Sermon Fifth Sunday of Easter

Text: 1 Peter 2:2-10

I think it was 9th grade, maybe tenth. We had health class that year, and we each had to give a presentation on a topic. I was given Maslow's Hierarchy of needs. It gets complicated, but essentially it's the order of things that you need to function. It's based on a pyramid with core things on the bottom, leading up to the top.

I decided to portray the pyramid instead as a human body. I asked the class to give me items from the pyramid, starting with food, then shelter, companionship and so on. With each thing I added a section of a body, using the words to create a stick-figure of sorts. The first one I made a leg. So there was just a sideways food written on the projector (yep, old fashioned overhead projector.) then put shelter as an arm, companionship as the torso. At first they had no idea what I was doing, then as it became a body, they understood that without each of these things we cannot be a whole person.

I told this to my math teacher as we were walking down the hallway later in the day, and she was so interested she stopped in the middle of the hall. It was pretty cool, one of only a few times I've made a teacher or professor speechless.

In our text from Peter this morning we see in someways Peter's hierarchy of needs. Peter uses two different ideas to show who we are, starting with food, and then shelter. He talks first about Spiritual Milk, it being what we need, what gives us nourishment so we grow into salvation. I like this image of us being fed. So often the only example is that of bread and wine, which are wonderful images, but we can go out and buy bread and wine for ourselves. We can lose sight that we are given the bread and wine through Christ giving his body and blood. In being newborn infants, we have no choice to get the food on our own, and we are inclined to urge for milk. Give a baby anything and they will attempt to suckle at it. I love Peter's image of us longing for the nourishing mercy God gives to us, and through that growing into salvation.

I also love Peter's second image, the cornerstone, living stone, and spiritual house. Cornerstones are somewhat a thing of the past. They are mostly just symbolic cornerstones now days, a block that lists the building date of a structure, sometimes not even at a corner. In fact I looked up cornerstone online and the first example image I found had the cornerstone as a metal plaque about 4 feet above the ground, that sort of loses the point. A real cornerstone is the first stone placed. It is often the largest stone, and based on it all other stones are then placed, allowing the stones to be square with one another so the structure stands. Without a cornerstone a building will be out of sync with itself and could collapse.

In January of 2008 I traveled to Israel and Palestine. We explored the old city of Jerusalem for a few days while there, and one of the sites we saw was the Western Wall of the Temple Mount. It is all that is left of the ancient temple grounds that existed in Jesus' time. And in fact much of the wall has been added over the years, but the bottom half or so are from the time of Herod and the second Temple. Part of the wall is the cornerstone of the complex. It is a block about 6 feet high and 12-18 feet long. I have a picture of my sister standing in front of it and she does not reach the top. That is a cornerstone. Something that you cannot ignore, something so solid that it gives strength to the rest.

But what if we were Peter's audience? 1 Peter was written probably around 75 to 95 AD, after the time when the Temple was destroyed by Rome in 70. For them the cornerstone is not the huge block my sister is standing in front of, but it was the block of the temple itself, the block that has been destroyed. Just as Jews of that time are trying to figure out what to do with the temple destroyed, so are Christians, many of which see themselves as Jewish as well.

And so Peter changes the dialogue. No longer is the temple the spiritual house, built of holy stones upon the cornerstone. Now Jesus is the cornerstone and the spiritual house is comprised of us, believers, living stones rooted upon Christ.

And, Peter, himself called the rock, builds upon the image even more than that. We are to let ourselves as living stones be built into a spiritual house. But it is not us that builds, but God that builds us up upon Jesus, the cornerstone.

In Peter and Jesus' time living stones were rooted things. A large megalith, or an important stone, like Stonehenge, or the inscribed columns of the temple, would have been called living, because they were rooted in an important place. They have life because they are rooted to something, much as a plant is rooted to the ground. For Peter living stones are now rooted in Jesus, the Word of God, but they are just as much rooted in the world. Daniel G. Deffenbaugh, Professor of Religion at Hastings College says “for [Peter], the revelation of Christ was destined to happen in the midst of creation itself, and it was here that Christians were called to be a priestly community in anticipation of the [coming kingdom of God]”

And so we find ourselves. A spiritual house of living stones, built upon Jesus our cornerstone, rooted in Christ, and rooted in this world, God's good creation, that Jesus came into to save. The church, this spiritual house built of us living stones, this is a place of refuge and welcoming, not a place to hide, a place to escape from the world, but a place to receive spiritual milk, so we may be nourished to go out into the world proclaiming. To proclaim Christ's message that when your life is falling down around you, when you are fearful, lost, crumbling, here is a place with a cornerstone, it is a place where you will be built up, a place to be rooted.

Peter says “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.”

We are rooted living stones not so that we can escape and ignore or view ourselves as better than the world, but so that, nourished by and rooted in Christ, we can be sent out into darkness again showing others Christ's light. For unlike those thinking the end would happen yesterday, Christ's message is not that we will be taken out of the world, but that Christ is in the world. We are rooted living stones built in the world, and built upon Christ the cornerstone.

Let us pray,

God our creator, our builder, lift us up to be able to proclaim your glory, your mercy. We thank you for giving us a solid base to stand upon, Christ our cornerstone. Help us to lift others upon this stone.

Amen