Sermons

Sun, Apr 30, 2023

Truly being church

Series:Sermons
Duration:13 mins

Peter Hollingworth—

the former Anglican Archbishop of Brisbane—

was criticised, this week, by the Professional Standards Board of the Anglican Church.

It found that—

as Archbishop— 

he had committed misconduct in allowing two priests… who he knew to be paedophiles… 

to remain in ministry…

and… 

in appointing as executive director of the Anglican Schools Commission… 

someone who had ignored a case of abuse at a Queensland school.

The Board also described as “unsatisfactory, insensitive and…distressing”… 

comments that he made about one of those priests’ victims in a television interview…

which amounted to victim-blaming;

and a letter that he wrote to another victim’s brother was described as “inappropriate and insensitive”.

But… 

despite all of that…

after a five year “investigation”…

which culminated in a hearing that was closed to the public and the media… 

the Board recommended that Hollingworth not be defrocked…

saying that he posed “no unacceptable risk of harm to any person”.

Ironically, five years ago… 

a former director of the Professional Standards Board told a survivor that there was more than enough evidence to warrant a defrocking.

Needless to say, victim support groups are outraged.

They’re demanding a fully transparent investigation by an independent body…

not an internal investigation simply trying to protect the Church’s reputation.

As one victim’s lawyer put it, “What message is this giving?”…

This decision is a retrograde step…

It’s going back to church behaviour of the past that we had a…royal commission trying to correct”.

 

Surely, at the very least, the Board should have acted more decisively because of the optics.

While Hollingworth is no longer in a position to do harm…

his presence still does harm…

and his comments in response to the Board’s findings show that he still doesn’t really get it.

But, I guess, you could say the same about the Board…

and the Church hierarchy.

If protecting the church’s image is more important than healing and compassion…

then something is fundamentally amiss.

If the church’s first response is not one of compassion…

and a concerted effort to make amends…

then something is fundamentally amiss.

They have, effectively, failed to understand what it means to be “church”.

They’re so caught up in the institution that they call “church”—

so caught up in its structures and its survival—

that they have actually stopped being “church”.

Martin Luther King jr once suggested that…

“If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority”.

If the church’s life is not fundamentally oriented towards healing and compassion;

if it does not speak out against that which is unjust…

or life denying…

or just plain evil…

then, whatever else it is and whatever else it is doing…

it is not longer ‘church’.

 

And yet, in a sense, it’s also much broader than that.

At the most primal level, the function of the church—

it’s very raison d’être

is to enable a transformative encounter with the living God;

and to foster a sense of the divine mystery.

As such, it is called to be open—

open to admitting its failures…

open to change…

open to new and radically different ways of understanding and experiencing God…

and God’s relationship with humanity and the whole of creation.

It’s in light of that, that the church is called to “worship”.

That is, what we call ‘worship’ is our response to the God who we have experienced.

And that response— 

“worship”—

is far more than what happens in a church building on a Sunday.

It’s about who we are. 

It’s about how we live.

It’s about how our experience of God informs and shapes our everyday lives.

But, even more than that, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said:

“The church is her true self only when she exists for humanity”.

Our response to God—

our worship—

is not simply something individualistic, esoteric, or ephemeral…

it’s grounded in the way that we live, practically.

To continue that quote from Bonhoeffer—

if you excuse the non-inclusive language—

the church… 

“must take her part in the social life of the world, not lording it over men, but helping and serving them. She must tell men, whatever their calling, what it means to live in Christ, to exist for others”.

Now, I think he’s right— 

but with one major modification. 

The church’s role isn’t to tell people what it means to live in Christ—

it isn’t to tell people what it means to exist for others—

its role is to show them.

The church’s purpose is to incarnate Christ.

The church’s purpose is to be Christ for this broken and needy world.

And that ought to flow from its experience of God in worship.

 

In a way, I think that’s what the author of First Peter is trying to say in our reading this morning.

Here, he offers a variety of different but inter-related images, describing them as:

a chosen race…

a royal priesthood…

a holy nation…

a spiritual house or temple.

On the whole, these are all images drawn from the covenantal understanding of Israel—

namely…

how a poor, insignificant, vulnerable group of people were chosen by God… 

to be a light to the nations…

and to reflect and manifest God’s nature.

And perhaps that’s most apparent, and most pertinent, in the priestly image that our author loves:

“You are a royal priesthood…

a holy priesthood”.

And yet, he’s not referring here to the idea of the “priesthood of all believers”—

an idea that’s so beloved of protestant theology, historically.

Rather, the word in the original Greek is difficult to translate.

It a collective noun.

It refers to a group who, together, exercise a priestly function.

In other words, according to the author of First Peter…

the church’s calling is to be a priest;

that is, to manifest…

to reflect…

to embody…

to incarnate…

the very nature of God—

to be a sign, a symbol, a sacrament of God’s presence in the world.

 

Being church, then, does not mean gathering together out of habit, routine, or tradition.

Being church does not mean coming together to listen to a pipe organ and to sing much-loved hymns—

when the minister deigns to pick the ones that we want.

Being church does not mean being a self-help group or a social club.

Being church does not mean busting a gut to keep old buildings open and in good order.

Being church does not mean striving to keep certain traditions… 

or memories… 

or out-dated principles alive.

Rather…

being church means being the contemporary incarnation of the living, loving God.

Being church means striving— 

at all times and in all ways—

to embody what God has done, and is doing, in and through Jesus Christ:

namely…

welcoming the outcast, the rejected, the unwelcome, and the unlovable;

forgiving those who are unable to forgive themselves;

feeding the poor, healing the sick, offering hope to the hopeless;

making the broken whole;

and bringing new, resurrected life into every experience of death, destruction, and dehumanisation.

That

and only that… 

is what it means to be church!

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