You are a Priest! A sermon for Nov. 25, 2012

A Sermon for November 25, 2012 (Proper 29, RCL B)

Offered by Nathan Ferrell for The Church of Saint Mary

Texts:             Daniel 7:9-10,13-14; Psalm 93; Revelation 1:4b-8; John 18:33-37

Primary Message:  we are priests in service to Truth
Call to Action:          embrace your priesthood, commit yourself to Truth
Title:               You are a Priest

My sisters and brothers: we are priests together called to passionately and diligently seek after Truth.

Some of you know that I was once a Baptist minister! At least the Discernment Committee knows this little secret! But it’s not actually a secret. Four years before being ordained in the Episcopal Church, I was first ordained as a Baptist minister of the Gospel in Richmond, Virginia.

In May of 1998, when I graduated from the Baptist Theological Seminary in Richmond, I was ordained by a congregation with historic ties to the Southern Baptist Convention.

Now, I understand that those historic ties carry a lot of negative baggage these days. Rest assured that I never felt at home among the fundamentalists in the Southern Baptist world, and I hope that the brevity of my time within the Baptist fold itself testifies to my personal uneasiness within the Baptist tradition.

But I always have appreciated one of the hallmarks of Baptist life from the very beginning of that movement. And that hallmark is their emphasis upon the priesthood of all believers.

There can be no question at all that the movement started by Jesus of Nazareth in the region of Galilee was radically egalitarian when compared to the societies in which the first churches lived.

Throughout the entire New Testament, there are repeated assertions of the role that all disciples play in Christ’s kingdom. We see it here today in our reading from the Revelation to John:

“To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever” (Revelation 1:5b-6).  

Christ has made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God. When the medieval Roman church placed an over-emphasis upon the hierarchy of church leadership, the Baptists were among those who responded by returning to the original, egalitarian teachings of the New Testament. And they were right.

We are all priests, my friends! Each one of us was ordained a priest when we were baptized into Christ. Each one of us is called to share in this kingdom of priests.    

Do you remember the sentence of welcome that we all say together at the conclusion of each baptism? It’s right on Page 308 in the Prayer Book.

Please pick up the Prayer Book and take a look. After the prayer for the seven-fold gifts of the Holy Spirit at the top of the page, we move to the sentence of welcome at the bottom. It’s a masterful statement, worthy of our meditation.

Let’s read it together aloud right now: “We receive you into the household of God. Confess the faith of Christ crucified, proclaim his resurrection, and share with us in his eternal priesthood.”

Share with us in his eternal priesthood.

My friends, this is who we are! Partakers in Christ’s priesthood, members of his body.

I believe that it is absolutely vital for us all to grasp this truth about ourselves. So I want you to please repeat after me and to declare this with conviction, “I am a priest!”

Good! Now, let’s do one more thing to drive this point home. Turn to your neighbor sitting next to you and look them in the eye and say, “You are a priest!”

Excellent! A number of you have remarked to me about the changes in the list of names on the front of the Sunday bulletins. I think that it is helpful to add some clarity to that list, especially for those new to Saint Mary’s. But in preparing for today, I realized that I had left out the most obvious recognition of all. And that is you!

You are the ministers of the Church, and together we share in the priesthood of our Lord Jesus Christ.

I know that this gets confusing because of the language that we commonly use.     I am considered to be a priest among you, but actually I have been ordained to serve as a presbyter.

Presbyter is a Greek word meaning “elder”. That is my role among you, to serve as a wise elder. Now, I may not look like an elder to many of you, but at least I think that I fit the part a bit better than the 19 year Mormon “elders” sent out on missions around the world!

An elder in a family, a leader among a group of ministers, all working together to carry on the priestly work of Jesus Christ in this world. That is who we are.

But what does it mean to carry on the eternal priesthood of Christ in the world? What does that look like? I believe that one way to understand this is through a relentless commitment to the truth.

Our Gospel reading appointed for today concludes by leaving out the final sentence of the paragraph, which happens to be, in my opinion, one of the key verses in the entire Gospel of John.

Jesus responds to Pilate’s questioning with an assertion that might seem obscure but in fact is poignant and profound – too profound for Pilate, surely. “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

Pilate’s reply is the final piece of this conversation which, very unfortunately, is left out of our reading today. For Pilate responds by asking Jesus, “What is truth?” (John 18:38).

You see, Pilate cares nothing about truth; he cares only about power, strength, political force. He asks Jesus if he is a King. This is the only language that he knows. This is how Pilate sees the world: authority, power, rank, force.

But Jesus speaks a different language and it is a priestly language: light, love, life, way, truth. “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

My friends: I want to suggest to you that our task as priests in God’s kingdom is to passionately and diligently seek after truth. But this is not an easy task, and truth is often lost in the world of competing ideas.

 

When I spent a college semester abroad in the southern African nation of Botswana, a young, urban, professional single mother hosted me for about 6 weeks. Her name was Barbara Badimela, and she lived in the capital city of Gabarone with her two sons. One Sunday morning, I invited Barbara to join me at an international Baptist church in the city where the services were in English and the congregation comprised people from many different nations. (This was during my stint as a Baptist while in college, after all.) The service was similar to that which you might experience at any standard protestant gathering here in the States. Afterward, I asked Barbara what she thought and I was very surprised by her answer. “I could never go to a church like that. Did you see those women wearing pants?! Ah!”

Although Barbara was quite westernized – she spent hours watching western soap operas every day, yet she still held deep-seated African cultural norms which explicitly forbade women from wearing pants. This was a red-line for her.

I was amazed, and this forced me to begin to consider for the first time in my life the power of our culture, and how easily we tend to embrace the norms of our culture without question.

How to separate truth from culture is an enormous issue, and one which we can barely touch on here. But let me suggest to you that to be priests in the kingdom of Christ means that we are always asking the questions, always seeking truth beyond the accepted notions of our culture. It means that we are never content with easy answers, and that we never confuse the exercise of power with the pursuit of truth.

To be priests together in Christ’s kingdom, passionately and diligently seeking after truth, means that we live every day in service to the God who is, the God who was, and the God who is still to come. Amen.