| Scriptures: | Psalm 118:19-29 Acts 4:5-21 |
I rather imagine that nearly all of us know what it’s like to be rejected. Those of us who, like me, are male and of “a certain age” remember a time when adolescent boys were the ones who were expected to call up and ask girls out on a date. If you are male, some of you can probably remember what it was like to screw your courage up to make that telephone call…..only to be told “no”. Conversely, most women, I imagine, at some time in their lives have known the hurt of waiting for that promised telephone call that never comes. Given the mores of today’s youth, now both boys and girls can have the experience of being rejected while making the call or waiting for the call – whether it’s over an actual telephone or via a text message. This is progress? Gays and lesbians know the painful rejection of waiting for a legislature finally to recognize that marriage equality is only simple justice, as Nevada is now struggling to do with the specter of a governor’s veto hovering over the whole process, or to experience an electorate blocking progress as California’s has done.
Throughout our lives we have known all kinds of rejection. The worker knows the frustration of having a good idea rejected by a status-quo-minded boss. A person risks the vulnerability of opening up to another, only to find insensitive misunderstanding. At its most extreme sometimes when a loved one dies we experience that as being rejected by them – illogically, perhaps, but that’s what it feels like. So, we can easily see that rejecting and being rejected make up a significant, albeit negative, part of what it means to be human.
Our experience, then, makes it easy to understand how the image of Christ as the rejected stone which nonetheless became the head or cornerstone was an important image for the New Testament writers. Here was an image with which they could identify, just as we can. They had known not only personal rejection but also the rejection of authority, for to live as captive peoples under an occupying force is to know daily rejection – which is all the worse for being impersonal. For these early followers of Christ to see that he had been rejected by his own people as well as by those in authority was key to making them want to become part of his community of believers. Here was no Teflon superstar who over-awed everyone into submission, but who had no idea of how the people felt deep in their inner core (as an aside, that description reminds me a bit of the review I read last Monday of the Brittany Speers concert). When the prophet Second Isaiah wrote, “He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity (53:3),” although these words did not at the time refer specifically to the Christ, because they so well described his experience and our experience of him, they came to be associated with him.
Yet, if our identification of a man who was rejected was all there was to it, this Jesus of Nazareth might not be the one to whom we bring our ultimate allegiance. There have been others who have suffered and been rejected with whom we could identify, but that doesn’t mean we would worship them – think of Galileo or Luther or Joan of Arc or Martin Luther King Jr. or Matthew Shepherd. Such people we can admire and try to emulate, yet I doubt that any of us would say that we are their disciples.
With this Jesus of Nazareth something more had happened – something which went beyond rejection and in fact used the reality of human rejection to point to the divine will. That’s why the Psalmist’s image of the rejected stone that becomes the chief cornerstone was so significant to the New Testament writers. The Psalmist, most likely, was thinking of Israel – a people rejected and enslaved, yet who had been entrusted to bring the word and will of God to the world. Because “This is the Lord’s doing,” there was a sense of timelessness as well as timeliness about it. The emphasis is on God’s action: “This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.” (The New English Bible translates this verse: “This is the day on which the Lord has acted,” which makes what God is doing so much more powerful.) Each day was for the Israelite a day of special responsibility and joy – a day for proclaiming the will of God and for rejoicing in God’s salvation, despite rejection and the insensitivity of others. God’s chesed – God’s steadfast love – endures forever.
Is it any wonder, then, that the early Christians saw this same image in the Christ? Here was the one who showed how God’s will was to be proclaimed and who demonstrated in his own life the means of salvation. The fact that he was rejected – by his own people, by the authorities, even by his disciples who fled at the crucial moment (as we saw during the mime on Maundy Thursday) – only enhanced what he had come to be and do.
The rejected stone: what a great image! Picture if you would in your mind’s eye someone building a great monument – a bridge, say, or even a new downtown casino. In choosing the stones with which to build, the architect rejects one – oh, for any number of plausible reasons: it came from a country which is supposed to have inferior stones, say; it isn’t pretty enough; it doesn’t fit exactly right into the space which the architect has carved out for it. Now, in such an imagined situation when a stone like this is rejected usually it won’t get used anywhere else. But the marvelous point of our story is that not only is the stone used but it becomes the chief cornerstone of another structure – that structure which we call the Kingdom of God – a structure which puts into proper perspective all of the monuments built to glorify human beings.
In our story from the book of Acts this image of the rejected stone helps the people (and especially the religious authorities) see the nature of the will of God. In the chapter just prior to the one we read Peter and John are going to the temple in Jerusalem, and on the way they are stopped by a man lame from birth who wanted help. Here, again, we see the rejection of suffering, for it is not hard to imagine the many people who passed this man on their way to the temple – good, religious people who nevertheless have no time to spend with one who suffers because they are in too much of a hurry to pray to God. Peter and John not only stop to listen, but they also listen with empathy, for they perceive behind this man’s asking for money what his real needs are. So, Peter is enabled to say, “’I have no silver or gold, but what I have I give you; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, stand up and walk.’” The man is healed, and as G.H.C. Macgregor points out, the Greek word for “healed” is the same as that for “saved”. To be saved, then, is to become a whole, healthy person, capable of fulfilling yourself as a human being.
In Peter’s encounter with this lame man we have a parable for what our Christian attitudes and actions can be toward the rejected: those whose poverty makes us look away, those suffering from prejudice (like the boys Dick Stubrich told us about last week who commit suicide because of taunts about their homosexuality), those who are in anguish in all sorts of ways because of this economic downturn. Such a parable calls us to serve “even the least of these” – the rejected ones.
But now look at what happens as we pick up the story in the passage which we read. Peter’s action in healing the man touches off quite a controversy among the temple authorities. Here we come to that kind of religious rejection that we are most likely to face – the kind of rejection based on the fear of something new or that will rock the boat. So, these authorities respond by asking the question, “By what power or by what name did you do this?” They are challenging Peter and John’s authority, as religious leaders are prone to do.
I imagine you’re already anticipating me here. You know what the moral of the story is: not to be afraid of new ideas or approaches to the work of God, even if they do not coincide with our idea of what God’s work should be. Nor need we be too judgmental about someone who does not fulfill the formal requirements of our religious teaching but who may well have discovered a way of serving God outside the bounds of formal religion.
But what if, in hearing this story, you and I identify with Peter and John? Again, the moral of the story is pretty clear: when we have new ideas, new approaches, new understandings of the will of God, we need not be afraid of the rejection of authority, which will inevitably come. To speak out on an issue or to try to relieve suffering in a controversial way – such as giving medical aid to both sides in a war – may well lead us into the valley of the shadow of rejection. But there is where we will meet the Christ.
The only answer that Peter had for these authorities was that he and John were filled with the Holy Spirit and that they were acting in the name of Jesus Christ. Now, admittedly, there is much that may be contrary to the will of God that can be rationalized by saying you are acting in this name – just think of the Crusades, to take one extreme example. But to bring in, as Peter then does, this image of Christ as the rejected stone which becomes the chief cornerstone is to suggest, at least, that Christ will be the cornerstone of our efforts if we are constantly striving to discover what is in fact God’s will for our lives. We cannot always know with assurance that we are acting on the basis of that will. We must sometimes act in the hope that we are acting faithfully but also with the realization that being human we may well be mis-interpreting God’s will by letting it filter through our human desires about what should be done. Nevertheless, the important point is that we must act not fearing rejection – either the rejection of the suffering of a cross or the rejection of authority (which is another kind of cross).
Peter and John, as these authorities saw, were “uneducated and ordinary men”, but they had been “companions of Jesus”. Our courage to withstand the fear of rejection comes from simply being with Jesus in all the ways we can be with him. Because we as human beings are conditioned so much by rejection and the fear of rejection, we are grateful that the Christ has known our sense of being rejected and has gone beyond that to become the chief cornerstone in a building the magnificence of which we have only barely begun to see. We, too, can become bricks in that building – which is, of course, the Kingdom of God – as we overcome our fear of rejection and witness to our knowledge of the word and will of God.
Amen.
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church/United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
May 3, 2009