Let Us Be Built
It is so good to be back with you today. And I want to acknowledge what a gift it is to have folks at the ready to preach so that I can get away from time to time. I am grateful to Janice Harmon for her co-leadership of worship from week to week – she’s under the weather this week, and we pray for her rest and restoration. And it was so fun to hear Rev. John Campbell speak a word into this community last week. It was as if he had sat in worship strategy conversations and brainstorms over weeks to land right into the stream of our shared work here at Faith. Or…it is as if he and Bonnie did the good work of pastoring for decades and it’s a bit like riding a bike. Thanks be to God for that.
In the Easter season, the lectionary focuses on early followers of Jesus coming to grips with the reality of the resurrection and then continues with stories of the earliest communities of Christ-followers figuring out how to come together, continue the work Jesus started, preserve and expand the teachings of Jesus, and grow the movement while watching for Jesus to return.
In the Acts passage from last week, the early church committed itself to being an interdependent community –sharing meals, sharing resources, growing and learning together. It committed itself to togetherness in the midst of doing a new thing – being the early church.
Today, we have a portion of a letter entitled 1 Peter, likely not written by Peter himself but instead written in a voice honoring Peter’s ministry sometime after 75 CE, and probably NOT written to a single church, but to a circle of churches influenced by Peter’s work as it was centered from Rome and into Asia Minor.
Throughout the letter is the encouragement to live Christian lives. Perhaps a bit different than the way popular Christianity flourished over the past fifty years, it is not a letter about self-sustaining, self-serving, solitary, Jesus-is-my-personal-Lord-and-Savior Christian lives. Instead, the letter describes shared life that is values based, interdependent and communal…much like the Acts text.
The writer focuses in today’s reading on a compelling and complex set of images and references to stones. And I want to linger there this morning.
First, the writers names that Jesus is a living stone – and the cornerstone that has been rejected by some. This reference ties Jesus to the words of the prophet Isaiah. And those hearing this letter, they are encouraged to be like him, like a living stone, letting themselves be built into a spiritual house.
Not a solitary stone in a field. Not a stone on a mountaintop all by itself. Not a series of stones that are all mine. No…because a stone alone is different.
In fact, one of the images the writer evokes is that for those who do not understand and follow this Jesus, a stone CAN be a stumbling block.
There’s something super-practical about that. Aren’t you more apt to stumble over a single stone in a field, the woods, or a path rather than stumbling over a stone structure? There is more presence, more visibility, more purpose in a composition of stones that are together for a reason.
I was so caught this week by the encouragement to let ourselves be built into a spiritual house – a part of something bigger. Where each of us is a component in an interdependent system that makes a bigger, stronger, more useful thing – a shelter, a community, a presence.
Let ourselves be built into something bigger than ourselves.
Still a stone – something solid. Something eternal.
But let your stone be part of something more.
Our individual stone-ness is called to be but one among many stones, built together into something more.
This is at the heart of what it means to be a Christian – to be part of a body.
AND it is deeply a part of what it means to be a Methodist. It is at the heart of our connectional system – where I am not a Christian by myself. Where I am not only a member of one church at 6810 Montrose Road but also a member of a global BODY that works together to do big things. Sure, my one stone is being built into this particular local church, this local church is just a part of a larger body of folks who move together to receive God’s grace, act with mercy and justice and compassion in light of that grace, and let themselves be transformed by that grace day by day over lifetimes and generations to resemble Jesus.
And as I thought about the ways that stones create structures that are more than the sum of the various stones that are a part, I remembered standing on several “tels” in Israel.
Are you familiar with what a “tel” is? Spelled TEL, per our friends at Wikipedia, a tel is a “mound consisting of the accumulated and stratified debris of a succession of consecutive settlements at the same site…”
So as you stand on these sites, which feel like little mountains, there are many layers of civilization built up from ground level. Each prior civilization becomes the foundation layer, the solid ground, on which the next civil society can be built.
You are seeing some images from Tel es-Sultan, also know as Tel Jericho, which is in the West Bank, and is claimed by some to be the oldest “town” excavated, with its lowest layer believed to have been established 10,000 years before the common era. There is evidence of civilizations from the hunter-gatherers, from the pre-pottery era, from the pottery era, from the bronze age and from the iron age. It was probably last developed shortly after Babylonian captivity. Each community built one upon the next. The former a strong foundation for what is to come.
Lately I have been in conversation with a lot of folks who have expressed concern for the state of the world, and particularly for the state of the church. I hear parents and grandparents express their concern that the church will not survive for future generations.
And I am aware that I see that differently. First, I believe that because of the bigness of God, I cannot even begin to imagine what God will do with and for and among generations to come. In my 13 years of fundraising for Wesley Theological Seminary, I came to believe that our work was to build leaders for a church we could not yet see.
And might that be what we are doing here?
Stones shaped by a love for God, a desire to follow Jesus, and nudged by the Holy Spirit, allowing ourselves to be built into spiritual houses, to be a holy priesthood, to offer ourselves as sacrifices that are acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
Stones that – beginning 60 years ago – began forming up walls to house works of nurture and transformation.
And stones that might, over time, become the bedrock on which a new thing is built. Sometimes that means letting go of what we have always done, how we have looked, what we prefer, to let God do the new thing.
God, let us be built into a new thing.
Beloved, believe that you are a stone, valuable and needed. And one day our stones will be the solid ground on which new, unimaginable structures will be built.
Today and for the weeks to come, we’re going to create some quiet space for reflection immediately following the message. There are those among us who deeply long for quiet, for the space to be open to God’s voice…and what better place than right here.
Silence takes practice. I’m going to frame our time of silence this way – I’ll share a bit of scripture from today’s message and then sound the singing bowl. We’ll hold silence for a few minutes, and that time of silence will end with the singing bowl.
Again, silence takes practice, preparation, intention. So I invite you to take a couple of deep breaths, plant your feet on the floor, take a deep breath….
Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God's sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
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