Sermon: “Of Rocks and Grace”
A Sermon Delivered
by
The Rev. John D. Painter
at
Centenary United Methodist Church
Metuchen, New Jersey
September 25, 2005
Texts: Psalm 78:1-4, 12-16, Philippians 2:1-13
In February 2005, the engineers of the California state transportation agency (Caltrans) had a serious problem. A mountainous 30-foot boulder teetered above the Pacific Coast Highway posing a serious risk to life and limb, and conventional methods of disposing of this boulder were probably not going to work.
Granted, it would have been convenient if they could’ve applied the approach of the an-cient Rabbi of Nazareth: If you had faith the size of a tiny pebble, you could say to this gigantic boulder, “move from here to there,” and it would move.
But that particular method not being available to the Caltrans engineers, they considered a more traditional approach for disposing of huge rocks like this: simply blast it to smithereens.
The problem is that such a blast generates a lot of flyrock: sporadically deadly and often dangerous and destructive rock projectiles that are created when an explosive blast occurs. There are some ways of controlling flyrock, but none seemed practical for the stone at hand.
There are some other methods used to destroy boulders, and each was probably consid-ered for this one—including bursts of electricity from high-voltage capacitors, slugs of water shot at high speed, or steel pistons rammed in water-filled holes.
In the end, the engineers used a super-sized jackhammer called a Ho-Ram, which is es-sentially a tractor-mounted jackhammer. Bit by bit they chipped it apart.
We all have rocks in our lives. Some are huge. Some are small. They may be at our feet as stumbling stones blocking our faith walk, over which we trip; or strung around our necks as millstones threatening to sink us down; or lurking in our hearts, shielding us from love, or pain, or hope, or joy; or, perhaps, even rocks inside our heads making us plain hardheaded toward God.
Shakespeare’s Othello says, “My heart is turned to stone: I strike it, and it hurts my hand.’’ The rocks of our lives hurt us. If we even notice our stumbling stones, our rocks of heart or head, our weights about our necks, our sins, our blindness, our denials, bigotries, hatreds, an-gers, prides, betrayals and jealousies that we carry, or trip over, hurting ourselves, we still may not turn to God for healing. Even when and if we notice the pain we cause others with the stones of our own making, even then we may not turn to God for healing.
Instead, lacking expertise, we still may choose to do the demolition alone, by ourselves. We tend to deal with things in our own way, and load up the stones with dynamite whenever we can, to explode these suckers, sending flyrock debris scattering every which way, injuring any-one who happens to be nearby.
So how do we deal with the boulders that hover over our lives, or squat stubbornly across the road, impeding our progress? Who can deal with this?
God can. God will. And there won’t be any flyrock. God doesn’t even need a Ho-Ram super-jackhammer, dynamite, high-voltage electricity, steel pistons or high-speed water slugs to crack apart the rocks in our lives.
In Psalm 78, the psalmist praises God, saying, “[God] splits rocks open in the wilder-ness…[God] made streams come out of the rock.” God did so in the desert. God can do so with us.
The psalm revisits a critical chapter in the lives of the Israelites. The writer provides in this song a listing of the awesome things God did for the people. The author, perhaps a teacher or a priest, announces his intention at the beginning: “Give ear, O my people, to my teaching; in-cline your ears to the words of my mouth” (Psalm 78:1). Then the psalmist begins to remind his readers or listeners of God’s past activity in their lives:
• Their enemies, with superior weapons, had been turned away (Verse 9).
• God worked miracles in the land of Egypt (Verse 12).
• God parted the sea to allow them to pass through safely (Verse 13).
• By day God led them through a daunting wilderness with a cloud, and at night by a pil-lar of fire (Verse 14).
And if that weren’t enough, God “split rocks open in the wilderness, and gave them drink abundantly as from the deep. [God] made streams come out of the rock, and caused waters to flow down like rivers” (Psalm 78:15-16).
The reason the psalmist recounts these interventions is so that “they should set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God, but keep [God’s] commandments” (Psalm 78:7).
You would think that if you have a God who is acting on your behalf in ways described in this psalm, having hope would not be a big problem. Your enemies are turned away. You’re looking at miracles before your very eyes. The waters of destruction are rolled back, providing a way of escape, and rocks, rather than being obstacles, are split open to provide the waters of sal-vation.
How hard can it be to believe in a God who does all that? How hard can it be to have hope when you have a God acting and intervening on your behalf like this?
Yet, the psalmist sadly notes: “Yet they sinned still more against [God], rebelling against the Most High in the desert” (Psalm 78:17).
No, I’m afraid that like our ancestors in the faith, we often prefer to deal with these rocks in our own way. We drill a hole, drop in a stick of TNT, and blast away with no thought about the flyrock risk. No wonder that this approach results in all sorts of injury to ourselves and those around us!
Better to confess our sins, approach God in humility, and understand that the God of cloud and fire, of parted waters and miracles, is perfectly able to deal with rocks in our lives that need removing.
So how does God take care of these rocks?
In the end, God deals with each of us in different ways. God may create a detour around the rock for one, provide a path in the wilderness that we’ve not yet seen for another, or show us some toeholds and handholds to enable us to climb over the rock. Like the Caltrans engineers, God may simply chip away at these obstacles until they can be removed and do so without the risk of flyrock. And in some cases, God simply takes it away. An old story reminds us of God’s gracious power and love for us.
A little boy was playing in his sandbox with his box of cars and trucks, his plastic pail and a shiny, red plastic shovel.
In the process of creating roads and tunnels in the soft sand, he discovered a large rock in the middle of the sandbox. The boy dug around the rock, managing to dislodge it from the dirt. With no little bit of struggle, he pushed and nudged the rock across the sandbox by using his feet (he was a very small boy and the rock was large).
When the boy got the rock to the edge of the sandbox, he found that he couldn’t roll it up and over the little wall. Determined, the little boy shoved, pushed and pried, but every time he thought he had made some progress, the rock tipped and then fell back into the sandbox. The lit-tle boy struggled, pushed, shoved—but his only reward was to have the rock roll back, smashing his fingers. Finally he burst into tears of frustration.
All this time the boy’s father watched from the window as the drama unfolded. At the moment the tears fell, a large shadow fell across the boy and the sandbox. It was the boy’s father. Gently but firmly he said, “Son, why didn’t you use all the strength that you had available?
Defeated, the boy sobbed, “But I did, Daddy, I used all the strength that I had!”
“No, son,” corrected the father kindly. “You didn’t use all the strength you had. You didn’t ask me.” With that the father reached down, picked up the rock, and removed it from the sandbox.
Some of the rocks in our lives are huge, like that 30-foot, twelve-hundred-ton “pebble” hovering over the Pacific Coast Highway. Some are small—hardly bigger than a grain of sand.—but they sometimes can be the hardest stones of all to deal with. A small pebble in our shoe can bring our walk to a halt pretty quickly, and if left in place, can result in blisters and bleeding.
When we invite God to be present in our lives. When we are faithful in prayer and medi-tation upon God’s Word. When we trust implicitly in God’s purposes, God’s methods and God’s timing. When we allow God’s grace to permeate our souls, our beings, every fiber of our exis-tence. As surely as God rolled away the boulder that sealed a tomb and raised Jesus Christ to life, our God is able to remove the rocks from our lives, and lead us toward the fountains of living and life-sustaining water from which we’re invited to drink freely.
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PRAYER
Lord, who has mercy upon all, take away from us our sins and mercifully kindle in us the fire of the Holy Spirit. Take away from us the heart of stone and give us a heart of flesh, a heart to love and adore you, a heart to delight in you, and to follow and to enjoy you, for Christ’s sake. Amen.
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