Trinitytide begins quietly. The great feasts are behind us now — Easter and Ascension and Whitsun, the Church’s high summer of revelation — and before us lies the long green season, Sunday after counted Sunday, in which we do not so much receive new things as live out what we have already been given. And on the first morning of it, the lessons set in our hands a builder, a storm, and a hard question about foundations.
Hear first the prophet. Am I a God at hand, saith the Lord, and not a God afar off? It is spoken in rebuke to the false prophets who dreamed their own dreams and called it the word of the Lord — but it is for us both comfort and warning together. The God who fills heaven and earth is not far off; there is no secret place where a man may hide himself from him. And his word, Jeremiah says, is no soft or decorative thing. Is not my word like as a fire? and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces? The word of God is not given to ornament our mornings. It is given to do work upon us. It burns. It breaks.
Then comes our Lord, at the very close of the Sermon on the Mount, and he sets two gates before us, and two houses. Enter ye in at the strait gate. The wide road is easy and crowded and ends in destruction; the narrow way is hard and little-travelled and leads to life. And then the houses: two men build, and the very same storm comes against them both — the rain descends, the floods come, the winds blow and beat upon each alike. Mark that well. The wise man is nowhere promised gentler weather. What divides the house that stands from the house that falls is not the storm. It is the foundation.
And what is that foundation? Our Lord could not be plainer. Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. The wise man is the one who heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them. The foolish man hears the very same words — he is in church too, he says Lord, Lord along with the rest of us — and does not do them. The line between the two houses runs straight through the middle of the congregation. It is the old, plain difference between hearing and doing.
Here the prophet and the Lord meet, and we should not miss it. Jeremiah’s word is a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces; the Gospel’s wise man builds his house upon a rock. These are not two images at odds but one motion in two moments. The word that breaks us is the rock that holds us. To let the hammer of God’s word fall upon the hard places in us — to let it break our excuses, our self-deceptions, our comfortable saying of Lord, Lord — is the very thing that lays a foundation beneath our feet. We are not made to stand by sheltering the rock from the hammer. We are made to stand by being broken open enough to rest upon it.
The word that breaks us is the rock that holds us.
And lest we imagine this doing to be a grim business of gritted teeth, the Psalm shows us where it begins. Asaph is honest in a way we seldom dare to be: he confesses that he envied the arrogant, that his feet had well nigh slipped when he looked upon the prosperity of the wicked. He could not make the account come right — until, he says, I went into the sanctuary of God; then understood I their end. The doing of God’s will does not begin in raw willpower. It begins where Asaph’s understanding began: in drawing near. It is good for me to draw near to God. The strait gate, in the end, is not a clenched fist. It is the door of the sanctuary.
Which is the very thing we pray in this morning’s Collect: that because, through the weakness of our mortal nature, we can do no good thing without thee, God would grant us the help of his grace, that in keeping of his commandments we may please him, both in will and deed. In will and deed. The hearer made a doer — not by the strength of his own arm, but by grace, drawing near to the God who was never far off.
So this is the work of the long season now opening before us: not great feeling, not fresh revelation, but the daily, unglamorous, faithful doing of the will of God — the one foundation that holds when the rain descends and the floods come. The storm will visit every house; our Lord promises no soul an exemption. But blessed is the house, however plain, that is built upon the Rock. Draw near, then, this morning. Let the word do its good and breaking work. And build.
Like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces.
AMEN.