Rock Solid Series

[Note: The title of this series is "The Stony Path." Each sermon has a theme or uses the image of a stone. As the people come into church, they are given a stone to hold during the service. At the end of the service, they are asked to place their stones at the foot of a wooden cross at the front of the church. Over the course of Lent, they see the pile of stones getting bigger but on Easter Sunday morning, when they come in, the stones are gone.]

Close your eyes for moment. Seriously, close your eyes for moment. Feel anything?

Believe it or not, the ground beneath your feet is moving right now. You may not feel it but trust me … every house, every church, including this church, every building in this area is slowly sliding downhill. The scientific term for this imperceptible movement of the soil is … “creep.” Makes sense. The ground or soil beneath our feet right now is creeping downhill under the influence of gravity. Some of you have had to learn about “creep” the hard way, amen? Becoming aware of the problem only after discovering cracks in your walls because something’s gotta give … and that’s your walls … a very expensive and very labor-intensive process to fix … one, that if left untreated could destroy your home or this building over time … a long, long time, perhaps … but still … like time, gravity marches one … pulling us, pulling everything down … which is a good thing, right? Because life on this planet couldn’t exist if it weren’t for gravity holding us and everything around us down.

Here, we have creep due to the slow movement of soil downhill … in the Middle East, they have two things … rocks … lots of rocks … and lots of sand … so the people listening to Jesus’ parable about building on rock or sand were, shall we say, very familiar with the difference between building your home … or any building for that matter … on shifting sand versus solid rock. They didn’t have to go to architectural school or study geology to know the truth of what Jesus’ was saying … but Jesus wasn’t talking about actually building a home on rock or sand, was He? He was, however, talking about the winds and storms that constantly buffet our hearts and minds and he is challenging his listeners and us to examine how we withstand these constant assaults on our faith and on our belief.

Now … Jesus had, in fact, put His listeners in a very curious position. You see … most … if not all … of His listeners believed that God was going to send a deliverer … a savior … in the form of a messiah or a king … like David or Solomon. This was a deeply held and powerful belief of the people in Jesus’ day who were hanging on to the hope that God would one day send them someone to deliver them from the oppressive hold of the Roman Empire. In fact, their only hope of deliverance would have to come from God.

What they didn’t expect, however, was for God to send them the son of a common laborer. And yet, when they heard Jesus speak, again their impressions were challenged. When Jesus had finished speaking, “the crowds were astounded at His teaching, for He taught them as one having authority, and not as their scribes” (Matthew 7:28-29). Was their faith in God strong enough to accept the fact that Jesus was not only the messiah, the long awaited king, who would deliver them, but that He was in fact, THE Messiah … the king not only of Israel but THE King of Heaven and earth. Would their faith in God be able to withstand the dramatic shift that Jesus’ very presence, His message, His purpose would demand … that He came to deliver them, not from Rome, but that He came to deliver them from forces and powers far, far greater than Rome. The question wasn’t whether they believed in God. The question wasn’t whether they had faith in God. The question was how far did their trust and faith in God go? They were being asked to believe in a pretty fantastic thing. They were willing to believe in a God who could do some pretty fantastic, amazing, incredible things … but just how fantastic was their belief in a fantastic God, amen?

None of this was on Peter’s mind when he set out with his brother to fish the morning that he met Jesus and his life changed forever. Just another day of loading up nets, heading out in the Sea of Galilee. It was not the first time that he and his brother had come up empty … part of the risk of being a fisherman … still, very disappointing. And then it happened. Matthew and Mark say that Jesus called out to Peter and his brother, Andrew, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people” (Matthew 4:19) and they immediately left their nets and followed Him (v. 20). Luke gives more detail. Peter and Andrew were cleaning their nets, listening to this “teacher” who showed up on the beach, when Jesus asked them to put out a ways so that He could stand in their boat and speak to the crowd. When He was done, Jesus asked them to put down their nets … which they had been washing and getting ready to put away when Jesus showed up … so that they could catch fish. “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing,” Peter protests, but he puts down his nets anyways and, well, we all know what happened. Their nets were so full that they had to ask for help hauling them in. It was at that point that Peter fell to his knees and declared that Jesus was LORD … if not the very Son of God certainly someone who had very special abilities and powers that must have come from God. He probably wasn’t sure who Jesus was at this point but the foundation of his faith was being laid. Again, we hear that Peter and Andrew left everything and followed Jesus (Matthew 5:11).