PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER

First Peter 2:1-10                                                                                      You Are the Church

Sermon April 20, 2008:  People's United Church of Christ, Dover, DE:  the Rev. Dan Griggs

 

            In the Lesson I just read, images and quotations from the Old Testament tumble over each other in a cascade of joyful celebration.  I've said before that First Peter started out as a sermon preached to a group of converts at their baptism, and in these sentences the preacher showers them with an overload of pictures about who they are—about who we are.  Well, basically you are the church—the people of God together in worship and dispersed in service-- you are the church; but First Peter rings all the changes.  I want to focus on the last two verses, where he says that you, the church, are a "royal priesthood." 

            We don't spend much time thinking about us—all of us—as priests.  Luther gave us the phrase "priesthood of believers," by which he meant not that every individual can approach God for herself or himself without a go-between, but rather that every one of us is given to somebody else as their priest—to "traffic between heaven and earth" in behalf of another.  In your baptism you were ordained to be a priest for somebody.  So my point is this:  The priesthood of believers is about being a bridge for others to come to God. 

 

 

These are Old Testament words, originally addressed to the Hebrew nation.  Moses led the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt to Mount Sinai and there received the covenant with God and the mode of worship of the new religion.  It was his successor Joshua who led the people into the Promised Land and settled it.  Perhaps as much as five hundred years later it was King David who established a kingdom—in fact, as late as the New Testament (a thousand years after David) they spoke of "the kingdom of God" when they referred to the rule of David and his family.  The prophets came among them to call them back again and again from their sins; and they hoped in the Coming One—the Messiah, the new Anointed One.  This is Hebrew history.  They understood themselves, the Jews, to be especially "chosen" for God alone:  Paul got his famous word "election" from that idea of chosenness.  But here's the question that they asked—indeed, that they needed to keep asking:  What does it mean to be God's chosen people?  Were they chosen simply to receive some gifts—the Promised Land, the innumerable descendants, the Messiah?  Did God choose Israel just to give Israel benefits—to give them stuff?  No, the prophets kept working to remind them that Israel was chosen for service.  Our Lesson picks up on this theme when First Peter claims for us, the church, the same chosenness—he says: 

 

 

Israel was chosen to do something—to be a holy nation, a bridge nation to bring the world to God.  First Peter says that we are called and commissioned to be "a royal priesthood, a holy nation"—the priesthood of believers is about being a bridge for others to come to God. 

 

            Am I a priest?  Yes, but so are you.  We've all heard the pope referred to as "the pontiff":  that word comes from the Latin pontifex which means "a bridge."  In fact before Christianity the pagan priests of the Roman religion held the same title, pontifex.  In Hebrew history the archetypal "priest" was Moses' brother Aaron.  Aaron's career through Exodus and Leviticus is a strange one, not always inspiring or uplifting; but it's instructive.  Moses was eighty years old when God called him to lead the slaves out of Egypt, and Aaron was his older brother.  Aaron was self-indulgent, and he knew how to play hard-ball politics.  In the previous religion of the Hebrews the office of high priest was inherited—the oldest son of the oldest son of the high priest; but Aaron wasn't in line—he had a cousin who was supposed to be high priest.  Aaron was the oldest son of the third son:  he got to be high priest by playing politics against his cousins and grabbing the priesthood away from the heir—years before they left Egypt.  It was only later, when God called Moses to be the liberator, that Aaron his brother was made high priest of the new religion.  So Aaron was a politician, sort of unfocused, undisciplined; but this was the man God chose to be "high priest" of the Hebrew nation:  "priest."  Once he even served as care-taker while Moses was absent.  At the foot of Mount Sinai Moses faced a dilemma:  he had to leave the people and go up the mountain to meet God, but somebody needed to be in charge; so Moses called on Aaron, "Look, brother, you don't have to do anything; and please don't start any new programs while I'm gone; just be here for the people."  This was Aaron's assignment.  But he was high priest, and the people cajoled him into making an idol, a golden calf, to represent the God who had led them out of slavery.

            You see, priests don't always have to be right, or do everything right.  Priests don't have to be creative.  Aaron was a bit dense and made big mistakes; but as "high priest" it was Aaron who could perform certain sacrifices that even Moses himself was not permitted to perform.  Aaron was the bridge, the man who spanned earth to heaven; it was for this that he was "chosen."  (Remember, we're talking about the church as a "chosen race.") 

            "Chosen" doesn't mean picked out to get stuff:  "chosen" means sent to serve in the world.  I think the Jewish people, as God's "chosen" people, continue to do that even today.  How?  Have you visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington?  If not, you owe yourself a trip there:  it was the hall of shoes that really got to me—the shoes of all the people who were sent to their deaths.  And why?  That's the question the Jews themselves have been asking for sixty five years now.  Some have lost their faith altogether.  Elie Wiesel has written a short-story about a group of Jews in a concentration camp, talking among themselves about why God permitted this terrible thing, and they decided to put God on trial.  Is this what it means to be "chosen"?  How about this:  by suffering so terribly, the Jewish people have broken through the superficial optimism of Western culture and reminded us that if a country as socially advanced, as scientifically creative, as technologically developed, as "modern" as Germany was in the mid-twentieth-century could murder the people of God just because they were who they were, then we all had better think again whether our wonderful advancements as individuals and as a society are all that special:  sin is real, and we're not immune.  How's that for bridging the gap between human pride and God's call? 

 

First Peter picks up all this language about "priesthood" and applies it to the church—the Christian community in the world.  We have been made church to be "a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, to proclaim the mighty acts of the one who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light."

            This is an age of private spirituality, people who say "I'm spiritual but I'm not religious."  The church looks like an institutional dinosaur sinking under its own weight into the mire of  "do your own thing."  But then along comes somebody like Mother Teresa of Calcutta, a small woman who struggled terribly with her own personal spirituality, but who devoted her life to the people dying in the slums of India, serving the world—a bridge to God.  Along comes somebody like Dag Hammarskjöld, who gave his life in a plane crash while he was trying to bring peace and national independence to the countries of Africa; and after his death they discovered his diary.  Less than a year before his death he had written a poem about the crucifixion that also spoke of his own self-understanding as a bridge-person:[1]

 

 

"If I love them."  This is the bridge, isn't it!  This is what you and I are called to DO as "a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation."  Not save the world.  Not become something magnificent.  Certainly not get stuff.  We are called to love—to do the deeds of love, and so build a bridge from earth to heaven for somebody.  The priesthood of believers is about being a bridge for others to come to God.   Who is waiting for your priesthood?