1 Peter 2
“Building
a Spiritual House”
Last week, we entered into the first letter of
Peter. He is writing to people that have
found themselves living in exile. A
people that desire a different way of life for themselves, a people longing to
return to Israel. Instead of raising
their hopes that they will have a future promise of returning home, the writer
of this letter instead encourages them to embrace their current reality. Embrace living where they are, embrace the
purpose God has for their present, instead of a focus on what God might be
doing for their future. Last week the
focus was on how to be a Holy people, even in exile.
Today, the writer of this letter continues to help guide
this group of people into defining what it means for them to be community with
each other. This part of the letter
calls this gathering of people to think about their behavior, to think about
their actions, to think about how they are treating each other. They are told to rid themselves of: all
malice, and all guile, insincerity, envy, and all slander. Before they can move forward as God’s people,
before they can move forward to living out the purpose God is calling them
into, they need to create peace within themselves. They cannot just be a group of people
gathering together, they must be a group of people gathering together for a
Holy purpose.
This whole first section of 1 Peter,
is directly connected to the Hebrew scriptures.
The writer is reaching back into their faith story and drawing on the
scriptures as they are creating a new community in their present situation. Taste that the Lord is good, is from the
Psalms.
They are to prayerfully examine what
in their lives connects them to God. How
do they taste God? Is it through
study? Is it through prayer? Is it through the kindness of another? Something has impacted their life in such a
way that they are being drawn to this new fledgling faith community. Somehow they have been introduced to God’s
work through Jesus, and they believe that in and through his life and teachings
that he is indeed the Messiah. In their
current setting, this was not an easy decision to come to. They are breaking from the cultural setting
they are living within, they may even be breaking from their family heritage,
alienating themselves from the family community with which they live.
And this is partly why, 1 Peter is
guiding them on how to be community. For
some, the faith community might be the only community they now have. Embracing the faith of the early Christian
church was not the standard way of life.
The writer emphasizes this within the letter, “Come to him, a living
stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight…” We usually understand this Hebrew scripture
of the corner stone being rejected as a direct reference to Jesus being
rejected by the religious authorities of his time. But here, it is being used for all those that
are a part of this community of faith.
Just as Jesus is the living stone, rejected by mortals, so are
they. They are living stones, yes,
rejected, but living stones in God’s sight to be used by God for God’s holy
purpose.
Rejection is one of the hardest
emotional stresses people wrestle with.
Most people do not desire to be rejected. Most people want to be liked. They want to be a part of their
community. And yet, we know, there are
people we like and people we just don’t seem to connect with. Within the faith community, there is no room
for this. God calls us together, God has
given each purpose within the community a purpose. The outside world, the cultural around the
church might be full of rejection, but within the faith community, God desires
acceptance. God desires each member of
the community to be a living stone, to be built up into a spiritual house for
the Lord. The writer of 1st
Peter is calling them to understand that together they serve a purpose. And together, they are the spiritual house
for God.
Their time period was rather
different than ours. They did not have
this independent individualistic society that we have today. Community was absolutely the core of their
everyday lives. In our world today, we
value independence. We value being able
to stand on our own; to support ourselves, to not have to depend on anyone but
our self. For many, we no longer live
within our family communities. We are
transient, we are able to move from place to place and more often, it is our
job that dictates where we live.
For many of us, we do not grow up
going to school with our cousins, or spending weekends with the extended
family. Rather, we recreate family, we
give close friends the title of aunt and uncle and develop new networks of
familial community with those that live close by. Even in our individualist culture, we still
crave, desire, gravitate towards community.
This is one of the critical
questions the church of the 21st century must ask of itself as it
seeks to remain relevant to people in today’s world. What kind of community are we? How are we tasting that God is good? How can we share that spiritual milk with
others? How are we God’s living stones
being built into a spiritual house for God?
How are we facing rejection and embracing love?
God has not called us together as a
family of faith just to recharge our own batteries. God has not called us together as a family of
faith, for our own individual needs, but God calls us together to be a
community. A community with a purpose – But you are a chosen race, a royal
priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people,[c] in order that you may proclaim the
mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. This text is part of our baptism
liturgy. It is essential that we embrace
the understanding that together, our purpose and our very being is to proclaim
that we believe God’s light of love is at the core of our own lives.
Being God’s living stones gathered
together to build a spiritual house for the Lord changes from generation to
generation and looks different depending on the cultural context. We are living in a day and age where people
proclaim they are spiritual but not religious.
We are living in a day and age where people no longer desire to be a
part of a faith community because they are finding community in other
places. In a very real sense, the
greater church is finding itself back in the day and age of 1st
Peter, living in a world that doesn’t really value us. But we know those small gatherings of people
kept the faith and found a way to make it relevant to the world around them and
the church grew. In the ebb and flow of
life, in the changes of the seasons, God will continue to work through the
church and through communities of people that gather, and God’s story will
continue to transform people’s lives as we taste and know that the Lord is
Good. Amen.
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