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Luke 6:46-49 · The Wise and Foolish Builders
Whether You'll Weather the Weather
Luke 6:46-49
Sermon
by David J. Kalas
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Every so often, toward the end of a hot, still, muggy day here in the Midwest, we'll have a television show interrupted by an alarming beep and a printed message scrolling across the bottom of the screen. It's tornado season, and so the message usually features one of two words from the National Weather Service. It's either a "watch" or it's a "warning."  A tornado watch means that the atmospheric conditions are ripe for the development of a funnel cloud. A tornado warning, on the other hand, means that a funnel cloud has actually been sighted somewhere in the area. If the National Weather Service issues a watch, you are encouraged to be alert. If the National Weather Service issues a warning, however, you are instructed to take cover. 

Jesus has issued a warning. 

Jesus tells the story of two men, each of whom builds a house. The two men make different choices, and their stories have different endings. Please note, though, that the two men are more alike than they are different. We might miss that fact, for our natural instinct is to focus on their differences. Before we can appreciate their differences, though, we ought first to take a measure of their similarities.  The first great similarity is in the weather. The one man, you remember, builds his house on a foundation of rock, and so his house survives the storm. The other man, however, builds his house without a foundation (or on the sand, according to the more familiar version of the story in Matthew 7). The second man's house is devastated by the storm.  Perhaps we ought to have an alarming beep sound each time we read this teaching of Jesus. Perhaps it should be printed periodically as a crawl across our television screens, for in this teaching Jesus has issued a warning. It's a severe storm warning. And it is not just a watch. 

We might say that the first man is wise and the second man foolish. We might conclude that the first man is obedient to God and the second man is not. And those would be fair characterizations. But see that it makes no difference to the weather in Jesus' story. We would like very much to believe that the wise, the righteous, and the faithful would be exempted from life's storms. Not so here, though.

Our sense of fairness -- and perhaps also our theology -- expects that where the wise man chooses to build (or how the faithful person chooses to live) is a place less susceptible to storms. And there is surely a scriptural basis for that presumption. In the Old Testament Law, as well as much of the wisdom tradition of ancient Israel, there is a straightforward cause-and-effect paradigm: obedience brings blessing, while disobedience yields disaster. 

At the same time, however, the Old Testament people of God were not naïve on this point. They cherished the stories of Joseph, David, Job, and others whose sufferings were unfair and undeserved. Many of the Psalmist's prayers are cries for justice in the midst of unjust persecution and troubles. And the faithfulness of people like Jeremiah, Daniel, and Nehemiah seemed only to create trouble for them. 

The path of the righteous, we discover, has mixed results. On the one hand, it steers one clear of all the self-inflicted troubles that come with sin and wickedness. On the other hand, in this fallen world, it may also lead a person directly into the troubles of persecution and unjust suffering.  Both the wise and the foolish builder live with the same weather. That is the first great commonality they share. Saints and sinners alike experience life's storms. And so it is that Jesus' story does not offer a storm watch, but rather a storm warning. No matter who you are, no matter where you build or how, storms are coming. Other elements of the story are variable, but the storm is a given. The question, therefore, is not whether the bad weather will come. It will. The question is whether you'll weather the weather. 

I. The First Similarity is Weather.

And so it is that, right on the heels of the great similarity between the two builders, comes the great difference between them. Their weather is the same. How they weather it is not.  Last summer, as we were preparing dinner one evening, we heard the telltale beeping on the television. We turned to read the crawl. It was the real thing: not just a watch, but a tornado warning. And so the announcement was accompanied by a series of urgent instructions about where to go and what to do.  Typically, the instruction during such severe weather is to go to your basement. That's the most secure place to be during a tornado. Basements are usually concrete and underground: a foundation of rock, if you will. And so that's where you want to be -- where you need to be -- during a storm.  As it turned out for us, no tornado touched down in our immediate area, and so our shelter was not sorely tested. Both men in Jesus' story, however, do have their shelters tested. Both experience the same potentially devastating kind of storm, but they are not equally devastated in the end. The house with a rock foundation survives, while the house without such an enviable base is utterly destroyed. 

I am reminded of Jesus' parable each time I go to the beach with my two young daughters. Only half of their beach fun, you see, is playing in the water; the other half is playing in the sand. And a standard part of playing in the sand at the beach is building sandcastles with Daddy.  My older daughter and I have endeavored some pretty elaborate structures together. At first I set down my reading to embark on the sandy assignment as just a favor to my girls, but soon I find myself thoroughly engaged in the project. I work on tunnels, bridges, and towers, while my daughter adorns our proud structure with stones, sticks, and seashells.  In the end, of course, our sandcastle's fate is always the same. The tide begins to come in, and the little constant laps of water prove devastating to our project. Gradually we watch our work being undermined, crumbled, and washed away. It comes with the territory, for that is the nature of sand. 

Such vulnerability is harmless enough in a sandcastle. In fact, it's rather fascinating to watch. When it happens on a larger scale, on the other hand, it is truly disturbing to watch. You have no doubt seen, as I have, news footage of people's homes being battered and twisted by hurricanes, or leveled by tornados, or suddenly disappearing down the side of a hill in some California mudslide. It's a frightening scene. 

And it's worse still when the wreckage is not a structure but a life. That's what Jesus is finally talking about, of course, in his storm-warning parable. The risks that come with a fragile foundation in a human life are even more poignant, more tragic than the sight of a building being devastated by some natural disaster.  I expect that we've all seen it. We've seen lives buckle and crumble. We've seen the human wreckage left in the wake of some storm.  Of course, unless we are very close to the situation, we may not see it coming. It's difficult to perceive from a distance that a person's foundation is being gradually eroded away. The final "crash," therefore -- the suicide, the divorce, the crisis, the breakdown, the addiction, or whatever other form the crash may take -- often catches us by surprise when it comes. "I had no idea," we exclaim when we hear the news. "I had no idea he was going through that." "I had no idea that was going on in her life." 

As a parish pastor, I do a fair amount of counseling with folks. That counseling is not initiated by me. Rather, it is typically precipitated by some storm in a parishioner's life, and they come looking for help. I have thought sometimes, while trying to help some soul cope with the present storm, that perhaps a variation of Jesus' parable would be appropriate. Perhaps there is a third category of people -- those who did not build on the rock at first, but who frantically run to find a firm foundation once the storm hits.  The real estate agent will readily tell you the axiomatic truth of his trade: "Location, location, and location!" As a pastor and preacher, meanwhile, I would bear witness to my work's version of that truth: Foundation, foundation, and foundation! 

In my roles as a preacher and a teacher, I endeavor to help people build on the rock while the sun is shining. In my role as a counselor, however, I reckon myself out there in the rain and the wind with them, trying to help them find the rock to build upon, even in the midst of their crisis. It's a desperate effort. And it's a poignant sight.  I remember some years ago a woman in the church asking for an appointment to meet with me. I had no idea what she wanted to talk about, and when she arrived and began to tell me, I was caught completely by surprise. She told me about the situation in her home and her marriage -- about the affair her husband had been having with another woman for years, about how she finally discovered it, about how he had been treating their daughter, and about the state of their marriage. It was shocking stuff. He was a respected leader and Sunday school teacher in the church. No one had any idea what had been going on. 

Now here was this woman in my office, suddenly hit by one of life's potentially devastating storms, and she was looking for help. As we talked, it became painfully apparent that she had no real foundation of faith. She was foundering, and had no sense at all of the God to whom she belonged. She had been in church her whole life, and yet still there was no solid foundation in place when the storm came. 

II. The Second Similarity Is Opportunity.

That brings us to the second great similarity between the two house builders. The first, you remember, is their weather. The second, it turns out, is their opportunity.  "I will show you what someone is like who comes to me, hears my words, and acts on them," Jesus says, and he goes on to describe the person we think of as the wise house builder. "But the one who hears and does not act," Jesus continues, "is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation." 

The second great similarity between the two house builders is that both persons heard the Word. Both had the opportunity to build on the rock.  I suppose that's why we are right to think of the two builders as "wise" and "foolish." If the difference between them was that one had heard the life-changing, life-saving Word and the other had not, then we might label them "lucky" and "unlucky," "fortunate" and "unfortunate." But they had the same opportunity. They heard the same Word. But in the end, one responded wisely to the Word, and the other did not. 

In so many of the parables Jesus tells, you and I are presented with a choice of characters. Am I more like the priest and the Levite or the Samaritan? Do I more closely resemble the wise virgins or the foolish ones? Do I live like the first two stewards or the third who buried his talent in the ground?  And here, too, in this parable: Both characters experienced storms, and both characters heard the Word, but each one responded differently to what he heard. Which of the two builders am I like? Which of the two characters are you like?  Have we acted on what we have heard from the Lord? Have we responded to his Word with our lives? 

Every so often you hear the story of a scam artist who manages to bilk some poor, trusting souls out of their life savings. He makes promises, he offers guarantees, and they invest most or all of what they have in his proposal. But then both he and their money suddenly disappear, leaving them devastated.  The original scam artist, of course, was known as the most subtle and crafty of all the creatures in the Garden. He, too, made promises and guarantees. Eve believed him, and in the process she and Adam lost virtually everything they had.  And still today the Deceiver tries to sell folks a bill of goods. Or, in the parlance of our parable, he tries to sell us a piece of property. "Come build your life here," he urges. "Here you'll have everything you need!"  Not everything. Not a firm foundation. 

We human beings keep buying property and building structures on flood plains, fault lines, and along hurricane-vulnerable coasts. It's a calculated risk, and many thousands of folks seem willing to take it.  There is no risk calculation to be made, however, when it comes to the life-storms represented in Jesus' parable. We do not need to assess the probability of being hit by one (or several) of these storms. They are a given. And yet, still, people go merrily on, building vulnerability into the structure of their lives. 

Perhaps we have been advised too early and too often not to "put all our eggs in one basket." After all, the prudent key to sound investing in our world is to diversify.  That's fine when only money is at stake. When it comes to the weightier matter of our life's foundation, however, diversification is not so wise. "All other ground is sinking sand,"1 declared nineteenth-century hymn writer Edward Mote. The wise ones have discovered, when it comes to investing your life, your hopes, and your faith, that you need to un-diversify. Retract the far-flung hopes and reliance, entrusting instead the whole weight of your life onto the one sure foundation. 

"Which of all the airy castles can the hurricane endure?" asked Joachim Neander over 300 years ago, concluding that "built on sand, naught can stand by our earthly wisdom planned." And so he resolved, "All my hope is firmly grounded in the great and living Lord; who, whenever I most need him, never fails to keep his word. God I must wholly trust, God the ever good and just."2

Modern meteorology is a highly sophisticated science, and many of us depend on it daily in the routine matters of predicting temperatures and precipitation. And, from time to time, we also depend upon it to alert us to danger, to warn us of storms.  We don't have such a sophisticated and reliable means of predicting life's storms. But Jesus has done us two great favors. First, he has issued a warning: the storms are a given; you can count on them. And, better still, he has offered us a firm foundation: his rock-solid and reliable Word; you can count on him. 

1. Edward Mote, "My Hope Is Built," The United Methodist Hymnal (Nashville, Tennessee: The United Methodist Publishing House, 1989), p. 368.

2. Joachim Neander, translated by Fred Pratt Green, "All My Hope Is Firmly Grounded," The United Methodist Hymnal (Nashville, Tennessee: The United Methodist Publishing House, 1989), p. 132.

CSS Publishing Company, Sermons on the Gospel Readings, Cycle C, by David J. Kalas