Dr. Joe Emerson

April 24, 2005

"The Ultimate Test"

Text: I Peter 2:1-9

 

Scripture: Rid yourselves, therefore, of all malice, and all guile, insincerity, envy, and all slander.  Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation – if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.

 

Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.  For it stands in scripture:

 

"See, I am laying in Zion a stone,

  a cornerstone chosen and precious;

  and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame."

 

To you then who believe, he is precious; but for those who do not believe

 

"The stone that the builders rejected

  has become the very head of the corner,"

and

"A stone that makes them stumble,

  and a rock that makes them fall.

 

They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do.

 

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

 

The year is100 C.E.  It is seventy years after Jesus has died and nearly forty years after the death of the last of the disciples. Domitian, the Roman Governor begins what is the first universal persecution of the church.  Nero was very vocal in Rome.  Domitian wants to destroy the Christian movement completely.  Out of that persecution and, three authors write to the Christian community, each of them taking the name of an apostle, each of them offering advise on how the church ought to respond to the persecution.

 

The first is the Book of Revelation created to St. John.  Basically, he says, "Don’t worry about it.  Christ is going to return shortly, and it is all going to be all right."  The second one, attributed to Paul, was the Book of Hebrews.  It simply said, "Christ suffered.  He is our chief priest.  Hang in there.  Your reward is going to come in heaven." 

 

Peter has a different spin on it.  The First Letter of Peter to the people under dire persecution and the threat of death is that "This presents to you a golden opportunity to witness where you are by how you live, indeed by how you may have to die."  He compares Jesus to a living stone and then he says to these people, "You are living stones."

 

The scripture lesson for today may refer back to when Peter made his confession of faith to Jesus.  Jesus responds, "Thou art the rock."  Perhaps it refers back to that time when Jesus was coming into Jerusalem on a donkey, and the people were crying out.  The Pharisees said to them, "Don’t cry out!"  Jesus said to them, "If they don’t cry out, the very stones (the living stones) will cry out."  Peter says, "Let them see you live out your faith in spite of and in the midst of life.  You are living stones." 

 

These people were living under no illusion.  Martyrdom might come to them.  How could they not escape the knowledge that this could happen.  All of the apostles, save one, had met violent deaths.  In the Book of Acts, James the son of Zebedee was killed.  Matthew was slain on a sword in Ethiopia; Philip is hanged in Phrygia; Bartholomew is flayed alive in Armenia; Andrew is crucified; Thomas is run through with a lance; Thaddeus is shot with arrows; a cross goes up in Persia for Simon the Zealot, and Peter, the chief apostle is crucified upside down in Rome.  There are no illusions or guarantees.  There is no promise that God is going to intervene.  There is no promise that you are going to make it to heaven.  The big news is just this: Here is a unique opportunity in the midst of devastation to indicate what it is like to live as a follower of Jesus Christ, as a living stone.

 

Those who appreciate the great opera performed by IU’s School of Music were treated to The Dialogue of the Carmelites by Poulenc.  Those who saw it were moved by the end of it when these Carmelite nuns decide to choose martyrdom rather than to violate what they believed to be important.  You hear the guillotine as one after another of them dies.  When it is all over, you are absolutely drained, but you are sure that they were victorious.  Music means something and that music moves us when sheer words do not.

 

The twentieth century has seen its share of Christian martyrs.  Who cannot have a chill run through them when you see Archbishop Oscar Romero in San Salvador.  He takes on the rich, the insiders, and the government on behalf of the poor and proclaims that this is who Jesus died for.  He is saying mass in the cathedral one night, and just as he lifts up the cup of salvation, he is cut down - shot in the back by the powerful.  It started a revolution.

 

Those of us who were followers of Martin Luther King Jr. can remember him saying in that sermon preached in Memphis not only that "I may not get to the Promised Land, but you will get there," but he also says, "I would like to live a long time.  There is something to be said about longevity, but if I don’t...." and he didn’t.  There are more important things than living a long life. 

 

It has been less than two weeks but I doubt that very many of you remember the name Maria Ruzicka.  Maria was a golden-haired California girl who saw the tragedy that is unfolding in Iraq.  She thought that she could make a difference.  She went to Iraq not on behalf of the government but on behalf of some Christians who sent her there.  Her chosen task was to bind up the wounds of those who had quite unintentionally been a part of it because of where they lived and who they were.  A car bomb ended her life.  Maria Ruzicka.  At least for a while, remember the name.

 

What Peter is saying, young people, is don’t expect any kind of special treatment because you happen to be Christian.  Smooth it over by saying you are a royal priesthood, a holy nation, but that doesn’t keep you from suffering, from being abused, and having the opportunity to witness in the midst of it.

 

We all love the beatitudes.  "Blessed are the poor in spirit...blessed are they that mourn.....blessed are the meek......blessed are those who thirst for righteousness..... blessed are the peacemakers."  All of these we recite from the keynote address of Jesus.  We seldom ever complete the list.  Listen.  "Blessed are you when you are persecuted for righteousness sake."  Have you heard a sermon on that one?  "Blessed are you when they revile you and utter all sorts of evil against you on my behalf."  I thought I would check on myself.  I preached that series of sermons in my last parish the final fall before I retired.  Much to my chagrin, I stopped before I got to those two.  Too hard?  Too difficult?  We don’t want that part of it.  People come to church to be built up.  Peter is writing at a time that most of us may never experience. 

 

John Claypool, a great Southern Baptist preacher in Louisville, Kentucky preached a sermon in his congregation one Sunday morning about the prodigal son.  The prodigal son is not a dangerous sermon to preach until you compare the United States of America to the prodigal - we have given up our birthright and gone off and lived in riotous living.  We have given up much that our Founding Fathers thought was important for us.  We have given it all over to see who can get richer and who can have the most.  The congregation rose up in horror and invited him to quit preaching.  In his autobiography, he said, "We are caught in the brutal crossfire in America between its unloving critics and its uncritical lovers."

 

You read about Florida Judge George Greer fulfilled his legal obligation and had the tube removed from Terry Schiavo.  He was invited to leave the church of which he was a member and resign his membership.  He was no longer welcome to be a part of that worshiping congregation.

 

Wonderful Ann Lamott wrote a new book called Plan B.  In it, she tells the story of  A.J. Muste.  All during the Vietnamese War, A.J. Muste stood outside the White House  every evening, rain, shine, cold, or warm with just one candle lit.  Finally, in the rain, a reporter came to him and asked, "Why are you doing this?  You really don’t think you are going to change the policies of the country by standing there do you?"  He said, "I don’t need to change the policies of the country.  What I need is for the policies of the country not to change me." 

You are living stones - solid but capable.  You are a rock but you are living.  You can change over the years.  New occasions teach new duties.  I am coming more and more to believe that the theologian of our generation, Paul Tillich, will be the one who leads us into the next century because he speaks about God as the ground of our being.  The ground never changes but we see different parts of the ground.  There are all kinds of symbolism that humanity seeks to grab hold of.  There are people who have said that Tillich is not really a Christian.  Maybe that is good.  When he was recruited out of Germany, Union Theological Seminary in New York thought they had gotten quite a coup.  They had gotten this famous theologian from Germany only to discover that when he got to Union and made his first lecture, he didn’t speak one word of English.  The dean of the school, Henry Sloan Coffin had to translate for him.  He began to learn just enough English.  One time, he made a sentence and Henry Sloan Coffin translated it.    Tillich replied, "Dat does not sound like de right vord, Herr Doctor."  Coffin said back to him, "There is no English word for it."  Tillich would beam, "Ve make one!"  That’s the point.  There comes that time when as living stones, we discover that new occasions do teach new duties.

 

I’ve been asked at least a hundred times this last week what I thought about the election of the new Pope?  I try to be gentle, but I am disappointed, terribly disappointed.  Why?  We have chosen as the leader of the largest branch of Christendom someone whose feet are firmly pointed toward history and toward the past - not living stones.  I couldn’t sleep early this morning and heard a part of his opening address about 4:00 a.m. on NPR.  He talks about the fact that he is opening dialogue to everybody - to the whole world.  I think that sounds good....to bring them all back to the umbrella of the chief shepherd.  Guess who the chief shepherd is?  It isn’t going to work, friends.  It isn’t going to happen that way. 

 

Here is a man who still proclaims that you cannot use birth control.  When the church first taught that, there were ten children born and only two of them would live.  Now that hunger stalks us, parents can’t afford ten children.  They will usually all be healthy because we have the medical tools to make them so.  Not only that, the use of birth control methods would stop the sweep of AIDS.  There are new reasons and new times.  Please, you are living stones.  You can change.  You must change.

 

Walter Rauschenbusch was the minister from Hell’s Kitchen, who launched what has been called the Social Gospel, said that in front of every church there ought to be two saints.  One should be St. Martin who took his sword, cut his cloak in two, and gave half of it to a beggar.  The other should be St. George who mounted a horse to go out and fight the dragons that were devastating the country.  What is it that you need to be?

 

A Harvard Professor of Philosophy is sitting in his office one day.  A student came and asked him, "Describe for me what it means to be a Christian."  He started to answer, and then he suddenly looked out the window and there walked Phillips Brooks, the great rector of Trinity Episcopal Church.  He said, "I’m not sure I can describe it to you, but there goes one."

 

If you have ever been to Boston, you know that there is an oversized statue of Phillips Brooks in Copley Square standing outside of Trinity Episcopal Church.  His arms are outstretched for the world, and he is always absolutely covered with pigeon dung.  I think that is symbolic.  That is who we are.  Arms outreached to everyone but willing at some point to risk what we are for the sake of the gospel.

 

James Forbes, a magnificent preacher from Riverside Church has said, "Nobody gets into heaven any more without a letter of reference from the poor." 

 

We still want our vision of sweet little Jesus holding babies, of sweet little Jesus sitting on a hillside talking to a group of country bumpkins, and of sweet little Jesus doing all of the good things.

 

The movie "On the Waterfront" is once more in rerun. (That’s when Marlon Brando looked like Marlon Brando.  That’s the scary part of growing old when you see what he looked like then and when he grew old.)  It is based on a book by Budd Schulberg.  In it, you may remember a scene where Runty Nolan, a little guy, runs afoul of the mob and is brutally killed and tossed into the North River.  A priest is called to give last rites after they drag him out.  The sacrament is administered, and then the Father says, "You want to know what is wrong with our waterfront?  It is the love of a lousy buck, fat profit, wholesale stealing, a rush job more important than the love of man.  Don’t you understand that we are all brothers in Christ down here?"  And then, Schulberg goes on to say, "The word ‘Christ’ wasn’t spread over them softly as a balm.  It was hurled at them as a gauntlet, as a furious challenge...For them, it was a shock to be urged to make room for a living Christ who stood among them in a windbreaker, carrying a cargo hook in his hand, a Christ who wondered how He was going to meet His rent and His grocery bill, a Christ crucified by loan sharks and strong-armers, a Christ on a North River cross, dumped like garbage or Runty Nolan." 

 

What is Christ going to require of us as living stones?  I tried to think through who my "living stones" were - those people who inspired me and whose names are rapidly disappearing. 

 

People my age will remember Albert Schweitzer.  Albert Schweitzer was a musician and a theologian.  He was brilliant in both careers.  He wrote The Search for the Historic Jesus.  It is a magnificent book that is still being read.  He played organ concerts all over Europe.  He studied to be a doctor, and left comfort and affluence and went down to Labarene, a little town in Equatorial Africa.  There he set up shop and ministered to people.  In the process, he lit a candle as a living stone that the world knew.  Now the world forgets.  Labarene is now grown over by weeds, and you say to me, "What good did he do?"  Doctors Without Borders is inspired by him.  There are people inspired by him.

 

I think of Toyohika  Kagawa.  He was a Japanese Christian living in Kobi in the slums of Tokyo in the midst of World War II.  He came to the United States bringing with him the young students from the Christian orphanage in Hiroshima who were badly burned when the atomic bomb was dropped.  He gave a lecture to a group where I was.  I touched him.  It was like holiness.  A young student said, "Don’t you know this Christian faith is all busted up!"  He said, "Mine isn’t."  His name is going to disappear but just maybe the spirit of people like that live on in the Shalom Center, Habitat for Humanity, and a lot of places are going to continue because we are living stones.

 

Dag Hammarskjold - I saw his name in one of those little blips that occur in the paper saying that he died forty years ago.  Who remembers Dag Hammarskjold?  He was one of the first leaders of the United Nations, giving himself to peace all over the world until a plane crash took his life.  He wrote a spiritual autobiography that is still very readable and profound.

 

Martin Niemuller stood up to Hitler and lived in prison.   I heard him speak and sat at breakfast with him.  Living stones that tell the story.

 

Frank Labach was a missionary.  His name isn’t even known any more.  In addition to proclaiming the gospel, he believed that literacy was an absolute necessity.  He served in the Philippines.  He had a program called "Each One Teach One."  I’ll teach you to read if you promise that you will use that knowledge to teach one more to read.

 

Lee Albin - If anybody knows that name, I will be greatly surprised.  He was an English teacher and football coach at Benjamin Bosse High School in Evansville.  He was also a parishioner at Central United Methodist Church which was my home church.  When I was cutting my teeth as a young clergy trying to learn the tools of my trade, he was a very faithful participant in the worship service.  He sat there every Sunday, and every Sunday, he would come up afterwards to encourage me.  He would take my hand and say, "You are really doing a great job.  You have a promising future."  But then, he would take a 4x6" card out of his pocket and hand it to me with all of the grammatical errors that I had made that morning.  He later said to me, "Joe, what you do is so important that you absolutely must use good English because people will hear errors, and they will never hear anything else that you say."  I appreciated that and loved him for it, but I never looked at him when I was preaching because he was always reaching into his pocket.  Living stones. 

 

What is God calling you to do?  Where is God putting you to be a living stone?  It may not be as it was to these people so long ago.  It may simply be to participate in a walk for the homeless or to be a part of the minimalist movement in terms of what it really takes for us to live.  It may be as a teacher or a counselor.  Living stones because that is the way the world will either come to appreciate or not appreciate what it is that we proclaim.