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2 Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, 3 now that you have tasted that the Lord is good. 4 As you come to him, the living Stone—rejected by humans but chosen by God and precious to him— 5 you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. 6 For in Scripture it says: “See, I lay a stone in Zion, a chosen and precious cornerstone, and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame.” 7 Now to you who believe, this stone is precious. But to those who do not believe, “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone,” 8 and, “A stone that causes people to stumble and a rock that makes them fall.”They stumble because they disobey the message—which is also what they were destined for. 9 But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. 10 Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. (1 Peter 2:2-10 NIV)
Leave it to American marketing to have convinced millions to buy a non-breathing pet. I'm referring to the phenomenal craze which was The Pet Rock. It was 1975 and an advertising manager by the name of Gary Dahl who was in a casual conversation about how real pets require care and that a rock, if it were to become a pet, would require no care at all. Mr. Dahl took the idea and ran with it, selling 1 million rocks in four months. The timing was right, the rocks were cheap and from Mexico, they shipped in a cardboard carrying box that looked like a pet carrier with air holes, and it came with a humorous instruction manual entitled, "The Care and Training of Your Pet Rock." Selling for around $4 it was very affordable and made for a great gift.
Leave it to the Bible to come up with some solid (yes pun intended) plays on words like saying a stone could be living, and The Living Stone was the Lord Jesus Himself; and those who came to Him would become, like Him, living stones as well. Once and now. Before and after. The way things were, and the way things are. Peter is writing to scattered, displaced believers who have every reason to feel small, forgotten, and inconsequential. And he reaches for the most radical reorientation available to him: he tells them who they are. Not who the world says they are. Not who they feel like on their worst days. Who God has declared them to be. And the distance between “once” and “now” in this passage is nothing less than the distance between the cross and the empty tomb.
Eastertide is the season of “now.” The resurrection has happened. The stone has been rolled away. The old things have passed. And Peter’s invitation in this passage is to live from that “now” — fully, joyfully, and with the kind of settled confidence that comes from knowing exactly who you are and whose you are.
Peter opens with one of the loveliest images in his letter: “Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation — now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.” The image of a newborn is not a picture of weakness. It is a picture of appetite. A newborn knows exactly what it needs and makes no apology for wanting it urgently, persistently, and at inconvenient hours.
But notice the sequence Peter gives us. The craving doesn’t come first. The tasting does. “Now that you have tasted that the Lord is good” — the craving is the result of having already tasted. You don’t crave something you’ve never experienced. You crave something you’ve had a first taste of and can’t quite get enough of. Peter is assuming that the people he’s writing to have already had that moment. The moment when grace became real, when prayer felt like an actual conversation, when the Word opened and something in you said: yes, that is true, I have always known that was true.
You have tasted. The question the Eastertide season puts to us is: are you still craving? Or have we grown so accustomed to the grace of God that it no longer stirs the appetite it once did? One of the subtle dangers of a long faith is that we can gradually move from hunger to habit. We go through the motions of devotion without the desire. We arrive at the Word without anticipation. We come to prayer as an obligation rather than a meal.
Easter is a recalibration of appetite. The risen Christ is not stale. The gospel is not old news. The same grace that first broke through to you is available right now, in the same freshness, with the same power. The Lord is still good. The milk is still pure. And the invitation to come and taste again is extended to every one of us, no matter how long we have been walking this road.
Peter pivots from the image of a newborn to the image of a building, and he places one stone at the center of it all: the living Stone, rejected by humans but chosen by God and precious to him. The reference is unmistakably to Jesus — and the word “living” is everything. This is not a metaphor for a dead teacher whose memory endures. This is the risen Christ, alive and active, the cornerstone of a structure that cannot fall because He Himself cannot be held by death.
Peter is drawing from Psalm 118, the same psalm quoted when the crowds welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem — “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” The builders of the world assessed this stone and found it unsuitable. Too rough, perhaps. Too inconvenient. Too costly. And they set it aside. But God chose it. God declared it precious. And on the morning of Easter, God demonstrated precisely how wrong the builders’ assessment was.
Here is the extraordinary thing Peter does next: he tells his readers that they, too, are living stones. “You also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house.” Not just building blocks — living ones. Not static, inert material, but people who share in the resurrection life of the cornerstone. You are not merely positioned near the living Stone. Something of His life has gotten into you. The same resurrection energy that raised Christ from the dead is at work in those who are built on Him.
And notice the tense: “are being built.” Present continuous. The construction is not finished. God is still placing stones, still shaping and fitting the community together, still doing the work of making something beautiful out of the very people the world has overlooked, dismissed, or declared unsuitable. If you have ever felt like you were the wrong shape for the life you were supposed to have — too broken, too ordinary, too far past your best years to be useful — this image is a word directly to you. The divine Builder is still working. You are not a reject. You are a living stone in the hands of the one who specializes in using what the world casts aside.
And now Peter arrives at the passage’s great crescendo — four declarations of identity stacked one on top of another like the richest gift you have ever been handed. Read them slowly, because each one is meant to land.
A chosen people. Not chosen because of merit or achievement. Not selected because you got your life together or finally became the person you always meant to be. Chosen — which means the choosing happened before you did anything to earn it. You were wanted before you knew to want back. That is the only kind of choosing that is truly grace.
A royal priesthood. In the Old Testament, the priesthood was a narrow, hereditary office — a small group of people with the specific vocation of bringing humanity before God and bringing God’s presence to humanity. Peter says that in Christ, that vocation has been democratized. Every one of you is a priest. Every one of you has direct access to the Father. Every one of you carries the vocation of making God’s presence known in the ordinary spaces of your life. And you carry it royally — not as a burden but as a dignity.
A holy nation. Holy does not primarily mean morally superior. It means set apart for a purpose. You belong to a community that crosses every border of ethnicity, nationality, culture, and class — a nation shaped not by geography or bloodline but by the resurrection of Jesus Christ. You are citizens of something that will outlast every earthly empire. That citizenship is your deepest identity.
God’s special possession. The Greek word here — peripoiesis — was used in the ancient world for a treasure kept safely by its owner, something valued above ordinary goods. You are not incidental to God’s story. You are not a bystander or an afterthought. You are the treasure He purchased at the cost of His Son’s life, and He intends to keep you.
Peter gives these four declarations not so we can feel good about ourselves, but so we can do something with them: “that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” The purpose of knowing who you are is to point to the One who made you that way. The identity is not the destination — it is the launching pad. We are chosen, royal, holy, and treasured so that we might tell the world something true about the God who calls the rejected, the forgotten, and the once-nobody into the glorious light of belonging.
And then Peter closes with those two quiet, devastating words: once and now. “Once you were not a people — now you are the people of God. Once you had not received mercy — now you have received mercy.”
The “once” is real. Peter does not pretend it wasn’t. There was a time before. A time of wandering, of being no one in particular, of looking for belonging in places that could not hold you. A time of living outside the mercy that was always, already, waiting to be given. The “once” is not something to be ashamed of — it is part of your story. Without the “once,” you cannot fully appreciate the “now.”
But the “now” is the point. And the “now” is held open by the resurrection. Easter is what keeps the “now” from collapsing back into the “once.” Because Christ is risen, the mercy is not withdrawn. Because the cornerstone is living, the building stands. Because you are built on the one who came back from the dead, nothing — not failure, not weakness, not the accumulated weight of your worst days — can reduce you back to nothing. You are the people of God. You have received mercy. That is not temporary. That is permanent.
So let that be the word you carry out of this room today. Not a to-do list. Not a new spiritual program. Just this: you are not who you used to be. The “once” is behind you. The “now” is the ground beneath your feet. And the risen Christ, the living Stone, is holding the whole thing together.
PRAYER: Living Stone, risen Lord — thank You that the “once” is behind us and the “now” is held open by Your resurrection. Build us into what You have declared us to be: chosen, royal, holy, and Yours. May we live from that identity today. Amen.
Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Write down one of the four identity declarations from this passage — chosen people, royal priesthood, holy nation, or God’s special possession — whichever one your soul most needs to hear right now. Put it somewhere you will see it every day this week. Read it aloud each morning as a statement of who you are, not a wish for who you might become. Let the “now” be louder than the “once.”
I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! Once you were not a people. Now you are the people of God. Live like it.
Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.
