Remember Who You Are!
1 Peter 2:2-10
April 24, 2005
5^th Sunday of Easter
First Baptist Church, Wilson, NC

It was a snowy day in January when Whitney was to fly to Spain for a whole semester of study there. She was to fly from RDU to Newark, where she would meet five classmates, and then fly to Madrid. But by the time we got to RDU, we knew that a blizzard was blowing into Newark. If the Newark airport closed after Whitney’s plane took off, then her plane could be diverted to who knows where, perhaps for overnight. I persuaded her to let me fly with her, promising to leave once she found her classmates. So I went to the counter to buy a ticket for Newark: "That will be $900 for a same day ticket," said the agent. I looked at Whitney and joked to myself, "I love you, Whitney, but not that much!"

And then all of a sudden it was time for her to board her plane. So this was it. So what do I say? I looked her in the eye and said, "You’re an adult now. You’ll be fine. I love you. Godspeed." And off she went.

I could also have said something else which many a parent has said: remember who you are. Most of you have heard it from your parents. Most of you have said this to your children when they go off to school, or off to camp, or off to college, or off to adulthood. Remember who you are. One family had its own offbeat way of saying this: "Remember where you came from…and try to rise above it!"

What we have in the scripture I am about to read is a fatherly letter addressed to Christians who lived in Asia Minor, what is now Turkey. The author is concerned about them. They are new Christians, mostly, just beginning this journey of living the Christ way in the midst of a culture that does not know that Way at all. These Christians are living like strangers in a strange land, living with values that are not the values of their neighbors. So the writer of 1 Peter tells them, "Remember who you are." Listen to him as he tells them just who they really are: (read 1 Peter 2:2-10).

I read this to you today because you and I are in the same spot as the readers of this letter. We too live like strangers in a strange land. We Christ followers are following His way in the midst of a culture that is not about that Way. Our values are not the values of our neighbors. We have a different identity, a different calling. We have different convictions and different behavior. As Flannery O’Connor wrote, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd."

This letter tells us "Remember who you are," and then it tells who we are with rich and vivid images.

REMEMBER: YOU ARE LIKE NEWBORN BABES. "Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation…." (v. 2) We are but babes in the faith. Even those of us who have been Christian a long time still have a lot to learn. But we have tasted the kindness of the Lord Jesus, and having tasted that, we want more. We want to drink in his love and his forgiveness and his leadership. And the more we drink, the more we grow up like him, into salvation. No wonder that when the early Christians were baptized, as they came up out of the baptismal waters, they were given milk and honey as symbols of being born again as babes into Christ’s promised land of salvation.

This week I heard the tape of the April 10 service in which our mission team to the Middle East reported their experience. I was so moved to hear about one new Christian who talked with Marla on Easter morning, who confessed to Marla that she couldn’t sleep that night because this was her first Easter. Hearing of that woman’s excitement and passion helped me to remember who I am, a newborn babe with her in a new life in which all things are new and in which we yearn to keep on growing with Jesus.

REMEMBER: YOU ARE LIKE LIVING STONES. (vv. 4-8)

It sounds strange to hear Jesus described as a living stone. But it makes sense when we look through the Bible and remember how often Israel praised God as its rock. If God is our rock, then Jesus is that rock incarnate, the living stone. When we build our lives, we make choices of what materials we will use to build it. We can build our lives with Jesus, the living stone. Or we can reject him as if he were just an odd-shaped rock that doesn’t fit into our plans. For us, Jesus is the cornerstone of our lives. We build our lives around him.

The letter gives the stone metaphor a twist. Up to this point we have been seeing Jesus as a living stone, God our rock in the flesh. And we have been imagining various people building the house of their lives, either including or rejecting the stone of Jesus. Now here is the twist. Imagine Jesus the cornerstone in place of a building to be built. Now imagine that you and I are each a living stone to ourselves. And now we are laid around that cornerstone to make up the rest of the building. Remember how Paul once described us (the church) as the body of Christ? Here we are described as the BUILDING of Christ. We living stones have come to him, the living cornerstone, and we have let ourselves be built into a spiritual house.

So remember who you are. You have not rejected Jesus, but have made him the cornerstone of your life. More than that, you have allowed yourself like a stone to be built around the Christ cornerstone, to be built in as part of the church.

We could go outside and marvel at all the bricks that Frances Elrod’s father Mid Elrod and others laid to build this church building. But the church itself is made of you and me, each of us building blocks laid around our cornerstone, Christ.

This speaks to the great hunger and yearning of our time: community. We use a lot of new terms to describe our 21^st century generation: the post-modern generation, the post-Christian generation. Most of all it is a fragmented generation, a generation that hungers to belong, that yearns for a place to be loved and to grow and to be useful for something great. Nothing meets that hunger better than the church of Jesus Christ, in which we draw near to the cornerstone of our lives, to whom we belong, in whom we find meaning. People yearn to find their home in the household of God. Remember who you are, part of that house.

Then the letter ticks off one thing after another of who we are and in a rush tells us to REMEMBER: YOU ARE "A CHOSEN RACE, A ROYAL PRIESTHOOD, A HOLY NATION, GOD’S OWN PEOPLE…" (v. 9)

Picture a great king about to come into his court, and before him the herald comes into the room and declares, "And now, his Royal Highness, the Protector of the Realm, the Source of Wisdom, King so-and-so!" But here in this letter we have something even more overwhelming said about each of us. The Word of God piles one accolade after another upon us: a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people…" They are the greatest titles a human being can have, and they are entitled to us.

We are God’s chosen, God’s own. And as such we have direct access to God with no need of any priest or other intermediary between us and God, because we ARE God’s priests! As God’s people we are holy, that is, we are a different kind of people. And the difference is that we are a people that have been called out of darkness into God’s light. We are a people who declare what God has done with us. All of the above are the rights and privileges of the titles we have been given.

They are our titles, but they are NOT our entitlements. We have been given as many responsibilities as privileges. We are responsible as God’s priestly people to bear one another’s burdens, indeed, to bear the burdens of the world. I think of Pope John Paul and the photographs we have seen of him, especially the photographs of him in prayer. Sometimes when he prayed it looked like the weight of the whole world was weighing on him, with all its wars and terror and disease and cruelty and sin. He wept for the same things about which Jesus wept. That was the privilege and the responsibility of being pope. And that is the privilege and responsibility for you and me, members of God’s royal priesthood. We are to bear the burdens of this world, and then to do whatever we can to relieve them where we see them. When we do, we will be a drastically different kind of people, which is after all what holy means: different.

Pastor Susan Andrews once got a glimpse of her congregation that revealed what a different people they were. This didn’t happen in the sanctuary, but on a softball field during a church retreat. Everybody was playing, from age five to sixty-five. They used a ball the size of a volley ball so everybody could hit it:

They showed how they were a different kind of community with different values of love and grace and tolerance. They were "a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light."

-- Douglas E. Murray