July 21, 2024 – Ninth Sunday After Pentecost
Rev. Gary Percesepe
On September 18, 1793, George Washington laid the U.S. Capitol cornerstone at the southeast corner of its foundation to mark the building of the nation’s most symbolically important building. Caleb Bentley, a Quaker clockmaker and silversmith, made the silver plate for the Capitol ceremony.
Washington stepped down into the foundation trench, laid the plate on the ground, and lowered the cornerstone onto it.
But over time the cornerstone of a nation’s commitment to democratic rule sank in the swampy soil of the region, where it was then covered by gathering debris. Its location is a national mystery. In 1991, a search for the Capitol cornerstone was conducted using a metal detector to locate the engraved metal plate. But it was never found.
We cannot find the cornerstone to the cornerstone of our democracy, the one that was dedicated at the Capitol, a building that was attacked by its own citizens on January 6th 228 years later.
Cornerstones are more than massive stones embedded into buildings; they are symbols that point beyond themselves to a deeper meaning. A cornerstone helps remind us why we are here. Losing sight of a cornerstone suggests we may have lost sight of the original purpose of our founding and are floundering.
Today, America is a nation of widely separated people. Each camp is convinced that they are right. Both sides regard each other as not only misguided but also morally corrupt, bad people, evildoers, even demonic. In such an environment, violence is inevitable.
Political division is not new to America, and the U.S. Capitol is no stranger to violence. The U.S. Capitol was burned to the ground by the British in the War of 1812, and subsequently occupied by Union troops. When Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office on the building’s east side, he stood beneath the still unfinished dome. In his First Inaugural address, he pleaded with his countrymen to avoid war. Lincoln prophesied that a nation divided against itself cannot stand. He sought to remind a divided nation of the purpose of a cornerstone.
The cornerstone mentioned in Ephesians describes the founding of the church, not a nation.
So now you are no longer strangers and aliens. Rather, you are fellow citizens with God’s people, and you belong to God’s household. As God’s household, you are built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Jesus Christ himself as the cornerstone. ~ Ephesians 2: 19-20
By the time the book of Ephesians was written, Gentiles had been grafted into the church as full-fledged members of God’s household. It was a titanic struggle, the most significant controversy faced by the early church.
Listen carefully to the language the writer uses to describe the two warring camps. It sounds very contemporary, like two political parties trolling one another on Twitter. The writer calls them “two humanities.” Gentiles are called aliens, strangers to the covenant of promise, those without hope, without God in the world. Jews are the elect people of God, able to walk in the inner courts of the Temple, while Gentiles were outside the gates, desolate and disenfranchised.
The matter was eventually resolved, largely through the efforts of Paul and the writer of Ephesians interprets this as miraculous!
How did hostilities cease? How did this war end? Who demolished the high walls of separation? Who made this peace?
This is God’s doing. Whose church is this? It’s God’s church. Circumcision or bloodline count for nothing; we have all been adopted into the family of God. Christ is the meeting place for a divided humanity. Christ is our peace. Widely separated peoples are fused together through the reconciling work of the cosmic Christ. Ethnic and racial distinctions are obliterated, as well as sexual, social, and class distinctions. The cross levels all distinctions, while at the same time confirming us in our various identities.
Symbol points beyond themselves. The symbol of the cross points to the God who was crucified not between two candles on an altar in a church but between two thieves in the place of the skull, Golgotha, where the outcasts belong, outside the gates of the city. It is a symbol that leads us into the fellowship of the oppressed and the abandoned. How often have we listened to the laments of those who were damaged and broken by religion! At the cross we see that the Crucified God (1) was himself a victim of religion. The cross is a symbol that calls the oppressed and godless into the church, and through the church into the fellowship of the crucified God. This is no jingoistic nationalism that fuses God, Leader, Nation, Blood, and Soil. That fascist vision of a Führer was defeated in 1945, but its specter haunts the world today. The book of Ephesians and the story of the lost Capitol cornerstone reminds us that when the cross ceases to be a symbol and becomes an idol it’s no longer good news, it is a false gospel.
The church is not a club for “Members Only,” it is the last hope of the world for a new community; it must never become a place where we ask, “what do the members want,” but a place where we continually pray, “What does God want us to do?” The church must always be a parable of true communion, a rebuke to the powers that be, and the fulfillment of the promise that God is making all things new. This is the only citizenship to which we aspire and to which we are called. Amene.
1. The Crucified God is the title of the extraordinary book written by German theologian Jürgen Moltmann; this section of the sermon is indebted to Moltmann. If you read no other work of theology this year or in years to come—read The Crucified God. First translated into English in 1973, this book is one of the essential works of theology written in the twentieth century. From the back cover: “Moltmann proposes that suffering is not a problem to be solved but instead that suffering is an aspect of God’s very being: God is love, and love invariably involves suffering.”