Stonework - A Sermon for the 5th Sunday of Easter

Maybe it was all the jackhammering at the church this week. Or the masonry repair underway on the 1926 parish house. Or the newly visible, and quite beautiful, cornerstone at Capitol and Scott. Whatever the reason, it has been impossible not to think about stones around here.

Which makes it hard to miss the stones in today’s readings. We began with the tragic account of Stephen, stoned for his vision of God and his bold preaching. Then, in 1 Peter, we hear of cornerstones and living stones, of being built together into a spiritual house. We are warned not to stumble over the stone of unbelief. And in John’s Gospel, Jesus offers that steady promise: “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.” God has made a home for each of us and will show us the way.

With all the stonework going on around here, and all these biblical stones, it begins to feel like more than coincidence. The lectionary can be uncanny like that, handing you the right scripture at just the right time, even when you didn’t know you needed it. Maybe the stones are up to something—inviting us to lift our eyes from the construction around us and consider what our own stones might reveal about God at work here at Christ Church. Because if God is building something with us, if God is making a home, then we ought to get curious about what God has in mind.

Last weekend, clergy from around the diocese gathered for a time of fellowship and renewal. We heard wonderful speakers, including a theologian from Yale, Miroslav Volf, who said something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. He began with a classic theological question, one, perhaps, that we don’t ask as often as we should: Why did God create the world? His answer was simple and astonishing: God created the world so that it might be our home, and God’s home with us.

From there, he traced that idea through the whole of scripture. Creation, he suggested, isn’t complete in the first few chapters in Genesis. Creation reaches a kind of fulfillment in Exodus, with the building of the tabernacle. God gives Moses the blueprint on Mount Sinai, and the people construct a portable dwelling place so that God might live among them as they journey through the wilderness.

Later, that dwelling takes more permanent form in the Temple in Jerusalem. At its center is the Holy of Holies—the place of God’s presence. Not large by human standards, and certainly not large enough to contain the creator of the universe. But that’s not really the point. The point is that God chooses to dwell with God’s people.

And then, if you turn to the end of the Bible, you see the fulfillment of that desire. In Revelation, John of Patmos sees the New Jerusalem coming down from heaven to earth. And a loud voice announces what it all means: “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples.” In other words, the whole story of scripture from beginning to end is the story of God making a home for us, and with us (Miroslav Volf, “A Story of Home,” Seen and Unseen, March 23, 2023).

Of course, no story is complete without a plot twist. All this talk of building and dwelling is beautiful—but our scriptures remind us that a stone can be a cornerstone, or a stumbling block, or even a weapon. Humans have a way of taking what God is building and bending it out of shape. Or, as Miroslav Volf puts it, we have let a few monsters loose in the home—forces that distort what God intends.

One of those monsters is escalation: the constant pressure to move faster, produce more, stay busy, keep up. But a home cannot be built on hurry. A home requires time, attention, presence. And those are exactly the things we seem to have less and less to give. Another is the way we have come to see the world not as God’s creation, but as something to use. What was meant to be received as gift is treated as commodity. The home God is building becomes something we manage, consume, and exhaust. There are other monsters we could name. But the pattern is the same: again and again, we lose sight of God’s vision. We forget that this world is meant to be a place of shared life with God, and we begin to live as if it belongs to us alone.

The good news is that God does not abandon the home when we make a mess of it. God does not walk away when the stones are misused, or when the house feels more like a battleground than a dwelling place. Instead, God comes closer. We see it in Stephen’s story. Even as the stones were raised against him, he looked up and saw the glory of God. In the very moment when the “home” of the world had become hostile, Stephen was still at home in God.

We hear it in 1 Peter, too. “Come to him,” we are told, “a living stone… and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house.” Not a perfect or finished house, but a living one still under construction, still being shaped and held together by Christ, our cornerstone. And we are given the promise in John’s Gospel: “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.” Not just someday, but even now. God continues to make room for us.

In this season of stonework at Christ Church, what a beautiful reminder of the deeper work we are doing together. What looks like construction on the surface carries real spiritual weight. The sound of jackhammers can become a kind of call—to break apart the false stories we bring into the house, to loosen the grip of the monstrous forces that pull us away from God’s vision. And the steady work of laying stone upon stone can remind us of something just as important: that God is not finished yet. Not with this place. Not with this world. Not with us. We are still being built—into a living, breathing, Spirit-filled home. A place of presence in a world of hurry. A place of gift in a culture of consumption. A place of welcome in a world that so often turns stones into weapons. And by grace, we are not just living in that home. We are becoming it.