It's Not What You Know, but Who You Know
Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Paul J. Carling
Genesis 6: 9-22; 7:24, 8: 14-19; Matthew 7: 21-29
Before I became a priest, I spent part of my academic career serving in the Carter administration in Washington. I’d worked hard to get there, and as I headed for my first White House reception, I was eager to rub shoulders with my new colleagues and share my thoughts on some key domestic issues. But it only took a few minutes to discover how low I was on the political totem pole. You see, no one who was introduced even bothered to look me in the eye. They didn’t seem to listen to a word I said. Maybe that’s because they were constantly scanning the room to see if anyone who was actually important had arrived yet. And the moment someone did, they literally walked away in mid-sentence. That’s how I learned the most important lesson of my short political career – it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.
Today’s gospel text is the capstone to one of Jesus’ longest sermons in the New Testament. It starts with the Sermon on the Mount, describing what the “kingdom of God” looks like for those who choose to follow him; it continues through a refresher on the Ten Commandments; and it concludes with a lesson on how to pray, in the words of the Lord’s Prayer.
Today we hear the “so what” conclusion of Jesus’ extended teaching session. And the core of his message is that what really counts is not what we know, but who we know; what kind of foundation our relationships are built upon; and whether we’re willing to turn Jesus’ words into action in our lives.
Throughout his public ministry, the best-connected religious leaders grilled Jesus about where he was from, and who he knew, and somehow, he always came up short. Born in a stable and raised in a backwater, he didn’t spend enough time building the kind of relationships that would help him “make it” in the world. To make matters worse, he hung around with tax collectors and prostitutes. The smart money took one look at Jesus and rejected him out of hand – he simply wasn’t well-connected.
In that way, first century Palestine isn’t all that different from our own communities. Priest and author Tom McGrath describes a classic urban example of only being able to get things done by having the right connections. “In the south side Chicago neighborhood where I grew up,” McGrath writes, “if one of the men on the block found himself stymied by City Hall’s bureaucracy, he would talk to Louie. I was never quite sure what Louie did for a living. Unlike the other men in our neighborhood, he drove off each day in a sleek Lincoln Continental, wore fancy clothes, sported a diamond pinky ring, and always smelled of expensive, or at least obvious aftershave.”
“But whether your problem was getting a pothole repaired, acquiring a building permit, or getting your wayward nephew a job on the Streets and Sanitation crew, Louie was your guy. He’d “drop a dime;” he’d “reach out,” he’d “make things happen.” Not everybody could make that call and get action. ‘We don’t want nobody nobody sent’ is a phrase and a principle Chicago politicians live by.”
McGrath goes on to point out, “Jesus was sent by someone. He did have a connection. He was tuned into a different power structure, one founded on faith. His connection flowed in and through the heart of God. That’s why it sent him in some wildly different directions than the worldly folks with such good political connections. Jesus’ influence was based on grace, freely given. His power,” McGrath writes, “derived from his own experience of being grounded in his relationship with God.”
And because he was grounded in God, Jesus knew something the rest of us usually learn the hard way – that these supposedly great connections we think we have, whether in business or politics or in community life, are essentially fleeting. That’s because “knowing the right people” is all about pretending we’re doing something useful, while we’re actually keeping the focus on ourselves, on “what’s in it for me.” Just like the folks who abandoned me in mid-sentence at that cocktail party, these connections last only as long as we allow ourselves to be used by each other. They’re built on sand.
Instead, Jesus invites us to build our connections on rock, on the rock of ages – our relationship with God. Because the real difference between being well-connected in the eyes of the world, and being well-connected to God, is that, instead of just “talking the talk,” staying connected to God leads us to “walk the walk;” it changes our lives.
Jesus puts it clearly in today’s gospel. “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father…” In other words it’s not the smooth talk or the looking good; it’s the action that counts, action based on what we believe God wants – those small unspectacular actions Jesus lays out in the Sermon on the Mount – not being angry with those around us; mending broken relationships; being true to our word. As Jesus makes clear, “Everyone then who hears these words of mine, and acts on them, will be like a wise man who built his house on rock… and his house will not fall, because it is founded on rock.”
Now none of us is Jesus. And even though, like Noah, we can “walk with God,” we’ll never have anything like Jesus’ rock-solid grounding in God. But what we can have, if we decide it’s important, is a relationship with God that grows closer and deeper the more time we put into it; a relationship in which we actually come to experience, more and more, just how much God loves us; and as we do, find ourselves becoming more and more vessels for carrying that love to others.
Jesus was sent into the world more well-connected to the source of all love, the source of all hope, than any of us could ask or imagine. Today, he asks us – when we wake up each morning, when we take that first breath of a new day, when we prepare to go out into that same world Jesus ventured into – he asks us to simply decide, “Who am I most connected with? Who is sending me?”
