Sunday Sermon - 3 May
Ever since I was a young kid I’ve been a huge fan of wrestling. I think it was my grandfather, my mother’s Dad, who got me into it. I remember my brother and I used to visit Grandpop’s home and watch it with him on his black and white TV back in the day.
I recall wrestlers like Whipper Billy Watson and Mean Gene Kiniski. Even after my grandfather passed away, I kept my interest in wrestling—as did many others, I guess, because it wasn’t long, by the time I was in my early teens, that wrestling had become hugely popular. My friends and I were all into the WWF (the World Wrestling Federation) which is now branded as the WWE.
To be clear, I was really into wrestling back then. I even wrestled in high school for a few years, but that was real, proper, freestyle wrestling and not the performative entertainment wrestling we see on TV.
Some of my favourite memories from when I was a young teen was going with my cousins and friends to watch matches at Maple Leaf Gardens. I got to see in person, up close, the superstars of wrestling. I saw Andre the Giant, Big John Stud, King Kong Bundy and the biggest and most famous of them all, Hulk Hogan.
Back then it was Hulk Hogan who boosted the ratings and became, arguably, the most famous wrestler of all time. Hulk Hogan was the foundation for the off-the-charts success of professional wrestling. As Hogan got older and his ‘schtick’ grew tired, the WWE brand began to wane. People started losing interest. I even started losing interest. Ratings dropped, and things felt like they were slipping.
After a few floundering years, along came a new ‘sizzling’ character to save the franchise: Dwayne Johnson—“The Rock.” Ratings soared again. Wrestling found new life. What a great name, The Rock. What a metaphor. You can see where I’m going with this, right?
I expect most of you know who Dwayne Johnson is. An American-Canadian, yes, he has legitimate Canadian citizenship. His Dad was from Nova Scotia. He played college football and was hoping for a professional career. He was drafted by the Calgary Stampeders, but was eventually cut and that’s when his father got him a job as a professional wrestler and the rest is history. Though he was supposed to be a bad guy (“a heel” as they call them in wrestling), the fans loved him and his stardom skyrocketed. His celebrity grew, he started to act and now he’s one of the highest paid movie actors of all time. He’s also enjoyed great success in all sorts of other business ventures and has even made musings about running for the presidency of the United States. The Rock is a well loved celebrity.
But here’s the thing. Like all of us, there are parts of this Midas-touched life that we might not immediately see. Behind the bravado, the charisma, the muscles and the larger-than-life persona: even “The Rock” has known what it is to stumble.
Long before the fame, before the championships and Hollywood success, Johnson has spoken openly about periods of deep struggle—times of failure, injury, and even depression. At one point, after being cut from a football opportunity that he thought would define his life (he really wanted to be in the NFL), he found himself back home, feeling like everything had collapsed beneath him. The rock he thought he was standing on—his identity, his future—had given way.
Later, even at the height of success, he has spoken about the quieter struggles—the internal battles that don’t make headlines. In those moments, strength looks very different. It’s not about muscles or bravado. It’s about what actually holds you when everything else feels uncertain. Johnson himself has pointed, in various ways, to his faith, to gratitude, and even something beyond himself, perhaps God, as part of what carried him through.
This is where I’d like to make the connection to this morning’s real message. In reading Peter’s first letter, Peter tells us to “come to him, a living stone, rejected by mortals, yet chosen and precious in God’s sight.” He says something striking: that this stone—this Christ—is both a cornerstone and a stumbling block.
The same rock can either hold you up or trip you up. If we’re honest, that tension is something we already know in our own lives. There are moments when we feel steady, grounded, secure. And there are moments when the ground beneath us feels like it’s giving way. Moments when life itself feels like it is throwing stones at us.
That is exactly the kind of moment we hear echoed in the prayer of Psalm 31. The psalmist cries out, “Be my rock of refuge, a strong fortress to save me.” That is not a pleasant song or comfortable prayer. It is the cry of someone who feels under pressure, under threat, under the weight of life. Someone who knows they cannot hold themselves up.
“My times are in your hand,” the psalmist says. Not in my control. Not in my strength. Not in my image. But in God’s hands. And then those hauntingly beautiful words we hear again: “Into your hands I commend my spirit.”
It is not by accident that those same words also echo in our next reading. When we turn to the Acts of the Apostles, the image becomes painfully real. Stephen, full of faith and the Holy Spirit, stands firm in his witness to Christ. And what happens? Stones are picked up—not as a metaphor, but quite literally as weapons. Stones meant to hurt him, to silence him. Stones meant to end his life, to kill him.
Yet, extraordinarily, powerfully, we read that Stephen does not crumble or stumble. As the stones strike him, he looks up and sees Jesus, standing at the right hand of God, and he prays, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit… do not hold this sin against them.” Resonating with the words spoken by Christ during his last moments on the cross.
Here is the paradox. The paradox that we often talk about and is woven throughout scripture when we read it to understand the suffering in our own lives. The very stones meant to destroy him become the setting in which his life is most clearly built upon Christ. The physical stones being hurled at him are nothing compared to the rock of faith upon which he stands. The world hurls stones in violence, but Stephen stands on the strongest foundational Rock entirely. One that cannot be broken or shaken, even by death.
This is not abstract theology. This is faith forged in the moment when the ground gives way. When the rocks of life are falling around us and feel as though they are falling on us, painfully burying us under the weight of life’s angst. That brings us to our Gospel - the words from John. Jesus says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled… I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”
In other words: you don’t have to be the rock. You just have to stand on it. Or, perhaps better stated, you just have to keep coming back to it. Even after you’ve stumbled over it. Even after you’ve tried to build your life on something else. Even after the stones of life have knocked you down. We are called to return and stand on our rock, the foundation that is our faith.
This is where the metaphor stretches even further for us. Because stones are not only things that strike us. They can also become the very material God uses to shape us. Rough edges are worn down. Hard surfaces are reshaped. What once caused pain can, over time, become part of the very structure that forms us and holds us up.
It’s almost as if the very rocks that fall on us do not simply remain scattered at our feet but are gathered up by the hands of a master craftsman. Like a sculptor standing before a block of unforgiving stone, God does not discard what is hard, heavy, or broken in our lives. Instead, he begins to work with it. Slowly. Patiently. Mercifully. Faithfully.
Every strike of the chisel, every careful cut, every moment of pressure—these are not acts of destruction, but of transformation. What feels like loss, what feels like pain, becomes—when we place ourselves vulnerably in God’s hands, like stone upon the sculptor’s pedestal—the very means by which he shapes us. In those difficult moments, if we trust Him, He forms us into something meaningful, something beautiful.
The remarkable thing is this: the sculptor does not replace the stone with something softer or easier. He uses the very stone itself. The same hardness. The same weight. The same material that once bruised and burdened us becomes, over time, the very medium through which grace is revealed. It is those moments in our lives - the times we feel chipped away, carved - that ultimately form us if we stand firm on the rock of our faith.
In faith, we begin to see differently. The stones of disappointment, failure, grief—even the quiet struggles we carry within—are not wasted. They are being worked. Refined. Redeemed. Not always in ways we can immediately recognize, but in ways that, over time, begin to take shape.
Until one day, perhaps, we can begin to glimpse it: and what once seemed like nothing but the fragments and cracks in our lives have, in the hands of God, become something whole. Something that bears witness. Something that reflects not our strength, but God’s artistry alive and working in, on and through us.
Maybe that is what it means to become, as Peter says, “living stones”—not perfect, not untouched, but shaped by grace into something that can stand, something that can hold, something that can even help bear the weight of others. God shapes us, God lovingly shapes you - beautiful you.
The psalmist says, “Make your face to shine upon your servant, and save me for your mercy’s sake.” That is not the prayer of someone who has it all together. That is the prayer of someone who knows they need saving. Someone who knows they cannot be their own foundation.
Isn’t that the quiet truth behind so many of our stories, including that of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson? Beneath the strength, beneath the success, beneath all of those muscles, there is still a human life that needs grace. A life that needs something deeper than determination. A life that, at some point, has had to say: I cannot hold myself up forever.
That is where the Gospel meets us today and every day.
Because this is the heart of the Gospel: the Rock we need is not our own strength, but Christ himself. The one rejected, the one who suffers, the one who forgives—even from the cross. The one who prepares a place for us, who holds us, who receives us. Even Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, that famous muscled-up man, cannot ultimately save himself. But the good news for him—and for us—is this: There is a truer Rock. A real “Rock”.
In Jesus Christ, we are all held. We are all forgiven. We are all, by God’s grace, being shaped into something beautiful, and being saved