A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
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
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
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
The priests of
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
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
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
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.
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