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Mid-Week with Christ
May 8, 2020
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1 Peter 2:2-10
2 Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation— 3 if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good. 4 As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, 5 you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. 6 For it stands in Scripture: “Behold, I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious, and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.” 7 So the honor is for you who believe, but for those who do not believe, “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone,” 8 and “A stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense.” They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do. 9 But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. 10 Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.
Prayer for the Day
Great are you, O Lord, and exceedingly worthy of praise; your power is immense, and your wisdom beyond reckoning. And so we men, who are a due part of your creation, long to praise you – we also carry our mortality about with us, carry the evidence of our sin and with it the proof that you thwart the proud. You arouse us so that praising you may bring us joy, because you have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you. Amen. (From Augustine's Confessions)
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We are in the midst of an unprecedented crisis. Not specifically the COVID-19 crisis, although it has demonstrated the seriousness of the problem. Not the issue of climate change, either, although again it is connected. No, the problem is a loss of identity. We don't know who we are. Because we don't know who we are, we struggle to make sense of our life and our death.
We feel lonely, because we do not realize that as God's children in Christ Jesus we can never be alone. We feel useless, because we cannot look past Jesus' useless crucifixion to see God's own Son dying to redeem the world. We fear dying, because we do not know the one who died and rose again to deliver us from slavery to the fear of death. We stumble around in darkness, because we prefer the darkness of our sins and the world to the light of Christ's love and redemption.
Peter wrote his first letter to the newly baptized, those who had become newborn infants in Jesus. They had tasted a heavenly food in the Lord's Supper that granted them immortality. They were now living stones, being built into a temple that would surpass anything humans could build. Once, these newborns had been no people, without mercy or love. Now they knew who - and whose - they were.
This is what God does to us and for us in Christ. He has made us his sons and daughters once again, we who despised him and cut ourselves off from his love. Now we have an identity that can stand against anything the world or the Devil can throw at us. In the words of Psalm 95, "He is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand."
Augustine once wrote 1,600 years ago that our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God. We do not know who we are, until we find our identity as brothers and sisters of Jesus.
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