First Reading: Acts 4:5-12
5The next day [the] rulers, elders, and scribes assembled in Jerusalem, 6with Annas the high priest, Caiaphas, John, and Alexander, and all who were of the high-priestly family. 7When they had made the prisoners stand in their midst, they inquired, “By what power or by what name did you do this?” 8Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them, “Rulers of the people and elders, 9if we are questioned today because of a good deed done to someone who was sick and are asked how this man has been healed, 10let it be known to all of you, and to all the people of Israel, that this man is standing before you in good health by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead. 11This Jesus is
‘the stone that was rejected by you, the builders;
it has become the cornerstone.’
12There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.”
Psalm: Psalm 23
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not be in want. (Ps. 23:1)
1The Lord| is my shepherd;
I shall not | be in want.
2The Lord makes me lie down | in green pastures
and leads me be- | side still waters.
3You restore my | soul, O Lord,
and guide me along right pathways | for your name’s sake.
4Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall | fear no evil;
for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they | comfort me. R
5You prepare a table before me in the presence | of my enemies;
you anoint my head with oil, and my cup is | running over.
6Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days | of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the | Lord forever. R
Second Reading: 1 John 3:16-24
16We know love by this, that [Jesus Christ] laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. 17How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?
18Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. 19And by this we will know that we are from the truth and will reassure our hearts before him 20whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. 21Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have boldness before God; 22and we receive from him whatever we ask, because we obey his commandments and do what pleases him.
23And this is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us. 24All who obey his commandments abide in him, and he abides in them. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit that he has given us.
Gospel: John 10:11-18
[Jesus said:] 11“I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. 12The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away—and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. 13The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the sheep. 14I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, 15just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep. 16I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd. 17For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. 18No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. I have received this command from my Father.”
Let us pray. Spirit of the living God you are already with us, but we asked that we might feel your presence with us now. We give you thanks for this chance to gather together both near and far. Wherever we are. Settle our minds, soften our hearts. If we are tired, give us rest. If we are angry, bring us peace. If we are scared, bring us trust. If we are lonely, bring us comfort. If we are inspired, give us courage to act. If we are joyful, guard our joy. Though we, your people, are scattered across the land, draw our hearts together to still be the body of Christ, the Church, you call us to be. Amen.
Last summer, at the beginning of July, with a significant amount of unscheduled time at home, I decided to do something ambitious.
I was going to rip out of the ground the walkway to our front door. It was this old cement lattice that had sunk down deep into the earth and had become over run with weeds. And I was going to build a new brick walkway in its place.
Now the ending of this story isn’t important. I built the walkway. It’s there. You can look at it. It’s fine.
But the process, the journey of building it is where this story is at, because in the middle of learning to build this brick walkway – I had a Biblical epiphany, if you will. I had a lightning strike moment, where out of the blue, I instantly had a new understanding of a biblical passage that I didn’t really understand before.
Now, if you look at this walkway up to our house, you can see that there is a cement slab that sticks out like a sore thumb. It juts out from the porch and collides with what would be beautiful and symmetrical walkway. From the beginning of this project, I knew I was going to have to work around this cement slab. It wasn’t going anywhere.
So I did all the things – I cleaned out the foundation, I cleared the space of grass and weeds, I laid down some rock and sand, leveled it all out with a hand stamper, I did all the math, geometry – it was going to fit perfectly. So I started laying bricks, right alongside the cement slab. Brick by brick by brick. I put it in this cool, kind of unique square pattern. And my sides were flush and the height was level…
Until about 12 feet and a quarter inch later…when I got to the corner of the cement slab. And suddenly, everything was off. Nothing fit like it was supposed to. It was not beautiful. The pattern for walkway became askew and misaligned. It just looked wrong.
And as I sat there, frustrated and confused, wondering what went wrong or what I didn’t consider, I look at the corner of the cement slab jutting out into my walkway space and I realized…
Oh. I was supposed to start here. At the corner. I was supposed to start laying down the brick from this cornerstone. And that’s when it hit me.
This is what it means to call Jesus our cornerstone. It means we are supposed to start here. With Christ.
“This Jesus is ‘the stone that was rejected by you, the builders,” the Apostle Peter said in our Acts reading for today. “This stone you rejected, this stone you ignored, this stone you thought you could work around, instead of work with…it has become the cornerstone.” This Jesus is the cornerstone, Peter says.
Now I am not someone who works with masonry, I’m not a construction worker, but a cornerstone is the stone that all the other stones are set around. It determines the entire structure and integrity of a building or a walkway. What I learned that hot day in July was that when I did not start with the cornerstone, everything goes awry.
And here’s the thing – I did not know it at first. I was blind to it. For the first 12 feet, it looked great. I did not know it was going to be off kilter and crooked. It all looked good…until it didn’t. Until I looked at the cornerstone.
What I am learning from our Acts reading today is that when we do not start with Jesus as our cornerstone – everything goes awry. And we can be blind to how wrong things have gone. Everything can look fine….until it isn’t. Until you get to Jesus the cornerstone and then you see.
A number of a years ago, at another congregation, the council was having a difficult conversation. Some of the church members wanted the church to do this thing over here, others wanted the church to do this thing over here. And in the middle of the argument, a new member of the council, who didn’t say a lot and whose voice didn’t carry much weight yet, raised her hand and said quietly….” Can I just ask: what do we think Jesus wants us to do?”
The whole room went quiet. Everyone looked at each other for a moment.
And then they just blew right past the question and carried on with their same old arguments. No one wanted to look at Christ as the cornerstone of the conversation because they knew he would reveal how off set their idea was to the gospel.
If that slab of concrete hadn’t been there, if I could just have lifted it up out of the ground, everything would have been fine. But I couldn’t. It wasn’t going anywhere. So what did I need to do?
I needed to go back and rebuild. To pick up the bricks where I placed them and start a new path. That cornerstone was holding me accountable to the vision I had for that walkway. It showed me where my path has gone out of sync. Where I messed up. I needed to start again.
And as followers of Christ, when we are willing to look at Christ as our cornerstone….it holds us accountable to the life of faith, the life of discipleship we are called to lead. Christ as our cornerstone reveals to us our sin – when we are out of sync with God and God’s dream for the world. Where we’ve messed up and need to start again. Christ the cornerstone hold us accountable.
Accountable. Accountability. We have heard that word a lot this week, in light of the conviction of Derek Chauvin. That word – this week, it was everywhere. After watching to the verdict being read, I go on Facebook, Instagram, public radio and people talking about how this verdict, this conviction isn’t justice, this is accountability. A white police officer finally held accountable for the death of a black man.
Minnesota’s Attorney General Keith Ellison said, “I would not call today’s verdict “justice” … because justice implies true restoration. But it is accountability, which is the first step towards justice.”[1]
Accountable, accountability, accounting for one’s actions. It has been all over the news this week. Which is why I stopped in my tracks when on a podcast (likely recorded weeks ago) I heard Dr. Karoline Lewis use that very same word about today’s text, saying that today’s scripture readings are about accountability.
The reading from Acts reminds and hold us accountable to the fact that as people of faith, Christ is our cornerstone, meaning that our lives and our ministry are to be built around the life and ministry and teachings of Jesus. “Is Christ our cornerstone?” the passage from Acts wonders.
What is Jesus’ life and ministry and teachings? The gospel of John tells us – Jesus as the good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep. He has sacrificial love for his sheep, which leads directly to what Jesus will say a few chapters later…love one another as I have loved you. “Are we loving each other as the good shepherd loves us?” the gospel of John whispers.
And then the reading from 1 John doesn’t wonder or whisper, hollers that haunting line, “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? (Let me say that again, “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?”) Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.” Does God’s love abide in us? Or are we refusing to help those in need, 1 John interrogates this morning.
Can you hear the accountability in these passages? Can you hear Acts and John and 1 John asking that the words of our faith mirror our faith in action?
Reminding us that our faith compels us, holds us accountable and responsible for embodying the kind of love we receive from Christ. Not in the abstract. Not in Facebook posts or yard signs. In truth and in action.
This might be Good Shepherd Sunday – It’s also Accountability Sunday.
We have to see Christ as our cornerstone, we have to let that be where we start because if we don’t, how can God’s love abide in us, 1 John asks. When we do not live with the heartbeat of our life as love God and love our neighbor, our life – our world – gets askew. And when we do not live with the heartbeat of our life as our communal and individual need for the grace of God to be poured out for each one of us, then everything is off and nothing is beautiful.
This Jesus is ‘the stone that was rejected by you, the builders; it has become the cornerstone. The place where we have to start.
I think we all are finding ourselves in an accountability moment right now. Where we have to look closely back at our world and the way we were living pre-Covid and ask, “How now shall we live? Are we living out our faith as Christ calls us to?”
A little over a year ago, the poet and activist Sonya Renee Taylor wrote these words in an Instagram post. She said, “We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was never normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate and lack. We should not long to return, My friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature.” [2] No more than a week or two into the pandemic, Taylor was looking at the cornerstone of how we should be living this life and then back at the bricks we’ve laid over our life time and said, “Nope. That looks wrong. That’s not normal. Let’s not go back to that.” We have to start again.
This pandemic has put us in a moment of accountability.
This season of racial justice has put us in a moment of accountability. Not only demanding us to question our policing practices and our internal and systemic racism, but to question our American criminal justice system all together.
On Wednesday morning, after Chauvin convictions, a writer by the name of Darnell Moore spoke at the Healing Our City Virtual Prayer Tent, a Twin Cities based daily prayer gathering that has been going on since last summer.
In his spoken word reflection on Wednesday morning, Darnell Moore said what so many were feeling but couldn’t put into words. He said that he was shifting between joy and lament. Joy because, finally – finally – a white police officer is held accountable for killing a black man. But lament because George Floyd is still gone (Adam Toledo is still gone, Daunte Wright is still gone, Ma’khia Bryant is still gone) and the system of accountability is still broken.
Lament because our limited imagination has led to a country where justice looks like punishment, looks like cages, looks like cuffs, looks like policing the police … like more violence as a response to violence.
“I am shifting between joy and lament…,” he said, “because we are forced to rely on a system that needs to be raised, (removed).”
And then Darnell calls us into our imaginations. An imagination that, to me, looked like placing Christ as the cornerstone and starting a new path. He said, “Imagine a world – if you can – where sentencing might result in someone like Chauvin having to commit to service over an extended period of time in the very community, on the very streets in which he took George Floyd’s life.
Imagine a world where Floyd’s family and community could determine the form of restitution that Chauvin would be committed to perform. A type of service that demands he bring life to the place where he once brought about a death.
Imagine a world where the easy way out isn’t a cage… but is replaced with the harder work of deep accountability, self-reckoning, the seeking of forgiveness through addressing harmful systems, and reconciliation. What are we to think and feel and do today? The day after. It is our job to imagine differently.[3]
Can you hear it? On Tuesday Afternoon, a jury held Derek Chauvin accountable. But on Wednesday morning Darnell Moore held our faith accountable. To make Christ our cornerstone and to start again.
Friends, Christ is our cornerstone. And that cornerstone will be a stone of accountability. To hold us to the life Christ calls us to. Little children, let us love in truth and action. Let us love one another as I love you. You gotta start with me, Christ says, or everything will be off kilter.
Christ is our cornerstone. But that cornerstone will also be a stone of grace. Why? Because Christ the cornerstone says, “I’m not going anywhere. I am with you always. I am the good shepherd. I know my sheep. Others might run away but I will not run away. I’ll be here. So pick up your bricks and start building a new path.” Amen.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/20/keith-ellison-george-floyd-speech-minnesota-attorney-general
[2] I discovered this from Sam Well’s sermon, “The New Normal”, https://www.stmartin-in-the-fields.org/the-new-normal/
[3] Darnell Moore, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoldFFFCook
Untying the Cerebral Knot 