"Rock of Ages"
God is our foundation
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Text: Isaiah 26:1-11
Some things your eyes witness in this life, your mind never forgets. Recently, my mind has gone back to something I saw about 28 years ago in Luanda, Angola.
It was an amazing sight that horrified me. Inside a brick building, I saw stone walls embedded with spots of blood. Shackles and chains hung precariously from crumbling, weather-worn walls. I saw cells, archways and steel-barred doors, and I realized why the structure was built well over 200 years ago. It was a place where slaves were shackled before being placed on ships and taken to the New World.
Sites like this dot the landscape of the west coast of Africa from Sierra Leone, all the way down to Angola. During the years of slavery, some three million people were sold as chattel. They were items to be bartered for. In all the empires from the French in the Congo to the British in Ghana, people were sold and taken across the Atlantic to places they had never seen.
March 25 is the celebration, the remembrance, of the end of slavery within the British Empire. In 1807, the Abolition of Slavery Bill was passed in the House of Commons. What we don't understand, and what our minds will never be able to fully comprehend, is the sheer extent of the pain that slavery brought. So much so, that in Kiswahili there is a word to describe it: “mafa,” which roughly translates to genocide.
In 1783 in Liverpool alone, 303,737 slaves boarded ships to the New World. It is staggering! Yet, in the midst of this, one name rises above all the others: William Wilberforce. Although much has been written about him leading up to this Memorial Day, many people don't realize who the man was and what motivated him.
William Wilberforce was brought up in a Christian home. He had listened to the preaching of Newton and Wesley. When he went to Cambridge University he decided to put his faith behind him. He took up drinking, card-playing and carousing, and lived a profligate life as an avant-garde academic. However, he realized that his life was hollow and empty. His new-found freedom did not give him the solace he was looking for.
So, listening to the great sermons of Philip Doddridge, Wilberforce decided to recommit his life to Christ. His whole vision of the world began to change. He saw the injustice and unrighteousness that was before him. He saw the poverty, and most of all, his eye went to the villainous dangers of slavery. He was one of the founders of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. He was on the side of children who were being used as workers. He hated the fact that the Sabbath was being trampled on, and that God's word wasn't being exalted in society. But fighting slavery was his greatest passion.
Along with his friends, Fox and Grenville, Wilberforce decided to enter politics and put an end to it once and for all. For years, he tried to have slavery overturned. Even when a bill passed in the House of Commons, it failed in the House of Lords, until finally one day in 1807, after being labelled a villain and surviving two assassination attempts, he finally won the day. In the House of Lords by a vote of 41 to 20, and in the House of Commons with a vote of 114 to 15, the bill that ended slavery was passed, and this great man was vindicated.
Unfortunately, many ship owners did not like the levies and fines that accompanied this new law. If found guilty, they were fined 100 pounds - a lot of money. In one case, some ship owners realized their ship was too heavy and sat too low in the water, giving away that they had human cargo. To avoid detection, they threw 132 slaves overboard. Thus, even though Wilberforce succeeded in getting the bill passed, the struggle for the freedom of the enslaved continued. It wasn't until 1833 that slavery was completely abolished.
What motivated Wilberforce? What was it behind this man, under this man, in this man, that caused him to do what he did? It was the fact that he had a strong foundation in his life- the love of God.
In a dark moment, when it looked like he was not going to succeed and his life was being threatened, he received a letter from a preacher. The man wrote the following words to him:
Unless God has raised you up, I see not how you can go through with your glorious enterprise in opposing that execrable villainy. You will be worn out by the opposition of men and endeavours. But if God is with you, who can be against you? Oh, be not weary in well-doing. Go on in the name of God and in the power of his might till even American slavery, the vilest that ever saw the sun, shall vanish away before it.
One week later, the letter's author died. This was the last letter ever written by John Wesley.
Here we are, in this magnificent church, far removed from the shackles, bonds and crumbling stones of Luanda. Here we are in a marvellous place, in the freedom of this great land. A place that was built in many ways on the foundation that Wilberforce made. Here we are! And what does all this say to us?
It speaks to us of the importance of having that strong foundation in our lives, no matter the era, place or circumstance. As someone once put it, “God's centre is everywhere, but his circumference is nowhere.” In other words, the centre of life is God: the foundation, the source, the beginning, the end. God's love and grace know no bounds, cannot be constrained, and have no circumference. But the centre is everywhere, and is available to each of us. Wilberforce knew that, and he was able to take on the devils, the assassination attempts and the mockery even by the so-called great people of his time, precisely because he had that foundation in his life.
In today's text, the great prophet Isaiah spoke of exactly that same foundation hundreds of years before. At a time when Israel was shaken, uncertain of its future, and did not know whether Jerusalem would ever be a great city again, Isaiah spoke to his people. He said, “You will have a strong city, and you will have a firm foundation.” In this magnificent psalm of praise, a glorious litany that talks about the people returning to Jerusalem and coming through the gates into the great City of God, Isaiah tells the down-trodden and oppressed, “You will return home and the gates will be opened for you.” Hundreds of years after Isaiah wrote this, Jesus rode on a donkey into that very city, and proclaimed the victory of God. Such is the power of the foundation!
But, on what should we build? On which foundation should we have confidence? First of all, there is no question that Jerusalem was a strong city. Most scholars agree that Isaiah was contrasting what took place at the entrance to Jerusalem with what happened in the City of Edom in the book of Obadiah. Edom was, in many ways, the enemy of Jerusalem. The Edomites were in opposition to the people of Judah. Their city was built on a shaky foundation, while Jerusalem was built on a firm one.
In the great city of Petra, which is in Jordan today, hewn into the great rocks and the walls of the valleys are homes and temples that have withstood all the battering of time and the elements. They have existed over the ages precisely because they were built on a foundation of rock. So too, the Kingdom of God stands and will not be crumbled with the ages.
Who goes into this city? Isaiah answers that the people who go into the city are the righteous. Who is not allowed into the city? Those who practice unrighteousness, deny the foundation and are unfaithful. And it is the poor and oppressed who will shame the unrighteous and say, “You will not go into the strong city.”
Many years ago, construction workers were trying to build some property on the old city of Pompeii. They dug down and came upon something they had never seen before - the body of a woman. In her hands, she was grasping jewellery. It was evident from the way she had been preserved that she had been under Mount Vesuvius when it had erupted. In trying to escape from the volcano, she must have stooped down and kept her jewels, thinking that they were important. And of course, they weren't!
So often, like the Edomites and that woman in the midst of turmoil, we hang on to things that are not strong or immutable. We think they will be there for us, and they are not. If we build on a solid foundation, one that does not end, we have something strong. This is the eternal city of which Isaiah spoke. The famous words we sing in the hymn Rock of Ages quote Isaiah. He said, “It is the rock of ages on which this city of God will be built and it will be able to withstand everything. It is the foundation of Jehovah.”
But God's sense of eternity isn't always ours. There's a story about a man who had a chat with God. He asked Him,
“What is a million years like to you?”
God said, “Like a second.”
The man then asked God, “Well, what is a million dollars to you?”
And God said, “Like a dime.”
The man said, “Can you then lend me a dime?”
God replied, “Just a second!”
Our expectations of what is eternal and our concepts of truth and justice are so warped compared to that of God. God's foundation does not change. Even Karl Marx, as much as he despised religion and saw it as the opiate of the people, understood one thing. In a letter he wrote to one of his friends, he said:
When all the political foundations of religion are wiped out, when the organization and the institution of the church are destroyed, then normally, religious faith, the Christian faith, would have to disappear; but it is not out of the question that the Christian faith will survive any fact. This would mean that there is a religious reality that does not depend solely on the sociological and the institution, and under these conditions, we would have to heed this reality, which is not in the category of traditional religion.
Even Karl Marx knew that there is a foundation that cannot be shaken, and that there is a truth and a justice that cannot be avoided. There is something that is immutable and never-ending: the city of God.
God's city is also a city of peace. Isaiah wrote, “You will keep your perfect peace whose mind is steadfast, because he trusts in Him.” Peace comes from trusting in God. My friend, in times of injustice and war, it is precisely that foundation of trust in God that is the source of peace. For anyone who has ever witnessed war and violence and seen the inhumanity the world often brings, even in the midst of that there is the hope and the foundation of God's peace. The great hymn writers knew this. On Remembrance Day, we sing those great words:
Before the hills in order stood
Or earth received its frame,
From everlasting Thou are God
To endless years the same.
When there is violence and uncertainty, and it feels like we are standing on shifting sand. When nothing makes sense and no truth seems immutable or right, we hear the words of Isaiah, “You will keep your perfect peace whose mind is steadfast, because he trusts in Him.” William Wilberforce was able to take on the forces that promoted slavery because he believed this to be true. Throughout the centuries, people have stood against that which is immoral, unjust and wrong on the basis of that truth.
A couple of years after I first saw that unloading dock for slaves, I returned to Angola. It was in the midst of a civil war between the forces of the MPLA and UNITA. Luanda had been bombed and shelled, and the place that once held slaves was destroyed. I realized that even these symbols of injustice and terror will disappear. But, God and His love is the Rock of Ages, which lasts forever. So, stand on that rock! Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.