vividreports: Rocks and Parables

Sunday, I told the children's story and gave the sermon at Guilford. Fred Breunig led the rest of the service. This service grew out of the "Pageant of Parables" two weeks ago - I had shared with Sue Owings a service and sermon I gave on October 29, 2000, at Guilford, on the meaning of Jesus' parables. The basic thrust of the sermon was that Jesus' parables probably had a different meaning when he told them than the one they were given in their setting in the gospels, and that originsl meaning was often surprising and even revolutionary - pointing to the realm of God that upsets our accustomed social order. The children's story was a "parable" I created out of an incident that had happened at my house that year - 2000 - when Eddie Clark was building a new stone wall. It was about a big rock he wanted to put into the wall. I tied that in with the parable about the two men who build a house in a dry stream bed (crazy!), one on sand, the other on a rock. Here is the story: Eddie's Big Rock My story this morning is about a rock. A very big rock. This is a true story - it took place 23 years ago at my home in Dummerston. My house was built in 1973 - 50 years. ago - into the side of a hill, and there is a stone wall by the house that keeps that hill in place. In the year 2000, 27. years after the house was built, that wall needed rebuilding, and I hired a well-known and very fine wall-builder to do the work - Eddie Clark. If you look outside the church here you will see some very fine stone walls Eddie Clark built here as well. To appreciate this story you need to know a couple of things: (1) My first wife was Shirley, and she was minister of. this church for 22 years and died in 1998, just two years before this story took place. Eddie Clark was very fond of Shirley and I think Eddie felt that Shirley was a saint. - that is important for this story. (2) The other thing is that Eddie used a. backhoe in his work - do you know what a backhoe is? It is a machine that has a long arm, and at the end of that arm is a kind of jaw that opens and shuts and you use it it dig holes and trenches or to pick up things and put them somewhere else. To rebuild my stone wall, Eddie used a lot of rocks that were right there, and he found one in particular that he wanted to use. It was partially buried near the stone wall, but the part that showed above ground looked good. so he dug it up out of the ground with his backhoe so that he could see all of it - and he liked it. It was perfect - just what he needed for the end of the wall. The trouble is that it was big. Bigger than any other stones in the wall. More like a boulder. And he had to be able to pick it up with the backhoe and carry it over to the wall and set it in place. So he tried. But every time he picked it up with that jaw on his backhoe, he would just get it up and it would slip out and fall back onto the ground. He tried several times and failed again and again. I was right there watching, and I could feel his frustration. Then he did something I did not expect: He called out, and said, "Shirley ,help me get this stone into that wall. This is for you!" Then I realized that for Eddie, this was not just any old rock. This was like a memorial for Saint Shirley! So he tried again, and this time, he picked up that huge stone, swung the arm around, drove over to the wall and set it in place, slick as a whistle! Wow! Ever since, when I drive up and look at that stone, I think of Shirley. Here is a picture of it as it looks today.