Thursday, December 1, 2011

Matthew 7:21, 24-27

This too shall pass.

There is a song in an old play that they did here last year that I can't seem to remember all of - but it's about a king who turned to his wise men and asked them to find him a song that touched the highest string of joy but also spoke of the greatest despair. While they were theorizing, either an old man or a little boy in the back started to speak/sing:

This too shall pass.

Whether you're high or low.

No matter where we belong

Some day we'll all be gone,

So you should always know:

This too shall pass.

It's a great song they way they do it, and that's what I thought of when I read today's (I know, I know, yesterday's) reading. Because the winds and the flood will come. That we know. Someday, all of this will pass away. It will wipe away the mansion and the shack indiscriminately. The things of this world were not made to last forever.

Actually, increasingly less so are we making things to last, but that's another topic.

So building a house on rock is building a house on permanent things - on God and heaven. On eternal foundation - finding our joy there, our despair there, our work there, our lives there. Putting ourselves, our house, there. Because the rest shall pass away. However you truss it up, whatever you build because you think it will protect you - this too shall pass.

It was made to pass.

We weren't. Our souls are eternal and we are promised someday our bodies will be remade to be. So we should place all the important things about ourselves on something else that is eternal - God.

And although, again, that's a good, neat place to end, I thought of one more thing as I was writing. Science fiction and magic stories have a favorite theme these days, it seems: how much it sucks to be an immortal, a permanent thing, trapped in an impermanent world. To be a thing which does not pass when everything around us does.

Because there are some truths we always know, deep down in our bones, whatever we believe. That's actually one of the things that make certain sci fi or magic stories so beautiful - their attempts to make words for the truths they still know, in their souls. All the things we people of faith are blessed to have words for.

We were born with the knowledge of two contradictory truths: we are dust and unto dust we shall return; and, we are eternal beings. You can break your heart infinity times building a little life on the sand, because you will survive infinity floods in one form or another. What so few sci fi and magic stories can't do is provide a satisfactory answer (usually you find a way to die after all, but that doesn't really solve the contradiction). I haven't found any yet, anyway.

We people of faith are blessed to be told the answer. But also - at the beginning of this gospel we are told that we must not just build a house to retreat to when the flood comes. We must make our lives on the stone, we must build our lives completely in God. And, well, I know people who do that without calling Him by name. So I also take from this: actions louder than words.