Homily | 🙌 The Praise-Making God

5th Sunday of Easter

Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA

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In 1945, a young Soviet artillery officer named Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was arrested for writing a letter. In the letter, he had made some unflattering remarks about Stalin. For this offense, he was sentenced to eight years in the gulag.

Before the arrest, Solzhenitsyn was — by his own later admission — insufferable. For example, he ordered old men out into shellfire so his superiors wouldn’t scold him. One of those old men died. Solzhenitsyn forgot about it for years.

He’d earned his officer’s stars in the war and had, as he put it, developed “a tigerlike stride and a metallic voice of command.” He believed, with the full confidence of a young man on the right side of history, that he was (and these are his words) “a superior human being.”

In light of our Gospel passage today, we might say he was a builder. He thought he knew which stones fit and which didn’t. He had the schematic.

And then, after that letter was ill received... he wasn’t. He found himself on rotting prison straw in a Siberian camp, where it often reached fifty degrees below zero, watching people die for nothing.

He was a rejected stone.

Not a cornerstone. Not even one of the good-enough stones the builders kept in the pile.

He was a stone that his own fellow builders had thrown away. Because the line he’d drawn so confidently between the good people and the bad people, between the comrades and the enemies — that line, he wrote in his later years, “passes right through every human heart. And through all human hearts.”

Including his own.

This is when, in his memoir, Solzhenitsyn writes one of the most shocking sentences in twentieth-century literature: “Bless you, prison, for having been in my life.”

Bless you, prison.

This is the gospel. The place of rejection becomes the place of mercy. The pile of discarded stones turned out to be the quarry where God builds a different house entirely.

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Peter says this to a community of Jesus-following nobodies scattered across the Roman Empire:

Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received it.

Solzhenitsyn was a “not-a-people” in that gulag. Before that, he thought he’d belonged to the great Soviet people, to history, to the future. But in the gulag, he was floating. Unclaimed.

And then... mercy found him. In the place where he was most rejected.

And the moment he stopped being able to pretend the line between good and evil ran somewhere outside himself, he became, by the grace of God... a people. Claimed. Named. And held.

This is what Christ does. Christ is the cornerstone the builders rejected. Christ is the one whose own body was thrown out of the city as garbage on a Friday afternoon.

And precisely because he was the rejected one, he becomes the praise-maker of every other rejected stone. (You and me. We’re all rejected stones in one way or another.)

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Solzhenitsyn wrote that the hardest step in his whole conversion wasn’t surviving the gulag. The hardest step was this (and I quote): “Reconsider all your previous life. Remember everything you did that was bad and shameful and take thought.”

Not what was done to you. But what you did. The sins you have arranged to forget.

Until you face that, he said, you remain — and this is his phrase — “sharply intolerant.”

He wrote this after remembering that old man he ordered into battle who died. Though he probably did countless violent acts like this, THIS was what stuck in his mind as the catalyst to confession and healing.

I know this in myself. I know what it is to have my knives out. To be quick with a verdict and slow with a blessing. To carry around a comfortable certainty that the trouble is out there (in those people, in that institution, that circumstance, whatever) and meanwhile, to not look very hard at the small daily ways that I’m part of the same wounded human story everyone else is part of.

The propensity in me to muck things up. To choose the result over the person. To reach for the snark before the prayer.

That cuts far deeper than a list of naughty things I did this week. Sin is a condition. A malady. One we’re all caught up in together; the whole tired human pattern of violence and condemnation fueled by self-righteousness and justification.

This has personal and communal implications. Right now, we’re living in this illusion that there’s a line that divides two sides: us and them. And our side is the right one. The algorithm is attuned to it just as the human ego is. This is nothing new. It’s been cooking for a long time. But it’s calcified and hardened all our hearts. Which is why these illusory “two sides” can’t even talk now. Can’t be the body of Christ. Activism isn’t battle. It’s relational. Cruciform. Self-emptying. Especially Christian activism.

Here’s what Solzhenitsyn discovered, and it’s something I’m still learning, and what I think Peter is trying to tell us this morning: the moment that this condition is exposed and named and acknowledged inside us... something breaks open.

You’d think this would lead to despair. But on the ground, it leads to relief. Because you no longer have to defend a self that was never going to hold up anyway. You can finally let that failed endeavor go. And you can finally be loved.

And on the other side of that — only on the other side of that — does real love and praise become possible from you.

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Speaking of praise... Peter calls us a royal order of priests. And your priesthood is praise. You are called to be praise-makers. And I want to be very specific.

He means today! The grocery checker. Your spouse over coffee. The kid in your house who’s trying so hard to become someone and doesn’t know if anyone sees it. The person at church you’ve been mildly annoyed with for three years. The version of yourself you catch in the mirror and have a hard time looking at.

One personal interaction at a time. The smallest possible ways. Cruciform praise. Praise that costs you something. Praise that doesn’t expect to be returned. Praise that names what is actually true and good in this person, not because you’ve manufactured it, but because God is a good creator. And since God already put it there, your only job is to notice it out loud.

Imagine how different the world would be if Christians re-membered Christ in other people? Called it into being by recognizing it and praising it underneath all of the surface division and fear.

The biggest role of being a priest... Is to bless. Not a shallow Hallmark-ish affirmation, “You’re doing great!” And not a thumbs-up to awful behavior. Something deeper, more real, and specific. People respond to genuine, cruciform praise. It allows space for them to be their beloved selves. Not legalistically perfect. But softer. More honest. More vulnerable. They feel safe. Not judged. So they don’t need to harden or justify. It’s not a tool for manipulation and no one is promising a 100% success rate in the moment.

This is mysterious work, this priestly work.

It hardly ever feels natural. The ego speaks first and loudest. The fear (and subsequently, the attack) speaks first and loudest.

But underneath all of that... is praise. Because God is a good Creator and everything God has made is good. The goodness is just often sleeping. In them. In you. In the whole tired world.

So, go. Wake it up.

As a priest freed in Christ, this is what you are free to do.

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And know this... Whatever praise you can muster for others falls hundreds of eons short of the praise God already holds for you.

So come to this table. Come and taste, and find that the Lord is good. The stone the builders rejected has been broken open and laid here, and a strange, mercy-drenched, “once-not-a-people” people has been gathered.

The line running through the middle of your heart and mine is the opening that God uses to bring us all together and shape the new heaven and earth. It’s not out there. It’s in here. With God who redeems all. Amen.