This was the sermon I preached this morning as part of a series on Baptist distinctives.
What’s Baptist about Bunyan?
The Priesthood of all Believers: God’s People in and for the World
Bunyan Baptist, 3 June 2007, AM
1st Reading: Exodus 19.3-6
I know that for some of us what church we belong doesn’t seem that important. We’re Christians, who just happen to go to a Baptist church, so doing a series on being Baptists might appear to some as irrelevant. I want to suggest this morning that there is no such thing as just a Christian, but that Christians come in all shapes and sizes, from different traditions and with different convictions. Some Christians believe the Bishop of Rome to be God’s chief representative on earth. Some Christians believe that the Bible is the infallible and inerrant Word of God. Some Christians believe that unless you speak in tongues, you have not been baptised in the Holy Spirit. Some Christians believe that baptism is for believers only. We’re all Christians, we all claim and rightly so to worship and follow the person of Jesus Christ. But our understanding of what it means to a Christian and how we worship and follow Christ is different. And Baptists have their own set of convictions and traditions that reflect how they believe Christians should worship and follow Christ. The aim of this series is not to disparage other traditions, in fact, there is much I believe we can learn from our other Christian brothers and sisters. The aim of this series is to help us appreciate and celebrate something of our Baptist tradition, to see its riches as a way of worshipping and following Christ, as well as perhaps to see its possible weaknesses. And hopefully if you’ve found the title (something I suggested) ‘what’s Baptist about Bunyan?’ off-putting, today you find something positive in being a Baptist church.
This morning having looked at the Lordship of Christ, the authority of scripture and the baptism of believer’s, we come to the priesthood of believers. Let us read our second scripture and then pray.
2nd Reading: 1 Peter 2.4-10
The phrase ‘priesthood of all believers’ was first coined during the Reformation in the Middle Ages, taking the idea from 1 Peter of the church being a ‘royal priesthood.’ It was a statement of freedom and a protest against hierarchy in the church. In a period of church history where there was an aroma of class, the ‘priesthood of all believers’ was a slogan to all Christians that the Christian faith was non-hierarchal, non-class, and non-status. All Christians, whatever their particular vocation – be it minister, doctor, policeman, taxman, shop assistant, or shoemaker – are equal before God. In fact, the slogan ‘priesthood of all believers’ suggested that all Christians have one shared vocation: to be God’s people in and for the world.
For Baptist Christians we practice a non-hierarchal view of church. The ministry and mission of the church belongs to each local church. Baptists recognise that some are called to leadership and ministry, but power and privilege is given not to them, but to the church as a whole as it meets together. I like that. What makes me a Baptist is partly the conviction that as a whole church, as the priesthood of believers in this place, we discern together the mission and ministry of the church. We recognise that every person can hear from God, we believe that every voice can and should be heard - although this does not mean every person every time does hear from God and every voice should be acted on. I recognise also that what I have described does not always happen in Bunyan – the ideal does not always match the reality - and my hope is that as a church we find ways to take even more seriously the idea of the priesthood of all believers.
So what does the phrase mean? Are we all priests? In short no. As Christians we believe there is only priest and that is Jesus Christ, and as those who belong and exist in Christ, we share in his priesthood. We participate in the mission and ministry of Jesus Christ, as God’s priest to the world. What is a priest? A priest is a mediator between God and the world. As Paul says to the Corinthians, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself. Only in and through Christ, our mediator, are we reconciled to God.
And so, the priesthood of all believers is a statement of the gospel. We all share and participate in the priesthood of Christ because of Christ willingness to go to the cross. The good news is that we are adopted into God’s family thought Christ. This is not something we do, but something God in Christ does for us. As Paul writes to the Ephesians, ‘thought Christ both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father’ (Eph 2.18)
The priesthood of all believers is a statement of the mission and vocation of the church. Peter says the church is a priesthood, mediating on the behalf of God, in the name of Christ, to the world. A priest is a mediator, connecting people to God. As the church our mission is to enable people to connect to God, pointing always to Christ as the way to God. Paul Fiddes, a Baptist theologian puts it this way, ‘[we are] called to be a priestly mediator of God’s presence to others, and to intercede with God for others. A close relationship with a God who is on mission in the world is never for the sake of one’s satisfaction or privilege but for the sake of the service to all nations’ (Fiddes, Tracks and Traces, 2003, 69). The danger for the church is we get so focussed on our relationship with God, that we forget that God is on a mission. Jesus says to his disciples as ‘the Father sent me, so I send you.’ As the priesthood of all believers we are called to continue the mission of Christ to the world. So Paul writing to the Corthinians says ‘we are ambassadors for Christ since Christ is making his appeal through us’ (2 Cor 5.20)
The priesthood of all believers is a statement about the worship of the church. A priest was a lead worshipper. As the priesthood are believers we are called to point the world to the worship of God. Our lives together as the people of God should worship God in heart, body, mind and soul. Again this is only in and through Christ, who is our lead worshipper. As the famous Reformation theologian John Calvin says, ‘Christ is the great chorimaster, who tunes our hearts to sing God’s praise.’ When we gather to worship, we participate in Christ, by the Spirit as he worships the Father. Today if you didn’t know is Trinity Sunday, and as Christians we believe God is Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity is thought by many to be impossible to understand, but at its most simplest it is the belief that we come to God through Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit. The phrase the priesthood of all believers when we unpack it means worship is not something we do, but something we participate in, something we are caught up in by the Holy Spirit, through Jesus Christ before the Father.
The priesthood of all believers is a statement about the inclusive nature of God and so the church. All those who trust in God are part of the people of God, regardless of anything else. One of the joys of recent years at Bunyan is the increasing greater diversity among us. I pray and hope that continues. We demonstrate that Jesus Christ welcomes all to follow him. We display that Jesus Christ invites all to be his brothers and sisters in the family of God. We do not determine or decide who gets the invitation; we are to witness in the name of Jesus, to all that all are welcome. The church should be a place of welcome and inclusion. As Paul writes to the Romans ‘welcome one another, just as Christ welcomed you’. This desire to be a welcoming and inclusive church is not something we make happen with the click of fingers and it is a pretence to think it is. It requires us to be conscious and active in making space for different voices and stories, in discovering the gift that each person is to this church, in celebrating our differences. It’s acknowledging that when members of our congregation are absent we are incomplete, because as Baptists we are a covenant community bound together in love, whether it feels like it or not. So when we come together and some maybe missing, it’s like a family where a daughter or brother is not there – its noticed. Everyone is needed and included for us to be a complete church – and the strange thing about church is that we are forever incomplete, because there is always space for another person in God’s family.
And lastly the priesthood of all believers is a statement about the sacrificial nature of the church. Priests were and are those who make sacrifices on behalf of others. The wonder of Jesus is that he is the Priest who also becomes the sacrifice. We belong to the priesthood of all believers, because Christ is our priest and our sacrifice. From the life and death of Jesus we understand what sacrifice really is; and from Christ and the Holy Spirit we receive the means of living the kind of life that is sacrificial. So Paul says to the Romans we are to ‘present our bodies as living sacrifices.’ The people of God, whose lives are shaped by Christ Jesus, are called to sacrificial living on behalf of others. This means those who belong to the priesthood of all believers are those who love thy neighbour and deny self.
This short phrase ‘priesthood of all believers’ is a short-hand for the life and mission of the church. It’s a statement about the gospel, a statement about the mission of the church, a statement about the worship of the church, a statement about the inclusiveness of the church, and a statement about the sacrificial nature of the church. And most importantly it is a statement that reminds us that it is in and through Christ, our Great High Priest, that we find our life and mission.
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