“Like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house.”
I’ve given you all a stone
today. You might like to hold it as you listen. You can take it home with you –
in fact, please do! Put it somewhere special. Decorate it if you like, or don’t
if you’d rather not.
Let’s ponder these stones for
a moment, though. Each one is different – a different shape, colour and size.
Some are smooth and round, some have rough edges where they have been broken at
some point in their lives. I wonder where your stone came from, and what
stories it could tell if it had a voice. Perhaps it was once part of a
mountain. Perhaps it is limestone, built out of the shells of tiny sea
creatures. Perhaps it has been at the bottom of the ocean, or the middle of a
desert at some point in its long life. But now here it is, in your hand.
The Bible is full of stones,
like the stony Middle Eastern landscapes which the people who wrote it knew. Of
course, there is lush, green, fertile land in Israel, but there is also a great
deal of desert, rocky wilderness in which life is tough.
Maybe it’s no surprise, then,
that those make their way into so many Biblical stories.
In the Old Testament, Jacob
uses a stone for a pillow when he lies down in the middle of nowhere and dreams
of a ladder reaching from earth to heaven. He’s on the run from his family,
having stolen his twin brother’s birthright, so he is amazed to find that God
is still with him. He sets up the stone as a marker at the place he calls
“Bethel” literally the “house of God”.
Stones were used as markers
in other stories too. When the Israelites crossed the river Jordan into the
Promised Land, God told each tribe to bring a stone to make a cairn. In times
to come they would see it, and show it to their children and remember the
journey – and the God who had rescued them. These weren’t the only stones in
that journey. The Ten Commandments were
written by God on tablets of stone – another reminder of what the priorities of
their new nation should be.
Stone was a symbol of
permanence. It endured. It was solid. It said, “we are here to stay, and so is
our God.”
Eventually the Israelites
built themselves a stone Temple to worship in, replacing the temporary wooden
structures that had gone before it. The altar was of stone too, unhewn stone,
like a drystone wall. They weren’t to use chisels on it, presumably so they
wouldn’t be tempted to carve images into it.
Of course, stones could also
be instruments of death. David killed the Philistine giant Goliath with a sling-stone
, and stoning was a common means of execution. Stones could make life tough in
other ways too. The stony soil in the parable of the sower couldn’t nourish the
seeds which fell on it. They sprang up, but then withered and died.
And stones could be barriers.
The stone that was rolled across the mouth of Jesus’ tomb was meant to make
sure his body stayed where it was. “Who will roll the stone away?” asked the
women who came to the tomb to anoint Jesus. But God, it turned out, had that
problem sorted out – stones were no barrier to him, any more than death was. I
could go on. When you start looking for stones in the Bible you find them
everywhere.
But let’s look at the
readings we heard today. There were stones in both of them, but they were of a
very different kind to the ones we are holding in our hands, very different
from those other Biblical stones I have
been talking about. The stone in the Gospel reading was St Peter, one of our
Patron saints. His name was really Simon, but Jesus called him Petros,
the rock. The name is a signal that Peter will be part of the foundation of the
new community he is building. We find the same idea in the first letter of
Peter, which talks about “living stones”. The author almost certainly isn’t St
Peter. It is too late and too elegantly written to be the work of a Galilean
fisherman. But the person who wrote it might have given it his name because he
had known and followed him. He certainly seems to have stones on his mind. He
talks about Jesus as the cornerstone of a new building. The cornerstone is the
stone all the others are lined up with. It is vital, but it is only the
beginning. It isn’t a building on its own. And that’s where we come in, because
we are called to be stones too, “living stones”, like Jesus, used by God to
build with.
I was struck by this phrase
“living stones” this week as I thought about this passage. It’s an odd phrase. I
wondered whether it was a common metaphor at the time, or whether this writer
had invented it. It seems that he probably did. It’s not used anywhere else in
the Bible, and doesn’t seem to be used in this sense in classical literature
either.
But his hearers would have
understood what he meant, because it grows out of ideas that were very much in
people’s minds at the time.
Both the Gospel and the
letter were probably written at some point shortly after AD 70, the date when
the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans. It was a huge crisis point
for the Jewish people. This massive stone edifice had looked indestructible, as
if it would stand forever, but the Romans had other ideas, and razed it to the
ground. Today there is just one wall of it left, the Western or wailing wall,
where Jewish people go to pray.
The Romans didn’t just
destroy a building when they knocked the Temple down, though; they destroyed an
entire religious system. Ancient Judaism was based on sacrifice. This was how
you drew close to God. Now there was nowhere to sacrifice, so how were you to
encounter God, to be strengthened, forgiven , healed? Some turned increasingly
to their scriptures and their laws, and focussed on these – the Pharisees - but
those who followed Jesus said that they’d met God in him, a flesh and blood
person. Once he was no longer physically with them, they believed his presence
could still be felt through his Spirit at work in their communities as they
learned to love and serve one another. They had met with God within the stone
walls of the Temple, now they met him within the living stones of Jesus and the
Christian community. They didn’t need monumental marble to mark out their
sacred space; they made it themselves whenever they gathered together.
And this is still our calling;
to be the “living stones” that make a Temple for our own time, a place where
people can find God – not the only place of course, but one we deliberately
make together.
To live up to that calling to
be living stones, we need to ask ourselves two questions about ourselves.
First are we “living”? That
doesn’t just mean that being physically alive, with breath in our bodies and a
steady heartbeat, though that’s a good start! We also need to be spiritually
alive, alive with the life of God. That’s a hard thing to describe, but my
experience is that we know it when we find it. It’s not about being happy or
feeling that your life is all sorted out. It is more to do with knowing that
you aren’t alone, whatever it is you are going through God is going through it
with you, that you have access to strength beyond your strength. All sorts of
things can get in the way of that. Resentment, anxiety and the burdens of
unforgiven sin can all deaden us spiritually. But it is often when things are
apparently going well for us that we are most at risk of dying spiritually. We get
smug and self-satisfied. We think we are fine just as we are, that we have all
we need. We close ourselves off to anything beyond us and we stop growing and
reflecting. The good news is, though, that God is good at bringing the dead to
life – this is the God who raised Jesus from death. He is good at turning stone
into flesh. He promised the Prophet Ezekiel that he would take away hearts of
stone and replace them with hearts of flesh. The first reading summed it up. “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”. Through loving service, through
the Bible, through prayer and worship and through one another God can bring us
to life if we let him.
The second question we need
to ask is about the stony part of that phrase. When we thought about stones
earlier we saw they could be used for a lot of different purposes. A stone is
just a stone until it is used for something. The “living stones” which the
Bible talks about are very specifically meant to be put to use to build a
Temple, joined to others to make a place where people can meet with God. A
stone may be very fine, very beautiful, but on its own it can’t make a
building. Of course we can live good and holy lives on our own, but we are
called to do more than that. The stones God needs are the ones who are prepared
to be committed to the wall, set in place next to others – perhaps not of their
choosing - so that the whole structure can be strong, more than the sum of its
parts. “Let yourselves be built into a spiritual house” says the
reading. That’s why it matters that we come together, that we learn together,
that we reach out together, because together we can build the generous place of
welcome, the safe and holy space that we, and those around us, really need.
I don’t know what you will do
with your stones, but I hope they will help you to think about your own
calling, to be a living stone, alive with the life of God, part of a Temple
that is big enough to welcome all who come to it.
Amen.
