Scripture: Matthew 7:24-27; Matthew 5:3-4 Series: 2022
Launching the ‘How to Build a Car’ series (really about building a church), Pastor Wilson uses Formula 1 and Adrian Newey’s account of designing a race-car chassis to ask what the church’s true foundation is. Drawing on Matthew 7:24-27, he argues the church cannot be built on tastes, history, controversy, worship styles, or consultant fads (all ‘sand’), but only on hearing Christ’s words and putting them into practice. On Confirmation Sunday, he calls Bee Creek UMC to a foundation that lets the church move and grow, to live faith together, invite others, and live as Easter people as it begins conversations about its future.
Illustrations: formula-1-drive-to-survive, astros-dead-sports-heart, adrian-newey-how-to-build-a-car, charles-weymann-chassis, model-t-ford, church-consultant-fads, sunday-school-1745, churchs-one-foundation-hymn, confirmation-sunday-confirmands
May 1
The Chassis
““Everybody who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise builder who built a house on bedrock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the wind blew and beat against that house. It didn’t fall because it was firmly set on bedrock. But everybody who hears these words of mine and doesn’t put them into practice will be like a fool who built a house on sand. The rain fell, the floods came, and the wind blew and beat against that house. It fell and was completely destroyed.”” Matthew 7:24-27 CEB
I am not a car guy. I know car guys. I am not one of them. The time that car guys were in garages or looking through magazines, I was playing my bass. I wasn’t very interested in driving when I was a kid. I had to be convinced by my mom to drive. I mostly begrudgingly drove places only when it was more convenient than walking.
Last year, I became a Formula 1 fan out of the blue. Part of it was watching the Drive to Survive show on Netflix. Now, if you were here the Sunday after Christmas, I preached about how the void left in my heart after the Astros blew another world series. This was the other reason why I got into formula 1. I wanted a sport that I didn’t care about and that didn’t have any emotional baggage connected to it.
When Duke was in the Final Four, a church member asked me how I was feeling. If I was excited. I think I surprised her by saying, “oh, my sports heart is dead inside.” A lot of the joy I used to feel around sports had been replaced by stress. This is why I can easily make fun of UT and the Aggies and Cowboys (well, I’ve always been able to make fun of the cowboys). I have memories of those experiences, but, but my heart is just not there. I still love sports and competition in many ways. And so Formula 1 offered me something radically new. It is a whole world to see. It is like a passport across the world, with exotic locations and different strategies and drivers from different cultures and countries and engineers and challenging ideas of what it takes to build the best car. I started readings books on formula 1, because that is what I do when I am interested in something, so I found the book, How to Build a Car, by Adrian Newy, the lead designer for the red bull racing team that just won the formula one title on spurious circumstances. That’s a separate sermon. He’s a brilliant engineer and the book is the story of the cars he has built and of his life.
What Newey shows is that the engineering part of the racing team always comes back to this question: what is a car? They always have to start with what it is, what they are trying to do, and everything is up for grabs. Automotive companies across the world have a principle objective of profit maximization which limits what they can do. And the manufacturers are always focused on making everything constantly scalable. In Formula 1, there’s a scale of one or two, because there are two racers on a team. With that understanding, how do you build the best car to run 50 or so laps at these specific tracks like Monaco, Silverstone, and COTA when you don’t have to think about cost? When you don’t have to think about marketing, if you just have to build the best. Now this made me think about the church. What is the church? What is the church at its best? You can’t erase history. You can’t erase experiences that people have had, but you don’t begin there.
My friends, we are starting a new sermon series called How to Build a Car, which is really about how to build a church, looking at the church as what the church can be, not just as a building or activity center or membership roll.
When starting a new design for a car, Formula 1 engineers have to always start with the Chassis. Car guys or car girls out there know what a chassis is. I didn’t know what it was a year ago. It’s a funny word. It’s not an English word. Chassis. It’s a very, very French word. The first automobile comes from Germany, and then we have Oldsmobile and the Ford motor company and other developers around the world. We don’t always think about France in the development of cars. The word chassis in French is used to describe a kind of wooden cage used in a wagon and it describes the basic structure in a car. That is the base of the car. The reason why the word we use is French has to do with a man named Charles Weymann. The first cars were basically a gasoline engine that you put on a wagon. And these were mostly wooden structures that were solid all the way through. They were loud and noisy. The Model T Ford from 1906 is still one of the best selling cars or all time, but it was really loud and noisy and structurally limited.
Charles Weymann was born in 1889 to an American father and a Haitian mother, but he was raised in France. He was a airplane test pilot before World War I and flew for France during the war, earning the Legion d’honneur. He brought his aeronautics background to the car and in 1921, developed and sold the Weymann system, which transformed the old wagon coach frame into a unified base with hinges and joints we now call a chassis. It allowed for a more comfortable ride. It was safer and allowed an increase in speeds. By the 1930s, cars were getting heavier and another innovation passed Weymann by with metal panels, but it was still called a chassis. If your car’s chassis breaks, your car breaks. There is no car without a chassis. What is the chassis of the church? What is the sine qua non, the without which we are nothing? What is the foundation?
I love the great old Hymn, The Church’s One Foundation is Jesus Christ our Lord. This is good. And this is true, but Jesus gives us another way to look at our foundation in this parable I read earlier at the end of the Sermon on the Mount,
Everybody who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise builder who built a house on bedrock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the wind blew and beat against that house. It didn’t fall because it was firmly set on bedrock. But everybody who hears these words of mine and doesn’t put them into practice will be like a fool who built a house on sand. The rain fell, the floods came, and the wind blew and beat against that house. It fell and was completely destroyed.
What is important to understand is that both the house on sand and the house on rock hear the word of God. They both hear it. Jesus is present in both places. One side hears the word of God and does it, the other side hears the word of God and does not. The word of God causes activity or it lands on sand that will not stand. So when we think about the church, we cannot begin with what we like or what makes us confortable. We cannot begin with history. We cannot begin with ideas about controversial subjects in the news. We cannot begin by what we think a Christian is or isn’t. We cannot begin with anything you find at a Christian bookstore, We cannot begin within any of these foundations because each of these, in their own way, is like building a house on sand. To build a house on what we like or what we don’t like is like building on sand because our tastes change. Fashion’s change. Churches grow and churches shrink. There’s a season for everything under heaven. If we build the church on worship style or on programs, it is like building on sand. Sunday school classes in 1745 taught kids to read before anything else. They did so both so the kids could read the Bible but also because they valued children not as an instrument but an opportunity. Twenty years ago, church consultants would say that having plenty of parking spaces was the biggest change a church should make. Sand. 15 years ago it would have been contemporary worship. Organs out. Guitars in. It doesn’t matter if you can play. I love our worship, but it is still sand if that is what we base our church on. Worship styles change. It is like building a car on a cabin frame and then the Weynann chassis comes along.
Other church consultants would say that if your church worship space ever gets to 80% capacity, you need to build a new building and double it. But that House is a squeaky chassis.
So what does the best chassis look like in a car?
When building a car, Adrian Newey says that there are four main goals with the chassis.
“One: ensure that the tyres are presented to the ground in an even and consistent manner through the braking, cornering and acceleration phases. Two: ensure the car is as light as possible. Three: ensure that the car generates as little drag as possible. Four: ensure that the car is generating as much downforce as possible in a balanced manner throughout the phases of the corner.”
If your foundation is not stable, light, and balanced, you are not going to be at your best. Churches build buildings but the church is not a building. It is the people Christ has gathered here. The chassis helps the car move. The church is designed to move, but some people don’t like motion. The motion of the church is that our population is never stagnant. Today is confirmation Sunday. It is not conformation Sunday.
We have three wonderful young people who are going to confirm their faith in Jesus Christ, not be more like us and the things we like, but to be more like Jesus and to show us more of Jesus. If our confirmands don’t change us as a church by what they offer, we are not giving them space.
We are called to invite others on and offer them a life that makes them want to join the body of Christ. Hearing the word of God and doing it means both living the faith and sharing the faith, with our children and our neighbors.
Matthew 7, where this verse is, occurs near the end of the sermon on the mount, that great passage that tells us what the kingdom of heaven is like. Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. This is the word of God that needs to be put into practice. Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted. This is the word of God. Let us put it into practice and build our house on the rock. Let us hear God and then actually love our neighbors. Let’s build a strong chassis that is going to be able to handle a lot. We’re starting conversations this summer about the future of Bee Creek UMC. About where we’re going, who we are and who we want to be. There are a lot of people here and watching online, who have encountered God in his place at different periods of the church’s life. The church will be officially 20 years old next year. I am only the third pastor, and yet, there have been many seasons in this church. People have come to the church and joined the church for different reasons. There are people who see the church at its best in a different way. For us to really be at our best, we cannot build on sand. We must put our faith into practice. We must live our faith together and inspire others. We are saved by grace but we are not left alone. We are still in the season of Easter and we must live as if Jesus did rise from the dead. We must live in a way that only makes sense because of who Jesus is. If we can do that, our Foundation is strong. Our chassis Is going to handle a big load. Let us do that together, my brothers and sisters, our future, our foundation doesn’t begin with what other people do, but what we do.
Start right where you are: are you living your best now? Are you living your fullest life now? If so, praise God, invite others into that life. If not there’s mercy and grace, but take a step towards that best this day. How can you put your faith into practice this week? How can you take a new step?
Let us pray, We thank you for your love in Jesus Christ. We thank you for the firm foundation that is both your son and a life lived following him, help us to continue to build that firm foundation here. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.