Living Bricks

Sermon for Sunday, May 3

Last week I talked about Christian living in uncertain times. I talked about Peter’s letter to people who believed in Jesus and left behind the religion of their parents and their neighbors. Their love for Jesus was enough to break those relationships. However, the pain of their situation could distract them from the God they had come to believe in and the new life they could have in him. So Peter gave them a point of focus: the Father who loves them, the family he called them to, the fear they needed to approach God, and the fellowship love they had for each other. These are our anchors in times of trouble. We need to stop and remember God’s presence when the going gets tough. This week, Peter challenges us to think more deeply about our relationship with Jesus. These days, sometimes we start to think of Christianity as church membership. We set it in its little box next to the Ruritan Club or our political party membership, and we think that being a “good Christian” means being a good church member. We measure this in how much we give or how many times we attend. We don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how it impacts our other associations. This would have made no sense to Peter. In Peter’s world, it was clear that making a decision for Christ cost people something. Loyalty to Christ was not a loyalty among many others. Loyalty to Christ crowded out all other loyalties, or at least put them into a new order of priorities. Deciding for Christ is not an investment in the future. It is marked by a change in life now. So Peter’s goal in the midst of all the uncertainty of an evil time is that Christians would “grow into salvation” here and now. When we talk about salvation, we usually talk, rightly, about something that was given to us. Something we can’t earn. But we don’t talk about how it changes the way we live. Or when we do, we talk about super-spiritual people who went “above and beyond.” “Well done, my good and faithful servant” is reserved for a select few super Christians, not for the average person. Well I’m here to tell you, God wants to say that to you too. I’ll go one better: God wants to make you into that. God wants you to become a good and faithful servant. Peter shows us here how God will accomplish this salvation work. God’s people need to let God work on them. And here is what to expect when that happens: God will feed us and God will build a church out of us. Peter says we need to want God to feed us spiritual milk. Now when I read this, I guess because I’m a man, I imagined walking up to the refrigerator and pulling out a glass of cold milk and sitting down at the table and drinking it. And that sounds nice, cool, and refreshing. If we think about religion this way, we might think we can go and get us some God any time we please. In our world of “On Demand” content and entertainment, that’s what we’ve come to expect. But that’s not the image Peter uses. The image here is one of a deeply intimate and ultimately dependent relationship. We get our nourishment from God like a infant from her mother. An infant doesn’t really know when or where she gets her food. She doesn’t understand how to make it happen; she just cries out in total helplessness. And to draw on that nourishment, especially at first, a baby has to rely on a combination of instinct and coaching. A mother has to put the baby’s mouth where it needs to go and sometimes to hold it there until the baby latches. This, thankfully, is what God does for us. When we come to Christ, we are totally helpless, but we have had just a taste of real nourishment. And God doesn’t just lead us to the living waters; God places that nourishment in our mouths. What is this “spiritual milk” that Peter commends to us so strongly? We know instinctively that we are meant to long for something more. We are meant for a depth of life with Jesus— life in Jesus—that always seems just beyond our reach. We want to read one more spiritual self-help book and be able to manufacture a relationship with Jesus. But there is something mysterious in faith that is beyond our control. Peter doesn’t say: go get some spiritual milk. He tells us to long for it, like a helpless infant, and trust that the Lord will give it to us. Jesus said something similar: “Blessed are the poor in Spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” Look at your life; really examine it… are you praying that God will help you to “grow into salvation”? And what is God trying to “grow” us into anyway? In verses 4 and 5, Peter shifts metaphors to talk about what growing in our salvation looks like. Using a metaphor for Jesus that we are familiar with, he tells us that in our hunger we should come to Him as the foundation stone of our faith and our lives. If we do that, he will build us into a new house, a new temple. Around the time that Peter wrote this letter, the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem. Even for the first Christians, the Temple was an important place. It was the center of Jewish religious life. Jews would return there on pilgrimage and to offer sacrifices. The earliest Christians saw the Temple as a place of great religious importance as well. The destruction challenged both Jews and Christians in different ways. For Peter, a born Jew, it would have shaken him to his core – it was the physical place where he met God throughout his life and now it was gone. So when Peter says “let yourselves be built into a spiritual house,” he has the image of the Temple in mind. No longer is God’s presence confined to a brick and mortar building. Instead, as Christians, we are to understand ourselves as God’s house. There are two challenges for us today. First, we are to understand that the church building is not the church. Monte Vista Baptist Church is not located at 1737 Grit Road in Hurt, Virginia. It is the people who meet there that make up the church. The second challenge is that you are not the church. Each of you is merely a brick in God’s spiritual house. We are only the church together. We are supposed to be as close to each other as bricks in a wall. Are we willing to be supported by each other? To support each other? To be built up together? We are only the church if we are sealed together in mutually supporting ways. Otherwise we are only a pile of bricks— or worse, scattered stones. Like Peter’s first readers, we are living in a challenging time. We are seeing our understanding of church challenged by our inability to meet together in our building. Churches all over the world are going through this with us. After the Temple was destroyed, Christianity changed. Judaism also changed. They never rebuilt the Temple. Instead, Christians and Jews learned to live out their faiths in scattered communities around the world. This pandemic is going to change us. So what do we do? We cultivate in ourselves a hunger for spiritual milk. We need to wake up every day aware that we don’t have what it takes to feed ourselves. Before we read our Bible, we should pray “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” Before we come to worship, we should ask God to meet us there. Authentic Christianity begins with a recognition that we are fragile, feeble creatures, and we cannot get what we need by our own power. We practice supporting each other as fellow bricks. It’s amazing to me that this crisis has come at a time when we are more connected than ever in human history. Our distant friends and neighbors are only a phone call or a text message away. And yet we feel so isolated. I have felt lonely in these last weeks, and a couple of times I have gotten a text message or a card in the mail that says “I’m praying for you.” This reminds us that we are not alone. Love each other in these ways. In Jerusalem, only one wall of the Temple remains. It is the Western Wall; often called the Wailing Wall because Jewish pilgrims today go to the wall to hold mournful vigils. Pressed between the bricks of that wall are prayers written on slips of paper. The religious pilgrims who gather there have not abandoned the Holy Place. But they do not pretend like things haven’t changed. They found a new use for that Holy Wall. And every day people go there, to mourn what was lost, and to look forward to what is ahead. We are the living bricks that make up Monte Vista Baptist Church. Right now, we have been taken apart. We’ve been set down. Let’s spend this week praying for faith that when God puts us back together, we will be stronger. We will be made new. We will rely on God for our nourishment. We will support each other when God builds these bricks into something new.