1 Peter 2:2-10

The house where I grew up was about a mile from a large, limestone quarry. On about a weekly basis, we’d hear and feel small tremors from the explosions that the quarry set off to break apart the stone. And throughout the day, there would be a parade of dump trucks driving to and from the quarry, loaded with stone and asphalt for whatever construction site in eastern Pennsylvania needed it.

This also meant there were lots of rocks on our land. The land where we lived had so many rocks that we couldn’t till our garden or dig a hole without hitting a decent sized one. More than once I jumped on a spade or bladed shovel hoping to dig deep into the ground to turn over soil only to hear a clang, be immediately stopped with a thud from going into the soil further, and jolted off of the shovel because I hit a big rock. But what all of these stones allowed my dad to do, the Lord bless him, was build an entire raised flower bed a few feet high entirely with rocks around three sides of our house walls (before raised beds became cool again). And he put a giant rock probably 3-4 feet wide by 7-8 feet long in the front flower bed where our mailbox was.

The land behind our house eventually led into a 40 acre or so pasture that used to be part of my great-grandfather’s farm. When I was very young, my great-father sold the farm to an old order Mennonite family. They started a small dairy farm with 25 or 30 Jersey dairy cows. A few years after buying the farm, when I was teenager, they started selling their own milk. Their local dairy concept took off. On an average day, a few dozen cars would drive down the long lane, park, load up glass bottles of milk and pull off. We’d even spot New Jersey license plates (which the Pennsylvania New Jersey border was a good hour, hour and half from our house). It amazed me as a teenager that people would be willing to drive that far for milk.

Milk and stones. You’re probably wondering why I’m telling you about these things.

In our New Testament reading from the apostle Peter’s first letter, Peter uses two ordinary things in life – milk and stones – and says that Jesus Christ is like those things for us. 

First, the milk image. Peter invites us to think of ourselves like newborns. He says that we should ‘long for the pure, spiritual milk’. This is a maternal, a motherly, image for God. We often call God ‘our Father’ as in ‘our Father who art in heaven’. But here God’s work is motherly work. And while God is not a man or a woman, God is altogether different from humans, the Scriptures teach that God does have both fatherly and motherly ways. 

What is this ‘pure, spiritual milk’ that Peter writes about? It’s an image, a metaphor, so it’s not supposed to be precise or technical. We’re invited to use our imaginations. So let’s do that. Spiritual milk can be like God’s word, the scriptures. It could be fellowship with God in prayer. It could be Jesus Christ’s presence and work in your life because of the Holy Spirit. It could be the eucharist – bread and wine. It could be the church being the body of Christ to you and for you. 

The point is not the milk, it’s what the milk does. We are spiritual infants, Peter claims. Just as infants need milk to live and grow before they can start eating solid food, so we need spiritual milk, we need something easy to digest to nourish us and give us the spiritual protein and nutrients and carbohydrates to grow ‘into salvation’, as Peter writes. 

Salvation is a church word. In the original Greek it means something like ‘to be made well’. The assumption behind salvation is that there is something wrong that has made you unwell. Put simply, salvation is our recovery from whatever spiritual ailment or moral sickness we have. The church word for that spiritual ailment or moral sickness is ‘sin’. And it’s not just individual people who can have spiritual ailments or moral sicknesses. Entire societies, in fact the whole world, has a spiritual ailment (mainly, we separate ourselves from God) and moral sickness (we don’t want to do what God has asked us to do – summarized as love God and our neighbor). The medicine, the antidote that makes us well is the life, the example, the death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. 

Putting this altogether, the gospel message here is that God is like a mother to us. God feeds us and nourishes us with spiritual milk – things like the Word, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, prayer, and the people and presence of God in the church, the body of Christ. God does this so that we can be made well, we can be healed of our sin, and we can be nourished to grow into mature people. 

This is a process. If we are at first spiritual infants, eventually with time, milk, and persistence, we become spiritual toddlers, and then spiritual tweens, teenagers, and finally mature adults. The church word for this process of growth is ‘sanctification’. This is part of the mother-like work of God in our lives. It means we become more like Jesus Christ. It doesn’t mean we become God. It also doesn’t mean we have to become a holy roller. Instead, what it means is that we grow into spiritual maturity. Our prayer life deepens. Our love for God grows. We learn to forgive those who have wronged us, bless our opponents, and be generous with everyone. Our heart, mind, and will become more in line with God’s will for us and we live the kind of life that Jesus would live if he were living our life.

The second image that the apostle Peter uses to describe Jesus Christ is a stone. Stones and rocks are images of durability, strength, and longevity. The parable question to each of us is would you rather build your house on a rock or on sand? The answer of course, is a rock. Sands shift, but a rock is a firm foundation upon which to build a home. The moral of Jesus’ parable is that you want to build a life on something that will last.

And so Peter begins with an invitation – “come to the Lord Jesus, the ‘stone’ that lives.” It’s an invitation to build your life on something that will last, something permanent, something eternal.

If you’ve read or seen the Harry Potter books or movies, it is like the description that the evil Lord Voldemort gives to Harry Potter. Harry is “the boy who lives”. In the gospel story, Jesus Christ is the man of God who lives. The power of God in raising Jesus Christ undoes death. The powers of darkness, destruction, and death tried to do their best when they swayed Pontius Pilate to sentence Jesus to death by crucifixion. And yet, Jesus Christ lives by God’s power to raise him from the dead. He is the living stone.

The gospel message is an invitation to each of us to build our lives on the truth, goodness, joy, and beauty that is in Jesus Christ. The world is a wonderful place. It is full of beauty, wonder, love, and incredible joy – all gifts of God. But there is also something deeply disordered and chaotic at the heart of humanity. As we said earlier, this is the Christian concept of sin. We don’t want to become religious nuts or end times fanatics about it, though. Instead, we want to be sober minded and cleared-eyed about the human condition. The gospel message is an invitation to become sober minded and clear-eyed so that we build our lives on a firm foundation, that being Jesus Christ.

Peter then acknowledges that this ‘stone’, this rock, this foundation, is not something that is always welcomed by people. The Old Testament passages that Peter quotes from are Psalm 118:22, “the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone” and the prophet Isaiah 8:14, “he is a ‘stone that causes people to stumble, and a rock that makes them fall’.”  

We’ll focus on the rejection part first. Again, Peter quotes from the Psalm, “the stone the builder’s rejected has become the cornerstone.” My grandmother on my dad’s side was an orphan. She never knew her parents. I can’t recall if her parents died at a young age and thus she became an orphan or if she was given up by her parents because of their circumstances. But that experience, that rejection, did something to her. She was not mean or harsh or anything like that. But she was distant. As I got older, I got a sense that she knew what it was like in a very personal way to experience rejection from the very people who should have always been on her side.

Maybe you know something of what it is like to experience that kind of deep and painful rejection? The kind of rejection where you are put out, put off, pushed out, let go, ignored, or demeaned not because of something that you have done, but because of who you are, what you look like, or for no reason at all. An important theme in the Old and New Testament is that God is for the rejected, the pushed out, and the ignored in the world. Put another way, God doesn’t just love and bless life’s winners, and those who do well for themselves, and those seemingly have it all together. Instead, God is for those who have been rejected, those who have been looked past and ignored, those who are not winners at life’s game in the eyes of the world.

We can say this with confidence because of Jesus Christ himself. He was a poor, single man with no possessions who got himself arrested and put to death. By the standards of the world, he looked like a failure. But God looks at things differently than we do. What seems foolish or unbelievable to us, by the power of God is the very means to life and salvation. God did not accidentally send his son Jesus to be a poor, single man with no possessions to lead a relatively unsuccessful life from the world’s view. That wasn’t by chance. Instead, it was God’s plan because ‘the stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.’ 

This is the basis, the philosophy behind why the Church and the Christian world is (or should be) so focused on serving others and providing for the needs of others, especially those who society considers ‘weak’ – the orphans and widows in biblical speak. We are seeing more now than we have in many of our lifetimes a difference in ways of looking at the world. The ways of the world teach people that might makes right, that the most powerful and wealthy can and have the right to control the lives of the less powerful and wealthy. The Christian message turns that upside down. God lifts up the poor, the rejected, the lowly – ‘the stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone’. All people are made in the image of God. And if you extend that to our everyday lives – all people are equal and have rights. The second way that the ways of the world are becoming more different than the Christian way is how conflicts are handled. The spirit of the world is an ‘eye for an eye’. But the Christian way from Jesus himself is ‘turn the other cheek” and ‘bless your enemies’. This doesn’t mean being a doormat and letting people walk all over you. But it does mean that you can be strong and turn the other cheek, firm in your convictions and be humble, want accountability and also do it in a spirit of grace.

We’ll close with Peter’s promise and command: “But you are a chosen people, royal priests, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession. You were chosen to tell about the wonderful acts of God, who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” Amen.