I’d like you to imagine a master mason who is about to start building a city wall, a cathedral or a great monument. He is examining a pile of stones that have just been delivered from the quarry, trying to pick out the ones that will be suitable for laying in the foundations – he knows that his choice will be crucial if his building is to be strong and true. The builder look at each stone carefully – is it big enough or flat enough or square enough, does it have the right texture and density, are there any flaws? – and gets his labourers to place them in one of two piles: a small one of “possibles” and a much larger one of “rejects”. 

The builder thinks he’s doing a good job, but then the architect arrives. He strides over to the reject pile, points at one stone and says, “What on earth do you think you’re doing? Why did you discard this one?” Vainly the builder argues that he didn’t think it was suitable for the role. “Nonsense”, says the architect: “It’s ideal. In fact, make sure you put it in the most prominent place, where everyone can see it”. The builder is affronted at the criticism of his skills: but the architect is the boss!

I now want you to imagine a different scenario: the apostles Peter and John standing before the Jewish High Priest and other ‘worthies’ from the religious community. We’re told that this was a “meeting” but in fact it was a form of trial. For these leaders were puzzled and outraged by what Peter and John had just done: for they hadn’t just healed the lame man, known to everyone, who always sat beside the Beautiful Gate; but claimed to have done so by invoking the name of Jesus of Nazareth, that unauthorised rabbi and troublemaker. And they’d gone further: they’d not only told the crowd that it was the religious authorities who had rejected Jesus and had him killed, but declared that God had brought him back to life and that he was the promised Messiah! 

I think we can see why those leaders were so angry. First, they believed that Peter and John were preaching heresy: they would do everything they could to nip it in the bud. Second, they were sure that they held the monopoly of religious truth: how dare these fishermen undermine them? This Jesus-cult seemed to be getting dangerously popular: the time had clearly come to crack down hard on it so silencing its two ‘top men’ was obviously the way to go. The problem, of course, was that the two apostles weren’t cowed by this display of authority. When they were sternly asked what they believed about Jesus, they didn’t soften their message one bit. In fact Peter even quoted Scripture at these men who clearly regarded themselves as his intellectual superiors: “You crucified Jesus, but God raised from the dead. He is ‘the stone you builders rejected, which has become the cornerstone’.” 

Now that’s a familiar little phrase to most of us, as it comes several times in the Bible. For Peter doesn’t just use it here but also in his first letter: “You, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house … For in Scripture it says: ‘See, I lay a stone in Zion, a chosen and precious cornerstone, and no-one who trusts in him will never be put to shame’.” And Paul says something similar in his letter to the Ephesians: “You are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone”.

Neither Peter nor Paul actually invented the phrase. Nor did Jesus, who used it in his parable about a vineyard and its wicked tenants which is recorded in no less than three of the four Gospels. For it is first found in the psalm we read earlier, Psalm 118: the problem being that we can’t be absolutely sure what it means! This may well be a song of praise to a king who wasn’t originally regarded very highly by his people, but who has “come good” by winning a great victory in battle. He is now entering Jerusalem to general shouts of acclamation and praise. The phrase also comes in Zechariah (not a book we look at very much!) who tells us that “the Lord Almighty will care for his flock, the people of Judah … From them will come the cornerstone, from him the tent peg, from him the battle-bow, from him every ruler” – a clear prophecy of the Messiah.

So why did Peter use these words, which he knew would anger his listeners? I’ll answer that question in a few moments; but first I want to ask another one: what actually are cornerstones (also called foundation stones), and why are they important? Well, I talked about that builder searching for the right stone to use; but, if you’re looking for one in a modern building, you probably won’t find it at a corner and it might not be a stone at all! For these days it’s usually some kind of memorial or commemorative plaque which says something about the building’s history; for this reason some foundation stones are actually hollow and contain a “time capsule” or other memorabilia. These stones may be interesting but have no significance in the actual construction. 

But that wasn’t true in ancient times (and cornerstones go back several thousand years: they were used in ancient Egypt and Mespotamia). It wasn’t just that they were the base point in a building from which every other measurement was taken: which meant you took care to get them right because, if you didn’t, everything else would be out of alignment. There was more, for many ancient cultures held a strong belief in astrology, that events on earth are governed by the movements of the stars and planets. If you thought like that, you’d want to carefully align your building to the most propitious point of the compass: apparently cornerstones were often placed facing Northeast because this was thought to bring peace and prosperity to the building and its owners.

Now I do have to mention one aspect of these stones which is truly gruesome. It’s that they have often been associated with sacrifices: both animal and, in some cultures such as the Mexican Mayans, human. This goes back to a belief that building a city or large structure on their ‘patch’ made the local gods jealous: they had to be pacified with a bloody sacrifice. People also believed that the foundation-stone remained the seat of the building’s guardian spirit. Certainly human skulls have been found in the foundations of pagan temples in Mesopotamia; and Jewish tradition suggests that Hebrews, presumably slaves, were sacrificed in the building of some of the great Egyptian temples. Not nice at all!

I have no idea if Peter knew about that. If he did, it would have made his reference to Jesus as the Saviour who was killed and then returned to life especially powerful. What we can be sure about is that the costly and carefully-worked foundations of the Jerusalem Temple were regarded as bedrocks of Jewish identity, indeed as the most sacred spot on earth. So, when Isaiah predicted God “laying in Zion a foundation-stone, a tested stone (and) a precious cornerstone” he wasn’t just looking forward to the ruined Temple being rebuilt after the Jews’ exile in Babylon had ended; he was thinking of a new and perfect base for all of God’s people. Peter, Paul and the Church took that to mean Jesus, and used as their example Abraham, who had “looked forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God”.

So let’s get back to Peter addressing those leaders: “You didn’t think much of Jesus, did you? You despised him and couldn’t even imagine that a carpenter from Nazareth might be ‘the One’. Well, you’re wrong because God had different ideas: so you can stuff that into your pipes and smoke them!” Building bridges to them wasn’t on Peter’s agenda!

I have struggled to think how this verse might speak to us today. After all, we’re not those sceptical religious leaders and we probably don’t need convincing that Jesus who died on the cross is God’s Son, our Saviour. So is there anything we can learn here? I think that there is.

First, those leaders weren’t able to realise that someone who was a little bit different from them could be a servant of God. Because Jesus didn’t fit their mould of what a rabbi “ought” to be like, they weren’t prepared to give him the time of day. And, of course, they felt much the same about Peter and John. Here we have a religious hierarchy protectively closing ranks against the uncomfortable outsider.

I wonder how many of you watched “Panorama” on Monday evening, about racism in the Church of England? Interviews in the programme strongly suggested that clergy from ethnic minority backgrounds have been routinely sidelined and snubbed by the powers-that-be. I actually think that social class and snobbery are playing their part as well. But the conclusions seemed to be clear: you need to be “one of us” if you want to get on – which flies in the face of Paul saying that Christians are all equal in God’s Church. Now we may sit here and say, “Oh, we’re not Church of England, we’d never behave like that” – but every group of people has its own unwritten rules which both include and exclude others. We constantly need to examine our own attitudes and hearts.

Second, those religious leaders had shut God in a box and were unable to believe that he could ever work in new ways. They had carefully worked out their theology and wanted to keep it pure. Then along came Jesus with his radical re-interpretation of Scripture: “It is written … but I say to you”. That was hard enough to take. But now Peter and John were saying that this bumpkin from Nazareth wasn’t just a teacher with disturbing new ideas but God’s Messiah himself, who died and rose to prove himself. That was just taking things too far, it couldn’t be allowed.

Christians are in an interesting position. For we have the Bible which cannot (and must not) be re-written, together with the doctrines and traditions of the Church. Yet we also believe that God’s Spirit is alive and dynamic; he wants to lead us into new truths and understandings. There are several debates going on in the churches today, especially about sexuality and gender. Some Christians take the line that “we must defend the historic Christian faith” and will allow no debate. Others wonder if God is nudging us towards fresh thinking. That’s a tricky one: we don’t have to follow society’s agenda and we do want to uphold our beliefs. But we must always be open to God “doing a new thing”. Those men in Jerusalem had closed their minds; we must not be like them!

And, finally, we must come back to Jesus. For it is he – not the Bible, not any of the Creeds, not the Church and its tradition – who is the foundation of our faith. Of course we learn about him through the Bible and the Church, we have nowhere else to go for that: but ultimately the basis of a faith is to be found in a person, who we believe to be the Son of God. He is the rock, the sure foundation, on which we build our lives.

I started by taking you to a building site. I next took you to first-century Jerusalem. I’ll finish by taking you to the picturesque city of Milton Keynes, famous for its concrete cows. Bang in the centre of the city, there is a church which you genuinely “cannot miss”. It’s no ordinary church as it brings together Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, Catholics and the United Reformed Church in partnership. I don’t know how that works in practice: to me it sounds like a recipe for bureaucratic disaster! The church’s founding Covenant gives us its aims: “We covenant upon the foundation … that we have one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism; for we share a Gospel which effects reconciliation between God and humankind and between nations and peoples”. What is that foundation of faith, and what is the church called? You’ve probably guessed: it’s “Christ the Cornerstone”. They could hardly have chosen better!