Just in case anyone is interested, here’s the longer version of my sermon notes from this morning’ Metro Christian Centre, Bury and Whitefield, Zoom meeting (7th Feb 2021):
AN IMPORTANT TRIO:
Over the past few weeks we’ve been unpacking our church mission statement, ‘Jesus at the centre’, and exploring what that means in the arena of our lives, our church, and our community. Over the next two weeks I’m going to look at the fourth and final facet: Our World.
To help me with that, I’m going to introduce you to a triangle (don’t panic! We’re not having a geometry class). There’s an important trio of relationship that recurs within the Scriptures. Sometimes it’s obvious, sometimes it’s not. But it’s always there, in the background of the narratives that we read within the Old and New Testaments.
Sometimes the trio looks like this: God—Adam and Eve—Garden.
Other times it’s this: God—Abram and Sarah—Canaan
Or this: God—Israel—Promised Land
All of these pictures are small-scale, symbolic signposts of a larger, all-encompassing trio of relationship: God—Humanity—Creation
Or to put that another way: Divinity—Society—Ecology
If you exist, then you are inescapably partnered to Divinity, Society and Ecology. The kind of people we are becoming is shaped by our understanding and connection to these things. And, at the risk of making an over-generalisation, every worldview that exists stems from the importance we give to each part of this trio.
For example, an atheist view of the world would drop God out of the equation. It would just be a matter of People and the World. Despite being a Christian, a part of me is actually sympathetic to this—god-talk can be a dangerous thing in human hands, and there are many gods I’d like to see the back of (the gods of war, greed, power, wealth, fame, etc., being among them). I’m sympathetic to rejecting ‘god’, because god has often been expressed as a god of war and brutality, wealth and fortune, apathy and favouritism. Some people have found such a deity, and its followers, intolerable and understandably ugly, tyrannical and terrifying. God has, we must admit, been used as an excuse for much violence and oppression in our world’s history.[i] So it has often been thought, that if we cut God out of the picture, and if, as Friedrich Nietzsche declared in the 19th century, ‘God is Dead’, then wars will cease, greed and oppression would disappear, and life would be dramatically improved, because humanity is better off without God.
That experiment has ran for a couple of centuries now, so I’ll let you draw your own conclusions from the results.
The thing is, atheism never really happens in practice. It often just involves dropping the religious language and rites, but the gods of war and wealth and power etc., are still there, and we still, en masse, display our allegiance to their creeds and demands—and Christians aren’t immune to this!
Some people, even some Christians, would wrongly like to drop the Creation (Ecology) part of the equation. And so faith becomes ‘escapist’ in its nature. What I mean by that, is that for them, religion is all about souls and not bodies and not nature—for them, the world (and the cosmos) is just a disposable prop, something God doesn’t care about, something that is just temporary. Scripture would say otherwise, though. Creation is as much of God’s plan as humanity—it’s something God has formed, something God loves and has declared as good and as sacred space, something God is liberating and restoring. As Paul writes in Romans 8: 21, ‘All creation anticipates the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay.’ (NLT) (We will look into this more next week, and we’ll pick up a bit of the Hebrew language when we do).
Some people, again, including some Christians, would want to take the humanity part of that equation and trim it down to just themselves, so all that is left is ‘ME’ and God (from a religious point of view), or just ‘ME’ (from an atheist perspective). Sometimes that ME is widened into a sort of US. And so what results is a private and tribal version of life—one that is very self-centred, or us-centred, and that often sets itself over and against anybody else, because all that matters, or what matters most, is ME and MINE. When such a view infects a life of faith, then God often gets treated like an idol, a team mascot for our desires, our dreams, our whims. In such a view, God often looks likes us, acts like us, and even has the same enemies as we do. We should be deeply suspicious of such a faith, but it is very popular.
Divinity—Society—Ecology
Whenever we neglect or distort an element of this triangle, our view of reality shifts, and inevitably something goes awry: Greed, war, racism, sexism, consumerism, oppression, abuse, poverty, objectification, neglect of our ecology, apathy towards our neighbour and the proliferation of a world full of enmity.
What has this trio got to do with the theme of Christ at the Centre of Our World—well, everything.
Our World should be understood in the sense of these two, interconnected parts: Society and Ecology (Humanity and Creation). And through Christ, God has launched a restoration project for our world—for both human society and the ecology of our planet—and we’ve been invited by God to participate in that restoration. We are called to be a part of God’s Kingdom.
Jesus is the cornerstone of that restoration—Christ is already at the centre. The vocation God is calling us to adopt is to recognise and work out from that centre, and be an expression of the reign of Jesus into our society and our ecology.
I’m going to use two Bible images to define what this looks like: Priests and Stewards. They aren’t the only images available to us, of course, and actually, there is a huge overlap between these two definitions. They’re not in competition with each other, they complement each other. In other words, you can’t say at the end of this that I’m more of a steward than a priest or vice-versa. Both pictures, in their own ways, get to the root of our corporate call to be human.
The reason I’ve picked these two images is because neither of them are about our own personal gifting! We may be tempted to shrug them off by appealing to what we’re good and what we’re not so good at. Some us may want to say, ‘I’m not a priest, because I’m more of an evangelist’, or ‘I’m not a steward, because I am more of a dancer’, etc.
None of us are exempt from these categories. To be human, is to be a priest and a steward: to bear the image of God, to participate in filling the world with the knowledge of God. Both these words are about incarnating (fleshing out) the presence of God in our world.
So this morning, I’m going to look at us being Priests in relation to our Society, and next week (hopefully) we’ll look at being Stewards in relation to our Ecology.
READ: 1 PETER 2: 1-10
A NEW IDENTITY (NOT US OR THEM)
For those of you who want to read 1 Peter later, or who are familiar with it, you’ll notice that within the first couple of chapters Peter is fixated with identity. Peter is writing to the church in Rome, who are going through turmoil, and he feels this urge to remind them of who they are.
I’m not going to explain the nature of that turmoil—there are numerous possibilities. But whatever its nature, this turmoil stems from the church’s relationship to the wider society around it. And so Peter’s reminder about identity is crucial, because if the church forgets its identity then it’s going to respond in the wrong way to any suffering its experiencing, or any dissonance it feels within the world at large.
Our identity is important. How we define who we are, what has made us who we are, and what we’re about matter to us—especially when it comes to group identity. For some, our group identity stems from our shared DNA, or shared heritage, or that we have the same ethnicity, or language, or that we like the same music, films, TV shows, food, or that we support the same football team.
Now none of these are bad things. We should celebrate our heritage, ethnicity, language, and, depending which team you support, your football team. Our differences matter, and they are beautiful!
The problems begin, however, when our group identity flows from the wrong things. And even when it flows from good things, if it’s not monitored, it can express itself in some ugly ways. Sometimes, groups are formed by a common hatred of others, or a common fear and suspicion of others. Regrettably, our shared identity can cause us to scapegoat, demonize and persecute those who are not like us. And sadly, there are people who love nothing more than to play on that fear and hate, or on any kind of difference, in order to turn people against one another, whilst increasing their own popularity and agenda in the process. Sadly violence, oppression and alienation exist in our societies—some of our societies are built on those things.
Our identity is a good thing. But we have a knack of twisting it to endorse an US versus THEM lifestyle. Even little, unimportant things cause us to be a curse to others.
I bought a football hoodie two years ago; a Tottenham Hotspur hoodie. To be clear, I don’t support Tottenham, I don’t follow football, and, if I’m honest, I didn’t know it was a Tottenham hoodie when I bought it. But once I found out what it was, I decided I’d run a social experiment: I would continue to wear this hoodie and see what reaction it would get.
It was a revealing experiment. Some responses were comical, people would jokingly say, ‘you don’t support them, do you?’ But there were a few ugly encounters. Nothing violent, but, and I kid you not, there was a time when I was stood beside someone in a store, when they noticed the logo on my clothing and purposely moved a few feet away from me!
We can laugh at that. But our world is full of uglier expressions caused by the misuse of our identity. The human ability to curse one another has produced war, genocide, fratricide, infanticide, segregation, injustice, poverty… the list goes on.
It’s certainly not the entire picture, we humans can be better than that, and we do put our identity to more fruitful purposes. But sadly, when we look at some things that happen, it seems that we love to hate, and that US versus THEM is a popular way to live. It seems that we struggle with being a blessing to others, whilst being a curse seems to come naturally.
The thing is, what do we do when we are different to the world around us? And what do we do when that difference means that we’re on the receiving end of hate? Our response can often be either to withdraw or to hate back. But both responses are the wrong response. And that is one of the reasons Peter is writing this letter, and why he’s recalling the memory of who we are, ‘You are a chosen people. You are a kingdom of priests, God’s holy nation, his very own possession.’ (1 Peter 2:9a NLT).
At first glance, this may look like it could be used to add to the US versus THEM dynamic, but, not only with what Peter says in the rest of this verse, but the use of these particular words in themselves, undermines the whole US versus THEM enterprise.
Peter is echoing some very foundational words here. They’ve been plucked, almost word for word, from Exodus 19:6. In Exodus 19, the people of Israel have arrived at Sinai, after leaving the bondage of Egypt. Moses climbs the mountain to meet with God, and God instructs Moses to give these words to Israel: that they would be God’s kingdom of priests, God’s holy nation.
This Sinai moment is the birthing point of Israel as a national identity. But their group identity doesn’t come from a shared ethnicity—there is actually a mixture of nationalities present in this group of people. What makes them a nation is their shared experience of God’s redemption—of God bringing them out of their darkness and bondage in Egypt. They are a new nation—one that is different from the other nations. But they are not called to be in competition, or to be over and against the other nations of the world. God has not only called them out of Egypt, but calling them to be unlike Egypt. God’s intent for this nation is to fulfil a promise that was made much earlier to Abram, in Genesis 12:3; that God would cause this nation to be a blessing to all the nations, not a curse to them. They are different. They are separate—Holy. But being holy is not a case of being separated from the world; it’s more that they are separated to God’s passion for the nations of the world.
In other words, this nation is not to play by the US versus THEM rules. Their vocation is an US for THEM way of life. Or as Peter’s commentary on this Exodus experience puts it, in the rest of 1 Peter 2:9, they are called ‘to show others the goodness of God.’ And Peter wants the church to grasp this identity and vocation, too. The church then, just as it is now, was made up of a great variety of people—their group identity didn’t derive from any shared ethnicity or language; it came from this shared experience of God’s rescue. But now they are experiencing problems, and there’s understandably a temptation to break away from society altogether, on one side, or to retaliate and get even, on the other side.
There’s this temptation to fall into this US or THEM trap and to allow that way of living to distort the church’s relationship with society. And so Peter reminds them, among other things, that they are called to be priests; that they are called to be a part of society. As one author put it, they are to be ‘Resident Aliens’ (Stanley Hauerwas).
It should go without saying, but the church cannot exist without a society to exist within. It’s like saying you’re a Tottenham fan, but you don’t actually have any interest in football.[ii]
Our call is not to abandon and withdraw from society, nor is it to be hostile with society—we are to incarnate the goodness of God within our societies. To exhibit the centrality of Christ in our world isn’t about cursing others, but blessing them. We put away malice, jealousy and slander (1 Peter 2:1)—things that generate a lot of hostility in our world, and instead, by the power of God’s Spirit, we are to be a soothing balm to a world full of violence, oppression and alienation. Ministering life to the world. Loving the world. Serving the world. Suffering with the world. Mourning with the world. There should be something about our presence in the world that enhances the beauty and experience of life; so that the rest of society can taste this difference and be enlivened, refreshed and awakened to the sacred goodness of God. Or as Revelation 22:2 poetically paints it, we are leaves from the Tree of life sent out for the healing of the nations.
This cannot be some privatised idea of religion. It can never be just me and God (or us and God). Priesthood always involves others. In many ways, we could describe a priestly life as one that is both immersed in God and immersed in humanity, for the sake of humanity. We could, even, describe this life, as being a life of peace-making (Matt 5:9)—we don’t contribute to the fractures of society, we minister into them. We are to exhibit that all human life is sacred. As St. Francis of Assisi beautifully put it: ‘We have been called to heal wounds, to unite what has fallen apart, and to bring home those who have lost their way.’[iii]
Like Israel, though, we need help in knowing what that looks like. In Israel’s case, within this kingdom of priests, there is also a tribe of priests, who were called to model this life before the people, so the people can model before the rest of the world. And within those priests, there was a High priest, who would encounter God and image God before the tribe of priests, who in turn would exhibit that life towards the kingdom of priests, who would then express that to the world.
If we want to know how this looks, then we have only to turn our eyes to our perfect high priest—Jesus. Jesus lived a life immersed in God and humanity.
IMMERSIVE LIFE
It’s maybe something that we don’t give much notice to, but Jesus never added to any cultural or political rhetoric of hate.
Jesus never used racial, xenophobic, sexist, or ageist bigotry to draw people around him and his cause. Jesus never once exploited or propagated people’s paranoia of ‘the other’ to manipulate any decision or action. Jesus never used hate to increase his opinion polls. Instead, Jesus called people to love one another; to love all others. And, in a way that shouldn’t surprise us, some people hated this. To an extent, it was Jesus’ refusal to scapegoat, demonise or exclude that contributed to Jesus being scapegoated, demonised and excluded.
Some people think that loving others, blessing others, being a priest, is sloppy, sentimental and easy going—but it’s risky. Radical love could cost you your life, because you’re going to clash with the powers and principalities of our world. There are voices in our society, and even within the church, who promote hate and fear towards others (maybe because their own identity is callously defined by a shared hatred of others).
But in the face of such hate, we’re called to practise justice, mercy, generosity, grace, forgiveness, speaking truth to power, and love. Or, to lean on what Paul writes in Galatians, instead of being people of hostility, bitterness, envy, selfish ambition and quarrelling divisions, we are to be known within our society by the Spirit’s fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness and self-control (Galatians 5:19-21).[iv] Living like this will disrupt the greedy, prejudiced and maligned systems in our world—it will frustrate those who promote prejudice and oppression. To some, we’ll be a fragrance of life and liberation; to those who promote and profit from enmity, we’ll stink of death, to paraphrase the Apostle Paul (2 Corinthians 2:15-16). Either way, both these aromas emanate from our work of healing the divisions of this world, not perpetuating them.
I find it fascinating that after Jesus tells us that we are to love our enemies, he then adds that ‘You must be compassionate, just as your father is compassionate.’ (Luke 6:36). I find Jesus’ choice of expression revealing. It’s the rhythm he uses… ‘You must be ___ as your Father is ___.’
There’s a famous phrase in the Old Testament that gets to the heart of what priesthood is—you can find it in Leviticus 11:44 & 45, 19:2 and 20:7, 26 [and Peter, in his letter, has already made reference to it (see 1 Peter 1:16)]. The phrase is this, ‘You must be Holy, as I am Holy.’
Do you notice the rhythm there? It’s the rhythm Jesus adopts. Jesus, in his famous Sermon on the Plain, is echoing this famous summary of what it means to be God’s kingdom of priests. And just in case we get the wrong ideas about what it means to be holy—before we wrongly withdraw from others or start bashing others—Jesus plays with the wording and offers a commentary on it: Jesus equates God’s compassion to God’s holiness. (Peter was obviously a good student, and got this, too).
As I said earlier, to be holy is to be separated to God’s compassion for the world. We are to embody divine love.
The Dutch Priest and writer, Henri Nouwen, described compassion as this: ‘Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in the brokenness, fear, confusion and anguish [of others]. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.’[v]
That’s not just a fantastic description of compassion—it’s also a beautiful reminder of what God’s incarnate love for the world actually looked like. God with the abandoned. God with the powerless. God weeping with those who wept. God ministering to the broken and wounded. God liberating captives. God freeing the downtrodden from their oppressors. God sat around tables, sharing food and drink with people from all walks of life. God fully immersed in being human. God’s goodness meeting humanity.
What does it mean to be a priest, what does it mean to have Christ at the centre of our engagement with the world; it means to repent of hate and to incarnate the compassion of God into a society that is hurting, and divided, and that is deeply in need of love.
[i] I believe God is much more beautiful than this, and that the God of Calvary, the crucified saviour, expresses a God who is self-emptying, humble, and sympathetic towards humanity—a God who acts to save us from our allegiances to the gods of war and power and death, etc.
[ii] We cannot reach the world if we resist being part of it—we cannot claim that God loves the world whilst we distance ourselves from it and refuse to develop genuine, long term, authentic relationships with the people who form our society. Without authentic relationship, we’re just noise. Priesthood involves dwelling with others—as God in Christ dwelt with us, like God in the Tabernacle dwelt with Israel. We could reduce our involvement to just speaking to people—but that’s a cop-out of our calling, as we refusing to make ourselves vulnerably incarnate with others by entering into relationship. Additionally, there are plenty of noise makers in our society—who just talk at people, bombarding them with information and demands. It is blatantly clear that these people have no genuine care or compassion for those they are speaking to.
[iii] This saying is attributed to St. Francis within the early Franciscan text The Legend of the Three Companions, paragraph 58, circa 13c.
[iv] For other great practical lists that define our difference, see also Isaiah 58:6-8, Romans 12, and Luke 4:16-19.
[v] Henri Nouwen, Show me the Way: Readings for Each Day of Lent (Crossroad Publishing, 1994).
TRISTAN SHERWIN 
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