With You I am Well Pleased
1 Peter 2:4-5, 9-10; Matthew 3:13-17
(Pull out collection of Stones).
I have always loved stones. Picking up interesting ones along a walk. Finding flat round ones along a beach and seeing how many skips I can make in the water. Touching and holding them to discover their interesting shapes and sizes and textures – smooth, rough, jagged, weathered. Heaping them up into little piles. I looked on my desk at church this week, and I found these 4 stones, all with special meaning. This black spotted one was from a Music and Worship retreat at Laurelville where we did some dedications of the new Voices Together Hymnal and blessed the Hymnal committee. These two were from spiritual retreats, held outdoors in God’s Creation, where we took a stone home to remind us of God’s presence that goes with us always. This last one was from our Meals that Matter supper at the Willms home in February, led by Levi, when he led us through a ritual of passing around different rocks and building a little altar on the table. We were exploring Levi’s big question about despair versus hope in a messed-up world. Ironically, we first each choose a very smooth stone, that represented those places of despair and trouble in our world and in our lives, and dropped and released them into a bowl of water, before we each chose a more ragged, rough, but also more honest and real stone, where we wrote down what gives us hope – Friendship, love, relationships, community, random acts of kindness, nature. (show stone) I wrote down People Sharing Vulnerabilities. We gathered all of these rough, but profound stones and made a display, a collection of meaning making, an altar. These stones are more than just stones. They are symbols of faith along our life journey.
The Bible is full of stories of stones and rocks. When you cross the Jordan into the Promised Land, pick up 12 stones, and when your children ask in the time to come, what do these stones mean? You shall tell them about the faithfulness of Yahweh. There is a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them. My God is a Rock in a weary land, the fortress in whom I take refuge, the Rock of my salvation. You are Peter, and on this Rock I will build my church. He who is without sin, cast the first stone. Those who hear these words of mine are like a wise person who builds his house on the rock… the rain came down and the winds blew, but it did not fail, because is had its foundation on the rock. Even the wonderful passage we read about the baptism of Jesus, where Jesus hears the words ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased,’ is followed immediately by the wilderness of sand and rocks and the temptations to turn this stone into bread, to throw himself off the pinnacle of the Temple so the angels save him and not dash his foot against the stone, and to claim the kingdoms of the world from on top of the mountain of stone. He has to remember and hold on to the promise of being Beloved to deal with the stones of life. This stone image is not so straightforward or linear. It is tricky. It is nuanced. It brings our imagination all over the place. Stones can represent both despair and hope, both temptations and promise.
We heard the words from 1 Peter. Come to Jesus, a living stone, and like living stones, let yourself be built into a spiritual house, a holy priesthood. What a strange image – living stones. These hard, seemingly unbreakable, immovable objects, having life and breath and being… having meaning and purpose, like the stone images we have been talking about. It is a call to base your life on the foundational stone of Jesus, but not in a stagnate, unmovable, unchangeable way, but in a living dynamic way, as a way always open to change and growth and renewal, with lots of room for the Spirit to move and lead and blow in your life. It assumes that faith will be a journey, with lots of stops and turns and new paths and surprises along the way. It sees baptism not as an end point, but as a marker along that journey, as a place where you build a little altar, and then continue the journey. It is to come as living stones, rough as they are, knowing God can make them holy.
Levi, when I hear you talk about your faith journey, it is one of many living stones in the altar of your life. You did your pastoral internship over the months of January to March, right in the middle of our Anabaptism at 500 series of renewal services, and you commented how you see yourself as a part of this longer story of continued renewal. ‘Once you were no people, but now you are God’s people.’ You are a part of that larger story, even as you are so grounded in this particular congregation and local expression of faith at SJMC, a place where you thrived through your internship. You were moved to be a part of serving communion, that symbol of God’s grace, to the congregation, and to your Mom Wendy, who in turn served Grandmother Doreen. We are a part of a larger story and community and cloud of witnesses. You named the influence of two grandparents who have passed away, and yet whose story still influences you – your Bender Grandmother Loretta and your Janzen Grandfather Larry, who would both have been so proud of you today. These are living stones in your faith altar. You also named the influence and mentors of Rockway Collegiate, which gave you an open space to grow and thrive, and your summers at Silver Lake Mennonite Camp, and the gifts of leadership drawn out of you so naturally. You wanted to be baptized outdoors, in a body of water, because God’s Creation has been so important to you, with a deep connection to nature and the natural world, gifts of God to us – a place where you feel deeply the presence of God. You remembered the story of John baptizing Jesus in the Jordan River, in the waters, and affirming, as you are affirmed today – ‘This is my Son, The Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’ You named that faith is indeed a mystery, and that is okay. It is okay not to know where life and faith will lead you. But it is the journey and the God you want to put your trust in. You know it has to do with committing to loving your neighbour, to choosing servant leadership, to being a part of community, to practicing spiritual disciplines, to asking the big questions of life, to accepting that there will be times of wilderness and searching, and to seeing yourself as part of the larger story of God, not something you do on your own.
And so today, in baptism, we are picking up more stones, more symbols of God present with us. With your baptism, you are claiming God’s mercy and grace for you, and you are coming as a living stone, letting yourself be built into a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, acceptable and loved by God. So here by the water, we’ll build an altar to praise God, out of the stones of our lives that we’ve found here. We’ll set them down, rough as they are, knowing you can make them holy; knowing you can make them holy. Amen.