SPEAKER_00: Grace and peace to you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: It is such a gift to be with you this morning on the fifth Sunday of Easter tide.
SPEAKER_00: The Easter season carries us from Easter morning all the way to Pentecost.
SPEAKER_00: And in Easter, the church has us asking these particular questions, the same questions that Jesus' followers must have asked.
SPEAKER_00: What does it mean for us to live as Easter people who follow a risen Savior, one who died and who rose again for us?
SPEAKER_00: And how does Easter teach us to live together as a community?
SPEAKER_00: One of the earliest communities asking themselves this question were early Christians who had been expelled from Rome in the late first century.
SPEAKER_00: And it's thought that these were the folks that the author of 1 Peter addresses in the letter we'll read today.
SPEAKER_00: They were in one place, and yet, by threat and persecution and force, they had fled east from there and settled in Asia Minor, in like Turkey now.
SPEAKER_00: And they're asking themselves, well, how do we be who we were in this new place, in this new world?
SPEAKER_00: How do we make a life here as followers of Jesus?
SPEAKER_00: And in the first chapter, the author gives thanks to God for the living hope made possible in Jesus, and he acknowledges that his readers are going through real suffering and trials.
SPEAKER_00: But he frames those trials as a refining process, like fire purifying gold, that ultimately proves and strengthens their faith.
SPEAKER_00: And he marvels at the gospel of the grace that the Hebrew prophets claimed as God's true desire, revealed in Christ.
SPEAKER_00: The author then gives a series of exhortations: prepare your minds, set your hope fully on the grace that is coming, and be holy as the God who called you is holy.
SPEAKER_00: And this is a direct echo of Leviticus.
SPEAKER_00: Leviticus's command to be holy, for I am holy.
SPEAKER_00: He tells them to live with reverence, because you all have been born again through the living and enduring word of God.
SPEAKER_00: So love one another deeply and from the heart.
SPEAKER_00: And it's trying to help them see their suffering inside a much larger story.
SPEAKER_00: It's trying to zoom out a little bit and help them see the bigger picture.
SPEAKER_00: And so when we get to our reading for today, the author continues that sort of zooming out trajectory, seeking to help the community understand their location and their vocation.
SPEAKER_00: But before we read it together, let's pray and ask God to bless our time in the scriptures this morning.
SPEAKER_00: Will you pray with me?
SPEAKER_00: Holy God, quiet our minds and calm our fears, so that we can hear with clarity all that you might say to us, both as individuals and as your body here in South Knoxville this morning.
SPEAKER_00: By the power of the Spirit, and in Christ's name we pray.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: Now let's listen together for what the Spirit might be saying to the church from the epistle of first, from the Epistle of Peter, chapter 2, verses 1 through 10.
SPEAKER_00: The author writes, Rid yourselves, therefore, of all malice and guile, insincerity and envy, and all slander, and like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation.
SPEAKER_00: If indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good, come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals, yet chosen and precious in God's sight.
SPEAKER_00: And like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, and to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: For it stands in Scripture See, I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious, and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.
SPEAKER_00: This honor then is for you who believe, but for those who do not believe, the stone that the builder is rejected has become the very head of the corner, and a stone that makes them stumble, a rock that makes them fall.
SPEAKER_00: They stumble because they disobey the word as they were destined to do.
SPEAKER_00: But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim the excellence of him who called you out of darkness and into his marvelous light.
SPEAKER_00: Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people.
SPEAKER_00: Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.
SPEAKER_00: This is God's word for God's people.
SPEAKER_00: Thanks be to God.
SPEAKER_00: Your eyes blink open, but nothing you see looks familiar.
SPEAKER_00: How long have you been asleep?
SPEAKER_00: The floor you're on is cold, and you begin to look around and you see all sorts of strange knobs and levers.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you're on a spaceship.
SPEAKER_00: And just there, you see a bay of windows, and outside you're moving, you're moving through space on some sort of vessel with no memory of how you got there or why.
SPEAKER_00: And one by one you discover there are five others in this place with you.
SPEAKER_00: And each of them also has no particular knowledge of the ship that you're on or its mission.
SPEAKER_00: So together you all search the ship for clues.
SPEAKER_00: And eventually the six of you stumble across a table of sorts, with stools affixed to the floor, and after taking a seat and a long deep breath, finally someone asks it out loud, What are we doing here?
SPEAKER_00: This is a trope, a plot device that's used oftentimes in uh in science fiction, where someone wakes up on an unfamiliar vessel and has to learn how to pilot it, what it is, how it works.
SPEAKER_00: And for me, I imagine that's how so many folks in the church throughout the years have felt after major shifts migration, reformation, scientific advancement, world wars.
SPEAKER_00: In each generation, the church finds themselves in a new world.
SPEAKER_00: Far from home, they risk disconnection from their identity, their purpose, and from the stories and traditions and scriptures that keep them anchored to their great liberator, the God of their ancestors, Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, of Moses and Miriam, of the great prophets, and of the anointed one, the one through whom God arrived in God's most comprehensible form, Jesus of Nazareth.
SPEAKER_00: And it is that Jesus who Peter remembers and lifts up to anew, uh lifts up anew to a scattered and disoriented church, and says, Let me tell you who you are and why you're here.
SPEAKER_00: And how does he do that?
SPEAKER_00: Well, he reaches straight into the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_00: In over half of the verses we just read, there are clear allusions and quotations of the Hebrew Bible.
SPEAKER_00: The author brings these phrases and imagery into the letter to help ground them in their identity.
SPEAKER_00: He assumes that they're familiar with it.
SPEAKER_00: And he he lifts them up, and also the whole early church, to the work of the liberating covenant God of the Psalms and Isaiah, of Moses and the Exodus, of the prophet Hosea.
SPEAKER_00: Each one of these a thread that the author of 1 Peter is pulling from the Hebrew scriptures to weave together this community's identity in a new place.
SPEAKER_00: Your story, 1 Peter says, is part of the story of the liberating God who cares for the poor and the outcast, and who chooses time and time again, even after we fail, to claim and commit to the salvation of God's people.
SPEAKER_00: And so how does Peter describe that chosen people, that royal priesthood?
SPEAKER_00: He describes them as living stones.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know about you, but I find that a hard metaphor to wrap my head around.
SPEAKER_00: I have never met a living stone, as far as I know.
SPEAKER_00: They usually stay where I put them.
SPEAKER_00: But these stones are living stones and they're being built into a spiritual dwelling place.
SPEAKER_00: That word dwelling is similar to.
SPEAKER_00: It's the tabernacle, it's a building, but it's a place where we abide.
SPEAKER_00: It's about God's abiding in and with the people.
SPEAKER_00: How do I imagine a living, a place to live, whose components are built up of moving things, of living stones, of things that change over time?
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
SPEAKER_00: It would take an artist to imagine what this might look like.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's a floating house in the sky.
SPEAKER_00: But many years and many uh many centuries people have been reflecting on this letter and what it means for us to be living stones.
SPEAKER_00: What shape does that collective vessel take?
SPEAKER_00: There have been many metaphors used to describe the church throughout church history.
SPEAKER_00: For many, the church is a boat.
SPEAKER_00: That's why our building is built like this, by the way.
SPEAKER_00: It's referencing uh uh post-Reformation architecture, where the architects imagined the ceiling to be the inside of a boat, maybe upside down.
SPEAKER_00: The church is a boat that carries us through uh chaotic times, through the storms of life, to the shores of eternity.
SPEAKER_00: For many, the church are the sheep of God's pasture, guided by the Good Shepherd to each new meadow and valley, a flock, if you will.
SPEAKER_00: But today I want to follow 1 Peter's lead and reach back into the Hebrew Bible for a metaphor that the for the church that struck me the other day.
SPEAKER_00: I was listening to a podcast, as I am often doing.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, this one is one of my favorites.
SPEAKER_00: It's called Radio Lab.
SPEAKER_00: And this particular episode centered on uh the work of an ecologist named Nalani Nodkarni.
SPEAKER_00: She loves trees, and so she went to college to study trees, and all of her friends told her she should study the root systems.
SPEAKER_00: And we know now that trees can share nutrients with one another, and there's a whole network between trees, underground.
SPEAKER_00: But she didn't want to study underground, she wanted to get up into the canopy.
SPEAKER_00: So, like she did when she was younger, she climbed high above the ground into an area that had been long dismissed by scientists as essentially empty and uninteresting.
SPEAKER_00: And she found that in fact there is a staggering world of hidden life in the canopy of certain trees.
SPEAKER_00: So climbing into the old growth forests in Washington's Olympic rainforest, she found something nobody expected, that up there, on the branches themselves, built up over centuries by decaying moss and leaves, was dirt.
SPEAKER_00: Thick, rich soil in the sky on top of the branches.
SPEAKER_00: And as if that weren't enough, uh, up there she found earthworms and invertebrates and fungi, the same ones who are doing the nutrient sharing below the ground.
SPEAKER_00: She found them hundreds of feet above the earth.
SPEAKER_00: On one branch, she described a complete miniature ecosystem suspended in the air on a branch.
SPEAKER_00: But the deeper revelation came when she followed the roots.
SPEAKER_00: These great trees, it turns out, can also grow their roots upwards into their canopy soils, tapping a secret reserve of phosphorus and nitrogen that sits above that competitive scramble below the earth.
SPEAKER_00: And when the resources below are scarce, these trees can reach into what one researcher called the good snack cabinet in the sky.
SPEAKER_00: This air dirt that they had made over centuries.
SPEAKER_00: On several occasions, the scientists even found tree sprouts, tiny trees growing on the branches of the trees.
SPEAKER_00: The trees had trees, people.
SPEAKER_00: I thought it was wild.
SPEAKER_00: Thanks for letting me share it with you.
SPEAKER_00: It turns out that maybe the universe isn't turtles all the way down, maybe it's trees all the way up.
SPEAKER_00: Life generating more life, shelter producing more shelter, in ways that are still, even now, only beginning to be understood.
SPEAKER_00: The prophet Ezekiel understood this on a spiritual level, I think.
SPEAKER_00: A couple of times in his book, twice in particular in chapters 17 and 31, he uses a metaphor to describe what God is about.
SPEAKER_00: This is from chapter 17.
SPEAKER_00: Thus says the Lord, he writes, I will myself take a sprig from the top of the lofty cedar, and I will set it out, and I will break off a tender shoot from the topmost of its young twigs, and I myself will transplant it high on a lofty mountain.
SPEAKER_00: I will transplant it, and it will produce boughs and bear fruit and become a noble cedar, and under that noble cedar every kind of bird will live.
SPEAKER_00: In the shade of its branches will nest winged creatures of every kind, all the trees of the field shall know that I am the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: So, friends, here we are, around this organic table, with a seat for each of us, and we look at each other in the eyes, and we look around at what has been handed to us by our ancestors, and we ask ourselves again, what are we doing here?
SPEAKER_00: And responding to the Spirit's voice and Jesus' leadership, we remember together that we are living stones, not polished, not perfect, but chosen, picked up by the same God who chose a stammering shepherd to lead an Exodus, and who chose a teenage girl to bear the Savior of the world, and who chose a scattered band of exiles and said, You are my people, despite what your current circumstances might lead you to believe, you have received mercy.
SPEAKER_00: And living stones don't just survive, they build something.
SPEAKER_00: Our living stoneness is also a task.
SPEAKER_00: And the tree doesn't ask whether the bird deserves its branch.
SPEAKER_00: The tree doesn't screen the salamander for the right credentials or for offering shelter hundreds of feet in the air.
SPEAKER_00: The tree just grows deeper into the earth and higher into the sky until the shelter it provides exceeds anything its planters could have imagined or intended, or even scientists realized until very recently.
SPEAKER_00: Life generating more life.
SPEAKER_00: Shelter producing more shelter, shade producing more shade.
SPEAKER_00: That's what we're doing here.
SPEAKER_00: We are here to be the kind of community that reaches into its deepest roots, into the stories of liberation and covenant and mercy that have sustained God's people across millennia and draws from them the nourishment to offer something to this neighborhood, to this city, to this little corner of South Knoxville that the world desperately needs.
SPEAKER_00: The world needs a place where the weary find rest, where the excluded find belonging, where the lost find for themselves that they are named and claimed by a God who has never stopped looking for them.
SPEAKER_00: Peter says it plainly.
SPEAKER_00: Once you had not known mercy, but now you have received it.
SPEAKER_00: And that's not a private blessing, that's a commission to extend that mercy to the world around us.
SPEAKER_00: God has been merciful to us, and so we proclaim the excellence of the one who called us out of darkness.
SPEAKER_00: Not by having all the answers, not by being the loudest voice in the room, but by becoming the kind of place where people can walk in disoriented and not knowing what ship they're on or why, and slowly together, in the company of others, just as beloved and just as disoriented, we start to remember who we are.
SPEAKER_00: What are we doing here?
SPEAKER_00: We are growing, we are sheltering, we are becoming, by God's grace, a tree planted in the storm's path, so that every kind of bird might find a branch, and every weary creature might find shade.
SPEAKER_00: That's the church.
SPEAKER_00: That's our calling.
SPEAKER_00: That's enough.
SPEAKER_00: Thanks be to God.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.