Church Life: Rock to Sand to Rock Again

Feast of St. Argula von Grumbach

Given at the Celebration of New Ministry for The Rev. Ryan Missel, 20 July 2024

I was planning to start this sermon with a fun little anecdote about our saint we celebrate today, but that just doesn’t feel right under the circumstances. Like many of you, I was shocked and horrified at the assassination attempt against former President Trump last night. I was already feeling so disheartened about the future of our nation, and that just made it worse. I’m scared, and I’m upset, and I feel helpless.

Anyone with me in those feelings? We just seem to be spiraling further and further into hostility and despair and it seems like we’re headed for a black hole of chaos and violence. And you know why else I’m upset? Because this day and this sermon is supposed to be about Christ Church Cape and Father Ryan and the joy of your ministry together. I don’t want to talk about our stupid political environment and how horrible everything is.

Well, it turns out that the joy of building new ministry and our stupid political environment and how horrible everything is are intimately connected, and they always have been. Our saint for today, Argula von Grumbach, knew a thing or two about trying to do church when everything was going to hell in a handbasket.

Argula was a reformer. She was a pioneering female theologian born in 1492, and she found herself with a great number of very firm thoughts on how the church needed to be changed, thoughts that the great male theologians did not at first want to hear. Highly influenced by Martin Luther’s writings and his translation of the Bible, she began a correspondence with Luther and met him face-to-face in 1530.

In 1523, a young Lutheran university student was arrested for his Protestant views and forced to recant his beliefs on the Bible. Argula was furious and wrote an angry but extremely well-argued and Biblically grounded letter of protest to the university faculty. The letter went viral and became an overnight best-seller. It also aroused vicious controversy and Argula was attacked in all the usual ways women theologians are: she was called a failure and an abomination as a wife, mother, woman and person, and her husband got fired. Nevertheless, she persisted, and continued to travel and write, stirring up trouble and advancing the cause of the Reformation.

The reason I go into the story of her life in such detail is because I believe her circumstances are highly relevant to us today. The Protestant Reformation was a time of violent upheaval both in the secular world and the church. People were realizing that the old ways of being church were not working anymore. They wanted to bring some parts of the tradition forward, but realized that others needed to die. And this was happening in a political culture saturated by fear, enmity, and outrage. Sound familiar? They felt like the very ground beneath them was shifting and sliding away.

          Jesus anticipates these moments in our common life in our gospel parable today. We read of the wise man and the foolish man in our passage from Matthew. The wise man built his house upon the rock, and the foolish man built his house upon the sand. (And side note, my favorite vacation bible school song of all time is about this parable—if you know which one I’m talking about, find me at the reception and I will definitely sing it with you.)

We often think of this story as being about the moment these men chose to build their houses. They each looked at the ground available, and one smartly chose a solid rock to build on, and one stupidly chose shifting sand. But think again about the people of the Reformation. They all chose the rock, or the generations before them did.

Everyone started out getting together and trying to follow the gospel in community, and for hundreds of years, it worked pretty much okay (although I realize that is a gross oversimplification). No one chose to build their house on the sand; the rock turned to sand beneath them, and the house began to fall.

This analogy holds up when we think about both the church and climate change today. People all over the world who quite literally built their houses on solid ground have found the ground beneath them giving way under rising water levels. Rock can turn to sand. Fun fact: the “Cape” that Cape Girardeau was named for came from a rock promontory that overlooked the Mississippi. It was later destroyed for railroad construction. The rock that this very town was built on is no longer here.

          How does a rock get turned into sand? It gets ground down over time. Whether it is worn away by water or the friction of rock against rock starts to break it apart, the slow invisible violence of the elements grinds our foundation apart until suddenly the house is unstable and teetering. That is what I want you, the ministers of Christ Church Cape, to think about as you build the house of your life together with Father Ryan as your priest. All of you have been through the grinder the last few years. Sometimes that can wear away the rough edges in a good way, but sometimes it turns our rock into quicksand. How are you going to make sure your house is built upon the rock, and more than that, make sure that the rock stays steady and strong instead of being slowly worn away?

Well, let’s think for a moment. What creates the wear and tear and grinding pressure in church life that wears down our foundation? Bad communication. Defensiveness. Triangulation. Hiding our feelings. Acting out. Cutting each other off rather than hanging onto relationship and trying to work things out. Assigning the best motives to ourselves and the worst motives to others.

And let me tell you, dear friends, I know about all of these bad habits because I’ve committed every last one of them myself. Church life can get really tough sometimes. As Jesus says in our scripture, “The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house.” It’s inevitable. What are the practices you can engage in to keep that foundation strong?

Paul tells us in our lesson from Philippians. In five short verses, he sums it all up: “Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you…Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”

One reason the great Reformation our church is entering into now has been so disruptive to folks is that we have lost hold of an important thread of how God works in the world. Many of us who grew up as Americans in the second half 20^th century, especially those of us who grew up with any kind of privilege, lived in an unprecedented time of wealth, comfort, and stability, for the church and for society as a whole.

We thought that’s how life and church were supposed to be, and as things started to turn to sand underneath us in the 21^st century, accelerating even harder during and post pandemic, we panicked. Oh God, the church is dying and the world is ending! We’ve tried to cling to that false certainty we thought we had, but it still feels like we’re on sinking sand. What St. Argula wrote to the anti-reformation faculty, she might as well be saying to us, “You are defeating yourselves.”

The outlook that stability and calm is the norm does not hold up when we think of the history of God’s children. Stability and calm is the aberration. God’s people have always lived in times of crisis. The entire Bible is disaster research, a set of books that would fit into today’s academic discipline of disaster studies. It’s a detailed examination of how vast, terrible events impacted entire nations of people and how they reacted. War, famine, enslavement, plague, genocide, mass migration–it’s all there.

The Bible is first and foremost post-traumatic literature. It is people using storytelling to make meaning of their collective suffering. And in the final triumph of God, the Bible is the story of post-traumatic growth. God calls God’s people through pain and struggle into a new land, from the shifting sands of wandering in the desert to the solid rock of the Promised Land.

And they get to live there for awhile, until the rock turns to sand again and they have to start over. Incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, the pattern continues, and we don’t get to skip over the crucifixion part.

So what do we do as church? If we accept that the fundamental state of the world is struggle and upheaval, if we understand that the church is in the midst of a radical historic change, if we know that over and over again what we think is rock will turn to sand beneath us, what do we do? How can we build a life together in the midst of such ongoing chaos?

You already know the answer. Underneath the “rock to sand to rock again” ways of doing church, the structures and practices that work until they don’t work, is the layer of unchanging granite, unalterable, immovable, eternal. There is a deeper rock, as our psalm says, the rock that the world has rejected but has become the chief cornerstone. You know the hymn: on Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand, all other ground is sinking sand.

Climate change, political enmity, church struggle, war, our besetting sins of racism and failure to care for the poor—no matter how much sand we create for ourselves, beneath it all lies the rock of Christ Jesus. To quote James Watkins, “Underneath the water is the rock, and underneath the rock is the Word.”

St. Argula knew this. People were literally dying all around her, from everything from the plague to being burned at the stake for trying to change the church, and she wrote, “I send you not a woman’s ranting, but the Word of God. I write as a member of the Church of Christ against which the gates of hell shall not prevail…Great good will yet come.”

Great good will yet come. How do we make that happen? How do we dig beneath the shifting sands to the rock that is Christ? Jesus tells us. “Everyone who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock.” Everyone who hears Jesus’ words and acts on them. You, the people of Christ Church Cape, are already doing that together. And you are pledging today in this service, that when the ground beneath you starts to feel like sand, when things get shaky, you will come together and come back to the words of Jesus, the eternal Word.

So we are here to pray together, to dream together, to look forward to God working through us no matter how frightening or unstable the times we live in.  We live in hope, because we know who is upholding us, every minute of every day.  So let us rejoice, as Paul tells us, rejoice always, even in the shadow of fear that dogs our every step.  We proclaim the ancient phrase of prayer that the church has continued to sing every single morning, through crisis and despair and through peace and new beginnings, for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years: “Come, let us sing to the Lord; let us shout for joy to the Rock of our salvation.”