I: -- What
comes to mind as soon as you hear the word “Protestant”? Many
people have told me that they think first of protest; we
Protestants engendered a protest movement, and we’ve never moved
beyond a protest mentality. We
exist only as we criticise someone else.
If
this were the case, then Protestantism would be inherently
parasitic. Parasites
are creatures that can’t live on their own; they have to latch
onto another creature and draw their sustenance from it. Protestants,
if protesters by definition, would forever need something to
protest against or else we couldn’t survive. Protestants,
if protesters by definition, would always know what they are against but
likely wouldn’t know, if they even cared, what they are for. Protestants,
if protesters by definition, would be incurable contrarians;
ornery curmudgeons, chronic nay-sayers and fault-finders.
The
truth is, the Latin word (you’ve heard me say before that Latin
is the language of the Reformation) protestare is
entirely positive. Protestare means
to affirm, to assert, to declare, to testify, to proclaim. The
Reformation didn’t begin negatively as a protest movement. It
began positively as an announcement, a declaration, an
affirmation, a witness. There
was nothing parasitic about the Reformation in the Sixteenth
Century and there is nothing parasitic about the Protestant
ethos now.
If protestare means
to affirm, declare, testify, what are we declaring? To
what do we bear witness?
II: -- The
Reformers upheld the priority of grace in all the ways and works
of God; the priority of grace in God’s approach to us and God’s
activity within us. The
Reformers maintained that over the centuries the priority of
grace had become obscured as the silt of theological error
gradually covered up what ought always to be at the forefront of
Christian faith, understanding and discipleship.
If
people today are asked what they understand by “grace”, most of
them will say “God’s unmerited favour.” They
aren’t wrong. But
what they’ve said is more a description than a definition. Grace,
according to scripture, is God’s faithfulness; specifically,
God’s faithfulness to his covenant with us; God’s faithfulness
to his promise never to fail us or forsake us, never to abandon
us in frustration or quit on us in disgust.
God
keeps the covenant-promise he makes to us. We,
however, violate the covenant-promise – always and everywhere to
be his people – we make to him. We
are sinners. When
God’s faithfulness meets our sin, his faithfulness takes the
form of mercy. In
our reading of the apostle Paul’s letters we can’t fail to
notice how often he begins the letter by stating “Grace, mercy
and peace to you.” Grace,
as we’ve noted already, is God’s covenant faithfulness. Mercy
is God’s covenant faithfulness meeting our sin and overcoming it
as God forgives us our sin and delivers us from it. Mercy,
then, is God’s covenant faithfulness relieving us of sin’s guilt
and releasing us from sin’s grip. Peace
– here’s where you have pay close attention – is not peace
of mind or peace in our heart (at least not in the first
instance). Peace
here isshalom. Paul
is a Jew, and when he speaks of peace he has in mind the Hebrew
understanding of shalom. Shalom is
God’s restoration of his people. Shalom,
peace, then, is simply salvation.
Crucial
to the Reformation was a biblical understanding of how all this
occurs. According to
scripture, God expects us to honour our covenant with him. He
looks everywhere in the human creation, only to discover that he
can’t find one, single human being who fulfils his or her
covenant with God. Whereupon
God says to himself, “If humankind’s covenant with me is going
to be humanly fulfilled (only a human, after all, can fulfil
humankind’s covenant with God), then I’ll have to do it
myself.” And so we
have the Christmas story as God comes among us in Jesus of
Nazareth. This is
the Incarnation. And
then we have the Good Friday story (“God’s Friday”, our
mediaeval foreparents called it) where Jesus renders that
uttermost human obedience which you and I don’t render; renders
that uttermost human obedience which turns out to be obedience
even unto death. And
this human obedience unto death, thanks to the Incarnation, is
God himself taking upon himself his own just judgement on
sinners. This is the
atonement.
In
the Incarnation and the atonement the covenant is fulfilled. Jesus
Christ is the covenant-keeper. You
and I, sinners, are covenant-breakers. Then
by faith we must cling to Jesus Christ our covenant-keeper. As
we cling to him in faith we are so tightly fused to him that
when the Father looks upon the Son with whom he is ever pleased,
the Father sees you and me included in the Son. Covenant-breakers
in ourselves, by faith we cling to the covenant-keeper
with whom we are now identified before God. And
that is our salvation.
Salvation
is by grace alone,
since God has graciously given his Son to be the covenant-keeper
on our behalf. Salvation
is by faith alone,
since all we need do, all we can do, is embrace the Son who has
already embraced us. Salvation
is on account of
Christ alone, since Jesus Christ is both God’s mercy pressed
upon us and human obedience offered to the Father.
To affirm that salvation is by grace alone,
through faith alone,
on account of Christ alone is
to deny all forms of merit.
(i) It
is to deny all forms of moral merit. Our
salvation doesn’t arise because we are morally superior to
others and therefore have a claim before God which they
haven’t. Here we
should recall the parable of the two men who go to the temple to
pray, one a despicable creature as crooked as a dog’s hind leg,
without a moral bone in his body; the other a paragon of
virtue. The moral
champion boasts before God of all his moral achievements, none
of which is to be doubted. The
creep, on the other hand, can only cry “God be merciful to me a
sinner.” Jesus tells
us that it’s the latter fellow, the one with nothing to plead
except God’s mercy – this man goes home “justified” says Jesus,
where “justified” means “rightly related to God.
(ii) It
is also to deny all forms of religious merit. Our
salvation doesn’t arise – neither is it aided – by religious
observances of greater or less rigour or notoriety, as if God’s
purpose were to render us hyper-religious, what psychiatrists
call homo
religiosus.
(iii) It
is also to deny all forms of institutional merit. Our
salvation doesn’t occur because we have conformed to churchly
edicts or traditions or prescriptions.
To
affirm with the Reformers that salvation is by grace alone
through faith alone on account of Christ alone is to recover
essential truth that had gradually become silted over as century
followed century. “Nothing
in my hand I bring” cries the hymn writer; “nothing –
simply to thy cross I cling.”
When
this gospel truth was declared people gloried in their new-found
freedom. They were
freed from any and all forms of trying to placate God or curry
favour with him or impress him or bribe him. They
were freed from anxiously asking themselves “Have I done
enough? How will I ever know if I’ve done enough? Is my ‘enough’ good enough?” They
gloried in the fact that in Jesus Christ God had
done what needed to be done. Not
only had God kept his covenant with humankind, in his Incarnate
Son he had also kept humankind’s covenant
with God. Now men
and women needed only to own it in faith, thank him for it,
glory in the relief it brought them and the release they could
enjoy forever. Their
guilt, their anxiety, their guessing games, their insecurity –
it was gone. They
gloried in the freedom that God’s grace had brought them.
Either
we uphold the priority of God’s grace in all his ways and works
upon us and within us, or we uphold a meritocracy of some sort,
whether moral or religious or institutional, wherein we think we
have to earn God’s favour, only to be left assuming that we have earned
it (and now are insufferably self-righteous); or we are left
assuming that we haven’t earned
it (and now are inconsolably despairing.)
Grace,
mercy, peace (shalom). The
priority of grace means that God’s loving faithfulness will see
his people through their disobedience, through their
covenant-breaking. The
priority of grace means that God has pledged himself to see his
people saved by his free grace for the sake of their glorious
freedom before him.
III: -- The
priority of grace, continued the Reformers, entails “the
priesthood of all believers.” Protestants
have always been quick to speak of “the priesthood of all
believers.”
I’ve
been asked more than once, “If everyone’s a priest, then what’s
the meaning of ordination? Is
there any place in the Protestant understanding for an ordained
ministry?” Plainly
there is. Before we
probe what’s meant by “the priesthood of all believers”, then,
we should understand the place of ordained ministry.
The
ordained minister doesn’t have powers, spiritual powers, that
unordained Christians lack. To
be sure, denominations customarily prescribe that it is the
clergy alone who preside when Holy Communion is administered in
congregational worship. We
must understand, however, that this is simply to maintain
order. It isn’t the
case that the clergy alone preside because the sacrament will
“work” if they administer it but it won’t work if a lay
personadministers it. It
“works” ultimately (i.e., it is a vehicle of Christ’s cementing
himself even more firmly into the believer’s life) just because Christ has
pledged to give himself afresh to us, unfailingly,
every time Holy Communion is administered (i.e., Christ
invariably keeps the promises he makes), regardless of who
administers it. The
ordained minister doesn’t have powers that others lack.
The
ordained minister does have, however, a responsibility that
others don’t have. Specifically,
the ordained minister is essential to the church in that
someone, by vocation, aptitude and study – someone has to ensure
that the congregation’s understanding of Jesus Christ doesn’t
drift away from that of the apostles.
The
apostles are the normative witnesses to Jesus Christ. While
Christ is different from James and John and Peter – that is,
Christ is person in his own right and can never be reduced to
the apostles – hearing and obeying Christ himself always takes
the form of
hearing and obeying the witness of James and John and Peter. In
other words, we honour Jesus Christ only by honouring the
normative witnesses to him. We
receive him only
insofar as we receive them. It
is the responsibility of the ordained minister to see to it that
the congregation doesn’t drift from the apostolic understanding
of our Lord, but rather in all aspects of individual faith and
congregational life the congregation conforms to the apostolic
pattern of believing upon Jesus and obeying him.
Make
no mistake. Left to
itself – that is, in the absence of the ordained minister – a
congregation will always drift. First
of all it drifts by retaining biblical words but filling them
with non-biblical meanings. Drift
is underway when the word “sin” is equated with immorality. (No
one reading this article is likely flagrantly immoral or
criminal, yet everyone is sinner through-and-through.) Drift
has occurred when the word “faith” is thought to mean “feeling
optimistic in general.” Drift
has occurred when the word “God” comes to mean “there is a
cosmic power in the universe that’s greater than any one of us
or all of us put together.”
The
next stage of drift is substituting the Reader’s
Digest for
scripture at worship; the singing of such theological nonsense
as “God is watching from a distance” instead of hymns that speak
of the Holy One of Israel. (Characteristically
the God of scripture acts,
and speaks so
as to interpret the meaning of what he has done on behalf of us
whom his salfivic action has made his beneficiaries.) Or
think of the ‘cutesy’ communion services where grapes are
substituted for wine as each communicant plucks a grape and eats
if instead of drinking from the cup. Grapes
are what God makes; wine is what we make. Everything
we make is sin-riddled, and yet God’s grace gloriously renders
our sin-riddled offering to God the vehicle of his mercy wherein
our sin is pardoned. Left
to itself a congregation always drifts and will continue to
drift until it has turned 180 degrees away from the gospel
without knowing it, thereafter insisting its anti-gospel to be
the gospel.
Ordained
ministry is essential to the church just because someone by
vocation, aptitude, study and ecclesial appointment has to
ensure that the congregation doesn’t drift away from what the
apostle Jude calls “the faith once for all delivered to the
saints.”
Then what is meant by the “the priesthood of
all believers”? In
the Older Testament, priests are those engaged in the service of
God, specifically in an intercessory service. “Priesthood of all
believers” means that any Christian
may engage in an intercessory service on behalf of his or her
fellow-Christian.
Think
of the matter of confession of sin. In
one of his treatises Luther maintained that there are several
forms of confession. One
is what we do here Sunday by Sunday: as part of public worship
the minister gathers up the people’s confession of sin and
voices it before God, even as in the name of Jesus Christ the
minister pronounces absolution (pardon, forgiveness) for the
people. This is a
public, liturgical form of confession. Then,
said Luther, there’s a private form. Someone
visits the clergyman, unburdens herself concerning the sin she
can no longer deny, and awaits the pastor’s pronouncement of
absolution or pardon. There’s
one more form, says Luther: any Christian at all may hear a
fellow-Christian’s confession of sin and pronounce absolution in
the name of Christ.
We
must clear about this matter. We
are not dealing with psychotherapy, or at least not dealing with
psychotherapy in the first instance. We
are dealing with something profounder than that, a spiritual
matter of ultimate significance. The
Reformers were convinced that since the Church is defined as the
people of God rather than in terms of clergy function or clergy
hierarchy; since the Church is the people of God then the people
of God can hear each other’s confession and pronounce God’s
pardon in the name of Christ.
This
is not a devaluation of the ordained ministry. It
is rather the elevation of God’s people.
The
mother who overhears her child’s prayers at night and who
listens to her child’s tearful apology during the day is engaged
in a priestly activity. The
board member who offers counsel to the fellow-board member who
is too embarrassed to speak with the minister is engaged in a
priestly service. Jean
Vanier, the Canadian born to the aristocracy who has given
himself to disadvantaged folk, especially men who are severely
intellectually challenged; Vanier also spends much time visiting
the impoverished, the sick, the confused, the forgotten
geriatric patient in the back ward of a substandard facility. Vanier
says that frequently he comes upon someone whose mental or
bodily distress is overwhelming. All
he can do, he tells us, is put his hand on the sufferer’s head
(a scriptural sign of intercession) and say “Jesus.” This
too is priestly service.
Another
dimension to “priesthood of all believers”: any Christian’s
daily work, done as under the scrutiny of God, done with
integrity, done conscientiously, done so as to give full value
for compensation received; any Christian’s daily work, done so
as to please God, has the same spiritual significance as the
work of clergyman, monk, or nun.
I
wince whenever I hear it said of someone offering herself for
ordained ministry, “She has decided to enter fulltime Christian
service.” Full
time? What about the
homemaker? Is she
engaged in part time service? Which
part of the homemaker’s day is “Christian”? God
is honoured by the labourer who renders a day’s work for a day’s
pay. God isn’t
honoured by the clergyman who waits until the Saturday night
hockey game is over before starting to think about what he’s
going to say Sunday morning.
“Priesthood
of all believers” means there are no higher callings and no
lower callings. There
is no double standard of discipleship for ordained and
non-ordained. There
is only the integrity in the workplace that is to characterize
whatever we do for a living. There
is only the service we can render on behalf of a needy neighbour
whose suffering is undeniable. There
is only the word and truth, pardon and patience of Jesus Christ
that all Christians are privileged to mirror to each other,
since all of us are to be icons of our Lord to our
fellow-believers.
The title of today’s sermon is Ecclesia
Reformata et Semper Reformanda Secundum Verbum Dei –
the Church reformed and always being reformed in accordance with
the Word of God, the gospel. The
truth is, no church, Protestant, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, can
coast. All churches,
all denominations, all congregations become silted over with
accretion after accretion that may look like the gospel but in
fact has nothing to do with the gospel; silted over, that is,
until the gospel is obscured – unless – unless such congregation
or such denomination is being constantly reformed in accordance
with the gospel.
