Many folks were glued to their TV sets watching the events of the Royal Wedding. My 6-year-old daughter was amazed. She thought princes and princesses were only in her Disney movies. She said, “Daddy, I am going to have to move away, because I’m going to marry a prince!”
Looking at an upcoming lectionary reading of 1 Peter 2:2-10 and this “royal priesthood” to which we are called, I got to thinking about the church.
Derik Hamby
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All my life I’ve been a part of the church. I grew up going Sunday morning and night. We went to fall and spring revivals. Our lives revolved around the activities and events in our local church.
I never got to see the Disney shows on Sunday night (to my sorrow) or sleep in on Sunday morning. What other people did on Wednesday night instead of going to church was a great mystery to me.
I knew that “Just as I Am” was to evoke guilt and last 15 minutes. Beer was taboo, but smoking as you head into the sanctuary was no big deal. Lottery tickets were evil, but if someone won we hoped they would tithe. I remember having a Catholic girlfriend in high school and thought how exotic that was and how cool it made me. What a rebel I had become!
Years later my views of the church are no longer naïve. Looking back, I didn’t know about the divisions or disagreements folks in church had. My parents tried to keep that from us. As I grew I noticed that church wasn’t always perfect, and as I got older I realized that I didn’t always agree with my home church. Still the underlying themes did shape me. The older I got the more I saw the diversity of the church. I was able to embrace those other churches we didn’t say much about as a kid. I saw the “big tent” that was the church.
Now I’m 39 with kids of my own. Our lives revolve around the church, and yet with a different twist.
My daughter plays church and writes sermons and knows girls can preach, too. We hang out with folks of all denominational stripes, and we are trying real hard to be less closed-off. But we still eat our share of potluck meals, go to church more than the average family and have collected enough craft projects at church from our kids to open our own Michaels.
Since most of my adult life now still revolves around the church and many of the things we do flow from this community, I think about how to really understand what or who the church should be. What images/metaphors give us a picture of the church in a healthy way?
The 1 Peter lectionary passage has several — newborn infants, living temple, holy priesthood, and elect people of God. All provide homiletical ammunition for some really good sermons about the church, but reading the passage this time I thought back to the Royal Wedding.
Royalty from various places came for the big day. The British monarchy is not as powerful as it once was, of course, but it still illustrates power and status. Not everyone gets to marry in such pomp and circumstance.
Those folks are not like other people, yet we are royalty as well. Because we are the church we are a royal community, and that should point to something unique and “other than.” There is a difference.
What must it be like to be in the royal family in England? One might marry into this family, but are they every really “accepted” 100 percent? What if Prince William had married a waitress at Cracker Barrel?
The media said his new bride was a “commoner,” but she stayed in a hotel room before the wedding that cost $8,000 a night. I wonder if she ever mowed her own lawn, struggled to figure out whether to pay the light bill or the phone bill this week or compared prices at Wal-Mart and Dollar General.
But the church as a royal family is actively inviting folks to become one with us. We are letting folks know that they are royalty in waiting, and they don’t even know it yet!
Derik Hamby is pastor of Randolph Memorial Baptist Church in Madison Heights, Va., and a trustee of the Religious Herald.