I heard this story about a mom who was making pancakes for her two young
sons one morning. They loved their mom's pancakes, so they got into an argument
about who would get the first pancake off the griddle. Sound familiar? Anyway,
Kevin and Ryan, barely over a year apart in age, got into a shoving match to
put their plate ahead. Mom saw an opportunity for a spiritual lesson, so she asked
them, "Boys, if Jesus were here to eat pancakes with us today, what do you
think he would say?" They looked down at their shoes, probably so Mom
couldn't see them rolling their eyes. She went on. "I'll tell you what
Jesus would say. He would say, `Brother, please, you have the first pancake; I
can wait.'" "Great idea, Mom!" said Kevin. "Ryan, you be
Jesus!" Isn't that what we all want? We want somebody else,
we want everybody else to be Jesus for us! And to do our bidding.
We want to control God. But God is older
than the big bang and newer than your next thought. God is bigger than the
universe and smaller than the electron. This in not a God to be taken for
granted. This is not a God to be trifled with. This is not a God we can reduce
to bumper stickers and catchy slogans. This is not the puny God of the
televangelists whom you can buy off with a donation and control with a credit
card. In fact, this is not a God any of us can control or connect with at all.
We need to get a glimpse of this vast Mystery from time to time to put
ourselves in perspective. Realizing God created a universe 360 billion years
ago … that we are just now seeing light that left stars at 186,000 miles
per second when Jesus was still walking the shores of the Sea of Galilee
… reminds us that we are not the center of God's existence. It reduces to
the level of the absurd our ridiculous musings about God … our violent
arguments about God … our presumptuous pronouncements in God's name
… as if we could ever approach understanding who God is.
A God that big is terrifying. "You cannot see my face" God
warns Moses during the Exodus, "for no one shall see me and live"
(Ex 33:20). When I see God for who God is, when I glimpse the magnitude of God
in time and space, I die inside. "It just kills me," as they say.
Suddenly my brief little life has no meaning. I can't imagine me mattering any
more than a speck of cosmic dust floating in the outer reaches of the solar
system. Who can approach such a Mystery? How can we talk to that cosmic sized
God about our little problems and worries and sorrows, and expect to be heard,
let alone helped? I don't want to reduce God to my size, but I need some way to
link with God at the level of my personhood, some mediator who can connect me
with the cosmic, eternal Presence.
Of course, that's where Jesus comes in. "God was in Christ, reconciling
the world to God's self," declares Paul, "and God has given us
the ministry of reconciliation" (2 Cor
5:18). Long ago
Jesus himself suffered, the author of Hebrews reminds us. "In the days
of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and
tears, to the one who was able to save him from death" (Hebrews 5:7).
Jesus' human suffering is purposeful. It makes him tenderhearted and
compassionate because he knows how it feels to be slandered and betrayed,
ignored and misunderstood, hungry and tired, tortured and killed. In Jesus, the
eternal God understands what it feels like to be merely human. In Jesus, we
meet a God we can understand well enough to follow, to love, to connect with.
Let us pause here a moment and reflect on a Cosmic God who understands what it
means to suffer and be mortal. This means no problem, no pain, no harsh circumstance, no challenge is beyond the compassion of God.
In The Legends of Our Time Elie Wiesel speaks
of his experience in a Nazi concentration camp. The Germans were cruel to their
Jewish prisoners, and one guard enjoyed reminding them that whoever won the
war, it wouldn't be the Jews. As time crept by in these deteriorating inhumane
conditions, the prisoners naturally lost hope and fell into desperation. One
night in the camp, as a group of prisoners despaired of having any future at
all, one of the Jews they had nicknamed "the prophet," began to
preach. He told them the Messiah lived just as they were living now:
You relegate him to the heavens, but He is here among us. You imagine that
He is safe, sheltered from danger, but He has come to be with the victims. Yes,
even He, He better than anyone, knows the sorrow that consumes you. He feels
the fist that smashes into your face. The darkness that engulfs us engulfs Him
also. It is He, here and now, who urges you not to give way to despair.
In a prison camp, in the hospital, in the prison of our own mortal soul, the
cosmic, eternal God is with us through the Messiah, through the Christ, as
close to us as the air we breathe, present even in the pain and sorrow we feel.
Jesus is our priest, but this identity is both unique and typical. I mean, no
one is so effective a priest as Jesus because no one else so perfectly combines
the human and the divine in one integrated self. But Jesus' priesthood is also
"typical" because he is the model of what we are supposed to be. "You
know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants
over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among
you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be
slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to
give his life a ransom for many" (Mark 10:42-45). The followers are
called to be like their leader. And our leader, Jesus, is not about power or
glory victory over enemies and the abuse of underlings for his own gain. No,
Jesus is about service and sacrifice and suffering with and suffering for those
whom God places in his care.
All of which is to say, you and I who are called the "Body of Christ"
are also priests like Jesus. In the Old Testament, God describes the goal of
the covenant with Moses the Hebrew people at Sinai. "Indeed, the whole
earth is mine," God says, "but you shall be for me a priestly
kingdom and a holy nation" (Exodus 19:5,6).
God chooses the Hebrew people, not to be the only people with whom God will
connect, excluding all others, but in order to connect with the whole world
through them. God wants them all to be priests, carriers of the presence of God
to all nations and all peoples. In the New Testament, this same goal is applied
to the new covenant in Christ, as 1 Peter tells the early church, "You
are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of
him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not
a people, but now you are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but
now you have received mercy" (1 Peter 2:9-10).
The Reformers called this universal Christian vocation "the priesthood of
the believers," and set it over against the attempts of a few powerful,
elite clergy to control the church. Over against these arrogant gate keepers
who said only they had the right interpretation of scripture, only they could
say who was in and who was out, only they could control the church and dole out
access to God, the "priesthood of the believers" remembered that God
democratized the church long ago. Jesus alone is our connection with God.
Nobody else can interfere with that. And as Jesus is our priest, so every one
of us who follows him has a connection with God and can help others connect,
too. But this spiritual freedom from oppressive preachers, as important as it
may be, is actually an incidental, secondary meaning of "the priesthood of
the believers." The primary meaning of the "priesthood of the
believers" is that God has called you and you and you, and you in the
choir and you in the back and even me also to be priests in the world. Your
mission is to bring the presence of the cosmic eternal God to every person you
encounter. You are their contact, the missing link that makes an impersonal
ultimate Power of unimaginable magnitude personal and accessible to mere
mortals like yourself.
If you think about it, surely you can name some person who has been a priest to
you, God with a human face. More likely, you can name several people who taken
together have shown you who God is. Maybe some of them were ordained. But
probably most of them were not. We need to thank God for these priests in our
lives.
A while ago I shared with you about going with my friend to the Baptist church
when I was a child for their VBS because it was always quite a production. Well, another thing I didn’t wanted to
miss was their big revival each summer.
It was spectacular. After lots and lots of hymn singing a traveling
evangelist spoke and invited everybody there who wasn't a Christian to come
forward and meet Jesus. I was only eight years old and figured that if I was
Catholic I might not be Christian (I know better now) so I walked down that
long aisle in front of all those people. I was pretty scared, but not because
the place was packed. I was scared
because I thought I was really going to get to meet Jesus and shake his hand. Yep,
I was totally convinced that he was going to be there, live and in person. Needless to say I was more than disappointed
that the only hand I got to shake that evening was the preacher’s. But that is no longer the case. I shake hands with Jesus each Sunday morning
when I shake your hands.
The church is Christ in the world carrying God's love to all people and serving
God's children wherever and whoever they might be. The church, these priests
right here, are the missing link, where people meet Christ, where people connect
with the immortal invisible God. At least that's our mission, to be priests to
each other.
These are your priests. This is your flock. This is your Christ shaped
community. We know God is bigger than any one person, more than all the human
community combined. But we cannot connect all by ourselves to this gigantic God
of space and time. We connect to God through our priests, through Jesus, the
Christ, who is God with us, and through the living and breathing Christ we meet
in each other. Of course, it is not the priesthood of the believer, but the
priesthood of the believers that mediates the presence of God. We
would not be so foolish as to deify one person, however holy and good. We
cannot point to one person alone here in our church today and say, "This
is Christ." But we can point to the church as a whole, all of us together,
and say, "Christ is among us; God is in this place," can't we?
In the movie, Remember the Titans, Denzel Washington plays a tough
football coach facing the challenges of racial integration in the sixties. In a
memorable scene where his undefeated team is playing another undefeated rival
for the state championship, one of the players stands up to encourage his
teammates. He reminds them that "Coach" told them at the beginning of
the season he expected them to be perfect. And he admits,
that as an individual athlete he hasn't been perfect and cannot be perfect.
"But all of us together have been perfect," he says. They are
undefeated, not as individuals, but as a team. My friends, that
is the church. None of us is perfect. None of us can mediate the love of God by
ourselves. But all of us together can show the world who
God is and be the missing link to the magnificent Mystery this crazy spinning
world so desperately needs.
Therefore, today I want to invite you to meet Jesus. I invite you to become his
follower and agent, to accept his call to be a carrier of the infectious love
of God. I ask you to think of those persons who have been God's priests to you
and of those people who have no other link except you to the love of God. Step
up, and step out. Others will be Jesus for you when you need Jesus, but I am
saying to you today, you be Jesus. You be Jesus. We
need you to be Jesus with us in this place.
May we pray?
Eternal God,
How could we really know you or even understand a little about you if it
weren't for our brother Jesus? How would we know that you know what it is like
for us here, how love gives us life and causes us to suffer at the same time?
So today, we thank you for Jesus, our priest, our link to life and eternity and
to you. And we thank you for every one of his followers who has shown us his
love by being priests to us, too. And we thank you for the church, even with
all its human frailties, which has carried the gospel down through the years to
us. Now help us, in this place and with one another to be priests ourselves
like Jesus, that the world might know you and rejoice,
in Jesus' name. Amen.
Rev. Mary Anne Biggs, Pastor
Nekoosa United
Nekoosa