“..if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good. As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious..” 1Pt2v3-4
⊃ “..if..” See previous commentary on If from 1Pt1v17-18 last week. If demands an answer. An answer demands an action. Don’t be iffy. Get iffing if’ed up.
👅🍖 “..tasted that the Lord is good..” The bible has been banging this drum since Ps34v8. Christianity is epicurean or it is nothing. Rather as, if tech-for-good is not going to be a tool for mere accelerated legalism, it must feed first. Front load your faith with flavour, yes. Eat your own dog food, yes. But somehow more than that. Suck on the marrow of Christ, that is to practice, what you presume to preach, yes. And, more than that.
This consumption allegory begins in “..longing for spiritual milk..” and leads immediately into “..being built up as a spiritual house..” It is as if a precondition (or even the precondition) for being co-fabricated together purely in Christ is an irrepressible appetite for Christ’s purity. Useful living stones are hungering living stones.
The heady hedonism of yearning-to-consume and of then consuming and then of yearning.. is the regulating principle which governs the suitable coherence of the constitutive parts and secures them as a proper unity. Perennially recurrently satisfied hunger is our harmony, and it is a vertiginous virtuous spiral, a self-reinforcing addiction to the substance-and-anticipation, a voracious appetite to be suckered at the teat of God. This is not nothing. Desire is not optional, not an indulgence, not bourgeois luxury. Faith without the eccentric idiosyncrasies of taste and desire, without the passion to pursue the specific and to innovate the peculiar, without the honest longing to God-given hungers.. Faith in tasteless fuel is no help.
💩🏖 “If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” CSL
👩🍳👨🍳 Desire and hunger suggest a condition of privation ~ you are not hungry when you are full, you cannot desire what you already have. But we desire a God on an infinite plane. There is always more of his more-than, there are always new mercies, he is always doing a new thing. I have such a paltry theology of desire. I am a creature of such stale functionalism, satiated by spiritual Huel’s nutrition content, presuming to crawl across the finish line of inoffensive mere technical salvation (as one barely escaping 1Co3v15, as one barely saved 1Pt4v18..)
Christians rather should be full-bodied libidinous taste explorers, both ravenous and satisfied simultaneously. And such is the substance and source, of our purity and our unity as a church. When we call people to the church, to join as living bricks, we are calling them to supreme satisfaction, and we are calling them to supremely purposeful unsatisfaction. What could be more purpose-giving, than the organised coordinated entrepreneurial pursuit and energetic export of ever novel culinary pleasure to a starving world. Church is a kitchen. Church is a farmer’s market. Church is a banquet. Church is a cauldron kettling flavoured mischief. Church is the mouth-watering aroma and the meat itself.
🗿 “..living stone..” Warning. High view of inanimate objects alert. Warning. // Where do you begin with this metaphor? It is no mere metaphor via comparison, as if the random combination of Living + Stone were a 2 + 2 = 4 The emergent complexity of a the synthesis of LivingStone = 5.
A potent metaphor is more than the sum of its parts because, in some way, the combined LivingStone has some imaginative non-absurd plausible possibility. Consider the Zoombinis from Lk19v39-40’s “Stones would cry out”