Audio Recording
One Sunday after church a few months after Dana took
her charge at St. Andrew’s Owen Sound one of her parishioners, knowing I was a
minister too, asked me how I was enjoying just being able to come to church and
sit in the pew and just be a part of the congregation. I answered that I found it very difficult to
sit in the pew. I joked a bit about how
God had given me a back that tolerated standing in the pulpit better than
sitting on those hard pews. But that
aside, I had been a minister for fifteen years, all my education and experience
eggs are in this basket, what I do and who I am is all tied up in being a
minister, and not to mention I really enjoy the pulpit…not being able to do the
ministry God had called me to and gifted me to do was brutally difficult. I felt like I was being wasted and at times
punished. What had I done that Jesus didn’t
want me for a sunbeam. It is difficult for
clergy to just be laity. Ask any retired
minister. It is truly difficult for
clergy to take your seat there in the pew.
Oh my. Did I
just say that? You must be thinking “How
arrogant of him, that pompous collar-wearing master of obsequiousness.” But I suspect you are not thinking that at all
and that you saw nothing wrong with me saying that it is difficult for clergy
to just be laity, to take your place in the pew. This difficulty would seem obvious to us and obvious
because we have bought into a model of church that relies on a clergy/laity
dichotomy, a dichotomy that only works to keep the majority of the body of
Christ functionally dependent on a handful of trained professionals for its existence.
Let me flesh this out a bit.
What do you think of when you think of clergy or
minister? You probably think of someone
who has been set aside or called to go into the ministry, one who serves the
church. When I have to describe to
Revenue Canada what I get paid for it is conducting religious services,
ministration of sacraments, administrating a congregation, pastoral care,
teaching doctrine. I’ve received
specific education for this work. And,
I’ve been ordained for it, authorized by a particular religious body. Clergy take the lead in doing the ministry of
the church. In the Presbyterian way the
same can be said of Elders but to a lesser extent.
It is also nigh impossible to think of the clergy
apart from its institutional counterpart, the laity. The laity are those who receive the services
of the clergy. They assist the minister
in the ministry. But there is something
wrong here. John Stott, a very widely respected
British theologian and apologist, in his book One People writes about
how the word ‘lay” has been debased in the church. He says: “‘Lay’ is often a synonym for ‘amateur’
as opposed to ‘professional,’ or ‘unqualified’ as opposed to ‘expert’” (p. 29).
This debasing gets reinforced even here
in our Coop when we talk about training ‘lay’ worship leaders, ‘lay’ preachers,
and ‘lay’ pastoral care givers. It seems
that to be a ‘lay’ person is somehow less than being clergy.
Paul seems to reinforce this dichotomous way of
thinking to the extent of calling the ‘ordained’ more or less “God’s gift to
the church” when he says here in Ephesians 4:8-11: “Therefore it is said, ‘When
he ascended on high he made captivity itself a captive; he gave gifts to his
people.’ (When it says, “He ascended,” what does it mean but that he had also
descended into the lower parts of the earth?
He who descended is the same one who ascended far above all the heavens,
so that he might fill all things.) The
gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some
evangelists, some pastors and teachers…”.
If we left it at that partial and out of context quote, it would seem a
good justification for our dichotomy between clergy and laity.
Yet, the verses immediately preceding and following
this passage note that we are all gifted by Christ Jesus with a share in his
ministry and those offices or tasks of ministry that Paul designates here are
for equipping us all for our common ministry in the body of Christ. Verse seven reads: “But each of us was given
grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift.” Verses twelve and thirteen follow that the
purpose of apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers is “to equip
the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until
all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of
God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. Ministers or clergy were never supposed to be
set aside to do ‘the ministry of the church’ but rather to equip the whole
church for ministry. Everyone of us is
gifted for Christ’s ministry. He gives
his ministry to all of us.
Did you know the word clergy derives from a New
Testament Greek word? The word is kleros (cleric) which means “lot” as in
“chosen by lot” or “one’s lot in life”. Kleros is also the root word for
“inheritance”. In our reading from
Ephesians this morning Paul speaks of an inheritance, a kleronomia, that we all have and will receive in Christ…his
ministry. But it is not just clergy who
get the inheritance. Each of us has been
chosen by God the Father for a share in the inheritance that belongs to Jesus,
the Son, of which the Holy Spirit’s presence with us now is a down payment
on. This inheritance is a share in Jesus
kingdom, in his reign…in his ministry.
This Sunday is Ascension Sunday. We don’t talk about Jesus’ Ascension all that
much and this is unfortunate. Jesus’
Ascension is as important as his becoming human and dying for us, as important
as Easter, as important as Pentecost, and as important as his one day Coming
Again. Today we celebrate that Jesus,
our Jesus, has taken his seat at the right hand of God the Father as Lord of
all Creation. If he has not Ascended, he
is not Lord. As Lord he shares his reign
with us through sharing his ministry with us through the gift of the Holy
Spirit to us all. If he is not Ascended,
then there is no Pentecost. His reign,
his ministry is reconciliation, justice, peace, forgiveness, and healing gifts
that he extends from Heaven here to Earth through us, through each of us. The Christian faith is not about how we get
to Heaven. It is about how God is
bringing his heavenly reign to Earth through Jesus Christ in the power of the
Holy Spirit. Jesus taught us to pray “Thy
kingdom come, Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.” not “God get me
out of here.”
The effect of Jesus Ascension is that we are all his ministers,
his servants chosen by God to share in his ministry, in his reign and he has
gifted us each for this universe-transforming work by the gift of the Holy
Spirit. But for now, Paul wrote here in
Ephesians 2:5-6 “he (God) made us
alive together with Christ (by grace you are saved), and raised us together and seated us together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus…”. We are now seated with Jesus where he is in
the heavenlies. I started out this
sermon remarking how difficult it is for clergy to take your seat, the
pew. Conversely, it is difficult for
you, the laity to take my seat in doing ministry in the church. This way of thinking, this dichotomous way of
thinking is killing the Church, the Body of Christ. Timothy and I are not clergy who do the
ministry to which you are an adjunct. We
are your teachers here to equip you for your share in Jesus’ ministry. You are not ‘laity’ as opposed to our being ‘clergy’. We are all the ‘laity’. Laity in New Testament Greek means simply the
whole people of God. Jesus invites us
all to take our seat with him in his heavenly reign, his ministry. This invitation requires that we change our
way of thinking about ministry in the church and get out of our pews and out of
the chairs behind the pulpits and get outside those doors and have a look
around, because Jesus is Lord out there too and if he exercises his loving
reign through us, then bench-warming in here is not our place. Take your seat with Jesus. His ministry happens everywhere you are; in
your home, at your work, over the fence with your neighbour. Take your seat. Amen.
