A Rock by Any Other Name

A sermon preached at Faith Episcopal Church, August 21, 2005.

What do the Washington National Cathedral, the Empire State Building, the Pentagon, and the Biltmore, that outrageous Vanderbilt estate in Ashville, NC, all have in common? They are all made out of Indiana limestone. That’s right – that part of the country where Melanie is about to begin her graduate school studies is honeycombed with limestone quarries. The particular stone from those quarries is known as freestone – meaning that is has no grain or direction. That makes it especially suited for carving and decorative stone work – it makes good gargoyles! Every year some 2.7 million cubic feet worth of Indiana ends up somewhere else. It crops up everywhere – Chicago city hall, the Washington Holocaust Museum, the Department of Commerce along with many statehouses and mansions of other great American robber barons. When you have an important building to build, trust Indiana limestone!

“Listen to me, you that pursue righteousness, you that seek the Lord. Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were dug.” Isaiah’s words go on to refer to Abraham and Sarah as the genetic quarry from which the people of Israel were dug. Abraham and Sarah’s story, found in the Book of Genesis, provides a blueprint for relating to God. Trust makes up a big part of their story. They trusted that God was truly calling them into a new life in a new place for a purpose. Their faith was deep enough to allow mystery and the power of the infinite and the implausible to become real. Abraham was also able to let go of the son he held most dear and future that had been long promised and assume that God’s will was being done. That is the faith quarry from which we come. All of those qualities rest within us and can be drawn out and drawn on when they are needed. The good thing about this quarry is that perfection was not one its qualities. Abraham proved to be fearful and dishonest; Sarah was jealous and spiteful. And yet, God didn’t let their failings define them. God built with their best qualities. And while their weaker moments give us comfort that we too are worthy of God’s favor, it is a reflection of their faith and trust in God that we hope to find in ourselves.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus also finds a rock on which to build. Many scholars believe that this is a reflection of a later, post-resurrection experience. No where else in the Gospels does Jesus refer to creating the church. He consistently sought to return the faith of Israel to its original intent. He sought to overturn and redirect what he saw as errant practices by the Jewish leaders of his day. But the truth is that by the time Matthew’s Gospel was written, the church already existed and Peter was cast as the new Abraham. What makes Peter “the rock” other than his name – Petros, Pierre. We lose that translation in English because Peter doesn’t immediately make a word image of “rock.” That is why in Clarence Jordan’s wonderful translation known as the Cotton Patch Gospels – which sets Jesus’ life in Georgia in the 1960s – has Jesus calling Peter “Rock” in good ole boy fashion. Jordan reclaimed the original meaning of Peter’s name.

When I read of this story there are always three images that come together for me. The first is Caeserea Philippi – the region mentioned in today’s reading. It’s one of the places that you visit with you do Israel. The striking feature is the sacred cave dedicated to the worship of Pan – that naughty little Roman god. In part, Peter is proclaiming Jesus supremacy over the pagan gods of the Empire, if not the Empire itself. It’s a cool place.

The next image is the charming little grey stone church built on the shores of the Sea of Gallilee – known as the Church of Peter’s Primacy. It’s the site dedicated to this idea of Peter as the quarry from which the church draws its building stones.

What makes Peter a good quarry? We don’t have the benefit of the total relationship between Jesus and Peter, we mostly have glimpses of Peter as the impetuous, somewhat dense, ultimately fallible yet intuitively right about the one he proclaimed as Lord. In the Gospel story two week ago, he excitedly jumped out of the boat and tried to walk toward Jesus on the water – when he realized what he was doing he couldn’t do it any more. Jesus called his faith little – I think Peter’s faith is enormous – it’s just trapped in a human body. He had the ability to just know something is true even if it is implausible. He runs into trouble when he tries to manifest the truth of Jesus in his own life – to live as if the kingdom has come. Later in Peter’s ministry, after assuming for some time that the message of Jesus was meant only for Jews, his mind was opened to the message that not only are all foods clean and acceptable, but all people are acceptable to God – he said “Truly I perceive that God shows no partiality.” The world still needs Peter the Rock to blurt out the truth.

The final image that comes to me from this story is St. Peter’s Square in Rome. It is an expression of the explosive spread of the Church. It is so grand and grandiose that in comparison to the little stone church on the shores of the Sea of Gallilee it boggles the mind and has often boggled the message. The church has become equal parts good and evil, brilliantly intuitive and demonically stupid. What has happened to the faith of the simple fisherman?

This week the world lost another rock, Brother Roger, the founder of the Taize community in France. In 1940, as a young Swiss priest, Roger came to this picture perfect village in Burgundy and began a lifetime of work teaching peace, reconciliation and ecumenical welcome. Last Tuesday night, the 90 year old Frere Roger was at the evening prayer service. The church was filled with young people singing the familiar Taize chants when a woman approached him and stabbed him death. Ironically, his health had precluded his joining Pope Benedict in Cologne, Germany this week. He had stayed home, too frail to make the journey and this rock, this quarry of love and peace died by the violence that grips our world. I can’t help but wonder whether Brother Roger’s spirit kept him home for this one last lesson to us – how very Jesus of him. Did his death say to us – from which quarry will you cut your rocks – the quarry of beautiful shining stones of peace or from the quarry of violence and war?

As Christians, we have all of these different expressions of quarry on which we can draw. Abraham and Sarah, Peter, Brother Roger and the peace of the Taize community, and our ultimate source – God as known to us in Jesus Christ. We are made of the stones of faithfulness, trust, compassion and love as well as the stones of fear and violence. Jesus and Brother Roger died so that we might know enough to make the choice.

The stones cut from the quarries in Indiana have no choice in how or where they are used but you do. What kind of a quarry will you be for the world beginning today? What is God building out of you?