Luke 6:43-49
No good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit; for each tree is known by its own fruit. Figs are not gathered from thorns, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush. The good person out of the good treasure of the heart produces good, and the evil person out of evil treasure produces evil; for it is out of the abundance of the heart that the mouth speaks.
Why do you call me “Lord, Lord”, and do not do what I tell you? I will show you what someone is like who comes to me, hears my words, and acts on them. That one is like a man building a house, who dug deeply and laid the foundation on rock; when a flood arose, the river burst against that house but could not shake it, because it had been well built. But the one who hears and does not act is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation. When the river burst against it, immediately it fell, and great was the ruin of that house.’
I’ve been in a reflective mood this past week. I think it was a combination of things that got me reflecting. It started with reading our passage for this morning. It continued as I watched the farmer next door to my house plow the field. My reflections continued after listening to the confirmation class read their statements of faith. Finally, I kept thinking about how all this relates to our capital campaign.
Let me start with the passage. When I read our passage for this morning, it seemed to go right to the heart of so much that plagues our world, our country, and our community. I look around and realize that so many people in our country and community live lives built on weak foundations, which leads them to produce bad fruit. I’ll get more into that idea a bit later. Our passage really drives home the point that if we are to live good lives that produce good fruit, we have to start with a good foundation. I look around our country today and wonder how good our collective foundations are, and how good the fruit we produce actually is.
This got me thinking about the farmer next door. Most of you probably don’t know where I live, but I live south of Zelienople next to a field that a farmer grows corn and, I think, oats. Last week he planted the corn, and this morning I got to see the short, green sprouts popping just above the dirt. What got me thinking as I watched him plow was how much time he spends preparing that field to produce corn and oats. He doesn’t just plow in the spring. It’s an all-year venture, and we know this personally because each time he prepares the foundation of the field, our property is permeated with the smell of manure.
All year round he comes by with a manure-spreader and spreads the manure from his dairy farm. When we first moved into our house, we were convinced that he timed his manure-spreading for when we had friends or family over ☺. Now we know that he spreads manure on one of his many fields at least once a week. He spreads it in hot weather, cold weather, dry weather, wet weather. It’s kind of a bummer when he spreads it on the snow because it changes the white blanket on the field to brown. Still, seeing it, I always imagine that spreading it on snow probably helps it get into the field better because when the snow melts it infuses the manure into the ground. The point is that the farmer prepares a foundation for his field all-year long. And he doesn’t let anything get in the way of it. The results are the fruits he yields in the corn and oats he grows. That foundation creates the conditions where healthy plants can grow and yield nourishing corn and oats. If he did little for the foundation, he would get little from the field.
How profound is that? It’s a metaphor for life, reminding us that the fruits we produce in our lives depend entirely upon the foundations we set. If we are committed to fertilizing our lives in good times and bad, up times and down, when we are busy and when we aren’t, then the fruit of our lives is good. But when we do nothing, why should it surprise us when the fruits of our lives turn bad.
I couldn’t help but apply this to our confirmation class that gave their statements of faith to the session the past two weeks. I realized that through this class we were preparing a foundation for these new adults, the confirmands, all year long. In fact, their participation in the confirmation class was a testimony to the foundations their parents had been setting throughout their lives. So many said that because their parents got them to church every Sunday, faith was a natural part of their lives. What they were saying was testimony to the importance of the battles all parents have with their children on Sunday mornings to get them to church. Every Sunday battle to get the kids to church lays a foundation for the future of their faith.
When these teens took part in the confirmation class, all 19 of them, we really pushed them to make a commitment and to make this class part of their foundation. For instance, we really pressed upon them that their commitment to the confirmation class and their faith had to be at least as important, if not more so, than their commitment to sports and school. We pushed them to let coaches and teachers know that because of their commitment to the class, they might miss some activities. The teachers also changed the class a bit to really get the teens to study the subjects in a way that asks, “How do you apply this to your lives?” We saw the fruits of the foundation set by the teachers and the parents in the statements of faith. They were incredible.
I wish I could go over each statement, but I don’t have enough time. What I can do is give you snippets. For instance, we had incredible statements articulated through songs, poems, power point presentations, and self-made dvds. We had one teen who created a shadow box that had in it his soccer uniform, a cross necklace, scripture and inspirational quotes, and pictures from his life. We had another who took a soccer ball and wrote on it his five favorite passages, and then he got the whole confirmation class to sign it. One of the most profound statements came from one teen who said, “When I started this class, I didn’t want to take it. I only joined the confirmation class because my father made me. He told me that when he went through is own confirmation class, he had an experience of God, and he wanted me to have the opportunity to have the same experience. So I took the class. And now that I’m done, I’m not joining the class because my dad is making me. I’m joining the class because I have experienced God in it, and I want to be part of this church where I can experience God.” Another confirmand was asked a question about the impact of his faith on his life. He said that it helped him last month when a group of peers pressured him to take drugs and he just walked away. There is the impact of a good foundation in terms of producing good fruit.
These statements of faith got me reflecting on our capital campaign. I began to realize that not only this capital campaign, but our two previous ones, were all about laying a foundation for the future harvest of fruits. As one person said to me recently, the sad thing about being a human church is that we never really quite get to see just how big of an impact we make on people’s lives. Our campaigns have always been about making an impact.
I’ve been here thirteen years, and I know that our efforts haven’t just been about making a difference in the present. They are about making a difference for the future. Actually, this laying of a foundation started even before I came here. In the several years prior to my coming, the church did some very unsexy, but important building improvements. They put a new roof on the sanctuary, which is actually a huge thing. They also renovated the kitchen and the fellowship hall, which had become very run down.
Despite those improvements, when I came to Calvin Presbyterian Church I almost didn’t because of the challenges it presented. During the period when I interviewed with the pastor nominating committee, I fell in love with the committee and the town, but I hadn’t actually seen the church. My interview took place in another church in the South Hills where I was teaching a class. I had a subsequent interview over lunch at one of the member’s house. When I came and saw the church for the first time, and looked at the condition it was in, I almost didn’t come. I remember driving away teary-eyed from the church and saying to my wife, “I don’t think I can go there. I’ll end up doing capital campaigns my whole time there, and I don’t want to do any capital campaigns.” You may not know this about me, but my least favorite part of ministry are these campaigns. But I also knew then, and know now, how important they are. Without them, churches can slowly decline to the point of dying.
Our first campaign was in 1998, and out of it we renovated the sanctuary, bought faith house, gave $33,000 to mission, and started an endowment fund. The sanctuary renovation was sorely needed. When I came here the sanctuary had dark maroon and badly wrinkled carpet. Instead of the extension on the left-hand side of the sanctuary where about 40 people sit on Sundays, we had an accordion door that opened into fellowship hall. When it was opened for extra seating on Christmas and Easter, it sucked the sound out of the sanctuary. The organ was in the center, and Bruce played it with his back to us, facing DeWayne, who played a small piano that was back-to-back with the organ. The lights in the sanctuary were a brownish yellow that gave the sanctuary a slightly brown tinge.
The renovations we did were both for the present and the future. We created a traditional look in our sanctuary, but did our best to put in the elements that would be present in any contemporary sanctuary, such as a sophisticated sound system, upgraded instruments, and bright lighting that could also be used for our plays. We built the Friendship Room extension onto the sanctuary that gave us more seating, but could also be closed off with sound panels, making it a much-needed meeting room. We did not have nearly as many in attendance on Sundays that we get now, and so, for the first three years after building it, those doors were almost always closed. Then, as we began to grow, we would open them more often. Now we’ve grown to the point at which they haven’t been closed in almost four or five years. Even back then we were building a foundation for the future of the church. We recognized that this church was going to have a big influence on people’s lives well into the future, and we had to have a sanctuary that accommodated it.
Our expansion and renovation in 2006 was similarly not just about the present. It was also about the future. I remember many expansion committee meetings in which the discussion were about how to do the construction in a quality way that would cause members in 2056 to say, “Wow, look at the quality of what they did back in 2006.” This future-focus was really embodied in something that was said to me by Bill Frank, chair of the expansion committee, as we were putting together plans for the offices. I looked at the specs for my office and said to Bill, “You know, all the wainscoating and woodwork are too nice for me. I don’t need anything that fancy.” Bill said, “I appreciate that, Graham, but this isn’t for you. This is for the pastor who succeeds you. We want the future pastor to like the office so much that she or he will want to come here.” That’s a future-focus, and that’s laying a foundation for the production of good fruit in the future.
Our present campaign is also about laying a foundation for the future. We are trying to eliminate debt so that we can move forward into the future debt-free, able to respond to any challenges that the future might hold. We have 22 years left on our mortgage, in which we pay approximately $80,000 per year. We can absorb that into our general budget, but it limits everything else we can do in the church. And what if a crisis hits in the future? What if something happens to me, or Bruce, or Toni, or Connie, or Steve. What if something happens in the community? That yearly mortgage payment can quickly become like a millstone, dragging down our ministry and negating the positive impact our new building has our lives and our community. This campaign is about freeing the church to respond to God’s call no matter what.
Ultimately, our campaigns, our ministry, and our mission are really about how we help people set a foundation for their lives in order to produce good fruit. And what we do is even more important today than it was fifty years ago. The culture has changed, and we have to respond to those changes. Do you know what the fastest growing religious group in this country today is? It is those who declare that they have no religious affiliation, and see themselves as either spiritual but not religious, or as agnostic or atheist. Here are the facts: fewer and fewer people are setting a spiritual foundation for their lives by making church part of that foundation. And don ‘t be fooled by those who say they are spiritual but not religious. By not being religious they are admitting that they do very little to practice their spirituality. Spirituality isn’t just about “feeling” spiritual. It’s about actively doing things that nurture spiritual maturity, such as prayer, study, reflection, service, worship, and living in community with those who also care about these things. This is what was so important about our confirmation class. To be spiritual means setting a foundation that nurtures the spirit. That’s what these teens did, and you can see it reflected in their statements of faith. It means making a commitment to God with others. It also means setting a foundation.
And here’s the fruit of that foundation. Do you know what the impact of church is on people’s lives? There have been a lot of studies in the past twenty years on church participation and its impact on life. Despite agnostics and atheists who will tell you that religion has a negative impact, they are 180ยบ wrong. Here’s what research shows. If you go to church, you tend to be healthier and happier than those who don’t. You report more marital satisfaction than those who don’t. Now, you might be tempted to say that the reason is due to the fact that healthier and happier people go to church (as if that was a bad thing), but you’d still be wrong. Lots of studies have been done to control for factors such as this. What they show is that smokers who attend church are healthier than smokers who don’t. Overweight people who attend church are healthier than those who don’t. Church attenders with heart disease live longer than those who don’t attend church. There are literally hundreds of studies out there showing all this, which National Institutes of Health researcher, Dr. David Larson, chronicled years ago. In effect, what this says is that church lays a healthy foundation even for those who aren’t particularly healthy.
Why does all this matter? It matters because I’m calling all of us to root ourselves in our passage for this morning. What kind of foundations are we setting for our lives? What kind of fruits are we producing?
Amen.
