By Reverend Laurie DeMott

Psalm 127:1 says “Unless the Lord builds the house, the workers labor in vain.” As I thought about this verse during the week, I asked myself, “How would a house that God builds look different from a house built without God?” And I decided that while I cannot tell you what color God might paint a house, or whether God would choose casement windows or doublehung windows, I can say with some certainty that any house God would build would also have a lot of nails.

Think for a moment about why Habitat volunteers use more nails that the average construction worker. Professional contractors must balance their need to create a good reputation – to build a satisfactory house – with an efficient enough use of time and materials that they will end up with a profit so they can continue in the business and so every decision that they make weighs these two sides of the equation against one another. Even things as seemingly trivial as the number of nails used to build that house can have an important effect on the overall balance sheet. Let’s do some very quick math: Say a contractor knows that under normal circumstances 15 nails will fasten a sheet of plywood to the studs just as well as 25. My tiny house required over 50 sheets of exterior plywood (not counting the roof) which means if my contractor told his workers to use 10 less nails on each sheet of plywood, he would have needed 520 fewer nails just for the exterior walls. Add in the roof, interior studs and joists, flooring, and drywall, and you can see that a small reduction in the number of nails on each piece of the construction quickly adds up to thousands of nails saved in the overall project. Consequently, a professional contractor is going to tell the workers to pace themselves carefully when hammering in nails, and the smart worker, motivated by the promise of a paycheck, will heed that order.

A volunteer working for Habitat for Humanity, however, isn’t worried about getting a paycheck but is motivated instead by the desire to help someone in need. Habitat volunteers often come to know the future owners of the house quite well because the family that will eventually live there is required by Habitat to labor alongside the volunteers which means volunteers develop a personal investment in that family’s future. Every time those volunteers drive a nail into the wall, they are not thinking about the contractor’s profit margin or staying on the employment rolls; they are thinking about the little boy that is going to be sleeping in that bedroom or the family that will be gathered around the kitchen table someday. They are thinking about the people they have laughed with and sweated alongside of and whose long dream to own a home they are now helping to fulfill. If pounding a few extra nails into that piece of plywood will help assure a more solid house for that family, the volunteer will make sure that is what happens.

“Unless the Lord builds the house, the workers labor in vain.” The Psalmist declares that the God of the heavens, the Lord who rules over all of creation from the east to the west, north to the south, from the heights of the mountains to the depths of the seas — this limitless, most holy, most formidable God, cares about you. Though there are billions of people in the world and billions of lives to construct, God refuses to see any one of us as just another job in a long list of projects ahead but God is instead solidly invested in each of our lives on a very personal level. God has listened to your struggles and wants to lift you from your despair. God knows your dreams and holds those hopes tenderly and close. God toils along side of you, and laughs with you, and weeps with you, and cares about you with a strength of compassion that is unmatched by any human love could ever be. If putting a few more nails in the walls is what is required to ensure that our lives will be able to stand against the hurricane forces that assail us, then that is what God will do. That is what God did do when God went all the way to the cross for us.

Many religions teach their followers that there is a God out there who unifies and permeates everything around us but Christianity declares that this all-encompassing infinite God is not some impersonal force like gravity or electricity. The God we see and discover through Jesus is a God who steps down from heaven to walk the road with us. Our God is a God who stops to talk with a scorned woman or who pushes through the crowd to call out to a despised tax collector watching from a sycamore tree. Our God is a God who sits with the children, who breaks bread with the hungry, and who turns aside to listen to the grief of a father weeping for his dying daughter. While the gospels do attest that Jesus was a social reformer who spent much of his ministry challenging the oppressive religious and political authorities, the gospel writers don’t leave us with records of Jesus’ manifestos and his blueprint for economic reform. They tell us the stories of his interactions with individual people along his way who look an awful lot like you and me. God is not just working to build a new world, the gospel proclaims; God is working to build a new you. As you strive to strengthen your heart in love and firm up your determination for good, open your hearts to allow the presence of God to enter so that God can instill in your efforts a most holy power and together the life you build will stand for all time.

But I would not be completely honest if I ended this sermon here. While most of the extra nails hammered into the walls of a Habitat for Humanity house are put there by caring volunteers wanting to build the best and most solid house they can for the family, we have to admit that some of those extra nails are there because of the volunteer’s fear of inadequacy. Because Habitat for Humanity accepts any volunteers over the age of 16, many of the people working on a site may have very limited construction experience – the only time they may have ever picked up a hammer was to hang a picture in their living room. Nervous about their inexperience, these volunteers have nightmares that they will step back from their newly erected wall and the whole thing will topple over. So to relieve their anxieties, they drive in a bunch of extra nails just to make sure that wall is going to stand up when they let go. Those houses in southern Florida that withstood the impact of Hurricane Andrew were constructed with nails driven in by both the volunteers’ love for the family and their own deep sense of humility about their work. And so too, it is both the holy power of God working within our lives and an equally profound awareness of our own limitations that will enable us to construct lives that can ultimately withstand the storms we will encounter. Without the confidence of God working by our sides, we would be devastated by trial and tragedy because we would be brought down by our own weakness and be alone in our sorrow. But without an equally healthy dose of humility, we would become puffed up with the pride of God’s love for us and instead of building righteous lives, we would dwell in houses of self-righteousness and arrogance.

In Paris, there is a community called L’Arche where people with disabilities and people without disabilities share their lives together in family-like homes. A priest named Father Doug McCarthy went to work at L’Arche one year to train a young developmentally disabled man named Claude for the 100 meter sprint in the Special Olympics. Another young man in the community named John was also competing but everyone’s hopes were pinned on Claude because he was the stronger runner. The only problem was that Claude had tendency to zig zag as he ran which, of course, hurt his time. One day, after weeks of trying unsuccessfully to convince Claude he had to concentrate on running a straight line, Father McCarthy became so exasperated that he burst out, “Claude, you are a much better runner than John but if you don’t stop this zig zagging, he is going to be the one to win the gold medal!”

Claude clapped his hands in delight. “Wow, wouldn't it be wonderful if John won the gold medal?” he beamed.

Claude understood what even Father McCarthy had failed to understand – we are not in this alone. We share one another’s successes and cry together over one another’s failures. God cares about you personally and will walk by your side as you strive to shape your life in goodness and love but look around you and remember, God is walking with the person sitting next to you in the pew as well. God is working by the side of faithful down the road, whether they be Methodist or Lutheran, Pentecostal, Evangelical, or staunch Catholic. God is intimately involved in the life of the Muslim and the Jew. God loves that computer programmer in Alabama, the homeless man on the streets of LA, the Republican pollster and the Democratic campaign worker, the starving child in Indonesia and the overweight teen chowing down on a McDonald’s hamburger. Yes, you have the power of the universe at your side but so do they.

And so let us always, in the words of Paul, work out our salvation with fear and trembling; knowing that it is God who is at work with us as God is at work in all the world.