George A. Mason Reformation Sunday Wilshire Baptist Church 25 October 2015 Third in a series, the Once and Future Baptist Church Dallas, Texas The Holy Church: Baptists and the Sanctity of the Church 1 Peter 2:4-5, 9-10; Matthew 13:24-30 A weird thing happened in Washington, D.C. recently. What? Weird things happen in Washington, George? Well, this one moves past the political to the spiritual. After Pope Francis addressed Congress, Democratic Rep. Bob Brady of Pennsylvania ran to the podium and snatched the Holy Father s half-drunk glass of water and whisked it away to his office, where he, his wife and Rep. Bob Casey and his wife shared a sip of what they considered to be holy water. When reminded by reporters that the tap water was not holy in the strict Catholic sense, Brady dismissed them by saying, Anything the Pope touches becomes blessed. 1 The question of what is sacred and what is profane, and what is holy or blessed in relation to the church, is as old as the Church itself. We ve made it today to the third of our five-part series on The Once and Future Baptist Church: A Challenge for Our Time. We re looking particularly at the Baptist movement where we ve been and where we re going through the lens of the four historic marks of the larger Church. The Church is one, holy, catholic and apostolic. Two weeks ago we looked at how we can be uniquely Baptist and still part of the one Church with a capital C. Today we consider what it means for the church to be holy. The odd incident concerning the Pope s drinking water has more of a popular superstitious underpinning to it than even the Catholic Church would accept. But it is true that the Catholic Church has claimed that the Pope and ordained priests have power to make ordinary water holy because the Church they serve as Christ s representatives on Earth is holy by definition. This debate about how the Church is holy was fierce in the fourth century in North Africa. A group called the Donatists claimed that the true Church was composed only of saints that is, holy ones, not sinners. And they went so far as to say that only if you were 1 Sightings, http://us6.campaignarchive1.com/?u=6b2c705bf61d6edb1d5e0549d&id=932fe71a06&e=f0c9027622
baptized by a Donatist priest or received communion from one could you have been validly baptized or truly have received the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist. This debate raged until the eminent Bishop of Hippo, Augustine, made his defining argument about the Church in his book The City of God. Augustine cited a passage from Matthew 13 about how the wheat and the weeds grow up together in the field, and while they are growing, they look so much alike that it is futile to try to pick out the weeds until the harvest. His point was that saints and sinners are both in the church until the final judgment by God, who alone has the power to tell one from the other. This issue goes along with the Catholic Church s baptism of infants and calling on church members to be faithful all their lives long in order to be counted among the holy when the judgment comes. Augustine himself feared on his deathbed that he would not be judged to be among the holy. In the sixteenth century, an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther was so tortured about his sinfulness that he confessed to his priest to the point of wearing him out. Today we join the rest of the Protestant world in commemorating Reformation Sunday. On All Hallows Eve in 1517, Luther famously nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg church, hammering home his protest against this spiritual insecurity, among other things. Luther s great insight was that the church is holy because God is holy, not because Christians are holy. For Luther, everything came down to God s grace in Jesus Christ. It is Christ s righteousness that we receive in our relationship to him, not our righteousness that we achieve in order to be worthy of him. Our faith is Christ s faith that is granted to us, because whatever Christ touches is blessed. Whoever is in Christ is holy. Luther said the church is not filled with sinners and saints but with people who are sinners and saints at the same time. Baptists came along about a century later. Luther s ideas about holiness being centered in relationship to Christ were carried over to how the church is organized. Baptists were not Reformers like Luther or Calvin; we were Separatists. The first Baptists believed that the only way to have a holy church was for it to be composed of holy people. And they were only holy if they were 2
first born again and then baptized. Baptists believe in what is called the regenerate church; that is, the church is holy because it is only made up of people who have been regenerated the word means born again or born anew by their profession of faith in Jesus Christ and their baptism thereafter. The problem is what to do with those regenerate people who, after becoming regenerate become degenerate again? What happens when they keep sinning? Luther himself acknowledged this problem when he said that the old man who supposedly drowned in baptism seemed to be a pretty good swimmer. Baptists didn t have a tradition of confession to a priest, since we believed all Christians were made priests, so we assumed that we should confess our sins to one another. And the revival movement really drove this practice home, as many would publicly rededicate their lives to Christ at planting and harvest times again and again. However, this habit wasn t enough for some Baptists, who were so concerned about this that they believed such sinners had actually fallen from grace. The Church of Christ movement under the influence of Alexander Campbell and Barton Stone in the nineteenth century split from Baptists and said that only if you were properly baptized by a minister in a truly New Testament church could you be saved. And if you kept on sinning, you would have to be baptized again and again. Sounds a lot like the Donatists, doesn t it? What s old is ever new, don t you know?! Baptists were losing so many members to the churches of Christ that they developed their own theology of how they were the true church. These Baptists tried to trace their holy lineage all the way back through history in an unbroken series of landmarks of true Baptist-like martyrs all the way to John the Baptist himself. The Landmark Baptist movement is what shaped some of you in your Baptist upbringing, although you probably don t know it. For instance, the language of joining a church by letter came from the idea that only if you had a letter from a Baptist church that said you were duly baptized by a Landmark Baptist pastor could you safely join another Baptist church without being rebaptized. Some of you may also have grown up in a Baptist church that allowed only members of that church to receive the Lord s Supper. Same movement. You see, Baptists have sometimes reshaped their 3
theology to stave off losing members to more-conservative churches by inoculating the church with even-more- conservative theology. Go figure. I believe we need to rethink today what it means to be holy. With Luther we can affirm that all Christians are holy that is, saints in the general sense that by virtue of the work of Christ, he makes us his own. If you have put your trust in Jesus Christ, you are already among the saints. As Baptist Professor Curtis Freeman puts it: When individual members fall into sin and even when as a community it is unfaithful and in need of reformation and renewal, the church by virtue of its union with Christ and the indwelling presence of the Spirit remains holy. As Karl Barth observed, the church may become a beggar, a shopkeeper, or a harlot, but it is still and always the bride of Christ. We are, as 1 Peter says, the people of God, a chosen race, a royal priesthood and a holy nation. But here s the important thing Peter says that follows: in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. You see, our holiness is directly related to our purpose as the people of God. This is where we have so often gone wrong. We have made holiness into something that must be constantly examined to see whether our status is sure and our salvation assured. We have defined holiness as sinlessness, as purity, as some kind of state of saintliness. And too often that idea has to do with what we don t do rather than what we do. You know the old saw among us: a good Baptist boy is someone who doesn t drink or dance or chew or go with girls who do. But the point of purity isn t purity any more than the point of fitness is fitness. If you work hard to get into great shape by watching what you eat, lifting weights and doing cardio workouts, and all you do with that is to celebrate how great your body is and how good you look, that s vanity, not purity. The point of great fitness is what it allows you to do because of it. If an athlete is out of shape, she won t be much good on the field or the court. The point of self-discipline is what it allows you to accomplish with the instrument of your body. 4
Likewise, spiritual fitness let s call it holiness is about how Christ-like we are becoming in order that we may participate in God s great mission to the world of calling those in darkness into the light of God s love. With Augustine, we can leave the winnowing work to God at the end of days and now just trust in Christ for our eternal salvation. This approach will free us to get on with the work we share with all other Christians of every stripe that we proclaim the good news. So how can we as Wilshire Baptist Church become part of this effort to interpret a holy church to the larger Christian community? First, let s acknowledge that we are all of us sinners saved by grace and get out of the business of trying to figure out who s holier than someone else. We should leave the sorting to God and get on with the serving instead. We should focus on how each of us can be better spiritually prepared to serve. And that s the second thing: as Mark Wingfield nicely put it in his Tapestry column today, we should attend to how the gifts the Holy Spirit has given to us can be used for holy purposes. What are your unique gifts and passions? How can God activate them in service in order that your purpose can be fulfilled? An old American Express ad said, Membership has its privileges, but the future Baptist church saying should be, Membership has its responsibilities. Holiness is the means of achieving our mission; it is not the mission itself. A holy man was praying on a creek bank one day when his eye caught a scorpion that had gotten stuck on a log trying to cross the waters. As the waters continued to hit the small creature, the holy man sprang to his feet, reached out his hand and freed it so that it could make it to the other side. In the midst of the rescue operation, the scorpion stung the holy man. A bystander noticed the goings on and asked the holy man, Didn t you realize that it s the nature of a scorpion to sting? The holy man replied, Yes, but it s my nature to save. 5
Friends, as long as we are concerned with a holiness that protects us from dangerous encounters with others, the church is not really holy. The holy nature of the church is seen only when we are about the work of saving. Amen. 6