Soul Signal

When I was a girl, I stepped behind the rail at the front of my church to pick up a hymnal somebody had dropped. An usher froze like I had set the building on fire. He did not yell. He just held out his hand, palm flat, and shook his head. Behind that rail was for the priest. I was maybe nine years old, and I remember thinking, “What is back there that I can’t be near?”

I have thought about that little rail for a lot of years. Because it turns out people have been fighting about it for two thousand years. And this month, on the last day of October, a good chunk of the world will quietly remember one of the biggest fights of all.

The Fight That Started on October 31

October 31 is Halloween, sure. But it is also Reformation Day. The story goes that on that date in 1517, a German monk named Martin Luther sent out a list of ninety-five complaints about how the church of his day was run. Folks tell it that he nailed the list to a church door in Wittenberg. Historians still argue over whether he really took a hammer to it, so I will not swear to the door. What nobody argues about is that the list lit a fire that is still burning.

One of the ideas that came out of that fire was a big one. A few years later, Luther wrote that every baptized believer is a priest. He did not mean everybody gets a collar. He meant nobody holds a private key to God. No man has to stand between you and the Holy. That idea got a name later: the priesthood of all believers.

Now here is what caught my attention. Luther did not make that up out of thin air. He pulled it from a verse, and the verse has a word in it that is worth slowing down for.

The Word Behind “Royal Priesthood”

The verse is First Peter, chapter two, verse nine. In many English Bibles it reads something like, “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation.” And that was written to ordinary believers. Not to the clergy. To the whole scattered bunch of them.

The Greek word for “priesthood” there is hierateuma. Say it like this: hi-er-AH-tyoo-ma. It grows out of another word, hiereus, which means priest. So hierateuma is the thing a priest does, or the body of priests. A priestly company. A people who all serve at the altar.

Think about that for a minute. The writer is not telling a few special folks, “You are the priests, and the rest of you are the crowd.” He turns to the whole crowd and says, “You are the priestly people.” The same idea shows up in the book of Revelation, where the believers are called a kingdom and priests. In the old way of thinking, a priest was the one who got to stand close. Here, the writer hands that closeness to everybody.

I do want to be fair. Scholars still talk about exactly what Peter meant, and how much that picture was about a group together and how much about each person alone. I am not here to pick a winner in that argument. I am only pointing out that the word is there, in the Bible most of us were handed, and for a long, long time hardly anybody was told what it was saying.

What Jesus Said About the Rail

There is another place that stopped me cold. In Matthew, chapter twenty-three, Jesus is talking to a crowd about the religious leaders of his day, the ones who loved the best seats and the fancy titles. And he says, plain as day, “Do not be called teacher, for you have one teacher, and you are all brothers and sisters. And call no one on earth your father, for you have one Father, who is in heaven.”

You are all brothers and sisters. That is not the language of a rail. It is the language of a kitchen table.

I will say this gently, because I know good priests and good pastors who have given their whole lives to serving. They are not the problem. The trouble starts when serving turns into standing in the doorway. When a helper becomes a gate.

A Saying About What Is Right in Front of You

Now I want to bring in an old book that was never allowed into the Bible. In 1945, a farmer in Egypt dug up a sealed clay jar near a place called Nag Hammadi. Inside were a lot of ancient writings, including one called the Gospel of Thomas. It has no story to it, only a list of sayings, and the fifth saying is short.

It goes something like this. “Know what is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be shown to you.”

That is a loose paraphrase, so please check it against a translation you trust. But look at the direction it points. It does not say, “Go find the person with the right robe, and they will unlock it.” It says to look at what is already in front of you. The hidden thing comes into view when you really see the plain thing. That fits with the other saying in the same book that says the Kingdom is inside you and outside you. No rail. No usher.

Scholars disagree about when Thomas was written and who read it. I am not asking you to take it as scripture. I am asking you to notice that it and Peter and Jesus in Matthew all lean the same way. Toward the person standing right there, with no one in the way.

The Part Nobody Likes to Say

Here is where I have to be honest, because a Reformation Day piece that only cheers is not telling the whole truth. The Reformation did not end gatekeeping. It mostly moved the gate. Within a few years there were new churches with new rules, new leaders, and new fights over who was in and who was out. Some of those fights turned bloody. Luther himself, for all his talk about every believer being a priest, still had very firm ideas about who should be teaching and what should be taught.

That does not make the idea wrong. It tells me the idea is bigger and harder than any one movement can carry. It is easy to say nobody stands between you and God. It is much harder to live like it, and to keep from building a new rail the minute the old one comes down.

Stepping Behind the Rail

I did go back to that church once, as a grown woman. The rail was still there. The usher was long gone. I stood at the edge of it for a good while, and then I stepped across, picked up nothing, and just stood in the spot where I had been told I could not stand.

Nothing happened. No thunder. No light fell out of the ceiling. It was just a floor, and some carpet, and a window with the afternoon coming through it. But something in me let out a breath I had been holding since I was nine.

That is what I think the old words are really after. Not tearing down buildings or shaming the folks who love them. Just handing you back the thing that was yours before anybody told you it was not. The closeness. The standing. The light that was lit in you before you ever walked through a door.

So here is my question for you this Reformation Day. Where is the rail in your life, the place you were told you were not allowed to stand, and what would it take to step across it? Tell me in the comments. I read every one.

Kelli Scott
Soul Signal