Month: February 2014

For a priest to become a priest he or she needs to enable others to find their priesthood as well. The first priest in that sentence is a presbyteros, the latter two are hiereus. But what does the hiereus do that can be shared and taught? Their primary task is to offer oblations, which doesn’t get us much further. Although in a more modern sense oblations were non-blood offerings to a deity and sacrifices were blood offerings, oblation is a proper name for the offering of anything to a deity. And sacrifice will do as well, for its roots are from Latin words meaning “to make sacred.”

Thus, what sort of sacrifices or oblations does the Christian priest (hiereus) offer? Pretty much everything we encounter can be offered. The objects we deal with, the people we encounter, the situations in which we find ourselves can be offered to Jesus, priest and messiah, for the purposes of holy transformation. And that’s the wonder of our priesthood that we share. There is no situation or circumstance that cannot be set on the path of blessing when we offer it as part of the royal priesthood of the messiah.

Our work becomes all the more important as there is also another priesthood at work in the world that has been part of our sorry history and still operates today. When we offer the people, the encounters and the objects of our lives as oblations to the loving and transforming Father, we reverse the actions of that other priesthood. But a further examination of that waits for another posting. Till then — The eye of God dwelling with you, the foot of Christ in guidance with you, the shower of the Spirit pouring on you, richly and generously.

I’m pretty much on schedule as it’s been nearly 7 weeks since I last posted. There’s much that’s been going on and much on my mind, though reading a lot of N.T. Wright recently hasn’t helped my focus. However I want to get back to being an Apprentice Priest. I’d written something about being an apprentice, so it seems appropriate to follow up with something about the “priest” part. Apprenticeship is pretty straightforward. As I put it – you can be a disciple of anyone living or dead, all you need is their teaching to follow. But you can only apprentice yourself to someone living, someone with whom you can have an ongoing relationship.

But priest? That’s a bit less clear. After all, I am an Episcopal priest. I was ordained to that Order in 1978. For all of the things that clergy do, being a priest really only means I have a particular place in the ordering of the common life of the Episcopal church. Under my bishop I have authority to preside at the celebration of the Holy Eucharist. That’s a privilege given only to bishops and priests in our tradition. I have authority to pronounce absolution. I have the authority to bless objects, people and covenants that people make. Of course, priests take on many other roles: preaching and teaching, pastoral care, leadership and administration, spiritual formation and many more. Being ordained a priest doesn’t make me competent at any of them.

Where it gets complicated is in the etymological root of the word priest. The most common theory is that comes into English from the Greek presbyteros by a circuitous route. Presbyteros means “elder” (as anyone with presbyopia can attest). But the English word is also used to translate the Greek hiereus which refers to the priest who offers sacrifices and stands between God (or the gods) and the people. The two meanings of the word have been mixed over centuries of Church life until the roots have been considered synonymous. But they are not.

The the New Testament we meet two sorts of priests, neither of which are the sort of priest I am. There is the priesthood of the Temple who, aside from Zechariah, have a major PR problem. Then there is Jesus, of the tribe of Judah (not where priests come from according to Moses) but who inaugurates a new kind of priesthood. The author of Hebrews associates Jesus’ priesthood with Melchizedek, a shadowy figure in Genesis who gets a mention in Psalm 110. Peter associates this Christ priesthood with a promise in Exodus 19 about being a royal priesthood. Luther and other reformers, reacting against the abuses of the medieval Church lift up a concept of the priesthood of all believers. It’s an interesting idea, but neither Luther or his contemporaries or their descendants do much with the idea. But in terms of being an Apprentice Priest, that’s the direction I want to go. And will soon. In a few days. Or maybe a few months. But I do plan to get there.