In 1 Samuel 2:2, Hannah, a devout worshipper of God, begins her prayer of praise with these words, "There is no Holy One like the Lord, no one besides you; there is no Rock like our God." King David composed a song to the Lord that is found both in 2 Samuel 22 and in Psalm 18. Through this song David thanked God for the victories God had given to David and the nation. David began that song by saying, "The Lord is my rock, my fortress, and my deliverer, my God, my rock in whom I take refuge, my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold" (2 Samuel 22:2; Psalm 18:2). Toward the end of that same psalm David says, "For who is God except the Lord? And who is a rock besides our God?" (2 Samuel 22:32; Psalm 18:31). Twice in Psalm 62 we read that God "alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress; I shall not be shaken" (verses 2 & 6). In all of these passages, God is likened to a rock because that metaphor conveys God’s stability and dependability.

But there is also a quite different use of the rock and stone metaphor in the Bible, and it is that other use which I want to focus on this morning. We meet that other usage first in Isaiah 8:14 where we read that God will become "a stone to strike and a rock to stumble over" and God will become that "to both the houses of Israel;" and the very next verse says, "many among them shall stumble; they shall fall and be broken." Here God as stone conveys not stability; here God as stone conveys the message that God is a cause of stumbling and a serious stumbling––a stumbling that causes people to be broken. A similar statement is made in Jeremiah 6:21 where we read, "Therefore thus says the Lord: See, I am laying before this people stumbling blocks against which they shall stumble; parents and children together, neighbor and friend shall perish."

Another usage of the stone metaphor is found in Psalm 118:22. There we read, "The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone."

When we move from the Old Testament to the New Testament, we find that Jesus combines the image of the Cornerstone and the image of the stumbling stone that causes people to be broken. In Matthew 21:42-43 Jesus says,

"Have you never read in the scriptures: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes’? Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom. The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls."

This passage is paralleled in Luke 20:17-18; and in the apostle Paul’s writings, in Romans 9:33, Paul uses verbiage from both Isaiah 28:16 and Isaiah 8:14 and reports God saying, "See, I am laying in Zion a stone that will make people stumble, a rock that will make them fall, and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame." Paul is referring to the gospel of righteousness by faith as the stone of stumbling here. Paul makes unmistakably clear that stumbling is inherent to the nature of that stone. Paul also makes clear that the persons who are converted as a result of this stone’s power and go on to believe or trust in it "will not be put to shame."

Now, if you have your Bible, please turn to 1 Peter 2:4-8 and follow along as I read.

Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For it stands in scripture: "See, I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious; and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame." To you then who believe, he is precious; but for those who do not believe, "The stone that the builders rejected has become the very head of the corner," and "A stone that makes them stumble, and a rock that makes them fall." They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do.

I like small, smooth stones––stones from a creek bed that the water has taken all of the edges off of, stones whittled down to miniature size. I like stones that can be polished and varnished and sold in gift shops. Those kind of stones are decorative, and they pose no threat; they make no one uncomfortable.

Jesus is not a smooth, small stone. He is the cornerstone of the building God is constructing, but Jesus is not the cornerstone people have selected. People, in fact, rejected that cornerstone. But God has chosen Jesus, and God has made Jesus the most important stone in the building. But it is not because Jesus is easy for people to accept that God has chosen Him. Jesus is not easy to accept. Jesus causes people to stumble and fall. But those who are awakened by the power of the stone, will find they have a cornerstone in their lives, a cornerstone that will never put them to shame.

Michael Card is a Christian music composer and performer. He has written and performs a song that he calls "Scandalon" from the Greek word, ska¿ndalon, from which we get our English word, "scandal." This word ska¿ndalon is the noun we have in 1 Peter 2:8 where the Greek text refers to pe÷tra skanda¿lou which is literally rendered as "a rock of falling" or a "rock of offense," but it comes into more idiomatic English as "a rock that makes them fall." The word ska¿ndalon here is the word that attaches to the rock the attribute of making people fall. Please listen to the words of this song written in 1985 by Michael Card.

Scandalon
by Michael Card
copyright 1985, Birdwing Music

That verse about offending no one troubles me. It troubles me because I know that this is what happened in Old Testament times, and I know that it is an easy failure to repeat. You see, the nation of Judah managed to create an aberrant version of biblical faith, and it offended no one. They learned how to be religious without living lives of justice and mercy and righteousness. They learned how to mouth the words and act out the rituals without allowing any of it to offend them with the radical call to godly living, the call which it all was designed to proclaim. They crowded into the temple and performed all of the prescribed rituals, but their lives were starkly out of step with the will of God, the God whom they worshipped with such regularity.

Have we done the same? Do I, as your preacher, make following and believing in Jesus easy? Do I allow the creekwater of rationalization and abstract theologizing to smooth all the rough edges off of this stone of stumbling and this rock of offense? Do I miniaturize God’s cornerstone? Do I domesticate the gospel.

Sisters and brothers, we must have ears ready to hear the prophetic voice––the voice that awakens us to the sharp edges of our faith, the sharp edges of the Word of God. Otherwise we can be lulled into thinking that everything we need to know we already know and everything the church needs to be it already is and every change Christ calls for has already been accomplished.

Jeremiah the prophet was called to be a prophet in 627 BC. Jeremiah went on to prophesy until just after the fall of Jerusalem which took place in 587 BC. He prophesied to a people who had managed to rub all of the edges off of their faith. It would make no one stumble, no one fall. You could live and believe pretty much as you pleased as long as you showed up at the temple to do all the right religious stuff.

God sent Jeremiah to shake up the people. Let’s see how God did it. Please turn in your Bibles to Jeremiah 7. Through that chapter we hear the sermon God gave Jeremiah for the people who had gathered to worship.

Listen to verses one through four of Jeremiah 7:

The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: Stand in the gate of the Lord’s house, and proclaim there this word, and say, Hear the word of the Lord, all you people of Judah, you that enter these gates to worship the Lord. Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Amend your ways and your doings, and let me dwell with you in this place. Do not trust in these deceptive words: "This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord."

Notice that Jeremiah is not told to preach inside the temple complex. He stands in the gate and preaches to people as they enter. It would be somewhat like a person preaching at a door into the Broadway church building as we are all entering on a Sunday morning. It would have been very disruptive. It would have made worship more difficult. And the message Jeremiah gave made people angry. It would not have facilitated a reverent participation in the accustomed rituals. In fact, Jeremiah’s words make quite clear that––even though the people think God is present with them in their worship, in their rituals––God is not with them. God instructs Jeremiah to say for God, "let me dwell with you in this place." In other words, I am not with you now; and God is not with them because their lives separated God from them. They had caused God to depart from them by the wickedness in their lives.

But they think they are fine. They are all attending worship this day feeling secure and confident. They think the existence of the temple of the Lord in the city of Jerusalem makes their security unshakable. Listen again to the slogan of the people of Judah which the Lord quotes and commands Jeremiah to repeat for the purpose of denouncing that slogan. The people say, "This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord." They believed that the temple of the Lord made them inviolable; they thought that because the temple sat on a hill in their holy city that harm and destruction could never come.

And guess what. They had good reasons for believing that, good biblical reasons. They sang songs still contained in our Bibles that seemed to teach that the temple would always be secure. Psalm 78:68-69 says that God "chose the tribe of Judah, Mount Zion, which he loves. He built his sanctuary like the high heavens, like the earth, which he has founded forever." And Psalm 132:13-14 says, "For the Lord has chosen Zion; he has desired it for his habitation: "This is my resting place forever; here I will reside, for I have desired it."

Listen to more words placed by God in the mouth of Jeremiah in Jeremiah 7. The Lord says in verse 14 of that chapter, "I will do to the house that is called by my name, in which you trust, and to the place that I gave to you and to your ancestors, just what I did to Shiloh." Shiloh was a place where the tabernacle of God had been in former times. In other words, it was an earlier center of worship. The holy ark of the covenant had been kept there. Divinely prescribed rituals had been performed there. But Psalm 78 makes clear that the sin of the people had caused God to abandon that place of worship; and Psalm 78, quoted just moments ago, also declares that the sanctuary in Jerusalem is like "the high heavens, like the earth, which [the Lord] has founded forever." God through Jeremiah agrees with the straight-forward reading of a portion of this biblical psalm. It affirms that, yes indeed, Shiloh was abandoned by God. But God through Jeremiah does not agree with the straight-forward reading of another verse of that same psalm. God does not agree that the desire for the temple to be founded forever cannot be negated by the sin of the people who worship there. God through Jeremiah effectively denies a prima facie reading of a passage found in the sacred texts of God’s own people.

Jeremiah 26 appears to be a retelling of the events first reported in Jeremiah 7. This retelling includes a reporting of the reaction of the people to the sermon. The reaction is not surprising. At first it looks as though Jeremiah will be executed for his radical words, but there is sufficient reverence for the role of prophet that they do not kill him. But neither do they respond with repentance and changed lives to the message the prophet declared, the message given the prophet by Judah’s God, the God whom they came to the temple to worship.

Their reaction is so easy for us to duplicate. Broadway is a fairly tolerant church. We will grant a firebrand a place among us. Some will get upset by the words of the firebrand, but the majority will allow him or her to have a say. But I sometimes fear that I and all of us are so tolerant because deep inside we know we are not going to change very much at all; we know that the desire for peace is stronger than the passion to pursue the radical and even offensive will of God. And we have our proof-texts, just like the worshippers in Jeremiah’s day, proof-texts which protect us from the radically sharp edges of the Word of God.

Sisters and brothers, we must shine to the glory of our God. We must shine with lives radically open to the offensive gospel of God. We must be always ready to reconsider, reexamine, and re-study. Our apprehension of God’s Word is limited and finite, and that will always be so. But we must not settle into complacency because that it is unavoidably true. We must hunger to show forth more and more of the will of God, more and more of God’s justice, righteousness, and holiness. We can do that if we allow God’s stone of stumbling to be the chief cornerstone in this community of faith. May we all have ears wide open to the radical Word of God!

If you have any spiritual need which we can assist you with, please come to the front now as we stand and sing.