Situated in a rather remote part of the great castle in Prague in the Czech Republic, there is a tiny church called All Saints. Unlike many of the great churches of Prague, St. Vitus or St. Nicholas, or Our Lady Before Týn there is this little church, a sanctuary that is hidden often from public view, it doesn’t receive vacationers tracking through it. It is obscure. The only time it is open is for worship or when the odd person comes along who specifically asks to be able to see it. And because, I suppose, I was clergy, I was given that privilege.
I gazed into this small sanctuary, which is rather simple compared to so many of the ornate sanctuaries of St. Vitus and St. Nicholas. It is simple, with the Communion Table in the middle and just a few pews. There is a Cross and a few windows that are very simply decorated. It is a holy place, hidden and out of sight from most people. Yet, it is a place of prayer. It is as much a church as the great cathedrals. It is a place where you bow and you kneel, and you worship the Lord.
I thought about that when I was reading our text from Peter this morning, for there is a sense in which All Saints is hidden, is invisible in the midst of what are many more visible and outward places. In some ways, the Church is like All Saints. There is a sense in which it is at the same time visible, and on the other hand, invisible. The great St. Augustine of Hippo was the first to make this distinction. He made the distinction between the Church that is seen, that everyone can identify – the bishops, the sanctuaries, the sacraments, the reading of the Word and the congregations – and are all visible to the eye of an onlooker, but he suggested that there is also the invisible church, and that the visible church exists within the invisible church and the invisible church works within the visible church.
The invisible church comprises those who genuinely have been called by God, those who have a genuine faith and desire to follow Christ. They are not just part of a visible structure; they are an invisible presence of those who have been called and chosen. Later on in church history, the Reformers picked up the theme of Augustine. They did so at a time when there was this great theme that was being used: extra ecclesiam nulla salus, or “outside of the church there is no salvation.” That was at a time when the two parts of the church, the visible and the invisible were indistinguishable. Those who were in positions of power within the visible church maintained that unless you were part of that visible church, could you be considered to be a Christian. If you did not subscribe to what the visible church said, then you could be excommunicated or you could be removed from God’s favour.
The Reformists said “No!” They went back to Augustine: the church is both visible and invisible. The invisible are those who are known by God, those who are chosen by God, those who have been appointed by God, those that God knows have a sincere heart and faith, and it is not up to those who represent the visible church to determine who they are. Luther, later on Zwingli and others, took this to be the essence of it all. But what I found interesting was that the reformer who started that whole movement was none other than the Czech-Prague preacher, Jan Hus. He saw the dangers of the visible church trumping the invisible church and seizing for itself power at the expense of the faithful.
Our passage from Peter is talking about the visible and the invisible church. Peter uses his metaphors to describe the church, as one of my friends who is a theologian says, like buckshot. He just throws metaphors around all over the place: the Church is a building, the Church is like babies and infants and adults. You see it all in this one passage. And yet, despite that, the metaphors are powerful! He talks, for example, about a church being like a building. This building has a cornerstone, and the cornerstone is Jesus Christ. This cornerstone could be a stumbling block for some. He of course is not talking literally about a building that people fall over. He is talking rather about a spiritual church, an invisible church really, that has as its foundation a cornerstone. The cornerstone is a spiritual cornerstone, which is Jesus of Nazareth. This cornerstone determines how the rest of the building is built. Like any cornerstone, it becomes the source for how every part of the structure develops. If Christ is the cornerstone, then the Church is a building that arises from that spiritual cornerstone – Jesus of Nazareth.
While the Church is clearly a visible church, and clearly developed from Peter’s time into the church that we know even to this day, with its great monuments and its great buildings, with its St. Nicholas and St. Vitus and its Timothy Eatons. They are great and glorious places, and are even more glorious than you realize at times: this Church is now nearly 105 years old, our organ is going to be celebrating its 100th anniversary this coming year– and what an incredible instrument it is! There are glorious outward buildings, visible to the world. It is nevertheless, despite all the glory of the buildings and the cornerstones that we have laid, nothing compares to the cornerstone that has been laid in Jesus of Nazareth.
Peter uses this word “cornerstone” to describe a building, but then he talks more about the living of the Christian life than he does the building. Now, he gets into a really lovely set of metaphors. But to help us grasp this today, I want to use one that is current, one that fits in to 2014 as opposed to the first century. I call it the DNA of the Church. I think Peter is talking about what really makes a church a church. What is our DNA? What are the building blocks of the Church? There are a couple of things.
The first is, I think, the DNA of our identity. Peter is writing to Christians who are mainly of Gentile descent and origin. He says this famous phrase “You were once not a people, but now you are a people.” In others words, you did not really belong to God, you were not part of Israel, you were not part of the Covenant Community, but now, because of Christ you belong, now you are a people, and not only are you a people, you are a people who are pleasing to God. This is now your identity: your identity is found in Jesus Christ. You are a people who have been called. You have been chosen, you have been appointed, you have been selected, you have had God reach out to you, and you have responded.
The problem that these early Christians faced that led to the crisis of their identity was that they were being persecuted for their new-found faith. As I mentioned last week from, many of them were servants and slaves who were abused by their masters and their mistresses. Others were those who were working within society as a whole, and they were looked upon with suspicion as being part of this new, growing movement that was based on Jesus. Peter is writing to them to encourage them: “You are royal priesthood. You are a holy nation. You have been chosen. Don’t you look back when you are persecuted: maintain your faith, don’t disavow your faith just because of your persecution, hold on to that which you believe, because you are now living stones, you are now a vibrant people. Don’t go back!”
I can’t help but think that Peter is as relevant today as it was in the first century. Some of you will have picked up the paper this week to read about a woman called Mariam Ibrahim in the Sudan. She lives in Khartoum. She had grown up in a family of mixed religions: her father was a Muslim and her mother was a Christian. She had grown up a Christian based on her mother’s faith in Ethiopia. She married a man in 2011 from the Sudan, and they had a child, and they were living a perfectly normal life. He was Christian and she had been brought up half-Christian: they lived a Christian life. But the government in the Sudan saw this, and thought that rather than her continuing her Christian faith, believed she had converted from Islam to Christianity, and she has now been sentenced to death: A mother, who is pregnant with a second child, because of her faith. If she renounces her Christianity she will be saved; if she does not, she will die.
Amnesty International says this is one of the clearest violations of human rights in our world today. But it is a sign, is it not, that sometimes just standing for your faith can cost you your life! This is an extreme thing that is being done with her. Do not misunderstand me, this isn’t indicative of all of Islam, but it is a case in point where people are being forced to renounce their faith to save their lives. In Rome, in the first century, they were doing the same thing.
If your identity is in Christ, if you realize that you are not just sort of a believer from a distance, but a believer who is intimately connected with the living cornerstone, Jesus Christ, it is not an identity you can jettison, because it is part of your spiritual DNA. It is part of the very fibre of your being. It is God’s Holy Spirit within you, and you are not and never will be able to turn your back on the identity to which you have been called.
It is more than identity! It is the DNA of our initiation. It is fascinating that this passage from Peter was originally written, many believed, to help those who were new Christians at their baptism. It was a form of instruction for them. It enabled them to realize that in their lives they had to mature, they had to develop, they had to grow. It talks about the fact that they need to move from sort of an infantile position to a mature position, that as those who are newly baptized and new Christians, they need to grow. He uses the image of moving from a child being on milk to a child growing into an adult and eating meat. He says that what you need to do though in the Christian life as you are initiated in this and you are finding your identity is to grow and to learn and to mature. He wasn’t alone. The writer of the Book of Hebrews put it this way in Chapter 5, and I read for you from verse 12:
For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic elements of the Oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk being still an infant is unskilled in the word of righteousness, but solid food is for the mature, for those whose faculties have been trained by practice to distinguish good from evil.
In other words, the Christian life according the writer of Hebrews and according to Peter – and this surely shows that in the early Church in this part of their worship and their liturgy – you move from milk to meat. You move from the basics to something more complex that you can handle. You mature as you come along.
This is a call for the Church never to stand still. You can never say as a Christian, “I have arrived. I know all that I need to know.” There is a point in which in the Christian life that is a continued and an ongoing form of growth. There are way too many people who just stand still in their life. They are quite happy and content with what they know and what they believe and they have a world view that they think is going to work for them, but they need so much more. They need the meat! If there is anything that we are in this congregation trying to do, it is not only to provide the children with the milk; it is to provide the mature with the meat. But, you have to come to that meat! You have to consume it and desire it. In the world, where there are so many competing views and so many challenges to what constitutes faith, that meat becomes all the more important, otherwise in the marketplace of life you starve if you are not maturing in the faith. Never, ever do faithful people stop growing!
You also, and this for me is the knockout punch, have a DNA that makes you a priest. I am sure you didn’t wake up this morning thinking, “Well, gee, you know, I’m a priest!” This is because when you get up you can ask your spouse, “Can you make breakfast for the priest this morning?” I am sure that would go down really well! I know in my home it would be a real setback! You say: “I am the priest!” “Priestliness” does not mean pompousness. It does not mean and does not equate with earthly visible power. In Israel, there were the priests, and they came from the line of Aaron. They were chosen and appointed. But the priestly group were not the only ones that were called priests. In Exodus 19, all of Israel was seen as a Priesthood, and the early Christians like Peter understood that the new Christians were becoming like Israel: they were becoming the priests of God. The priestly function of course is to speak on behalf of, to represent, to be an interlocutor between God and humanity, to take on the role of offering sacrifices to God. The sacrifices that you offer are holy sacrifices, spiritual sacrifices, giving yourself for Christ and the world.
Attending a performance of The Last Confession, primarily because of its star actor David Suchet – and like many people I am a huge fan of this actor – I wasn’t sure how I was going to receive the play, for the visible church didn’t look very good in it. Suchet plays a priest who becomes an archbishop, who becomes a cardinal, and even has many votes to become Pope. But, in his role as Cardinal Bonelli, he plays the kingmaker for a new Pope, but also a Pope whose life was taken, and hence the reason why he felt the need to confess. It is a glorious role! But that is the visible thing that you see. What is really interesting is the invisible that you see in the life of the actor, for David Suchet is a Christian. He struggled with his life and his faith. He had grown up half-Jew and half-Christian. He was never sure of his identity – there is that word again! He didn’t know really where he belonged. He struggled and he wrestled with it. How can he reconcile the two? This really worried him. He explored all different paths. He was troubled in his soul until just after he left the Royal Shakespeare Company. He spent time with his good friend John Lithgow working on Harry and the Hendersons. It was during this time that he decided he had to find the answer. In an interview with the Toronto Star he said:
“I leapt out [of the hotel bathtub] and went looking for a Gideon Bible, but my hotel room didn’t have one, so I phoned a religious supplies store the next day as if I were asking for porn. ‘Do you have a Bible?’ I whispered. And the man replied, ‘Yes we sell Bibles, that’s what we do.’”
Once he had one in his hands, Suchet flipped right to Romans. “I didn’t read about Jesus. I was fascinated by Paul.
“John Barton at the RSC once said to me, ‘When you get a text, no matter how old it is, imagine it’s just come through your letterbox as something brand new.’ So that’s how I read Paul’s letter to the Romans. For seven chapters, I couldn’t understand a thing.”
With superb dramatic timing, Suchet pauses, sips at his tea and then looks at me portentously.
“But then, starting with Chapter 8, I began reading about a way of life that I had always been looking for . . . generosity, caring, being there for people.”
All that was well and good for him, but he continued, “For 21 years, I wandered in the wilderness, very much in confusion, very much in anger, trying to make sense of it all. But there, in the Book of Romans, I found what I was looking for.”
There is the visible church, with all its pomp and show and circumstance, visible to the world to see, open to criticism, hard in the way that it does things at times, but then there is this invisible church, this church that is called by the Word, this church that is inspired by the Spirit, this church that has as its cornerstone Jesus Christ. And, when we have his DNA, when that is the foundation of the Church then we are truly faithful. May you rise to that task! Amen.