+Z’ev

Today’s assigned readings:

Sirach 45:6-16, 2 Corinthians 12:11-21, Luke 19:41-48

He made an everlasting covenant with him, and gave him the priesthood of the people.
Sirach 45:7

I continue to struggle with the idea or question of “What is my vocation in the Church?” I wrote to my friend, Donald, that the big question is “what now?” “Now” being that I’m nearly 43 and feeling totally stranded. I’m so very used to the idea that I’m supposed to be doing this - church, Bible, mystery. Every other job - and I’ve had a lot of them - seems like simply paying the bills. This is what I do and this is what feeds me as I do it.

Late Thursday evening as I sat down to write this I picked up a voice mail from my boss asking me to consider a change in my schedule. The change would, basically, take away all the freedom I’ve recently found to continue to explore vocation. I know my vocation is not being on the lowers rung of the drug-rehab industry. But that pays the bills. But if I can’t be doing this - Bible, Church, Mystery - all the rest is rather useless. I’d continue doing this for free. It’s my life.

Who are the ministers of the Church? I wrote yesterday “if we look with unbiased eyes at Church history there was a lot more diversity than we like to admit: congregational, presbyterian and episcopal governance were all present.” This is true of the earliest days of the Church, gathered in Jerusalem and we see it throughout the book of Acts and the Epistles. By some lights we see it in the Gospels, too, although I admit to being confused by that.

No matter how you slice church history, however, there is a sense that something changed. This verse from Sirach - this entire passage, in fact - is no longer true. The covenant with Aaron and his sons was not everlasting. It ended sometime around the appearance of the Archangel to the priest, Zachary, the father of John the Baptist. While it is true that “Before Aaron such beautiful things did not exist.” It is not true, as it says following, “No outsider ever put them on, but only his sons and his descendants in perpetuity.”

My friend, Susan, and I have been having an extended email conversation about, among other things, lay presidency at the Eucharist. This is ironic for those who know me, because I tend to have a very “high” theology of Sacramental things. Baptism really saves one, the Eucharist really is the Body and Blood of Christ (God save me, I had to edit out “Blog of Christ”) and ordination really puts an ontological mark on your soul.

Or does it?

I don’t know my answer to that any more. During my time as a non-Christian I learned a lot of things. Among them was that anyone can lead a service if they have the right skills. Later I had time to learn this very same thing at St Gregory of Nyssa Church, functioning as a liturgical deacon even though I was not ordained. But was I? This is really the source of the question. Is a Christian priest (or pastor) ordained to speak before God instead of the people, or is the pastor (or priest) ordained to speak for the sake of order: because having 50 or 100 voices all babbling together might be unseemly and chaotic?

Is a priest or deacon (or bishop or verger or any other Church Title you might pick) simply a function of the congregation, something that is done to make things happen “decently and in order”, or are Holy Orders part of the magic of the Church? I’m mindful of two phases of Methodism (in which tradition I was raised). On the one hand, at its very beginning, the Methodist societies had no ordination. When they wanted sacraments (as for once a month communion) they visited the local Anglican church). Later, John Wesley began ordaining presbyters himself because of necessity, feeling that the Methodists needed someone empowered to administer the sacraments. He did this after he had rejected any idea of Apostolic Succession… so he was simply empowering laymen to do the function within the community. There was no “magic” involved.

Also feeding into the conversation is my contact with modern Judaism: among its many streams, traditions and denominations, one increasingly finds egalitarian structures where services are conducted not by the Ordained but by the community and those the community names as having the right skills for the job. The same is true in parts of what is called the Emergent Church movement.

While I do not doubt that an ordained clergy has been a part of Christian tradition for nearly all of the last 2000 years, it was not always so in all parts of Christendom. Nor, I think, need it always be going forward. So who are the ministers of the Church?

In her book Leaving Church, Barbara Brown Taylor realises that her ordination keeps her apart from the very people with whom she worships God. She speaks of being at a pool party with her parishioners. Various persons are getting dunked in the pool fully clothed but no one is coming near her - The Priest™. Finally someone takes pity on her and throws her in as well and from within the pool, people laughing, she looks around in love:

If being ordained meant being set apart from them, then I did not want to be ordained anymore. I wanted to be human. I wanted to spit food and let snot run down my chin. I wanted to confess being as lost and found as anyone else without caring that my underwear showed through my wet clothes. Bobbing in that healing pool with all those other flawed beings of light, I looked around and saw them as I had never seen them before, while some of them looked at me the same way. The long wait had come to an end. I was in the water at last.

In his review of the book, Adam says the following (after hearing the author speak on the same topic):

At the lunch, she always shared what her ideal church would be. She said it would consist of 52 people, and it would be a community of pastors, in that all of the leadership would be shared. Hopefully they would be a community of social activists, a community of leaders, and they would never own a building - because she said as soon as you have a building, then the problems begin.

Adam says these are, “Some interesting thoughts for would-be emerging church planters.” I think they are interesting thoughts for all of us who are Christians living today. How do we do Church? Why do we do it the way we do? Is it simply because “that’s the way it was being done with I got here”? Is it possible that’s not the best way to look at things? Or, more to the point, is it possible that what’s “always” been done isn’t “always” the right answer?

Aaron’s sacrifices shall be wholly burned twice every day continually. Moses ordained him, and anointed him with holy oil; it was an everlasting covenant for him and for his descendants as long as the heavens endure, to minister to the Lord and serve as priest and bless his people in his name.

Continually until things change.

The Community always assumes continuity. Of course Israel’s sacrifices will continue forever (even speaking - as the writer is - after a time when they had been interrupted).

The Community always assumes changelessness. History will show the evolution of the Eastern Rite liturgy - but people still say “it never changes.” the same is true of the “traditional Latin Mass” which grew and evolved right up until it was discontinued in 1967. It will return to it’s evolutionary track after B16 takes it out of storage and releases it to the wider Church later this year. History will show the evolution of even the most modern things: the 3 or 4 very different liturgies that developed over the last 25 or 30 years at St Gregory of Nyssa, for example. But some folks, even when I was there, wanted to lock them away in a kind of liturgical Tupperware. Nothing stays fresh for long without the Holy Spirit’s winds of change blowing through. Nothing keeps out freshness like Tupperware.

We see Jesus driving out the moneychangers in today’s Gospels. The money changers and animal sellers were all there doing the work of the Mosaic law. You could not sacrifice animals that had not been approved by the priest - better to get them pre-approved in lots than risk having some turned away at the altar. But you couldn’t bring images of pagan gods into the temple - such as were on the Roman coins. So, change your Roman coins for kosher gelt, then buy a sacrifice. Jesus’ action overthrows not just any injustice that might be present, but the entire sacrificial and sacerdotal system by disrupting its purpose and function.

And Christians set up a new one a couple of centuries later. Who are the ministers of the Church? (As the Episcopal Catechism asks):

A friend wrote a little thing and shared with me. (He said then that he’d deny he wrote it 15+ years ago when he hired me at the Episcopal Church Centre. I wonder how he feels now?) Of course, I don’t have the full text memorised, I only saw it the one time, but here is the gist of it:

Who are the ministers of the Church?

We are all called to be evangelists. We have this sacred meal we are all called to shared with everyone. We have the Risen Lord who gave us this meal - that we are called to share and somehow, by sharing this meal we share Him.

We are all called to be evangelists - but some of us fail at this.

God is merciful however, and has appointed a place for those of us who fail at being evangelists. He allows them to be waiters at his Holy Table. And so they are - they carry the napkins and lead us to our seats, they direct us in our actions and our words and they bring us the food that we eat at God’s dinner party. The Christian community functions better thus with dinner guests/evangelists and waiters.

Some of us fail at these jobs, however, but God is still merciful. He allows those who fail at being waiters to be Maitre D’s. They get to be the sort of dinner directors. They speak in the assembly. They hold forth. But their only purpose is to help feed the evangelists - which they do with the aid of the waiters. The community functions really well, thus - with Dinner Guests/Evangelists, Waiters and Maitre D’s.

Some of us, however, continue to fail - even with a job spectrum so wide. God is merciful, however, and has a job even for these triple failures.

From the earliest days of the Church those who went to this dinner party were persecuted for various reasons: the Waiters were stoned, the Maitre D’s were crucified. The Evangelists were driven out of town on the rails. The idea of a dinner party wherein everyone was welcomed and no one - male female, slave free, Jew or Gentile - was turned away usually managed to offend someone: at first, the Free Male Jews (even the ones who claimed to follow Jesus) - later we found cognates for them in every society.

So God in his wisdom found a way to help protect the dinner party: he created the office of Decoy. He dressed the decoy up with a lot of finery and put a big hat on his head. He sat the decoy up in the middle of any room where the dinner party was happening and, sure enough, they began to attract attention. It keeps the heat off the people doing the real work of Evangelism.

And the community works very well with its sacred ministers:
Evangelists
Waiters
Maitre D’s
and
Decoys.

One last thought. Before entering the sanctuary to serve liturgy with the people, the “vested party” at St Greogry’s Church reads the following. Based on Aaron, it was written as a meditation for an Anglican Priest to read before service (by George Herbert, an Anglican Priest). But read by everyone about to lead a liturgy - choir director, cantor, lay readers, etc - it becomes a profound statement of the priesthood of all of us. Who are the ministers of the Church? Us.

Aaron

Holinesse on the head,
Light and perfections on the breast,
Harmonious bells below, raising the dead
To leade them unto life and rest.
Thus are true Aarons drest.

Profanenesse in my head,
Defects and darknesse in my breast,
A noise of passions ringing me for dead
Unto a place where is no rest.
Poore priest thus am I drest.

Onely another head
I have, another heart and breast,
Another musick, making live not dead,
Without whom I could have no rest:
In him I am well drest.

Christ is my onely head,
My alone onely heart and breast,
My onely musick, striking me ev’n dead;
That to the old man I may rest,
And be in him new drest.

So holy in my head,
Perfect and light in my deare breast,
My doctrine tun’d by Christ, (who is not dead,
But lives in me while I do rest)
Come people Aaron’s drest.