Glacial Transformation

Glaciers transformed the face of this continent. Valleys and canyons, lakes and plains were shaped, in some cases over 1000s of years, sometime only over centuries, and when floods were loosed by glacial movement, sometimes over mere decades. The generally slow movement of glaciers over extended periods gives the adjective “glacial” a sense of an extremely slow process, but one that reaches deep beneath the surface. This is a helpful image of the sort of transformation that needs to happen in churches. And that was one dangerous sentence.

After all, when “change” and “church” are used in the same sentence you can be sure that someone is going to be unhappy, and most likely many “someones.” And yet, when changes disturb the equilibrium of churches, those changes tend to be superficial: styles of worship, decoration, furniture arrangement and so on. The sort of change churches need is far deeper, and when they happen, the superficial ones lose their significance.

Transformation occurs at levels we rarely think about. The first and most important is when the “glue” that holds us together changes. This glue, in nearly all congregations, is not consistent among all members. For some it is a denomination identity, for some it is a variety of connections with other members, with leadership, or with aspects of the congregational life. Go to any traditional congregation and ask 50 members what connected them to the group, you might get 50 different answers. When the glue changes from the individual reasons to the single purpose of following Jesus then there is a change that rocks the very depth of congregational life.

Deep transformation does not, however, stop there. The connection with Jesus must always begin with an individual choice. The next step in deep transformation is when “me and Jesus” becomes “we and Jesus.” At this level our commitment to following Jesus is inextricably connected to our commitment to one another. No member’s joy is private joy. No member’s pain is private pain. We see signs of that in the life of any healthy congregation. When transformation comes, even those with whom we are not close become matters of our concern. Here “membership” regains its older meaning of the parts of a body. We know well the term of dismemberment when it comes to physical bodies. Here we rediscover the meaning of “re-member” each time we gather together in worship. When Jesus says, at the Last Supper, “do this in remembrance of me,” He’s not just speaking of a recollection of the past, but the present gathering of us, His Body – re-membering. As we come from scattered places – disconnected by different work, different stresses, different schedule, different obligations – in the Eucharist a community of this deep transformation is reconnected with Jesus and with one another. We are re-membered to one another because we are re-membered to Jesus in the Sacrament.

And there is more. The movement from me to we in relationship to Jesus also means a movement from inward to outward focus. This movement does not appear by magic. It is simply the result of following Jesus. His ultimate command is to go out into the world (Matt. 28: 19). As we go we are to make disciples of all sorts and conditions of people, people like us and people very, very unlike us and everyone in between. As an essential element of making disciples we are to incorporate them into community. And as part of this community of disciples we are to show them how to make God’s kingdom visible in all we do and all we say.

There is even more than this, but already this description is sounding like the deluded fantasy of a priest wearing his collar too tight. But that’s where Glacial Transformation comes in. This is very slow work. It requires the intentional adoption of spiritual disciplines that draw us to Jesus, build us into community and points us towards serving other. In fact, it requires something very like our Trinity Way of Life. It requires a priest who is willing to stay as long as necessary to keep the message repeating week by week, season by season, year by year. It requires a people who are willing to try this out and persevere over delays, setbacks and all the ups and downs of keeping a congregational system running while never losing sight of the goal.

As a priest in his early 60s it is natural that my thoughts and plans might turn to retirement from time to time. It is natural that timing should be considered: 65? 72? Next week? It is natural that finances should be considered, though that seems to be in order in our household. What is not natural is supernatural. Trinity, Greeley was never in my plans – only because I had no plans. All planning was given over to Jesus 16 years ago. The vision of a deeply transformed community has been both God’s gift and God’s curse that will not go away. So I plan to plug on until Jesus says stop.

The Priesthood of un-meaning

OK, it’s been 5 months since I’ve been online. This is not unusual. I’m still working through what it means to be a priest, whether presbyteros or hiereus but in the interest of full disclosure, most of these ideas come from a book written many years ago by a wonderful, witty and somewhat strange priest, Robert Farrar Capon. In his book An Offering of Uncles Capon examines the priesthood of Adam and the priesthood of Christ. In both of these he uses the meaning hiereus. His primary assertion is that Adam, as a figure representing all humankind, was created to be a priest and thus all human acts, intentionally or not, are priestly acts. But that leaves us with a conundrum and that’s where I pick up after the long delay:

The role of the hiereus priest is the transformation of the ordinary through oblation. Phew! That was loaded with jargon. However, jargon is a shortcut for a longer declaration, so let me try that instead. When we offer and embrace others in the love of God, change happens. Not big headline change, but a quiet and small change that has depth which shows itself slowly and in ways that build meaning and joy in life.

If that was all there was to it then life would look a lot different than it does. The painful reality is not all priestly offerings build meaning and joy. We are priests. We are created to be priests. All our offerings are priestly offerings. But that means that betrayal, abuse, deceit and other equally sinful acts are priestly offerings that rob meaning, rob joy from those caught up in the offering. Such offerings are part of a Mass, but it is Black Mass of unmeaning. Our world is full of such masses of unmeaning: the greed and immorality of the financial frauds behind the Great Recession; the kidnap and murder of three Israeli teens and the revenge killing of a Palestinian teen; schools shootings, innumerable incidents of stalking, spousal and child abuse, drug violence and even the tediously vile political advertisements and social media postings all evidence the human propensity for offering Black Masses of unmeaning. In the overwhelming tide of such awful priestly acts it seems like the priestly acts of building and blessing are like fighting all of Hell with a water pistol.

The problem we face is that the priesthood of Adam cannot be both the problem and the solution. A new priesthood is needed, not based in human history, but entering from outside. That’s just what has happened. A new priesthood, which is a fulfillment of old promises, is already on the ground. The nature of that priesthood and how we can participate in it will be the subject of the next posting — hopefully before the end of the year!

The Priest Part — Two

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.

The Priest Part

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.

Apprentice?

I’ve been ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church for 35 years this December 17.  So why am I still an apprentice? The term refers to someone who studies under an expert until she or he masters a craft. But the apprentice relationship conveys not only the acquisition of a skill set. An apprentice also learns character from the master. And in fact, the term apprentice as it was chosen for these reflections does not refer to ordained ministry, but to my fundamental relationship with Jesus the Messiah.

I picked up the term apprenticeship from the late Dallas Willard. He was using it as an alternative to the more common term discipleship. Discipleship is particularly common in Christian jargon, though its meaning is by no means clear. Willard referred to the role of an apprentice learning character from the master, not just studying the master’s techniques and teachings. Yet one thought fought its way to the forefront of my consciousness. One can be a disciple of almost anyone, living or dead. All the master need to is leave some teaching behind; or in the case of Socrates, have a student who makes a record of the teaching.

But apprenticeship is different. While you can be a disciple of anyone, you can only apprentice yourself to someone living, someone with whom you communicate. Being an apprentice of Jesus implies a lot of things that many Christians are not that sure of.

Loose threads

Somewhere along the line, fairly early on, I lost the thread. The thread in question was what moved me towards seeking ordination. It was a desire to see Christians get rooted deeply in their faith, to know what they believed and why they believed. It was, at the time, all head stuff. Christ-like character didn’t come into it which was just as well as my character was about as non-Christ-like as they came. OK, I was 18 at the time so maybe there’s some excuse for that moment. But not for the years of moments that followed.

 

It’s 42 years on from that day. According to the late Douglas Adams, “42” is the answer to life, the universe and everything. Of course, in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy the problem was they didn’t really know what the question was. It’s a question I’ve stopped asking. Instead, after 42 years I’ve found myself on a journey with Jesus. I’m not sure where it’s going, but it is filled with surprises, big and little. Maybe something of what I’m experiencing may be of help to others who’ve lost the thread, or at least know that there is a thread to be found.

 

I’ll be sharing (rather irregularly if past history is any indicator) some of the adventure on this blog. And not just the stuff in the past. This is a daily adventure. Parts of it are satisfying, parts exhilarating, parts are discouraging – but all of it is fun.