Living Stones
17 May 2014
Fifth Sunday of Easter Year A
Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland
(Oregon)
8:00 a.m. Said and 10 a.m. Sung Mass
God, give us hearts open to change and
growth,
Ground us in You, Our Rock and
Unshakeable Refuge.
Amen.
Wow.
Most of our readings today have stones or rocks in them. The Psalm says, "O God, You are my Rock!" The Epistle
talks about Christ being a stone giving us life, the capstone of the Temple,
though once rejected in the quarry as flawed, and of us believers all being
stones infused with Christ’s life in a Temple—the House of God—built to give
acceptable offerings to God. The Gospel talks about that House of God where
Jesus invites us to follow him: “In my
Father’s House, there is more than enough room.
Otherwise, why do you think I’d invite you to come there with me? I am
the way to that House, the truth, and the life.” He might as well has said, “I am the Rock all
this is built on.” And the first
lesson—that horrible story of the murder by stoning
of one of the first seven deacons of the Church, Stephen.
It is good during the Great Fifty
Days of Easter to hear these stories from the Book of Acts. But I think it a little sad that we read them instead of the Hebrew scriptures. The substitution has the unintended effect of
encouraging us to think of the Hebrew Scriptures as the “Old” Testament, and
Judaism as valuable only as a pale hint of the glorious faith to come,
Christianity, rather than something to be cherished and valued on its own
terms. And stories like today’s emphasizing
the growing rift between the followers of Jesus and their compatriots who place
more trust in their traditional faith than they do in Christ only make it
worse. The stories see them increasingly as outsiders: they arrest and persecute the disciples. In today’s story, members of a particular Synagogue
are unhappy with the competition the deacon Stephen presents them. They accuse him of blaspheming the House of
God and the Law of Moses that it embodies, saying that Jesus of Nazareth will
come back to destroy the Temple and change the Laws. Stephen, “looking like an angel,” reacts in
kind, harshly saying “you are a stiff-necked people, uncircumcised of heart,
always opposing the Holy Spirit, and killing the prophets as your ancestors
did” (Acts 7:51-53). “You” and “Us.”
Clear divisions between good guys and bad guys, whether you are on Stephen’s
side or his opponents’. Stephen’s
accusers pick up stones and kill him. How
could they not be bad guys?
Dividing the world into “good guys”
and “bad guys” may be satisfying for telling a riveting story and stirring the
fires of tribal and family attachment.
But it is contrary to Jesus’ teachings: “Be wholly complete like God—who impartially
gives the blessing of rain and sunshine equally to the ‘righteous’ and the
‘wicked’” (Matt. 5:44, 48). “The first
will be last and the last first”… the ‘good guys’ will be turn out to be bad,
and the ‘bad guys’ turn out good (Matt. 20:16). A pillar of righteous living goes to the
Temple to pray and so does a notorious sinner—the Pharisee and the Tax
Collector—and guess who goes home right with God? (Luke 18:9-14).
If I owe my neighbor love, who is my
neighbor? Who is on this side of that
line? Jesus replies with a story of
hated foreigner showing compassion while the religious stalwarts walk on
by. You create neighbors by being
compassionate with them, not by drawing lines between our tribe and its barbarian
enemies.
“Father, forgive them, for they do
not know what they are doing.” “Forgive others as you would want to be forgiven.”
Every single one of us is a mixture
of good and bad. We are all God’s
creatures. Labeling a whole person or
group as “Good” or “Bad” only confuses matters. The line between good and bad is not between
groups of people, but runs down the middle of each and every human heart. So we
need to pray even for our enemies. We
are all in this together.
In the Harry Potter books, Harry’s Godfather
tells him, “We've all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the
part we choose to act on. That's who we really are.” His mentor Professor Dumbledore tells
him: “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are….”
If these stories are not about good
guys vs. bad guys, why do some people in these stories accept Jesus as the
Rock, and others pick up rocks to kill people like Stephen? What is it in our hearts that allows some of
us to accept the apostles’ witness, yet others to reject it and try to stamp
out this belief even by murder? What
makes some of us cry “Joy!” and others, “Blasphemy!” What in our hearts leads
us to be living stones or to pick up stones of death?
There are some hints in the Hebrew
Scriptures that 1 Peter quotes. They all
use the image of Rock to describe God.
1 Peter quotes from
Isaiah about those who try to seek a sense of security by
deceiving themselves"
“Look! I am placing a foundation stone in Jerusalem, a firm
and tested stone, a precious cornerstone, safe to build on. Whoever trusts in it need never be shaken. I will test you with the
measuring line of justice and the
plumb line of uprightness. Since
you have made your refuge out of lies, a hailstorm will knock it down. Since it is made of deception, a flood will sweep it away. [Not so, the
Rock I offer!]” (Isaiah 28:15-17, my
paraphrase).
This was probably the passage Jesus was
thinking about when he gave his parable of the house built on a rock and when
he gave Peter his name, meaning “Rock,” after his declaration of faith in
Jesus.
Faith based on the Rock must be grounded in truth, not self deception. It must respond to the realities of our experiences.
And its ultimate measure is justice, fairness, and right dealing with
others.
1
Peter also quotes a Psalm of praise to God from someone who had been in
horrible straits, set upon by persecutors until almost dead, whom God
surprisingly rescues. The turnaround is
described this way:
17-20 I didn’t die. I lived!
And now I’m telling the world what Yahweh did.
…21-25 Thank you
for responding to me;
you’ve truly become my salvation!
The stone the masons discarded as flawed
is now the capstone!
This is Yahweh’s work.
We rub our eyes—we can hardly believe it!
On this day, Yahweh has acted!
let’s
celebrate and be festive! (Psalm 118:17-24,
my paraphrase, using some of the Message
paraphrase)
Christians ever since the beginning have used this Psalm to
describe the resurrection of Jesus. It is a mainstay in our Easter
liturgies. The very fact that Jesus’
case was so hopeless—dead and buried in a quarried tomb—is why Peter uses this
image of a flawed quarry stone once cast away, but wondrously now a finished,
precious, capstone of a great building.
Peter adds a final passage to tell us of this mystery of the
heart, another oracle from Isaiah:
14The Holy One can be
either a Hiding Place
or a Boulder blocking your way,
The Rock standing in the way of the willful …
A net preventing trespass…
15Many are going to run into that Rock
and get their bones broken,
Get tangled up in that net
and not get free of it.”
(Isa 8:14-15. my paraphrase, using
some of the Message paraphrase)
I do not know why sometimes we are able to joyfully accept
new things from God and other times we aren’t.
Part of it comes from enjoying and loving what we have received
from God in the past. New things present
themselves as strange, risky, and possibly a betrayal. Sometimes in these matters, bitterness can
grow where we are feeling uncertain, on shaky ground. The
Rock we thought was unshakeable has
turned out to be unstable. We perhaps talk to others rather than to the
one we think is strange. As seen in this
Synagogue in Acts, gossip and grumbling thus can become the first step on the possibly
deadly road of faction and schism. We begin
by trying to relieve our own anxiety and fear by labeling the others as bad guys.
I read news this last week from the Church of England
Cathedral in Salisbury, home of the famous Sarum Use originally behind
much of our Prayer Book liturgy.
A couple of years ago, they had to re-gild their somewhat
dingy and bedraggled organ pipes.
Congregants howled. It made them more
luminous and bright than anyone had every seen.
Too bright. Many bemoaned “change
for change’s sake.” Today, everyone
there loves the warmer, more personal feel the bright organ gives the Nave.
Now the Cathedral is faced with the need to replace their
old and broken baptismal font. A Cathedral
parish process was initiated, design proposals solicited and competed. The committee has chosen a modern “living
water” design where the narthex has the visual richness of the font plus the
sound of pouring and flowing water.
Again, there are angry howls.
The Dean, flummoxed at trying to engage
everyone in the process and saddened that nothing was learned from the organ
pipes, made this statement to the Press, as best as I remember: “I understand
not wanting change for change’s sake. We
must value and honor our past and the rich experience we have had of God. But change is an unavoidable part of our
lives and is demanded if we are to grow.
Wanting no change for no change’s sake is spiritually
deadly.”
It is important to honor and value where we have come
from. This is why we must not demonize
or belittle Judaism. It is also why we
must not belittle or demonize Eastern Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism, or the
great insights of the Reformation. We
must in this all be open to God doing a new, wondrous act.
C.S. Lewis wrote famously, the one prayer that God can never
grant, will never grant, is the prayer after we have received grace and light
from God, the prayer that says, “Encore!”
We need to base ourselves on Jesus
as the living Rock, have full assurance of being beloved by him, and no
fear. Only thus can we serve as living
stones for others. Only thus can the
House of which we are part make truly acceptable sacrifices to God.
In reflecting of these stories this
week, I invite us all to apply Isaiah’s standards of truth, justice, and
fairness with others when looking at our own attachments to the past. Are our feelings in any of these matters firmly
grounded in confidence in Jesus who will never let us down? Or does it grow from fear of losing what we
once enjoyed, and that now find fading or gone?
Do we choose to label and draw lines, rather than take responsibility
for our feelings and enter into uncomfortable conversations with the strange?
Do we choose to be living stones, or
stones of death?
In the name of God,
Amen.
