"The Priesthood of All Believers"
1 Peter 2:4-10
June 21, 1998

V 8. A strong predestinarian note. We struggle with this, but God is God! He works out everything according to the purpose of his will. There is much to this effect in the Bible and it is a sentinel posted around the cross -- we are not our own Savior. What is more, if there must be damnation, I much prefer that it be God's judgment and God's decision and not man's!

Now, most of the time when I compose a sermon from a text I think of myself as reiterating a theme often preached before, going over ground in a somewhat different way that we have traversed before. After all, there are not that many major themes in the Bible and if one preaches through parts of Scripture consecutively, as I do, one is bound to come across the same subjects time and time again. One of the challenges of preaching is to make fresh and relevant subjects that all Christians have heard many times before. What Goethe said is true of the Christian faith as well: "Everything has been thought of before; the trick is to think of it again." One of the main tasks of the preacher is to keep the great truths of the faith alive in the Christian heart by repetition.

But every now and then, I wonder if in preaching the text before us I might in fact be laying before at least some members of the congregation a perspective, a doctrine, a way of looking at the Christian gospel and the Christian life that is really new, if I do not have the opportunity to aid believers before me in the thrill of new discovery, especially the discovery of very important truth that bears mightily on our lives as Christians in this world.

I have that wonder and that hope about this sermon from 1 Pet. 2 on the priesthood of all believers.

Before I set out what I think is the material burden of this chapter, however, I need to clear away a possible misunderstanding.

You hear the phrase "priesthood of all believers" from time to time and, very often, it is used with the understanding that this "priesthood" is a new development in the NT epoch. People speak as if this "priesthood of all believers" should be understood in contrast to the religion of Moses and the prophets, which had priests serving in a temple. Now, not just a few of us, but all of us are priests, so they say.

But that is plainly not the teaching of the Bible -- anywhere! Peter here cites the OT, he cites Exodus, for goodness sake, in referring to the priesthood of all believers. The Lord told Israel that she would be for him a kingdom of priests. By that he meant, not some criticism of the levitical priesthood, but that, provided they remained faithful to his covenant, they would have the holy God for their king and, like priests, would have a specially intimate relationship with Him and a life in which they could serve him.

Whatever is meant by this priesthood, it is not something that began with Pentecost. Nor is it in contrast to the priestly ministry of the OT that existed even while Israel was to be a kingdom of priests. Today we are priests, all of us as Christians, in one sense; but that does not mean there is not such a thing as the Christian ministry, the ministry of the word and sacrament -- which was all the ministry of the priest was in the OT. Whatever the priesthood of all believers means, it does not conflict with, it is not inconsistent with the existence of an office in the church that has special and specific priestly functions. Paul writes in Romans 15 that he was a priest because he was a preacher of the Word of God. The apostles say in Acts 6 that the work of the priests --Word and worship-- had fallen to them in the new church. But there is also a kind of priesthood that all believers share, always have, and do today.

Now, then, on to our text. What you have here in 1 Peter 2:4-10 is a corporate concept of priesthood and of the Christian life. This is the key thing, I think. We are a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, in v. 5. Again, in v. 9, we are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, and a holy nation. We are looked at from this vantagepoint, not as individual believers in our distinctness, but in our wholeness as together we form a people, a priesthood, a nation. Indeed, the individual believers are viewed here as stones, each of which takes his or her place in a house, a temple that is being built. We are significant as building blocks out of all of which, together, when properly arranged, a spiritual house can be built. The house is the great thing; we contribute to that!

We, however, typically think of the priesthood of believers in very individualistic terms. It is our tendency in the Western church. We live in a democratic tradition that has placed all emphasis on the individual. We think of this priesthood, at best, in terms of our own individual access to God, our own obligation to pray, to serve, to worship, our own relationship to Jesus Christ, direct, immediate, intimate. At worst, we think of the priesthood of all believers in terms of each of us being able to decide for himself what he thinks the Bible teaches and what duties it does or does not impose upon him or her. Every man his own minister, his own theologian; so people often think. This last idea is something the Bible never teaches! Even the first idea is not really the Bible's primary idea of the priesthood of all believers, and certainly not the emphasis that falls on this idea here in 1 Pet. 2, as we shall see.

Now, don't mistake me. There is a great deal of emphasis in the Bible placed upon the individual Christian's life and walk with God. The psalms bear witness to the often intensely individual, even private, character of the Christian faith. It remains forever true, in certain respects,

Down to Gehenna and up to the Throne
He travels the fastest who travels alone.

But all of that being said, there is a corporate character to Christian life, a solidarity of the body of Christ, a sense of every believer a part of a community of faith and life that we Western, and, still more, American Christians do not find as easy to assimilate into our thinking.

The modern evangelical thinks about salvation and about becoming a Christian in almost entirely individualistic terms. The convert doesn't hear about the church, about the community of faith, until after he has gone forward at an evangelistic meeting or confessed faith at a retreat or in someone's living room. He may never be told that his Christian life, to be authentic at all, must be the life of someone who lives in the most intimate and structural fellowship with a community of believers like himself and that his great calling as a Christian is to serve the Lord in and through that community. To the extent that the typical evangelical thinks about the church, he thinks of it as an institution that exists to help him in his own, individual walk with God. He does not see the church as his home, his mother, his people, his place of life and work, his family, his calling, his very body, which is the way the church is viewed in the Bible over and over again! He does not think of himself as a stone in the wall of a spiritual house.

You see this is so many ways. Private worship is emphasized over corporate worship. Corporate worship is redefined as a means, an opportunity not for the believers to serve God as one single body, but to reach individual unbelievers. The works of the Christian life are seen largely in individual terms. A greater emphasis falls on the life of the nuclear family than upon the life of the family of God. And the role of the church as making demands upon the time, gifts, and energy of her people is now highly problematic and near to disappearing because such demands seem to interfere with the church's capacity to attract new individuals and minister to them. The church exists for the individual not the individual for the church.

Listen to this contrast. This is how one writer envisions a person coming to Christ in ancient Christianity. Notice how different this sounds, how odd, at least in comparison with our perspective today.

"What? You want to be a Christian? Ah. Well, now -- its an immense business, really. You'll have to turn around and head 180 degrees in the opposite direction. But if you're serious -- and you can mull it over for a while if you wish -- I'll take you to Polycarp, our bishop here, and he will no doubt talk to you and then turn you over to some of the elders in our Christian assembly, and they will take you in hand and instruct you and bring you to our weekly liturgy (you'll have to leave half-way through, though: they won't let you stay for the Lord's Supper); and if, over a period of months, everyone, and most especially Polycarp, is satisfied that you are whole-hearted in your desire to be a Christian, and that you understand all that it will entail, then Polycarp will baptize you at the liturgy, and you will then be a Christian." [Howard, On Being Catholic, 141.]

That isn't perhaps exactly how it was done early on, but it is certainly closer to the practice of the early church than our practice is today. The church loomed over the life of individual Christians. It was the church, in her individual congregations, who shaped their discipleship and formed the context of every part of their Christian lives. No Christian life could conceivably be led apart from the community of faith. There was no Christian life that was not conceived to be a part of that community and contributing to its life and work. It was as clear as crystal that Christians were called into life so that they might be a part of the body of Christ, living stones built up into an entire building, a beautiful temple.

It was a glorious thing to Christians then, and it is in the Bible a glorious thing -- this temple, this spiritual house. You know, everywhere in the world, the most beautiful buildings, the most impressive, are regularly houses of worship, whether Christian or those of some other religion. I make bold to say that among these, the most beautiful and the most impressive are the great Christian churches, the great basilicas and the great cathedrals. These are, themselves, images of what Peter is saying here about the church as a spiritual community. There is nothing like it in all the world: living stones built up into a spiritual house. It sometimes can seem like the church is very little, though even then, it is the apple of God's eye.

But, it often seems very little precisely because it is far too little a thing to Christians themselves. They do not themselves understand their lives in terms of the church, they do not invest their lives in the church, they do not measure their lives according to the health and the prosperity and the fruitfulness and the power and the influence of the church of Jesus Christ.

And that brings us to Peter's great emphasis here. For he sees this spiritual house not as a way-station for travelers, not as a place offering refreshment for pilgrims, not as a domicile where individual families may reside -- though, in a sense it is all those things -- but as a temple, where the praises of God are proclaimed, where God is served, from which his name is proclaimed to the world.

That is what he emphasizes here, whether in v. 5, where he speaks of the spiritual house in which a holy priesthood offers spiritual sacrifices to God -- an image of worship and service of all kinds

-- or in v. 9, where he speaks of this priesthood, declaring the praises of God.

We do not so naturally think of the church as the center of God's work and service. We tend, in our spiritual culture, to think that God's interest terminates on individuals and on families. But the Bible's primary emphasis is otherwise. As we read in Psalm 87:2: "The Lord loves the gates of Zion more than all the dwellings of Jacob."

This is the importance of the term "priesthood" as opposed to an emphasis instead on many individual priests. It is not a denial of our individual roles as Christians, but it is an interest in the work we perform, we accomplish together.

The Lord is not as interested in you as a priest, as he is in you being part of a priesthood. And, as a priesthood, he looks upon the church as the great agent of his work, his cause, his kingdom in the world. He sees what the church may do together, how in her unity, how in her common effort, she may do so much that Christians could never do in and of themselves.

We must recapture that vision, that commitment, that sense of our place and purpose in the world -- the union of believers into a single spiritual house, forming a priesthood in that house for the service of God.

It is not as though we will forget the course of our individual walks with God, or that we will not care about the spiritual condition of our own families at home. Of course we shall. But all of that interest will be taken up into the sense we have, the stronger and stronger sense we have, that God's great purpose in our lives individually and in that of our families, is the part we play, the role we fulfill in the one, great house and priesthood of God.

The American church, our own evangelical church, our own Reformed segment of the evangelical church, has mostly lost this organic, this corporate concept of the Christian faith and life. We do not see our lives as being lived for the church or the church as the focus of our faithfulness to God and the service we render to him.

Here, for example, is Stanley Hauwerwas, the United Methodist ethicist, explaining, in his words, "Why a Friendly, Caring Church is Impotent". [From After Christendom? (Abingdon, 1991)]

"The church seems caught in an irresolvable tension today. Insofar as we are able to maintain any presence in modern society we do so by being communities of care. Pastors become primarily people who care. Any attempt in such a context for the church to be a disciplined and disciplining community seems antithetical to being a community of care. As a result, the care the church gives, while often quite impressive and compassionate, lacks a rationale to build the church as a community capable of standing against the powers we confront. That the church has difficulty being a disciplined community, or even more, cannot conceive what it would mean to be a disciplining community is not surprising given the church's social position... The church exists in a buyer's or consumer's market, so any suggestion that in order to be a member of the church you must be transformed by opening your life to certain kinds of discipline is almost impossible to maintain. The called church has become the voluntary church, whose primary characteristic is that the congregation is friendly... As a result the church has increasingly found it difficult to maintain any kind of discipline that might make it identifiable as a distinct body of people with a mission to perform in the world."

But a distinct body of people with a single mission in the world is surely what we see here in 1 Peter 2 to be the nature and character of the church and, as well, the purpose God has for Christians in the world -- that they should be a part of that house, contribute to its life and work, and, together, in concert with all other believers more powerfully and beautifully proclaim the name and the glory of the living God and Christ his Son to our benighted and dying world.

I confess to you that I have lived too long with too much individualism in my own view of my own Christian life. I have not thought of my life as a stone in the wall of the house of God, of my life and service as part of that of a great priesthood of which I am but one member, one contributor. I have not nearly enough thought of the faithfulness and the fruitfulness of my life in terms of the faithfulness and the fruitfulness of the house of God into which the grace of God has built me. It has not been nearly as true of me as it was of the believers who formed the royal priesthood in long ago days that I should think and say: "If I forget you, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its skill. May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not consider Jerusalem my highest joy." (Ps. 137:5-6) I have been too willing to sing the songs of the Lord while the church mourns in exile in foreign land.

This is a fault and I see that it must be corrected. We must all be much more churchmen and churchwomen than we are, much more conscious of the Lord's house and our being part of that house, and of that house and that priesthood as having a distinct mission and calling and purpose in the world. It is in that house, it is by that priesthood that the Lord's great work will be done in this world. The fruitfulness of our lives will be measured by the fruitfulness of her life. That is what we are taught to believe in the Bible and here in 1 Peter. It has often been the conviction of Christian folk, but sometimes it has not been, and it has not been much their conviction in recent years. Has it been yours? Do you see your life in terms of the house of God, your life and work as a priest as part and parcel of a larger priesthood, your fruitfulness as the fruitfulness of the house and the priesthood of which you are a part in this congregation and the larger church?

That is the key thing. That is, I believe more and more, the need of the hour. That you and I should come to love, as God does, the gates of Zion, more than all the dwellings of Jacob. It is that church that is the body of Jesus Christ and the apple of God's eye, not each of us in isolation. It is us together not apart -- in fellowship, in mutual love and caring, in worship, in witness, in teaching, in works of kindness and service -- it is us together, a spiritual house, that declares the praises of God to the world. It is not enough to be a living stone in a decrepit, unattractive, cold and drafty, unwelcoming, largely useless house. If you a living stone, you care to be placed in the wall of a great house, standing unmoved and immovable in the storms of life, cheerily lit by a roaring fire and the light of beautiful lamps, where those who come are kept warm and well-fed, where the most intensely interesting conversation may be found, where many come to find life and peace and love, and where the atmosphere glistens with the glory of God. No stone can make that so; only many stones together!