Thou Art a Priest

Art by Elizabeth Wang

Propers: The Fourth Sunday after Epiphany, AD 2022 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; before you were born I consecrated you.”

You each have a calling. I hope you all know that. It isn’t just the clergy here ordained to their vocations: it’s all of us, every Christian, every member of this Church. It seems to me we used to talk a lot more about “the priesthood of all believers,” the understanding that each and every one of us has direct access to God in Christ Jesus: that in fact we all are priests, gathered as one in the great High Priest.

Clergy, theoretically, are those from the congregation, whose gifts for ministry have been discerned by the Church, and who have thus been set apart for special training and education, in order rightly to preach the Word and to administer the Sacraments. We can’t all go to seminary, so we pick a few to send, who then come back to us to share what they have learned. But our pastors aren’t the only priests.

You are a priest, made so by your Baptism; by the Holy Spirit of Christ who now dwells within you, and who makes of us His Body. Whatever you pray, God hears. Wherever you go, He is with you. Indeed you bear Him within you, as Mary bore Jesus, as temples of His Spirit. Every Christian has a calling. And that calling is to bear forth Christ for this world. You are to be examples, signs, of the New Creation, the new humanity; the New Adam, who is Christ. You are to bear witness to His sacrificial love, filling you up to overflowing, so that it bursts out upon all the world around you.

What brings people to Christ? Christians do. And who brings Christians to the people? Christ does. Christians truly are called to be “little Christs”; that’s what the name actually means. And I know that’s a tall order, an impossible order really. But that’s why we have each other. That’s why we come to Church. We are called to be Christians not because we were better or wiser or somehow more special than all the mass of humanity. To the contrary! We are sinners, every one of us. We are those most in need of God’s grace. Who better to witness its power to the world?

We are gathered in. We confess the truth of our sins. We hear the truth of forgiveness. We sing out in the joy of blissful absolution. Then we hear the Word, the great love story of God and His people, recorded in the books of our Bible. And we pray as one, as God commanded, that we might learn to trust Him always. And then we share in the blessed Meal, the Sacrament of the Altar, the Body and Blood of our Lord, so that we become the Incarnation, God made flesh in Christ.

And then we are sent out—back out into the world, bearing forgiveness, bearing grace, bearing Jesus! We used to call the Sunday service “Mass.” And Mass means sending, the most important part; going back out, as sheep amidst the wolves. And we fail, of course. We screw up. And so we come back to be forgiven once more, renewed and sent back out. Through us the seeds are planted; now it’s God who makes them grow. And the whole cycle, the whole process, is purely grace. It’s that grace that conquers the world, that grace that saves us all.

But now what does this look like, really? What does it mean to go out and be Christ for the world? Does it mean that we stand on street corners with placards threatening hell? Shall we hawk the Lord like barkers, like salesmen with something to sell? A brilliant book came out last year called Jesus and John Wayne, which documented how, following the Civil War, Americans applied modern methods of advertising to religion. And this combination of the market and the Maker produced Christian fundamentalism. We hard-sold God as merchandise, and made of Him a devil.

And honestly, I think that’s what people are sick of. I think that’s why so many are so fed up with the Church: because Christians in America today are just one more group of hucksters trying to sell us stuff that we don’t need.

That’s now how we used to do it, in the earliest days of the Church. The early Church didn’t give a flying fig for numbers, attendance, popularity, or money; sure as hell not politics. They made it hard to join. You had to work to become a Christian. If you weren’t baptized, you had to leave worship before Communion, at the time when we share the peace. And if you wanted to be baptized, you had to undergo a period of penance, prayer, and instruction lasting months or even years. And if at any point you didn’t like it, there’s the door.

So how did the Church grow as she did, spreading from city to city, crossing lines of language, class, and gender? How did Christianity go from 11 scattered Apostles to the conquest of the Roman Empire? Well, we didn’t do it by selling something. We did it by going deep: deep into prayer, deep into silence, deep into Scripture. We did it by sharing all things in common and ever caring for the widowed and the poor. We did it by living out the commands of Christ to the best of our abilities, and by being honest and forthright about our general failure to accomplish this.

We filled ourselves with grace until it came out all our pores. And people wanted that. They wanted the liberation, the selflessness, the charity, the undeniable spirituality of Jesus in our lives. We all lived like priests, like sainted sinners. And it was this patient ferment of the early Church that went on to change the world. To hell with going broad! Give me a dozen sinners willing to trust in Jesus Christ, with faith the size of a mustard seed, and we shall move all mountains.

That’s what Paul is trying to get through to the Corinthians this morning. We’re used to hearing these verses in the context of a wedding, but really he’s instructing us on Christian daily life. Yes, there are people out there who work wonders, he says; people who can heal, or cast out demons, or have visions. I’ve met some. There are people who have great learning, great fame, great prestige. And this is no bad thing, in and of itself. All good blessings are gifts from the Spirit.

But strive for the greater gifts, Paul says. Ever strive for faith and hope and love. That’s what really matters. And these are the gifts available to us all, to share with all:

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist upon its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.

He’s not talking about romance here. He’s talking about how each and every one of us is called to witness Christ. Live in this way, love in this way, and Christ abides within you. Everyone can see that. Everyone can see Him in you. And  the Corinthians are really bad at this. I mean, these are wealthy people used to wealthy privileges. But that doesn’t change the fact that they have been called in their Baptism. These are the children of God, the “little Christs” sent out to the world. And Paul’s going to remind them of that. Paul’s going to remind them of who we are.

It’s not easy. Christian life has never been rainbows and cupcakes and sweetcream in the gardens. Christian life is about fallen, broken, sinful people called to freedom, called to life, raised up from our graves—and then sent out to share what we have been given, purely by love, purely by grace, to a world in need of the same.  I’m a grouchy, selfish, prideful, slothful sinner, yet Jesus put Himself in me. And so my job now is not to pretend as though I’m no longer a grouchy, selfish, prideful, slothful sinner. I am! My job is to give people Jesus anyway. My job is to give them what He gave me, namely Himself. And that’s your job too.

In our Gospel reading this morning, Jesus has made quite a name for Himself, preaching and teaching and healing the sick. And now He’s come home, to the place He grew up, to a hometown hero’s welcome—a local boy made good! And when He proclaims that the scroll of the prophet Isaiah has been fulfilled in their hearing, that He is in truth the long-awaited Messiah, then they’re over the moon. They think this is great. One of their own, the Christ! Vindication at last!

But then He says they’re nothing special. They have no monopoly on the grace of God. He’s their Messiah, yes, but not only their Messiah. God lavishes grace on us all. And of course this provokes a very different reaction: now they want to kill Him! Yet He passes through the midst of them and goes on His way, nonviolently, nonvengefully. And this is not the reaction one expects from a Greco-Roman god.

Yet we are called to this as well: renouncing violence, renouncing vengeance, picking up instead the Cross; letting go of bitterness and jealousy, hatred and rage. You do that today, and I guarantee that people will take notice. Grace is not the norm. Christianity is not the norm. But strive to live as one with Christ, and He shall change our world; for He is God and Lord and King. And we are all His priests.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.