“Unless the Lord Builds the House”

Psalm 127:1, Hebrews 9:1, 6-7, 23-28

Hebrews 9:1, 6-7, 23-28

^9:1 Now even the first covenant had regulations for worship and an earthly sanctuary.

⁶ Such preparations having been made, the priests go continually into the first tent to carry out their ritual duties; ⁷but only the high priest goes into the second, and he but once a year, and not without taking the blood that he offers for himself and for the sins committed unintentionally by the people.

²³ Thus it was necessary for the sketches of the heavenly things to be purified with these rites, but the heavenly things themselves need better sacrifices than these. ²⁴For Christ did not enter a sanctuary made by human hands, a mere copy of the true one, but he entered into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. ²⁵Nor was it to offer himself again and again, as the high priest enters the Holy Place year after year with blood that is not his own; ²⁶for then he would have had to suffer again and again since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the age to remove sin by the sacrifice of himself. ²⁷And just as it is appointed for mortals to die once, and after that the judgment, ²⁸so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin, but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.

Psalm 127:1

¹ Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.

Unless the Lord guards the city, the guard keeps watch in vain.

The Sermon

If I were to ask you to take a long look around your life and your world, and tell me what’s there, what do you think you would have found there?

What’s real? Of what does life consist?

Your favorite room, the people you rely on seeing every day, your school or home or workplace? When you look around, what do your eyes and ears tell you about?

Traffic, sunsets, pain, joy, books, babies, love, loss, anxieties, Hot Doughnuts Now, talking heads, Wal-Marts, nursing homes with empty parking lots…

What’s out there? What is reality?

And how do you know what’s real? “Well, I saw it. I know it’s real because that’s what I see.”

But what if all of these realities were just a sketch of something much greater, something as timeless as infinity and as profound as the way you feel when you are most deeply glad?

The man with a pen in his hand sat in front of a tablet, hunched over a blank sheet of parchment. He was highly intelligent and well educated, a Jew who was comfortable in the Greek society around him and who knew both cultures inside and out. He was better spoken than the Apostle Paul—or most other prominent Christians, for that matter.

Most of the writing in the first few years of the Church consists of letters written between apostles and churches—sometimes in love, sometimes in anger, always for the purpose of teaching one another what it meant to be the Church. But this writer wanted to write something for no one in particular but everyone in general, and so, instead of writing a personal letter, he had in mind something more like a sermon.

The people of God, he wanted to say, and the people in the street, were at risk of thinking they already had this God business all figured out, and at even greater risk of taking it all for granted.

Because we’ve got our society worked out, and we’ve got our world worked out, and we’ve even got our worship traditions down pat; we can do this all by ourselves. We know what’s real, and what’s real is the everyday business of living our human lives—you learn how to eat, go to school, go to work, make a home for yourself, pay your bills, take care of business, have some leisure where you can get it, and then you’re done.

That’s life. That’s reality.

Or so they thought.

And so the man dipped his pen in the ink and leaned over the parchment.

He needed to tell the people that we’ve got it backwards: we look around at our world and, because it’s what we see and hear and feel and experience, we think this is as real as it gets.

And sometimes, some of us, in some ways, may think about God, but a lot of times when we mention things like heaven, you can almost see the quote marks floating like cherubim and seraphim above the word: “Heaven.” Sometimes we talk about “eternal things,” and about how we “pray” to “The Deity.” Like those things are cute to think about and even mention from time to time, but they’re not really what’s real.

But, he wanted to say, it’s these everyday concerns, even these things we do in worship, that ought to be in quote marks. Just as “reality TV” is a strange and largely artificial version of reality, the life we see all around us is only a sketch of what is true life, the eternal and true life made by God.

And so, he wrote: There was a man born in Bethlehem, and his name was Jesus. He was the Son of God. He lived a pure life from start to finish, and in the things he did and the words he spoke, he showed us that God is real, and God is love, and God is the source of life, and God is in love with life, and God is in love with your life.

This made Jesus extremely popular among the people, and extremely despised by those in power who relied on the people to focus more on being selfish and hateful toward each other.

And Jesus wouldn’t give those in power what they wanted, which was for him to just pat them on the back and say, “Whatever you say goes, Chief; I’ll just keep my mouth shut.”

Instead, he kept healing people, even the ones they considered the “wrong” people; and he kept teaching the people to love one another, to feed those who are hungry, to look out for those who are powerless.

And those who had power said, “You can’t go doing that! You’ll mess up the whole system!”

And they wanted to have Jesus killed. And he knew that’s what they were going to do. But he did not stop teaching and healing and feeding people, because even though people already had a Temple, and even though they worshiped God, they never were able to stop themselves from being selfish, and unkind, and forgetful about what God had always taught them about how they should live with each other.

And all they could really do was try to make up for the bad things they did one thing at a time, by bringing sacrifices to the priest at the Temple.

But Jesus knew we could be better than that, and if we couldn’t make the atoning sacrifice for ourselves, he would make it for us. He would give up his life, so that we could have eternal life.

Because he loved us so much, he would give up his life as the one final sacrifice for ours.

And the man with the pen in his hand wrote: “Christ did not enter a sanctuary made by human hands, a mere copy of the true one, but he entered into heaven itself, to appear in the presence of God on our behalf.

“Nor was it to offer himself again and again, as the high priest does year after year with animal sacrifices. But Jesus appeared once for all to remove sin by the sacrifice of himself.”

The writer of what is now called the letter to the Hebrews (even though it’s not a letter and wasn’t written only for the Hebrews) was convinced that what we’re about here is a mere shadow—a sketch—of the true life.

My concern is that we are so focused on the sketchy world we find ourselves in—

The one where there’s too much to do and not enough time to do it;

The world where it’s nice to do something for someone else once in a while, but mainly our lives are about accumulating as much as we can and making sure that if somebody has to go without, it won’t be us, so we won’t have to care that much;

The world where we’re too busy or preoccupied to work on handing on what’s truly important from one generation to the next, but somehow at the same time there seems to be no hindrance to kids inheriting hatred and ignorance, abuse and addictions;

My concern is that we are so focused on doing whatever we have to do to make it in this world that we start to think that this is the world that’s real, and God’s world is the one that’s not quite so real.

And even as God prepares an eternal home for us, we put a little more trust in the flimsy houses that we can build for ourselves.

And that’s a problem, because unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.

I am concerned even for those of us who are somewhat active or maybe even very active in doing “church stuff”—the things it takes to make church function: putting events together, staffing, volunteering, serving on committees, all those things that are necessary for the mission of Jesus Christ—

I am concerned that in this sketch of God’s heaven, which is what the church is, it becomes easier and easier to mistake church activity for spiritual life.

But activity is not the same as spiritual development; it is not building discipleship. It’s getting things done, but it’s not the same as spiritual formation. That comes from worship, and prayer, and taking time for deep thought. It comes from encountering scripture honestly—not in a rush to get through a lesson, but an honest encounter with the Christ who is revealed in the pages of holy scripture.

I am concerned that when we mistake activity—even good, self-sacrificial, necessary church activity—when we have mistaken church activity for real spiritual formation, then when life throws us a curveball, it’s easy for us to say, “Well I tried church; I tried God, and it obviously hasn’t really helped me.”

But that wasn’t God; that wasn’t a deep encounter with Christ. It wasn’t worship; it wasn’t heavenly. It was just a sketch. It was just some activity.

Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labor in vain—

because there is a world beyond these sketches. That is the true world, the real world, God’s world, of which, during this earthly life, we occasionally catch a glimpse—

When Pee Wee Reese puts his arm around Jackie Robinson, say,

Or when formerly mortal enemies shake hands and throw down their guns in disgust,

Or when one person says to another, “I hope you can forgive me,” and the other says, “I forgive you,”

Or when somebody does something to make someone else’s life a little less burdensome,

Or when someone finds herself so profoundly moved by an act of worship that for the first time in her life, she genuinely feels the presence of God.

Before the beginning of time, God conceived you, and in God’s time, you were born into this world—into this universe that God also created—to live a good, fulfilling, generous, kind and faithful life. God’s fingerprints are all over you. And all that you are, and all that you do, reflects the one who created you—sometimes weakly or distortedly, but sometimes brilliantly, radiating God’s truth.

If I were to ask you to take a long look around your life and your world, and tell me what’s there, what would you tell me is real?