Sand
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
August 31, 2008
Psalm 146, James 4:13-16; Matthew 7:24-27

Psa. 146:1                      Praise the LORD!
                  Praise the LORD, O my soul!
2                   I will praise the LORD as long as I live;
                                    I will sing praises to my God all my life long.
3                      Do not put your trust in princes,
                                    in mortals, in whom there is no help.
4                   When their breath departs, they return to the earth;
                                    on that very day their plans perish.
5                      Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob,
                                    whose hope is in the LORD their God,
6                   who made heaven and earth,
                                    the sea, and all that is in them;
                  who keeps faith forever;
7                                     who executes justice for the oppressed;
                                    who gives food to the hungry.                    
  The LORD sets the prisoners free;
8                                     the LORD opens the eyes of the blind.
                  The LORD lifts up those who are bowed down;
                                    the LORD loves the righteous.
9                   The LORD watches over the strangers;
                                    he upholds the orphan and the widow,
                                    but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.
10                      The LORD will reign forever,
                                    your God, O Zion, for all generations.
                  Praise the LORD!

  James 4:13   Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money."   14 Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.   15 Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that."   16 As it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil.

Matt. 7:24   "Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock.   25 The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock.   26 And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand.   27 The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell--and great was its fall!"

I.  BEGINNING

This past summer, I went on a vacation in Maine, along the beaches of the Atlantic coast.   If you walk up and down those beaches you will see people children and adults alike building sandcastles.   Some of them are quite elaborate.   We saw one that had a number of different towers and terraced staircase.   Others were pretty rudimentary structures: the result of an upturned sand pail or clumps of hand-scooped sand piled into rough barricades and towers.   Some children had dug a rather deep castle wall and moat combination.   

It is was an impressive display of human creativity and reminded me that we as creatures are singularly blessed with that creativity.   We are blessed with the ability to imagine things that are not, and dream them.   We are able to look at the world and see possibilities.   To understand that the way things are is not the way they need to be.   We are creatures with the ability to imagine the future.

II. Sand Castles

But that is also our greatest curse.   For in our imaginings of possibility, among all the things we dream could be, lies the realization that ultimately someday, we ourselves will not be.

There is the realization that for all our planning, all our science, all our medicines, all our effort, the death rate remains unchanged from what it always has been: one per person.

And so the world creates a fair amount of anxiety in us.   For we eventually realize that all our plans, all our expectations, even our lives themselves, are ultimately building castles out of sand.   The relentless movement of tide and time will eventually sweep them away.  

Now, try as you might, you cannot build a sand castle that stands up to the tides. I have often tried: perhaps a V-shaped wall right in front of the castle will deflect the tide around it.   Or if I dig a trench that will carry the water away.   Nope, that doesn't work.   I saw some folks who had piled up sand almost 5 or 6 feet high, in a pile that would surely outlast the tides.   It didn't.   The next morning, it, too, was gone without a trace of its ever having been there.

As James writes in his epistle, "You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes."

Indeed, James, often identified as the brother of Jesus, James of Jerusalem, or James the Just, reminds his fellow Christians of their limitations, of their mortality and warns against making too much of plans.  

James 4:13   Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money."   14 Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.   15 Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that."   16 As it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil.

All our planning, says James, is arrogant boasting.   We are vapor, mist, a fleeting breath. We think we control our destiny, but we do not.   Ultimately we seek to control that which cannot be controlled.

But we like to plan anyway.   And we build up expectations around those plans.   But somewhere in the back of our mind we know how precarious our plans are and this creates anxiety in us.   Or disappointment when our plans fail to come to fruition.

III. Building on Sand

It is a well known passage from the Gospel of Matthew.   Jesus says to his disciples the following words:

Matt. 7:24   "Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock.   25 The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock.   26 And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand.   27 The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell--and great was its fall!"

Jesus is instructing his disciples on faithful living.   ACTING upon one's faith.   And that the difference between acting upon one's faith and not acting upon one's faith is like the difference between building a house on rock and building a house on sand.   One endures, the other perishes.

But what does it mean to act upon faith?

Christopher Morse, the Dietrich Bonhoffer professor of Theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York says that Christian faith is "being on hand, for a kingdom that is at hand, but not yet in hand."

That is, Christian faith is about acting out a trust in a reality that is breaking into this world but is not yet fully here.   He notes further, that very few, if any, people actually live this way.   That practically none of us really lives our lives as if we were on hand for a kingdom that was at hand, but not yet in hand.   We don't actually live our lives as if we were already a part of that kingdom.

But that's what Jesus' words should yield in us.   Jesus' words about the Kingdom at hand should yield in us a response in faithful action.   If his words were not enough, his example should be.   And if his example were not enough, then his death and resurrection should be.

But we continue to hear the words and not act on them.   We act not out of faith but out of fear and anxiety. We are not being "on hand", but "on sand."

IV.  Trusting in Princes

The awareness of our precarious state often creates a lot of anxiety in us.   In our anxiety, we turn to anyone or anything that will promise to alleviate our anxiety.  

For, many who cannot cope with the anxiety and the uncertainty turn to substances to help dull the pain.   Alcohol, drugs, food, sex, baseball, whatever it is that in the moment makes you feel better, makes you feel that the world is just that much more controllable.

For others, certainties are the answer.   Rigid unbending orthodoxies, black and white political ideologies, fundamentalisms, or any other "certain" thing that they can hang their hats on in a world of uncertainty and impermanence.

And still others will turn to those who promise them stability, security, certainty.   Who promise that this out of control world can be put back in control and they have the solution to do it.

The Psalmist writes:

3                      Do not put your trust in princes,
                                    in mortals, in whom there is no help.
4                   When their breath departs, they return to the earth;
                                    on that very day their plans perish.

Do not put your trust in someone who cannot save.   They are just as mortal as you.   They too will die.   On that day their plans will come to nothing.   But so often, we do precisely that.

But nothing that anyone can do will save us from the unpredictability of life, of the impermanence of life.

Barack Obama cannot save us.   John McCain cannot save us. Not even Ron Paul or Bob Barr can save us.

Our military might cannot save us.   The Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Agency cannot save us.   Not even the heroic police and firefighters of the NYPD and the FDNY can save us.

The ACLU cannot save us.   A border fence cannot save us.

Free Trade cannot save us. Trade tariffs cannot save us.  

Social Security reform cannot save us.   Welfare cannot save us.   Roth IRAs cannot save us. The state lottery cannot save us. Indian casinos cannot save us.

Anti-oxidants can't save us.   Red wine can't save us.   Prozac, Zanax, Cialis, Levitra, and Viagra cannot save us. The South Beach Diet cannot save us.

Only Jesus.

Only Jesus Christ can save us.   As the Psalmist continues:

             Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the LORD their God,

Only the saving power of God through Christ redeems us from the brokenness of the world.   Everything else is simply building another kind of sandcastle.   Perhaps one that may last a little while longer, but the basic situation is still the same.   We are impermanent, temporal things.   A mist that appears for a little while then vanishes.   Nothing we will do will change that.

But Christ has already done something about it.   Through the resurrection we have already been saved.   Through the resurrection, our salvation has already been assured.   It was accomplished by God's grace.   As the writer of Ephesians notes, "By grace through faith you are saved." Not will be saved, not might be saved.   Are saved.

What a tremendous gift that is!   All around us is death and decay.   Our days are like grass, our lives like a mist.   Everything we build is ultimately like castles of sand, and yet we have this promise, firm, solid. We have a share in eternity.   By the grace of God.

What would it look like if we were to live our lives like we actually believed that? What would it be like if we were to build our houses of faith on the rock and not on the sand?   If we were to build them not out of anxiety and fear but out of faith and hope?

What would this world look like?

What would our world look like if fear could no longer lay hold of us?   If we understood that the worst thing that could happen to us--our death--was no threat to us at all? What kind of courage might we lead our lives with?   What kind of witness might we make?

Imagine if freed from anxiety about our lives and our deaths we could live a life worthy of that Gospel.   Imagine if we were freed to love those whom no one else will love.   The stranger, the outcast.

Imagine if we were freed to live lives of love and justice, to speak up for the oppressed.   To champion the weak against the strong. No matter how strong the strong happened to be.

Imagine if we were freed to live lives of love and compassion for those in need, giving of ourselves without worrying about all the things that cause us anxiety, all the temporal promises that derail us from living out our faith fully and freely.

V. END

I like sitting in the sand and building sandcastles.   It's fun.   To try to see how long they'll stand.   But they won't.   It's tempting to keep trying.

But without the rock of Christ, nothing we do will stand.   All of our plans, indeed our very beings, pass away.

We are called to get up out of the sand.   To trust in the rock that has been so firmly established for us.   To build a faith of action that is not beset by fear and anxiety but that responds in faith and trusting.   A faith not built upon the sands of our impermanence.   But built upon the rock of the everlasting Grace of God.