Sermons
September 6, 2026 (Proper 18)
Ending at the Beginning
Matthew 7:24-27
Today we finally reach the end of the Sermon on the Mount, the first of five major blocks of Jesus’ teaching in the Gospel of Matthew. And where we end is at the beginning of the life of faith.
One thing to know is that Jesus’ teaching stands firmly on the teaching of the Hebrew Bible, the Law, Prophets, and Writings. The Wisdom literature of the Psalms and Proverbs speaks many times of “two ways,” one the way of wisdom and one the way of foolishness. Jesus employs this device more than once in the Sermon on the Mount—we saw it two weeks ago with the two roads, one that leads to death and one that leads to life; and we see it again today as he ends the sermon with a parable.
When Jesus tells these little stories—parables—to help us understand God’s Reign and our life as his followers, he employs imagery taken from real life, but with a twist that creates some cognitive dissonance. The kingdom of God, he says in Matthew 13, is like a woman hiding her sourdough starter in a sack of flour (something that, if you’ve done much baking at all, you’ll recognize as a recipe for a real mess).[1] It’s like a weed that starts out with a tiny seed and grows into an unrealistically large plant.[2] God is like a farmer who discovers his field is overrun with weeds, and whose servants want to deal with the weeds in a way that seems like common sense, but he says no.[3] The kingdom of God is like a treasure that is hidden, and the person who discovers it is willing to throw literally everything away to get hold of it.[4]
The parable that closes the Sermon on the Mount is more straightforward; it doesn’t contain the twist but ends perfectly sensibly. Anyone who has ever built or had built a house or other structure with a foundation can understand what he’s getting at.
Mike is fascinated by the story of the Brooklyn Bridge’s construction, and he has made me watch quite a number of videos about it. Did you know that one side of that bridge is not sitting on bedrock?
The Brooklyn Bridge is a suspension bridge, with the bridge deck suspended by enormous cables from two towers at either side of the East River. In building the bridge, workers had to get under the water, in a structure called a caisson, basically an inverted box that could be filled with pressurized air allowing them to work in a continually deepening shaft. It was hard, uncomfortable, and dangerous work.
The bedrock was shallower on the Brooklyn side, and workers reached it relatively easily. But the Manhattan side was a different matter. The bedrock on that side was nearly 80 feet further down, and workers began to experience what divers now know as “the bends” when they came up from the pressurized chamber.
The engineer overseeing the process, Washington Roebling, worked right alongside them and ended up with a case of what at the time was called “caisson disease” so severe that he was unable to go to the bridge in person for the last roughly ten years of its construction. Instead, his wife went to the site every day.
Emily Warren Roebling learned mathematics and engineering so she was able to communicate and supervise, and defend the project when the board of directors tried to interfere with it. All that time, her husband watched through a telescope from their apartment in Brooklyn Heights after the bends left him disabled, nearly blind, and in constant pain.
Washington Roebling wasn’t the only person to become seriously ill from the bends—something that no one had understood before this—several workers were sickened, and a few died from the condition. As a result, it was decided that digging for the Manhattan tower would stop once they reached a level they thought was safe. It’s sitting on sand.
It’s an extremely heavy structure and the sand is still very deep under the surface of the riverbed, which may be the reason why it hasn’t fallen victim to the forces that doom the second house in Jesus’ parable. But the reality is that a lesser structure, with its foundation sitting well above bedrock, would not be able to stand.
What Jesus may have had in mind was a house built in what’s known as a wadi, a streambed that is dry most of the time, but after a substantial rain becomes a torrent for a short period. That would be a very foolish place indeed to try and build a house.
Jesus says a life built on something other than following him and his teaching is similarly unsustainable. So the question we have to ask ourselves, we who claim to be followers of Jesus, is upon what we have based our own lives.
If we look at what Jesus said about loving our enemies, about not worrying about our daily provision, about not passing judgment on others, about looking after folks who are in need, and proclaim that such things are unrealistic and out-of-date, and we therefore should go in another direction even while claiming to follow Jesus, what foundation is our life sitting on? If we come to church on Sunday and hear Jesus’ instructions, and then go out and devote our lives to something else, like making and holding onto our money, what foundation is our life sitting on? If we are holding grudges over things that happened years ago, what foundation is our life sitting on?
We have to answer that question, and we have to keep answering it over and over, because it’s pretty easy to stray from the Way of Christ; the world around us is just absolutely full of things that seem perfectly sensible, but are not at all in keeping with what Jesus has told us life in the Reign of God is supposed to be like. If we stray, our lives stop being founded on the bedrock that is Jesus’ teaching, Jesus’ words, Jesus’ life and example, and we may well find ourselves in big trouble when hard times come.
This story comes from William Willimon. As a young pastor, he was called to the home of a young mother whose husband had just been killed in a tragic accident. They had attended his church a few times, but hadn’t really gotten involved and had drifted away when life got busy. They never joined, never made professions of faith, nothing. And now this woman was faced with a horrible loss.
The questions hammered at Willimon: “Why did this happen? Why would God do this to me? I have a young child; how are we supposed to go on?” But she wasn’t yet a believer; she had no foundation in God’s Word, in the teaching of Jesus, in Christian theology that teaches us how even out of enormous tragedy God can bring forth new life. So he had no idea how to shore up a life that was collapsing under the weight of horrific loss.
On the other hand, he told about another woman facing a similar situation; unlike the first young mom, this woman had been a follower of Jesus her entire life; she knew what he taught, how he lived, how in his death and resurrection God brought forth hope that nothing could shake. Of course she grieved; perhaps she even asked the same kinds of questions the first woman had asked—but she had something to hold onto.
At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus urges us to think about the foundation of our life. Upon what is your life standing? Is it founded on a continual quest for financial security, on the myth of redemptive violence, on pop culture and the influence of social media—or on Christ, the solid rock?
[1] Matthew 13:33
[2] Matthew 13:31-32
[3] Matthew 13:24-30
[4] Matthew 13:44; compare Paul’s words in Philippians 3:4b-14.