The Dance of the Trinity

A sermon for Trinity Sunday, 30th June 2021

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

Listen to this sermon here: 

Genesis 1.26-2:4a
 Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth."
 ²⁷ So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
 ²⁸ God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."
 ²⁹ God said, "See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food.
 ³⁰ And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food." And it was so.
 ³¹ God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
2:1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude.
 ² And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done.
 ³ So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.
 ⁴ These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.
 
2 Corinthians 13.11-13
 Finally, brothers and sisters, farewell. Put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you.
 ¹² Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints greet you.
 ¹³ The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.

 
John Donne once famously claimed
            that no-one is an island;
and in a seventeenth century metaphorical precursor to the Brexit debate,
            went on to suggest that Europe is the less,
                        if even one clod of earth be washed away,
            let alone an island or promontory.
 
His famous sonnet concluded that any person’s death diminished him,
            because he is involved in humankind.
 
More recently, in the context of rebuilding relationships in South Africa
            in the wake of the abolition of apartheid,
Desmond Tutu spoke of the African concept of Ubuntu:
            the idea that we are all interconnected through our common humanity.
 
And every once in a while, in the course of our lives,
            there come along those defining moments,
            which bring home to us once again
                        the truth that life is not something
                        that can ever be truly lived in isolation.
 
            It is these defining moments
                        which remind us of the fact
                        that we are created to be in relationship
 
These defining moments tend to be times
            of great happiness, of great joy
 
Think about the birth of a new child…
            - something which, by it’s very nature,
            necessitates the involvement of at least three people:
                        There has to be a mother,
                        There has to be a child,
                        and there has to have been a father involved
                                    at least biologically speaking, somewhere along the line
 
Of course, normally the birth of a child
            involves far more than three people:
there are all the extended family,
            grandparents, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts
            - all of whose lives are affected by the new arrival.
 
And then there are all the friends of the family
            - a network which can spread far and wide,
            spanning many countries.
 
So many people with a stake in the birth of one new child,
            all concerned for the family’s wellbeing,
            all caught up in the gift of new life.
 
And what about a wedding?
            the marriage of two people
            - binding themselves to each other
                        to create a new relationship.
 
My own wedding was nearly three decades ago,
            but I can still remember the build-up to it
            as if it was only yesterday.
 
In theory, of course, a wedding can be reduced down
            to the couple, the witnesses, and the registrar,
But even at this minimal level
            it is in essence still a community event.
 
After all, two people making promises to each other
            on their own in the privacy of their own home
            is not actually a wedding.
 
However, casting my mind back,
            I seem to remember that our wedding
                        went rather to the opposite extreme
            - with so many different people wanting a stake in the special day.
 
Our respective (and respected) parents
            had very different ideas to both each other and to us
            about what the wedding should be like,
and the negotiations we had to enter into
            would have been a test for any professional diplomat.
 
So much so that, on occasions, we started to wonder
            whose wedding it really was?
 
But actually, I think the answer to that question is important,
            because a wedding is not solely the property of the couple.
 
A wedding is always a community event,
            with the newly married couple
            taking their place in society, in a new way.
 
And so births and weddings
            point us to a universal truth,
which is that that life can never be truly lived
            apart from relationships with others.
 
But of course, sometimes it’s the sadnesses in life
            which remind us of our need of one another.
 
This last year of pandemic has been a time when many have faced grief and loss,
            and have often had to do so in isolation from the communities of support
            which normally rally around at such times.
 
And it seems to me that there is no escaping it
            - life, in both good times and bad
            involves, demands, relationships with other people
                        if it is going to be life in all its fullness.
 
A life lived in perpetual isolation
            with no participation in relationship,
is a life which, in a significant way, never truly finds completion.
 
Of course, not everyone’s life path includes marriage,
            and not everyone has to have children.
 
But we do all need other people.
 
Simply by virtue of being human,
            of being who we are created to be,
we exist and define ourselves
            through relationship with, and in relation to, others.
 
The passage we read earlier from Genesis
            represents an Israelite attempt from the time of the Babylonian Exile,
at understanding the world,
            and its relationship with the God who made it.
 
Let’s listen again to how this creation story
            seeks to express the relationship between God and humanity:
 
    [26] Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness…"
    [27] So God created humankind in his image,
        in the image of God he created them;
        male and female he created them.
 
The amazing thing about these verses
            is that God uses the self-referential plural:
God speaks of “us” and “our”, not ‘me’ and ‘my’.
 
And it is clear from this
            that the relational aspect of humanity
            - that part of us which needs another to be complete,
was seen by the Israelites
            as being a reflection of the relationship which exists
            within the very being of God.
 
And just as God was understood as existing in an eternal state of relationship,
            so too humanity was seen as having been created
            to exist in relationship.
 
And it is this ancient insight,
            that both God and humanity
            are relational in their very essence,
which finds its expression in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.
 
The Old Testament has a number of other places,
            apart from the reference in Genesis which we’ve just looked at,
where it hints at the fact that the ancient Israelites
            understood their God as existing in relationship
            (Gen. 1:1,2,26; 3:22; 6:3; 11:6,7; 20:13; 48:15; Is. 6:8).
 
And this understanding found its way from the Hebrew Bible
                        into the Christian tradition,
            as the followers of Jesus
                        attempted to understand the implications
            of their experience of Jesus as God on earth,
                        and their experience of the Holy Spirit
                        as the power of God with them.
 
And so Christians speak of the Trinity
            - of God existing in three persons: Parent, Son, and Spirit.
we have an understanding of a Trinitarian God
            existing in eternal relationship.
 
Today is the day in the Christian year
            known as Trinity Sunday,
And it’s the day when we consider what it means
            to be the people of a God who, in very nature, exists in relationship.
 
Here, of course, we start to hit against the limits of human language,
            because we don’t have the right pronouns in English
            to speak of God in Trinity.
 
And just as the debates over he, his, her, and hers
            can be helped by using the plural to speak of the singular,
so I think it is also appropriate
            for us to speak of God as they and theirs,
            because God is one God, but they are also Trinity.
 
Contrary to popular belief
            the doctrine of the Trinity as we know it today
            is not actually found in the Bible:
 
It’s the product of many discussions in the early church -
            and scholars down the centuries to the present day
            have devoted much time and effort
                        to trying to find the language
            to express what it means
                        to have one God, in three persons,
 
A famous example of this ongoing attempt is that of St Patrick,
            who used the Shamrock
            to explain the Trinity to the Irish.
 
As with all analogies, it is an imperfect illustration,
            but his basic point was that the shamrock
            has one leaf split into three parts
            just as God is one God in three persons.
 
Whatever it’s inadequacies, this illustration provides the setting
            for a great comedy moment in the film Nuns on the Run.
 
The gangster characters played by Eric Idle and Robbie Coltrane
            find themselves dressed as nuns
            and hiding from the police in a convent school.
 
Robbie Coltrane’s character finds himself having to lead a class
            in which he is expected to explain the doctrine of the Trinity
                        to the students.
He stutters for a while, and then half-remembers the story of St Patrick
            which leads him to utter the immortal line:
“God is like a shamrock. Small, green, and split three ways”
 
And so, from the sublime to the ridiculous,
            theologians of varying abilities have sought
            to explain God in three persons.
 
But I don’t think this process of ongoing development and thought
            in seeking to understand the nature of God
            is anything to be concerned about.
 
After all, if God really is God
            then they are so far beyond our comprehension,
that even our most eloquent and scholarly attempts at describing them
            will only scratch the surface of all that could be said…
 
Now, it may be true that our understanding and words
                        are incomplete and inadequate,
            but nevertheless the task is not in vain.
 
The task of trying to understand and describe God
            as God is revealed to us,
is one of the great tasks of the Christian church
            because it shows us more of the God we worship and relate to.
 
And this task finds its beginnings in the New Testament,
            where we see the early Christians
trying to understand how it might be that the man Jesus
            could also be the almighty God.
 
How it might be that one who died a human death.
            could also be seated enthroned in the heavens?
 
How it might be that God in heaven
            is nevertheless present with people on earth,
            changing, transforming, renewing and empowering them
                        for world-changing acts…
 
These are the questions
            which drove the early stages of Trinitarian theology,
and they are still questions which require an answer today
            as we continue to experience God as Parent, Son and Spirit.
 
Paul Fiddes, the former Principal of Regent’s Park College in Oxford,
            has said that the doctrine of the Trinity
            is a concept which was invented to express an experience.
 
He suggests that talk about the Trinity is not speculative theologising,
            it is instead an attempt to put into words
            an experience of the living, loving, relational God.
 
Just as the early Israelites sought to express their experience
            of human and divine relationships
            in the creation story from Genesis 1,
 
so the Christian doctrine of the Trinity
            is an expression of the Christian experience of God
            as God is encountered as divine parent, incarnate son, and ever-present spirit.
 
At the end of 2 Corinthians,
            Paul gives us a glimpse of how,
                        in the middle of the first century,
                        some twenty five years after Jesus’ death and resurrection,
            he sought to put into words his experience of God.
 
He concludes his letter with the now-famous blessing:
‘The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God,
and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.’
 
And here we see that, for Paul,
            God’s Trinitarian nature is directly related
            to the experience of God in the life of the Christian believer.
 
When Paul speaks of Jesus, God, and the Holy Spirit
            he directly relates these three persons
                        to three aspects of the human experience of God
                        grace, love, and fellowship.
 
It is God experienced through the Son, who lived, died and rose again,
            which speaks of the grace of God
                        reaching out to sinful humans
                        with the promise of forgiveness and new life.
 
It is God experienced as divine parent,
            which speaks of a love that is, from the beginning,
                        a love for the world that was created,
            and which transcends all time and activity.
 
And it is God experienced through the Holy Spirit
            which speaks of the ongoing presence of God with people,
                        binding them to one another and to God
                        in a fellowship of love and a communion of grace.
 
Paul may not have articulated the doctrine of the Trinity
            as the classical theologians understood it,
but his experience of the relational God
            at work in his own life, and in the lives of those in his congregations,
was such that his language pointed to God in three persons
            - a gracious, loving, communal God.
 
The Gospel of Matthew,
            written some years after Paul’s letter to the Corinthians,
provides us with another glimpse
            of how the early Christians
            sought to express their experience of God.
 
Let’s listen to it together now:
 
Matthew 28:16-20
Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them.
When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.
Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age."
 
This passage is often referred to as “The Great Commission”
            because it contains the command to the disciples of Jesus
            that they should go to all the nations of the world,
                        inviting people into a relationship with God through Christ.
 
And right at the heart of this commission,
            we find a recognition that entry into the Christian faith
            involves an entry into a relationship with the God
                        who exists already in eternal relationship .
 
In many ways, this command to baptise new believers
            in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit
is Genesis 1 come full circle…
 
Where Genesis 1 shows a relational God
            creating a relational humanity
Here in Matthew we see a relational God
            inviting humanity back into the eternal divine relationship.
 
The human need for deep, meaningful relationships,
            which is part of who we are created to be,
is seen in Matthew as finding its ultimate fulfilment
            in the invitation that God issues
            for us to enter into the life of the Trinitarian God.
 
The practise of baptism by immersion
            speaks powerfully of this invitation:
Picture a baptism now in your mind’s eye…
 
As the person being baptised goes down into the water
            symbolically they are plunging down into the grave
 
Just as the Son went from the Father
            to be plunged into the bitterness and alienation of death,
            and to identify with mortal humanity through his death on the cross,,
so the believer, in baptism, identifies with the Son in death.
 
But then as the person comes up from the water
            they are being symbolically raised to new life in Christ,
and the hold of death on their life is seen to be broken,
            as the power of the resurrection of the Son is made known.
 
Then as they are able to start breathing again,
            having been under the water,
so the breath of the Spirit of God,
            opens up new life and possibilities,
turning the water of death into the water of life,
            so that the baptised person
            is seen to be born again of both water and Spirit.
 
In this way, the command in Matthew
            to baptise in the name of the Trinitarian God,
becomes an invitation from God to all people,
            inviting them to enter into the relationships that already exist
            within the very person of God.
 
And those who accept this invitation,
            who enter into relationship with the relational God,
Find themselves in a new life of eternal relationship.
 
We aren’t talking here about the banishing of normal human loneliness
            - of the kind experienced after the death of a loved one
                        or the ending of a relationship.
The pain of human separation
            remains a feature of human experience.
 
But what is banished, is the deep existential distance
            - the fear of being utterly alone in the universe.
 
Jesus says to his disciples, right at the end of the Gospel:
            “remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age”.
 
And so we have, here at the end of Matthew’s gospel,
            not just the great commission,
            but the great promise.
And it is on the promise that the commission hangs.
 
The promise is a promise of invitation
            it is an outstretched hand extended from within the Trinity,
inviting us to enter into the eternal relationship that exists within God.
 
Paul Fiddes uses the image of a divine dance,
            between the three persons of the Trinity,
            to express this invitation for us to join that dance..
 
And he says in his excellent book on the Trinity
‘In this dance the partners not only encircle each other and weave in and out between each other as in human dancing; in the divine dance, so intimate is the communion that they move in and through each other so that the pattern is all-inclusive… ‘
(Participating in God, 72)
 
And so we meet the God who exists as three in one
            as Parent, Son, and Spirit
            as creator, redeemer, and sustainer
            as love, grace, and communion
            as eternal relationship,
            as a divine dance of movement.
 
This God invites us to join the movement,
            to enter the dance
            to become part of the eternal divine relationship,
            and in doing so, to become truly human.
 

Pentecost without division

A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

Pentecost Sunday, 23rd May 2021

Acts 2.1-21   

Listen to this sermon here:

Today is a moment of change, a day of significant transition,

            in the life of the gathered people of God.

 

Today, the church moves from one way of being to another,

            from one mode of existence to another.

 

And I’m speaking, of course,

            not just about the fact that today is the beginning

                        of our new weekly hybrid worship services

                        based once again in our building on Shaftesbury Avenue,

            after a year of worshipping mostly online due to the pandemic.

 

But also about that fact that today is Pentecost Sunday,

            when everything changed for the early Christians in Jerusalem,

            and after which nothing was ever the same again.

 

That first Pentecost, fifty days after Passover,

            was the day that Spirit of Jesus came upon the disciples in a powerful way,

            leading them to speak of the experience as a rushing wind, as a burning fire,

as they sought to explain the intensity

            of their Pentecostal experience of the Spirit of God.

 

It seems the descent of the Spirit upon these early disciples

            transformed their experience of the world irrevocably:

Suddenly, barriers which had always divided people, one from another,

            barriers of ethnicity, language, gender, class, economic circumstance, and age

were broken down by and rendered obsolete,

            as the Spirit came on all people, equally, without distinction.

 

Those gathered there in Jerusalem, from many nations, cultures, and languages

            suddenly found themselves able to hear and understand,

                        each in their own language,

            the truth of the mighty deeds of God’s power

                        as they had been revealed in the life and person of Jesus Christ.

 

And so, suddenly, by the gift of the Spirit, a new community was created!

 

A community where the gift of mutual relationship and understanding

                        was given by the Spirit;

            a community where Babel’s curse of a divided humanity was reversed.

 

The events of Pentecost have sometimes been called

            the birthday of the church,

and this can be a useful way to think of it,

            because it was with the coming of the Spirit on the followers of Jesus

                        that a new community was born,

            a community quite unlike which had preceded it.

 

A community which continues down to us, here today.

 

You see, the gift of the Spirit of Jesus

            broke down far more than just the language barrier

                        that everyone remembers

                        as the spectacular miracle of Pentecost.

 

When Peter, one of the twelve, came to give his sermon,

            to explain to those watching on

                        the significance of what they’d just seen,

he went back into the Old Testament

            and turned to a prophecy by Joel:

 

‘In the last days … I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy.’ (2.17-18)

 

It’s not just nationality and language-based divisions

            that were broken down here:

The Spirit had been poured out equally

            on male and female,

            on young and old,

            and on slave and slave-owner.

 

All the traditional divisions

            of gender, age, class, and ethnicity

were transcended in the Pentecostal gift of the Spirit.

 

And this had some profound implications

            for the ongoing life of the church

            which was born that first Pentecost.

 

And it also has some profound implications for us, here today…

            because to this day, Christians hold that all those who receive Jesus

                        also receive the gift of his Spirit.

 

All those who are baptised, are baptised with both water and spirit;

            and all those who confess that Jesus is Lord,

                        do so by the Spirit of Jesus, the Lord of creation.

 

And this gift of the Spirit of Christ,

            is given to all Christians without distinction;

it unites us with one another, and with Jesus Christ himself.

 

Through the Spirit,

            we are each able to participate in the ongoing life and ministry of Jesus

and through the Spirit of peace

            we are each joined to our sisters and brothers in Christ,

                        with no division or distinction,

            so that together we make up the church;

                        the body of Christ in our generation.

 

Not everyone in our congregation today can each other.

            Some are online, some are in other countries,

            and some of us are here in central London.

But as a congregation we embody diversity:

            We’ve got different ages, different skin colours,

            different social circumstances, different genders, different languages.

What variety!

            I can’t think of anywhere else a group like this would gather,

            apart from having been called together by the Spirit of Christ.

 

The gift of the Spirit breaks down barriers that would otherwise separate us,

            joining us to one another in Christ.

And so, by the Spirit, the church of Christ is continually re-created,

                        as believers are born again from above,

            just as the church was brought to birth that first Pentecost,

                        nearly two thousand years ago.

 

And as the Spirit-filled followers of Christ,

            as the Spirit-filled church of Christ

it is together that we participate in the ongoing life and ministry of Jesus.

 

Peter quoted from the prophet Joel,

            clearly taking a prophecy and applying it to the church.

And I believe that, as a community called together by the Spirit,

            we have a prophetic role together,

            to offer to the world beyond our own community.

 

The world is so often seeking to divide people one from another.

 

And I’m profoundly concerned by the narratives of division

            that have taken root in Europe recently again.

                        ‘Those people are out’, ‘these people are in’,

                        ‘those people deserve to be here’, ‘those people don’t’.

 

It just seems to me to be wrong,

            and speaking from a Judeo-Christian tradition

                        which says we should welcome the alien in the land;

            and speaking from a Spirit-filled-church perspective,

                        that says the Spirit is present with all people,

                                    whoever they are, without distinction;

            I think we have something profound to offer

                        about what it means to be human

                                    in a way that includes and doesn’t exclude,

                        which brings people in and sees them transformed and renewed

                                    by the power of the Spirit,

                        and not excluded and told they don’t belong here.

 

So we are called to share in and participate in

            the ministry of Christ by his Spirit.

 

Another one of the ways we do this is by sharing with him

            in what is sometimes called Jesus’ priestly ministry

 

Now, I don’t know what comes to mind

            when you hear the word priest?

Maybe a shadowy figure straight from the Da Vinci Code

            wearing purple and plotting in dark corridors?

 

But for a Jew at the time of the early church

            ‘priest’ meant only one thing,

and that was those who were tasked

            with serving God in the Temple in Jerusalem.

 

The priests of Israel had a very specific function:

            their job was to mediate between the ordinary people,

                        and the presence of the almighty God,

            who was believed to dwell in the holy of holies

                        at the heart of the Temple.

 

So, the Jewish priests brought the needs of the people to God,

            in the form of prayers and sacrifices,

and they spoke back to the people

            God’s words of forgiveness and acceptance.

 

For many centuries, the people of Israel had related to their God

            through the priests who served the Lord

            in the courts surrounding the holy of holies.

 

And the Spirit of God was believed to dwell in this holy of holies,

            where the ark of the covenant lay,

                        containing the stone tablets

                        on which God had carved the ten commandments.

 

And the Jews believed that ordinary, sinful, human beings

            could never have direct access to the Spirit of God.

So the priests acted as intermediaries,

            making sure that they were ritually pure

                        so that they could represent the people to God

                        and God to the people.

 

However, the message that Peter proclaimed that first Pentecost,

            was that God no longer lived in the holy-of-holies.

 

Instead of keeping apart from humanity,

            God had embraced humanity in the person of Jesus Christ,

and in so doing,

            had opened in turn a new way for people to relate to God.

 

Before Jesus, the established way of getting a message to God

            was to give it to a priest and ask him to pass it on.

 

But those who had met Jesus in the flesh

            had encountered one who seemed to embody God:

                        they spoke of him as God-made-flesh,

                                    not hidden from them behind curtains and ritual,

                        but available for meals and laughter and conversation.

 

And so, to express this immediacy they experienced in Christ,

            this new access to the divine that he embodied,

the early church spoke of Jesus

            as the great high priest.

 

Within the Jewish temple system,

            it was actually only the high priest himself

                        who could enter the holy of holies,

            and even then only once a year.

 

But in Jesus, the way to the presence of God

            had been thrown wide open,

and anyone was free to meet God in Jesus,

            to speak with him,

            and so to encounter God direct.

 

No longer do people need to go

            through a hierarchy of priests and high priests

            before they can encounter the Spirit of God.

Rather, the Spirit has been poured out on all flesh, as Joel says,

            without distinction.

 

And Jesus’ priestly function

            of mediating God to humanity,

                        and humanity to God,

became at Pentecost

            part of the ongoing ministry of the Spirit.

 

Just as the church which is gathered by the Spirit

            shares in Jesus’ kingly and prophetic ministries,

            so too, by the Spirit, it shares in his priestly ministry.

 

There is no longer any need for the priesthood in the temple,

            instead, the Spirit has created a priesthood of believers,

where the fellowship of followers, the gathered spirit-filled body of Christ

            have direct access to God

            because of the high-priestly work of Jesus.

 

There is no longer a need for sacrifices to be offered

                        to atone for the sinfulness of the people,

            because the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross

                        represents the once-for-all sacrifice,

                        which doesn’t need to be offered again.

 

In place of the offering of sacrifices,

            the church participates in the sacrifice of Jesus

            breaking bread and drinking wine,

                        symbols and signs of the broken body and spilled blood of Jesus.

 

And in place of going to the temple,

            and presenting requests to the priests,

            for them to take them to the high priest,

            for him to take them to the Spirit of God once a year,

the church itself becomes the priesthood,

            a priesthood of believers who have the Spirit dwelling amongst them.

 

The church of Christ presents its requests to Jesus the great high priest,

            who takes on the role of interceding

                        on behalf of the church that confesses his name,

                        and within which his Spirit is to be found.

 

This is why, each week, we offer our prayers of intercession here,

            as together we pray to God, with no human intermediary needed,

            with Christ interceding before God on our behalf.

 

And this gives us a clue

            to a very important point

about the idea known as “the priesthood of all believers”.

 

And this important point is, that the priesthood of believers

            is the priesthood of all believers together.

It is not a priesthood of each believer separately

 

It’s not about me having access to God through Christ

            and you having access to God through Christ

            and you, and you, and you…

Rather, it’s about us, together, the church of Christ,

            sharing in Christ’s priestly ministry,

because it is when we gather together

            that the Spirit of Jesus is present in our midst.

 

The priesthood of all believers

            means that when we gather together as a church,

                        called and bound together by the Spirit,

            we become a priesthood of believers.

 

There’s no place here for individualism:

            it’s all about the community.

 

We’re back where we started;

            it’s about all of us together,

            not just the educated, the powerful, or the wealthy.

 

It’s all about the radical new community

            that was brought into being that first Pentecost,

a community where there is no division,

            because all have received the Spirit equally.

 

It is surely one of the great tragedies of Christian history,

            that the church has so successfully re-invented

                        the system of priesthood,

            in its attempt to determine who holds the power.

 

So much of the Christian church around the world

            operates out of a system of authority and power,

which reflects the hierarchical system

            of the Jerusalem priesthood.

 

One of the desires of those who developed

            the congregational form of church government,

            that we find in Baptist churches such as this one,

was to try and recover that radical vision of the first Pentecost,

            where the Spirit is poured out on all people,

                        and there is no need for priestly mediation

                        to represent the people to the God they have gathered to worship.

 

The priesthood of all believers in a Baptist context

            means that it is together, as the gathered people of Christ,

that we have direct access in the Spirit

            to the will of God himself.

 

We don’t need someone to mediate God’s will to us,

            because we believe that together we all share

            in Christ’s priestly ministry.

 

Now, you might think that church meetings sound a bit dull!

            and, I’ll grant you, some of the ones I’ve been to over the years have been!

 

But they don’t have to be…

            in my experience, the church meeting

            can be the place where the church becomes most true to its calling in Christ.

 

Church meetings, you see, aren’t really about voting.

            they aren’t some hangover

                        from the Victorian trades-union meeting,

            where people addressed the chair

                        and made points of order.

 

Rather, the church meeting is the meeting together of the church

            so that it can fulfil its priestly ministry

            in the power of the Spirit.

 

You see, church membership, and church members’ meetings really matter,

            because it is there that we decide what kind of church we are going to be.

 

It’s there that we discern what we thing God is saying to us,

            as we hear from one another.

 

It’s not down to one individual, it’s down to all of us,

            from the most educated to the least educated.

 

If you are a church member, you are part of that process.

            If you’re not a church member, and you come here regularly,

                        why aren’t you a church member?

 

We need you!

            We need your voice, because it is together that we do this.

 

I sometimes worry that the Baptist practice of voting in our church meetings,

            takes us away from what they are really about,

and I think that we would do well to remember

            that the church meeting exists to discern the mind of Christ

                        not the will of the majority.

 

As Nigel Wright has said,

            voting as a method of decision making

                        should be secondary to sensing the mind of Christ.

Seeking consensus is the essence of the process

            not winning a vote by a narrow margin.

 

As Baptists, we believe that it is when Christ’s people

            gather together in his name to seek his will,

that we discern the mind of Christ for our time and place.

 

That’s why it’s important that, at a church meeting,

            anyone who is a member of the church

                        from the oldest to the youngest,

                        male, female, educated, uneducated,

                                    high IQ or living with learning difficulties,

            anyone who is a member of the church can participate,

                        and play their part in helping the people of Christ

                                    to fulfil their priestly ministry,

                        as together we come before God.

 

And it is this way because, we believe, with Peter and Joel,

            the Spirit of God is poured out

                        on all believers without distinction.

 

The ministers and deacons

            don’t tell the church what the Lord’s will is.

Rather, they serve the church by providing a lead

            in helping the people of the church

            discern the Lord’s will.

 

In a Baptist church, there is no authority higher than the church meeting

            except Christ himself,

because we believe that when the people gather,

            they gather as a priesthood of believers,

            coming before the Lord himself.

 

Ultimately, of course, absolute authority belongs not to the church

            but to Christ.

 

However, the authority that Jesus delegated to Peter

            is the common property of the royal priesthood

            of all the people of God.

 

In place of a priestly hierarchy

            what we have is the power and authority of Christ,

            diffused throughout the whole body of Christ.

 

And that is why we need one another…

            each of us, every single one, without exception…

 

It is together that we are the gathered people of Christ,

            called and empowered by his Spirit

            to be a radical Pentecostal community,

without hierarchy, without division

            where every member is a priest of God

            and where together we are a priesthood of all believers.

 

It is together that we discern the mind of Christ,

            it is together that Christ’s body is re-membered in our midst.

 

It is together that we bear faithful witness to the world

            of the radically inclusive nature of the in-breaking kingdom of God,

            where no-one is excluded by virtue of

                        their age, gender, sexuality,

            ethnicity, nationality, social standing,

                        economic circumstances, or indeed any other division

            that might tear apart the body of Christ,

                        which was broken on the cross for our reconciliation.

 

It is together that we take our place in the Church of Christ’s body,

            as the Spirit of Peace breaks all barriers down (Eph. 2.14),

and calls us to give voice to bear testimony

            to the new humanity that is born again

            wherever people embrace the inclusive peace

                        of the Spirit of Pentecost.

 

So may the Spirit of the Lord be with us all. Amen.