“BELIEVE IN GOD”
Acts 7:55-60; 1 Peter 2:2-10; John 14:1-14
Market Square Presbyterian Church in the City of
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
May 14, 2017 - Fifth Sunday of Easter
The first church I served after graduating from seminary was located in a first-ring suburb just
west of Baltimore called Catonsville. Catonsville was created a couple of centuries ago as a
posh haven for wealthy Baltimoreans who sought to escape the searing summer heat of the city
in favor of green pastures and open spaces. Large, beautiful homes were constructed on
tree-lined streets. Gardens and parks dotted the landscape. It was easy to imagine the peaceful,
privileged vacations the well-to-do spent in Catonsville.
By the time I accepted the call to the Catonsville church by the work of the Holy Spirit and the
coincident virtue of it being the only offer I received that placed me near the Baltimore Orioles,
Catonsville had acquired the look and feel of “city.” Baltimore had crept outside of its
boundaries and was helping itself to this once-secluded mecca. In the late 1960s, it momentarily
became the center of a national firestorm during the Vietnam War when Daniel and Philip
Berrigan and the Catonsville Nine hauled into the parking lot of the Knights of Columbus
building where the local Draft Board was located hundreds of draft files and poured napalm on
them. I have told you in previous sermons how my social conscience was formed in that parking
lot during frequent lunchtime retreats I made there in those years.
Older members of the Catonsville congregation like Sue and Dick Kiefer, John and Jean Nesbitt,
Tom and Mary Lawrence, and Karl and Laura Kirkman loved to tell stories about “old
Catonsville” as much as I enjoyed listening to them. The history of the village came alive as
they spoke as many of the original homes and buildings still were standing and are today. Many
of them, however, had been re-zoned and were being used for something different than originally
intended. Many of the big residential homes, for example, had been converted to offices for
physicians, attorneys, accountants, and insurance brokers.
In the piece of Peter’s letter we read today, he encouraged the members of the fledgling Christian
church to ​“let themselves be built into a spiritual house.”1 ​Peter wanted the Christians to be
re-zoned and re-purposed, if you will, like those old Catonsville homes. Whatever designs their
lives previously had served, they now are to proclaim Christ and to show forth his gospel by the
way they lived their lives.
In our turn, we, too, following Peter, are to offer ourselves as living stones in a spiritual house in
which Jesus Christ is the cornerstone. Peter issues this call to holy living to the Christians: ​“As
Christ who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct…Through Christ you have
come to trust in God, who raised Jesus from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and
hope are set on God…Rid yourselves, therefore, of all malice and pretense, envy, insincerity, and
hurtful talk…Love one another deeply from the heart…You have had a taste of God. Now, like
infants at the breast, drink deeply of God so that you will grow up mature and whole in God.”
I embrace the image of the church as a spiritual house, each of us a living stone, a building block,
in the presentation of Christ and the gospel to the world in word and deed. The church is not a
clubhouse where members gather together for their own entertainment and edification only but a
spiritual house through which and whom God commissions its members to spread grace and
hope into the world.
I have seared in my memory, as maybe many of you do, too, the terrible tragedy that occurred
almost two decades ago at the Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. It was the first of
the school shootings that tragically have become too commonplace. A few days after the
killings, almost 70,000 mourners gathered in the parking lot of a shopping mall for a memorial
service in honor of the victims. As I recall, it was a rainy day and only forty or so degrees. The
people huddled together under blankets and umbrellas in order to keep warm and to support one
another. They listened as the then Vice-President Gore addressed them. Gospel singer Amy
Grant offered an inspirational song. But the most comforting words were spoken by Charles
Chaput, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Denver who simply quoted a verse of scripture from
the Song of Songs: ​“Love is stronger than death.”2
One of the people killed at the school was a business teacher named William Sanders who also
coached the girls’ basketball and softball teams. His nickname, and the name by which he was
known, was Dave. At the same moment he could have been running for his life, Dave Sanders
ran headlong into the gunfire to try to save the lives of as many students as he could. Dave was
critically wounded and, when the gunmen moved on to another part of the school, students knelt
on the floor beside Dave and tried to stop the bleeding with their clothes but it was too late.
1
2
1 Peter 2:5
Song of Songs 8:6
When it became clear Dave would die, the students took Dave’s wallet out of his pocket and
opened it to a picture of his wife and daughters. “Tell my girls I love them,” were Dave Sanders’
final words. He died while looking at the faces of his loved ones - his family and his pupils.
Many students at his memorial service credited Dave with saving their lives and said they never
will forget the last lesson he taught them: ​“Love is stronger than death.”
Dave Sanders’ death is reminiscent of Stephen’s death about which we read today in the Book of
Acts. Stephen had been appointed by the early apostles to be what today in the church we call a
deacon. Like our deacons at Market Square, Stephen and the others who were appointed with
him provided hospitality, care, and advocacy for the poor and dispossessed by means of
proclaiming and living the gospel of Jesus Christ. Some of the same people who could not
stomach Jesus could not tolerate Stephen either.
Luke tells us that these “againsters” argued and sparred with Stephen but were no match for the
wisdom with which Stephen spoke with the Spirit’s help. ​They trumped up false accusations
against Stephen and dragged him before the same council Jesus had faced. Stephen saved his
finest defense of the gospel for the members of the council who turned out to be a very
unappreciative audience. Enraged at what they heard, for Stephen told them they kept neither
the spirit nor the letter of the law they had been given by God, they ordered Stephen stoned, and,
like Dave Sanders, he suffered an awful, violent death at the hands of people filled with rage and
hatred.
Like Dave Sanders, Stephen also died while looking at the faces of loved ones. Scripture tells us
Stephen had a mystical vision at the moment of his dying in which he saw Jesus, his beloved
Lord, standing at the right hand of God. Stephen died showing love to his enemies, praying at
the last, ​“Lord, do not hold this sin against them.”3
Jesus, too, died, like Stephen and Dave Sanders, a horrific death at the hands of people filled
with anger and animosity. Jesus, too, died while looking into the faces of loved ones standing
before him at the foot of the cross. His mother, Mary, was there. John, the beloved disciple, was
there. But even his enemies were encompassed by the love of the Lord. He would have seen
from the cross the religious leaders who had condemned him, the soldiers who crucified him, and
the crowd who mocked him. Yet, Jesus, who in his ministry adjured his followers not to hate
their enemies but to love them, to pray for them, and to build bridges to them, considered even
his executioners loved ones into whose faces he gazed and for whom he prayed as he was dying.
“Love is stronger than death.”
3
Acts 7:60
You do not need a preacher to tell you the forces of death are at work in our world today. We
see their fury in every act of violence, in every form of inequality, in every sting of racism, in the
brutality of bigotry, in the budgetary preference for weaponry over education, in the arrogance of
those who think nothing of spoiling the environment and desecrating our planet if it means larger
profits for themselves. Sometimes we feel the forces of death doing battle in us, in our own
lives. Relationships rupture, dreams dissolve, careers crash, friendships fade, our bodies wither,
and sometimes even hope goes on life support. We are no strangers to the forces of death.
But the good news of Christ’s gospel is that the forces of love also are loose in the world and in
us and they ultimately are more powerful than the forces of death. Witness Jesus the Christ.
Witness Stephen. Witness Dave Sanders. Witness Martin Luther King, Jr. Witness the daily
sacrifice of love many mothers make for their children. Witness the myriad acts of love done by
people like you and me that go unheralded and unrecorded by anyone save for those on the
receiving end of them. ​“Love is stronger than death.”
Peter preaches that we who are the church are called to offer ourselves as living stones who give
ourselves to be built into a spiritual house by the Spirit of God, a spiritual house where love
lives, compassion resides, forgiveness abides, hope dwells, and justice rises up. From it, we are
sent to offer ourselves as a sweet fragrance and a healing balm to the world around us, pointing
our neighbors, our communities, our brothers and sisters to “a still more excellent way” by which
to make our sojourns through this life.
Stones were used as instruments of death to kill a man named Stephen who dared to do the truth
and to announce the reign of God. By contrast, in Peter’s letter, living stones become the means
by which God’s “new creation” emerges in the world through Christ and his church. Thus,
Market Square Church and the whole church of Jesus Christ is to be nothing less than a spiritual
house who ministers Christ into the world about us.
These Sunday morning meetings we attend are no mere and mild religious gatherings. We do no
less than come before the Divine Zoning Board in the presence of the great Architect who is
designing and building a gospel life in us and through us. The hammering, sawing, planing, and
sanding the Spirit does to build such a life in us is not always pleasant to endure and is hardly
ever easy, but the result is pleasing to the Lord and life-giving for us and the world.
Maybe the most audacious sentence in scripture is found in our gospel reading of the morning:
“Let not your hearts be troubled.”4 So many things conspire to trouble us: troubled politics, a
4
John 14:1
troubled child, a troubled relationship, troubled health and a troubled healthcare system, troubled
finances, troubling inequalities, troubling employment prospects, the troubling pressures of
trying to keep “it” all together. We are stalked by worries, concerns, frustrations, fears, and
disappointments.
People try to calm their anxious hearts in a multiplicity of ways. Some seek escape into drink,
drugs, and addictions of various sorts. Others seek to exert power and control over others. Some
attempt to build dividing walls to keep at bay what scares them. Some dabble in denial. Some
think they can reason and cogitate their way out of their agitation and apprehension. But none of
those ways finally work.
When Jesus says, ​“Let not your hearts be troubled,” ​he offers a different and definitive antidote
to their restlessness: ​“Believe in God. Believe also in me.”5 Believe in God and what God can
do in us, what God desires to do in us, and what God will do in us given an ounce of acceptance
and openness on our part.
It is as the psalmist sings and we sang - ​“I am a wretched sight to see: a broken, troubled thing;
with only terror all around, and deathly whispering./ And yet I trust in you, O God; your
covenant still stands, Redeem me in your faithful love: my life is in your hands.”6
St. Augustine was exactly on the mark when he wrote that “our hearts are restless until they find
their rest in God.” ​“Believe in God.”
When we believe in God; when we believe it is ​“in God in whom we live and move and have our
being,”7when we believe it is God with whom our lives have first and last to do8, we open
ourselves to love as a flower opens itself to the warming sun. The forces of death recede in us
and new life begins to grow. Winter thaws and gives way to the blossoms of spring. Our hearts
begin to heal, our relationships begin to mend, our lives become potent with new possibilities,
we start to put the interests of others ahead of our own, we begin to do justice and to love mercy
and to care for the last, lost, least, and littlest among us. And, as we look around us, we see only
the faces of loved ones because our joy becomes as wide as the world.
5
Ibid.
From David Gambrell’s paraphrase of Psalm 31 appearing in the PC(USA)’s new hymnbook, ​Glory to
God​, as Hymn # 214, ​You Are My Refuge, Faithful God​. The congregation sang this hymn earlier in the
service as the appointed lectionary psalm of the day.
7
Acts 17:28
8
Revelation 1:8
6
It reminds me of a story9 writer Kathleen Norris told about her mother as her mother lay dying.
Norris said to her mother, seeking to comfort her, ​“In heaven, you will be there with all those
you have loved.” ​But her mother, more sagacious and wise as mothers often are, replied, ​“No, in
heaven, I will love everyone who is there.” ​As we pray every Sunday for life on earth to become
as it is in heaven, Kathleen Norris’ mother points to us the way.
I am no Peter who stands before you this day, but do not let my lack of stature keep you from
hearing his message through me: Present yourselves as living stones to be built by God into a
spiritual house through whom justice, love, and peace may yet change our world, and us.
Amen.
9
Unfortunately, I cannot recall the specific citation. She may have told the story in an interview.