Sermon - The Rev. Dr. Elise Feyerherm, May 7th, 2023

All across New England, fields are bordered by miles of old stone walls. You may have seen them out past Rte 128: walls constructed masterfully of stones laid on top of each other and fitted together with no mortar at all. They have lasted for centuries, some of them.

One of the reasons, I hear, that these walls have endured is because they have no mortar. In our harsh New England winters, mortar takes a beating – it expands and contracts, the ice gets in and pushes the stones around, and before long the wall is misshapen and off-kilter. But the dry stone walls let the water flow through, and the stones can shift and shimmy and stay together instead of being pushed and pulled away from each other. What might look like a haphazard and slipshod method is actually a recipe for resilience and long life.

The New England stone wall is also a witness to the power of “repurposing.” The farmers who took the plow to these rich lands cursed the stones that stopped their blades and tripped their oxen. After dragging these heavy rocks to the boundaries of their fields and dumping them in a pile for generations, eventually they abandoned the fields to livestock farmers, calling the terrain “the work of the devil.” But for those raising livestock the stones were a boon – haphazard piles became rustic, elegant, ingenious walls protecting their cattle, sheep, and horses. Centuries later, when the elegant walls fell down and became haphazard piles again, they continued to be of good use, stabilizing the soil and sheltering all sorts of other tiny wild creatures.

The first letter of Peter calls to its readers:  “like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”

You are living stones. You are called to be a holy priesthood. I wonder whether these dry stone walls are in fact a better image for who we are called to be as Church, better than, say, the Jerusalem temple or even our own St. Paul’s.

We have been brought together, stones first pushed up out of the ground and exposed not by frost heaves but by the various traumas and forces of life – birth, family life, separation, death, the search for purpose and meaning and belonging. Each of us bears the marks and layers of a unique and ancient story, born of pressures and ruptures and more gentle shaping by life’s experiences. Each of us different, yet born of the same earth. Alone, we may be beautiful in our own way, reflecting a small part of the earth’s majesty. But it is not until we are brought together, laid side by side and stacked, turned and fitted into this whole edifice of living stones, that we find our deepest meaning and our truest purpose.

What holds us together? Not mortar – nothing that glues us in place or forces us into a particular space. We are not forced and held, but we are steadied and stabilized by the places where we touch each other, where we hold each other up and keep each other from falling. It is connection rather than coercion, and it means that there is room between us, cracks where the storms can pass through and drain away, where they have to drain away if we are to survive and stay together. Otherwise the storms, if they are trapped by compulsion, cruelty, or duress, will find their way into the pain, freeze, and crack us apart. Our connection keeps us steady, but we are able to shift and slide to make room, staying together as the squalls pass by.

New stones will be added, and must be added, just as others will be taken away. In a place where tradition and family mean so much, it is easy to expect that the new stones will find a place without disrupting the lines of the venerable old wall, but that is rarely the case. You see, we’re the stones – but we’re not the builder. True, we are living stones, not cold inanimate pieces of mineral. But remember the admonition from First Peter: “Let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, a holy priesthood.”

I would say it’s not about passivity, but about the lifelong process of surrendering ourselves to God’s love and mission in the world. We are called to let God place us in the body, in the wall, where we can best serve the mission of Christ. We have a say in it, but it is more about listening carefully, staying open to where the hand of God is guiding us, than it is about telling God where we want to go or what we want the wall to look like.

It’s not easy being a living stone. I have the feeling that from time to time God takes the wall apart and rearranges it in a different form. We are living in a time of radical rearrangement – not only in the world and in society, but in the Church, this edifice of living stones which extends across the globe. We are coming to understand that the Church is not about us, about where we want to be or how we want things to look. It is not about being safe. What has been an elegant and venerable wall is beginning to shift and take a new shape. Stones are being moved around, whether we like it or not.

Such artistic license on the part of the divine builder is disconcerting, no doubt, to those of us still in the wall. Everything is shifting, sometimes violently, around us. But God’s mission in the world will not stand still. God’s mission in the world needs us, as living stones, to be willing to listen, pray, trust, and let God shape us into the body that the world needs in order to know God’s healing. The stones heaved up in these New England fields were dragged to the perimeter to make room for crops that would keep families fed and flourishing. Those same piles were rebuilt into erect walls that served a different purpose, but an essential purpose nonetheless. And as those walls begin to lose their clear shape and become piles once again, they continue to feed and shelter a new community of creatures.

Your priesthood, given to you by God at your baptism, is to attend to where Christ has made himself known to you in your life and to discover how Christ can heal the world through you. Your priesthood is to let yourself be built into this building of living stones, and serve the world in Christ’s name.

I opened the Globe this morning to see that there had been yet another mass shooting, this time in Allen, Texas. Our priesthood has to, somehow address this gaping wound in American society. Stones, as we heard in the first reading from Acts, can be weapons of hate, or they can form shelters of love. As a holy priesthood, how can we bring God’s grace and love to places where hatred and violence hold sway? If our priesthood is not about this, I don’t know what it is about at all.

We have been through much change in the last year – Yet our call as a holy priesthood in service to Christ means that we can face all of the upheaval in our lives not only as a challenge but as a gift. It is a gift that compels us to face just how desperately we need God and each other. Our weakness, our struggle, our disappointment, our inability to control life – these things are the foundation of our priesthood, because they are what keep us in touch with the power of God in our lives and enable us to connect with the world’s pain.

“Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 2:4-5). The house is shifting – it is always shifting. But know that you are precious in God’s sight, and that your priesthood is holy. Thanks be to God.