Living Stones

This blog post is adapted from a talk given at Christ Church Abingdon, UK in August 2023. The Bible excerpt referenced is 1 Peter 2:4-10.

Last summer, a friend from university reached out to me. It was kind of out of the blue. We were really good friends and spent a lot of time together but we simply took different paths after graduation. No harm, no foul, I thought at least. Anyway, she reached out last summer and started asking me questions about Jesus. Now, I work at a church. I really should know how to answer these questions. And intellectually, I do know how to answer her questions. I know how I wanted to answer her questions. But, here I was, sitting in a coffee shop on the phone with this person I’d known for almost ten years who had seen me at my best and my very worst, feeling awkward and insecure about my faith. But she had observed something in me that, when she began to explore faith, she felt like she could and perhaps even should talk to me about it. I had one of those ‘night and day’ conversion stories when I was at university, and she had been there (albeit sometimes at a distance) for the whole 24 hours, so to speak.

With the gift of hindsight, I wish I had this passage from 1 Peter to hand when I spoke to her last summer because it, to me, sums up the gospel and what it means for us today. So that’s what we’re going to talk through this evening through the help of three words that unintentionally form an acronym. If you’re taking notes mentally or literally, these are the three words to remember.

Repentance → Acceptance → Mission

In the Message translation, it says this:

Welcome to the living Stone, the source of life. The workmen took one look and threw it out; God set it in the place of honour. Present yourselves as building stones for the construction of a sanctuary vibrant with life, in which you’ll serve as holy priests offering Christ-approved lives up to God. 

The Scriptures provide precedent:

Look! I’m setting a stone in Zion,
    a cornerstone in the place of honor.
Whoever trusts in this stone as a foundation
    will never have cause to regret it.
To you who trust him, he’s a Stone to be proud of, but to those who refuse to trust him,

The stone the workmen threw out
    is now the chief foundation stone.

For the untrusting it’s. . . a stone to trip over,
    a boulder blocking the way.

They trip and fall because they refuse to obey, just as predicted.

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.

1 Peter 2:4-10 (MSG)

Some context: it is easy to assume that the book of 1 Peter is intended for Jewish Christians because it is commonly attributed to Simon Peter, whose mission was generally located in Jerusalem to the earliest converts from Judaism to Christianity. Paul was, on the other hand, associated with Gentile Christians. However, many scholars now conclude that this letter was written to Gentile Christians, those with no Jewish background. Despite this, the author uses a lot of references to the Old Testament. Why? Because it helps us to know more of God - it is not something to leave aside. It is part of our story. And because this is a letter to the Gentile Christians, we have a lot more in common with the people receiving this letter than we may think.

So when Peter says that they were once not a people and now are the people of God, the presumption is that he’s talking to a bunch of people who may not have had a religious heritage at all before their conversion - or they as a group had lots of different religious backgrounds. But now they have been welcomed into the greater and longer story of the people of God. A title that was once only granted to a select few is now open and available for all through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, God’s own son. That is the gospel message: that we can go from being apart from God to being with him.

In this image of the house being built, Jesus is the cornerstone. A cornerstone is the stone that orientates the building and, up until recently, it was the first one laid. It was the thing everything was built around. So the image is of Jesus as the first stone placed down and the living stones being built up around it, creating a sanctuary that the Message says is to be “vibrant with life.” 

The living stones are those of us who have declared that Jesus is our cornerstone. And together we are building a spiritual house, most commonly understood to be an allusion to the temple - the place where God’s people used to meet with God. This is why this passage is most commonly used as a foundation for Christian ecclesiology, which is the fancy theological word for the theology of the church. 

This is what it means to be the church - each of us contributing to the building of the sanctuary. When looking at a brick wall, it can appear as though bricks are meant to be the same. But if you look closer, they are not all identical. They have different grooves on them from the different places they’ve been bashed, they’re all slightly different shades of brick colour, and they were each created. They didn’t just come out of the ground. They were moulded into those shapes, just as we are being moulded into living stones each day that we walk with God. And our walks with God require these three calls to action: repentance → acceptance → mission

REPENTANCE

This passage doesn’t use this word specifically but it is clear throughout and throughout the whole New Testament that this is part of our call. According to the gospel of Matthew, the first message Jesus begins to preach is, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” (Matthew 4:17, NIV) And, in Luke, he says, “I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.” (Luke 5:32, NIV) To repent is to have a complete change of heart, mind, and action. The term comes from the Hebrew word תשובה (teshuva), which literally means to ‘turn back.’ So, repentance is to turn back to God, to do a 180 degree turn from where you are. In Greek, the language of the New Testament, the word μετάνοια, (metanoia) is used. There is some inference of remorse and sadness but echoes the Hebrew word to turn away from sin. Some scholars argue that ‘conversion’ is actually a better translation of metanoia. This makes me wonder the extent to which we should be sad about our repentance. There is an important and healthy amount of grief and guilt that comes with repentance but turning back to God should perhaps be a joyous occasion. Our passage in 1 Peter points to that. Jesus, the living Stone, is (as verse 4 says), “rejected by humans but chosen by God and precious to him” (1 Peter 2:4, NIV). Is the Stone precious to you? 

I wonder if the thing many of us need to repent of (myself included) is the fact that we’ve been acting like living stones when we’re building wildly off base. We need to convert our hearts, minds, and our actions such that they reflect the preciousness of Jesus. We should certainly be sad that we “disobey the message” (1 Peter 2:8, NIV) but we should probably be glad to repent because it means that our lives will better glorify the Stone, the Stone who should be the most precious thing in our lives.

We’re building mansions all over the place full of ornate and exciting things but we too have actually rejected the cornerstone. Living for Jesus doesn’t always look fun and pretty so we choose the fun and pretty things. It’s not uniquely Christian to say that ‘not all that glitters is gold.’ And to extend the metaphor even further, it’s not even the case that all gold glitters. If you didn’t know its worth, you may pass over a seemingly boring chunk of gold for something more shiny and sparkly. 

A shallow understanding of repentance calls us to be sorry for breaking the rules. A true understanding of repentance shows us that building our lives around any cornerstone other than Jesus is disobeying his message. Jesus tells us to build our lives around him. When we don't do that, we fall short in all kinds of ways that look like breaking rules, but that’s not actually the point. The point is that when we truly turn to Jesus and follow his message, we’ll want to throw off all that hinders us (Hebrews 12:1). 

Perhaps we need to repent and turn to Jesus once again, or for the first time. 

ACCEPTANCE

If you’ve been around evangelical churches, or even if you haven’t, you’ve probably heard the phrase, ‘do you accept Jesus as your Lord and Saviour?’ Sometimes the word ‘personal’ is thrown in there too. So we’re going to take a moment to think about what that means in the context of this passage from 1 Peter. Put simply, it means to trust in Jesus as your cornerstone.

That can sound quite simple as it is easy for us to consider trust as a passive thing but, when we think about it, trust requires a lot of work. I am a relatively insecure person. I had a conversation with my dad earlier this week in which he had to remind and reassure me (again) that he did in fact love and like me. My default is not to trust him (because I have trust issues not because of anything he’s done wrong), so believing what he tells me is hard. Trusting is therefore an active process. It requires me to put down my default position and put on a new one. I don’t know how many of you have had to do that thing with a doctor where they push down on your knee and you have to push back but that’s often what it feels like. Your default position is pushing you down and you need to push really hard to make any progress.

Accepting Jesus as your cornerstone doesn’t just mean agreeing one time to put your trust in Christ and then give up when there’s pressure. It is an active commitment that takes daily renewal. That means constantly having to turn back to God in acts of repentance - yes, because we hurt others and need to say sorry and ask for forgiveness, but also because we drift from the cornerstone. One of the pieces of liturgy we often use says, ‘we have not loved you with our whole hearts.’ And that’s true. We don’t love Jesus with our whole hearts. We constantly and consistently choose other things.

I wonder why this is all the time. Some of us have these beautiful mountain top moments where the Holy Spirit speaks wonderfully into our lives and we feel the presence of Jesus so closely. God’s love surrounds us and we’re overwhelmed. And then life hits and the feeling feels so distant and far away, and we begin to drift again.

One of the things that I didn’t really come to appreciate until recently was that the cornerstone isn’t actually the thing that holds everything up. Stuff can still fall down even when there is a cornerstone. The cornerstone probably won’t go anywhere because it was the first thing to be placed down, but everything else can crumble. Sometimes we can mistake the things in our life crumbling to be a sign that God doesn’t exist. But I have come to realise and forget and realise again that these things aren’t actually related. Sometimes things crumble because we’ve built away from the cornerstone. But, sometimes things just fall down and it has nothing to do with the cornerstone because we live in a broken world. The thing is that the cornerstone stays present in both of those circumstances.

Accepting Jesus as our cornerstone doesn’t mean things won’t crumble. Life will still be hard. And it won’t always be our fault, or even the fault of anyone in particular. Like I said before, sometimes things are just hard because we live in a broken world captivated by sin.

But sometimes life will be beautiful because we are building off of life’s most precious Stone. 

We need to live in a continuous cycle of repentance and acceptance because we are called to do so - repent and accept Jesus into our lives. But this in itself is not enough. We can spin in that cycle for a long time but we’ll stay somewhat stationary. I’m not an engineer as may be evident by my understanding of motion in this metaphor. But, anyway, to move forward we need to go beyond ourselves.

MISSION

Mission is a necessary outpouring of our repentance and acceptance. It is an integral part of being a living stone. It says in verse 9 that we are to declare his praises because we went from being a nobody to a somebody, went from being rejected to being accepted. The spiritual house of living stones should always be growing. As we read before, it needs to be “vibrant with life”  (1 Peter 2:5, MSG). It won’t be that if we keep this good news to ourselves, if we refuse to bring others in and have them add to our number. We have to be a missional people - people who want to share the good news with others.

Recently, I was watching a livestream of a large Christian conference. At one point, we were invited to pray and cry out for our nation and our communities. And I lamented to some degree. Why isn’t that arena bursting at the seams with people desperate to hear the message of Jesus? What if the venue needed to grow because the arena became full of all those people we know and love? And not just at large conferences? What if we got to our next time for baptism and confirmation and we had to split it into multiple services because there were simply too many people wanting to get baptised and confirmed on the same day? I know I’m not the only person with someone we long to know Jesus. And what if we didn’t just wait for these things to happen… What if we actually did something?

Being a Christian can easily become an insular experience if we don’t hear the call to mission. We need to open our ears to what God might do because it’s not just ‘us’ as Christians that this message is for. It’s for all people everywhere. So many people are still walking around not knowing God’s love and mercy, but he is longing for them to become part of his people.

We’re called to be living stones. So let’s be living in this next season, and increase our number so that more know of the good news of Jesus. Just imagine what can happen.