Sermon: Like Living Stones

Paxton Presbyterian Church, built in 1732 in Harrisburg, PA

"Like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house" (1 Peter 2:5).  I grew up in limestone country of Franklin County, Pennsylvania, where the old farm houses were built out of limestone, as were the barns, the fences, and the churches.  All built out of stone, which settlers found in the fields as they cleared the land.  Did you ever consider yourself to be like a stone? We’re talking about rock, hewn to the right size by a mason. To be useful in a stone building, the stone must be a common size so that it fits with other stones to form a wall. Unlike today’s construction materials of wallboard, insulation, and vinyl siding you don’t put your fist through a stone wall.

Like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house. As a boy growing up helping on a farm in limestone country, I learned that the first harvest was the stone harvest. Stones are a hindrance in the field and do all sorts of damage to farm machinery and keep seeds from sprouting.  So after the spring plowing, the farmer would roam the plowed fields with a tractor and wagon with three or four teenagers like me, and we would pick stones, throw them on the wagon, and haul them to a stone pile somewhere out of the way.  Those stone piles are pretty useless, they become surrounded by briar patches, habitat for rabbits and snakes. But when you put stones together one next to another in construction, they provide the longest lasting roads that last centuries, the safest fortresses, the most solid homes.  Consider yourself to be like a stone.

Like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house. Actually, too many people live as though they are inanimate objects that never move.  Living stones are like the stones Jesus pointed to when challenged entering Jerusalem, a city built out of stone.  Pharisees complained at the crowds shouting praises for Jesus.  His response, “If they were silent the very stones would shout” (Luke 19:40).  Living stones are what once were inanimate but now are alive in the Spirit.  Jesus who was killed, put in a tomb sealed with a rock, then raised to life.  Peter calls the risen Christ a living stone, who was once dead brought to life, a life that death, the final solution of evil, could not contain.  Consider yourselves to be like Jesus, a living stone, raised from the dead to life.

Like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house. As a carpenter's son, Jesus knew how to build a house that would survive the ravages of time and nature.  Build your house on rock not sand.  As he approached his death on the cross, he prepared his disciples for when we would be absent.  "Don’t let your hearts be troubled.  Believe in God, believe also in me.  In my Father's house there are many dwelling places...I go there to prepare a place for you"  (John 14:1-2).  Room, dwelling place, mansion, spiritual house, however we translate it, it means a place were disciples do what God desires, a place to abide, commune, enjoy each other and God.

Living stones animated to life, raised to new life, a do over life, let yourselves be built.  Recognize here, the difference between the builder and the buildee.  God builds.  We provide the construction material.  Jesus is both builder and material.  He is builder as the preparer of our abiding place with God and community.  He is the foundation cornerstone as the bringer of grace.                                      

Like living hewn stones prepared for construction, take another look at the tragedies of your life.  Those hard experiences which cause us to ask the questions of the Book of Job, why do bad things happen to good people?  God does not sit in heaven and decide that we're having too much fun and so zaps us with bad news.  No, like a good parent, God allows us to experience the consequences of our actions when we abuse a loved one, bully a neighbor, pollute our water, soil and air.  God does not parcel out good and bad experiences. 

HOWEVER, we learn from the book of Job that God uses trials of life like a master mason and chisels away the unneeded excess, to shape us into hewn stone ready for construction for life in community.  Readying us for joining others who together will form a wall, who in turn will join other walls to form a room, who in turn will join other rooms to form a house, a spiritual house, a dwelling place for God.                  

            

Consider yourselves a construction site. Consider the church a construction site where God is at work. Please excuse our mess while we are under construction. This is a hard hat area. Wear your safety glasses, and steel toed shoes.

Like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, where you abide with God and God with you, where you live freely and lovingly with others and they with you. That’s what heaven is. We get a glimpses of it here as we meet God in the face of others. We will know it fully in God’s time. But for now, don’t be troubled when trials and tragedy strike. We ask why God? Didn’t we pray right? Didn’t we believe enough? Didn’t we work hard enough?  Instead of these questions, ask the more empowering questions: where is love in this picture? How can I participate in that love? Ask these questions and let God turn the foundation of your life from sinking sand into solid rock. Following the leading of these questions and allow God to plow the field that raises you to the surface; to pick you from that plowed field, to reach and take you from the stone pile, to hew you to fit with others in the wall or community.  Alone, we damage things and hinder life.  Together, we become something blessed, a spiritual house, a blessed community where all thrive! 

The surprising joy is that through the pain, after the pain, beyond the pain, our service as living stones is not how well we can whip our neighbors into place, but just to be there in community, in line, in fellowship with them, fitting perfectly with them and they with you – abiding and shining to the glory of the master builder.

           

Come to Jesus Christ, the living stone and like living stone, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, where God is loved and honored, where neighbor and self merge into something greater, something grander.  To the glory of God.

A sermon "Like Living Stones" by the Rev. Dr. John M. Best to the Pine Island Church, 7888 8th Street, Kalamazoo, MI on October 14, 2018 based on Job 1:1, 2:1-10 and 1 Peter 2:2-10.