Who are you?  There’s a deep question to get things rolling.  Who are you?  In the martial arts they teach you to know your center of gravity.  If you know your center of gravity, you aren’t easily knocked over, no matter how hard you are hit.  It allows you to stand firm in the midst of battle without being locked in place.  You can move and act with confidence, because you know where your center of gravity is.  If you don’t know who you are, you have no personal center of gravity.  You’re easily knocked off balance by the slightest thing.  You let other people define who you are, lay expectations on you, try to bend and mold you to their idea of who you are.

When we don’t know who we are, we tend to ball up on ourselves, assume a kind of fetal position with respect to the world.  And we never mature, we never grow up, when we don’t know who we are.  We have no sense of meaning, purpose, place.  We simply exist and let others or our circumstances define us.

Who are you?  Peter answers that question for some newly baptized Christians in his first epistle, part of which you just heard.  They are newborn infants that need to nuzzle up to the breast of mother Church, to drink the pure spiritual milk of the Word so that by it they would grow up to salvation.  They have tasted that the Lord is good.  They have come to the table, still dripping wet from their Baptism, wearing white robes, oil running down their faces and onto their robes. They have come to eat their Savior’s body and drink His blood and taste that the Lord is good.

Now Peter tells them who they are as baptized believers:  They are living stones built into a spiritual temple; and they are a holy and royal priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices that are acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.  Another way of saying it:  they are worshipers who worship the Father in Spirit and in Truth.

They are living stones, and so are you...