From the Sunday Note, with additional thoughts–
Beloved:
Come to him, a living stone, rejected by human beings
but chosen and precious in the sight of God,
and, like living stones,
let yourselves be built into a spiritual house
to be a holy priesthood to offer spiritual sacrifices
acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
For it says in Scripture:
Behold, I am laying a stone in Zion,
a cornerstone, chosen and precious,
and whoever believes in it shall not be put to shame. (Isaiah 28:16)
Therefore, its value is for you who have faith, but for those without faith:
The stone that the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone, (Psalm 118:22)
and
A stone that will make people stumble,
and a rock that will make them fall. (Isaiah 8:14a)
They stumble by disobeying the word, as is their destiny.
You are-
a chosen race, (first and last phrases from Isaiah 43:20-21)
a royal priesthood, (second and third phrases from Exodus 19:6)
a holy nation,
a people of his own,
so that you may announce the praises” of him
who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.
1 Peter 2:4-9, 2nd reading, Fifth Sunday of Easter
It is all too easy to fall into the lazy mental habit of thinking of the Church as a “top-down” organization: pope at the top, under him the bishops, then priests, then laity. Even Protestant and various independent Christian bodies acknowledge this by looking upwards for teaching, inspiration, and organization, though their hierarchies are more-or-less informal.
Of course, insofar as the Church has any outward structure, it must have some such shape, to have any cohesion at all. We can rely on it that this world cannot imagine it any other way, but that fact alone should make us wary that something important is being missed, for the world’s spiritual insight is partial and blinkered at best. And, in fact, Peter in this letter describes the Church in a completely different way—with Christ at the bottom, the “foundation stone,” a “living stone” upon which the whole house is built. Built upwards, of course, and it is the upper and most numerous layers (us) that are most visible.
Peter also describes us as “living stones” built upon that one foundational living stone of Jesus. We living stones offer “spiritual sacrifices.” Those would be prayers of intercession, words of truth and encouragement to the downtrodden, words of challenge to the unjust, and multiple works of care for the suffering and miserable, etc. In this letter Peter is not talking just to elders (priests), hierarchs, head preachers, church planters, or whatever, but to all of us in the pews: he calls us to consider ourselves as a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people of his own. The hierarchy, in fact, lives to serve us, because we are out there in the world where the everyday struggles of faith go on. A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows us that there is only 1 member of the hierarchy for every 3000+ Catholics in the world. Leaving all witness and work to men in clerical robes is nothing but lazy thinking.
No—we are the immediately visible, living, acting, growing edge of the Church, whether we (much less the world) realize it or not. We are that chosen race, that royal priesthood, that holy nation, that people of his own—therefore, we have plenty we need to set about doing. Doing right under the noses, or right in the faces, of that world which does not believe.
For further reflection:
Certainly, many men and women of the laity are called upon to directly assist the work of a priest or deacon for a parish, but all such assistants, added up, are only a tiny percentage of the wider parish population. Most of the evangelization and good works done by most of us will be done among our friends, neighbors, wider families, and with non-parish organizations for a hundred different kinds of service needed in most every human community. That is the way of everyday evangelization–being Christ for others throughout our towns and cities, organizations and sub-communities. As Christ said to his disciples (we are not of the 12, but we are disciples are we not?) “The harvest is abundant [or ‘vast’] but the laborers are few, so ask the master of the harvest to send out laborers for the harvest.” (Matthew 37-38) That’s what the celebrant does, send out the laborers, at the Dismissal at every Mass.