See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse.

When I was working, these past few weeks with Jesus parable of how to provide a firm foundation for a home, I understood and appreciated the message more than I ever have before.

Debi and I have been talking about Foundations and about how they determine your future a lot over the last few years. Our shore house, which we hope will serve as our home years from now when we are retired, is built on a slab and we are not sure whether the slab can handle the increased weight to expand to the size we would both want and need.

Hours upon hours of conversation and deliberation have been spent on this subject during the last 5 years and we still don’t know exactly what we are going to do, but I mention it this morning because it serves as a follow-up to this parable of the Christian faith that we are called to.

Our foundations, not only in construction about which I know little, but more importantly our foundations in faith, about which I know some but never enough, shape our futures, not only as individuals but as a Church, here and in the larger Church. It requires no great insight to recognize that American Christianity is troubled, more troubled than it has been in my lifetime. There has always been a tension in our national faith between liberal and conservative, or between evangelism and social justice, or between liturgical worship and free style worship, or between tradition and innovation, but the tensions have usually been creative and helpful as we felt free to borrow from both extremes and our theology, our mission and our worship have all been shaped, in evolutionary ways, by the blending of diverse perspectives.

However today I am concerned with what I see in the larger Church.

The divide is growing and the tension these days is not creative, it is corrosive, it is following the path of national political games of “gotcha” with single issue litmus tests, tests that all fail the most significant litmus test of all: God’s word and God’s will. Now of course I will over-simplify this, but I think it is a helpful oversimplification.

On the one hand are the people, and I have been one of them at times, who want their faith to be exactly like it has always been, these are the people who would be focused upon the slab that our house is built upon, singing only songs that are older than they are, praying only in language that William Shakespeare could have written, doing the work of being the Church only in ways that have been done before. These are the people who want to sing and believe “Give me that old time religion, it was good enough for Grandpa and Aunt Matilda and Cousin Horace and the cocker spaniel and it’s good enough for me.”

Well it’s not.

The faith of our fathers and mothers was good and great for them, but it isn’t and can’t ever be good enough for me or you or us. Faith needs to be rediscovered and redefined in each generation and each individual and even after you have found your faith, it needs to keep changing as you change and your religion either changes with it or it needs to be tossed aside like the shed shell of a crab who has grown and moved on.

You see religion is nothing more than the way in which we express our faith, so it must change in order to reflect our faith. The curse of tradition is that it begins to worship religion more than God, it never allows the believer to grow and adjust to new realities that are being revealed by God.

And haven’t we all been guilty, at one point or another, of worshiping our tradition above our Lord?

See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse

Then there is the curse on the other hand, the curse of those people, and I have been among these as well, who are so impatiently addicted to success that they will do and say anything that is going to attract people and they celebrate shallow little victories. These are the people who can only see the potential and possibility of the future, people who would love to build without regard for the foundation, people who hold the traditional church in distain, willing to accept money from us to fuel their efforts but openly and mockingly critical of those who find comfort and strength in familiar words of faith that retain a relevance in our lives.

This constant, restless, relentless pursuit of the new never allows faith to grow and to mature and to develop.

It took Jesus Christ 30 years of living before he was ready to do his work, 30 years of studying scripture, 30 years of learning to pray, 30 years of developing and nurturing relationships.

And after all of that he went into the wilderness for 40 more days and nights, just to be sure that he was ready.

We want microwave religion, pop it in, pop it out, move on.

It takes time to build a faith, it takes years and experiences shared to build a church with meaningful relationships and when we try to speed it up we find ourselves with shallow and empty souls.

But haven’t we all been guilty of trying to take spiritual shortcuts, growing bored with the discipline of regular prayer and worship that builds our faith for the long haul?

See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse

A strong faith, a Christian faith, is one that is built on both tradition and change, foundations and futures. There are great blessings in our past and in our future, but when we cling to only one we lose the strength of both. Today we name names, in our bulletin and in our liturgy.

We will speak of those people who have been of significance to us in our Church life and in our personal lives. People whose lives have touched and shaped ours, in small and large ways.

Debi and I have learned over the years the value of utilizing the Church’s special funds as a tangible way of remembering the people we love with gifts over and above our regular weekly giving. These funds serve, for us, as something of a Protestant mass card. Each year on our fathers’ birthdays and on my mother’s we make a gift and it reminds us of the foundational people of our lives, when there is a death that touches us or those whom we love, we make a gift, when there is a joy that exceeds anything that we can even find words for, we make a gift.

These are not big gifts, but they are tributes to the love that God has given us.

I know that these gifts help, a little, in the work that happens here and we’re glad for that, but I also know, and this is far more important to me, that these gifts help, a lot, in keeping us balanced in our faith, in reminding us of the wisdom and errors of our parents and that the commandment “honor your father and your mother” does not end with a funeral, but above all these gifts tie our past to our future, they tie our history to our vision, they tie who we have been to who we are becoming.

Someday we will probably get around to figuring out what we are going to do with our foundation and our dreams and how and where we are going to live when we can’t live here any more, but these are things that we don’t need to know today.

Someday, as a Church, we will figure out what God had in mind in 1834 and how we are meant to be the connection between yesterday and tomorrow, and why it is that we are flourishing at a time when Churches like this are supposed to be becoming extinct, but for today it is more than enough to know that we have chosen the blessings and we have built our faith on a strong foundation and that it will lead us to other blessings that will exceed any plans or dreams that we might have.

In all of our memories, in all of our activities and in all of our dreams, let us always continue to choose the blessing.

See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse