Easter Five, 2011, Immanuel Chapel, I Peter 2:2-10
Who are you?
I really wanna know.
Tell me, who are you?
Cause I really wanna know.
If those words ring a bell, you may be a fan of the English rock group “The Who,” or you watch the TV show, CSI.
This morning, on the basis of our epistle lesson from I Peter, we consider, “Who are you?” That question is not addressed so much to you as individuals but to you, Immanuel Chapel. Who are you?
First, you are people who have tasted that the Lord is good. Your taste of the Lord’s goodness began when you were born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus. In your faith in Christ, you have a taste of the new life that is kept for you in heaven. You have an inheritance imperishable, pure and unfading. No tax, inflation or disputed will, is able to diminish its value. Your living hope of a new life is guarded by God until the time that Christ reveals the full riches of your salvation.
Therefore, Peter urges you to be like infants in their craving for their mother’s milk. The night before Kyle McClellan pitched this past week, his wife told him he could sleep downstairs so their five day old baby would not keep him awake. When an infant’s craving for its mother’s milk is not soon satisfied, it goes into emergency mode emitting a piercing full bodied wail, red faced, hands and arms tensed and shaking. When mom places the infant to her breast, the emergency siren becomes a gurgle. Once again, life is good and pleasant, hunger satisfied. Peter wants you to have that same intense longing for the “pure spiritual milk” of God’s grace in the risen Christ.
God’s grace nourishes you to grow into salvation, loving not only God, but one another as well. Filling up on the pure spiritual milk of the gospel enables you to shed behavior that is not consistent with what we experience in the risen Christ Jesus. Growing into salvation is a lifetime matter of continually yearning for more grace to overcome our weakness.
However, when we fill up on the story of God’s love for you and for the world, that story will put you at odds with the world and even at odds with yourself as you struggle to grow into live accordingly. The author Flannery O’Conner once said, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.” The church is always an odd collection of saints and sinners. The words of the Reverend Will B. Dunn in the comic strip Kudzu describes the church all too well as he addresses his own congregation: “Brothers and sisters…Friends and neighbors…Heathens and hypocrites! ---Have I left anyone out?”
The church is an odd collection of people with a variety of personalities and perceptions, sometimes meshing in pursuing a God pleasing united goal and sometimes clashing over which direction to go. Nevertheless, you are bonded together by the resurrection of Jesus. In baptism you were brought into Christ and in Holy Communion Christ enters directly into your body and being to nourish you. However, you are always susceptible to someone saying, “Oh, grow up would you?” Grow up into your salvation, that is.
It’s being a variety of people in Christ that leads us to Peter’s next picture of who you are. You are a people who have come to a Living Stone. A wood carver or a sculptor of stones will say that they may have to wait for the block of wood or stone to tell the carver or sculptor what object is within waiting to emerge through the artists skills. In that sense you could say the wood or stone is alive. But many people in Jesus’ day didn’t see anything in Jesus with which and upon which they could build their lives. He had no apparent form or beauty to make him desirable; therefore, he was despised and rejected. The longer his opponents looked at him the less desirable he became. But God made him the cornerstone upon which he would build his church. God declares through Isaiah, “Behold, I am the one who has lain as a foundation in Zion, a stone, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone of a sure foundation.”
You also are living stones which God is using to build up a spiritual house.
God takes all of your various personalities and perceptions and cultural backgrounds and binds you together, with Christ as the cement, building up a temple in which spiritual sacrifices are offered to God to the praise of his glory.
Just as Jesus did not look like much and yet was God’s chosen precious cornerstone upon which to build His church, so you, Immanuel, may not look very precious to the folks in this community or passing by on old Halls Ferry Road. But God sees you differently.
In 1957 some Buddhist monks in Thailand hired a crane to move a large clay statue of Buddha because a new highway would run straight through their temple. When the crane lifted the huge statue a loud crack was hear. The head monk stopped the work and because of rain had the clay statue covered with a tarp. Later the night the monk, flashlight in hand went to check on the statue. When he went under the tarp and shined a flashlight on the idol his eye caught a slight gleam. He fetched a chisel and began carefully tapping on the clay. What he discovered was solid gold Buddha hidden under the clay, ten and a half feet tall and weighing two and a half tons. Research revealed that some ancient monks had sought to protect the idol from plundering by an approaching army.
Immanuel, the good news of the Christian gospel proclaims with delight and certainty that you are precious and holy in God’s eyes, because Christ, God’s living and precious stone dwells in you and has made you a delight in God’s eyes.
Eugene Peterson sums it all up in his paraphrase of the rest of our text. “But you are the ones chosen by God, chosen for the high calling of priestly work, chosen to be a holy people, God’s instruments to do his work and speak out for him, to tell others of the night-and-day difference he made for you-from nothing to something, from rejected to accepted.”
Who are you, Immanuel? You are a people who have tasted that the Lord is good. You are a people who have come to Christ the Living Stones and are yourselves Living stones. You are chosen by God to be a holy people telling the wondrous things God in Christ has done. That’s why we sing a new song today. That’s why we come in worship and praise to God expressed by organ, trombone, trumpet guitar drum and voices. That’s why we will come with craving hearts to fill up on Christ in the bread and wine of Holy Communion. That’s why we will sing at the close of the service that we are sent by God’s blessing, our true faith confessing, to work for God’s kingdom and answer his call.
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