Sermons for the Month
The Pisa Makers
DATE: March 11, 2001
SERVICE: Lent II
TEXT: Luke 13:31-35“To all of you Saints here this morning, grace and peace to you from God our Father, from His Son, Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit. AMEN
True story. "There's a solid ledge under this dry ground," the soil engineer must have said to the developer. He was planning to put a fine home on the cliff's edge over the salt water along the coast of Maine. The contractor came with his backhoe in tow and dug until he hit solid ledge. The cement truck followed, then came carpenters who built, and then the home was sold. Twenty years later, after the sea had done its secret work, a rain from an offshore hurricane came to wash away the remaining silt and sand from beneath the so-called solid ledge, and half the home tumbled down into a huge and sudden hole where once there was solid ledge. "An act of God" was what the insurance companies called it. "The act of an unthinking fool" was a more accurate description. One can imagine the homeowner wringing his hands at the sight of his house sinking to the bottom of the bay. If you can, then you can appreciate how the Lutheran Outdoor Ministries of Ohio has been feeling over the years as much of Camp Luther on the bluffs overlooking Lake Erie gradually washed into the lake. But can you imagine Jesus weeping, as he sat on a bluff above Jerusalem, over the sight of a city that had ignored the prophets to its peril? There is a small chapel there called the Dominus Flevit. On the altar reads a portion of our scripture text for this morning, the lament of Jesus, "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, you' re your temple will be deserted" (13:34). Watching a house, or a city, or a life, collapse is an emotional experience. Take the Italian engineers trying to save the Leaning Tower of Pisa, for example. The work on the tower began August 9, 1173. The builders, contractors, engineers and architects didn't mean to make it lean. The tower was designed perpendicular and was straightforwardly expected to point plumb starward. But tilting became a problem. A sudden and immediate problem. So for centuries, the 177-foot-tall Tower of Pisa has looked like it is about to fall over. The combined weight of all the marble stones built into Pisa's pride pressed bottomward onto and into the soft, silted soils, squeezing water from clay underneath, bulging into the dense sand beneath. This tower teetered on the extreme edge of disaster for 800 years. All 32 million pounds of marble constantly verged on collapse. Its 5.3 degree tilt is startling, even shocking - a full 15 feet out of plumb. Finally, computer models proved that the tower was going to fall - sooner, rather than later - and a committee of engineers and scientists set about to right the tilting tourist trap. Thanks to some hi-tech engineering, the current Pisa makers, the Leaning Tower is now moving, centimeter by centimeter, in the right direction. Engineers are removing bits of clay from beneath the tower through long, thin pipes, at about a shovelful or two a day. By removing these small amounts from the right places, the tower is tilting back toward stability. It's not a perfect nor a permanent fix, but sometimes that's the best that can be done with ancient buildings - or even a living church. Sometimes all that can be done to right a sinking church is to remove some bits of bad soil, or trouble-making souls, to make things level and plumb once again. Sometimes the best one can do to stop a sinking soul built on unstable sand is to lend a hand, give a kind word or demonstrate a faithful heart. Engineers believe that by this summer they will have been able to bring it back by 20 inches, which is enough to save the structure for several centuries. Of course, it will still lean a little - preserving the tourist trade for tilting tower towns. This is by design. The Pisa makers do not ever intend to bring the tower into a perfectly upright position! And therein lies a lesson for both the church and the Christian. God does not expect that any of us will reach moral perfection. Jesus didn't expect the house of Jerusalem would be fully compliant with the laws of God. He did expect Jerusalem to listen to the prophets. God does expect us to be faithful and obedient. But perpendicular? No. We're fallen, tilting creatures, redeemed by the grace of God. The tilt has been arrested, and not only arrested, readjusted: we're now in closer alignment with God's purpose for our lives. Of course, the argument can be made: Didn't Jesus say, "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Matthew 5:48)? Yes. The word perfect, however, is an interesting one. It's the same root word that is elsewhere translated "mature" (Hebrews 5:14). There's a vast difference between seeking maturity and striving for perfection! Jesus looked upon Jerusalem and said, "Your house is left to you, desolate" (Matthew 23:38). You've got a mess on your hands, and you rejected all attempts to straighten out. Now, see what you've done. We, too, need to stop our spiritual house from tilting until it collapses. Because, if we ignore the warnings, it will fall as surely as the Tower of Pisa would've fallen and as, indeed, the house of Jerusalem did fall. Perhaps it's time to do a soil and soul analysis. Is our house built on sand? Silt? Gravel? Clay? Ledge? Rock? Or some collection, cluster or conglomeration of these? Will your faith stand the rising waters in life's tempest? Will trouble or temptation undermine your soul's foundation? Is your life built on The Rock of Ages? Bruce Thielemann tells the story of a church elder who showed what it means to follow Jesus. A terrible ice storm had hit Pittsburgh, making travel almost impossible. At the height of the storm, a church family called their pastor about an emergency. Their little boy had leukemia and he had taken a turn for the worst. The hospital said to bring the boy in, but they could not send an ambulance, and the family did not own a car. The pastor's car was in the shop, so he called a church elder. The elder immediately got in his car and began the treacherous journey. The brakes in his car were nearly useless. It was so slick that he could not stop for stop signs or stop lights. He had three minor accidents on the way to the family's house. When he reached their home, the parents brought out the little boy wrapped in a blanket. His mother got in the front seat and held her son, and the father got in the back. Ever so slowly they drove to the hospital. Writes Thielemann: They came to the bottom of a hill and they managed to skid to a stop, he tried to decide whether he should try to make the grade on the other side, or whether he should go to the right and down the valley to the hospital. And as he was thinking about this, he chanced to look to the right and he saw the face of the little boy. The youngster's face was flushed, and his eyes wide with fever and with fear. To comfort the child, he reached over and tousled his hair. Then it was then that the little boy said to him, "Mister, are you Jesus?" Do you know in that moment he could have said yes. For him to live was Jesus Christ." This is a call to recover your spiritual center, to recognize that without God as the center of your lives, everything else becomes meaningless. Perhaps this is what Albert Camus, the French existentialist and author of The Plague and other works, discovered before he died, when he approached Howard Mumma, the pastor of the American Church in Paris. "I am searching for something I do not have, something I'm not sure I can define," he said. To correct the Pisa tilt, three important processes were inaugurated: extraction, replacement and restraints. The bad soil needed to be extracted, a solid foundation needed to replace the bad soil, and steel cables need to hug the structure assuring it would tilt no further. The spiritual link should not be hard to spot. We need to rebuild our faith foundation and let the Word of God hold us unerringly from slipping into spiritual depravity. If we don't, listen carefully. You might hear Jesus weeping over you. AMEN