Building on the Foundation of Faith

In this insightful sermon, Sub Dn. Timothy Grace explores the essential teachings of St. Paul about preparing for the coming kingdom. He delves into the epistle's call to build wisely on the foundation of Christ and emphasizes personal holiness as a key contribution to the church's communal faith. Through biblical examples and spiritual wisdom, Timothy Grace invites listeners to self-reflection and growth in anticipation of judgment day.

Transcript

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today's epistle reading is about readying ourselves for the coming kingdom, about our preparation for that great and glorious day of the full revelation of Christ and the judgment that comes along with his second coming. It's an event that we prepare for with anticipation, but also with awe and with care that we may be ready.

Today I'd like to explore what this text says about that and how the gospel text relates to it too. St. Paul makes clear that we are all building on the same foundation, which is Christ. And he says also to us to take care how we build, to watch how we build on the foundation which we have received.

St. Paul has just been speaking about how the Corinthian church has suffered from people's envy and strife, how some people have allied themselves to one or another leader, and some have said I belong to Apollos and some have said I belong to Paul, and there is this kind of factionalizing element in the church. And St. Paul wants to put an end to all of that and to any cult of personality. And he says, "No, Christ is the foundation and the rest of us are mere workers."

So there's a sense to which this is a collective endeavor. We are all contributing to the body of Christ, which is the church, the community of faith. And we ask ourselves on this morning, are we adding valuable things to this foundation or are we adding worthless things? What are we doing with the foundation of orthodoxy that we have received? Are we learning about it? Are we living it out? Are we practicing it in a faithful manner? What are you adding to the communal building of the church? Positive things or selfish things, heavenly things or earthly things? Do you come to the church community with a humble, God-pleasing attitude or a sinful and egotistical one?

And what about the little church of the home? What are you adding to that building, metaphorically speaking? A good attitude, helpfulness, forgiveness, kindness, or are you adding to the building of your home? Resentment, bitterness, irritability, anger, selfishness, and pride. The virtuous things are like the gold and the silver and the precious stones. And the sinful things are like the wood, the hay, the straw that will get burnt up.

Now Paul's using very interesting language here. He says that we are God's fellow workers, but he also says that we are God's building. So we're building the building, but we also are itself the building too, as in our very selves. In fact, a few chapters later, St. Paul is going to tell the Corinthians, do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit?

So individually, our bodies are contributing to this body of the church, and it's all kind of fairly complex and mysterious. But what it points out to us is what we do and how we live, even in the most private of our private thoughts, is us either building with costly and worthy materials or is us building with worthless ones. And it shows that the best way that we can add beauty and adornment to the church is not through things that we do external to ourselves but who we actually are. The personal holiness that we cultivate because St. Paul says that the end will reveal it.

And here we see something of the orthodox understanding of the personal judgment. In our understanding, this will be an unveiling of what is already there. It's not so much God arbitrarily sending us to one place or another, just a revelation of what we already carry within us. And if your life has been built with worthy materials or unworthy, that is already a reality that will get unveiled.

Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol highlights this, I think, very clearly, where we have the character of Scrooge, and everyone knows him, caught up in his selfish life. His friend Jacob Marley, a ghost, comes to visit him. And Jacob Marley has, just like Scrooge, lived a life of total selfishness and greed. And he's wearing this chain. And he says this: "I wear the chain I forged in life. I made it link by link and yard by yard. I girded it on of my own free will and of my own free will I wore it."

And later he tells Scrooge, "Would you know the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was as heavy and as long as this seven Christmas Eve ago." So Scrooge, in his selfishness, is already carrying within himself the judgment that will get unveiled later on. And after death, that is merely a revelation of that reality because in some way in this life, we are already touching eternity, right? We are already experiencing a taste of our eternal destiny.

In fact, St. Gregory of Sinai writes that passion-embroiled states are foretastes of hell's torments, just as the activity of the virtues is a foretaste of the kingdom of heaven. Think of that good feeling that you get when you act with love towards someone or with humility, or you've made up after a fight, or you act with self-control turning away from sin and choosing Christ's commandments. That good feeling is a small taste of the kingdom of heaven. Now think also of that feeling of repulsion and remorse and anguish that you feel after you have sinned and you realize what you've done. What St. Gregory is telling us is that it is a small taste of exactly what it feels like to be in hell.

In a small way, we already live in the judgment of our lives. And this can actually be a blessing if we pay attention to it. You know, as an English teacher, I see a pattern amongst the best students that I've had over my years, and that's this: they ask for and complete a number of practice pieces of writing before an actual assessment task, right? Practice essays before the real one. And the keener and the more intense their desire to excel, the more of these they want to be subjected to, right? And they don't want me to be polite about it. They want me to tell them point blank, right? With as blunt language as possible: This is a terrible sentence. This is a poor example. This is a bad way to start your essay. This is a clumsy use of language. They want to be told point blank. Why? So that they can actually change and so that when the real one comes along, they are as ready as possible.

And you know, if we're wise, I think life for us can be a similar thing because we're constantly being tested and tried. And it's like God is offering us the blessed opportunity to learn from the practice run, right? To kind of have a go, learn again. Repent. Change your ways. Why? Because the day is coming as St. Paul tells us.

And we come to the gospel story then where we see St. Peter, who's just experienced his own kind of judgment, a practice test of his level of faith in stepping onto the water. The true content of his heart is shown. Now, what's there is probably more faith than what the rest of us would have, right? Certainly the rest of the disciples who didn't step out of the boat like he did. But he does get a reality check and he is able to learn what he really is. And this is the feedback that Jesus the teacher gives to him: "Oh man of little faith." That's the feedback. "Oh man of little faith."

Now we know from St. Peter's life that he's not going to stay there, right? And by the time we read the book of Acts, we see that he is actually a man of great faith. He learns, he grows, right? And after the day of Pentecost, receiving the Holy Spirit, he is a great exemplar of great faith, right? And for us, each moment of our lives and especially difficulties can be moments where we see what little faith we have, what little strength, what little courage, what little trust in God, what little purity of heart that we might learn the only lesson really that we need to learn, and that is humility.

Because once we kind of get that in our mindsets how little we have of anything, that God can actually work with us from that place of truth, right from that place of the reality of our spiritual situation, from the reality of having our eyes open to our condition, then God can come in and change us. And you know it's like God is constantly putting these things to us.

In Richard Linklater's film Waking Life, some characters are talking about time, and one says that there is actually no time. There's only one single instant. And that instant is right now. And that instant is in fact eternity. And in this instant, God is posing a question to all humans. And he's saying, "Do you want to be in heaven?" And all of humanity is basically saying, "No, thank you. Not just yet." And so time is actually just us constantly saying no to God's invitation. Well, how about this? How about we say yes?

Here are some things that we can do. We can pray the dangerous prayer, "God, please show me my sins," and for God to actually show us little by little and with his gentleness our blind spots and our weaknesses that we might have a true and not a distorted understanding of where we're really at. Once we see them, we can come to confession and get ourselves right before God because if we don't confess it now, it will come out later. St. Paul tells us the fire will test what sort of work we have done. It will come out sooner or later. And there's this sense that the church fathers tell us if you condemn yourself beforehand, you avoid the condemnation later on.

Another thing that we can do is we can accept the evils that befall us. And here I want to share a quick story from the life of St. John. And he writes this story to his friend St. Olympia, a deaconess of Constantinople, who suffered from despondency and despair. As he was getting exiled to Armenia because he had many enemies, he tells this story of something that he experienced. And he says that he was on this journey on his exile, and he was extremely sick with a fever, and he was so sick that he needed to be carried on a stretcher.

And one night he was awoken in the middle of the night because there were some barbarians around who were attacking. And not only that, but there was a group of rebellious, violent monks that had it in for St. John because he had a number of enemies that also were hunting him out, trying to find him. So barbarians on the one hand, hostile monks on the other, he has to suddenly leave. And he tells them being so sick that he can't even walk. So here he is carried on a stretcher on a donkey. He's going through this rugged mountain path in the darkness, and he's sick. He's almost falling off, and it's kind of something out of Mission Impossible really.

But he says to her after that, he says this: "Does it not seem to you that these sufferings alone, even if I didn't experience any others, would have the power to loose me from my many sins and provide a grand beginning of divine favor?" Would have the power to loose me from my many sins and provide a grand beginning of divine favor. And this is a curious thing, but he knew that the suffering that he was undergoing was purifying him of hidden sins, right? Maybe ones he didn't even know about, a judgment before the judgment, as it were. He understood this is happening to me now, and this is good for me. This is cleansing me of sins I didn't even know I had. And it's like getting judged before the judgment as it were. And this is a good attitude I think we can all have through the trials, through illness, this understanding. God must be cleansing me of my hidden sins and I'm being judged before the judgment.

A final thing that we can do is that we can constantly compare ourselves to the standard of the scriptures and the lives of the saints. In the Ladder of Divine Ascent, there's a holy aesthetic who used the holy trick when the demons would tempt him that he was a really good monk and really virtuous and holy. And what he would do was he would write all the virtues on a wall in his cell: perfect love, angelic humility, pure prayer, unassailable chastity. And when he felt tempted to think pridefully of himself, he would say to himself, "Let's go to be judged." And he would go to this wall. And he would read out all those virtues there. And he would say, "Oh, monk, do you in fact have all of these virtues in reality?" And he would realize that no, he didn't have the full perfection of these virtues. And so, he would be humbled.

And I think that we can adopt a similar approach when we read the scriptures and the lives of the saints. Ask ourselves, am I really as good as I think I am? Am I really as patient? Am I really as pure of heart? When I compare myself to the standard of the saints, we actually see that we're not all that great, and we can be humbled and we can change. In conclusion, people first in 1 John 3:2, we read that when he appears, that is Christ, we shall be like him because we shall see him as he is, is what St. John tells us. And if we have conformed our life to Christ's, that seeing him will be a blissful experience. But if we have not, if we have built the edifice of our home and of our place in the church with worthless things, it will be a painful experience.

God gives us plenty of chances to see where we're at in this life and to change, to submit to the judgment before the judgment, to have a healthy sense of self-condemnation and learn humility. So let's face ourselves with honesty and cry out to God for his grace to change us so that we might take care in the building of the church and the temple of our lives, that it may be something worthy in that great and last day. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.