Have at ye… oh wait, am I sure I’m still here?
John 14:1-14; 1 Peter 2:2-10; Psalm 31:1-5,15-16; Acts 7:55-60
Well, we seem to still be here. You may have heard that a certain Christian radio personality has been pushing May 21st as the date of the rapture. Of course, if there was a rapture, I’m going to have to change this intro quite drastically. But, I knew I was going to have to mention it eventually, and with that out of the way, how do you like being a stone?
No, really. I know last week I mentioned that we are God’s sheep, but this week the metaphor is stones. Nice, pet-rock style stones. It shouldn’t be surprising that Peter calls us stones, the guy’s name means “rock” after all, but it’s still a little interesting. Let’s see how he got there. The reading starts out with Peter telling us to seek after the basics of faith first, before getting into the fancy stuff, and then once we’ve experienced God’s goodness we move on to step two.
Now I don’t mean to imply that is any kind of “standard progression for believers”. It’s just the way Peter is using to describe the Christian life to his intended audience. So he says, “Alright guys, you’ve been good with simple stuff, you know God is good. So here’s the deal: as you get closer to the Stone of stones, you are being build into God’s temple as both walls and priests, giving God sacrifices of praise, time, money, and the like.”
Then he goes on to quote a few passages from the Psalms and Isaiah. From Isaiah 28, “See, I lay a stone in Zion, a chosen and precious cornerstone, and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame.” He carries on to say that to us as believers, that cornerstone is precious, but to people who don’t believe he references two other Scriptures, one from Psalm 118 and one from Isaiah 8: “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” “A stone that causes men to stumble and a rock that makes them fall.”
He does a rather curious thing here. For people who don’t yet know Jesus, He is a stumbling block — something to trip them up. How would Jesus trip up an unbeliever you might ask? Well, it depends on how you view it. Jesus has a wonderful habit of saying things that make Christians feel good and people who aren’t Christians get mad. Take our Gospel text for instance. In 2 verses he says something that infuriates non-Christians and even a lot of people who label themselves as Christian: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Christians hear this and focus on the first part, that Jesus is the way, truth, and life, and get a few flavors of excited. Non-Christians tend to focus on the latter part, seeing just another way Christians are bad and exclusive.
The unfortunate part is that the very words that would bring them life are those that drive them away. In our culture of universalistic relativism, where what’s true for me is true for me and what’s true for you is true for you, the idea that Jesus is the only way through whom to reach God is a giant stumbling block. But what Peter is basically saying is that this is nothing new. They stumble over Christ’s words and that’s just how it’ll be.
But then Peter switches gears, and starts talking about the body of Christ, the Church. What is the church’s job, according to this section of Peter? Well, I’ll tell you in Peter’s own words: “You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” So what’s our job? To declare praise of God.
Ok, so what does this mean then? There’s a few things involved here, in part because it’s never specified to whom we should make this declaration. That makes me think that there’s two parts to what it is to declare God’s praise. The first is to give praise back to God. It’s a good portion of why we’re here this morning actually, to tell God how amazing and wonderful and awesome and super He is. The other part of declaring God’s praise is telling the people around us what he has done for us.
That’s the harder part. It’s easy to tell God what He did; it’s another thing entirely to tell others. But if we think God did something important enough for us that we’re going to tell Him about it, why not tell others? Sure, it’s a lot easier to deal with the “Immortal, Invisible, God only Wise”, but if we just tell God, no one around is going to know how good God is, they’ll just carry on assuming that He is something to stumble over and occasionally mention in a TV-friendly curse.
Peter even ends this section of his first letter with that kind of message: “Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.” The implication is, there are still people out there who are not a people, who have not received mercy, and are yearning for it, even if they don’t know what exactly they’re yearning for. People struggling with guilt, with a sense of not belonging to anything. People who turn to anything but God, who they only see as something to trip over, when God is really who they need to give them the love they so desire. But how will they know about our Loving God, if no one tells them?