Ecclesia
Reformata et Semper Reformanda Secundum Verbum Dei
(The
Church Reformed and Always Being Reformed In Accordance With the Word of
God)
Isaiah
55:1-9
1st Timothy 1:1-2
Luke 18:9-14
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, 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, silted over, as there was 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 eve to be our God, always to be with us and
for us, 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 extra-close attention –
is not peace of mind or peace
in our heart (at least not in the first instance).
Peace here is shalom. 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
the same as 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, we are deemed covenant-keepers in
Christ as by faith we cling to the
covenant-keeper with whom we are now identified before God.
And this 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 by faith we 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 representative 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 (Luke 18), 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.
(Hyper-religiosity ends in an illness that 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 and
received 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 truth 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.
In all meritocracies 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 all
believers constitute a priesthood, 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, I am the only person in this congregation who
presides at Holy Communion. We
must understand, however, that this is simply to maintain order.
It isn’t the case that I am the only person to preside because
the sacrament will “work” if I administer it but it won’t work if
a non-ordained person administered it.
Ultimately it is effective (i.e., it is a vehicle of Christ’s
cementing himself ever more deeply into our lives) just because Christ
has pledged to give himself afresh to us, unfailingly,
every time Holy Communion is administered, 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 already underway, for instance, when the word “sin” is equated
with immorality. (No one in
this congregation is flagrantly immoral or criminal, yet everyone in
this congregation 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; or the singing of such nonsense as “God is
watching from a distance” instead of hymns that speak of the Holy One
of Israel; or as it has been suggested to me, using juice and cookies at
Holy Communion instead of bread and the cup.
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.
Ordained ministry is essential to the church just because someone
by vocation, aptitude, and study 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 be 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 in terms of 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 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
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 in accordance with the
command claim 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 to his
congregation next 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 until the gospel is
obscured – unless – unless such congregation or such denomination is
constantly being reformed in accordance with the gospel.
Victor
Shepherd
Reformation
Sunday 2006
