Living Stones

Written by Ed Kauffman

Living Stones

May 22, 2011

Ed Kauffman

 What comes to mind when you think of rocks, or stones?  Some of the more fascinating stones for me are those of Stonehenge on the Salisbury Plain of southern England.  While Stonehenge itself is a fascinating place, the theories of how these massive stones were quarried and then moved from their origins near Wales and then erected into their current configuration are equally fascinating.  And they are still discovering things about this and other sites.  The Avebury Ring, while not as massive, is another ancient site where stones play an important role, marking out a giant ring as well as a road.

 Perhaps the first thought around here is of the Okotoks Erractic, probably the most famous rock in this area.  It’s rather amazing to think of this massive, 16 and a half ton, chunk of mountain being transported on a glacier from around Mt. Edith Cavell to its current location.  And it’s only the largest of a whole string of rocks known as the Foothills Erratic Train stretching from Jasper south into Montana.  These were rocks that were carried on top of a glacier and left behind when the glacier melted.

 In South Dakota, in contrast, the glaciers scraped rocks along ahead of them and underneath them, tumbling and shaping them and eventually burying them deep in the soil as the sediment and eventually ash from volcanoes filled in around and over them.  One of the amazing things there, as elsewhere, is that each year with the freeze and thaw cycles, some of those rocks emerge from the ground and the spring ritual of “picking rocks” takes place.  This has happened since the land began to be cultivated, and so beside many fields there are large piles of rock, accumulated over generations.

 It was those rock piles, which I passed on my way to my office in Freeman, that caught my attention and interest when we began talking about the possibility of re-landscaping our back yard and building terraces on the hillside.  And so, with the farmer’s permission, many days on my way home from work I would pull into the most easily accessible rock piles, slip on my coveralls, work shoes and gloves, and load the back of my Toyota pick-up with as many rocks as I thought appropriate to haul home.  I even found ways to load rocks too big for me to lift, so sometimes could only haul 6 at a time.

 When our plans finally included the installation of a waterfall, I had quite a pile of rocks which the landscaper used to form and shape the waterfall. In fact, he used all the rocks I had accumulated, and I had to start over with the rock hauling.  And eventually I had enough rocks to build the walls and paths for our backyard landscape.  I can’t even begin to guess at the number or weight of the rocks involved.

 I knew something about rocks prior to this adventure.  I had taken a course in geomorphology in University, the study of land formations and rocks and so forth.  But handling all those rocks at least three times gave me a new appreciation for the differences in rocks; the fact that rocks weigh different amounts even though they may be the same size; the composition of rocks with strands of different materials pressed together; and the presence of fossils and other interesting items in rocks.  And yes, rocks can be dangerous, as the tip of my one still slightly numb finger will attest.

 And I learned something about building with rocks; finding the right shape and size to make the next layer.  I learned that having rocks of all the same size and shape, unless they’re pre-formed, doesn’t make a very stable wall, or very interesting, as Gay liked to point out to me.  And so I learned to pick out specific rocks even to load and take home, sometimes with a specific place in mind to use them, probably most obvious in the rock that formed the bridge. 

 There are, of course, many different kinds of rocks, and you have brought a good variety of stones here this morning.  Some stones are considered precious – I’m sure some of you women are wearing stones you wouldn’t really want to add to the pile up here.  Stones come in all shapes and sizes, some rather ordinary, some looking rather ordinary until they are cut and polished.  And, of course, some are massive rocks which make up our mountains and other land formations, or serve as bedrock forming the great Canadian Shield.

 Many of these images of stones are found in the Bible, as the Scripture writers grasp for images to describe God.  For in the Old Testament particularly, the image of a rock is most often chosen to describe God as a source of strength and firmness.  It is God as fortress and stronghold, a safe place in which to dwell. 

 It’s the image we use in many hymns:  Rock of ages, cleft for me; he hideth my soul in the cleft of the rock; Jesus, rock of ages, and so on.  And it is the image of the cornerstone that Peter applies to Jesus in the passage we read.  As Peter, or Petra in Greek which as you know literally means “rock”, seeks to find an image to describe the church, he begins with Jesus and goes back to the Psalms to find images.  And so he describes Jesus not only as the cornerstone, a special chosen rock upon which to build, but also notes those passages where the stone is rejected, or a cause for stumbling and applies those images to Jesus as well.

 But if Jesus is the cornerstone upon which the church is built, the foundational rock from which the building takes form, then we become the stones which form the rest of the structure.  One commentator noted that the background for Peter’s imagery here may have been the recent destruction of the temple.  Peter may have been thinking about the massive stones of the temple, once thought to be indestructible, now lying scattered about and broken.  With the destruction of that physical dwelling place for God, something new was needed to replace it.

 “While the old stones appear to be dead, the living stones of the church, founded on the cornerstone of Christ, will now be the light that overcomes the darkness.”

  And there are several ways of understanding this term that Peter uses, that of “living stones.”  There is, of course, the literal meaning.  We are not inanimate objects, no longer the blocks of compressed material that buildings are made of, but we are living beings, flesh and blood which make up a living, active building.

 But John Elliott, in his commentary, notes that in antiquity, “objects that were perceived as firmly rooted in the earth were often referred to as ‘living.’ Imposing megaliths, for example, seemed to possess an inherent integrity; their vitality was a function of their being rooted in place. And this remains instructive for the contemporary church as we reflect on what it means to carry the "living stones" tradition into the twenty-first century.”  And so, being living stones means to be deeply rooted, grounded in the vitality of the creation and the creator.

 Peter invites us to be built into a spiritual house and goes on to use other well-known phrases.  “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people.” (v.9)  But that’s not just so we can build a great building and look good.  He continues, “in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.” 

 There is always a purpose for our being.  We as the church are not an end in ourselves, but rather the means by which God calls a people into existence and moves toward that ultimate goal of bringing all things into unity with Godself.  While the temple built of stone has been destroyed, God’s temple, the church continues.

 We could, of course, go on with the rock analogy in a number of different ways.  We could talk about the fact that, in order to build a rock wall, one needs many different kinds of rocks – different sizes and shapes to hold everything together. Sometimes what you need is just a small stone.  We could note that sometimes you need to knock the sharp edges or points off of a rock in order to make it fit better.  And sometimes you discover that you have been trying to use a rock at the wrong spot, or turned the wrong way, and so you need to find a better spot for it or turn it around to make it fit better.  You can draw your own analogies with all of that. 

 And so we bring ourselves, to be fitted into the building.  And we build on that cornerstone and foundation, which is Jesus Christ.  As Paul says in I Corinthians 3:11, “For other foundation can no one lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.”  Let us come as living stones,  offer ourselves to the master builder, and proclaim God’s light to a darkening world.