To Christ glory and kingship

Daniel 7.9-10, 13,14 I saw, coming on the clouds of heaven, one like a son of man

Revelation 1.4b-8 Jesus Christ has made us a line of kings and priests

John 18.33-37 Yes, I am a king

 

Preached at the Eucharist with Holy Baptism of Naomi

 

To him was given dominion

and glory and kingship,

that all peoples, nations, and languages

should serve him.

(Daniel 7.14)

 

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To confer baptism today, as we celebrate the kingship of Jesus Christ, is beautiful and very appropriate.

 

The thread that weaves baptism and kingship together is anointing.

 

Anointing is the act of applying oil, in baptism it’s olive oil, which consecrates a man or woman and realises the inward anointing of the Holy Spirit.

 

In the scriptures, priests, prophets and kings are all anointed with oil; empowered by the Holy Spirit of God to fulfil their God-given task.

 

It’s water that makes baptism: water of life, cleansing and birth. Light signifies the light of the resurrection of Christ. Oil, for anointing, tells us we share in the life of the Anointed One.

 

Now, you may be thinking ‘who’s this Anointed One?’ he’s talking about!

 

So, the Hebrew for ‘Anointed One’ is  mashiach (מָשִׁיחַ,) and the Greek is chrīstós (χριστός).

 

Sound familiar? Mashiach, Messiah; Chrīstós, Christ.

 

Interestingly the first person to bear the title Maschiach was one of the most famous kings in the Bible, King David. And one of king David’s most distinguished ancestors is Naomi, the name of our candidate for baptism today!

 

And that’s why it’s significant that Jesus was born in the city of David: but let’s not get ahead of ourselves; we’ll enjoy that link at Christmas!

 

To be anointed in baptism we come to share in the life of Jesus Christ, the Anointed One: the Great High Priest, the Word of God and ascended and glorified King of all Creation.

 

No day or action is more important than the day of your baptism, it’s when we are grafted into the life, death and resurrection of the Anointed One, Jesus Christ.

 

Naomi, today you become a citizen of the Kingdom of God. You are recreated, reborn and take on the mantle of priest, prophet and king.

 

So, let’s look at those three aspects of being Christians – priest, prophet, king - which some of us have carried for many years, some more recently, Naomi as of today, and, who knows, there may be someone here not yet baptised who is being called to be.

 

Priest.

 

Let’s first be clear, I am ordained as a priest. But my priesthood comes first from the baptism I share with you: the ministerial priesthood - i.e. what I am ordained into - exists within the priestly body of believers.

 

My priesthood expresses and reflects the priesthood of the whole Church, all the baptised.

 

My first call, like yours, is to be baptised: how you and I serve Christ is down to discernment and wisdom and the gifts we have to offer to the whole Body.

 

You may not wear priestly robes, though at baptism St Paul tells us we ‘put on the Lord Jesus Christ’ (Romans 13.14; Galatians 4.24). Our “clothes” are compassion, kindness, humility and such like (Colossians 3.12,13).

 

The white robe I wear today, the alb, is the robe of baptism, the first robe that goes on me, and goes on you – be clothed in Christ!

 

What did our second reading today say? Christ ‘loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father…’ (Revelation 1.5,6)

 

That’s why we speak of the Church as ‘a royal priesthood, a holy nation’ (2 Peter 2.9)

 

The task of the priest at its heart, is to pray and offer sacrifice.

 

In prayer the individual priest stands representing God to the people and the people to God.

 

As a priestly people we stand representing God to the world, and lifting the world in prayer to God.

 

You are a priest of the priestly people of God.

 

You, with all the baptised, are to pray: praying for the sake of others, and offering your life, as I will bread and wine, ‘as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God’ (Romans 12.1).

 

We are most clearly the priestly people of God when we come together at the Eucharist.

 

Here, hidden in bread and wine, God presents himself to us, and we present ourselves before him, and we offer that sacrifice, which spills out into the world He made: ‘may our sacrifice be acceptable to God, the almighty Father’.

 

Go for it priestly people!

 

And you’re anointed as a prophet.

 

A prophet is one who receives God’s word, takes it to heart and proclaims it to the world beyond him or herself.

 

Being baptised we receive the Word of God, Jesus Christ, and are called to read and meditate on the scriptures as the ‘lively oracles of God’

 

A brief self-examination on what ‘goes in’ and what ‘goes out’ is worth doing.

 

On what goes in: how faithfully do I receive the Word of God? How often do I read the Bible? Do I seek out guidance and insight in reading that word? Do I have a bible in the house? Do I have a Bible app on my phone?

 

On what goes out: Am I ready ‘to give an account to others for the hope that is within me?’ (1 Peter 3.15) How do I help others gain insight into God’s word: my family, friends, colleagues, fellow believers? Or do I keep it all to myself?

 

When you’re addressing those questions then you are becoming prophetic. It is being, like Daniel, one who is prepared to look into and sound the depths of God and then reveal them.

 

Throughout scripture we see that being a prophet is never cost free: it’s not Cross-free.

 

But the anointing Holy Spirit gives grace, power and help to us to do that.

 

Try it! It sounds frightening, but it’s life-giving.

 

After all, as St Paul tells Timothy, ‘God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, and love, and self-control’ (2 Timothy 2.7).

 

So, priest – a life of prayer offered sacrificially to God.

 

So, prophet – receiving and speaking God’s living word.

 

What of king. Now, you might say, ‘I get that I have a priestly role or a prophetic role as a baptised Christian, but king?!’

 

The Blessed Virgin Mary testifies, ‘[The LORD] has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate’ (Luke 1.52)

 

In the psalms it says that the Lord raises you up and crowns you, like a king: God, ‘who redeems your life from the Pit and crowns you with faithful love and compassion’ (Psalm 103.5).

 

Baptism is a coronation of the people of God; baptised into the ‘royal priesthood’ of the holy people of God.

 

To speak of kingship, is to speak of sovereignty and where authority lies.

 

First, in our lives as the baptised, we have to allow Christ to crown our lives; that is what the anointing of baptism does.

 

This is about mastery of self, the Spirit’s gift of self-control, not being like autumn leaves blown about, tossed to and fro by every breath of fashionable opinion, but being governed by the Spirit’s gift of ‘power and love and self-control’.

 

It’s about exercising wise sovereignty in your dealings with others, about how you reveal who is sovereign in your life: Christ, the King.

 

So in baptism the Christian is anointed: consecrated as priest, prophet, king.

 

This reality now touches Naomi’s life, as it has touched mine and yours, and might yet the life of someone you know.

 

As priest, prophet and king, live the life of the Kingdom, a kingdom described by St Paul as a kingdom of ‘…righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit’ (Romans 14.17)

 

The Temple of the Body

Daniel 12.1-3 Some will wake to everlasting life, some to shame and disgrace

Hebrews 10.11-14 When all sins have been forgiven, there can be no more sin-offerings

Mark 13.1-8 Jesus said to them, “See that no one leads you astray. Many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am he!’ and they will lead many astray.

 

‘There will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down.’

(Mark 13.2)

 

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Today’s gospel reading is dramatic and unnerving.

 

Jesus foretells the destruction of the Temple and speaks of the signs of the end of the age.

 

It sounds chaotic, destructive and frightening: we might well ask, ‘where is the Gospel, the Good News – in all of that?

 

Today is the annual ‘Safeguarding Sunday’.

 

Safeguarding is tremendously important to me and a priority as Vicar.

 

To my shame ‘Safeguarding Sunday’ is not something I have ever emphasised in the life of the churches in my care.

 

All that went on last week, and what led to it, resulting in the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, shows that safeguarding is not for one Sunday year.

 

Safeguarding is not an inconvenience, a bureaucratic exercise or something to sigh and shrug our shoulders about: it is about creating a culture across the church where the voices of victims and survivors of abuse of body, mind or spirit are heard and all who are vulnerable, not least the young, are safe.

 

The Church has not always been that place of safety; we have not always modelled the life of faith and hope and love we espouse.

 

So what might the gospel today speak into that bleak scenario?

 

One way in is to consider the Temple: the physical Temple in Jerusalem; the Temple of Creation; the Temple of the body.

 

The Temple of which Jesus foretells destruction is the Temple in Jerusalem.

 

As Jesus came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher, what wonderful stones and what wonderful buildings!” (Mark 13.1)

 

We construct edifices of great beauty and power.

 

That’s true of the Church of England, but for too long those at the heart of the Church of England have stood gazing at the Church and thought ‘how wonderful’ and, in doing so, have gazed on their own grandeur and glory and worried about ‘reputational damage’, as if their wonderful stones, what they have built and lived in, will be pulled down.

 

‘Yes, it will’, says Jesus, ‘When you build to your own glory and not to God’s, then the edifice will crumble’.

 

Furthermore, the Church of England, through her Bishops and Synods, has for too long sought the approval of society, protecting a worldly reputation and not being right with God.

 

All we see of God in the face of Jesus Christ is compassion for the victim, for He Himself becomes the Victim without blame, the Spotless Lamb, who is one with every victim of violence and abuse, in a way the powers -that-be in the Church of England have not been.

 

To see the Cross at the heart of our faith is to see the association of Christ with the innocent victim and nothing of worldly reputation.

 

This moves us to the Temple of the Creation, because the Temple in Jerusalem was conceived by God to be a microcosm of the Creation, the meeting point of divinity and humanity, where right worship is offered.

 

At the heart of the Temple in Jerusalem was the representation of the Garden of Eden – creation as God intended it - before the whispers of sin, through the wiles of the Enemy were heard and acted on, taking humanity away from God and in need of rescuing, salvation and redemption.

 

Sin is the corrosive force that attacks the Creation itself, yet even then God’s redeeming power is at work.

 

In nature and human society, we see destruction and war, and our natural instinct is despair: but our instinct  as disciples of Christ must be hope: hope, not that we can save ourselves, but that we have a saviour.

 

God’s capacity - repeatedly demonstrated in the scriptures - is to turn our destructive ways into the ‘birth pangs’ (Mark 13.8c) of a new age, the pain of the close of an old age.

 

What does that look like on ‘Safeguarding Sunday’?

 

The Church of England is at the close, we pray, of a former age.

 

It’s painful for we who live through it but, as the new child knows, from the safety, warmth and security of the womb delivery into the world is traumatic, yet ultimately about life, new life, abundant life.

 

What we live through now will, by God’s grace, deliver us into the life of the New Creation.

 

All this is a reminder of the spiritual wisdom - expressed in the service of Holy Baptism - that we die to sin, to live with Christ.

 

This takes us to the Temple of the body.

 

In St John’s Gospel Jesus says that the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem -  to which we might add, the Temple of the Creation - is a sign fulfilled in the destruction of his body on the cross, which will be raised after three days.

 

St Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians extends this Temple imagery saying,

 

…do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body. (1 Corinthians 6.19,20)

 

For those who say Christianity is anti-the-body, re-read that passage!

 

It tells us that the body is precious, to be cherished, not to be abused, hurt or destroyed.

 

That has a bearing on the body of the unborn, the terminally ill body, the marred body, the pained body, the tired body, the elderly body.

 

Every body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, a gift from God.

 

That is why abuse of another person’s body is so wicked, it is a blasphemous destruction and violation of the sacred ground of another person’s precious body.

 

And so too is psychological or spiritual abuse that assaults the God-given human spirit within.

 

‘Safeguarding Sunday’: it might sound like a niche cause, or theme enforced on the Church, but I hope we see on this Sunday, and every day, that safeguarding is integral to the protection of the human body, which is a Temple of the Holy Spirit, the meeting place of divinity and humanity in God’s good creation.

 

And may the Church, which is Christ’s own body, honour her call to be compassionate, loving, kindly and gracious, and purge away the sin that clings so closely, but over which Christ, the High Priest, has triumphed.

Be unbound: be a saint

Isaiah 25.6-9 We have waited for the Lord, so that he might save us.

Revelation 21.1-6a I saw a new heaven and a new earth

John 11.32-44 Father, may they believe that you sent me.

 

 

‘Unbind him and let him go’

 

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The story of the raising of Lazarus is one is the pivotal moments of the Gospels.

 

And it has direct bearing on today’s celebration of All Saints, because it shows the movement of the saint from death to life through the resurrection power of Jesus Christ.

 

There are two distinct levels on which to hear this passage.

 

First, we cannot dodge the fact that it’s physical: Jesus, who is deeply moved to tears at the death of his friend, listens to the pleadings of Mary and Martha, Lazarus’ sisters, faces the stinking reality of death, and raises Lazarus - who is well and truly dead - from death to life.

 

That opens up all sorts of questions:

 

What was Lazarus’ body like?

 

How can his body work, with cells and bodily functions and the decay of four days in a tomb?

 

And, after all that, what was Lazarus’ life like once he had come back from the dead?

 

This is about life after death: not just in heaven but on earth too.

And that takes us to the other level of hearing the passage, the spiritual life:

 

What is your life like… before you die?

 

I expect we have all either thought, or talked to people, about our so-called ‘bucket list’: the things we want to do or achieve before we die.

 

It might involve Machu Picchu, a ticket to an Oasis concert, seeing Taylor Swift live, going up the Eiffel Tower: things that people now call, ‘creating memories.’

 

Lazarus’ resurrection pushes this further to deeper spiritual level:

 

if you died and were brought back to life, how would you live your life if you had it all over again?

 

That takes us way beyond memorable experiences into living life in the light of knowing the gift of life, the graced moments of all we do.

 

We don’t know, in any detail, how Lazarus lived his life after death, but we do know he was a disciple of Jesus Christ.

 

Later in John’s gospel, just before Palm Sunday, his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, Jesus dined with Lazarus, and his sisters, at their home in Bethany, and we’re told that the crowds came to see Lazarus as well as Jesus (John 12.9).

 

So, Lazarus was a noted person as well as Jesus: there was a buzz about the man who raised someone from the dead, and about the man actually raised from the dead.

 

The ‘buzz’, the ‘wow’, should not be about the man raised, but, as Jesus says, it is that God sent Jesus precisely to bring life, abundant life, to all people. (John 11.42)

So the story of Lazarus has a physical and spiritual reality, but don’t conclude there’s a physical bit of you and a spiritual bit: the word ‘holy’ relates to ’wholeness’.

 

A fundamental Christian doctrine is that we are body and soul together.

 

We declare in the Creeds that ‘we believe in the resurrection of the body’ (Apostles’ Creed) and ‘look for the resurrection of the dead’ (Nicene Creed).

 

That is about whole person life: physically and spiritually alive – that’s what a saint is, a whole, integrated, holy person living in the power of Christ’s resurrection and then raised body and soul.

 

St Paul puts it like this:

 

[I want to know Christ] and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. (Philippians 3.10-11)

 

So this gospel text asks a big question of you and me: if you were given a new chance at life how would you live it?

 

The Church’s answer is framed by our baptism and the forgiveness of sins.

 

By being baptised, you and I have sacramentally been raised from the dead, passed through the deep waters of death with Christ and called out of the death of sin into the life of holiness.

 

When we seek forgiveness of our sins, we are moving from death to life: the move of the saint.

 

In other words, you and I have made the move of the saint, each day we seek to follow through on it: today is a new chance at life!

 

Don’t think of saints being remote, otherworldly figures, just portrayed in stained glass: but rather real, flesh and blood people who face death, wherever it reigns, with the life of Christ.

 

The saint on earth is a person who has passed from death to life in baptism, clothed in a new robe; the saint in heaven is one who is clothed in the new, glorious resurrection body we are promised (c.f. Philippians 3.21; 1 Corinthians 15, esp. 35-49).

 

Lazarus was called out of the tomb and Jesus commanded those around him to ‘unbind him [from his grave clothes] and let him go’ (John 11.44).

 

His body bound by death was freed into life.

 

Be unbound!

 

Do not be constrained by fear, despair, lack of purpose but live the ‘lively life that deathless shall persevere’.

 

At baptism a new garment, a new robe, signifies this: as of the next baptism, here at the Minster, the newly baptised will be wrapped in a white to robe signify just this: unbound from death; clothed in Christ’s life.

 

That is the process of your sanctification, your becoming a saint.

 

The call to be a saint is for now: don’t be bashful about it: it is the beginning and end of the Christian life.

 

Then the vision of Isaiah of a banquet at which the redeemed gather saying ‘let us be glad and rejoice in God’s salvation’ (Isaiah 25.9) is fulfilled by the vision of a new heaven and a new earth, where death is no more, neither crying, nor weeping, nor mourning for all is made new (c.f. Revelation 21.1-6a).

 

Our Eucharist now points to that same heavenly banquet tasted by saints on earth: this is the banquet of life!

 

Be unbound. 

 

Be clothed in resurrection power.

 

Come to the banquet of the Lamb of God.

 

Be a saint.