Living Stones

Sermon for the Fifth Sunday of Easter 

May 7, 2023

Acts 7:55-60

Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16

1 Peter 2:2-10

John 14:1-14

When I was 17, I got selected by my diocese to go to the Holy Land to take part in a 2-week pilgrimage for teenagers at St. George’s College, Jerusalem. There would be young Episcopalians and Anglicans there from all over the world. And I was soexcited. And although I’m pretty sure my mom must have had reservations about sending her only child off to Jerusalem, she let me go.   

Now what I anticipated would be the most remarkable part of the trip was visiting all of the holy sites. The places where the Bible stories I had heard in church had taken place; the places where Jesus himself, and his followers had lived and breathed and walked. Months before the trip, I checked out as many books on the Holy Land as I could find from the library, and learned everything I could all about all the places I would be visiting: The Sea of Galilee. Nazareth. The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem that marked the spot where Jesus was born. Hezekiah’s tunnel and the pool of Siloam where Jesus healed people. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the holiest site in the world for Christians, built on top of the places where Jesus was crucified and buried. When I read about these places, and looked at pictures of them, I imagined my life would be changed forever after I visited them.   

But when I finally got there, something unexpected happened. We did visit all of these places, and many more. And to their credit, they were pretty remarkable. I still have a stone on my desk that I pulled out of the Sea of Galilee, and I’ve often wondered if it looked up one day 2000 years ago and saw a man walking on water? But the unexpected thing that happened was this: that what actually ended up transforming me most of all about the trip wasn’t the holy places. It was something else: the other teenagers in my group.

There were 11 of us: 2 Americans, 3 British, and 6 Palestinians, all of us under age 18. But it was the Palestinian Christian teenagers in the group whose life and witness touched my heart most of all. We had grown up under very different circumstances, they and I. I’d had a safe, relatively stable, peaceful upbringing in a small town in southern Virginia. Most of them had grown up in the West Bank under the shadow of the Israeli Occupation. They had seen tanks roll through the streets of their towns. They had watched as family olive orchards had been demolished and family land taken. They spoke of bullet holes in their bedroom windows, and raids on their neighbor’s homes, and navigating checkpoints and armed soldiers in order to get from one place to another. My roommate, Hatem, from Ramallah, who also wanted to be a priest, had had to sneak into Jerusalem for the pilgrimage program because he couldn’t get a legal pass. And here I thought the physical fitness test in high school gym class had been a great hardship! 

My time with Hatem and the others, and our late-night conversations around a clandestine hookah on the roof of the college, opened my eyes, and more profoundly, my heart. Never before had I known people (certainly not my age) who had experienced such injustice, such suffering and trauma as they and their families had. But it wasn’t just hearing about their oppression and suffering that transformed me. What also transformed me was hearing my new friends share what it had been like for them to grow up as Christians in these circumstances. As followers of Jesus. Never before had I encountered people who bore witness to the meaning of Gospel, and the importance of the church in their lives like they did. Compared to the polite, sometimes nonchalant experience of church back at home, it seemed like their hearts were on fire. I had never seen such conviction in other Christians! They had a story to tell about who Jesus was, and what it meant to follow him, even in the midst of great hardship, and they weren’t afraid to tell it!

Now, I noticed that when they told this story, they often referred to themselves as living stones. I didn’t have any idea what that meant at the beginning of the pilgrimage, but I can tell you, I sure did when it was time for us to say goodbye to one another. I remember flying home and thinking, “I want some of their fire, their conviction. I want to be able to tell my story of who Jesus is in my life. I want to be a living stone too.” 

I didn’t know it then, but they didn’t just make up this expression, “living stones.” It actually comes from our second reading this morning, from the first letter of Peter, in which Peter writes to some of the earliest Christian communities. Communities who were dispersed throughout Asia Minor. Many of whom had suffered persecution for their new faith in Jesus. And in the midst of this persecution, Peter writes to them to encourage them. To remind them that as followers of Jesus, they had a calling, a calling to be living stones. No matter what happens, he says to them, no matter what the circumstances are, or how hard things become, you are called to be living stones. Called, he writes, “to let yourselves be built into a spiritual house… to be a holy priesthood.” Called “to proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.” 

In other words, no mattered what was to happen, no matter how hard things got, they were called to know their story, and to be able to tell it. The story of their encounter with Jesus. The story of how Jesus had called them. The story of why they had chosen to follow. To bear witness—by their actions and their lives, certainly—but also, at the same time, by their words. And to do so with conviction, with fire in their hearts, like my Palestinian Christian friends. In such a way that made others want to be living stones too. 

This is what it meant to be a living stone. And it’s these kinds of living stones that the church must be built from, Peter says. The church was more than bricks and mortar! It wasn’t just a physical building that people gathered inside of. In fact, many early Christians had been kicked out of their buildings, kicked out of synagogues. They came to know that the church was a living, breathing body. An organism built of living stones. A community of people who knew their story and who could tell it. 

Now we don’t live in the ancient Roman Empire or even in Palestine, but our calling, the calling Peter reminds us about, is exactly the same. It is to be living stones. As followers of Jesus living here in this Seattle, WA, or wherever we happen to live, in the year 2023, our calling is also to be living stones. The truth is, being a Christian isn’t just a matter of being a “member” of a congregation, or being “Episcopalian,” or even just showing up to church every Sunday out of habit. Being a Christian means more. Much more. It means… being a living stone. It means being able to tell our story of following Jesus, which, as someone wise once said, is our Gospel to share with the world.  

You know, the Gospel isn’t just words on a page. It’s not just contained in that beautiful, silver Book of Gospels that Deacon Polly carries in every Sunday. The Gospel is where the story of Jesus meets our own story. It lives inside us. It’s a story only we can tell. And our calling, our job as Christians is to find a way to do that. To find a way to share it. Not to force it on people, or cram it down people’s throats. But to give it away as a precious gift. And to do so in such a way, that when other people meet us, they can see that the Gospel is alive in us. And they can’t help wanting to be a living stone, too.

Perhaps the invitation for us today is a really simple one: to ask ourselves how we can live more fully into this calling. To ask ourselves how we can be living stones in our little corner of the world. To ask ourselves how we can be living stones during this time, a time, I think we call all agree, when stories of hope and resilience are needed more than ever. It’s for times like these that living stones are needed most, to remind the world that all is not dead. And all is not darkness. And all is not lost. 

May our lives and our lips never grow weary of proclaiming this message. And may we be given the strength, courage and love we need for doing so. Amen. 

—The Reverend Edmund I. Harris