American Church in Paris - Sermons

ACP HOME - Sermon Archives - Past ACP Sermons

Each One a Priest by Rev. Gregory Turner 19 October 2003 TEXT: Mark 10:35-45 and Hebrews 5:1-10 Sermon for Kingdomtide © 2003 Gregory Turner

If you have ever felt bewildered about what it means to be a Christian, those scripture lessons were for you. If you sit in these pews occasionally or frequently and are still scratchin' your head about who this Jesus fellow is and what he wants, this sermon is for you. While you are pondering these things, you should know you’ve had lots of company from the very beginning. It has always been a comfort to me to recall how confused Jesus' disciples could be. I mean, Holy Cow! Here in Mark's gospel Jesus' offers one remarkable example after another of what it means to be a disciple. To which John and his brother James answer with the most muddle-headed request possible. Where have they been? Have they heard nothing of what he taught them? Kathy tells me the older I get the more selective my listening becomes. I tell her it’s just my bad left ear, but I suspect she thinks the problem lies somewhere between that auditory appendage and the other one. So it is reassuring to hear that the first fellows to drop their nets and follow the Lord of Life still wandered around in a daze much of the time.

Here's the story. Jesus has been doing his preaching and pastoral work up north in his home province of Galilee. Now, as his mission turns south toward Jerusalem, we sense a real pulse to this story, as if the gospel writer knows we will have to be told, told again, and told again. So in a series of teachings we learn that the Son of Man must suffer, that the one who gains his life must lose it, that he ("he" being Jesus) must not be enshrined on a mountain side for there is much yet to do in the valley, that he himself will be arrested and killed only to rise again, that rather than the machinations of the powerful is it in the humility and wonder of a child that the true kingdom is found, that poverty is closer to the throne of God than wealth -- and again, that in Jerusalem he will be condemned, mocked, spat upon, scourged and killed; and after three days rise.

Having heard, or not heard, all this, James and John ask him: "Teacher, do us a favor. When you get up there in all your glory next to God, let us sit on each side of you." We would be hard pressed to find a more startling example of selective hearing. The other disciples become angry over this appeal to favoritism not, I suspect, because they think the two brothers are wrong, but because they would like to beat James and John to the best seats. Obviously they'd been sleeping through the sermons. They all get it wrong. Peter wants Jesus to be some holy icon safe from harm. Judas wants him to launch an anti-Roman guerilla campaign. Thomas doubts that Jesus is human at all. And now, even as Christ is calling them to sacrificial service and to the renunciation of power, James and John -- his earliest and beloved disciples -- want to be named vice-presidents in a celestial corporation run by Jesus.

What we have here is the central to understanding for the teaching and, more important, the life of Christ: that God calls us not to gain authority but to render assistance, and that to live in Christ is to serve and not to be served. Surely the confusion of the first disciples is meant as a lesson to us later-day followers: that service to God can often be misguided. It is not about us. Or, rather, it is about us but by throwing the away from us so we may realize who we are as disciples. Knowing that, Charles Meigs made a prayer of intercession out of the same lesson:

Lord, help me live from day to day
In such a self-forgetful way
That even when I kneel to pray
My prayers will be for others.

Help me in all the work I do
To ever be sincere and true
And know that I all do for You
Must needs be done for others.

It is hardly surprising we are sometimes confused about what “service” means. Four generations ago the very word was reserved for those whose economic situation forced them into work for those of a higher station: to be “in service.” But lately we have rescued the idea so well that now we ascribe the quality to almost any undertaking. He served in Congress. She serves as a newspaper reporter. He just completed his service in the army. All of this may be good, but if service means everything, it means little.

In the church service for others is assumed, and we often get it right only to find it doesn't work out as expected. The story is told of one new church volunteer had just completed the training session on his new assignment. "Wow, this orientation really helped," he said. "Now I understand everything that's expected of me." The chairperson was delighted with this response and asked, "Great, so what I you going to do first?" To which the new member said, "I going to quit!" Next time the chairperson made sure not to lay it on. "Oh, there's not a lot to this, a real simple job. Piece of cake. You can do it with your eyes shut. So what do you say?" To which the target of the low-pressure pitch says, "I want something more challenging." You never know, really, and it’s a complicated concept.

Therefore, what are we to make of this central teaching of the Christian faith called “service”? Next week comes Reformation Sunday, and with it the old battle cry: The Priesthood of All Believers. If you’ve learned a little Reformation history, you know that in the 16th century ministry had been restricted to an ordained few. A priestly class was in charge of all matters of life and death, done in a language hardly anyone could understand and with rituals one could watch but not share. So this key biblical truth was rediscovered and reaffirmed: all of us who believe in God through Jesus Christ are called to serve as priests. That is, we all have vocations, a few through the church but most in our daily work and family commitments. If understood faithfully, all of it is Christian service…even serving in Congress.

Good enough. But how are we to apply the old teaching in a way that cuts through our current fog? In the Letter to the Hebrews we read of the function of a high priest as one who offers sacrifices for his own sins as well as for others. A priest, we read, is not one who takes honor upon herself but rather, through sacrificial service, is a source of healing -- even of salvation -- for others. Rightly understood, service means that each of us is called by God to claim the office of priest as the way to serve.

Yet we might ask, "How dare we call ourselves priests when we don't even think of our own clergy that way?" And that’s the problem; the baby got tossed out with the bathwater. The Reformers’ hope was not to do away with the priesthood but to expand it. Our Protestant battle cry was meant to jar loose the sense of service from the hands of select few. So the question now is: What might it mean for you to recapture our heritage and see yourself as a priest?

There are two things a priest does that are essential. First, it means you start to see yourself as a Confessor, called by God to take on the confessions of others. Talk about a stumbling block for us! We don't like the idea of confession at all very much (to our own loss!), and we particularly are put off by the notion we need to confess to someone else. But let’s think about it. In the letter to the Hebrews, the priest is sensitive to the shortcomings and sins of others, but only because the priest too lives each day with the limitations of weakness. The priest hears and offers sacrifices of absolution to God not only for others, but for himself also. A priest claims no perfection. Quite the reverse. So if we affirm our own priesthood, the service and the community following from it -- what God wants from us – means we are free enough to confess with and to each other, to see and trust each other as Confessors.

Why raise this difficult notion for Protestants? Our religious life just skips along the surface until that painful but wonderful day when we drop the facade and say to someone else; “Hey, friend, I need you to hear my confession.” Now that may scare him a lot; or she may resist. Yet we both need to be able to say, as did Robert Herrick well over three centuries ago:

In the hour of my distress
When temptations me oppress
And when I my sins confess,
Sweet spirit comfort me.

When (God knows) I'm tossed about
Either with despair or doubt
Yet before the glass be out,
Sweet spirit comfort me.

We find that comforting spirit in the solitude of our own prayers, of course. But when we are able also to share such deep needs for being understood with another person -- willing ourselves to act as confessors to others in need – then we open our lives to depths wherein the community of Christ comes alive.

The second aspect of “priesthood” we carry with us and need to explore is the image of the priest as Mediator. As Hebrews reads: “...chosen from among the people (and) appointed to act on their behalf in relation to God.” The mediator is one who passes on what God has given to her, often sacrificially, in ways not presently available to the one being helped. That is, the mediator expends his energy in being present to another, in listening, thereby conveying a bit of hope from God that the one being helped may not have known he could find. The mediator’s creed says:

Measure thy life by loss instead of gain,
Not by the wine drunk, but the wine poured forth...

Problem is that being a Mediator, even more than Confessor, is conflicted issue for lots of us. Didn't we get rid of intermediaries between the believer and God? I just spent another day at Chartres, which I love, but the whole place was built because of the mediating power of a relic of Mary. Those marvelous windows would not be there without the medieval convictions focused on a piece of cloth. And I realized again – pondering this message at the same time – that to presume one person has a special pipeline to God she or he can mediate for us is, to say the least, a sore point for those in the Protestant heritage. But, again, let us expand the idea rather than toss it out. Say to yourself that all who believe are priests, and, therefore, are able by the very giving of themselves to reveal something of God to one who may know little of it.

Ah, then the idea takes on a wondrous vitality. So wondrous, in fact, that when the role of mediating through the power of one’s talents and insights is added to the role of confessor, with its sensitivity and availability, we have a combination which Hebrews calls the very source of salvation. Yes, salvation. For how crippled the church would be if it counted on its confessional sharing and mediating power coming only from us clergy! How crushing for any of us to have to meet the vast needs for confession and mediation alone.

Thank God it does not work that way. Neither you nor I have to do that, for we are priests. My own ministry is possible only because of you, and yours only because of others. And, if we could but see that the foundation of what we do here is the confessing and mediating priesthood of God, we’d have a lot fewer people wondering why they couldn’t have something more challenging. And though the burdens of priesthood are great, because we share them as believers, we’d have a lot fewer of our volunteers say, “I quit!” We would be less bewildered about what is means to be a Christian…and less hesitant.

Oh yes, I know many here are stouthearted Protestants with rock-ribbed self-reliance. That is fine, but take it from one whose spiritual roots are planted in New England, but it’s also a pretty sterile diet over the long haul. For there are days when we are not joyful, weeks when we feel powerless, and months (even years!) when we hold our pains inside us. That’s a lot of us a lot of time, and that is when we need a community to claim the old truth that each one here is a priest to the other.

Theodore Chickering Williams said it years ago:

When thy heart, with joy o'erflowing
Sings a thankful prayer,
In that joy, O let thy neighbor
With thee share

When the harvest sheaves ingathered
Fill thy barns with store,
To thy God and to thy neighbor
Give thee more.

Hast thou borne a secret sorrow
In thy lonely breast?
Take to thee thy sorrowing neighbor
For a guest.

All of us here need the service we offer our neighbors inside the church and out as sensitive confessors and capable mediators. What a powerful force for good should that conviction be reborn in our churches. So good, in fact, that we become a source of salvation.

Amen.