The Priesthood of All Believers

There are several images that Christians have adopted in their leadership styles. A popular image in recent years is that of the leader as CEO, the Chief Executive Officer.This approach to leadership supports the image of a savvy businessperson with strongorganizational and managerial skills. Certainly the skills of organization andmanagement are great gifts that can be offered in leadership. The question we wouldneed to ask ourselves is the extent to which such an image should be adopted by thechurch. Is there any danger in modeling our leadership after market-driven corporations?Another approach to leadership models itself after the image of “Buddy Jesus” portrayedin the film

Dogma

. In the movie Cardinal Glick attempts to revitalize the image of theCatholic Church by introducing the up-beat image of “buddy Jesus” who is giving both athumb’s up and wink-and-a-gun. Here leadership becomes smiling and passive. In our attempts to be positive and inclusive we become paralyzed with the fear of saying or doing anything that may possibly offend. There is often an attractiveness to this approach but also a difficulty with reconciling it to our historical account of Jesus.These are just two images of Christian leadership that our contemporary culture hasoffered. There are of course several biblical images for leadership. There is the leader asshepherd. This image emphasizes care and guidance. There is the leader as prophet.This image focuses on the rigorous discernment of values and actions within both thechurch and the world. And there is of course the leader as servant which at the best timesinforms any model of leadership we attempt to adopt.In the Protestant and Anabaptist traditions there is another image of leadership that comesfrom a doctrine called the Priesthood of All Believers. This doctrine stems from both theOld and the New Testament. During the Reformation period this doctrine attempted toerase some of the lines the church had drawn between church leaders and lay people.Prior to the Reformation the church had established a model of leadership in which the1

priest himself stood as the mediator between the sin of another human being and theforgiveness of God. The calling and responsibility for God’s work lay solely in churchleadership. Christians were at the mercy of what church leaders demanded for theforgiveness of their sins. Many in the Reformation saw this type of leadership asattempting to stand in the position that Christ alone had claimed in the New Testament.And so reformers claimed that in fact

all

believers have access to the forgiveness of Godthrough Christ. This doctrine had a dramatic impact on how believers understoodthemselves to be in relationship with God. Now what this doctrine means for practical leadership in the church has not always beenclear. One thing that this belief has meant to Anabaptists is that in addition to having a personal relationship with God we also all share in the interpreting of God’s word asgiven in the Bible. God’s Spirit of discernment and insight is believed to be best sharedand experienced in a community of readers. Perhaps, not quite as helpfully, thePriesthood of All Believers has also come to mean for some that all the members of thechurch can do all tasks equally. This approach can tend to downplay the value anduniqueness of each person’s calling.The doctrine of the Priesthood of All Believers is a wonderful and challenging view of faith. In this doctrine we can encourage and celebrate that all those who have takenleadership roles in the church are able and equipped for the task because we all share inthe same Spirit and we are each in a personal relationship with same God. In addition thedoctrine reminds us that all of us in our daily lives carry with us in a very real way theoffice of priesthood.So among the other biblical images of leadership what does it mean to be a “priest”? Atthis point it might be helpful to take a quick mental inventory of the images andmemories that you associate with word “priest” either from the Bible or in the church. . .. And for the rest of the morning I will ask if you to put these images aside and reconsider the role of the priest.2

This morning I will ask us to consider that

priests are the ones who offer a form for the holiness of God

.To understand what that statement means we need to dust off the pages of books likeLeviticus and Numbers, those literary archenemies of our noble attempts to read throughthe entire Bible. Of course there is no real wonder that these books are so neglected.Leviticus strikes us a mess of obscure laws and rituals obsessed with anything frommenstruation to mold. And in the more honest Bible translations we even find littlefootnotes from scholars who confess that the meaning of certain Hebrew words in these passages still remain obscure and uncertain. However, what we cannot deny is that for the Israelites these books constituted a formative expression of their life and faith. Andwhen God called for a kingdom of priests In Exodus 19 what he gave them wasLeviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.So how can we interpret texts that for centuries have confounded some of the greatestmodern biblical scholars? One response to this is that

modern

interpreters of the Israelite priesthood have used

modern

methods of the interpretation. One of the hallmarksdistinguishing modern interpretation is the belief that each individual law could explainedrationally. For instance some would interpret the dietary laws according to hygiene.They don’t eat certain foods because they are unsanitary. Or perhaps that sheep are clean because they remind us of being a shepherd. Others suggested that women were asked to be separated after childbirth to rekindle marital romance. While some of theseinterpretations can be helpful the sheer volume and complexity of the laws alwaysthwarted any systematic interpretation of these books.In response to this type of approach there are an increasing number of commentators whoare convinced that we do not understand the Old Testament priesthood because we are nolonger conscious of how our

actions

reflect and also

create

our belief about the world.For the priest

every

aspect of life, every space, every relationship, every object wassomehow related to the reality of God’s holiness and therefore needed to be accountedfor.3