Together Part 1. What makes you think you can walk right in here and take over? asks Linus.

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1 November 16, Peter 2:4-10 Pastor Betty Kelsey Creekside COB Together Part 1 I m going to pull a Janet here and start with a Peanuts cartoon. Lucy comes storming into the room and demands that Linus change TV channel, threatening him with her fist. What makes you think you can walk right in here and take over? asks Linus. These five fingers, says Lucy. Individually they are nothing, but when I curl them together like this into a single unit, they can do a lot of damage. Which channel do you want? asks Linus. After a moment, he turns away, looks at his own fingers and says, Why can t you guys get organized like that? Our word for today is TOGETHER, and as you note in the bulletin there is a part 1 and 2. Both Rosanna and I have something to say about that word! The book, Everything I needed to know I learned in kindergarten 1 offers this five-year-old wisdom. "... No matter how old you are, when you go out into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together." 2 The Avery and Marsh song we just sang we used often while this building was under construction. 1 Peter talks about building a church together in which Jesus Christ is the cornerstone, and we are living stones that complete the building. The foundation was chosen and laid by God. Jesus 1 Robert Fulghum, Everything I Needed to Know I learned in kindergarten. 1

2 Christ, who endured suffering and death, taking on the weight of the world, is the chief cornerstone. Just to clarify the terminology, I have some slides to illustrate. (Narrate as they are shown.) My father s name was Daniel Stoner Krady. He went by Stoner, or D. Stoner, although Stoner was really the family name of his mother. The name Stoner may indicate some distant relative had been a stone mason, but that skill wasn t passed down through the generations. The only thing I know is that constructing a stone wall or building takes patience and precision. I understand that if a stone wall is expertly fitted together, mortar is not needed because the weight will hold it in place. Finding the perfect cornerstone is crucial for three reasons. 1) It is a measure to keep the foundation square and level. 2) It bears weight and assures stability. 3) It is weather worthy to withstand cracking. There is a story about the building of Solomon s temple, a mixture of truth and fiction. II Chronicles says Solomon used 80,000 stonecutters and 70,000 carriers of stone. The stonework took place in a field outside Jerusalem. Each piece was hewn to be perfectly fitted for a specific space, so that once the stone was carried to the building site, no additional chiseling was needed. Yet when the workmen carried one stone of peculiar size and shape to the construction site, they could find no place for it, and tossed it aside. As the building progressed, the workers were ready to lay the cornerstone. They searched long and hard to find a stone that was the proper shape. It had to be capable of handling the pressure of immense weight. But piece after piece cracked under the stress. Then one of the workers stumbled over the stone that was tossed aside. It had endured weather and mistreatment and stood up to the test. When the men hoisted it into its strategic place, it fit perfectly. True or not, it makes a nice visual to illustrate the stone that the builders rejected became the cornerstone of a whole new world. Although Jesus was rejected by his own people, he has become the very cornerstone of our faith. Yet no building is made of foundation stones alone. It takes many stones to create the walls adhering to the foundation. And like Solomon s walls, a 2

3 stone needs to be chiseled here and there, or sanded and smoothed to make it fit perfectly in its place. As God s living stones, we are fitted together to form God s spiritual house. We are chiseled, sanded and rubbed together by life experiences until our uniqueness meshes together with other living stones, and Christ becomes our foundation and cornerstone. Well -- maybe not perfectly fitted together. Our uniqueness doesn t take away our flaws. I read about a Presbyterian church that was intentionally built of clinker bricks. Clinkers, apparently, are bricks that come out of the kiln deformed and misshapen. Factory seconds. These rejects are normally thrown away. But this group of Presbyterians thought they were the perfect thing to use for a church building. God can turn even clinker bricks into living stones. 3 I used to have a vase made by a potter in Goshen who intentionally makes misshapen vessels to illustrate her own misshapen life. Think about the clinkers who served God: David killed another man s wife, yet he is a pivotal character in Jesus family tree. Peter denied Jesus three times, but he became a pillar in the early church. Paul persecuted and killed Christians, but turned around and became the most avid missionary of Christ and letter writer in the New Testament. We are all misshapen, but because of God s mercy, we are part of the body of Christ. Peter says, You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. 3 Michael L.C. Henderson, Clinker bricks and Ebenezers, May 2, 1999, Exeter Congregational United Church of Christ Web Site, users.rcn.com. 3

4 So today, this is our challenge -- to offer our misshapen selves as living stones to build a sanctuary vibrant with God s Spirit, recognizing Jesus Christ as the cornerstone of our faith. As God s own people who have received God s mercy, we offer that same mercy to others -- even the clinkers. We have received that mercy so that we can proclaim the mighty acts of God to other people. We at Creekside are responsible to build this kind of body of Christ -- TOGETHER! 4

5 November 16, Peter 2:4-10 Pastor Rosanna McFadden Creekside COB Together Part 2 You probably know of cases where this has happened -- maybe it s even happened to you: two people who have been friends for a long time have change in that relationship, and they decide to start dating, and get married. That s a little bit like what Elizabeth and I are feeling about the call from the Search Team to serve as your full-time pastoral team. We ve each been friends of this congregation for a long time; we ve known many of you and cared about you for years. But this new possibility feels different, and I want to share some of the ways it feels different to me, and ways which I hope it could be different for you. I would be taking on a larger time commitment and responsibilities, but that s not the significant difference for me. Marriage is a different level of commitment than friendship: it s a covenant to which both parties commit. No human covenant is infallible or unbreakable, but to the best of our ability, with God s help, we commit to work toward common goals and to not walk away at the first signs of disagreement or tension. Elizabeth s choice of this text from 1 Peter is appropriately targeted to the theological version of this kind of relationship, ecclesiology. It s a fancy word from the Greek ecclesia church and -- ology words about and it basically means the way we do church. And by church, I mean the organization of the followers of Jesus Christ. It is, for instance, the reason which you ll be voting on a pastor today, rather than having someone placed here by the bishop. As you might guess, there s not a whole lot of explicit ecclesiology in the New Testament: the earliest Christians were telling the story of Jesus and trying to get a handle on why we do church -- what is Jesus relationship to God, how does the Holy Spirit fit in, what does it mean if Jesus is the Messiah, what does his crucifixion mean and does that meaning 5

6 change in light of the resurrection? These are huge, big, formational and foundational questions. Until we answer the question why do we do church? It doesn t make sense to figure the way we do church. In other words, we have to lay the foundation before we start fussing about the color of the carpet and which hymnals we re going to use. 1 Peter is one of the later New Testament letters, aptly called the Pastoral Epistles, where the author is beginning to explore what it means to be the church of Christ. One of the images he uses is the idea of living stones, built into a spiritual house, with Jesus Christ as the cornerstone. It is a fine way to imagine ways that we might fit together and support one another and have different functions and be distinctively individual parts of the same structure. But we dare not get so caught up in the structure that we forget why it was built. The church does not exist to pay its staff or maintain its buildings or to meet its budget. That is one way of doing church -- it s not the way everyone does church--but as a paid staff member, I don t have an argument with any of those things. However, if we make the way we do church more important than why we do church, we are lost. If we talk so much about the budget that we never get around to talking about ministry; if we re focused on maintenance instead of mission; if we don t have a vision for our church beyond taking care of ourselves, we have confused the why with the way and that s a problem. We must never lose sight of the cornerstone which holds us together, Jesus Christ and his love and his example of hospitality, compassion, selflessness, and service which we have committed to follow. I suspect most of you are familiar with the Church of the Brethren tagline: Continuing the work of Jesus. Peacefully, Simply, Together. I own at least two T-shirts with those words printed on them. That tagline is a statement about ecclesiology -- fortunately marketing folks are smart enough not to put the word ecclesiology on T-shirts. Together does pretty well as a summary. I hope you will give me the opportunity to work with you to build the church of Christ. I have had the chance to pray about this and discuss it with the people who mean the most to me and whose counsel I value. I feel called to this work in this place, and I m excited about what we could accomplish together. But Elizabeth and I are only one side of the relationship. We have been your friends and your sisters in Christ, and we have 6

7 served as your pastors the best we can, with God s help. We have been asked to do more, and we are asking for more from you: to commit to work together to be living stones to build a church with Jesus Christ as the cornerstone. I want to end with a story from the book Rooted in Love, Rodger Nishioka s book of meditations for youth leaders: We don t run like that in this church. In this church we run together. 7