Last week, we saw how the first Christians
attempted to live out their calling as followers of a risen God. We saw how the devoted themselves to
fellowship, to koinonia, and
prayer and care for one another. We saw
that they had all things in common, that they sold all their possessions and
gave the proceeds to whoever had need . . . for them, the post-resurrection
reality was substantially different from that before, Christ’s teaching and
living among them necessitated a re-thinking of how they lived their everyday
lives.
This week, we get another look at that
post-resurrection reality, the state in which believers are now living after that first Easter morning . . . and it’s
important to remember that fact: it’s a reality only in light of the revelation
of God’s Word on that Easter morning . . . just before our passage is a rather
famous assertion: The grass withers, the
flower falls, but the word of the Lord endures forever. That word is the Good News that was announced
to you . . . and so it’s only in the light of that Word—who remember is Jesus
the Christ, crucified and then resurrected on the third day—that the reality
described here stands.
Rid yourselves, 1st Peter says,
of all malice, guile, insincerity, envy and slander . . . a laundry list of
maladies we are to avoid. And note that that
they all take two or more to tango, they’re not solitary sins before God—malice
is toward someone or something; envy is of something somebody else has; and slander, of course, is about
saying bad things about somebody else.
And thus, they interfere with living the Christian life which, as we saw
last week, is meant to be lived with others.
Malice and insincerity. Envy and
slander: all are things that make living in that post-resurrection koinonia difficult, if not
impossible. And what are we to do
instead? We are to long for the pure,
spiritual milk . . . Like newborn infants—like
sucklings, like helpless, mewling kittens, like hairless, baby rabbits—like infants, longing for that pure,
spiritual milk . . . and notice that 1st Peter writes as if we have
a choice, as if we have a
choice between insincerity, malice and guile, and longing, desiring that spiritual milk. We normally
think of desire as involuntary, as in we like what we like, we can’t help it,
sorry about that . . . but 1st Peter acts like it’s our choice to long for this pure,
spiritual milk . . . and if we drink of it, we may grow into salvation, into
our vocations as children of God . . .
Let’s pause right here and consider this
remarkable imagery . . . the Gospel as pure spiritual milk, as if from a
mother’s breast . . . it’s a feminine image, in a sea of masculine prose for the
divine. In the 1st century,
just as here in the 21st, milk has a comforting image, a nourishing
image, a down-home connotation . . . milk is nurturing, it comes from the
mother’s breasts, so this is a pretty radical image of the Gospel—and the
Gospel, of course, is personified by that
Word incarnate, Jesus Christ of Nazareth. The Gospel is likened here to milk—as
nurturing, comforting, body-building,
as milk, come from the breast of God . . . how does the commercial go? Milk does a body good? Well it certainly does . . . that pure
spiritual milk, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, Word incarnate, does the church
body a world of good . . . it
causes us to grow into salvation, into sanctification . . . if we have tasted
that the Lord is good, that is . . .
And it is this tasting that the Lord is
good that defines believers for 1st Peter, if we have indeed tasted
the sweet nectar of salvation . . . and if we have tasted thus, if we are
believers, we are to come to Christ, and in the Greek it’s clear that Christ is
the living stone in this instance, so a better translation might be “come to
him as to a living stone,” one that has been rejected by mortals, and yet
chosen—and in the Greek it’s our old favorite “elected”—by God and precious in
God’s sight . . . and this election, this choosing of Christ is the basis of
our own election, our own choosing, and that of course is the true wonder of
this living stone, this living milk from the heart of God . . . through our
association with Christ, we are like living stones ourselves, and like those
living stones, we are to let ourselves be built into a spiritual house and a
holy priesthood.
And so here’s another metaphor for what we
are, what congregations are . . . alongside the family metaphors in the
Gospels, the bodily metaphor in the writings of Paul, here we are likened to a
spiritual house and a holy priesthood. We
are to be a building, a house, and the word in Greek is oikos, house, home . .
. it’s where we get ecos as in ecology
. . . and calling it a house or household or a home implies that someone lives there.
So as living stones—molded in the image of
Christ—we are to let ourselves be a house, a home . . . and a home is for
something or someone to dwell . . . so the question is, who are we a home
for? Who are we—collectively, as a body—a
home for? Paul thought it was the Holy Spirit
. . . he said—using his body metaphor—that your body, that is plural, as in the
congregation, the body of Christ—is the temple of the Holy Spirit, and so is
that what 1st Peter is saying?
That we, as living stones, fed spiritual milk from God, are to be a
house of the Holy Spirit, a place filled by it, animated by it, quickened by
it?
I think so, though it’s not totally
clear from the text, but I can tell you something that I do know: this wing of the house, this particular branch
of the body called Greenhills certainly is spirit filled . . . I see it every
day, I see it when we greet visitors with kindness and empathy, as we embark on
new ministries like the very successful community dinners, as we fulfill our
promises to our mission partners like Soul and Winton House. And I can't help but see it in our dynamic
music program, singing to God's glory, helping young people to get the training
and experience they need.
And I can feel the movement of that
Spirit, rustling against my cheek, swirling around and through you all out
there in the pews, over and under and beside us all, as we begin to awaken, as
we begin to stir in our concern for this beloved congregation. The Spirit is here in the whispers as we
discuss the possibilities for renewal and hope for our future . . . make no
mistake about it, the Spirit is with us, as halting and as incoherent and frail
a vessels as we have been . . . I am enormously grateful for each and every one
of you out there. We members of Greenhills
are a temple, collectively, a house, an ecosystem for the presence of the Holy
Spirit, and I for one feel it every day.
But wait . . . there’s more! We’re to be made a priesthood, a holy priesthood, set aside for a
reason . . . to offer spiritual
sacrifices acceptable to God . . . Our
sacrifices are not just material, though those are important, they’re spiritual
as well . . . we’re to intercede for the world—that’s one of the functions of a priesthood—we’re to
intercede for the world, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God
through Jesus Christ. And the most
obvious way we do that is through prayer, which floats up like incense, a
pleasing odor to the creator of the universe . . .
But that said, I have to say as well that we often create a false
dichotomy between spiritual and material in our teaching and—I know you’ll be
shocked by this—our preaching. (Ok, I’ll
just up and say it . . . my preaching) We
separate our mission as a household of God into two separate spheres . . . the
spiritual, which includes praying and contemplation and all that stuff, and
doing, which includes social justice and making programs and plans and et cetera. And like Presbyterian congregations tend to
do, we make jokes about what a bunch of head cases we are, but we lose sight of
the fact that they are two sides of the same coin, or of the same mission of God. All the prayer in the world, all that
vertical stuff between us and God, isn’t worth a hill of beans without action,
without process, without doing in the world; by the same token, all the
activity, all the horizontal work—in the community and within our own house—is
incomplete without the listening, the stillness, the vertical dimension between
us and God.
I think it’s one of our tasks in our Greenhills
household to find a unique spirituality for ourselves , to discern what
spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God look like for us,alongside
and apart from what others have found.
Oh, we should listen to the advice of others, we should consider about
Christian spirituality in its many forms, from social action to contemplative
practice, from William Sloan Coffin to Richard Foster, but honed and
particularized for our neck of the house-of-God woods.
A spiritual sacrifice, acceptable to God
encompasses everything we do, everything we say, everything we pray, and as
such it presupposes a balance between the doing and the being, the activity and
the listening, that is bound to be unique for Greenhills Community Church, Presbyterian at 21 Cromwell Road in Cincinnati,
Ohio, 45218. And the trick is, we must
be continually involved in discerning that balance, and of what it should
consist . . . We must put into place practices that allow us to continually and
perpetually hone and tune that balance to fit our time and surroundings, what
we call in church-speak our ministry context.
But you know what? Saying we must put into place, we must
discern is misleading . . . one of the first things that struck me about this
passage is it’s continual passive construction . . . like newborn infants—the
most helpless kind of human being—we are to let ourselves be built into that
spiritual household, that holy priesthood . . . allow ourselves to be built,
and we know who the builder is, don’t
we? We know who the construction foreman is on the spiritual household project, don’t we? But we must allow it, we must let go and let
that foreman do that foreman’s business . . . if we don’t, if we try and do it
ourselves and build it in our image instead of God’s, then it’s doomed to fail.
Brothers
and sisters, we are a chosen race, a priesthood of the royal house of Christ
the King. And the one who did the
choosin’ was God, not us . . . we didn’t elect ourselves, we were elected by
God, and for a reason: proclaim the mighty acts of the Christ who called us out
of darkness, as 1st Peter says, into this marvelous light. So let’s long for that spiritual milk, let’s
pine for that milk from the bosom of God with every fiber of our being . . . let
us put aside the power-mongering, the turf-protecting, and the malice and
bickering that tear us down . . . we are a household of God’s spirit, a temple
of God’s mighty motivating force in the world.
Once we were not a people, but now we are God’s people . . . once we had
not received mercy, but now we have.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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