2618AFC050126 – To Be Known As A Stone
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John 14:6-7, 10-11 – 6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7 If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.
0 “Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works. 11 Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves.”
Acts 6:7 – 7 The word of God continued to spread; the number of the disciples increased greatly in Jerusalem, and a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith.
Psalm 33:18-19 (GNT) [1] –
18 The Lord watches over those who obey him,
those who trust in his constant love.
19 He saves them from death;
he keeps them alive in times of famine.
1 Peter 2:4-5 – 4 Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and 5 like living stones, let yourselves be built[a] into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
Aloha nui loa, ʻŌmea! Grace and Peace to each of you from God our Father and our Lord, Jesus the Christ, in the Power of the Holy Spirit. Things are moving slower than I wish for with this blog. I want to be able to send messages to all of you without fighting off accusations of SPAMming and getting my email address blocked. Apparently looking for a cheap way to do it comes with built-in delays which seems to be related to cost. Please keep this decision-making process in your prayers. I do not know how many persons on the email list actually read these posts, and that is by design. Nonetheless, we continue to crank out the verbiage, so let’s get on with it, shall we?
We’ve all heard these familiar words of Jesus, Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” These words are deeply meaningful for Christians, and deeply disturbing for non-Christians. Believers know that Jesus means it when he says this because we know it truly is the only possible way to know God; it is the inclusivity of F.A.I.T.H.. Unbelievers find it offensive because they view it as being divisive. I can recall a rant by a well-know female talk-show host about it. “Do you actually believe that God, who you claim loves everyone, would exclude someone from Heaven – no matter how good they have been, no matter how generous and loving they have been – just because they didn’t believe in Jesus?!?! There has to be something wrong with that. And what about all the other people who never even heard of Jesus?”
Well, obviously, she has never heard the Truth of the Gospel nor has she understood the teaching of the Church that whatever is good, whatever is generous, whatever is Love – it all comes from God who is the giver of all Good Gifts. God is the One who measures these things, not the earthlings who question them. in Eucharistic Prayer IV, we mention “Remember also those who have died in the peace of your Christ and all the dead, whose faith you alone have known.” So, what about those people, who – because of their own particular circumstances – never hear the Gospel? CCC 847 says – “Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience — those too may achieve eternal salvation.”
Jesus is the Savior of the whole World. Everyone who believes in him can have Eternal Life. We are to seek, to love, and to obey God with the entirety of our being, and that is accomplished by believing that Jesus is the only begotten Son of God. To help us do that in Jesus’ name, God – in his Perfect Integrity, Endless Mercy, Everlasting Love, Eternal Salvation, Immutable Justice, Irreproachable Wisdom, and Incomparable Grace – has given us the Church established on the anointing by the Holy Spirit of The Apostle Peter as the successor to the leadership of the ekklesia, the Church which Jesus himself established and passed on to us through the leadership of The Apostle Peter and the other eleven Apostles.
Jesus is the Corner Stone of that Church, and The Apostle Peter (↔ Music Link) is the next stone laid into that foundation. This Sunday’s second reading is from 1st Peter. He references a quote from Isaiah 28. In that chapter, the Prophet is really socking it to the leaders of the Northern Kingdom of Israel who have become drunken with wealth and power (and plenty of wine as well!) God is condemning their lifestyle and telling them they will soon feel the scourge of the Assyrians. He assures them, though, that he will place the beginnings of the renewal of righteousness by saying in Isaiah 28:16-17 a (GNT) 1 – 16 This, now, is what the Sovereign Lord says: “I am placing in Zion a foundation that is firm and strong. In it I am putting a solid cornerstone on which are written the words, ‘Faith that is firm is also patient.’ 17 Justice will be the measuring line for the foundation, and honesty will be its plumb line.” He also refers to Isaiah 8:14 – 14 He will become a sanctuary, a stone one strikes against; for both houses of Israel he will become a rock one stumbles over—a trap and a snare for the inhabitants of Jerusalem. The Psalmist refers to this Stone as the chief cornerstone or the capstone in Psalm 118:22 – 22 The stone that the builders rejected
has become the chief cornerstone. That is to say, it is the most important stone of all, yet a stone which with cause people to stumble and which the builders – the leaders of the Peoples – rejected.
That is still happening today, btw, by leaders and by billions of people who just don’t care enough to take the time to Love and serve God as he has [1st] commanded, and [2nd] provided for in his Christ, his Anointed One. In those first days of Jesus’ ekklesia, there were many people who overcame that tendency to trip over a stumbling block. In our Key Verse from the Acts of the Apostles we read, The word of God continued to spread; the number of the disciples increased greatly in Jerusalem, and a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith. That is the Church beginning to grow, brick-by-brick, stone-by-stone. Still, many others found the claims of the Apostles to be a stumbling block. What is that anyway? Here’s another familiar passage containing that concept.
Matthew 16:21-23– 21 From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. 22 And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” 23 But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block* to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
*Σκάνδαλον (skandalon) {skan’-dal-on} a stick for bait (of a trap), generally a snare, an offense; stumbling-block, cause for error. The most common designation is as the trigger of a trap (the mechanism closing a trap down on the unsuspecting victim), and it connotes an offense as in putting a negative cause-and-effect relationship into motion. It is used to illustrate how someone is caught by their own devices (like their personal bias, carnal thinking). It is also the native rock rising up through the earth, which trips up the traveler, hence, of Jesus the Messiah, to the Jews who refused him. Note that this word is also translated as offense or offended – scandalized: Skandalon (↔ Music Link). LYRICS HERE.
Those who are “scandalized” – tripped up, as it were – by Jesus’ words and Life stumble over his Law of Love just as the People of Israel stumbled – again and again – over The Law and the Prophets. It’s the same old story of us saying, “That doesn’t make any sense. God must of have meant thus-and-so.” Belovéd, we all know we shouldn’t try to DIY our Salvation. But knowing the Truth isn’t quite the same as believing the Truth. It really seems so simple. “For God so loved the world.” What is the appropriate response? Some of us “of a certain age” may remember Question 6 from the Baltimore Catechism: 6. Q. Why did God make you?
A. God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in heaven. Eezy-Peezy, jah? God Loves us, we Love him back. Remember the line, “To know, know, know him is to Love, Love, Love him, and I do, and I do, and I do.” The inverse is also true: To Love him is to know him – a thought that seems to simple for our complex minds, so simple, in fact, that we easily get tripped up.
Another way we interact with a stone or a rock (same-same for us, but not for the Greeks) is to “kick it down the road.” It’s just a rock, kick it on down the road. “It’s just a bunch of rules laid down over the centuries by an endless stream of religious nuts.” (You probably know the adage, “God wants Spiritual Fruit, not religious nuts.”) Or perhaps we’re more like Scarlet O’Hara who quipped, “I can’t think about that right now. If I do, I’ll go crazy. I’ll think about that tomorrow.” Remember, it is not “seek the Lord where he may be found; it is “Seek the Lord while he may be found.” When under the grass, we face Eternity, but on this side of the grass, Time matters! The place where God is found is not a destination. There is no place we can be wherein God is not already present. The time in which God is found is NOW – because, of course, God is in Time all of the Time, Time after (or during, or before) Time. :smiley:
Today we also hear from the Psalmist that The Lord watches over those who obey him, those who trust in his constant love. Here again, love and obedience are linked. We cannot obey the one we do not know without rebelling against being kept in ignorance. God reveals himself to us constantly – first and importantly, through his Word, but also through his works; in fact, even without hearing his Word, we can see the Works of God and know he is present. We know, through his Word, that God desired to make a place for the People of God to know, to Love, and to serve him. Since the earthlings, and their generations, consistently failed to do that properly, God did it for us by setting the Perfect Stone as a foundation with Justice as the measuring line (the blueprint) and trustworthiness (honesty) as it’s plumbline which keeps it true, straight, and stable.
You know about those two guys building houses, right? One on the sand and one on the rock? Well, The Apostle Peter is the rock upon whom the Corner Stone was set, the Holy Spirit follows the blueprint and guides the use of the plumbline, the Apostles laid out the first several courses of stones in the foundations of that ekklesia, and we follow that layout as the living stones which build up the Church for God. The walls are still growing, and the Church continues to be where God is worshipped well. After all, do we not call it “The House of God?” Adelphos, when we say that, we are not talking about the building we enter every Sunday (nearly at least). We are talking about the People of God.
We are the assembly, the Church who say “YES!” to Jesus’ question, “Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works.” Therefore we must ask ourselves, each and all, “Am I a living stone in the ekklesia of Christ, and in that ekklesia, am I where God is worshipped well, to be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ? Well, am I? Am I known as stone?” Or when the Rock “trips me,” do I kick the Rock?
Whatever, whenever, wherever, whoever, however, if ever, forever —
at your service, Belovéd!
Please pray with us hereat Share-a-Prayer.
Unless otherwise indicated, all scripture passages are from the New Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (NRSVCE) New Revised Standard Version Bible: Catholic Edition, copyright © 1989, 1993 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Biblical languages inserts from Bible Hub (Bible Hub: Search, Read, Study the Bible in Many Languages) Visit at http://biblehub.com
Aloha Friday Messages by Charles O. Todd, III is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
[1] Passages marked (GNT): Good News Translation (GNT) are from the Good News Translation® (Today’s English Version, Second Edition)© 1992 American Bible Society. All rights reserved. For more information about GNT, visit www.bibles.com and www.gnt.bible.
