William H. Willimon - "Christ, the Cornerstone" (July 23, 2000)

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Woman	The second reading is from	0:09
	the Gospel According to Saint Mark, the sixth chapter:	0:11
	"The apostles gathered around Jesus	0:17
	and told him all that they had done and taught.	0:20
	He said to them, 'Come away to a deserted place	0:24
	all by yourselves and rest awhile,'	0:29
	for many were coming and going	0:32
	and they had no leisure even to eat.	0:34
	And they went away in a boat	0:38
	to a deserted place by themselves.	0:40
	Now, many saw them going and recognized them	0:43
	and they hurried there on foot from all the towns	0:47
	and arrived ahead of them.	0:50
	As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd	0:53
	and he had compassion for them	0:57
	because they were like sheep without a shepard	1:00
	and he began to teach them many things."	1:03
	This is the word of the Lord.	1:07
	(congregation murmurs)	1:10
Preacher	They're having a big ruckus out in Colorado.	1:20
	The Chair of the state's school boards	1:23
	wants to put in every Colorado classroom	1:28
	the motto, In God We Trust.	1:32
	He was being interviewed by someone	1:37
	from national public radio	1:39
	who noted the controversy over this proposal.	1:41
	And the Chair of the school pushing,	1:46
	In God We Trust, said,	1:50
	"I just can't see how anyone could object to this.	1:53
	It's and inoffensive phrase.	1:56
	We have our differences religiously	2:00
	but we all can affirm God."	2:03
	and the reporter said,	2:09
	"Well, if the slogan is so offensive,	2:11
	why bother?"	2:16
	Our scripture today,	2:21
	Jesus Christ, the cornerstone.	2:24
	In him the whole structure is jointed together	2:28
	and grown into a holy temple of the Lord,	2:32
	in whom you are also built spiritually	2:35
	into a dwelling place for God.	2:39
	Would you believe it?	2:45
	They can't find the cornerstone of the US Capital.	2:47
	The Capital has a cornerstone.	2:51
	They had a big celebration in the early 1800s	2:53
	and they laid the cornerstone but over the years	2:56
	with the settling of the building and the alterations,	2:59
	they'd forgotten where the corner stone is located.	3:02
	A commission has been established	3:07
	to try to find the cornerstone.	3:09
	Now, I can show you the cornerstone of this chapel	3:13
	it is at that corner of the building outside.	3:16
	On a fall day in the early 1930s miss Doris Duke was here,	3:21
	they had a celebration and with trowel in hand	3:25
	she laid the chapel cornerstone.	3:28
	I don't know what they put	3:33
	in the chapel cornerstone when they laid it.	3:33
	Frequently, they take newspapers from the day	3:36
	and events related to the building	3:39
	and they put them in the cornerstone	3:41
	and then they're sealed.	3:43
	There is a room in this building that nobody sees	3:45
	up in the chapel tower where all the cornerstones	3:48
	from all the buildings at Trinity College	3:51
	that have since been torn down,	3:54
	all those cornerstones have been embedded	3:58
	in the walls of the chapel tower.	4:00
	A cornerstone is laid in the foundation of a building,	4:03
	it's where two wall meet.	4:08
	You build everything else on a cornerstone.	4:10
	In Ephesians, using an architectural metaphor, says,	4:14
	"Jesus is the cornerstone of the church.	4:19
	Everything else is built on top of that."	4:25
	More to the point of Ephesians,	4:30
	a cornerstone is where two walls meet	4:33
	and the writer to Ephesians, earlier,	4:36
	has talked about the walls,	4:38
	the walls that separate Jews and Gentiles	4:39
	have now been brought down and they have now	4:42
	been built in Jesus into a cornerstone,	4:45
	a new temple to God.	4:50
	Jesus is the cornerstone.	4:52
	To continue this architectural metaphor,	4:56
	this chapel, unlike a lot of neo-gothic buildings,	5:01
	is built in true gothic style.	5:04
	There's no structural steel used in this building.	5:07
	In this building, it's stone resting on top of stone.	5:10
	And high above us, here in the crossing,	5:16
	is the the capstone.	5:20
	There's a huge stone with an angel carved upon it,	5:22
	weighs over a ton, and all these soaring arches	5:25
	here in the crossing, all of them meet at that capstone.	5:29
	All the weight of the building comes upon that capstone	5:34
	and if you would remove that great capstone,	5:41
	all the of these stones would fall.	5:43
	The whole place would collapse.	5:48
	Ephesians would say, "If you remove Jesus,	5:52
	the capstone, the cornerstone of the church,	5:57
	the whole church would collapse."	6:02
	A while back, I went out to eastern North Carolina	6:07
	to speak to a gathering of clergy	6:10
	and I took along with me a Duke student	6:12
	who was thinking about going to seminary.	6:15
	And I went out there and I participated	6:17
	in a worship service.	6:20
	We had hymns and prayers and then I preached	6:21
	and then he and I came back to Durham.	6:24
	On the way back to Durham the student said to me,	6:28
	"Did you notice," I hadn't noticed.	6:31
	He said, "Did you notice that except for your sermon,	6:33
	Jesus was never mentioned	6:38
	in that entire service of worship? What is that?"	6:40
	Well, I thought about it and it was true.	6:44
	We had sung some of these contemporary hymns	6:48
	about God the creator and the sustainer,	6:51
	God the reconciler, God the embracing us	6:53
	and loving us and we had some contemporary prayers	6:58
	and Jesus was never mentioned.	7:04
	Now, why is that?	7:09
	Well, dear you see,	7:12
	if we can just keep talking about God,	7:15
	In God We Trust,	7:19
	well, then we can make God over into anything we please.	7:23
	Some feminist commentators say,	7:28
	"You know, we can't have God limited	7:31
	to some man in the first century.	7:34
	God is bigger, God is broader,	7:39
	God is more all encompassing	7:40
	and all embracing than that.	7:42
	In the 1930s in Germany,	7:46
	there were a lot of distinguished theologians who said,	7:49
	"We can't have God almighty	7:52
	limited to a Jew from Nazareth.	7:55
	Oh no, God is larger than that.	7:59
	God is the highest and the best	8:02
	and the brightest of all human aspiration."	8:04
	And the church,	8:12
	the whole house came tumbling down.	8:14
	Just about Easter, somebody handed me a copy	8:22
	of the Wall Street Journal that had an article called,	8:25
	Re-imagining God.	8:29
	In the article, "'Oh burning mountain, oh chosen son,	8:32
	oh perfect moon,' intones the Reverend Robert Brasher,	8:37
	during his Wednesday services,	8:41
	invoking earthly images of a deity	8:44
	that sound more like Greek myths	8:47
	than Christian liturgy.	8:48
	'Oh fathomless well, oh unattainable height,	8:51
	oh clearness beyond measure.'"	8:55
	Across the country the faithful are re-defining God.	8:59
	Dissatisfied with conventional images	9:02
	of an authoritarian and paternalistic deity,	9:04
	people are embracing quirky,	9:07
	individualistic conceptions of God	9:09
	to suit better their own spiritual needs.	9:12
	This Easter, rather than dwelling on the risen Christ,	9:16
	a traditional Easter sermon topic,	9:20
	the Reverend David Alison of Evanston Illinois,	9:22
	says he plans to compare God to a gardener	9:26
	in order to appease the quote,	9:30
	"growing theological diversity," unquote,	9:33
	in his small Methodist church.	9:37
	"I don't want anybody to be uncomfortable here	9:39
	or feel left out." He says.	9:42
	Seminaries of trained clergy are now dominated	9:46
	by baby boomers who came of age in the 60s	9:49
	and are less whetted to traditional orthodoxies.	9:52
	Indeed, the Reverend Doctor Peter Gomes	9:55
	at Harvard University says he has noticed	9:57
	an increased reluctance by divinity school students	10:00
	to instruct or admonish from the pulpit	10:03
	on practically any subject.	10:05
	"They've got authority problems." Gomes says.	10:08
	These gentler, almost mystical forms of theology	10:12
	found a receptive audience in today's affluent society.	10:15
	People are relatively peaceful and prosperous.	10:20
	So even as many Americans search for deeper connections	10:23
	with God, they aren't facing the kinds of crisis	10:26
	that often prompt people to seek protection	10:29
	or salvation from above.	10:31
	Instead, they are coupling together a spiritual life	10:34
	from a variety of religious influences	10:37
	along with a dash of yoga and psychotherapy	10:40
	and whatever else makes sense to them.	10:43
	Quote, "People seek out new Gods	10:46
	the way they seek out new products in the marketplace."	10:49
	says Randall Styers, assistant professor	10:52
	at Union Theological Seminary in New York.	10:54
	"This has got to be the ultimate form of individualism."	10:57
	This move, this move,	11:05
	we wanna keep God large and abstract and vague.	11:09
	This move, fashionable in many quarters of the church	11:14
	to down play the second person of trinity, God the son,	11:19
	in favor of some more kind of large,	11:24
	all embracing focus first person of the trinity,	11:26
	God the father, God the creator.	11:30
	I'm a afraid it's just one more effort	11:34
	to make God over into what we like.	11:38
	As someone has said,	11:42
	"God created us in his image	11:45
	and we human beings have been attempting	11:49
	to return the compliment ever since."	11:52
	Making Gods into images of ourselves.	11:56
	And all might be well but then comes along Jesus.	12:01
	Jesus, with his nasty little particularities	12:06
	and his annoying specificity.	12:09
	Jesus who is not as pliable and mailable	12:14
	as we might like him to be.	12:17
	Here in on campus often someone says,	12:21
	"Well, look, I am a Buddhist, and you're a Christian,	12:23
	she's a Jew but really that doesn't matter,	12:27
	the main thing is we all believe in God, right?"	12:29
	Wrong!	12:33
	Christians are those who believe	12:35
	that when we look at this Jew from Nazareth	12:39
	who lived briefly and died violently and rose unexpectedly,	12:43
	we have seen as much of God as we ever hope to see.	12:48
	And we believe that when he looks at us	12:55
	this is who we really are.	12:58
	We don't know who we are until he tells us and shows us.	13:01
	Our life is known only in his light.	13:06
	Ephesians says, "The whole church, your faith,	13:13
	your relationship to God rests	13:17
	on that foundation and no other."	13:19
	He is the cornerstone, the capstone.	13:23
	All of our spiritual aspirations	13:27
	meet at that capstone.	13:31
	And you can worship Jesus as the son of God	13:35
	or you can reject Jesus as crazy.	13:39
	You can sit back like Peter Jennings	13:43
	and discuss with professors just what did he say	13:45
	and what did he do?	13:50
	But you cannot make Jesus over into anything you please.	13:54
	Though Christians often wish we knew more	14:01
	about what Jesus said and what he did,	14:03
	I'll tell ya, there are times when we wish we knew less.	14:07
	Take me or instance, in a couple of weeks	14:13
	as I do the last few summers,	14:16
	I got to go up to South Hampton, Long Island and preach.	14:19
	It's a beautiful part of the world	14:23
	with a lot of beautiful people, like Martha Stewart	14:25
	and Steven Spielberg and I love it up there.	14:28
	Problem is, you see, when I go I have to take Jesus with me.	14:33
	(congregation laughing)	14:37
	Mister Cornerstone,	14:38
	I ought to get hazard duty paid	14:41
	for working up there.	14:43
	(congregation laughs)	14:45
	Invariably, I come back from the Hamptons every summer	14:47
	and I ask myself or my wife, whoever happens to be closer,	14:50
	(congregations laughs)	14:53
	"Look, look would you explain to me,	14:56
	what is it Jesus has got against rich people, okay?	15:01
	I like rich people. What is the problem?"	15:05
	Jesus, in Jesus God had a face, God has a way,	15:13
	in Jesus God gets specific and	15:18
	earthly and walks among us.	15:21
	To be a Christian is to be about Christ.	15:25
	It's to be listening to him.	15:30
	It means to judge yourself by him,	15:32
	it means to come to church on Sunday	15:35
	and allow yourself to be assaulted by him.	15:37
	It means to pray daily for the grace	15:41
	to see him more clearly,	15:44
	to follow him more nearly,	15:47
	to love him more dearly, day by day.	15:50
	And that isn't easy.	15:56
	It'd be a lot easier if we could just, like,	15:58
	In God We Trust.	16:01
	Unfortunately, it's in Jesus that we trust.	16:03
	Jesus, in whom the very fullness of God chose to dwell.	16:09
	In May, at he Methodist General Conference,	16:16
	we were debating a resolution	16:19
	condemning Methodists owning handguns	16:22
	and we had this kind of contentious and protracted debate.	16:26
	This laymen stood up and said,	16:32
	"You mean to tell me that when my house	16:34
	has been broken into, my wife is being assaulted,	16:36
	I've got nothing to defend myself	16:39
	but a copy of the Methodist book of discipline?"	16:41
	(congregation laughs)	16:44
	I said to the layperson seated to me,	16:46
	"hey, don't knock the book of discipline."	16:48
	I found in church meetings if you'll hit a layperson	16:51
	just right with the book of discipline,	16:54
	a layperson will tend to back off.	16:57
	(congregation laughs)	17:00
	We took our vote, we voted to ban handguns among Methodists.	17:03
	At the coffee hour after the session,	17:09
	standing around talking to a delegate from Indiana,	17:12
	and we were talking about how we had all voted on this	17:16
	and I said, "I'm curious,	17:23
	did you vote for the ban on handguns?"	17:24
	and he said, "yeah."	17:28
	and I said, "well, I'm curious,	17:30
	how did you come to that vote?"	17:32
	then he said, "well, not happily."	17:34
	he said, "During the debate I just sat there saying,	17:37
	'Lord, I wish when the soldiers came to arrest you,	17:41
	you had pulled out a .38 and attempted to defend yourself.	17:45
	Lord I wish you had let us use the sword,	17:51
	I wish you hadn't told us to not defend you	17:54
	or worse, not even to defend ourselves.'"	17:58
	and then he said to me, "You know, sometimes	18:04
	I just wish the whole point weren't Jesus."	18:06
	The whole point is Jesus.	18:15
	I was preaching that on the west coast.	18:18
	I'm not gonna say where but it's a building,	18:21
	a church that has more glass windows than we do.	18:22
	(congregation laughs)	18:26
	And it was a Sunday service with fountains	18:28
	and contraptions and open door and 75 foot TV screen.	18:32
	On the way to the airport my wife said,	18:36
	"Did you realize, if you had not read	18:39
	the scripture this morning and preached,	18:42
	Jesus would have never been mentioned?"	18:44
	and I said, "Hey, I know Jesus, I work with Jesus,	18:47
	he's uncomfortable in these settings."	18:53
	(congregation laughs)	18:56
	But without him, without this cornerstone, this capstone	19:02
	of what we're about, church degenerates	19:06
	into a kind of sanctimonious form of rotary,	19:09
	and at least rotary meets	19:11
	at a convenient hour of the week and serves lunch.	19:12
	I remember the Mennonite theologian, John Howard Yoder say,	19:17
	"You can test a theology by how much	19:21
	it talks about God and how seldom it speaks of Jesus."	19:24
	Jesus provides the content of Christian character.	19:31
	Jesus is what makes the Christian faith ethical.	19:37
	The words and the deeds of Jesus,	19:42
	those nasty little particularities	19:45
	you just can't get around no matter how hard you try,	19:47
	they determine the contours of this faith,	19:51
	the parameters of our life together,	19:54
	the substance of what we believe	19:57
	and who, by God's grace, we hope to be.	20:00
	Without these troublesome particularities	20:06
	called Jesus Christ in him crucified.	20:08
	Well then this current upsurge of spirituality	20:11
	just fills with hot hair and floats off	20:15
	into Never Never Land, never touching ground anywhere	20:18
	and making any difference	20:21
	about where we live and how we live.	20:23
	I kind of believe the Chair of the school board	20:28
	in Colorado is right.	20:31
	Everybody believes in God.	20:34
	But it takes conversion and being born again	20:38
	and again, and again to believe that	20:43
	God was in Jesus Christ	20:47
	reconciling the world to himself.	20:49
	In that TV show, a couple weeks ago on Jesus,	20:54
	with Peter Jennings and the professors,	20:58
	N.T. Wright, who has preached here,	21:01
	when asked about he possibility	21:03
	of believing in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead,	21:06
	said, "The only evidence I've got for that is the church.	21:10
	If you don't believe God vindicated Jesus,	21:16
	his life, his teaching, his way	21:20
	by raising him from the dead,	21:22
	well them how do you, how do you explain us, the church?"	21:23
	Lots of great teachers left some wonderful books,	21:29
	some teaching, a gaggle of admirers.	21:32
	But who left something like the church?	21:36
	"We believe in the resurrected Christ," said Write,	21:40
	"because we keep meeting him,	21:45
	or more to the point, he keeps meeting us."	21:49
	In word, in sacrament, in song, in Sunday worship,	21:52
	in those dark nights of the soul when we cry out in misery,	21:57
	and he is there standing beside us.	22:03
	Without the presence of the living Christ,	22:09
	well, what is the point?	22:13
	This whole thing just collapses into a mess	22:15
	of rather uninteresting musing	22:18
	on things eternal and vaguely spiritual.	22:20
	And, well, why bother?	22:24
	Without him and his constant assaults upon us,	22:29
	well, these walls topple	22:35
	and these arches collapse	22:38
	and this whole temple degenerates into some kind of	22:41
	archaic spiritual mumbo jumbo that means nothing,	22:45
	without him, without the cornerstone.	22:49
	Christ Jesus, the capstone, the point,	22:54
	the church's one foundation.	22:57
	We grope with words adequately descriptive	23:00
	to describe what his presence means to us.	23:04
	In a short time you're gonna say Nicene Creed.	23:08
	It's an attempt to try and put into words what he means.	23:11
	We have difficulty describing him	23:17
	and even more difficulty following him.	23:20
	But we keep coming back on some July Sunday	23:23
	when we could've done something else	23:26
	because we have found that	23:29
	the more freely we give ourselves to him,	23:30
	the more extravagantly he gives himself to us.	23:34
	Leading us down his way, down that narrow way	23:38
	that leads to life eternal.	23:45
	Jesus himself the cornerstone.	23:48
	In him the whole structure is jointed together	23:51
	and grown into the holy temple of the Lord,	23:55
	in whom you also are built	23:58
	into a dwelling place for God. He is	24:01
	the church's one foundation.	24:07

Item Info

Title:

William H. Willimon - "Christ, the Cornerstone" (July 23, 2000)

Description:

Sermon start time: (Part 1) 01:20. Sermon end time: (Part 1) 24:12.
The preacher argues how Jesus Christ is the cornerstone of the Church from the perspectives of doctrinal teaching and church life. (Abstract created by Duke Divinity School staff.)

Permalink:

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4sj1b59t

Date:

July 23, 2000

Speaker:

Willimon, William H.

Liturgical Calendar:

Ordinary Time

Biblical Book:

Mark

Chapter and Verse:

Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

Subject:

Contributor:

Duke University. Chapel

Identifier:

UA.17.01.0003 CS-1023
ref10203_eri
uachapelsermaud
duke:321234
dcrau001667
ark:/87924/r4sj1b59t
92f25e8e-5e00-4806-ad29-6f87ef3f83da

Digital Collection:

Duke Chapel Recordings

Source Collection:

Duke University Chapel recordings, 1954-2005

Language:

English

Location:

United States
North Carolina
Durham (N.C.)

Format:

Provenance:

The Duke University Chapel Recordings were transferred to the Duke University Archives beginning in 1970.

Rights:

Limited Re-Use

CC BY-NC 4.0

Rights Note:

This recording may contain 3rd party materials, such as music or readings that are therefore not covered by the Creative Commons license indicated here. For more information see https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/research/citations-and-permissions.

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William H. Willimon - "Christ, the Cornerstone" (July 23, 2000)

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