then, he stopped, and he said, “Oh my Lord! I forgot you need to have a hardhat. Wherever you go, whatever you do, for heaven's sake, wear the hardhat.” He even had a hardhat with “Minister” on the front - just to make sure no one stole it! I haven't got one of those - yet!
A hardhat is needed because dangerous things can happen when you are under construction. When we, as the Body of Christ, are being built up by God, dangerous things can happen. There are challenges. We have to change. It is difficult, but the hardhat is the hardhat of protection; it is the roof of trust. If we will trust in God, and if we will have the grace to trust one another, then the Lord can, and the Lord will, continue to build us up. Remember this: “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labour in vain.” So, the lesson is, look ahead and look up, for we are people under construction.
Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.