April 20th, 2008 at 10:39 am
I attended the 8:00 traditional worship service at Lutheran Church and School of Messiah in Grand Junction. Associate Pastor Timothy Storck was the liturgist, and Pastor Gary Buss preached the sermon.
Pastor Storck officiated over the baptism of two children before moving to LSB Divine Service I, with Holy Communion. The hymns were:
- Opening: 909, Christ Is Made the Sure Foundation
- Hymn of the Day: 645, Built on the Rock
- Distribution: 620, Jesus Comes Today with Healing; 464, The Strife is O’er, the Battle Done
- Closing: 644, The Church’s One Foundation
Good stuff.
After worship I attended Pastor Storck’s class. They were deep into The Blessings of Weekly Communion, by Kenneth Wieting. This has been a book I’ve been meaning to read myself, and it was a nice preview should I actually go and get the book.
I took notes from Pastor Buss’s sermon on 1 Peter 2:2-10:
(Anecdote about three little pigs told in class, where kid says, “Wow, a talking pig!”)
Just as the point of the three pigs is not that there were talking pigs, but that houses should be built out of proper building materials, God has constructed his church in his kingdom with proper materials: solid faith in Jesus Christ and the use of Word and sacraments to build faith.
It is noteworthy that Peter calls us stones instead of bricks. Stones have variety of shape, size, and color as opposed to the uniformity of bricks. God blends us all together to build his temple,
Stones by themselves are dead, and so are you and I in the flesh. Michaelangelo kept several unfinished statues in his studio. He referred to these works as his sculptures kept captive by the surrounding rock. The Bible tells us that we are all slaves to sin. Like the statues, we are captive, unable to walk and break free. Our sinful nature shows up sometimes in our arguing, our putting ourselves first, or our struggles for control. The end result of our sinful nature is God’s wrath. Our sinful disobedience is a stumble toward eternal condemnation.
God has destined us instead for eternal life in the mansion. God chose us to do works, and he made that a reality by sending Christ to die and rise from the dead. Even more so, he joined us to Christ in baptism, giving us not only Christ but his Holy Spirit. Christ is the living stone, precious to God, our supernatural Savior hewn out for our pardon, absolution, and forgiveness.
The stone building we are part of points us to the Cross, and Christ’s blood is like mortar, transforming dead stones to living with forgiveness. We are God’s own treasured possession, made holy and sinless, justified freely by his grace.
God looks at us like a proud papa pulling out the pictures of his kids. He declares us perfect on account of Jesus’s death and resurrection. We are trapped in a tomb of our own iniquity, but God has called us out. We need to remain connected to the Living Stone, through studying the scriptures daily and weekly worshipping and receiving the means of grace.
Peter tells us that we are to be like newborn infants longing for the pure spiritual milk. This is an understatement. Babies don’t just long for milk. They cry. They scream. They latch on and don’t let go.
Christ is not only our cornerstone but our capstone. He is the cornerstone upon which our faith is built. Anything not built on the cornerstone is unstable. As the capstone he also keeps our building of stones from falling apart.
(Anecdote: upon buying a life insurance policy on her husband, a wife asks what would she get if she killed her husband. Agent says, “a life sentence”)
We deserve that life sentence, but the gift of Jesus is ours. He is our true insurance policy.
As stones of the church, we are to daily keep our eyes open for opportunities to tell people about him who called us out of the darkness and to bring them to church.
