The Reverend Kirk T. Berlenbach

Easter V, Year A

April 27, 2008

I have spent the last several weeks working in my garden, getting it ready for planting. It’s a lot of work… I have to clear away all the leaves and debris. I have to turn the soil over and then I have to cultivate it. I have done this same work six times and over the course of six seasons of preparation and planting I have come to one conclusion; someone knew what they were talking about when they named this place Roxborough. You can’t turn around here without stumbling on one. The ground is so stony as to make the job of preparing my garden beds just endless. It is just rocks, rocks and more rocks. Each year when I till more rocks seem to appear. Even though I cleared them all out just the year before, I always seem to find more. Of course while all these stone make living here more difficult, they an also be rather useful, once you get them out of the ground, that is. I suppose it all depends upon what we make of them…

There is something rather profound in all of this. Whether we like it or not, the rocks are there… no matter what we do, we are bound to run into them. Even those of us who don’t go digging around the dirt have to keep our eyes open for rocks in this neck of the woods. And therein, lies our lesson.

In fact, rocks are an often overlooked, yet remarkably accurate means of understanding faith. You don’t have to read through very much of the Bible to see that they are frequently featured prominently; from the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments to Jesus’ frequent use of them in his metaphors and parables, the Scriptures are filled with objects and images made of stone. Today’s lessons are particularly focused on the subject. Rocks are present in Acts as Stephen gets stoned to death. They are present in the Psalm, used as an image of G-D as our rocky crag and stronghold. And the Letter of Peter uses the image in two different ways… first to refer to the believers and second, as a way of referring to Jesus.

In all these ways and more, these are the rocks of faith. Just like the soil of Roxborough, our lives are filled with these divine stones. The question is, once we stumble across them, we have to decide what we are going to do with them. But in order to decide that, we have to know what they are good for.

Let’s go back to the image of rock. What do we know about it? It is very hard and it is heavy. Rock is very durable. That makes it a great material to build with. In the ancient world nothing lasted longer than stone… there was nothing was better to build with. Stone was (and still is for that matter) something that will be around forever.

In short, this stone that we know as Jesus is the foundation on which our faith is built. Whether it is the stone that formed the tablets that held the 10 Commandments or his parable of building one’s house upon the rock instead of on the sand. Jesus describes himself as being the chief cornerstone of the new temple that G-D is building. Later Jesus names Peter as the rock on which he will build the Church. Finally, in the Letter of Peter the author describes the believers as “living stones” built into a “spiritual house.” These stones of can provide us with a sure foundation on which to build a faith that can sustain us throughout the course of our lives… a faith on which we can depend… something that will hold up and remain firm in the face of the trial and disasters that life can bring.

But of course these same qualities that make stone such a great building material also make it just as suited to being used as a weapon. From the time we are children we learn about the destructive power of stones. But as expression of faith stones have the power to cripple and destroy both figuratively and even literally. Nowhere is this more clear than in the case of Stephen. In the view of the crowd Stephen had blasphemed against their faith and so they turn their faith into a weapon and use it as justification for stoning him to death. While this is a literal example such “stonings” take on a near infinite variety of expressions… from the pogroms of Europe and the Spanish Inquisition to modern day jihads. Unfortunately it is all too easy to point to such horrific examples of religiously fueled violence that have scarred and continue to scar our world.

But there are less obvious, yet much more common examples of throwing religious stones. And the unfortunate truth is that many of us have been struck by such religious stones at one point or another. Have many of us know the pain of being excluded by a church or denomination? How many of us know the anger of being told that your faith or your theology is not legitimate? Of being told that you’re not holy enough or that who you are makes you a sinner? Many of us know the experience of being told that we cannot come up for communion when we attend a service at a Roman Catholic church. But sometimes the attacks are much more personal. I know of one of our parishioners who, because of their sexuality, was not allowed to give a eulogy at their uncle’s funeral. Even as a priest, I am not immune from having stones thrown at me. A few years ago I went to a wedding at a Russian Orthodox Church. The service was beautiful. After the ceremony I introduced myself to the priest and he offered to give me a tour. For nearly half an hour he showed me around the beautiful church, pointing icons and explaining the liturgy. For the whole tour he was kind and gracious. Then we got to the high altar area and he took great pride in explaining that the altar was specially consecrated and contained a relic of a saint. I began to move forward toward it and he told me to stop. The area was off limits to me because I was Protestant. I did not make a fuss or press him about it, but by refusing me entrance to the sanctuary he was making a very significant comment on my faith. He wasn’t just saying that Episcopal Church and the Orthodox Church were not in communion with one another. He was saying I was not even really a Christian.

And as much as I tried to shrug it off… as much as I tried to look past it and chalk it up to “cultural differences,” it still hurt. Maybe you know how that feels too. Most of the time, when something like that happens, I can look past it… I can chalk it up to differences in tradition or just ignorance. But there are those times when it really makes me mad. Especially when I hear such stories from others… when I hear how profoundly people like you have been hurt by callous and self-righteous clergy and churches… when I hear about the damage it has done to your self-esteem or to your relationship with G-D, I get mad. As I think about it, I get worked up enough that I would love to just tear into these priests and these denominations… who made them so holy… who gave them the right to say who is Christian and who is not… in fact, it would be really easy for me to turn this sermon into a tirade.

But who would that help? What would that really accomplish? Yes it would make us all feel better about our church and the fact that we try to welcome everyone. But we already know that and hopefully, that is already something that makes you feel proud and good about our parish. In reality all that I would be doing is the same thing I was accusing them of doing, namely, throwing religious stones.

And that is the real challenge when it comes to these stones of faith. When we happen upon them in course of every day life, it is pretty easy to use them to build rather than destroy. But it is much harder when the stones that get thrown at us. It is so much harder to be able to use those rocks constructively. When we are excluded or shamed or hurt by someone else’s religious attack, it is all too easy to take the rock that was just thrown at us and throw it back at our attacker. It is a great temptation. But it is not our only choice. We can instead take those same stones that were meant to break us down and instead add them to our foundation… although they were intended as weapons, we can use them as building blocks instead.

In order to do that, we must first forgive our attacker. If we don’t we run a real risk of getting stuck behind the rock they threw, unable to move it yet also unable to move past it. Only once we have forgiven the person or the church that threw it can we add that stone to the foundation of our faith. But if we do, our faith becomes that much stronger and that much more secure.

All through life we are going to run into divine rocks… they are our encounters with G-D and they can be big and significant life a conversion and they can be small and subtle, like receiving some guidance at just the right moment. But however big or small they may be each time we come upon them, we must decide what we will do with it. Will we use it as a weapon… something to knock down the faith of those who disagree with us or hurt us or will we use it to build? For even though such stones are common, each one is also a unique opportunity. And if we throw it away, there will always be that missing piece from our foundation and our faith will always be the lesser for it.