Sermon:  “God’s Good Gifts,
                 Part 2:  The Bible”

Many thanks to you, Girl Scouts, for bringing that “Parable of the Wise and Foolish Men” of Jesus to life for us today.  I think you have a future on the Weather Channel!  And even more thanks to you, Pete, for risking Vanilla Swirl’s life and limb to preach the Gospel for us today from those two chairs.  Will you pray with me?

Prayer:   “May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our hearts and minds here together be acceptable to you, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.”

With all due respect to my brother Jim Eagan, who’s also our church’s advisor on the policies that are reimbursing us for our office water damage, today’s sermon is not about flood insurance.  It’s about God’s good gift of the Bible, the Good News, the solid and reliable rock of Jesus Christ, upon which our faith is built and upon which our church covenant stands.  It’s about God, the one whom the great 20^th Century German theologian Paul Tillich calls “ground of our being.”  In other words, as someone was reminding me in a church meeting this week, God is NOT the fire escape of the house that is our life – there whenever we might need help in a spiritual emergency, but not needed in daily reality.  No – God is always there, ever-present as our spiritual foundation, the only sure and firm foundation for the human soul.

Now, we know this is true.  We read it in the Bible and sing it in our hymns.  But as our Fairfield East Regional Minister Sarah Verasco said in her sermon February 13^th, if we want to find the real foundation of our lives, we can dig into our checkbooks.  Where is your treasure invested?  I give to our church, but by far my biggest investment is my house – mortgage, taxes, insurance, fuel, utilities.  As I said last Sunday, now we’re also going to pay tuition for my son’s college, which will be considerably more expensive than all those years of his Christian education – Church School, Youth Group, Confirmation. 

I wonder what will ultimately have more value to him?  Pastor Amanda Warner at Prince of Peace Lutheran Church asked in one Brookfield clergy meeting, “Which will give our Church School kids more comfort at the end of life?  Will they cling to their first soccer trophy?  Or their Confirmation Bible?  Will they recite their “times table” on their death bed, or the 23^rd Psalm?  In the words of the hymn writer, Edward Mote, “On Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand.”  And to be able to stand on the teachings of Christ, it really helps to know Jesus as his story is told in the Bible.

This is why, in our United Church of Christ – which claims Jesus Christ as the only head of the church – we consider it essential to hand out Bibles to all our new members – whether newly baptized babies (who get children’s picture Bibles), or 4^th graders (who get easy-to-read paperback Bibles) or our Confirmands and adults who get the New Revised Standard.  Protestant heroes of the 1500s like Jan Hus died in the flames of the Reformation for your right to read those very pew Bibles that you sometimes pick up by mistake, thinking it’s your hymnal.  You know what a happy, self-proclaimed Bible nerd I am, so I’m biased – but I hate it when people miss the opportunity to learn and grow spiritually from the greatest story ever told, and from Jesus, who was the Bible’s greatest preacher.  As Matthew tells us over and over, Jesus had nothing but the greatest respect for his own Hebrew Scriptures, our Old Testament, and for his people he brought them to life and explained them in what were then “modern” terms through his amazing parables.  My master’s thesis (which included the skit you just saw) made the case that Jesus – unlike most of the kind of dry, academic preachers I had heard – was a great storyteller, with a great sense of humor.  If you could have heard us laughing in the Church Library Thursday morning at Bible study, you would believe me!

But the truth that Jesus teaches us is that – unlike the scribes and Pharisees of his day, who loved nothing better than Torah study and trusted in their own wisdom and righteousness – we don’t find our way into the kingdom heaven by the trail of our own piously sewn merit badges.  Jesus says his “little ones,” the children, lead the way into the kingdom of heaven.  In fact, he says that if we don’t turn and receive the kingdom of heaven like a child, we will never enter it.  Like the camel that is too laden down with goods to make it through the narrow gate, we adults are sometimes too bound up with worldly things to receive what Jesus would say are the good gifts God would give us in the world of spirit – like his own simple teachings in the Bible.  And these millions of trivial things – whether they are fun activities or nagging worries – make up the sand that Jesus says keeps our souls unsettled and off balance.  He calls us to instead lay our lives’ foundation firmly on him, and on the way of love God teaches us in the Bible.

So scouting, like our life of Christian faith, is not about what we can achieve (in terms of rank) but in learning to practice our faith by loving others.  As Christians, Jesus calls us to put kindness over achievement and graciousness over righteousness.  I was taught that lesson in both Church School and Scouting.  I thank God that my life’s foundation was built on lessons from Jesus and not from this world – which has other priorities, like “do unto others BEFORE they do unto you!”  I loved what Leslie Sands said our dear friend Gert Ewing’s high school said about her: under her yearbook picture it said, “Where she met a stranger, there she left a friend.”  There’s no place on this world’s resume for a statement like that, but as a spiritual epitaph, it is high praise indeed.

On what is your life built?  It’s all too easy for us to forget what’s real, what’s solid, what’s eternal and imperishable in our electronic lives of flickering facts and glittering consumer goods.  So I hope your life is not built upon your career or your bank account – the way people all around us are losing their jobs and retirement savings.  I hope it’s not built on your health club membership either, because cardiac health and looking great on the outside is no guarantee of longevity.  One of my old friends who ended up with colon cancer gave up the Midwestern bacon and egg breakfasts of his childhood for the fruit and granola his doctor recommended.  “I hated blueberries,” he said, “but I ate them religiously, for my kids, because they were supposed to contain antioxidants.  Now I call them lie-berries, because they didn’t keep me safe from cancer!”  But when he turned to his church for help, he found it was true:  “On Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand.”

As we enter into covenant in our church, we find our strength in Christ and his promises to love us no matter what.  As the living, resurrected body of Christ, we come together in worship and something actually does happen – something spiritual, something real.  In church we stand together and claim as solid a spiritual reality – the embodied power of God’s love in Christian fellowship.  Christians proclaim God incarnate – God here with us, in the flesh, even in something as ordinary as a family breaking bread together at home or at church.  In communion, as we receive Christ’s body we also enter into it.  We become part of the Biblical testimony of faith.  Because preaching the Good News takes many forms: Pass the peace to your neighbor.  Feel the firmness of the flesh in that handshake.  As you stand to bind the covenant, know that your brothers and sisters in Christ will help you to stand when you stumble.  We are trying to be solid and dependable disciples, who preach the Good News just by what we do every day. 

Some of our youth, they heard the Gospel preached by Ivan Park, who is remembered by the flowers here today.  He wrote The Gospel According to Ivan for our mission trip teams as he wielded a hammer with them, in Jesus’s name.  Gert Ewing, she heard our faith preached not in anything I ever said from up here in the pulpit, because she could barely hear anything – but in the music or our organ and choirs, especially the children’s choirs.  That’s why she sat so close, right over there – to hear better The Gospel According to the Peeps.  Gert Ewing knew God alive and in the flesh in the shining faces of the beautiful children of our church, who led the way for her into the Kingdom of Heaven. 

Thanks be to God for this Good News.  Amen.

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Matthew 7:6-12

[Jesus said],

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. 25The 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. 26And 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. 27The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell—and great was its fall!”

28Now when Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were astounded at his teaching, 29for he taught them as one having authority, and not as their scribes.