“Weathering the Storm”

Matthew 7:24-29

Listen to this Sermon!

Whenever I hear Jesus’ story about the man who built his house upon a rock, I remember the late afternoon of June 9, 1953. As a four-year old Sunday Schooler, I may well have already heard that exciting story, about how the rains came and the winds blew but the house did not fall because it had its foundation built upon the rock. But whether I actually heard the story or not back then, one thing I know for sure is that on the afternoon of June 9^th, 1953 I was living that story.

The other night, I was reflecting upon how those of you from Michigan and those of us from Massachusetts don’t really like each other all that much when it comes to the NBA playoffs! The Detroit Pistons and Boston Celtics have done mighty battle over the years to clinch a spot in the basketball finals. And we all remember the players over the years – great superstars like Larry Bird, Kevin McHale and Robert Parish, and those nasty thugs Bill Laimbeer, Joe Dumars and Isaiah Thomas. Oh, we love each other as brothers and sisters in Christ, but when it comes to NBA basketball, I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree!

And yet, we share a lot in common – especially those of you from the area around Flint, Michigan. You see, on June 8^th, 1953, a strong summer storm system formed west of Flint, and at about 8:30 PM, a tornado spun into life. Within minutes, the twister had grown into an F-5 tornado with winds up to 318 miles per hour. Hundreds of homes were destroyed and 125 people lost their lives before the cyclone ran out of steam. But even then, the storm system that produced the Flint tornado was not done. The system moved east – over the Great Lakes, through Ohio, and by late afternoon on June the 9^th, it whipped into Massachusetts.

Just west of my hometown of Worcester, another tornado formed – this one an F-4 with winds around 260 miles per hour. These were the days before the National Weather Service could get out warnings about such storm events, but everyone in my neighborhood knew something bad was happening. The sky had turned black and the clouds seemed to be boiling. We children were outside playing, but one after another, our mothers called us to get inside. The rains started to fall. The winds began to blow. There was a slowly amplifying roar like the sound of an oncoming train.

My mother herded us children into an upstairs front hall closet. We could hear the cracking of tree limbs outside, and the shattering of glass. Even inside, the sound was deafening.

My mother – acting intuitively, I believe – decided that we would be better off downstairs in our cellar. So she gathered us up and we ran for the stairs. When we got to the basement, it was pitch black. All we knew was that our mother’s arms were around us there in the darkness. It was a good thing she had moved us, too, because from upstairs came something like an explosion. A propane tank on a neighbor’s travel trailer had been ripped off the vehicle and was violently hurled right through the front door of our house, by the front hall closet where we had been hiding just moments before.

My mother – protecting us with her body in the musty darkness of the cellar - thought we would all be killed. So she whispered to us an instruction. If we got separated, my mother said, we were to meet at the throne of Jesus.

The rains fell. The winds blew. In 84-minutes, it was over. 90 of our neighbors were killed. Oh, we Piston and Celtic fans have much more in common than we sometimes realize.

I share this story with you not to suggest that it was faith in Jesus that spared our family from being among the fatalities. If I were to suggest that God intervened to save us, it would also suggest that God did not intervene for others. That is not Christian Faith. It is self-serving pride, although to the extent that people might find new purpose for living their lives after being spared, I suppose it can be useful. Otherwise, we run the risk of demeaning the lives of others, and placing around the shoulders of their grieving loved ones the question of why God chose to save others, but not their children or spouses or friends.

The fact is that everybody dies, sooner or later. No one gets out of here alive. And the rains fall and the winds blow on believers and unbelievers alike. That’s why the words of St. Paul that we often recite at Memorial Services are so powerful and important to Christians:

For none of us liveth to himself

And no one dieth to himself.

For if we live, we live unto the Lord,

And if we die, we die unto the Lord.

Whether we live, therefore, or die, we are the Lord’s.

And that is the message I hear in the story about the man who built his house upon the rock.

What my mother gave us children in the swirl of the great Worcester tornado of 1953 was a foundation upon which to build our lives – a foundation that has never moved – a foundation that has withstood all the changing circumstances of our lives – a foundation that has remained true and faithful even when we have not been true and faithful.

My mother gave us Jesus.

I don’t know if your spiritual journey has been like mine, but my Christian Faith has changed over the years. For instance, where once I celebrated the story about God saving from the flood Noah and his family and a pair of every animal, as I got older I wondered about those who drowned in the flood – especially the little innocent children. And I wondered how a good a loving God could do something like that. Where once I heard the command of God to Joshua and his fighters to kill everyone in the captured town, including the women, the children, the babies sucking at the breast of their mothers, and even the household pets, I later wondered how this was different from any story in today’s headlines about some nut believing God told him to go and kill his family or to wipe some ethnic group from the face of the earth.

My Christian Faith has changed over the years.

I looked down upon non-Christians until I discovered that my Jewish rabbi friend was far more Christ-like than most of the ministers I knew – including myself!

Our friend Beverly judged and condemned homosexual persons – until her son came home and told her he was gay. She said my son is not an abomination, my son is the baby whom I gave birth to.

Another friend believed you could ask God for anything in Jesus’ name and God would do it, but when he asked God to heal his child of leukemia, nothing happened and the child died.

Maybe not for you, but certainly for me and a few others here today, our faith has been challenged over the years when the rains fell, and the winds blew and what we thought we knew and believed crumbled away like a house built upon a foundation of sand. There is nothing that devastates your faith more than one of life’s personal tornados that rips away everything you once believed.

So I ask you, when the rains came and the winds blew on your house of faith, what was left when the storm was over?

I’ll tell you what was still standing for me.

Jesus.

My mother did not give me a theology. She gave me a Savior. My mother did not introduce me to a doctrine. She introduced me to a friend.

My mother gave me Jesus.

And I don’t know if this will help you or not if you are one of those whose faith has been shredded by the falling rains and blowing winds of life – but if you can bring it down to Jesus, you can have it all. You can have what it takes to weather all the storms that life throws your way.

To have Jesus means this: you are given in Him, a God who is the one who formed us and gave us life. He is, as my friend Bob Gates reminded me just the other day, the one who formed human beings out of the clay of the ground, and when God had finished forming human beings, he breathed into our nostrils – neshamah – the breath of life, and human being became a living soul.

You have been breathed into by the Living God. You belong to God. You are God’s and God will never let you down.

If you can bring your faith back to Jesus, you will have a God who loves you, and will never reject you no matter what.

If you have Jesus, you will have a God who is full of life, who is always looking to do what is good for you, what is best for you.

If you have Jesus, you will have a God who is faithful, to the words that St. Paul spoke about, when he talked about,

For none of us liveth to himself

And no one dieth to himself.

For if we live, we live unto the Lord,

And if we die, we die unto the Lord.

Whether we live, therefore, or die, we are the Lord’s

For that in life and in death we belong to this one who has given us life, who loves us who is always working to bring us to life, and fills us with goodness.

It is an amazing thing to me to think about the fact that Jesus told this story about the man who built his house upon the rock at the end of the Sermon on the Mount.

The sermon that many, many people think is the essence of what it means to live as a Christian. Words about picking up those who are down.

Words of hope for the poor and those who are lost.

Words about not judging.

Words about seeking, asking and knocking.

Words that remind us of God’s great and wonderful love.

Words that eventually boil down to what we refer to as The Golden Rule which is ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you,’ and then Jesus says, “If you hear these words of mine and do them, you will be like the man who built his house upon a rock.”

The winds blew and the rains fell. But that house stood because its foundation was built upon a rock.

I want to give you today, what my mother gave me about 55 years ago this coming week.

I want to give you Jesus.

Let us pray.