A Stone of Another Name...

Acts 4:5-12

April 26, 2015

Easter 4 Year B

Frist and Harmony Presbyterian Churches

The Rev. Dr. Robert Wm Lowry

            Unless you are a real Arkansas history buff, the names Prospect Robbins and Joseph Brown probably mean nothing to you.  Don’t feel too bad about that, there is not really much known about them except that they both lived part of their lives outside of St. Louis. MO and were both land surveyors. 

            In 1815, at the order of the Madison administration, Robbins and Brown began a monumental task; surveying and mapping the Louisiana Purchase into precise map squares. 

            Years earlier at Thomas Jefferson’s urging the nation had adopted the federal survey system that laid out land in precise one square mile rectangles called sections.  Since the earth is not flat, and the landscape is not either, surveyors have a challenging job and early in the 19^th century it was doubly so. 

            Over the next several years these two pioneer surveyors would map a small portion of east Arkansas mostly in and north/south of Phillips County.  It would take dozens more surveyors and more than two more decades of work before most of the state was mapped according to the survey system.

            To make the system work, there has to be what is called an Initial Point.  It is the point of intersection of a north-south line and an east-west line by which all the succeeding lines are measured. 

            Imagine being the person in charge of making that calculation!  Imagine what would have happened if they had been off by a little!  The whole Louisiana Purchase would have been crooked (of course given the history of Louisiana politics, that might be the case!)  Thankfully, Robbins and Brown were good at their jobs and even without the help of GPS satellites, they managed to precisely map hundreds of thousands of acres and lay the groundwork for generations of surveyors to follow all thanks to the accuracy of that first Initial Point meeting in Phillips County.

            What, you are probably wondering; does any of that have to do with Jesus, the bible, or our valuable time this morning?  Only this. 

Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, speaks to the assembled and tells them that the one in whose name the disciples have healed the man who could not walk is none other than the cornerstone that they have rejected.

            You see, a cornerstone in Roman architecture was not the ceremonial rock it has become in modern buildings.  It was the Initial Point of the building.  The cornerstone was the stone by which all the remaining stones would be laid.  The whole building- a house, a temple, a market, a coliseum- was built based on that one stone. 

            Being the mason in charge of setting that stone must have been like standing in a Phillips County swamp with Robbins and Brown meeting and marking that Initial Point for their maps.  Get it wrong and the whole thing will be off kilter.

            I wonder how often we really hear this text that way? 
            Jesus is the cornerstone.  No one and nothing else, Peter makes clear, but only Jesus.  He is the cornerstone; the stone by which every other stone in our lives is laid.  He is not ceremonial stone laid to mark an occasion or hold a time capsule.  He is no ornamental stone placed to make the building look more official or to make sure that the building committee’s names are memorialized forever. 

No, he is the cornerstone.  He is the stone by which every other stone in our lives is laid. 

Or at least he should be.

I don’t know about you, but if my life is supposed to be constructed with Jesus as the cornerstone by which all the other stones are laid, I am carrying around some pretty crooked rocks.

I suppose that is another way of talking about sin; as mislaid stones in our lives.  Maybe that is why it is so hard to change from some of our sinful ways; it is like changing a mislaid stone in an already built wall.  Cemented into place we cannot just shift it.  We have to chip away at it and clear away all the mortar that is holding that crooked stone in place before we can reset it according to the line of the cornerstone. 

If you life is anything like mine, there is still a lot of chipping to do.  In fact I imagine that I will draw my last breath with the chisel still in my hand chipping away at the mortar holding my sins in place. 

Of course the crooked stones are not the only ones mortared into place.  The cornerstone is as well. 

I wonder if Peter had that in mind when he called Jesus the cornerstone?  I’m sure that part of the reason he uses that metaphor is that it is used in the Old Testament and in the Gospels, but so are a lot of others.  Jesus is called everything from the cornerstone to the Lamb of God, so why chose cornerstone in this moment; in this story.

It may be giving Peter too much credit, but I like to think he did it because after his little outburst in chapter 3, he knew his audience and his moment a little better and realized that everyone was afraid.  Jesus was gone and they felt alone and his followers needed a word of courage and hope.  Lamb of God would have been fine, but lambs wander off.  He needed one of those familiar metaphors that would tell them that not only is Jesus the foundation of all hope and promise, but that he is also never going to leave them.  He is the cornerstone.

Of course it is not just the followers of Jesus who are going to hear him.  He is also speaking to his accusers who have seized them after healing in Jesus’ name.  So he reminds them that they are the very ones who rejected Jesus as the cornerstone. 

The traditional reading of this text makes it sound like Peter is chastising them again for the crucifixion and in fairness I think there is merit in that interpretation.  But I also think Peter saw this as a teaching moment. 

You rejected the cornerstone.

You rejected the one stone in the whole building by which every other stone is measured.

How can you have a solid building without a good cornerstone?

How can you have an ordered life without THIS cornerstone?

He scolds, but I think he also teaches. 

Christ, he says, is the true cornerstone.

Christ is the starting point for every life and the point by which every life is measured and built.

It is an elegant and powerful metaphor.

And, like so much of what we get in the Greek New Testament, it is only part of the story. 

Like so many words and phrases in Greek, the words that mean “cornerstone” also have another meaning. 

Keystone.

Christ is the cornerstone and, according to another possible translation, Christ is the keystone.

If the cornerstone provides the starting point for building a solid building, the keystone has an equally vital role; it keeps the ceiling from caving in!

Now that we have had a short lesson in the history of surveying, here is another short rabbit trail into architecture. 

The stones in an arch are called voussoir (vu-swar).  Each vussoir is wedge shaped to fit the curve of the archway.  You can have just a few or several dozen voussoir to create the arch, but whether it is large or small, one must serve as the keystone. 

Like the cornerstones of old, keystones in ancient and even some modern architecture are more than decorative headpieces above a doorway.  Thought it does not bear much weight, the stone placed at the apex of an arch provides the stability and structure that keeps the two sides from collapsing.

Christ, Peter says, is the keystone.

Right there at the top, holding things up, keeping all the stones of the archways of our carefully constructed lives from slipping away, is Christ the keystone.

It’s a nice image.

In a way, I like it better than the cornerstone.  The cornerstone is nice and all, but it seems so permanent; so invasive.  I have to measure my whole life by that one stone?  How about I measure my life by the stone I set at the corner, and Jesus can focus on holding the roof up over my head?

Christ is the stone that stays out of my business but still serves to keep the roof from caving in above me. 

That sounds better. 

It sure sounds easier.

So which is it? 

Cornerstone or keystone?

Is Christ the measure by which we build our lives or the stone that keeps the roof from caving in on us?

Like so much of the interpretation we do with scripture, there are loopholes we can find in the text.  This one provides a huge one.  It is not inaccurate to translate this passage as saying that Jesus is the keystone and run along with our days claiming that the role of Jesus is to keep the roof from caving in.

It is also faithful to translate it as cornerstone and get into all that measuring business.

So which is it? 

Both.

It is both. 

Jesus is both the measure by which the building is built and the stone that keeps it from crumbling down.

He is both the measure by which we build our lives and the sustenance by which we live them.

He is both cornerstone and keystone.

Or to use the words of the writer of Revelation, he is Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. 

When Peter stands accused of healing in Jesus name, he reminds the crowd, he reminds us, that Christ is both the measure by which we live our lives and the promised hope that keeps our lives together. 

He is the cornerstone and the keystone.  And in those times when we don’t quite measure up, he is always there to hold us up.

We can hope for nothing more, and our loving God will give nothing less.

Alleluia.  Alleluia.  Amen.

What’s in a Name? Everything!

Acts 3:12-19

April 19, 2015

First Presbyterian Church Clarksville

Harmony Presbyterian Church

Dr. Robert Wm Lowry

               

          This is a difficult text.

            In fact, it is more than difficult.  It is downright nasty.

            The disciples, fresh from the Pentecost miracle experience, go to the temple at the appointed time to pray and when they arrived they encountered a man.  The man was unable to walk and was carried there by his friends.  Each day, he would ask for money from the people entering the temple.  The text does not tell us how successful he was, but if his friends brought him back day after day after day, there must have been some luck in the spot.

            When Peter and John are about to enter the temple, they see him and when he asks for a gift they heal him in the name of Jesus.

            With Peter’s help, the man stood up and walked.

            It was a miracle.

            And if it sounds familiar, there is a reason.  It was a miracle with echoes.  Echoes of the healing of the man whose friends carried him to Jesus in Mark 2.  Echoes of the healing of the man who was ordered by Jesus to take up his mat and walk.  Echoes of so many moments when so many people had their lives transformed just by the words of this one named Jesus.

            The first moment out of the gate after Pentecost, the first public act of the church of Jesus Christ gathered and formed by the Holy Spirit, the first encounter between the world and the community of the Word is the restoration of bodily wholeness to a man to whom the disciples spoke the name of Jesus.

            It was a miracle.

            That is the easy part.  Strange for the miracle to be the easy part of the story!  To our modern ears, the miracle is usually the hardest part to believe.  But in the case of Acts chapter 3, the miracle is the easy part.  The trouble is in what comes next.

            We have a clue that what is about to come is trouble because we know who is speaking; Peter.  Whenever Peter speaks, part of me starts to shake my head and think, “oh no, here we go again.”  Not that Peter is somehow a bad figure, far from it, but he does have a tendency to step in it from time to time.  Watching Peter fumble and stumble with the gospel is kind of like watching a two year old make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  It makes a mess, but usually comes out in the end. 

            What makes this particular Peter moment difficult is that the first experience the world has with the disciples is an encounter that is wrong on so many levels.

            Hear it again, but this time imagine that you are part of the breathless crowd that has just seen this healing and, in its wake, run to Solomon’s Porch to get a glimpse of these two who heal in the name of Jesus. 

12 Seeing this, Peter addressed the people: “You Israelites, why are you amazed at this? Why are you staring at us as if we made him walk by our own power or piety? 13 The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—the God of our ancestors—has glorified his servant Jesus. This is the one you handed over and denied in Pilate’s presence, even though he had already decided to release him. 14 You rejected the holy and righteous one, and asked that a murderer be released to you instead. 15 You killed the author of life, the very one whom God raised from the dead. We are witnesses of this. 16 His name itself has made this man strong. That is, because of faith in Jesus’ name, God has strengthened this man whom you see and know. The faith that comes through Jesus gave him complete health right before your eyes. 17 “Brothers and sisters, I know you acted in ignorance. So did your rulers. 18 But this is how God fulfilled what he foretold through all the prophets: that his Christ would suffer. 19 Change your hearts and lives! Turn back to God so that your sins may be wiped away. (CEB)

            Did you hear it that time?  After demonstrating the miracle of transformation that comes just through the faithful name of Jesus, Peter stands in front of the awe struck crowd and essentially calls them murderers and fools.  “You rejected the holy and righteous one,” he says.  “You killed the author of life.”

Like I said, difficult. 

When the first crowd gathers to hear the first sermon, Peter starts by calling them Christ-killers.  In fairness to Peter, the writer of Matthew and the writer of Luke-Acts make it pretty clear that the real culprits in the crucifixion were not the Romans pounding the nails but the crowd calling for blood.  So Peter is not entirely off base when he says what he does about the past.  And as we know from our biblical studies, sometimes an author will take liberties when recording a speech by making helpful revisions to ensure that it complies with the theology of the broader narrative.

There is also the fact that the style of writing in this short passage from Acts demands some measure of the scolding that Peter gives.  In the tradition of Greek rhetoric, there were three broad types of persuasion that were used depending on the timeframe of the conversation.  In this case, Peter wants the people to see a past event in a different light.  More specifically, he wants them to see a person from their past in a different light.  Using the style of Greek judicial argument, Peter points the crowd back to their own misunderstandings and misdeeds and encourages them to rethink their mistakes, see Jesus for who and what he really is, and, later in the story, repent of their mistakes and believe in his name. 

Both of those academic arguments help to deflate the difficulty of this text, but I am not sure that we can really hang our hats on technicalities if we press down a little.  If we begin to peek around the edges of the text, I think there is a third possibility to explain Peter’s ill-advised and less than pastoral response to the awe of the crowd.  It is one that does not involve the technicalities of Greco-Roman rhetoric or the theological implications of authorship in the text.  

Stepping back and looking at this text in the larger context of the whole narrative of Luke-Acts, I have to admit that though I am taken aback by Peter’s harsh tone and scolding words and even the anti-Semitic undercurrent of the speech, I am not wholly unsympathetic to Peter because beneath it all- beneath the formal rhetorical style and the theological coherence with the larger narrative- Peter is angry.  He is sad.  He has lost a friend and when the people whose shouts of “Crucify him” are still ringing in his ears gather in front of him at Solomon’s Porch, Peter just cannot hold it in any more.

He chastises them and scolds them and theologically corrects them, but what he really wants to say, I think, is, “you killed my friend!” 

When it comes to studying the biblical text, I love to spend time on those technical issues.  The study of a particular word in Greek or Hebrew, a turn of phrase that can change the text depending on how it is translated, the ancient writing style that influences any modern reading.  I love to get into my commentaries and get deep in to the text.

From time to time, when I am getting too far down that well of intellectual curiosity and allowed the text to turn from the living word of God to a particularly interesting jigsaw puzzle, I hear in the back of my mind the voice of my friend and former parishioner Lucy who, when I got caught in a cul-de-sac inside my head, would look at me and say, “Robert, put down the book and pick up the baby.”

When left to the devices of the experts and the books, this text is pretty easily explained through technical arguments about style, theological context, and a laundry list of other things that help us do a good reading of the narrative.  But when you put the book down, and pick up the baby- when you get your head out of bible study and encounter the words of the text as the voice of the men and women speaking them, it is hard not to hear a very different voice.  It is hard not to see Peter as more than a theological mouthpiece for the larger text or a formal rhetorician formulating his argument. 

When you put down the book and pick up the baby, you, or at least I, find a man who is still in the midst of the pain that accompanies loss.   

It is difficult to read the apostles that way.  We are so attuned to reading their words as though they were as rigid and precise as the stone their figures are carved in throughout the great cathedrals of the world that it is difficult for us to hear the voices of the stones sound so very human. But if we take scripture at face value, we know that rather than being towering pillars of strength whose real lives rivaled the strength of the stone effigies they would leave behind in the church’s imagination, the people whom Jesus called to be his followers- the people whom the Holy Spirit calls to be the church- are staggeringly unqualified for the job and persistently getting it wrong.  To be sure, they all have their moments of great faith and great influence, but the rest of the time they are deeply flawed, occasionally foolish, frequently afraid, and seem to have to be told the same thing over and over again until it finally sinks in.

So when I read this and many other texts not trying to explain away this emotional outburst from “Petras” Peter who is called “Petros” the Rock, I find that rather than looking at Peter at a distance, I am looking at myself up close. 

Scripture does that a lot.  It uses ancient words to hold a mirror up to us in the here and now so we are able to see, in the common moments we share with men and women so long ago, our own reality staring back at us.

So when I put down the books and pick up the baby and look at this text and allow it to hold up the mirror to my life, it does not take long for me to see that I have the same problem Peter does in that moment; I’ve got some stuff I need to get off my chest and let go of.  We read this text as Peter being this great and towering prophetic voice, but in reality I think it is much more than that.  I think Peter is towering in his vulnerability.  He is towering in his honesty.  He is towering in his willingness to say, “you hurt me and I am still in pain.”

My guess is that I am not the only one who might see something like that in the reflection of this text.  I’m probably not the only one who needs to learn from Peter that letting it out and letting go is important to moving on.

We see what happens for Peter when he lets go.  The rest of the narrative of Acts 3 is Peter calling on the people to turn to the God who is always willing to receive us; to turn to the God who is always ready to forgive; to turn to the very one whose blood they were baying for just weeks before outside Pilate’s palace. 

The story starts with Peter healing in the name of Jesus and ends with him inviting the people into the transformation that comes through belief in the name of Jesus and all the while Peter himself is being moved from hurt to wholeness by what other than the name of Jesus. 

At its core this is a text about the power of Jesus’ name and the hope of the resurrected Christ.  It is the name that can make us whole body and soul.  In all of our wonderfully made sinfulness, God gathers us in and calls us by name. 

That is a hope we are called to share with the world, but also a hope that is shared with us!  Remember the words of the gospel, “God so loved the world.”  Not the rest of the world, or part of the world, but the whole world.  We are in that circle as well; the circle of hearers of the promise as well as bearers of it into the world. 

When I was a seminary intern, the Head of Staff was out of town and the Associate Pastor was dealing with a couple of hospital emergencies, so she called me to go to the home of a member who had died after a long illness and be with the family until she could get things moved around to meet and plan the service.

I was as green as green can get and this was going to be my first visit of this kind so I began to wonder what my strategy should be for the visit.  I may have even asked her using those same words, “what should my strategy be,” and Sallie reminded me as only she could that my job was to go there on behalf of the Church of Jesus Christ and show them and tell them that they are not alone and that Jesus loves them.  No more no less.  And, she said, if you aren’t sure what to say just remember, “to err on the side of pastoral care.”

I went to the house and I am sure that I managed to hit every possible pot hole.  I was sure I was going to get fired for messing up so badly.  Then at the funeral, the daughter of the woman who died took me by the hand and said, “thank you for coming by.  I needed someone to remind me that while Jesus was welcoming mom he still had time for me.”

There is such power in the name of Jesus that even an angry disciple or an inept seminarian can be vehicles for its healing power. 

And when we put down the book and pick up the baby;

when we let ourselves be swept up in the hope and the promise;

when we let out and let go of all the things that weigh us down and we dare to proclaim the power of Jesus’ name the world is not the only thing that will be transformed.  Like Peter standing on Solomon’s Porch who went from lashing out against the people he felt robbed him of his friend to calling those people to repent and know that God is good, we too can and will be transformed when we share the power and the promise of the risen Christ if we share it with open and vulnerable hearts.

He is risen!  He is risen indeed!  Alleluia, alleluia!  Amen!