“BRICK BY BRICK”
Luke 14:25-33; Josh. 2:1-16
Preached by Bro. Walt Wiltschek on the
occasion of First Church of the Brethren’s
125th Anniversary on September 13, 2009

 

 

 

 

 

The week before last I was enduring one of the really difficult parts of my job. I was covering the meetings of the World Council of Churches—on their dime—and that meant I was stuck in Geneva, Switzerland, for 10 days. Yes, it’s rough to suffer for the Savior sometimes! (Europe is nice, you know, but it’s no York!)

After the meetings were done, I had four days until I had to fly home, and I decided to head to Spain. I had long wanted to go to Barcelona to experience the culture and see some of the landmarks there, most notably the Sagrada Familia cathedral designed by Antoni Gaudi. You’ve probably seen pictures at some point; in the ones I’d seen, I always thought it looks a bit like a melting sandcastle.

And it really does, to some degree, although up close there’s an amazing amount of detail. Gaudi designed the cathedral to simulate nature, saying he wanted the congregation inside to feel as if it were sitting in a forest. And outside it’s covered with figures and symbols from Christ’s life, one side representing his Nativity, one sign his Passion. Parts of the work are a UNESCO World Heritage site.

It’s a massive building—seen from almost anywhere in Barcelona. It’s a true work of spiritual art, causing the viewer to do some reflection and introspection. And it’s far, far from finished. The brochure proclaims: “Here you have a unique opportunity to see how a church is built!”

The first block for the cathedral was laid in 1882. Gaudi took over the project the following year. The project began to take shape under his leadership for the next 40-plus years and continued until the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s dealt it a severe setback with damage to the structure and a loss of time and funds.

The work eventually picked up again, more intensely in recent years. It’s still a bit less than half-finished. The group overseeing the construction, based on what they have been able to piece together of the original plans, now says they hope to complete the construction by about the year 2030.

Talk about counting well the cost! You may remember the hymn on that theme penned by Brethren founder Alexander Mack—who knew all about taking risks—that is still in our hymnals today. In the first verse, Mack writes, “Count well the cost, Christ Jesus says, when you lay the foundation. Are you resolved, though all seems lost, to risk your reputation, your self, your wealth, for Christ the Lord as you now give your solemn word?”

Mack’s bigger question, really, was: What is the cost of NOT following Jesus? The words of the hymn tie in to the words of Luke chapter 14, where Jesus asks his disciples, “Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Will he not first sit down and estimate the cost to see if he has enough money to complete it?”

I can imagine the disciples thinking, “Oh no, here he goes with another metaphor!” Perhaps some of the denser ones even thought, “A tower? I’m not an architect! Why would I be building a tower??” But Jesus, of course, is coming back once more to that often-mentioned principle of priorities. The call to follow him cannot be taken lightly. If you’re going to come along for the ride, do it lock, stock, and barrel, not half-way. See it through, even if it takes nearly 150 years.

Well, I’ll get back to that theme in a bit, but I first want to take a slight detour into the sports world. Many of you know that I was previously a sports writer at the York Daily Record, and I continue to do some freelance sports work. And for a sports fan, this time of year is close to paradise! (For those of you who hate sports, you can get in your pew nap in the next 90 seconds.)

Here we are, with the major league baseball season in the annual September scramble for division titles and wild-card spots. The college football season has begun, and the regular season kickoff for most NFL teams (congrats, Steelers fans) is mere hours away. And the hockey and basketball seasons are just around the corner. You can almost smell it in the air!

Now beneath my passion for sports, is a rather odd taste in my favorite sports teams. You see, I tend to like the underdogs: the lower-profile teams, the low-budget operations, the ones off the map who catch people by surprise when they win.

Among these, one of my very favorites is my baseball team of choice, the Minnesota Twins. I somehow latched on to them even while growing up in Orioles country. They typically have one of the lower payrolls in baseball in one of the nation’s smaller media markets, usually with a roster full of good, down-to-earth guys who help their community, and, amazingly enough, in recent years they’ve actually been winning again after nearly being eliminated at the beginning of the decade! They’re still in the playoff chase this year, hanging on by their fingernails.

In football, my favorite team is the Seattle Seahawks, who have been to just one Super Bowl and lost—thanks very much, Steelers fans. Another team I always cheer for, though, especially since moving to the Midwest, is the Green Bay Packers. There’s something wonderful about a pro team, one of the NFL’s oldest, from a city of 70,000 or so people playing in a stadium full of aluminum bleachers that’s always sold out to fans cheering their little cheeseheads off even while sitting in below-zero temperatures.

There’s something in all of us that likes to cheer for the little guy, the unlikely hero. Even if you’re a fan of another team, it’s hard not to feel a tug at your heartstrings when a team beats the odds and makes a Hoosiers-like unexpected run at greatness. Look at Ms. Oudin in the tennis world this past week, for those who have been following that. Even if they don’t come out on top, there’s still something endearing about the “loveable losers” who give it their best shot—just ask any Cubs fan. Others can have their New York Yankees and Dallas Cowboys. Give me the little guys.

I think there’s something to the little-guy mentality that resonates with scripture, too. Our society says we’re to aim to be the biggest and the best: mega-corporations, Fortune 500, the rich and famous, the movers and the shakers. But the Bible presents for us another point of view: Amid the glitz and glitter, the power brokers and pretty faces, God often uses people and places who appear to be the most unimportant and insignificant—from the world’s point of view. Many of God’s best gifts do, in fact, come in small packages.

One of those instances of God working through the “little people” you heard in our first scripture a little bit ago. It’s from the Old Testament, not an unfamiliar story but not one of the first people we usually think of among the Bible stories. It’s the story of Rahab the prostitute, as she’s typically called, an interesting tale from the book of Joshua.

An interesting point I found as I studied the passage was that the Hebrew word used for “prostitute,” according to one commentary, could also mean “innkeeper.” Now admittedly those are two words I don’t often get confused today—or maybe I’ve just managed to stay out of those kinds of inns! But perhaps Rahab wasn’t even so much a woman of ill repute as history has typically painted her to be.

In the scripture text, though, the author isn’t concerned about Rahab’s career choice. Instead, the story focuses on her actions when she is faced with a test of courage and faith. Here she is, likely among the lowest ranks of the populace of the mighty city of Jericho, regardless of her profession, when two strangers come knocking at her door. Would she help them?

Rahab gives them shelter, then puts herself at extreme personal risk by hiding them in her home along the lines of those who sheltered Jews during World War II or the Underground Railroad of the Civil War. When the besieged city officials, representing the king himself, comes to her house looking for them, she sends them off on a wild goose chase. Something in her recognized the authority of the God of Israel, and she recognized this God at work in her very presence. She says to the spies, “The Lord your God is God in heaven above and on the earth below.” What a simple yet eloquent testimony of faith!

She eventually helps the men escape the city, and they in turn promise to protect her and her family if she follows their exact instructions. The spies’ safe return to the Israelites with the information they had gathered eventually helps the Israelites to take the city, in that famous story of marching around the wall seven times. The spies kept their promise to Rahab; she and her family were spared and went to live with the Israelite people.

This little bitty person in a big city, one solitary woman in an unheralded position, probably regarded as insignificant by most, but not by God. God uses her simple act of courage to carry out great things, and the rewards went well beyond just having her life spared in Jericho’s destruction. Later accounts trace her as an ancestor of Jesus himself through the line of Ruth and Boaz. And in Hebrews chapter 11 Rahab is listed alongside Abraham, Moses, and others as a hero of the faith. Not too shabby!

You could many others from the Bible to this list of little people, often unlikely people, making a big difference, right down to a tiny infant born in a cradle in the little town of Bethlehem some 2,000 years ago. Small steps, big stuff.

The big picture of faith is typically lived out not in fire and heralds of trumpets, in grand gestures and pious proclamations, but in the day-to-day, seemingly rather ordinary words and actions of people of faith who have courage enough to say yes when God calls and to live out Christ in daily living. Think about your past week—where might have you done a little thing that made a difference to someone? How might you have changed one small corner of the world, perhaps without even realizing it at the time?

When we come to anniversaries like this one you’re celebrating this fall, they are special times, and they should be. This congregation has much to celebrate for its work and witness over the past century and a quarter. I won’t try to list those accomplishments, because I’m sure I’d overlook many things, and besides, I don’t want to dwell there. We should celebrate where we’ve been, but we must avoid the temptation to get stuck there. We heard words along those lines as the Church of the Brethren marked its 300th anniversary as a denomination last year. We build on our past, but the greatest value of that heritage is in shaping who we uniquely need to be as we press forward into God’s ongoing work in the 21st century.

The other danger in anniversaries is to get so caught up in the big picture—wanting to re-capture the successes of the past, building big goals and great plans—that it feels overwhelming, even impossible. Setting goals is important, but it’s not where we dwell. A burst of energy at the beginning of some new project can quickly fizzle in the face of reality. We lose sight of the small steps, all the little ways that God acts along the way. We forget to do the tiny things we can right where we are, which added together might bring about bigger things that we could have ever imagined if we can let go long enough for God to work.

There’s a line often attributed to the Roman emperor Hadrian, who was encouraging his people in the face of the monumental task of building Rome and the empire. How could this possibly be done? “Brick by brick, my citizens,” Hadrian is reported to have said. “Brick by brick.”

The line was popularized a few years back in the movie “Seabiscuit,” where an unlikely combination of horse and young rider are both trying to come back from injuries and attain an seemingly impossible goal of victory in a major race. How on earth could they accomplish such a task when it seemed so far away? Brick by brick. Brick by brick.

As a writer, I like to read various forms of literature when I can, and one of my more favorite passages comes from the pen of author Henry David Thoreau: “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams,” Thoreau said, “and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. … If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.”

I like this passage because it causes us to think about possibilities. When meeting with our district youth cabinet in Illinois, we like to call it “blue-sky thinking.” If the sky’s the limit, what would we do? How can we build boldly for the Kingdom? Those words still apply all these decades after they were written. What does it mean to dream and live in imagination of what might be?

I also like the passage because it gets back to practical reality. You have your dreams? Good. Now get off your duffs and get to work with the day-to-day building.

Going back to Luke 14, I think this is the message that Jesus was trying to get across, too. It’s great to think big. “Make no little plans,” as Chicago architect Daniel Burnham said. But then see it through, whether in your hands-on plans and promises on earth or in your commitment to follow Christ through the topsy-turvy, wacky, winding journey of faith.

Jesus’ listeners had probably heard plenty of empty promises from the political and religious leaders of their day. He was pointing them to a different way, while also letting them know that being his disciple was a whole-hog, nothing-held-back commitment. “He who has ears to hear, let him hear,” Jesus says.

So how do we build for such a life, whether as an individual or as a church? If we skip back a couple of Gospels to Matthew chapter 7, we find a very familiar parable about building. Most of you probably encountered it as a child.

There is a wise man and a foolish man who are both building their houses, kind of a biblical predecessor of the three little pigs. The foolish man, of course, built his house on the sand. Being foolish, he probably put it on an earthquake fault and in the frequent path of hurricanes and tornadoes and the occasional swarm of locusts to boot.

And then there’s the wise man, who found a nice solid rock on which to place his home: A Prudential-like position of strength.

Without the benefit of the National Weather Service or its Middle Eastern equivalent, our building buddies probably had little warning of the torrential downpours moving in. And you know how the weather report went: “The rains came down, and the floods came up.”

No problem for the wise man. His house on the rock stood firm. For the foolish man, however, it wasn’t pretty. The New International Version says the house “fell with a great crash.” The song, if I remember correctly, gave an even more dramatic report that the “house on the sand went *** SPLAT!” I’ll be he didn’t even have homeowner’s insurance.

Two men, both building, evidently similar houses, but the foundation they chose made all the difference.

With 125 years behind you and a wide-open future before you, how will you build, York First? How will you live out God’s desire to be the church in this community? How will you make a difference in this little corner of Haines Acres, in East York, in York County? How will you be this century’s Rahab—in faith, that is—to do your part when God comes calling?

Over in Barcelona, the work on the Sagrada Familia cathedral continues. When it’s done, whenever that actually ends up being, there will be several more spires taller than any of the ones currently existing—and 18 in all. There will be more stained glass, and a beautiful worship space inside. And there will be another entrance façade to go along with the Nativity and Passion entries that now exist. The third entry? Gaudi called it the “Gloria” façade, one to display Christ’s resurrection—the majestic ending to the story begun in the Nativity and the Passion.

It seems appropriate that will be the last one to be constructed, for isn’t that what we all should be building toward?: the impact of Christ’s risen and living presence among us, and how we share that with the world.

That may seem a daunting task for anyone or any group, especially as the world around us so often seems to spiral out of control. It may seem as daunting in its own way as completing a massive Spanish cathedral. But as you celebrate this anniversary, remember that you have been placed here and gathered together for a purpose. And no matter how overwhelming it may seem, you can carry it out the same way they’ll finish the Sagrada Familia: brick by brick, my citizens. Brick by brick. Amen.

The Benediction and Challenge (given at the 8:30 A.M. Service only):
We’re always building, whether we realize it or not. York First, you laid a foundation as a congregation 125 years ago and have done some good building. What will you build now? As you leave here today, I invite you to consider what you are building, how you are building it, and for whom you are building. Blessings to you on that journey. Amen.