BEING CHRISTIAN - BAPTISM - Part 7

"But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people, that you may proclaim the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light; who once were not a people but are now the people of God, who had not obtained mercy but now have obtained mercy."
(1 Peter 2:9-10)

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus

In the series, 'Being Christian' I am trying to share with you the activities that signify a Christian essence in the life of the faithful and what kind of people we might hope to become in a community where these activities are practices. With this hope in mind, we started with the most important sacrament (or a rite) by which an individual is brought to the Christian family - the Baptism.

In the previous blog, we started to try and understand the identity that is bestowed on the baptized by understanding the titles that are mainly used in thinking about the identity of Jesus. We tried to identify with Jesus as a prophet, where the role of a prophet is to challenge the community to be what it is always meant to be. As a prophet we are to be ready to show each other the integrity of Christian life. We also tried to understand that the role of a prophet is not limited in the church but also in the wider societies that we live in. Let us now understand about the priestly role that is bestowed upon us.

Let us again go back to the Bible. In the Old Testament, a priest is someone who interprets God and humanity to each other. A priest is somebody who builds bridges between God and humanity when that relationship has been wrecked; somebody who by offering sacrifice to God re-creates a shattered relationship. Of Jesus' priestly role I need hardly speak in that connection. But we can perhaps see how, as baptized people we are drawn into the priestliness of Jesus, we are called upon to mend shattered relationships between God and the world, through the power of Christ and the Spirit. As baptized people, we are in the business of building bridges. We are in the business of seeing situations where there is a breakage, damage and disorder, and bringing into those situations the power of God in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit in order to rebuild something. We may not offer sacrifices in the Old Testament sense, but we offer and bring before God the reality of Jesus which has restored everything. We pray in Jesus that the restoration may be applied in the brokenness. And we offer our own service and devotion as best we can in the bridge-building process. 

And how do we relate to Jesus as royal king? In ancient Israel, the king was somebody who spoke for others to God. The king himself had a priestly role. But the king had the freedom to shape the law and the justice of his society, He could keep people close to the demands of God's covenant; he could make justice a reality (or fail terribly in this task). We read in Jeremiah the great definition of what it means to be a king who will 'know God' by favouring the poor, doing justice for the needy (Jeremiah 22:16). And that 'royal' calling is about how we freely engage in shaping our lives and our human environment in the direction of God's justice, showing in our relationships and our engagement with the world something of God's own freedom, God's own liberty to heal and restore.

So the baptized life is a life that gives us the resource and strength to ask awkward but necessary questions of one another and of our world. It is a life that looks towards reconciliation, building bridges, repairing shattered relationships. It is a life that looks towards justice and liberty, the liberty to work together to make human life in society some kind of reflection of the wisdom and order and justice of God.

All these aspects of the baptized life need one another. If we were only called to be prophets, we would be in danger of being constantly shrill nay-sayers to one another and to the world. There is plenty of that in Christian history and plenty of that in the Christian mentality today. And if we were only priestly, there would be a danger of never asking the difficult questions but moving on as rapidly as we could to reconciliation. And if we were only  talking about royal freedom and justice we would be in danger of constantly thinking in terms of control and problem-solving. But just as in Jesus these three things are inseparably bound up in His work and His words and His death, as in His life, so for us these are three facets of one life, not three isolated bits of a vocation.

... but still sinners

Throughout Christian history there have been plenty of debates around baptism. In the early Church people debated whether it was possible to sin after baptism. The great temptation was to think that when you had entered the new creation, the old world just stopped existing. St Paul knew that temptation but he also knew very well that the old world is tough, a natural survivor, and that the old humanity - muddled about its destiny and forgetful about its true nature - goes on with remarkable persistence.

So if, as a baptized person, we still sin - let's don't panic! Remember that the depths of God's love still surrounds us. And when we sin as a baptized person we are not, as it were, stepping right outside the depths of God's love (unless, of course, we fully and consciously decide to do so). Rather, it is as though we are deliberately ignoring the depths all around us, and not letting the reality of the world's need and the reality of God's love come through. So, what we need to do is to take the shutters down again, and we will find that every prayer of penitence that we pray is a taking-down of the shutters and letting the baptismal depths well up around and within us again.

And that brings us right back to where we started: the chaos of human sin and disorder and the wind of the Spirit blowing over it, and the embodied love of God going down into the waters and being drawn out again in a blaze of light and a word from heaven, 'This is my Son!' The baptized community lives in that mystery, drawn out of chaos, breathing in the wind of the Spirit and hearing from God the words that He speaks to His only Son: 'You can call me Father.'


In the following blogs, we will try and understand the second essential element of the Christian life - The Bible

The blog is based on the book - "Being Christian" by Rowan Williams

BEING CHRISTIAN - BAPTISM - Part 6

"But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people, that you may proclaim the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light; who once were not a people but are now the people of God, who had not obtained mercy but now have obtained mercy."
(1 Peter 2:9-10)

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus

In the series, 'Being Christian' I am trying to share with you the activities that signify a Christian essence in the life of the faithful and what kind of people we might hope to become in a community where these activities are practices. With this hope in mind, we started with the most important sacrament (or a rite) by which an individual is brought to the Christian family - the Baptism.

Dear brethren, as we look back on the last few blogs, let us just quickly recap on what we learnt about baptism. Baptism restores a human identity that has been forgotten or overlaid. Baptism takes us to where Jesus is. It takes us therefore into closer neighborhood with a dark and fallen world, and it takes us into closer neighborhood with others invited there. The baptized life is characterized by solidarity with those in need, and sharing with all others who believe. And it is characterized by prayerfulness that courageously keeps going, even when things are difficult and unpromising and unrewarding simply because we cannot stop the urge to pray. Something just keeps coming alive in us; never mind the results.

Prophets, priests & kings

Let us try to explore a little bit further what this new baptized identity, this new humanity, means by considering three titles that are often used in thinking about the identity of Jesus. For many centuries the Church has thought of Jesus as anointed by God to live out a threefold identity: that of a prophet, priest and king. We as baptized people can identify with Jesus in these three ways of being human which characterize and the define His unique humanity. As we grow into His life and humanity these three ways come to characterize us as well. The life of the baptized is a life pf prophesy and priesthood and royalty. What does this mean to those of us who do not normally think of our roles in quite such dramatic terms?

Thinking about the role of prophets, we quite literally think about what the prophets did in the Old Testament times.The role of the prophets is more than just foretelling the future. Much more importantly, they act and speak to call the people of Israel back to their own essential truth and identity. They act and speak for sake of a community's integrity, its faithfulness to who it is really meant to be. Isaiah and Jeremiah and Amos and Hosea are constantly saying to the people of Israel, 'Don't you remember who you are? Don't you remember what God has called you to be? Here you are, sitting down comfortable with all kinds of inequality, injustice and corruption in your society. Have you completely forgotten what you're here for?'

Therefore, the prophet is somebody whose role is always challenging the community to be what it is always meant to be - to live out the gift that God has given to it. And so the baptized person, reflecting the prophetic role of Jesus Christ, is a person who needs to be critical, who needs to be a questioner. The baptized person looks around at the Church and may quite often be prompted to say, 'Have you forgotten what you're here for?'; 'Have you forgotten the gift God gave you?'

One of the very uncomfortable roles we have to play in the Church is to be prophets to one another - that is, to remind one another what we are here for. By saying this, I don't mean that every Christian needs to go around nagging every other Christian (though it may seem attractive to some people). Rather I mean that we need to be, in a variety of ways, ready to show one another what the integrity of Christian life is all about. It is more of a nudging one another from time to time and saying, 'What do you see?'; 'Whats your vision?'; 'What are you making yourself accountable to?' And to go on gently holding one another accountable before God doesn't mean nagging or censoriousness. It means something much more like a quiet, persistent re-calling of one another to what is most important. We do it silently every time we meet for worship. We do it, ideally, when we meet together privately. We do it in all sorts of ways. The Church needs to always to hear the critical voice saying, 'Back to the beginning, back to where it all comes from. Let's try and listen again to what God said to us'. So, as prophets we lead one another back to the essentials: back to baptism, Bible, Holy Communion and prayer.

But if we as prophets are gifted with this uncomfortable calling to ask questions of one another, what about the wider societies we live in? People speak rather loosely of the Church being 'prophetic' and sometimes people talk as if the prophetic role of the Church is simply a matter of taking loud and very clear stands on all issues of the day. But it is surely much more a matter of the Church expressing and asking important and readily forgotten questions in out society. It is to ask, 'What's that for?' and 'Why do we take that for granted?' and 'Where's that leading us?' We do it for one another in the Church but I think that we also do it for the whole of our human environment, which needs that sort of questioning for its health and survival.

In the following blogs, we will understand the roles of a priest and kings that are bestowed on us with baptism that we share with Christ Jesus. In the meantime, do keep me and my family in your prayers.

The blog is based on the book - "Being Christian" by Rowan Williams