Sermon

Pentecost 20, October 2, 2005
The Rev. Melissa Skelton

“The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.”

“I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”

I’m lousy at picking houses with good, solid foundations. When Bob and I first looked at the farmhouse with attached barn we eventually bought in Maine, I somehow neglected noticing a large pile of granite rocks in the middle of the area under the barn. These, I came to learn later, had been part of the barn’s foundation, pushed out onto the ground over the years by successive winter freezes and spring thaws.

I’m lousy at picking houses with good, solid foundations.

And so when I hear Jesus’ words about the stone that the builders rejected having become the chief cornerstone, I get a little queasy in that what I want holding my physical and spiritual house together is the stone that builders would choose first—the strongest, most squarely chiseled, most solidly placed stone ever.

In his early days as a Jew, Paul, our Patron, had a similar yearning for a solid foundation, a rock solid foundation for his religious and spiritual life. And so he set up the pieces of his religious life like so many stones in a house, so that his identity as a Jew and his relationship with God would be unassailable. Much of this begins the passage from Philippians that we heard this morning. Paul states that:

• He was a pure bred Hebrew, a “Hebrew, born of Hebrews”
• He was an Israelite who traced his lineage to Jacob and his family to the tribe of Benjamin
• As a Pharisee he had strictly observed the law
• He was zealous, and had worked to drive out all those who did not embrace the Jewish way
• He was blameless in the righteousness that the Law afforded; there was no demand of the Law that he had not fulfilled.

With all of these things, then, Paul’s religious and spiritual house sat on a strong foundation and was contained within unassailable walls.

We might also want this for ourselves these days as, on the one hand, we watch houses wash away, and, on the other hand, we find ourselves surrounded by many voices that are convinced that they are right: right about politics, right about civic life, but most especially, right about what it means to live a life in right relationship to God.

And so with all of this, we might hunger for a psychological, religious and spiritual house that stands on a more solid foundation, one with well-insulated walls and swept floors that do not slope. For us here at St. Paul’s, this spiritual house might sit on a base of greater certainty about what Episcopalians believe, how Episcopalians pray, how Episcopalians understand the Bible, what Episcopalians believe on social issues, an d how Episcopalians can practice their faith.

It’s not a mistake, then, that the courses we’re now offering at St. Paul’s in these areas are called “Foundation” courses, for they’re meant to provide just that: to give us more of a foundation upon which we as individuals and we as a community stand in terms of a shared sense of who we are as Episcopalians worshipping and living within a contemporary Anglo-Catholic tradition.

And we are right to this.

But as Paul discovered, none of this kind of activity ultimately has the power to lead us into a right relationship with God.

For what Paul discovered and shared with the Philippians, the discovery that we have the opportunity to make each day, is that our efforts to secure a right relationship with God do not have the power to do this.

Our Christian faith tells us that a right relationship with God is something that God does, is something that God creates, not by building us a spiritual house that is tight and solid and unassailable, one that sits on and is held together by a perfect cornerstone, but by inviting us to live in a house that is sitting on and is held together by the stone that the builders rejected; by regarding all our efforts to be right as so much rubbish in the light of an unquenchable love that seeks us out at every turn; by replacing being right with being in relationship.

And so this is why in our Foundations courses we offer and teach people content, but the focus is on putting ourselves in a place of relationship with God and with others doing the same: practicing the process of prayer, listening to God on our own and in community.

The intent of this is to ground and reground our psychological, spiritual and religious lives in relationship to a God who loves us and is forever calling us to newness of life, not a fixed, “right” position.

In Evening Prayer on Fridays we’ve been reading from a little book called Concerning the Inner Life by Evelyn Underhill. It was originally a set of addresses she gave at a retreat for a group of clergy. In it she has something to say about what Christians are founded on:

“St. Ignatius of Loyola based the whole of his great Spiritual Exercises on one fundamental truth: ‘Human beings are created for this end—to praise, to reverence and to serve God.’ This sounds all right, indeed almost obvious, when one says it. It slips by, like so many other religious phrases, almost unchecked. But if we stop and look at it, and especially at the chosen order of the terms which that great saint and psychologist employed, what does it mean? It means that one’s first duty is adoration, and one’s second duty is awe and only one’s third duty is service. And that for those three things and nothing else, addressed to God and no one else, you and I and all other countless human creatures evolved upon the surface of this planet were created.

We observe then that two of the three things for which our souls were made are matters of attitude, of relation: adoration and awe. Unless these two are right, the last of the triad, service, won’t be right. Unless the whole of your…life is a movement of praise and adoration, unless it is instinct with awe, the work which the life produces won’t be much good. And if that is true, it follows that the Christian revelation, the work done by Christ in (human) souls, has also as its main object the promotion of God’s glory, the shining out of (God’s) reality more and more fully through our acts: the increase of our wide-open, selfless adoration, the deepening of our creaturely awe, the expanding of our consecration in service. And all this must happen in you, before you can give it to your people, mustn’t it? You have to show them in your own person that literal truth of the other great Ignatian saying: ‘I come from God—I belong to God—I am destined for God.’”

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Sources Consulted

Evelyn Underhill’s Concerning the Inner Life, p. 22-23