LIVING STONES

Scriptures:

Acts 7:55 – 8:1

I Peter 2:4-10

Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory is the story of an unnamed Catholic priest in Mexico during a time of great persecution of the church – in fact, in the town where the story begins the Catholic church is outlawed. This man is called a “whiskey priest” because he has all sorts of weaknesses, including a penchant for self-destruction. He really has a terrible image of himself; yet he is the last representative of the church left in that part of Mexico, and so he feels he must act the part of a priest. He is being hounded and chased down by a police lieutenant – also unnamed – who finally captures him and takes him before a firing squad. As he faces death, the priest feels that his life has been a total failure. But a young boy – again, unnamed – who hears about this priest’s death has his interest in faith reawakened. And the arrival in the town of another priest suggests that the faith will be carried on. This final incident suggests the failure of the lieutenant and the socialists to eradicate religious feelings in the people, since they are now being born again in the young boy. The unexpected arrival of another priest clearly suggests that the church will never be entirely stamped out. The title of the novel, of course, comes from the final line of The Lord’s Prayer, and thus reflects how the kingdom of God will indeed be “forever and ever”. There will always be someone willing to carry on the faith, and people willing to listen and give shelter. Also, the fact that all four of these key characters are not given names gives this story a universal feel. Each one of us can identify with any of these characters.

The Power and the Glory, which I first read in college, came back to mind as I read over the story of the stoning of Stephen in the book of Acts. The impact is strikingly similar. There is Saul, a persecutor of those early Christians, clearly enjoying and participating in the execution of someone who must be killed off lest he stir up unwanted religious feelings among the people. Stephen identifies himself with Jesus on the cross when he says, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them,” and again when he prays, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” In this way he testifies to the strength of the faith he has found through his following of Jesus the Christ.

These are radical statements for someone who is being battered and about to die. No wonder Saul wants him out of the way, so he won’t be able to cause people to doubt the prevailing religious establishment of the day. But, of course, we know what happens to Saul. On the Damascus Road Jesus appears to him, and he becomes Paul, the greatest missionary of the early church. But that transformation started here with the stoning of Stephen. Something had begun to stir inside of the Christian persecutor, Saul, when he heard and saw how Stephen met his death. Like that small boy in The Power and the Glory, an opportunity for faith to flourish had opened up in Saul, later to come to full fruition on that Damascus Road.

We are most often never given to know when our witness influences someone in a way that has lasting consequences and ripples out over the lakes of other peoples’ lives. Those of you who have been teachers may well have had the experience, as many teachers do, of having a former student come back to tell you how you had influenced his or her life, perhaps with a word that you hadn’t even remembered giving. Those of you who have been in business may have made a decision based on your ethics, even if it may not have been the best business decision at the time, and someone who saw you take that stand found that it informed her or his way of doing business down the road. Those of you who have been in a helping profession, like, say, nursing, may have said a comforting word that brought another out of a depression and enabled them eventually to live their life more fully. We don’t necessarily look for these opportunities consciously; often, they just happen. But they do happen because we seek to live our lives rooted and grounded in faith – a faith that proffers these kinds of opportunities to us.

This is what the author of I Peter had in mind when he spoke of his readers as being “living stones”. On the face of it, sounds like a real oxymoron, doesn’t it? Like “jumbo shrimp” or “virtual reality” or “government organization” or the one we’re really aware of right now: “tax return”. A stone is precisely the opposite of what we would think of as “living”. Or is it? Last week in the confirmation class I was talking with Samantha and Amanda about the nature of God, and they were saying that one way to describe God is as encompassing everything in nature – including things like rocks. That reminded me of an illustration I’ve used before (last summer when we were talking about “God in Matter”) that I shared with the girls, and it’s worth using again here in the context of this passage from I Peter.

In his novel The Andromeda Strain Michael Crichton has a group of scientists trying to find a definition for life. After throwing out all the old definitions because one could always find exceptions, they decide that energy conversion is the hallmark of life. But bacteriologist Peter Leavitt challenges this definition by presenting what he calls “three living things”: a swatch of black cloth, a watch, and a piece of granite. The cloth, placed in sunlight, becomes warm – converting radiant energy to heat. When it is objected that this is not purposeful, Leavitt responds, “How do you know it is not purposeful?” The watch has a radium dial which was decaying and thus light was being produced. And finally the granite: “This is alive,” Leavitt said. “It is living, breathing, walking, and talking. Only we cannot see it, because it is happening too slowly. Rock has a lifespan of three billion years. We have a lifespan of sixty or seventy years…. And the rock, for its part, is not even aware of our existence because we are alive for only a brief instant of its lifespan.” So, maybe the fad of pet rocks several years ago wasn’t so crazy after all!

OK, so this fictional account is probably pretty fanciful. But it does illuminate the idea that we should not get locked in to definitions of what constitutes life and not-life. For those first and second century Middle Easterners life was something that they saw all around them in a myriad of forms. And so for the author of I Peter to first speak of Jesus as a “living stone” and then to move on from there to try to get us to see ourselves as “living stones” is to affirm how our being in touch with the life that is in nature and then with our inner natures can help us to build our spiritual houses.

Another aspect of being “living stones” is the way we are connected as “living beings” with our environment. This Tuesday, April 22, is Earth Day, and the United Church of Christ is encouraging churches on this Sunday to celebrate the integrity of creation. That phrase, the “integrity of creation”, means that we are part of a whole when we think about the environment and climate change and, as the very familiar hymn that we sang has it, “of rocks and trees, of skies and seas”. That same hymn says that “All nature sings, and round me rings The music of the spheres.” Or, in not quite so poetic language, here’s how the UCC’s Pastoral Letter on Faith and Environment puts it:

“Our theological sense of place and the natural sciences reveal in startling, magnificent ways a profound relationship among living beings, the elements, and all matter of the universe. The social and the environmental dance together. Each species and habitat, each culture and region, each place and people in the world expresses the divine image. Each embodies an inherent worth that is indeed sacred and good, worthy not only of care, but also of celebration and appreciation in the living of our days.”

I love that phrase, “The social and the environmental dance together.” The blending, the intermingling that happens when we dance is a metaphor for the sense of deep connection we have with all that is around us when we truly feel at-one with our environment. It gives a whole new meaning to the theological idea of atonement – or at-one-ment – when we think of how we are empathetically connected with our environment.

I’d like to think that this is part of what the author of I Peter had in mind when he spoke to his audience as their being living stones: that they were to bring all that was around them – even inanimate matter -- into a relationship with God through Jesus the Christ.

So, we have talked about how being a living stone can mean witnessing to the faith that is within us sometimes when we don’t even know that that is what we are doing, and we have talked about how living stones can connect the social and the environmental when they dance together. A third meaning to being “living stones” is when God uses us to make a church come alive.

This is probably the closest to what I Peter is really getting at. He uses the image of Christ as a cornerstone, which is used elsewhere in the Bible – indeed, I Peter quotes from Isaiah, chapter 28: “thus says the Lord God, See, I am laying in Zion a foundation stone, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone, a sure foundation.” (vs. 16) And the familiar verse from the 118^th Psalm says, “The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.” (vs. 22)

But the author of I Peter is taking these images of erecting a building to another level: Christ becomes not just the foundation of our faith and therefore of our church, but he is a living cornerstone. Because Christ has died and now lives again he lives in our hearts in such a way as to enliven us – to make us something more than just building blocks in a structure.

For us to be living stones means that we are part of a living church. You know, it’s fascinating how many vibrant and lively churches want to be known as “Living Stones” churches. Just a cursory Google search turned up several dozen across the country that call themselves that. Here are just three: Crown Point, IN, Grain Valley, MO, Pickering, OH. There’s also one in Salisbury, MD, which says about itself:  “Living Stones Church offers a unique blend of the current expressions of worshiping Christ.  We believe God has a special work for each of us to do and we encourage each ‘living stone’ to discover their gifts and place of service in the House of God.”

Being part of a living church means being part of something that is organic rather than an organization, an emergent entity rather than an edifice, a growing, giving, grateful group of God’s family that is not afraid of change, because we know that to be living is always to be changing. It means that we envision what it means to be the church as being much more than a building. Al Horkay had a nice turn of phrase at the end of the Trustee’s meeting last week when he said that out of his experience as a realtor he tells people, “Don’t fall in love with something you can buy and sell.” We come alive to God through Jesus the Christ when we think of the church as being made up of those of us who become the living stones that have been stirred by Jesus as the cornerstone and moved to follow in his service.

The author of I Peter is really making a rather remarkable statement when he calls us living stones. Through Jesus, we become something that God can use to build the kingdom, and there is tremendous purpose in that. We really don’t need anything else in life to tell us why life is important and how to live it. All we need to know is that we belong to Christ. That sense of belonging to Christ is what it means to be part of a living church.

As we have been saying throughout the Open and Affirming process that we have been going through, in Jesus Christ, there are no boundaries that hold us in and no walls that keep others out. There are only people united together to build up the kingdom of God – people whose lives have been taken out of darkness and who now reach out through words and faithful living to encourage others to come into this glorious light. The church, then, is a visible sign of God’s kingdom.

Our author now leads us to a peroration that is one of the true high spots of the whole Bible because it tells us who we are and who we can become. It’s worth listening to again:

“But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.” (I Peter 2:9-10)

Chosen – not for privilege but for service; royal – not because we are high and mighty but because we follow a king; holy – not by any action of our own but because we have received God’s mercy and forgiveness; God’s own people. Be and become the people of God, and in that way you will live out what it means to be living stones…..for the glory of God!

Amen

Dave Pomeroy

First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ

Las Vegas, NV

April 20, 2008