Words And Action

Words And Action

Matthew 7:21-29
June 1, 2008

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only
the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. On that day many will say to me,
‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and
do many deeds of power in your name?’ Then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you;
go away from me, you evildoers.’ “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and
acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the
floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it
had been founded on rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not
act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain fell, and the
floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell—and great
was its fall!” Now when Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were
astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as their
scribes.

I just finished an interesting book by David Edmonds and John Eidinow called
“Wittgenstein’s Poker: The Story of A Ten Minute Argument Between Two Great
Philosophers” and it tells the true story and background of an extraordinary incident
that happened on October 25, 1946 in Cambridge, England, one that has become
legendary in philosophy circles for decades. Bertrand Russell had invited up-and-
coming philosopher Karl Popper to a meeting of the well-known Moral Sciences Club of
Cambridge, whose chairman Ludwig Wittgenstein was already legendary amongst his
disciples, and certainly he already gained a venerated status in the pantheon of
philosopher superstars of that time, one of which was his former mentor Bertrand
Russell. The Moral Science Club invited philosophers and other thinkers to present a
puzzle or problem to the gathering of students and faculties alike, those crowded in the
cold, damp room in the Gibbs Building, Stairway H, Room 3. The thinker would then
propose a solution to the puzzle before them, and the gathering would debate the
relative merits of the answer—with Wittgenstein tending to dominate the discussion.
(pictured below, Popper to the left, Wittgenstein, to the right)

On that cold night, two of the great philosophers of the first part of the twentieth century
went to battle with each other. Popper had shown up with the expressed intent of
challenging some of Wittgenstein’s ideas, especially his notion that there are no real
problems in philosophy—rather, there are instead only puzzles created by the
imprecise use of language: it’s the words that get in the way of solving the puzzles that
philosophy get itself locked into. Popper began his short paper by attacking the idea
that philosophy only dealt with “puzzles” created by badly handled language, by
arguing that there were indeed philosophical problems that related to the real world,
with its real problems—indeed, the book that had brought him recent great acclaim had
argued such a thing, especially in relation to the issues of facism and freedom, and
other challenges of the first part of the twentieth century. This encounter became
famous not only because these two great giants of philosophy were to have this first
and only fiery meeting—ironic, because both were refugees from Nazi-occupied
Vienna—but because during the argument Wittgenstein had mindlessly picked up the
fire poker, the one used to keep the ebbing fire in the small but crowded room going,
and had waived it around as he was trying to make his point to Popper. The sight of
seeing Wittgenstein losing his cool, with a fire poker in his hand, had startled the room
into a cool silence—so finally, in disgust, Wittgenstein flung the poker into the fireplace
and stormed out of the room, leaving everyone in stunned silence. Popper had felt that
he bested the great Wittgenstein, something he would later brag about in his
autobiography, though Wittgenstein’s disciples who were in the room did not quite
agree with that assessment. In Popper’s mind, he had torn to shreds the idea that
philosophy was only a language game, simple puzzles to decipher using the mind—for
Popper, philosophy was something that had a real relationship to the world we live in,
and it could effect the real behavior of living human beings in the real world.

Now, what in the world does this have to do with our text this morning, this conclusion
we have before us of Jesus’ Sermon On The Mount? Well, everything, in a way,
because Jesus himself makes a point here about all those beautiful words he has just
said, the ones about being the salt of the earth, the light of the world, about not being a
hypocrite when going into the temple, about turning the other cheek, about loving our
neighbors, about not storing up treasures on this earth, but in heaven—all of these
familiar words. Jesus is saying in these words before us, the ones that wrap up all
these others words, is that our lives, our lived actions in this world, matter more than
our words. All that Jesus has said will count for nothing if we choose not to act on
them, if we choose not to build our lives on the truths he has shared with his disciples
and with us. Popper was right, in a sense, because he believed that philosophy
became nothing more than a parlor game if doesn’t effect real change in this world, if it
doesn’t produce real results in the lived world where real problems take place.
Likewise, for Jesus, it is the same idea—the words he has just shared with that crowd
arrayed about him on that hill become meaningless, foolishness, if the ones who hear
them simply hold them in their hearts but do not practice them, do not live them out in
the real world. You see, Jesus doesn’t think that life is a puzzle, a game, but, instead,
he believes that there are real problems, problems that he offers solutions to, in these
words, in these solutions, given to us in his words. The choice on where to build our
lives, on the rock or on the sand, that is what wraps up his teachings in the previous 2
chapters of Matthew, the ones right before this text.

But before I unpack that a bit more, I want to go back to a point that I’ve often harped
on in the past, but I think is especially important for us to remember in our act of
digesting these words of Jesus. I’ve often said that I think that one of the things that
has been so destructive to our witness as the church is that we Christians often get
involved in battles around words, about the meaning of words, words in our Bibles,
words in our creeds, words in our traditions, and we start dividing up ourselves over
those words, into different denominations, different camps within churches, etc, etc.
Somehow we’ve come to believe that God loves us because we have the right beliefs,
the right words, to describe the holiest of holies and the most mysterious of all
mysteries. We think the house we’re building on, so to speak, is one that is built by
planks made of words, that the nails we use are the nouns, the verbs, the adverbs and
adjectives we use to describe God, or describe ourselves in relationship to God.
Friends, that has gotten us Christians into a lot of trouble, because it wasn’t the words
that are the building materials, the stuff with which we build the actual life that Jesus is
speaking of here. You see, the words are instruction manual, they are the plans, for
our lives, but the actual building material, the planks, the nails, the shingles, that is the
stuff of our actual lives, the way we actually we live our lives, the way we act out the
words Jesus has been saying to us in the Sermon on The Mount. Ironically, we argue
about the blueprints to the house we’re building, rather than focusing on living lives that
actually practice these words of Jesus, building the house that those blueprints we’re
arguing about asks us to build in this world. The building is what we do with those
words, whatever and however we have come interpret them, sometimes in
disagreement with each other.

In Anthony de Mello’s book, The Song of the Bird, he tells of a job search. “Enter the
first applicant. ‘You understand that this is a simple test we are giving you before we
offer you the job you have applied for?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, what is two plus two?’ ‘Four’ Enter
the second applicant. ‘Are you ready for the test?’ ‘Yes’ ‘Well, what is two plus two?’
‘Whatever the boss says it is.’ The second applicant got the job. Which comes first,
orthodoxy, or truth?” (page 95-96) he writes. The second applicant told the truth, the
real lived truth of what it means to have a job in this world. He was living in the real
world where he had to do what the boss told him to do, despite what he believed about
what two and two actually added up to. What I think de Mello is pointing us to is the
truth that what counts is the real world, the way we actually live in it, the way we actually
do what needs to be done to get through it all. Likewise, Jesus is pointing us to the real
world where his words were to be practiced—and he was saying that is what matters to
him, the practice of his words in this world, rather than the words themselves, and our
continuous and damaging arguments about what those words might mean. The
arguments will always be there about what the words mean, but however we
understand them, let’s put into practice whatever we might think they might mean.
Mother Teresa has said words that I’ve shared with you before—“Enough words, let
them see what we do.”

And, of course, in the midst of our arguments about the words found in our tradition, of
our Jesus, of our God, we Christians sometime seem to think that right belief will get us
right with God, that if we believe the rights things about the divine, then we’ll be alright
with God. But that’s not the Gospel, the Good News—the Good News isn’t the story
about how God has given us the right things to believe about God, Jesus, the universe,
the spiritual world. Rather, the Gospel is the story about God believing the right things
about us, that we are worthy of God’s attention, that we are worth dying for, worth
understanding, worth journeying with, worth saving amidst the mess we often make of
our lives and the larger world.

This focus on right beliefs, right doctrines, has often gotten us forbearers of the
Puritans and the Pilgrims, those of us on the Congregationalist side of the United
Church of Christ tradition, into a lot of trouble. Parsing up right belief about what the
Bible said, even if we left the church’s creed behind, has often made us the worst kind
of Christians when it came to those that disagreed with us—think of Anne Hutchinson
and others. You know, it’s actually the other side of our UCC family that taught that
what matters most is not right belief, but a life lived rightly—the German Evangelical
and Reformed threads of our denominations are the pietists who didn’t get lost in the
doctrinal battles that the early Congregationalists could never let go. They were
worried far less about having the right beliefs than having a life that attempted to live
out those sacred words of Jesus. They plowed their energy into hospitals and
orphanages and institutions that practiced Jesus’ words in the real world, places like
Back Bay Mission, something we can all be thankful for in our denomination.

So, the choice is before us, really, to where we build our homes, our lives, our actual
practice of faith in this world. The foolish man built his home on a dry creek bed,
thinking that the rains would never come again to fill up that riverbed. The wise man
built his home on something that could not be moved easily: a rock, a steady place, a
strong place. To hear the words and practice them, to make change in one’s own life,
and in the life of the world, that is what wise man did. The foolish man heard the same
words, but didn’t practice them, didn’t change his life using the blueprint given to him by
those words—however he understood them, he simply didn’t act on them. He was the
Wittgenstein of the moment, a person immersed in the words, but who saw no real
connection to the world outside of his mind, who saw no need to put those words into
practice.

Now, to be fair and to be totally truthful, it is Wittgenstein who star has grown brighter in
the last 50 or so years, while Popper’s own star has faded somewhat. And in truth
Wittgenstein got a lot right, and he was a genius far beyond even Popper’s great
intellect, but what Popper did get right was that words that have no legs to them, words
that are not acted upon simply stay in the mind; they become words that are endlessly
argued over, words that are plunged into the sandy soil of the dry creekbed, ready to
be swept away, in a world that needs people to live out Jesus’ words of justice and
goodness. The world needs us to do the words of Jesus as much or more than just
simply listening to the words of Jesus—those words about being the salt of the earth,
the light of the world, those words about not being a hypocrite when going into the
temple, those words about turning the other cheek, those words about loving our
neighbors, and those words about not storing up treasures on this earth, but in
heaven. It’s the doing of Jesus’ words that is most difficult thing, isn’t it, despite our
propensity to expend more energy arguing over his words and the meaning of them? It’
s time we did what Jesus asked us to do, at the moment when he had distilled his great
teaching during that time on that hill, at a place packed with people, his disciples, his
would-be disciples, all of who were astounded at what he said because he talked AND
lived like someone who practiced what he preached. Amen.