An Open Table where Love knows no borders

A Chosen People

A sermon on 1 Peter 2: 2-10 by Nathan Nettleton

Well, we’re all still here, so either the rapture didn’t happen yesterday, or none of us were deemed good enough to be carried off to heaven by the returning Christ. The cashed up American preacher Harold Camping and his followers, who paid for all the billboards telling us the world was going to end yesterday, are apparently all still here too, which must be a bit depressing for them, and I understand that suicide hot-lines in the USA are on high alert. Of course, it is possible that the rapture did happen, and not only were none of us good enough, but neither were any of them or anyone that any of us knows. And in that case, we’ve been rather wrong about the mercy of the God made known to us in Christ and God has written off the lot of us.

If you do see empty clothes and shoes lying on the ground, or naked people floating up past your windows, don’t panic. A closer look out your window will probably show it to be a helium filled sex doll, because I hear that lots of them have been being released into the air to mock Camping and his friends. And there has been lots of internet discussion about subjects such as the perfect pick-up line for a final pre-rapture one-night-stand, such as: “I promise it won’t be awkward in the morning”.

Now it is, of course, very easy to take the piss out of these people, but even in their stupidity, there are some important implications for us all that are worth thinking about. One of those things rears its head in our readings tonight. And we sang it before. “We are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people.” Have you noticed how much harder it is to say lines like that when people like Harold Camping are jumping up and down and giving the idea of being a chosen people such a bad name? It suddenly sounds like such a pretentious claim. We’re special. We’re special. We’re special, special, special. Jesus is coming back and we’re going to be taken to heaven, and you’re not. And the Bible says so, so there. But it is important to ask the question: does that mean that a line like that should always make us cringe, and we just notice more at certain times, or is it still something worth saying but we have to think a bit more carefully about what it is and how it comes across?

Let’s take a look first at the content of this line we heard and sang, and see what it has to say that might be important and worth hearing, and then we’ll come back to the question of whether it is a horribly pretentious and exclusive thing to say at all.

There are four labels in this line: a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, and God’s own people. I’m going to take two of them together — a chosen race and a holy nation — because the concepts of race and nationality are often taken together, or at least treated in similar ways. One of the meanings of the word “holy” is to be set apart to a special purpose, so we could be talking here of being a chosen race and a special set-apart nation. The language here comes straight out of the Jewish heritage, but in our world today, there is certainly more than one race or nation that has seen itself as the chosen people, the special set-apart nation. The concept may begin with a sense of being given a special task, or being commissioned for a special job, but it easily drifts into just being special, privileged, exalted above all others. I recently saw our friend Garry Deverell wearing a t-short that said “Jesus loves you … but I’m his favourite.” It is a surprisingly short journey from “Jesus has given me a job to do,” to “I’m his favourite.”

But when you stop and notice a crucial element of this line, you will realise that that is not where it is going at all. Because this line about being a chosen race and a holy nation is not being addressed to a particular race or nation. Those to whom it is addressed are not distinguished by a common racial background or a common nationality. It is being addressed to those who have chosen to follow Jesus and, as was made clear on the day of Pentecost, they come from every race and nation. So in fact, this line is taking the concept of being a chosen race and holy nation and turning it on its head. Rather than privileging any racial or national identity, it is conferring a privileged identity on a disparate group whose common identity is in Christ alone. And what that does is render previous racial or national identities irrelevant. However, privileged you thought your race or nation was, that is no longer your primary identity. Your identity is now in Christ. It is almost suggesting that next time you have to fill in a form giving your race or nationality, you might write “Christian”. And that, of course, can be seen as treasonous by those who insist that we should be ready to defend our nation, right or wrong, and kill for it if asked to do so. Because now those “others” we are being asked to hate and kill may be, in Christ, our own fellow citizens and our brothers and sisters. So the lines are redrawn in a radical new way.

Something similar is happening when we are called a “royal priesthood”. Priesthood is another category that has often been about exclusive privilege. The priests have often been seen as God’s special ones, and as the ones who have exclusive access to God and can therefore secure the special favour of God for others. Therefore they are esteemed in the community, and everyone wants to keep them on side. Many priests have relished this privilege and defended it against any threat. At least some of the heat in the current debates over worship in the Roman Catholic Church is over questions of the special rights of the priests and the special honour shown to the priests.

Now, whenever there is a populist objection to the elevated status of the priesthood, the natural reflex is to fight for the abolition of the priesthood. But it has sometimes been said of the early Baptists that they didn’t so much abolish the priesthood, they abolished the laity. And we Baptists would claim that that was no new innovation, but a move in clear continuity with the practice of the early church as evidenced by this very passage from the first letter of the Apostle Peter. But of course, it is sadly true that we Baptists have been just as often guilty as any other tradition of being enthralled by charismatic leaders and giving them an adulation that ends up in honouring the one who preaches more than the one who is preached. But clearly this line from Peter is calling for such an inverted understanding. There is no-one who is not called to share in Christ’s priesthood, to prayerfully stand in the gap, representing God to the world and the world to God and prayerfully pleading for the reconciliation of the two. This is all of you, says Peter, not a privileged few.

And the same goes when we come to the last one, “God’s own people”. But I want to unpack this last one more in reference to our other question: are these claims we can still make out loud in mixed company, or should we hush them up? Sure, “God’s own people” can sound like a very exclusive and privileged claim, but listen to what immediately follows it without so much as a full stop.
You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

Firstly, you are not given these titles as a special reward for being the favoured ones, but as a job description for a task of proclaiming and taking God’s love to the world. And secondly, there is a real humility about this new understanding of the privileged status we have been given. There is a recognition that it is totally grace, totally gift, totally undeserved but freely and generously offered to all. We might be God’s own chosen people now, but only yesterday we were no people and knew nothing of mercy. Our change of fortune and change of status was given to us through no merit of our own. It was offered to everyone, and all we did was accept the gift. And if we were no-ones yesterday, then today’s no-ones may well, by the grace of God, be a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people tomorrow. And it is our task as this gracious gifted and honoured group to work and pray for that to be so.

Any claim to special honour or status as God’s chosen ones is, and must be remembered to be, a proclamation of God’s passionate desire to welcome everybody, of every race and nation and gender and social class and age and sexual orientation and occupation into the chosen people of God. The offer is for all. Even those who think the rapture came yesterday!

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