Sermon by Professor Chloë Starr for Berkeley Graduation, 2024
1 Peter 2: 4-10
When I was a graduate student, roughly your age, I spent several summers standing in a stone quarry. I remember most the heat, in the basin of Portland Bill, and the bright light. And dust, lots of dust, from stone chippings and the ground itself as our chisels and claws hacked away at the blocks of stone in front of us.
The wonderful thing about Portland stone, a Jurassic limestone, is that it has no strong grain, no particular fracture lines, you can carve anything in any direction. The British museum façade is made of Portland stone, as are the white bits of St Paul’s Cathedral and Buckingham Palace.
Stone carving is not an amateur sport. You have to be able to think in inverse 3D, to imagine what needs to be removed in two axes for what you want to reveal to be left standing, and not accidentally chipped off. You can’t start again – if you make a mistake you have to sculpt something different out of the block.
Stone is also heavy. Very heavy, as the axis of my 900cc car found on the way home one year with a relief-carved sculpture of a hand, rather Soviet realist in style, in the footwell, which now sits in a fireplace in Oxford, never to be moved.
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. 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.
I love the lapidary overkill in this passage of scripture. So many Hebrew Bible references, so many stones – living stones, corner stones, stumbling stones, dislodged rocks. Be a foundation stone, don’t be a loose chipping…
Living stones, I think we can sense. There aren’t many stone buildings in CT, few great soaring carved stone cathedrals, but when you enter an old stone building, perhaps St John the Divine in NY, you are hit by clammy cold and by a distinct smell, a sweet, dusty stone smell. And if you sit outside on the Marquand steps on a rare hot day, you know that stone retains heat and can singe your skin. Indents on stone steps and even stone altars show us where generations have trod and knelt, slowing wearing the stone away.
Like living stones, you are being built into a spiritual house.
A stone can’t hold itself up.
A solitary stone is a boulder.
You need to lean on, and into, and fit with, and stand alongside, others in this household.
Graduates, stay in touch with your cohort! Keep your friendships close.
In my part of the world, they use dry stone walls. The stones themselves are angled and stacked tight so they don’t need cement. Let yourselves be built – we aren’t the ones with the architectural blueprint here. We are being layered on a bed of previous stones, and others will raise the building up beyond us. Some of us may be functional corbels, supporting others, and some may be decorative gargoyles in the household of God. But we are all, Berkeleyites and Andoverites and Congregationalists and Catholics and evangelicals, being built into one edifice.
And the cornerstone, the foundation stone, is Christ.
The stone that the builders rejected.
The image of the Messiah as a stone is frequent in Israelite and Christian imagery. In the reference from Isaiah 28, the precious head of the corner (probably not an actual cornerstone, the centre stone in an arch, but a ground-level stone) is “a tested stone, a sure foundation, “One who trusts will not panic.” These are difficult times, times that induce panic and fearfulness. 2024 has been a tough year. But we have a sure foundation, and this building will hold.
Come to him, a living stone:
Or as the verb is, keep returning to him, continue to look to him, the eternally-alive stone, and the building will be true.
May your generation build well, in Tucson, in Cambridge, in Philadelphia, in Providence, and in Houston. In the CPE placements several of you are going on to, in your chaplaincies and your teaching and your joint degrees and STMs and your PhD programs.
- and thank God the church will rise beyond all of us and our limited vision.
But hang on a moment, I hear you interject, three years of classes later. Peter is actually writing to a group which lacks stone buildings, which doesn’t have the ornate carved temples of the Romans and Greeks or the synagogues of the Jews.
Yes, you’re right: it’s a spiritual building we are fashioning. The monumental metaphors help us envisage the household of God as a building, but the building is not the church. Peter shifts his metaphor:
You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation…
Once you were not a people… but now you are.
Once you were not YDS students, but now you are. Once you were not graduates, but now you are.
Today, we congratulate you on your academic success, and we celebrate you.
But we also rejoice in you, in your formation, in the daily faithfulness and growth that has brought you to today; in all that you have overcome to get to this ceremony; in your building up into a royal priesthood, into a people.
I’m going to steer away from questions of predestination and later readings of supercessionism in the passage today – you’ve taken your bible and theology classes and can answer those to your own satisfaction.
Because it’s worth reminding ourselves just how far Peter has come in being able to transfer the language of Israel to followers of Christ from all over the world and from all peoples. It’s a long time since he stood up at Pentecost – which we would be recalling and celebrating now if this service had been just an hour or two later – and addressed the crowd. It was some time after that day that he met up with Cornelius in Caesarea, after his vision of that great sheet of unclean animals, and went to stay in Cornelius’ house, discovering that God truly shows no partiality. Peter stood up to opposition within the believers and defended his new understanding soon afterwards.
You too have come a long way in the last two or three years. Some of you have radically shifted your views too, and some have had to defend elements of your faith before families and congregations.
You’ve come this far, because you, because we, are all living stones – with a living faith – Unfortunately for us, that means constant growth and change. You may be fully trained and certified, but YDS isn’t the end. The blocks are roughed out, the form is defined, but the diamond grinder and the polisher still await.
Let’s not forget the point of Peter’s message: you are being formed “to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ,” and chosen “that you may proclaim the excellence of him who called you out of darkness.”
To live for God, and to proclaim God, that’s the work ahead. This is where this time in the quarry is leading. It’s a hard calling, for which you need every bit of support that the foundation of Christ and the walls of your fellow building blocks offer. When all around us in the world humanmade buildings are being pulverized to rubble, your work, your building and your sacrifices on this spiritual altar, are vital.
Living into this holy life has not been a solitary exercise. (If you’re a Berkeley graduate you should have been to 360 Morning Prayer services alongside your year group, excluding reading weeks and exam weeks, plus 72 Wednesday Eucharists and getting on for 400 YDS services.). Formation happens in the habits, and in the closeness to classmates. Your families, natural and chosen, have been grist and support too, whether tightly stacked alongside you or flying buttresses on the outer wall.
Sometimes we chisel, sometimes we are the ones being changed. Which makes all the more meaningful the rare chance we have this day to thank your families for their sacrifices, both spiritual and material, those good souls who have let you be here for two or three long years. What a great gift they have offered, perhaps with a sense of what would come out of it… or perhaps not! Our thanks, to one and all. With these souls you love, God has done wonderful things.
Living stones, built into a spiritual house, a royal priesthood… acceptable to God.
For this dusty quarry of YDS, literally a building site at the moment, and for the immense beauty that God has wrought out of it in the lives of those here, today we offer our thanks and praise.
Amen.