166. Year A - 5th Sunday of Easter - 1 Peter 2:2-10 - "You Are God's Chosen Race"

Scripture Reading2 Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, 3 now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.4 As you come to him, the living Stone—rejected by humans but chosen by God and precious to him— 5 you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. 6 For in Scripture it says:“See, I lay a stone in Zion, a chosen and precious cornerstone,and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame.”7 Now to you who believe, this stone is precious. But to those who do not believe,“The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone,”8 and,“A stone that causes people to stumble and a rock that makes them fall.”They stumble because they disobey the message—which is also what they were destined for.9 But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. 10 Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.Pulpit Notes[n.b. This is one of those instances where the variance between what was spoken and what was on the page in front of me is significant]Today is the fifth Sunday of Easter. In this period between Easter Sunday and Pentecost we spend our time meditating on passages that explore and open up for us the meaning of the death and resurrection of Christ for the world and in the life of us as believers.We struggle to properly relate to the New Testament scriptures in part because we live in an age of technology, of science. We live in a time where there only things that matter is what we can see and observe, the material world that can be measured and observed scientifically, that can be controlled through technology.Ours is a materialist world. What is most real is the things we can see. The unseen world of the supernatural and the metaphysical is less real to us than it was to those who lived in the period when men like Peter and Paul wrote.In their day, it was simply accepted that our world is a reflection, a revelation of the unseen spiritual world. In many ways that supernatural world was more real, more important, than the world that can be seen. The visible world is dependent upon the unseen world.The most important things that Jesus did were accomplished in this spiritual realm that is the foundation for the visible world.What Peter is doing throughout much of the book is helping the young church understand these realities and what Jesus did and how they shaped the universe within which we live.The task of our spiritual life is not to build things materially, whether churches or organizations or even nations; rather, our task is to reveal what is there in the unseen spiritual realm, this place where all things have been accomplished. Just like the Lord’s Prayer, we want to reveal the Kingdom and will of God as they already exist fully formed in the unseen heavenly realm.Our text builds in a progression, one thought building on the other. The lectionary actually begins mid sentence in the Greek. But this is fine, because it allows us to emphasize the point I open up with here this morning.“Like newborn babes, crave pure spiritual milk.” This is one of those moments where letting scripture interpret scripture can sidetrack you. Paul uses the image of “milk” in contrast to “meat” or “solid food.” But this is not what Peter is doing. He is not even telling his readers that they are immature, like babies. What he is doing here is saying that like babies, you need to eat the very best food you can eat, which is mother’s milk. What Peter is saying is that spiritually we need to eat the very best food we can eat.The word that he closes to use here, that is translated “spiritual,” is λογικὸν and not πνευματικός as he does in verse five. The choice of λογικὸν, especially in regards to this teaching is that Peter is urging his readers not merely to be “spiritual” but to seek the essence, the hidden reality that gives words their power.Something that we don’t often think about is that words and their meanings are separate things. People can use the same word but have very different associations with those words. You might have had a loving relationship with a pet dog while another person got bit by a dog. For one person the word “dog” evokes fear, and the other something warm and positive.So “pure spiritual milk” here means to seek the full divine truth, the supernatural and metaphysical realities that lay beneath t