Faith at Home…At Home in Faith
NW MN Synod Assembly
Concordia College, Moorhead, MN
May 17, 2014
I Peter 2:1-10
In
the name of Jesus. Amen.
“Whoever comes
out of the water of baptism can boast that he is already a consecrated priest,
bishop and pope.”[1]
Let
me say that once again: “Whoever comes
out of the water of baptism can boast that he (or she) is already a consecrated
priest, bishop and pope.”
Thank
God, when Martin Luther wanted to make a point, he never mumbled or beat around
the bush! Thank God, the Great Reformer
had a penchant for shockingly-bombastic hyperbole!
Of
course, Luther was grinding an ax here, as he was wont to do. He was demolishing a whole way of envisioning
the church--especially leadership in the church. Luther was leveling, flattening the church of
his day by sweeping away a rigid hierarchical structure that was burdening
consciences, blunting the gospel, keeping God’s Word shackled and killing the
church!
For
the church Luther inherited was a church that carefully distinguished leaders
from followers, those at the top from those on the bottom, the rulers from the
ruled….
…..which
is why in brash, sweeping assertions like this one, Luther declared: “Enough already!”
Whoever (accent on that: whoever, meaning anyone!)….Whoever comes out of the water
of baptism can boast that he (or she) is already a consecrated priest, bishop
and pope!
Now
I suppose we could say: “Well and
good! Sounds like ‘Luther being Luther,’
‘democratizing’ a brittle medieval religious bureaucracy, helping the grassroots
reclaim their community of faith….
Except that this
brash quotation from Martin Luther has such deep roots in God’s ancient and
abiding Word…..even as it also presses ahead, reaches forward, right up into
our own day.
Martin
Luther’s contention in 1520, after all, echoes the words of our text from I
Peter, a first century letter of encouragement that circulated among scattered
bands of “resident aliens,” Jews and Gentiles living in Asia Minor. These spiritual “exiles” had been caught in
the updraft of the Holy Spirit, claimed by the Risen Christ to spread the Good
News in an indifferent if not hostile, distracted, religiously pluralistic
world.
Peter
deploys a cascading array of images to remind these “resident aliens” just who
they now were in Jesus Christ:
· newborn infants
drinking in the spiritual milk of God’s Word,
· living stones being
crafted into a spiritual temple
· God’s elected,
chosen race,
· God’s royal
priesthood,
· God’s holy
nation,
· God’s own
people.
If
the world around them counted them as good-for-nothings, God had decided
otherwise:
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.
And
to what end, for the sake of what work had God gone to the trouble of feeding,
building, electing, claiming and sanctifying these “nobodies?”
That
they might “proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his
marvelous light.”
When
Martin Luther brazenly proclaimed that “Whoever comes out of the water of
baptism can boast that he is already a consecrated priest, bishop and pope” he
was only reclaiming for his own day, an ancient scriptural word from the First
Epistle of Peter.
Luther
reached back to a first century biblical treasure-chest…even as he
simultaneously pointed forward, into God’s future, right into our own
time. For, my dear friends, you and I
also need desperately to hear that “whoever comes out of the water of baptism
can boast that he is already a consecrated priest, bishop and pope.”
You
and I need to hear these words, not so much to flatten an outdated hierarchy
but to reclaim the dignity of our calling to live fully, imaginatively,
energetically as the whole people of God in the year 2014.
Luther
contended with a bullying Pope Leo and a corrupt Vatican Curia in
Rome….but we contend with a more subtle,
insidious adversary: ourselves and some of the assumptions
we make about who the church is, how it is formed, and why it is sent into
God’s world.
We
contend with a church that still mutters nostrums like:
· “Oh good, the pastor is here now, so he can pray for
us, and we can start our meeting….”
· Or: “Bishop,
please tell our minister to visit all our shut-ins every month….that’s her job,
you know….that’s what we hired her to do!”
· Or: “What
has the ELCA, what has the synod done for us lately?”
Words
like those, my friends, are the death-rattle of a terminally-ill church, a
church turned fatally inward, a church that thinks it can hire somebody else to
do the ministry that’s been given to all of us, a church panting for Christ’s
death-defeating, resurrecting power.
In
this assembly, I pray, we’ve been opening our eyes to another way, a better way
of being church and doing church in this time and place.
Living
in an indifferent if not hostile, distracted world….a world with scads and
scads of competing stories and compelling messages….feeling sometimes like
resident aliens, not sure we’ll ever feel “at home” here….
….you
and I are dying to hear Peter’s amazing proclamation of who we are and what God
is equipping us to do: “But
you—you, “you all”!-- 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.”
You
can’t hire someone to do that for you, though you surely can call a minister to
help you do your work better….but the work’s been given to all of us….in our
communities, in our congregations, and in those “little platoons” where we hang
out with folks near and dear to us.
This
assembly has invited us to pay close attention to these most basic cells in the
Body of Christ on earth—however we name them:
homes or households or families or table-gatherings or wherever folks
live and breathe together…
As
David Anderson reminds us: “Faith is formed by the power of the Holy
Spirit through personal, trusted relationships—often in our own homes….Where
Christ is present in faith, the home is church too.”[2]
Wrapping
our heads and hearts around that notion….inviting a critical mass of our
synod’s congregations to live more deeply into that bracing vision….just might
be the most hopeful and promising thing we could do as a synod over the years
to come.
I
can think of nothing, nothing else that will help us tap into God’s renewing,
refreshing Spirit as much as assisting congregations in helping households pass
on the faith to the next generation of God’s chosen people.
When
I was serving at Our Savior’s in Moorhead, we had some pretty big confirmation
classes come through our congregation’s process of forming young people as
disciples of Jesus. After confirmation
Sunday one of those years, I got a card from one of the young men that
read: “Pastor Larry, thanks for teaching me everything I know about God.”
When
the young man who scrawled those words first gave me that card, my heart was
warmed….for about 15 seconds….
….but
then I said to myself: “Oh no.
This can’t be! He didn’t really
mean that I had taught everything
he knew about God.” I barely knew
the lad, having been with him for such a slender slice of his tender young
life!
Surely,
surely, others had been teaching him about God, proclaiming “the mighty acts of God who called us out of
darkness into his marvelous light.”
Friends,
it will not do to keep thinking that if parents or other caring adults just
drop their kids off at our church buildings for one quick hour each week during
the school year, they will be formed into fervent followers of Jesus, with a
faith they can be at home in, a faith to carry them into the rest of their
lives. It takes more than one hour a
week to accomplish that!
Faithful,
fruitful proclaimers of God’s mighty acts want to get at the other 167 hours in
every child’s, every young person’s week!
If
that thank you note from my former confirmation student eats at me, other
stories give me hope.
I
think of the young dad who told me recently that his oldest son was soon to
become a teenager. “Oh boy--you ready for that?” I asked. “Well,”
the dad responded, “so far, so good. He still won’t go to bed at night unless I
bless him.”
We
can do this. Oops—let me say that
better: God, through us, will do this, even with the
likes of you and me….because Luther got it right: “Whoever
comes out of the water of baptism can boast that he (or she) is already a
consecrated priest, bishop and pope.”
….consecrated—that
is--to do what priests,
bishops and popes and every other person baptized into Christ is called to do: “To proclaim the mighty acts of him who
called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”
In
the name of Jesus. Amen.
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