The Foundation of Faith

a sermon by Torin Eikler
Romans 4:13-25, Hosea 5:15-6:6

I have been thinking about foundations a lot lately.

As some of you know, Carrie and I are working on expanding the little patio on the back of the parsonage, complete with a trellis and vining plants. We are hoping to make it bigger – and hopefully more inviting – so that we can set out a table and eat there during the warmer part of the year. As is always the case with such projects, our vision of the finished project has been exciting enough to get us started. But, now that we have moved several cubic feet of dirt and laid out the new pavers to make sure that the space is about right, we are faced with the reality of how big the project really is. (I’m even wondering if we’ll get it done in time to use this year at all.)

There is so much to do before we can even set the pavers in place to stay. There is a retaining wall to build – which wouldn’t be so much except that that means digging some more to place “dead men” in order to help hold the wall up, backfilling with gravel and maybe even a drain pipe, and covering it all up with dirt and sod again. Then, we need to fill in the parts where we dug out too much and pound it down so that it’s compact enough, add gravel and leveling sand, level the whole thing out somehow, lay the paving stones in place, and level it again. It’s so much more complex than we thought it would be, and there have been several times when we have considered skipping some of the work to save time, effort, and money. Fortunately, our neighbor – who is a contractor - has popped around a few times and reminded me that it’s important to do it right so that the whole thing doesn’t fall apart with the first year of hard rains.

It is advice that I have taken grudgingly, but I was reminded of how important it is to get the foundation right as I listened to the news coverage about the earthquake in China on NPR. In one of the provinces, several schools collapsed during the quake, killing most of the children inside. And, as reporters talked with the parents and others in those towns, it came to light that the builders cut corners in the construction process. On Thursday, local authorities admitted that they had done just that in an attempt to save money and that if the foundations had been built up to the standards, the schools would probably have withstood the shaking.


I don’t mean to compare the patio on the back of our house to the importance of safety in building schools or to make light of the devastating grief of lost lives – many of them the only children in the family. The tragedy in the lives of these communities is an all too painful reminder that a strong foundation is so very important no matter what size endeavor it supports. And, who knows … we may find Sebastian or some other child hanging on the trellis someday and give thanks for having a strong foundation supporting an unintended jungle gym.


Families, too, need to have strong foundations. As our society has discovered of late, when families are built on shaky ground they tend to fall apart when faced with the stresses of life. Heavy work loads, financial burdens, worries about security or misplaced ambition can all take us down paths that shake commitments to spouses and children in unhealthy, dangerous ways. And, it’s not just families. Friendships, working partnerships, teacher-student groups, and many other relationships are threatened when we build them on weak, incomplete underpinnings. Even, and perhaps especially, our faith is prone to such problems since faith is a short-hand term for our own relationship with the God of our salvation.

In some sense, that is what both Hosea and Paul are talking about in the texts we heard today. God’s chosen people – the children of Abraham – have always had a covenant with God – a covenant based on promises made by both sides. God promised to protect Abraham from all dangers and to make his descendants a blessing to all the nations. Abraham, trusting God, promised to worship only the Lord and to follow the command and guidance given to him. That covenant was sealed again at Mount Sinai when Moses brought the people back to the worship of God and God inscribed the Ten Commandments on tablets of stone.

Seeking to fulfill their part, the Israelites began to elaborate on those commandments and the inspired words of their prophets and priests, building a body of law to help them stay faithful. And yet, there was something missing. In a matter of a few generations – perhaps a hundred years – the people began to fall away from the covenant. They worshiped other gods, and they grew deaf to the voice of God giving guidance. They even twisted the laws they had made to serve their own purposes. As Hosea put it, their faith had become “like a morning cloud, like the dew that goes away early.” Despite the repeated calls of the prophets, the people of God continued to struggle to hold their faith community together, repenting at each call and adding to the religious laws in order to hold more tightly to the letter of the covenant.


During my first year in BVS, I visited Charleston, South Carolina a few times with groups who had come to work on the church we were rebuilding. During one of the tours we took, I learned about an interesting and ingenious building technique that came into use after the Civil War. The cannon fire and general mayhem of battle as well as the fires that swept the city damaged many of the grand old houses with already weakened foundations – damaged but didn’t destroy. Some time later, a small earthquake shook the area and some of those houses gave way. Others, seemed on the point of collapse, but nobody had the money to rebuild them from the ground up. So, one man hit on an inexpensive idea for holding them together. Extending long, iron rods with threads all along their length through the outer walls, people connected large iron plates on opposite sides of the house to hold them together. The result was basically the same, in concept, as a bolt and nut. And, when necessary, residents could tighten the whole set up by turning the rods.

The whole process worked quite well as the temporary fix it was meant to be. In fact, so many of the respectable home-owners used this technique that it became fashionable to hand decorative iron plates on the walls even when houses were structurally sound. Unfortunately, it did nothing to address the underlying problems. And, as people began to forget that there were deeper issues, their homes became dangerously stressed. Eventually some actually fell down due to overzealous tightening of the rods which pulled the walls into the house.

In a similar way, the body of law that grew up during Israel’s history served to hold together the religious community. Yet, prophets continued to call the people to look deeper than the law and renew the foundations of the covenant. To seek, as Hosea puts it, the knowledge of God and to offer steadfast love instead of burnt offerings. In other words, to cling to the one God in trust and to live according to the covenant of God’s love instead of man’s laws.

Paul, too, has the same message. It is not, even as Jesus taught, that the law is bad or wrong, but it is incomplete in and of itself. It is only when it is viewed through the promise of the covenant that it can be fully understood. And, only as it is lived by one rooted in the steadfast love and trust of God and the love of others that it is fulfilled, for these are the two great commandments from which all the law grows.

Love and trust… those are the rocks on which we are to found our faith. When we heed the call of the Spirit spoken through the prophets, the evangelists, and Christ himself, we build lives of faith on this true foundation. And though the rain and the wind beat against us or the ground around us shakes, our faith will keep us whole; protecting and sustaining us.


There it is. It sounds good. It’s true. And, perhaps I should end the sermon with that. Yet, I keep wondering…. “What does that mean?” It’s easy for us to make simple-sounding statements like that about faith. It’s much harder to get into the messy business of trying to figure out what they mean in the day to day of our lives.

What does it mean to build our lives and our faith on steadfast love and trust?

As much as I wish I could answer that question, I don’t think I can. It’s appealing – to me at least – to fall back on the guidance of the church … to trust the judgment of all those who have gone before me and make their teachings a new body of law to guide my life. Those rules, after all, have grown out of the teachings of Christ and the covenant fulfilled by his life, death, and resurrection. Yet, Paul warns against setting up a new law and reminds us that faith, not the law – any law – is what matters. Faith like that of Abraham. Faith that seeks God’s will and follows. Faith built on the foundation of grace offered by the wandering messiah rather than a rooted, cracked tradition of human invention.


I still don’t know what that means for us, but it reminds me of a Huron creation legend. It tells the story of how the world was created between the waters and the sky by dirt piled on the back of Big Turtle who was the only creature broad and strong and steadfast enough to hold it all. The story’s purpose, of course, is to explain the nature of the world as the Huron people knew it and to instill a sense of respect for the life and nature of all creatures. But when I first heard it, I wondered what things really look like from the back of a turtle, seeing what it sees and traveling where it swims. It would be a whole different perspective from my own, and I wonder if that’s the key.

If we build our own lives on faith in God – on the broad shoulders of the Christ who holds us all, send the roots of our spirit and soul into the heart of God, and keep our eyes and ears open, perhaps our perspective will shift. Perhaps we will travel, like Abraham, where God takes us instead of where our own feet wander. Perhaps our hearts will find the love of Christ welling up into us, and we will see what Christ sees as we turn to look where he looks. Perhaps if we trust enough to build on that foundation, we will find the way to live in the covenant fulfilled as we reach out our hands to offer healing and compassion as Christ reaches out – bringing hope and peace as Christ guides our living.

It’s not as easy and straight-forward as a set of rules for living, but the ministry of the one we follow wasn’t neat and tidy. And, if we seek to live in the promise of the covenant as children of God, we must build on the firm foundation offered by that One and follow in the ways he leads. Only then can we become the people God intends – the fulfillment of God’s promise, a blessing to all the nations.