Mtr Kelli Joyce

Dear friends in Christ,

I've written to you before about how much I love the passage from the Psalms that Jesus quotes in today's Gospel reading - "The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes.” The passage is from Psalm 118, which we read every year during Easter season. It's also the Psalm that Bailey and I chose for our wedding, because of what it says about the nature of God.

By quoting this Psalm, Jesus is putting his own life and ministry in the context of a well-established pattern of divine action. God delights, throughout human history, to reveal greatness in and through the people and things that the world dismisses as ordinary, or even as worthless.

Two thousand years later, most of us Christians, especially in America, are more likely to find ourselves in the position of the builders, judging which people and ideas are worthy, than we are to find ourselves rejected, cast aside, beaten, or killed. But Christ identifies himself with the outcast and rejected, and says that God exalts and honors what human logic rejects. Jesus doesn't just call us to care for the poor, the stranger, the incarcerated, and the oppressed - he tells us that he is those people, and when we care for them, we're caring for him.

When we see people in need, how quick are we to judge them, and to weigh whether or not they're worthy of our compassion and our help? How eager are we to be the builders, accepting the stones that meet our standards, and rejecting the ones that don't fit neatly and conveniently into our plans? And how would we treat people in need if we truly believed that when we looked at them, we were seeing the very face of Christ?

In peace,
Mtr. Kelli