Fifth Sunday in Easter

April 20, 2008

St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church

The Rev. Hannah Anderson

"Living Stones "

One of the most important questions of our times is this:  ‘How do I live as a Christian in a pluralistic world?’  How do I, how do we negotiate our way as followers of Jesus and as global citizens in a world that is growing evermore diverse in religions, people and choices?  It is not a simple question.  Nor is there a simple answer. 

 

The writings of C.S. Lewis may shed some light on this dilemma.  Referring to today’s Gospel message, Lewis once wrote that in God’s house there are, indeed, many dwelling places.  In fact, God’s house is filled with rooms, each attributed to a variety of faiths:  Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, and so on.   The Spirit of God invites us to walk through one of those doors, into a room that is filled with the history, traditions, rituals and promises of that particular faith tradition.  It is our responsibility to learn as much as we can about that religion and to adhere to it, without shame or apology. 

 

However, we do not remain in that exclusive room, with blinders on.  We are able to exit it, taking our core beliefs with us and meet people from other traditions for whom their faith is the way to God.  This is where interfaith dialogue is critical.  We seek common understandings that make for peace and reconciliation, for wider possibilities of collaboration together on behalf of the world. 

 

We are Christians.  We are specifically Episcopalians.  We are also global citizens.  At this hinge in history, our ability to remain clear and rooted in our Christian tradition while honoring other faith traditions is imperative.   It does no good to cast stones at others for the sake of killing their way of believing.  Instead, we are to consider how to be living stones that God can use in creative structures or activities meant to relieve human suffering, bring healing, assure peace.

 

The use of stones has a particular place throughout Holy Scriptures.  The Israelites, when visited by God on their journey out of exile into the promised land, would build pillars of stones and pour holy oil over them to mark the sacred place.  The ten commandments given by God to Moses on behalf of the people were carved into large tablets of stone.  It was a small stone that helped David overcome Goliath as he proved his ability to lead strategically the people of Israel.  And God promised that the peoples’ hearts of stone would someday be turned into flesh as their faith deepened. 

 

In the New Testament, as soon as Jesus is baptized and sent into the wilderness, he is tempted by Satan to change stones into bread.  Soon after, he finds a woman ready to be stones to death for adultery.  Jesus intervenes and draws a line in the sand, inviting any of the men who have not ever sinned to cross it.  None can, in good conscious, do this, and they all walk away.  The woman’s life is spared.  When a friend, Lazarus, dies, Jesus goes to the tomb where he has been buried and rolls away the stone that is blocking the entryway so that he might be called forth from death to life.  And when our Lord dies and is laid in a tomb, the women who go to care for his body the next morning are bewildered when they find that stone also rolled away from the entry and the tomb empty. 

 

Then we hear today’s story about Stephen, the patron saint of this parish, who was one of the first seven deacons appointed in the early church.  He is a young teen-ager, filled with the Spirit.  After retelling the story of God’s plan for salvation to a group of Jewish leaders, and of their rejection of Jesus, they rush to stone him to death.  Saul, who will one day become St. Paul, consents to the stoning.  As he dies, Stephen is given a vision of heaven and speaks the words reminiscent of our Lord’s on the Cross:  ‘Receive my spirit; Lord, do not hold this sin against them.’  For his faith, Stephen dies as the first Christian martyr by stones thrown at him and piled upon him.

 

The imagery of stones continues with the reading from First Peter.  We are offered belief in the chief cornerstone, Jesus the Christ, who is to be the One in whom we trust for a future with hope.  With Him as the cornerstone that literally holds a structure intact, we offer ourselves to God as living stones that can be used in this building process.  We are not in control of what is being built; God is the architect and builder. 

 

How will we offer ourselves, this day, then to God, as living stones?  As people of faith desiring not to be used as weapons against others but as men and women who desire to be markers of the sacred, who want the world to know that here and now, we have met a living God, that our lives have been changed forever?  And how can we, as global citizens, remain unabashedly Christian while open to the way that God might be building with other living stones in various faith traditions?  How we share with them in ways that help to build structures of peace and not violence?  Let us take these questions into silence and consider how God is leading us forward—

AMEN.