THOUGHTS OF A MONK

“Live the Promise”

Councils I-VI Fathers
July 17, 2005

You may have noticed the newspaper photo on the bulletin board as you entered the church today. It is of some houses that collapsed in mudslides in southern California. The clipping is courtesy of my mother who lives in San Diego. Growing up in Los Angeles, I saw many similar mudslides with houses falling down the side of cliffs. As kids we used to joke about those slides. Yes, kids can be cruel. We would speculate that the people living in them were unsuspecting easterners who had moved into those houses perched on the side of a cliff or on a palisade not realizing that they were not safe. Then the inevitable rainstorm would come and the houses would slide down the muddy slope. The disillusioned homeowners would leave, head back to Detroit or some other eastern location. New houses would be built in the same location and other equally unsuspecting newcomers from out-of-state would buy the new houses and sooner or later the same sequence of events would be repeated.

The image expressed in the Gospel we heard today is far from fanciful and it certainly is no joking matter. Building the house that is our life, our faith, and our aspirations, on a solid foundation is critically important. This Gospel message about building a house on a firm foundation applies to how we live our life and what we believe about God’s promise of eternal life. Let’s examine some of the rocks or building blocks that make up the foundation of our life.

Building a foundation for the development of healthy relationships later in life begins at an early age. We learn from the loving care and nurturing of our families and our early socialization in school and church that the foundation for relationships is built on openness of mind and heart toward others. Being open is Christ’s message. It opens the doors to many greater possibilities. 

We lay the foundation for our careers in school. What those careers will be like is not known while the foundation is being built. We don’t go to school planning to stay there forever, we’re learning skills that will serve us later in life. That life will be completely different, but it will be dependent on the foundation laid early in life.

Learning about proper nutrition and exercise needs to start early in life. This must be learned in the family and in health classes in school. They are the foundation for long and healthy life. We will never learn this from the advertisements that assault us daily on TV, in the print media and over the Internet. Recent news reports about child obesity confirm the critical nature of this problem for our society’s future. Sales promotion is not health information, no matter how slick the packaging. To build a good foundation in health requires learning how to go against the tide of cultural imperatives. Remember Christ’s words: “they tell you one thing, but I say.”

A strong foundation in relationships, education and health, not to mention in housing, are part of the picture, but the deeper Gospel message is about faith. It tells us that faith in the words of Jesus Christ is the foundation for being able to persevere against the storms of life. Even with the best preparation for life, storms will come. Prevailing against the troubles that will batter us like gale force winds does not mean we do not have to endure them. It means that we have an assurance; a promise if you will that there is something more to life than what is here on earth. The rock that is Christ is about that promise, not of an easy life in this world, but of eternal life in the world to come. Sometimes we shy away from talking about “life unending for those who believe”, no matter how many times we sing about it during Paschaltide. And yet, this promise is at the core of the Christian message. But it is not a rationalization that lets us off the hook. It does not mean that we will not have to struggle in this life.

As St. Paul writes to the Romans, the faith we follow is the example of the faith of Abraham. He believed in the promise of God. The foundation we base our lives and our faith on is the promise of life eternal. If our faith is simply in our achievements and well being then we are like the man who built his house on sand, or like the one the Prophet Ezekiel spoke about who simply whitewashed a flimsy wall. In both cases when the storms came they were washed away. For we and all that is around us is perishable, only life eternal is imperishable.  As St. Paul says elsewhere, if Christ did not rise from the dead then we are the most pitiable of people. But since we believe that Christ did indeed rise from the dead he thereby opened to us the way to a more abundant life because of our belief in that promise.

We heard in a meditation on Thursday morning, that “to believe in something is to act as if it is so.” If we believe in the promise of eternal life, if we have built our faith on that rock, then we should live our life accordingly. When the storm waves of life roll in and crash down on us, we will stand like the house on the rock of Christ’s words. This is quite different from the popular proposition, that the more and harder we pray and the more faithful we are to Church Tradition, the less likely we are to suffer illness, lose a job, endure a divorce or die. This is missing the point.  We don’t pray to avoid the realities of life, we pray for help in enduring them. Some might say that when problems arise, we didn’t pray hard enough, that may or may not be true, but that is not the cause of the problem. Christ suffered death on the Cross to experience with us the death that all mortals face, but he also rose from the dead to point out for us that our ultimate destination is life eternal.

Can we know what life eternal is all about?  No. Just like we cannot know what our later life here on earth will be like when we are laying the foundations for that life. We can dream, we can imagine, we can hope, we can speculate, but we cannot know. However, if we live in constant doubt and fear, scrambling to protect ourselves from every possible struggle, tension and burden, then our life will slip through our fingers like sand and when the storms that we have tried so hard to avoid hit us we will fall, and what a fall it will be! But if we believe that we will have life eternal and we live as if we believe that it is so, then that rock solid foundation of faith will enable us to persevere against the worst storms of life.

The Fathers of the first Six Ecumenical Councils, whom we recall today, wrestled with many of the theological issues that now form the doctrinal basis of our Christian faith. We pray with them and for them in thanksgiving for what they did, for the foundation of faith they built. By the prayers of all your saints and especially the fathers of the first Six Ecumenical Councils, O Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy on us and save us. Amen.