Acts 7:55-60, Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16, 1 Peter 2:2-10, John 14:1-14
You are a people. Once you were individuals, but now you are a people. You were always persons, and you belonged to other people, and you still do, but now you are a people. You are more than members of a church, you are more than adherents of an institution, you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people. Once you were no people, but now you are God’s people.
And you know the way. You are a people who know the way. You know the way to the truth, and you know the way to the life. You are a people who know where to go for truth and where to get your life. You know his name, who is the way. The life in him is God’s life, and the truth in him is God’s faithfulness. You know him to be the way, and not a wall around the life and truth. His way has no walls along it, and his life and his truth spread out from his way, and all across the world.
You know the way to God the Father. There are many ways to God. Jews and Muslims know the same God we do, they pray to the same God we do. I have prayed in synagogues with Jews more times than I can count, and I can sing Avinu Malkeinu with gusto, but only occasionally do they call God “Father,” as one of many metaphors. I have prayed in mosques with Muslims, and I have felt their matchless devotion to the same God I pray to, but they never, ever call God “Father.” They have 99 names for God, and “Father” is not one of them.
But you know the way to God as Father, because you go the way there with God’s Son, God’s only son. And only because of him is God a Father. The God of Jesus is not some general father of mankind or some uber-father of the world. The Romantics had it wrong, Schiller and Beethoven had it beautifully wrong, Michelangelo had it gloriously wrong; that way leads to all kinds of dangers, not least were World War 1, and then Fascism. That way is not to the truth of God the Father. To get to the truth and the life of God as Father you have go there in the way of Jesus.
In the way of Jesus it’s about intimacy, the intimacy of a little child with a parent, and of a parent with her child. It’s about safety and security, like you’re in your mother’s arms. It’s about God feeding you with God’s own life, like a mother nursing you with “pure spiritual milk,” as St. Peter dares you to imagine. It’s about the truth of God as faithfulness, like the passionate loyalty of a mother, and God’s care for you like the unshakable protection of a father. That’s the kind of God as Father that Jesus is the way to, and he takes you with him deep inside the intimate, inner life of God.
You are a people who know the way. And you know the way God comes to you. You know that God comes to you as your shepherd in the valley of the shadow of death. You know God comes to you in the oil on your head and in the breaking of the bread. In the mark of the nails in his hands you meet your Lord and God. You know these ways, and later this month, on Pentecost, you will remember how God comes to you in the Holy Spirit, and how the Spirit stays and dwells inside you.
You are God’s house. And in God’s house are many dwelling places, many rooms. How many rooms do you have today? How many of you have logged in? In your house for God are many rooms. There were rooms in the Temple in Jerusalem. Each rebuilding of the temple made more rooms. In those rooms you sat and ate your sacrifice with God. In the glorious and final temple of the vision of Ezekiel, there were 120 rooms, where even the Gentiles could come and eat with God. That’s what Jesus means, that the communion of his people is God’s new temple for all the world.
In the days of St. Peter’s First Epistle the only buildings the Christians had were their own homes. Their only altars were the tables they ate on. They had no images, no shrines, no priesthood, and the Romans condemned them as atheists, because they could see no signs of any gods among them. The Jews at least had a temple and a priesthood, and the Romans tolerated them as long as they kept their God to their own people. But these Christians were welcoming everybody in without regard, and all withdrawing from the service of the Roman gods, which put them in danger of the Empire.
How to deal with that danger is all through First Peter, but in our lesson for today St. Peter rises to affirmation. His rhetoric is unschooled and his metaphors mashed, but with power he tells them who they are: you are a people, you are a priesthood, you are a temple, you are a dwelling place for God, a house for God built of yourselves as living stones. Stones that live. An awkward metaphor.
Unless you are a structural engineer. Take our church building for example. Do you know much is going on within the stones of our building? With its arches and pinnacles and flying buttresses? Those stones are not just sitting there—they carry great forces of tension and compression.
The stones in our flying buttresses are living stones indeed. An engineer told me that if we took the pinnacles off the corners of the roof, the whole vaulting beneath them would eventually collapse! Those stones in our building are working stones, and you might call them stones that live.
You are a people, you are the living stones, and the wonder is that God dwells in you, that’s the wonder, and you are the sign. You are a sign for the world. The other signs we’ve looked at these last few weeks are signs for you, and for your faith and hope and comfort. But for the world the sign is you (as I said two weeks ago).
No, you are not the proof! There is no proof of God for the world, but the best sign to the world of the life and truth of God is nothing other than vital communities of believers, like you, quietly building each other up, and opening yourselves in welcome and service, to exhibit to the world God’s love. You are the sign, and God's presence in you is the wonder.
You know the way. You know the way from the world to God, and you are the way from God to the world. You are God’s way and you are God’s people. God loves you.
Copyright © 2020 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
No comments:
Post a Comment