William H. Willimon - "Christ, the Cornerstone" (July 23, 2000)
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| Woman | The second reading is from | 0:09 |
| the Gospel According to Saint Mark, the sixth chapter: | 0:11 | |
| "The apostles gathered around Jesus | 0:17 | |
| and told him all that they had done and taught. | 0:20 | |
| He said to them, 'Come away to a deserted place | 0:24 | |
| all by yourselves and rest awhile,' | 0:29 | |
| for many were coming and going | 0:32 | |
| and they had no leisure even to eat. | 0:34 | |
| And they went away in a boat | 0:38 | |
| to a deserted place by themselves. | 0:40 | |
| Now, many saw them going and recognized them | 0:43 | |
| and they hurried there on foot from all the towns | 0:47 | |
| and arrived ahead of them. | 0:50 | |
| As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd | 0:53 | |
| and he had compassion for them | 0:57 | |
| because they were like sheep without a shepard | 1:00 | |
| and he began to teach them many things." | 1:03 | |
| This is the word of the Lord. | 1:07 | |
| (congregation murmurs) | 1:10 | |
| Preacher | They're having a big ruckus out in Colorado. | 1:20 |
| The Chair of the state's school boards | 1:23 | |
| wants to put in every Colorado classroom | 1:28 | |
| the motto, In God We Trust. | 1:32 | |
| He was being interviewed by someone | 1:37 | |
| from national public radio | 1:39 | |
| who noted the controversy over this proposal. | 1:41 | |
| And the Chair of the school pushing, | 1:46 | |
| In God We Trust, said, | 1:50 | |
| "I just can't see how anyone could object to this. | 1:53 | |
| It's and inoffensive phrase. | 1:56 | |
| We have our differences religiously | 2:00 | |
| but we all can affirm God." | 2:03 | |
| and the reporter said, | 2:09 | |
| "Well, if the slogan is so offensive, | 2:11 | |
| why bother?" | 2:16 | |
| Our scripture today, | 2:21 | |
| Jesus Christ, the cornerstone. | 2:24 | |
| In him the whole structure is jointed together | 2:28 | |
| and grown into a holy temple of the Lord, | 2:32 | |
| in whom you are also built spiritually | 2:35 | |
| into a dwelling place for God. | 2:39 | |
| Would you believe it? | 2:45 | |
| They can't find the cornerstone of the US Capital. | 2:47 | |
| The Capital has a cornerstone. | 2:51 | |
| They had a big celebration in the early 1800s | 2:53 | |
| and they laid the cornerstone but over the years | 2:56 | |
| with the settling of the building and the alterations, | 2:59 | |
| they'd forgotten where the corner stone is located. | 3:02 | |
| A commission has been established | 3:07 | |
| to try to find the cornerstone. | 3:09 | |
| Now, I can show you the cornerstone of this chapel | 3:13 | |
| it is at that corner of the building outside. | 3:16 | |
| On a fall day in the early 1930s miss Doris Duke was here, | 3:21 | |
| they had a celebration and with trowel in hand | 3:25 | |
| she laid the chapel cornerstone. | 3:28 | |
| I don't know what they put | 3:33 | |
| in the chapel cornerstone when they laid it. | 3:33 | |
| Frequently, they take newspapers from the day | 3:36 | |
| and events related to the building | 3:39 | |
| and they put them in the cornerstone | 3:41 | |
| and then they're sealed. | 3:43 | |
| There is a room in this building that nobody sees | 3:45 | |
| up in the chapel tower where all the cornerstones | 3:48 | |
| from all the buildings at Trinity College | 3:51 | |
| that have since been torn down, | 3:54 | |
| all those cornerstones have been embedded | 3:58 | |
| in the walls of the chapel tower. | 4:00 | |
| A cornerstone is laid in the foundation of a building, | 4:03 | |
| it's where two wall meet. | 4:08 | |
| You build everything else on a cornerstone. | 4:10 | |
| In Ephesians, using an architectural metaphor, says, | 4:14 | |
| "Jesus is the cornerstone of the church. | 4:19 | |
| Everything else is built on top of that." | 4:25 | |
| More to the point of Ephesians, | 4:30 | |
| a cornerstone is where two walls meet | 4:33 | |
| and the writer to Ephesians, earlier, | 4:36 | |
| has talked about the walls, | 4:38 | |
| the walls that separate Jews and Gentiles | 4:39 | |
| have now been brought down and they have now | 4:42 | |
| been built in Jesus into a cornerstone, | 4:45 | |
| a new temple to God. | 4:50 | |
| Jesus is the cornerstone. | 4:52 | |
| To continue this architectural metaphor, | 4:56 | |
| this chapel, unlike a lot of neo-gothic buildings, | 5:01 | |
| is built in true gothic style. | 5:04 | |
| There's no structural steel used in this building. | 5:07 | |
| In this building, it's stone resting on top of stone. | 5:10 | |
| And high above us, here in the crossing, | 5:16 | |
| is the the capstone. | 5:20 | |
| There's a huge stone with an angel carved upon it, | 5:22 | |
| weighs over a ton, and all these soaring arches | 5:25 | |
| here in the crossing, all of them meet at that capstone. | 5:29 | |
| All the weight of the building comes upon that capstone | 5:34 | |
| and if you would remove that great capstone, | 5:41 | |
| all the of these stones would fall. | 5:43 | |
| The whole place would collapse. | 5:48 | |
| Ephesians would say, "If you remove Jesus, | 5:52 | |
| the capstone, the cornerstone of the church, | 5:57 | |
| the whole church would collapse." | 6:02 | |
| A while back, I went out to eastern North Carolina | 6:07 | |
| to speak to a gathering of clergy | 6:10 | |
| and I took along with me a Duke student | 6:12 | |
| who was thinking about going to seminary. | 6:15 | |
| And I went out there and I participated | 6:17 | |
| in a worship service. | 6:20 | |
| We had hymns and prayers and then I preached | 6:21 | |
| and then he and I came back to Durham. | 6:24 | |
| On the way back to Durham the student said to me, | 6:28 | |
| "Did you notice," I hadn't noticed. | 6:31 | |
| He said, "Did you notice that except for your sermon, | 6:33 | |
| Jesus was never mentioned | 6:38 | |
| in that entire service of worship? What is that?" | 6:40 | |
| Well, I thought about it and it was true. | 6:44 | |
| We had sung some of these contemporary hymns | 6:48 | |
| about God the creator and the sustainer, | 6:51 | |
| God the reconciler, God the embracing us | 6:53 | |
| and loving us and we had some contemporary prayers | 6:58 | |
| and Jesus was never mentioned. | 7:04 | |
| Now, why is that? | 7:09 | |
| Well, dear you see, | 7:12 | |
| if we can just keep talking about God, | 7:15 | |
| In God We Trust, | 7:19 | |
| well, then we can make God over into anything we please. | 7:23 | |
| Some feminist commentators say, | 7:28 | |
| "You know, we can't have God limited | 7:31 | |
| to some man in the first century. | 7:34 | |
| God is bigger, God is broader, | 7:39 | |
| God is more all encompassing | 7:40 | |
| and all embracing than that. | 7:42 | |
| In the 1930s in Germany, | 7:46 | |
| there were a lot of distinguished theologians who said, | 7:49 | |
| "We can't have God almighty | 7:52 | |
| limited to a Jew from Nazareth. | 7:55 | |
| Oh no, God is larger than that. | 7:59 | |
| God is the highest and the best | 8:02 | |
| and the brightest of all human aspiration." | 8:04 | |
| And the church, | 8:12 | |
| the whole house came tumbling down. | 8:14 | |
| Just about Easter, somebody handed me a copy | 8:22 | |
| of the Wall Street Journal that had an article called, | 8:25 | |
| Re-imagining God. | 8:29 | |
| In the article, "'Oh burning mountain, oh chosen son, | 8:32 | |
| oh perfect moon,' intones the Reverend Robert Brasher, | 8:37 | |
| during his Wednesday services, | 8:41 | |
| invoking earthly images of a deity | 8:44 | |
| that sound more like Greek myths | 8:47 | |
| than Christian liturgy. | 8:48 | |
| 'Oh fathomless well, oh unattainable height, | 8:51 | |
| oh clearness beyond measure.'" | 8:55 | |
| Across the country the faithful are re-defining God. | 8:59 | |
| Dissatisfied with conventional images | 9:02 | |
| of an authoritarian and paternalistic deity, | 9:04 | |
| people are embracing quirky, | 9:07 | |
| individualistic conceptions of God | 9:09 | |
| to suit better their own spiritual needs. | 9:12 | |
| This Easter, rather than dwelling on the risen Christ, | 9:16 | |
| a traditional Easter sermon topic, | 9:20 | |
| the Reverend David Alison of Evanston Illinois, | 9:22 | |
| says he plans to compare God to a gardener | 9:26 | |
| in order to appease the quote, | 9:30 | |
| "growing theological diversity," unquote, | 9:33 | |
| in his small Methodist church. | 9:37 | |
| "I don't want anybody to be uncomfortable here | 9:39 | |
| or feel left out." He says. | 9:42 | |
| Seminaries of trained clergy are now dominated | 9:46 | |
| by baby boomers who came of age in the 60s | 9:49 | |
| and are less whetted to traditional orthodoxies. | 9:52 | |
| Indeed, the Reverend Doctor Peter Gomes | 9:55 | |
| at Harvard University says he has noticed | 9:57 | |
| an increased reluctance by divinity school students | 10:00 | |
| to instruct or admonish from the pulpit | 10:03 | |
| on practically any subject. | 10:05 | |
| "They've got authority problems." Gomes says. | 10:08 | |
| These gentler, almost mystical forms of theology | 10:12 | |
| found a receptive audience in today's affluent society. | 10:15 | |
| People are relatively peaceful and prosperous. | 10:20 | |
| So even as many Americans search for deeper connections | 10:23 | |
| with God, they aren't facing the kinds of crisis | 10:26 | |
| that often prompt people to seek protection | 10:29 | |
| or salvation from above. | 10:31 | |
| Instead, they are coupling together a spiritual life | 10:34 | |
| from a variety of religious influences | 10:37 | |
| along with a dash of yoga and psychotherapy | 10:40 | |
| and whatever else makes sense to them. | 10:43 | |
| Quote, "People seek out new Gods | 10:46 | |
| the way they seek out new products in the marketplace." | 10:49 | |
| says Randall Styers, assistant professor | 10:52 | |
| at Union Theological Seminary in New York. | 10:54 | |
| "This has got to be the ultimate form of individualism." | 10:57 | |
| This move, this move, | 11:05 | |
| we wanna keep God large and abstract and vague. | 11:09 | |
| This move, fashionable in many quarters of the church | 11:14 | |
| to down play the second person of trinity, God the son, | 11:19 | |
| in favor of some more kind of large, | 11:24 | |
| all embracing focus first person of the trinity, | 11:26 | |
| God the father, God the creator. | 11:30 | |
| I'm a afraid it's just one more effort | 11:34 | |
| to make God over into what we like. | 11:38 | |
| As someone has said, | 11:42 | |
| "God created us in his image | 11:45 | |
| and we human beings have been attempting | 11:49 | |
| to return the compliment ever since." | 11:52 | |
| Making Gods into images of ourselves. | 11:56 | |
| And all might be well but then comes along Jesus. | 12:01 | |
| Jesus, with his nasty little particularities | 12:06 | |
| and his annoying specificity. | 12:09 | |
| Jesus who is not as pliable and mailable | 12:14 | |
| as we might like him to be. | 12:17 | |
| Here in on campus often someone says, | 12:21 | |
| "Well, look, I am a Buddhist, and you're a Christian, | 12:23 | |
| she's a Jew but really that doesn't matter, | 12:27 | |
| the main thing is we all believe in God, right?" | 12:29 | |
| Wrong! | 12:33 | |
| Christians are those who believe | 12:35 | |
| that when we look at this Jew from Nazareth | 12:39 | |
| who lived briefly and died violently and rose unexpectedly, | 12:43 | |
| we have seen as much of God as we ever hope to see. | 12:48 | |
| And we believe that when he looks at us | 12:55 | |
| this is who we really are. | 12:58 | |
| We don't know who we are until he tells us and shows us. | 13:01 | |
| Our life is known only in his light. | 13:06 | |
| Ephesians says, "The whole church, your faith, | 13:13 | |
| your relationship to God rests | 13:17 | |
| on that foundation and no other." | 13:19 | |
| He is the cornerstone, the capstone. | 13:23 | |
| All of our spiritual aspirations | 13:27 | |
| meet at that capstone. | 13:31 | |
| And you can worship Jesus as the son of God | 13:35 | |
| or you can reject Jesus as crazy. | 13:39 | |
| You can sit back like Peter Jennings | 13:43 | |
| and discuss with professors just what did he say | 13:45 | |
| and what did he do? | 13:50 | |
| But you cannot make Jesus over into anything you please. | 13:54 | |
| Though Christians often wish we knew more | 14:01 | |
| about what Jesus said and what he did, | 14:03 | |
| I'll tell ya, there are times when we wish we knew less. | 14:07 | |
| Take me or instance, in a couple of weeks | 14:13 | |
| as I do the last few summers, | 14:16 | |
| I got to go up to South Hampton, Long Island and preach. | 14:19 | |
| It's a beautiful part of the world | 14:23 | |
| with a lot of beautiful people, like Martha Stewart | 14:25 | |
| and Steven Spielberg and I love it up there. | 14:28 | |
| Problem is, you see, when I go I have to take Jesus with me. | 14:33 | |
| (congregation laughing) | 14:37 | |
| Mister Cornerstone, | 14:38 | |
| I ought to get hazard duty paid | 14:41 | |
| for working up there. | 14:43 | |
| (congregation laughs) | 14:45 | |
| Invariably, I come back from the Hamptons every summer | 14:47 | |
| and I ask myself or my wife, whoever happens to be closer, | 14:50 | |
| (congregations laughs) | 14:53 | |
| "Look, look would you explain to me, | 14:56 | |
| what is it Jesus has got against rich people, okay? | 15:01 | |
| I like rich people. What is the problem?" | 15:05 | |
| Jesus, in Jesus God had a face, God has a way, | 15:13 | |
| in Jesus God gets specific and | 15:18 | |
| earthly and walks among us. | 15:21 | |
| To be a Christian is to be about Christ. | 15:25 | |
| It's to be listening to him. | 15:30 | |
| It means to judge yourself by him, | 15:32 | |
| it means to come to church on Sunday | 15:35 | |
| and allow yourself to be assaulted by him. | 15:37 | |
| It means to pray daily for the grace | 15:41 | |
| to see him more clearly, | 15:44 | |
| to follow him more nearly, | 15:47 | |
| to love him more dearly, day by day. | 15:50 | |
| And that isn't easy. | 15:56 | |
| It'd be a lot easier if we could just, like, | 15:58 | |
| In God We Trust. | 16:01 | |
| Unfortunately, it's in Jesus that we trust. | 16:03 | |
| Jesus, in whom the very fullness of God chose to dwell. | 16:09 | |
| In May, at he Methodist General Conference, | 16:16 | |
| we were debating a resolution | 16:19 | |
| condemning Methodists owning handguns | 16:22 | |
| and we had this kind of contentious and protracted debate. | 16:26 | |
| This laymen stood up and said, | 16:32 | |
| "You mean to tell me that when my house | 16:34 | |
| has been broken into, my wife is being assaulted, | 16:36 | |
| I've got nothing to defend myself | 16:39 | |
| but a copy of the Methodist book of discipline?" | 16:41 | |
| (congregation laughs) | 16:44 | |
| I said to the layperson seated to me, | 16:46 | |
| "hey, don't knock the book of discipline." | 16:48 | |
| I found in church meetings if you'll hit a layperson | 16:51 | |
| just right with the book of discipline, | 16:54 | |
| a layperson will tend to back off. | 16:57 | |
| (congregation laughs) | 17:00 | |
| We took our vote, we voted to ban handguns among Methodists. | 17:03 | |
| At the coffee hour after the session, | 17:09 | |
| standing around talking to a delegate from Indiana, | 17:12 | |
| and we were talking about how we had all voted on this | 17:16 | |
| and I said, "I'm curious, | 17:23 | |
| did you vote for the ban on handguns?" | 17:24 | |
| and he said, "yeah." | 17:28 | |
| and I said, "well, I'm curious, | 17:30 | |
| how did you come to that vote?" | 17:32 | |
| then he said, "well, not happily." | 17:34 | |
| he said, "During the debate I just sat there saying, | 17:37 | |
| 'Lord, I wish when the soldiers came to arrest you, | 17:41 | |
| you had pulled out a .38 and attempted to defend yourself. | 17:45 | |
| Lord I wish you had let us use the sword, | 17:51 | |
| I wish you hadn't told us to not defend you | 17:54 | |
| or worse, not even to defend ourselves.'" | 17:58 | |
| and then he said to me, "You know, sometimes | 18:04 | |
| I just wish the whole point weren't Jesus." | 18:06 | |
| The whole point is Jesus. | 18:15 | |
| I was preaching that on the west coast. | 18:18 | |
| I'm not gonna say where but it's a building, | 18:21 | |
| a church that has more glass windows than we do. | 18:22 | |
| (congregation laughs) | 18:26 | |
| And it was a Sunday service with fountains | 18:28 | |
| and contraptions and open door and 75 foot TV screen. | 18:32 | |
| On the way to the airport my wife said, | 18:36 | |
| "Did you realize, if you had not read | 18:39 | |
| the scripture this morning and preached, | 18:42 | |
| Jesus would have never been mentioned?" | 18:44 | |
| and I said, "Hey, I know Jesus, I work with Jesus, | 18:47 | |
| he's uncomfortable in these settings." | 18:53 | |
| (congregation laughs) | 18:56 | |
| But without him, without this cornerstone, this capstone | 19:02 | |
| of what we're about, church degenerates | 19:06 | |
| into a kind of sanctimonious form of rotary, | 19:09 | |
| and at least rotary meets | 19:11 | |
| at a convenient hour of the week and serves lunch. | 19:12 | |
| I remember the Mennonite theologian, John Howard Yoder say, | 19:17 | |
| "You can test a theology by how much | 19:21 | |
| it talks about God and how seldom it speaks of Jesus." | 19:24 | |
| Jesus provides the content of Christian character. | 19:31 | |
| Jesus is what makes the Christian faith ethical. | 19:37 | |
| The words and the deeds of Jesus, | 19:42 | |
| those nasty little particularities | 19:45 | |
| you just can't get around no matter how hard you try, | 19:47 | |
| they determine the contours of this faith, | 19:51 | |
| the parameters of our life together, | 19:54 | |
| the substance of what we believe | 19:57 | |
| and who, by God's grace, we hope to be. | 20:00 | |
| Without these troublesome particularities | 20:06 | |
| called Jesus Christ in him crucified. | 20:08 | |
| Well then this current upsurge of spirituality | 20:11 | |
| just fills with hot hair and floats off | 20:15 | |
| into Never Never Land, never touching ground anywhere | 20:18 | |
| and making any difference | 20:21 | |
| about where we live and how we live. | 20:23 | |
| I kind of believe the Chair of the school board | 20:28 | |
| in Colorado is right. | 20:31 | |
| Everybody believes in God. | 20:34 | |
| But it takes conversion and being born again | 20:38 | |
| and again, and again to believe that | 20:43 | |
| God was in Jesus Christ | 20:47 | |
| reconciling the world to himself. | 20:49 | |
| In that TV show, a couple weeks ago on Jesus, | 20:54 | |
| with Peter Jennings and the professors, | 20:58 | |
| N.T. Wright, who has preached here, | 21:01 | |
| when asked about he possibility | 21:03 | |
| of believing in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, | 21:06 | |
| said, "The only evidence I've got for that is the church. | 21:10 | |
| If you don't believe God vindicated Jesus, | 21:16 | |
| his life, his teaching, his way | 21:20 | |
| by raising him from the dead, | 21:22 | |
| well them how do you, how do you explain us, the church?" | 21:23 | |
| Lots of great teachers left some wonderful books, | 21:29 | |
| some teaching, a gaggle of admirers. | 21:32 | |
| But who left something like the church? | 21:36 | |
| "We believe in the resurrected Christ," said Write, | 21:40 | |
| "because we keep meeting him, | 21:45 | |
| or more to the point, he keeps meeting us." | 21:49 | |
| In word, in sacrament, in song, in Sunday worship, | 21:52 | |
| in those dark nights of the soul when we cry out in misery, | 21:57 | |
| and he is there standing beside us. | 22:03 | |
| Without the presence of the living Christ, | 22:09 | |
| well, what is the point? | 22:13 | |
| This whole thing just collapses into a mess | 22:15 | |
| of rather uninteresting musing | 22:18 | |
| on things eternal and vaguely spiritual. | 22:20 | |
| And, well, why bother? | 22:24 | |
| Without him and his constant assaults upon us, | 22:29 | |
| well, these walls topple | 22:35 | |
| and these arches collapse | 22:38 | |
| and this whole temple degenerates into some kind of | 22:41 | |
| archaic spiritual mumbo jumbo that means nothing, | 22:45 | |
| without him, without the cornerstone. | 22:49 | |
| Christ Jesus, the capstone, the point, | 22:54 | |
| the church's one foundation. | 22:57 | |
| We grope with words adequately descriptive | 23:00 | |
| to describe what his presence means to us. | 23:04 | |
| In a short time you're gonna say Nicene Creed. | 23:08 | |
| It's an attempt to try and put into words what he means. | 23:11 | |
| We have difficulty describing him | 23:17 | |
| and even more difficulty following him. | 23:20 | |
| But we keep coming back on some July Sunday | 23:23 | |
| when we could've done something else | 23:26 | |
| because we have found that | 23:29 | |
| the more freely we give ourselves to him, | 23:30 | |
| the more extravagantly he gives himself to us. | 23:34 | |
| Leading us down his way, down that narrow way | 23:38 | |
| that leads to life eternal. | 23:45 | |
| Jesus himself the cornerstone. | 23:48 | |
| In him the whole structure is jointed together | 23:51 | |
| and grown into the holy temple of the Lord, | 23:55 | |
| in whom you also are built | 23:58 | |
| into a dwelling place for God. He is | 24:01 | |
| the church's one foundation. | 24:07 |