"Welcome to the Priesthood" Fifth Sunday of Easter May 22, 2011 1Peter 2:2-10
This afternoon you can get in your car and travel about 70 miles northeast of here to the Anza-Borrego Desert and maybe go for a hike or something, have a picnic, start a campfire and tell some stories, and watch the sunset. After about an hour you can look up and see something you would never see here. You will see a sky lit up with stars. You won’t be able to count them because there are too many to count. The stars you will see are about 100 billion miles away. You will marvel that you can see them. And then you can consider that they are part of the very same galaxy the planet you live on resides in. If you were to travel to those stars you can see you would be travelling 100 billion miles away and yet, you would not be leaving the Milky Way Galaxy you are in right now. From there, if you were to look up in the night sky you would see a similar sight to what you had seen out there by your camp fire. How many galaxies are there? How many hundreds of millions of stars light up the sky across the vast universe? Scientists will continue their quest for discovering new galaxies, new boundaries of the known universe. They will never be satisfied, constantly building bigger and more powerful telescopes. There will come a day when some will hop onto a spaceship and take flight to known planets, space stations, or whatever other destinations scientists and adventurers are able to put on their itinerary. Some will want to go to new frontiers, not necessarily a destination but simply to go, to boldly go where no man has gone before, to go farther and deeper into space than was ever thought possible. But if you were to come home tonight after gazing up into the night sky only a couple of hours from here and then sit down at your computer and log on to Google Earth or other sites on the internet that place the world in your living room, you would quickly see that even if you were extremely wealthy you would not have enough time to explore the vastness of this earth we live on. Our world is a grain of sand compared with the universe, and yet there isn’t enough time to see it and take it all in. It’s true that human beings have put their stamp on Planet Earth, and in some damaging ways, but there is still so much beauty and so many remarkable destinations, that for most of us we need to be content with pictures and TV shows and the internet to show us what all there is to see in this world we live in. If you were then to think of our earth in terms of its history you would see that the people that occupy it have normally done so as groups of people. There have been nations and kingdoms. To name just a few, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans, and the Mongols conquered vast areas of land and people. Some of the leaders of these and other kingdoms were not content with that but continued to pursue farther and farther, beyond what had been conquered by previous kingdoms. The history of the world in some ways is the history of power and ever-reaching attempts to go where no man has gone before in terms of glory and power. So if you were to compare these kingdoms to a small area on the map you would see that there is no comparison. There was an area in the ancient world about 150 miles from north to south and about 75 miles from east to west known as Palestine. The people that lived there weren’t going to make any impact on the world, they were just normal people making their way through life. Perhaps little boys and girls in that small place would look up in the sky at night and marvel at the vastness of the universe that they were a small part of. But it was in a small town in that little area of the world that something happened one night. A mother gave birth to a baby. In one way it was just like any other baby being born. This happened all the time in that little corner of the world, just as it had in every other part of the world. But in an important way it was a birth that was different from every other. The Creator of all there is, of the vast universe we can’t comprehend, entered into the creation. God was born. God the maker of all there is became a baby. It is in this baby we see the thing about God. He is Almighty and over and above His vast creation but He is very specific. And it’s not just that He’s specific. He operates in locatedness. It’s not just that He’s everywhere, He’s working for you and for your salvation in specific and identifiable means. You can gaze at the stars and marvel at the great God who created them but you can’t know Him and be in a relationship with Him with just knowing that about Him. That’s why He doesn’t come to us simply through the spectacle of creation but in the specificity of the baby that was born in a little town in a small area of the world. Did you know that as we have it recorded in the Scriptures that Jesus never travelled more than 100 miles from that little town of Bethlehem where He was born? You and I could do that in a couple of hours because we prefer using a car to a donkey or simply walking. But God in redeeming creation wasn’t concerned about coming in a powerful or glorious way but rather simply. Being born of a girl who herself grew up in that little area that Caesar or any other great power cared little about. It is for this reason that God created the priesthood. Not the one He instituted in the Old Testament, although that was certainly instituted for a very important purpose as well. The priesthood that God set up that Peter talks about in the Epistle reading is the one you are a part of. If you didn’t know you are a priest, then welcome to the priesthood! You won’t be needing to do extra laundry from all the blood of animals because the priesthood you are a part of isn’t one of offering up animal sacrifices, as the priesthood in the Old Testament was. It is in line with the one God sets up in Exodus 19:6 He says: “and you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” (ESV) Peter latches on to God’s purpose for His people in the Old Testament. The sacrifices you offer up are spiritual sacrifices. That’s why God in the Old Testament and in Peter in the New Testament refers to this priesthood, the priesthood you are a part of, as a holy priesthood. You are holy, God’s chosen priesthood. But you are not a priest for your own benefit. A priest wasn’t ordained for his own benefit but rather for the benefit of the people of God. In the same way, the people of God who are not ordained serve as priests not for their own benefit but for the benefit of others. Whereas priests in the Old Testament and pastors in the New Testament and still today, serve primarily for the benefit of the people of God, the people of God, the priests, serve primarily for the benefit of the people of the world. While pastors of course are Christians and serve those who are not they are primarily called to serve the people of God. In the same way, the people of God, while they of course serve their fellow Christians their primary call is to serve those who are not. In the Old Testament the people of God were called to be a light to the other nations. They were to make known the true God so that others too could know the only true God who is the Savior of the world. So too today. The people of God serve the people of the world by making known to them the true God in the person and work of Jesus Christ. The way Peter describes it is proclaiming “the excellencies of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light.” He describes how Jesus is to non-Christians a stumbling block and an offense. It is to these people that Christians are to be priests. What did the ordained priests in the Old Testament do? They carried out sacrifices. But why did they do that? Because they were interceding on behalf of the people of God. That’s what a priest does, he intercedes for another. That’s what you do as a priest of God. You intercede on behalf of all those people in the world who do not believe that Jesus is the Savior and true God. There is no more need for animal sacrifices, the once for all sacrifice of Christ has been accomplished. What there is a need for is spiritual sacrifices. That is what you offer up. You don’t do it so that you can get forgiven. You don’t do it so that God will love you. You have been saved. You are forgiven. In response you offer up sacrifices of thanksgiving and good works. You serve your neighbor. You love those who seek your harm. You help those in need. You pray for those who persecute you. You return malice with kindness. You intercede. You live as a holy priest in this world where people often don’t want any intercession on their behalf, they may not even realize they need it. This is why God has called you to serve where you are! God isn’t so much up in the stars and seen in power and glory as He is in the simple sacrifices that are offered up in His people serving Him humbly and faithfully. When we humbly see that God calls us where He wants us to serve then we can rejoice that we don’t need to worry about who’s better or who’s more important or who does more, because in the House that God builds, which is His Holy Christian Church, there is no better or more important or more accomplished. There is simply a kingdom of priests, a holy people of God. Often times this is seen simply as in the case of the First reading where some of the people weren’t getting the food they needed in the food distribution and others were getting more than what they needed. The solution was for everyone to serve as they were called. The apostles couldn’t devote all their time to this need because they needed to devote most of their time and effort to prayer and the ministry of the Word. Thankfully, there are many Christians in the Christian Church and so there were many people to choose from who could carry out tasks like these. Today, we see that there are many needs just as like then and so pastors carry in the footsteps of the apostles, primarily devoting their time and effort to the ministry of the Word and everyone else in the Christian Church carrying out their calling from God as priests, serving in many and various ways. In their homes, where they work, in all the many ways and places they find themselves living out their lives, often interacting with non-Christians and having the opportunity to make known to them the Word of God even as Stephen did. You are a priest. You have been called by God from darkness into His marvelous light to serve Him in this world. You don’t have to worry about reaching the world for Christ. Serve where you’re at. You don’t have to worry about if you’re doing enough, Jesus Himself said in the Gospel reading, “whoever believes in Me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father.” If someone other than Jesus had said that we could safely say that it’s not true. No one can do greater works than Jesus. But He’s the one who said it. It’s true. We do greater works than Jesus! How it is so is because of the priesthood. Jesus did a lot in His three year ministry in that little area known as Palestine. But think about what is accomplished now that He has ascended into heaven and has gone to the Father. The world is infiltrated with priests of God, ordinary Christians serving Him, serving the people of the world, proclaiming the excellencies of God who sent His Son into the world to save the world. You and I are let in on the secret, that when Jesus speaks in this way we know that He is really the one doing these works that we carry out. What we do is actually Him working through us. God is great, His creation is spectacular, but it’s all about the specificity, even the location. The heavens declare the glory of God but the Sacraments deliver the grace of God. God is very specific. In the vast universe He delivers to you His forgiveness, life, and salvation in specific materials of water and bread and wine. He is the God of all glory and is almighty but came to us simply as a man who looked like most of the other Jewish men in the society He lived in. In the same way, having called you to eternal life, He has welcomed you to the priesthood, still carrying out His marvelous work of extending His grace to the many who do not believe in Him through you, as you live and serve where you’re at in your daily life. It is a high and holy calling indeed. Amen. SDG -- Pastor Paul L. Willweber Prince of Peace Lutheran Church [LCMS] 6801 Easton Ct., San Diego, California 92120 619.583.1436 princeofpeacesd.net three-taverns.net It is the spirit and genius of Lutheranism to be liberal in everything except where the marks of the Church are concerned. 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