Sermon: "Wise and Foolish Lifestyles"

Seventh in the "The Authentic Life" series.
Delivered November 20, 2005 by Rev. Sam Henderson.
Other sermons in this series - 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7

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John Schmidt introducing: We have a guest preacher today; Dr. Sam Henderson. Sam is a friend of mine that goes back to my college days. He was the first person to disciple me as a Christian. Sam is responsible for introducing me to Inner Varsity Christian Fellowship. He introduced me to my very first Presbyterian; the Canal Street Presbyterian Church where his father was pastor. He also introduced me to the PCUSA denomination and to some of its confessions and things like that. He introduced me to Gordon Conwell Seminary where I went to prepare for ministry. And he also introduced me to Debbie Ingram, who later became Debbie Schmidt. Amen is right. So I owe this guy big time, okay. He also consults me on what kind of sweaters to wear, as you will see in a moment. Sam is here to share with us the Word of God and so Sam would you come up here. I would like to pray for you as you begin. Let's pray.

Gracious God, we thank you for the gifts that you have given Sam. We thank you that he can be here today, and we pray now that the words that he speaks will honor Jesus Christ, and may the words from his lips and the meditations on our heart as we think about this together be pleasing in your sight because you are our Rock and our Redeemer and we give you praise, in Jesus' name. Amen.

I want to say to you that I guess you could say John and Debbie have some dirt on me that not too many people have as we go back that far, but you know how that works. I've got some things on them as well. I will tell you maybe a little bit about some of that later. But I do want to just invite you to think with me a little bit about the kinds of storms that might come in to our lives sooner or later. I don't know about you and where you have lived and what your different backgrounds are. My wife Lane and I have had the privilege for the last few years of sharing in the lives of several different, wonderful, but really different congregations in different places.

I was widowed about eight years ago. Lane and I have only been married for about three years. We got married in Charlotte and stayed there for a little while. We then moved to Richmond, Virginia. Most recently we have lived in Southwest Florida in Ft. Meyers and I am going to tell you, we had never, ever thought either one of us about living anywhere in Florida, much less South Florida. I mean literally the line that marks the beginning of the tropics was a couple miles south of our house. We said we didn't want to live this far south and we certainly did not want to learn as much about hurricanes as we have learned in the last year. All kinds of complicated things like you know how to calculate wind speed, and how to look up all these charts about what the storm surge area is going to be like, depending on whether it's a category 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 hurricane. And we were about a 1 1/2 miles back from the water and so I figured well, hey how bad could it be? And I looked on the storm surge chart and they said even a category 1 we might get our feet wet, and if it is anything above a category 3, we better run for the second story because the entire first story of our house would be immersed in water and you go, "Wow, I hope this house is built on a really really good foundation."

So let's think a little bit about the kinds of storms that we might encounter, and what kind of foundation we've got to build on or we have built on when those storms come. The thing that scares me a little bit, a lot of times we think that if I am a believer, if I am a Christian, if I am walking in the path of discipleship then isn't it God's job to kind of keep me safe, hey to keep me out of those storms, to kind of lift up his hand and push the storm a little bit around me so my life doesn't get too messed up. Jesus does not give even a hint that that's the way it's going to be if we walk the path of discipleship. The rock he invites us to build our lives on is not a rock or a foundation that protects us from storms. It's a rock and a foundation that supports us in the storms that we absolutely will experience.

Now, I have only been married about three years and you know it's not that I didn't know this before, but men and women are really different. And you know the closer in proximity you get, the more you realize wow, we are really different. One of the ways that Lane and I are different is that, by the way, Lane stand up, I see people looking around, this is Lane right here, okay? My better nine-tenths. One of the ways that Lane and I are different is we will be driving along somewhere and she will go, "Do you remember what we were doing six months ago?" And I go, "I can't remember exactly what we did three weeks ago." But right now, if she were to ask me what were we doing one month ago, I could remember that. One month ago, we were waiting in Ft. Meyers for a class; it was fluctuating, anywhere from a class 5 to a class 3, maybe class 2 hurricane that was going to hit land very close to where we lived. And boy you know you hear these stories; you hear about the winds and all this stuff and I will just tell you one month ago tomorrow morning about 6:00 a.m. in the cold light of dawn, we were looking out through our big plate glass doors in the back, watching palm fronds blow just like that and that was the palm fronds from the other side of the tree and they are supposed to be going down like this. They were blowing like wind socks, alright?

And we were listening to the news reports that kept fluctuating as to whether it was a class 3 or class 4; it had at one point been labeled as the most powerful hurricane that had ever been measured in the Gulf waters. It had since depleted a little bit, but it was picking up steam as it came toward us. That's what we knew when the power went out, the TV went off, and the wind picked up outside. Once you are there in the middle of it, the only thing you can hope is that the house has been built on a good foundation. It's too late then to run outside and see if you can nail down a few shingles. It's too late then to hold on to the roof trusses and hope that your weight can keep the wind from blowing them away. It depends on how well the house has been built how you are going to fare in that storm. Now in all that talk about hurricanes, it was Wilma and before that Katrina. A lot of you I am sure heard about Katrina because it hit John's hometown and my place of residence for a while in my youth and there were a lot of questions about who should have evacuated when and with later hurricanes you just wonder. I mean believe me you take your life in your hands in Florida when you get out on the Interstate, I promise you. You have no idea, which is worse; the prospect of a 12-foot storm surge or getting out on the Interstate in Florida. I mean it is honestly a 50-50 tossup, which is more dangerous.

But you really wonder and you say, "Hey we've got to evacuate in some of these cases. Now one guy in the New York Times, he was a columnist, he wrote a column on September 6, John Tierney, and he said the title was "The Magic Marker Strategy." He talked about what they do in the tidelands of Virginia. They are not as low as New Orleans and South Louisiana, but they do get lots of hurricanes in the tidelands. In South Louisiana, they pretty much had a good neighbor strategy or a Good Samaritan strategy. They said, well if anybody can't get out, some neighbor, somewhere, will probably see that and help them out. That was pretty much it. You are pretty much on your own or hope you have good neighbors to help you get out if you need to get out. In Virginia they don't do that. In Virginia they actually have volunteers who are trained to borrow school buses and literally will drive around through all the neighborhoods where people might not be able to get out.

Now this is what caught my attention. The volunteers asked the people to get on the bus and come with them so they could take them to safety. But here is what happens if the person doesn't want to come. I mean nobody is forced to come, but if somebody does not want to get on the bus and evacuate, the volunteer is instructed to give them an indelible black magic marker, and to ask them, while the volunteer stands there, to write their social security number on each of their four limbs, and they say, " We may need that for identification later." Some people may say, "Wow, that's cold. That is cold." Maybe it is, but the column said it sure is effective. But the other side of it is- I want to suggest to you that maybe that's very respectful because it allows a person to make their own choice. I take someone seriously when I don't hold back on how serious the consequences may be if they don't make a certain decision. I take someone seriously when I tell them honestly the genuine danger that they are in. But I also take them seriously when I respect whatever decision they make, even if it leads to their own death.

I believe Jesus is talking to us that seriously today. In the Sermon on the Mount that John and George have been sort of walking you through and sharing with you in the last few weeks, Jesus gives an amazing invitation. He gives an invitation of grace to everybody. He goes to the people that all the religious folks had written off; the people that were considered the scum of the earth, the down and outs, the no-counts, the nobody's, the worthless people, the reprobates. He goes to them and he says, "You know what, if your crying now, then you are blessed because the people that are mourning are those that will inherit the kingdom." If you are poor and out, if you don't have all the mammon that makes the wheels turn, that assures your place of protection in the courts; all those things, if you don't those things consider yourself blessed because you are going to know God's justice. You are going to experience his rule.

So what a powerful, wonderful, wonderful invitation, but at the same time now Jesus is going to kind of close the deal and he says, "You've got a choice to make." One of the great commentators on Matthew that I have read that has really helped me and guided some of my study of the passage this morning is a guy named Dale Bruner, and Dale Bruner says, "You know Jesus in his discourses in Matthew does something that seems kind of strange. He always starts out broad and inviting and loving, welcoming and all these things, and he always ends pretty abruptly with just a warning of judgment." And I guess maybe he wants that to stick with people. Hey, we all want you to come, but don't make any mistake, what a problem it is and what a disservice you are doing yourself and what a grave danger you are in if you don't come. So today Jesus invites us to walk the path of discipleship. We've got to get through a narrow gate that almost nobody can find. We've got to watch out for false prophets in the church on both the right and the left, both the conservative and the liberal and then the scariest part comes, then we've got to deal with the decisions you and I make everyday that show whether we are building our house on sand or on rock.

Now, my son Andrew is a college student right now. Our son Andrew is down in Boone, North Carolina, Appalachian State University. He decided earlier in the year he was going to use his fall break to go to London. He has never been outside of the country at all. He thought he would go to London. It seemed like kind of a wild decision until you know that his girlfriend is studying over in London this semester okay? And also, this is the way he pitched it to us. His sister is doing her junior semester abroad down in Spain and he said, "Dad, guess what, wouldn't it be great if I could go over and see Lauren, my sister". He didn't mention until later that Michelle was over there as well. And he said, "We are going to meet in London" and they also got one other high school friend of theirs, a girl named Lindsey, whose dad is a US air pilot, she can get free airline tickets almost anywhere, so she decided to join them in London too.

So here's Andrew and these three young ladies who are all going to meet in London and just spend a couple of days looking around, sightseeing and all this stuff and everything was great. The two flew over from the United States, found each other, the one who was already in London you know they got there, they were supposed to meet my daughter Lauren who was coming on the train up from Spain, they were supposed to meet her in Victoria Station. We got an email a couple of days later reporting on the trip and my son said, "Has anybody ever told you how huge Victoria Station is? All we knew was they were supposed to meet in Victoria Station. Victoria Station is huge. We walked from one end to the other. There were thousands of people walking through it. There were gates going everywhere. There were trains coming in. There were trains going out. We could not find Lauren anywhere. We walked down a block to the bus station, the Victoria Bus Station. We thought maybe we messed up, maybe she meant she was coming on the bus. We couldn't find her". Finally, 10 o'clock at night, they don't know what to do and they are about to give up, and they accidentally bumped into each other in the street, both of them having looked for almost four hours. Jesus is saying that if you want to walk the path of discipleship, you are going to be a in place where there is all kinds of stations and all kinds of people coming and going, there are all kinds of gates, all kinds of people saying go this way, all kinds of people saying abundant life is here, self fulfillment is that way, this train to riches and wealth and happiness, all these things there are lots of offers, lot of invitations, lots of people. It's amazing how hard it is and how hard it's going to be to find the one person that you need to find, that's me Jesus.

It's amazing how narrow the road is on which you are going to have to walk to follow and find the abundant life that I have been sharing with you. But, you take that narrow, small gate and you walk together as a community encouraging each other on the narrow road and that's not even the beginning of the end of your problems. Then, you've got the danger, a real danger. Jesus says, "Watch out because there are false prophets in the church." The first is the sheep in wolves clothing. Now, maybe you can't tell from my accent, I am from the south, alright sorry. Hey, what can I say. And you may if you ever listen to national public radio, I don't know if you know there is someone named Bailey White, a lady who lives with her sort of ancient and kind of interesting, if not weird, mother, outside of a little town in South Georgia named Thomasville. And Bailey White has a book called "Momma Makes Up Her Mind." It has all kinds of just funny little stories about living down in South Georgia.

One of the funniest stories and somebody in the middle service told me they literally sat in their car and read this very story right before she walked in to the church service. This has got to be some kind of low-level miracle, that's what I am thinking. But anyway, she says one day you know her mother was sick, alright. She just had a number of complaints and she was getting pretty old, but her mother hated doctors. She just hated them. And she didn't want to go to the doctors and she didn't like to wait. She never thought they did any good and it just wasn't going to happen. And Bailey White just finally said, "Look Mom, you've got to go to the doctor. One way or the other I am taking you." So we are going to go to one of those little emergicare places. It won't take long. You know we will go in, I will just drop you off and she says, I tell you what, it's in a strip shopping center, you get out, go in and sign your name on the list, because you always have to wait in those places. I am going to run down to the other end of the shopping center, do one quick errand and I will drive back and park and I will come in and wait with you. It will be simple".

So Bailey drove the car down, dropped her mother off, went down to do her little errand, came back to park and there is her mom standing right on the curb right where she had left her. She goes, "Mom, what' up?" She stopped and started to ask and her mom jumps in the car, shuts it and said, "Man this is the best doctor's place ever. She said, "I want to come here anytime I have to go to the doctor." Bailey said, "Mom you can't have seen the doctor, you haven't even gone in yet." Her mom said, "I didn't have to. The doctor's were standing right out on the sidewalk. There was three of them." Bailey goes, "What are you talking about mom?" She said, "All I did was walk up to them, I saw them, I told them what was wrong with me. One of them, they were nice young men, one of them told me that if I would just soak my bunions in hot water that would give me some relief there, and the other guy just said go to the drug store and get some Carter's pills. It will take care of anything else that is wrong with you." She said, "Here I am. All I got to do is go to the drugstore and get the Carter's pills." Bailey goes, "Mom, you said you saw three doctors?" She said, "Yeah and they weren't just your average run of the mill doctors. They were real surgeons. They had like blood all over their white coats and everything." Bailey goes, "Mom, where did those guys go?" She said, "Well, they finished smoking their cigarettes and they went back in the grocery store right there." Bailey goes, "Mom, they weren't doctors. Those were the butchers on their cigarette break." Everybody that wears a white coat is not a doctor, alright? You do not want to entrust your health and your long-term well-being to anybody that's wearing a white coat.

And Jesus says you don't want to trust your spiritual well-being to anybody, to anybody that either just seems spiritual or maybe even anybody that uses my name, Jesus' name a lot. He says the one kind of false prophets are the ones that wear those white coats, those white fleecy wooly coats, kind of like sheep skins. They have lives that sound pretty spiritual and religious and they even talk a lot about love, a lot about acceptance, a lot about spirituality, a lot about fulfillment, a lot about you know all these things. They talk about getting in touch with the divine, whether it's in you or in the trees or in the sky or whatever it may be; lots of spiritual stuff and they sound a little bit superficially like Jesus, but they've got the wrong message because they imply to you that you can know and find and love and rejoice in God in some other way than Jesus himself.

The other kind of people Jesus says you have to watch out for are maybe from the more conservative side of the church. They know Jesus' name is important. As a matter of fact, they stamp it all over everything. They won't engage in a ministry unless Jesus' name is on it. They won't engage in a ministry unless Jesus' name is repeated. They put fish stickers on their cars. They listen to at least 50% christian music in their stereos and their cars. They put Jesus on their youth group t-shirts. They do all these things and Jesus says there are going to be lots of people that use my name all the time and even engage sometimes in powerful ministries, and when the last day comes I am going to look at them and say, "You know what, I don't think I ever knew you." I love what was said earlier that for at least one person in the church this is the scariest passage in the Bible, because it means I can hear Jesus' teachings. I can hang around with his people. I can use his name and plaster it all around my life and yet somehow never let him in to know the real me, because I never let him all the way into the place where I make my decisions everyday.

Dale Bruner who does his own translations says it this way.

"Jesus says for those people, even though they are saying Lord, Lord we did this in your name and your name and your name, he says I am going to be forced to confess to them, I never really knew you. Please get out of my face you doers of the opposite of everything that I have taught." Wow. I never really knew you. Please get out of my face."

Sisters and brothers, that brings us to the last part. We are all going to be building everyday our lives on one foundation or another. We are either going to be building on the sand or we are going to be building on the rock. Now let me tell you something. Sand is a lot easier to build on. I was talking with a development officer at our seminary when I was there one day, and we were sitting in the cafeteria and he goes, "You know what, I am trying to build a house and he said we haven't even gotten the foundation finished and we are already three months behind and $30,000 over budget." I said, "Really, what's the problem?" He said, "Well, we found out the lot we had is almost solid rock. We are trying to dig out a basement and we can't blast that much, so we are having to literally chip and jackhammer away out of solid rock a basement for our house." I tell you what; I bet that house is still standing, don't you? It's a lot harder to build in a foundation of rock, but it lasts a lot longer when the tough times come.

And I am here to tell you, I don't care whether you are a minister or anybody else, that if we had time I could give you some experiences. Sooner or later in every life, whether it's at the beginning or the middle or the end of the last judgment day; sooner or later there is going to come a storm that will blow away every single shred and hint of a life that's not built on Jesus Christ. I can tell you that with absolute assurance and confidence and I have been through at least some of that in my short life. It's a scary, frightening, unnerving, unsettling thing. A lot of things that you thought were important, a lot of things that you thought would give you security, just aren't there anymore. And Jesus said when that time comes, I am begging you build your life on the rock, because the storm will show what foundation you have laid.

So let me just ask you to consider what foundation your life has been built on. Every decision you make, John and George have talked with you about some of those. Every time you use mammon, what you think about, how you think about money, how much security you look to from it, every commitment you keep or fail to keep, every decision you make about how to spend your time and whose name to bear witness to and all those things, you are making decisions about whose word to live by. And a lot of us may say you know I kind of know this is right. I get a sense that this is the direction I should be going, but I just need to take care of a few other things first. I just need to get myself together a little more. I need to be in better financial shape. I just need to finish school. We just need to get our marriage together or a relationship together a little more and then we will really start working on what Jesus is doing and what he taught. Friends, to decide even for a little while, not to live by Jesus' words is to decide very very much, because it means that we are deciding to live by somebody else's words, all of us live by somebody's words. If you know who wrote the words to this song, I will get John to give you a 10% discount on your tithe next week, okay?

"You may be an ambassador to England or France. You might like to gamble. You might like to dance. You may be the heavyweight champion of the world. You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls, but you are going to have to serve somebody. Yes indeed, you are going to have to serve somebody. It may be the devil; they may be the Lord, but you are going to have to serve somebody. You might be a construction worker working on a home. You might live in a mansion. You might live in a dome. You might own guns. You might even own tanks. You might be somebody's landlord. You might even own banks. But you are going to have to serve somebody, yes indeed. You are going to have to serve somebody. It may be the devil, it may be the Lord, but you've got to serve somebody."

And so, all of us do, everyday, every hour, every decision we make, every step we take, we are building on some foundation. Jesus is saying through the Sermon on the Mount, wow have we got a life that we want you to live. We want you to live in such security that mammon means nothing. We want you to experience such commitment from us, that you are able to keep even the most difficult commitments in your life with our help. We want all these things for you. Please come with us. But if you're not, use this marker because the results are going to be deadly.

Sisters and brothers, all of us are building on one foundation or another. What foundation is your life built on?

© 2005, Rev. Sam Henderson
Central Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD 21204 410/823-6145
www.centralpc.org