When Gary and I were young adults, our closest family was actually a group of close friends whom we met as members of our Sunday School class at St. Paul’s United Methodist Church in Defiance, in Northwest Ohio. Most of us were new to the community, having moved there because of job opportunities or transfers. A few were natives who had grown up in the church, and had extended family across the church.

One of my friends, an immigrant from St. Louis via Toledo – met the mother of one of our class members in a business setting. Recognizing the name, my friend said, “Oh, you go to my church.” The elder matron of the congregation didn’t miss a beat as she replied, “Oh, no, my dear, you go to my church.”

Fortunately, we have texts in the New Testament that can clear up any disagreement as to whose church it is. The church belongs to Christ. And, while we might be members of a denomination or a congregation, it to Christ that we belong.

I Peter in particular seeks to instruct about the nature of the community to which we are related when we belong to Christ. There is a them woven into this epistle about belonging to a spiritual house, or a household of faith.

The Greek word for household is used here. And, of course, in the original culture, a household was not just immediate family. It was extended family, staff and tradespersons who served the household, and even slaves. The early church encountered difficulty with the status of persons in these households when it declared that all were the same in Christ.

But it is to this idea of diverse household that we belong when we belong to each other in the church. We belong to others in such a way that our economic interests, our security interests, our interests in well-being are mutual for all.

I Peter tells us not only that we are members of this household, but that the house – the space for this household is constructed using us as the building materials. We are the living stones. It is hard for us to understand the degree to which this image was good news for the early Christian community. They were persons formed in the faith of the Jewish temple at Jerusalem, where the priests lived and functioned to intercede on their behalf with sacrificial offerings. The Torah lived there. The priests lived there. God lived there. And in 70 AD that temple was destroyed – the stones out of which it had been carefully constructed reduced to rubble.

And so, imagine hearing that with no place and no means for priests to offer the sacrifices of worship on behalf of the people – they themselves were the living stones, the royal priesthood.

But we have a “temple,” a church building. We have clergy. So what good news is there for us in this household of faith where we are called to be both living stones and priests?

The image of the Priesthood of all believers is a foundational image in our protestant tradition.

In following Pope Benedicts visit to the United States this week, I noticed how many people spoke of their encounter with the pope, even if from afar, as a moment of great reverence. In the tradition of Catholicism, the Pope stands closest to Christ as the Priest among Priests, so to speak.

But Martin Luther rejected the idea that a priest was a necessary intermediary between God and ordinary Christians. He found plenty of evidence in the New Testament that each person could privately and corporately confess their sins and receive forgiveness without a priest holding the keys to such grace. Luther declared that every believer could stand before God as himself or herself because of the gift of Jesus Christ. And likewise, every believer does the work of a priest in the world, holding the whole community before God in prayer and worship.

In our United Methodist tradition, the role of clergy is a representative role. Persons come from within the community to stand as representatives of the people in leading worship, preaching, observing the life of the church and offering the sacraments. In discussing the role of clergy with someone recently, I said that we choose representatives because, practically speaking, we cannot all fit in the space around the altar, so we send representatives to stand before the Word and the Sacrament. It is a role within the household of faith, but a representative, not an intermediary one.

To use the metaphor of the stones, it is one stone, placed in a particular place in the structure, but without the cornerstone of Christ and the rest of the structure, it’s just a stone.

The image that I Peter uses to speak of the construction of the household is so vivid t hat I find myself imaging an animated children’s cartoon illustrating this scripture, where little stones are given smiley faces and little arms and legs and are scurrying around and building themselves into a beautiful cathedral – a temple.

But notice the language of the text. We are not to build ourselves into this temple –we are to let ourselves be built. There is a sense in which, living stones though we are, we are best built into a household of faith when we allow the architect’s design to fit us into the structure. If you’ve ever built with natural stone, you know that fitting the stones together is art as much as craft.

The stones need to be the right shape and size. They may need the rough edges smoothed, a part of their shape chipped away, the shape altered by this work so that they fit the space.

We have a basic human need to understand where we fit in. How many of you have been in a place where you knew you didn’t fit in? I know I have.

Church is a place where with Christ as the cornerstone, and God who created us as the architect, we can fit in.

It doesn’t matter where you’ve been that you didn’t fit before. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t make the varsity, or you’ll never be inside that gated community. It doesn’t matter that you don’t fit in even in those places you go where you’re glad you’ll never have to live. It doesn’t matter.

There is a place for everyone who belongs to Christ in this household of faith.

But Christ the cornerstone is also Christ the stumbling stone. We stumble, do we not, over this idea of “letting” ourselves be built – we who are so accomplished and adept at choosing our own way.

We stumble, don’t we, over the need to give way to the well being of the whole structure – who have inherited a culture that places the value of the individual above the value of the whole.

We stumble over believing that we can choose which stones will go into this structure when we are not, after all, the architect.

But the priesthood of all believers is not only about our place in the church. It is also about what it means to be the people of God in the world. This is about taking up our Christian vocation as priests in the wider world. We are all charged as priests to stand as members of the household of faith representing the heart and will of God to the world in which we live work and relate to the wider community.

We who offer ourselves as living stones receive a Christian vocation. Not in the professional sense, but in the sense that we are given a way of living the world that influences all of our ethical, moral and values decisions.

And that way of living in the world is discovered by belonging here. We begin as babes in Christ, so to speak – whatever our age when we are baptized, we mark it as the beginning of a journey to learn our way to salvation and receive God’s design-help for our lives.

Like most grandparents, Gary and I have found great joy in watching our grandchildren discover their place in the world. They discover how to be human by living in the human community. Our eight month old granddaughter has discovered who Mama and Dada are. She has discovered that one of her smiles will elicit a similar response from every human who approaches her. She has discovered ways of waking and sleeping and receiving care and kindness and food and comfort and love. She is learning how to be human by living among humans who are being human.

Christian discover how to be Christians in the world by living in a household of faith, by participating in Christian community and by living in the wider community according to the values learned in the household of faith.

We pledge to the newly baptized that we will live in such a way that they might learn from us how to be a follower of Jesus Christ.

I Peter tells us this about ourselves: Each one of us has a Christian vocation. It is received in and through the community of faith. Fundamentally it is this: to re-present Christ to the world in our relationships, our words, our actions, our ethical, moral and values choices.

Participation in this spiritual household is not about membership…it is about a way of relating to others and living in the world.

What if my friends’ conversation had gone this way: “You go to my church.” And the reply had been, “O, then, we are sisters in Christ!”

Of course, we don’t use the language this way…but that is how our relationship really is.

There are many biblical metaphors for the community of faith. The “living stones” image is just one metaphor. But it leaves me asking, “what kind of stone am I?”

Sir Christopher Wren, famous British mathematician and architect, who designed 52 London churches, including St. Peter’s Cathedral, is memorialized by this epitaph: “Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you.”

Ought we not be able to say, “Seeker, if you are looking for the risen Christ, look around you.”