Stones of Life, Stones of Death
Link to Video: https://www.facebook.com/138797592802860/videos/795394167652785
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale
May 10, 2020—Easter 5A
Acts 7:55-60; Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16; 1 Peter 2:2-10; John 14:1-14
We don’t know the way. We don’t even know where we’re going!
Such a classic line from the disciples, and such marvelous exasperation on Jesus’ part. It only gets better when they start in on the whole bit about seeing God, and Jesus has to tell them, again, that he is the very best glimpse into the face of God they’ll ever get. They’ve been traveling with him all this time, listening to his teaching, and witnessing his signs of the Kingdom of God. They’ve seen healings, and miraculous feedings. They’ve seen the dead raised and lepers cleansed. They’ve seen him break bread with rich and poor, sinner and righteous, male and female, clean and unclean. They’ve seen and experienced it all, and yet it’s still not clear to them that his life is the message, his life is the pathway, his life is a very window into the heart of God.
It is, I suppose, a bit amorphous. Jesus says that he’s going to his Father’s house, and they want to know the address. They want to be able to go on GPS and type in their address, and the one Jesus gives them, and get a route. Something concrete: an achievable goal!
But apparently there’s something they aren’t understanding. Suddenly they are completely focused on going somewhere, as though that’s been the goal all along. He tries to explain: “I am the way. I am the truth. I am the life.” The goal isn’t some kind of destination. The goal is to live in me! The goal is to live out the truth that I have lived. The goal is to allow my life to live in you. This is the way: not a freeway or a highway, and certainly not a tollway, but a way of life. A way of being. I am the way, and if you live in me, and let me live in you, you will see God!
And not only will you see God, but this side of the border between life and death, you will make God more visible to others as well. You will be, as Peter describes it, a living stone, from which God’s mansion on this earth will be built. You will be a part of the making of the Kingdom of God.
I’m particularly taken by that image of our being stones, used to build the dwelling and sign of God on earth, because of its contrast to the stones in our other reading today. In Acts, we hear the story of the stoning of Stephen, often called the first martyr of the church. He was one of the first deacons as well, commissioned to help care for the Gentile widows and orphans in the expanding Christian community of Jerusalem.
And perhaps that’s what gave him such an edge when he rose to respond to charges brought against him by the Temple authorities. Like so many prophets before him, he wished to challenge their neglect of the biblical call to care for the poor and the alien among them. Like Jesus before him, he faced charges of conspiring to destroy the Temple and blaspheming against the faith. Unlike Jesus, Stephen defended himself … at length.
He began by reiterating the course of Jewish History, describing the ways in which God reached out to save his people again and again, and so many times met with stubborn, stiff necked rejection. Over and over, receiving and then rejecting the Spirit of God, until finally they even reject and kill Jesus, the Righteous One. The killing of Jesus is not the centerpiece of his condemnation, however. That comes in his final words, which spring from deep within his work with the poor and neglected. They are the words the prophets have always leveled at the people and their leaders: God gave you the Torah, God’s gracious law; it was put into YOUR hands, and yet you refuse to keep it!
Which brings us to the moment we stepped into the story this morning. A prophet has called the establishment to task and now they must respond. What do they do? They cover their ears. They refuse to hear. And they rush against him, drag him outside the city and stone him to death.
Facing such incredible brutality, he dies as Jesus died: with words of forgiveness on his lips.
And we are left standing in the midst of the story, unsure what to do. Stephen carried it all with such grace; perhaps we can simply admire him and move on. But there are these rocks … heavy rocks … picked up and hurled at a man’s head to crush it. And they litter the ground around us. We are surrounded by rocks, and they cry out to us.
They cry out, and as Matt Skinner at Working Preacher puts it, they either implicate us or cause us to cry out for deliverance from such cycles of violence.[1] So many times in this world, people react to threats (whether physical or ideological) with violent reprisal. They seek to destroy the things that oppose them, things that threaten them and them worldview, things that are perhaps simply different from them. They are afraid, and they seek to destroy. Or they watch as others act out that destruction.
Do we too find ourselves standing silent and helpless, horrified, yet unable or unwilling to do anything, say anything? Do we sometimes, just maybe, cheer them on? Do we ever look down and find a rock in our own hand?
The stones cry out, confronting us with these very uncomfortable questions. They are littered at our feet, causing us to trip over them, to stumble if we attempt to ignore them. They are there, reminding us of what we can be. We can be a force for destruction, can be the stone that crushes another man’s head.
Or we can be living stones. We can be the building blocks of the Kingdom of God, the mansion of God in this world. If we can just follow the way, the truth and the life of Jesus. If we can allow his life, his way of life, to live in us!
How can we do that? Well, we can begin with a story. It’s a Hasidic story, a Jewish story like the ones that formed Jesus into the man that he was. And like many Jewish stories, it begins with an argument…
An old rabbi, Rabbi Moshe, once asked his pupils how they could tell when the night had ended and the day would begin. “Could it be,” asked one student, “When you see an animal in the distance and you can tell whether it is a sheep or the dog tending the sheep?”
“No,” answered the rabbi.
Another eager child blurted out, “Is it when you can look at a tree in the distance and tell whether it’s a fig or an apricot tree?”
“No, little one, wrong again,” replied Rabbi Moshe.
“Then just when is it?” a third, impatient student demanded.
Ever so slowly and ever so softly, Rabbi Moshe whispered, “It is when you can look on the face of any woman or man and see that it is your sister or your brother. Because unless you can see this, it is still night.”
THERE is a place to begin! It is the way of Jesus, the truth of Jesus, the life of Jesus. Let it live in you, grow in you. Let it change the way you act and give you courage to challenge the world around you. And you will be a living stone.
That is the way. That is where we are supposed to be going. Amen.
[1] Matt Skinner, http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?lect_date=5%2F22%2F2011