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The Priestly
Ministry of Teaching the Faith
Ephesians 4.7, 11-16
[A sermon preached at the ordination of Edward Mulligan
into the Priesthood of the Episcopal Church on January 21, 2007 in the
Salisbury School Chapel, Salisbury Connecticut.]
For this free-church sojourner, it is a great honor to preach at the ordination
of Edward B. Mulligan IV—otherwise known as Ned—into the priestly
ministry of
the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America and thereby
into
the sacred ministry of Christ’s one, holy, catholic, and apostolic
church.
I am pleased to be here for many reasons, but not the least of them is
the
strong respect, affection, and hope I have for Ned. If
any are worthy of this high
office of priestly ministry—which all of us must confess is only
possible by the grace
of God—then surely Ned stands firmly embraced by that grace. His
previous
vocations, studies, and ministries have given ample evidence of his earnest
appropriation of the grace Christ confers and by which Christ summons
some into a
future of consecrated leadership of His church. Whatever may be the numerable
faults and flaws in Ned’s life—which the angels can surely
enumerate and name—
we may be sure that such flaws are not legion. And just as surely, many
of us here
today can testify to having repeatedly experienced an irrepressible
glow and
gladness in Ned’s countenance. It does not seem to be the
glow of ambition or of self-
assured pride or of cocky confidence in native abilities; rather it seems
to be the
glow and gladness of a readiness to trust that he has been summoned by
God and
sent on a great adventure to witness to a Gospel that he does not own
and has not
invented but has radically changed his life.
Yet today this act of ordination is an act of the church of Jesus
Christ. It is,
however, a sobering matter that the church dares to ordain
persons to priestly
ministry. Coming from a tradition that wrestles often with the temptation
to think
the church must continually reinvent itself with new discourses and practices,
it is
provocatively reassuring to me to realize that the liturgy we are enacting
today has
been read, spoken, and prayed by centuries of believers before us. The
Scriptures
that have been read on this occasion have been read repeatedly in the
confidence
that the church and all of its ordinands need to hear, heed, and ponder
just these
Scriptural passages. The words that will perform this ordaining event
are words
that have performed countless previous ordinations. No slight of hand
or sneaky
invention here. The previous enactments of this service are a reminder
to us that the
church of Jesus Christ lives in and through its sacred discourses
and practices.
I am hoping that the historic steadiness of this liturgy and these Scriptures
will empower us to confess that being the church of Jesus Christ in these
tumultuous
times is also a staggering task. We—the church
today—do indeed stagger under the
weight of our brokenness, under the weight of our incessant temptation
to serve
other gods, under the weight of our nonchalant and hesitant performance
of our
worship and prayer life, and under the weight of the enmity that surges
among the
members of the church’s catholic body.
The church dare not ordain this man Edward Mulligan—or any other—in
the absence of a searching awareness of how utterly odd, bold,
and counter-cultural
it is to claim to be the body of Christ in just this contemporary worldly
culture. We
must not hide from ourselves that this very Christ was a Jew proclaiming
the
peaceable kingdom of God and that he was judged by the ruling authorities
as
deserving of being strung-up on a cross to experience a cruel and brutal
death—a
crucified death that aimed to demonstrate to Jesus’ frightened followers
and to all
bystanders that it is Rome that is in charge and rules over life
and death.
In the profoundest theological sense, it ought to scare the hell out of
us to
even contemplate being now the living body of this Christ and
thereby being
disciples of one who collided with the principalities and powers of the
world. If it
does not so scare us, it must be because we have so domesticated and tamed
Jesus
that being-his-body involves no more than occasional gestures
of invoking his name
and admiring his courage.
I make these remarks not in order to prepare us to launch
into a diatribe
about the ignominious policies of the Bush administration. Rather, I am
reminding
us that to engage in this act of ordination requires honesty about what
it means to
be the church of Jesus Christ in just these times in which we live. In
actual fact,
none of us can avoid confronting Bush and his world. Yet the crucial question
is not
whether we will confront him and his world as Americans-on-the-right or
Americans-on-the-left, but whether we will confront him as the body of
Christ.
There is a huge difference.
We are not ordaining another American to be a chaplain to America in its
wars and miseries. We are ordaining this man Ned to be a priest
of and for the body
of Christ as it witnesses to God’s judgments and grace in this world
and for the
redemption of this world.
There are, of course, various emphases we might make in describing the
priestly office within the body of Christ. Some might say the priest is
primarily the
performer of the liturgy, while another might say the
priest is primarily the prophet
who judges the church and the world, and yet another will say the priest
is the
pastoral counselor/spiritual director to the church and
to the spiritually wounded of
the world.
I do not doubt the claims of these various perspectives, but I ask us
today:
how can a priest perform the liturgy if he has no theological grasp of
the language of
the liturgy and can discuss that language with the people? How can a priest
be a
prophet in and for the church if she has no articulable theological criteria
for
discerning what sort of matters require the prophet’s discernment?
How can a
priest pastorally counsel the wounded in church and world if he has no
deep
understanding of the reality of God and the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
I must insist that it is impossible for a priest of the church as the
body of
Christ to perform any of these roles if he is not at the very
center of his priesthood a
teacher of the faith. It is this multifaceted role of the priest
as a teacher of the faith
that I want to celebrate and commend to us and to Ned.
We can make no headway in getting clear about what is involved in being
a
teacher of the faith if we fail to grasp that such a teacher—such
a priest—is a
theologian. And if we—clergy and laity alike—fall
into thinking that being a
theologian is somehow best performed by professors in the academy and
we poor
priests are really not theologians, then the game is up! We will remain
forever
confused about the priestly task of teaching the faith and its centrality
to the life of
the church, whether in its congregational manifestation or in its other
manifestations.
Over many years of working with congregational pastors, it never ceases
to
shock me when a pastor says ‘I’m not a theologian and have
never had an interest in
theology, but what do you think of...’ in which he asks about what
he thinks is
difficult theological question. [I say ‘he’ because no priestly
‘she’ has asked that
question.] Typically my short reply is to admonish my friend to resign
from his
church appointment immediately for it is impossible to be a pastor
and to preach if
he is not a theologian speaking and thinking theologically. The
only interesting
question is whether he is doing and teaching good, sound, and truthful
Christian
theology.
It is the Ephesians passage read today that warns the church that it must
be
wary of being “tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of
doctrine, by
people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming.”[4.14]
It is in the context
of these problems that Paul proclaims that Christ has given “gifts”
to some folk to
be apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers for the sake
of equipping
“the saints for the work of ministry.”[4.11-12]
Two quick points: First, we should not over-interpret this passage as
though
it is telling us precisely what the offices are that govern the life of
the church.
Second, we should not interpret the passage to mean that the offices loosely
and
imprecisely mentioned are the prime offices defining the ministry of the
church, as
though these are the offices where real ministry occurs and the others
in the body of
Christ are the one’s who get ministered unto. Rather, I would emphasize
that for
Paul these offices function to “equip the saints for the work of
ministry.” It is the
saints who are to do the work of ministry, not primarily the officers.
But who are
the “saints”? The saints are simply all those persons who
comprise the body of
Christ and in whose work the body of Christ is being built up!
Granting that Paul never mentioned ‘priest’ as an office of
the church,
tradition has pulled together several of the tasks involved in equipping
the saints as
the tasks of priesthood. And surely—now my big point—essential
to being a priestly
officer involves teaching the faith and you cannot teach the faith without
vigorously
speaking and thinking theologically.
It helps in making further traction on this task if we recall a traditional
distinction between two interrelated meanings of the word faith.
On the one hand,
there is the fides qua creditur —the act or activity
of believing—and on the other
hand, there is the fides quae creditur—what is
believed by the act of believing. When
the tradition goes on to say that the life of the Christian is the life
of fides quaerens
intellectum—faith seeking understanding—we cannot avoid the
conclusion that the
body of Christ—the church—has beliefs, teachings, or doctrines
that are crucial to
its life. Or to put it more emphatically, it is unsaintly and deceitful
to suppose the
church can be the body of Christ when the teachings or doctrines—the
what-is-
believed—are regarded as negligible and nonessential.
Certainly we must also grant that teaching the faith is more than teaching
folk the content of the beliefs, as though those beliefs stand on their
own as
abstractions apart from the practices of the Christian life. Yet
it is in the language of
the faith—what I also call the discourses of faith—that folk
come to learn how to be
a Christian.
Ned, nothing I have said here is new to you. But you do need to be reminded,
especially in this event of ordination, that teaching the faith is central
to everything
you do. Never succumb to the temptation to suppose that being a priest
can be
faithfully pursued in the absence of keeping together and wrestling with
the
interaction between the what of the faith and the how
of the faith. It is easy for
anyone—Christian or not—to forget that how we live our lives
necessarily involves
how we construe ourselves and the world in which we live;
such construals are the
beliefs that shape us.
The Christian Gospel of Jesus Christ intends to shape how-we-live
by how-
we-think and to shape how-we-think by how-we-live. Both inseparably together.
Two concluding points: John Howard Yoder, one of the most arresting
theologians of the second half of the twentieth century once wrote that
repentance is
not simply a matter of feeling bad, rather it is a matter of resolving
to think and live
differently. My wife, Sarah, is a spiritual director and the title of
one of her books
leapt out at me when I first saw it: Thoughts Matter, by Mary
Margaret Funk.
Yes, yes, feelings and actions matter too. But if the church does not
teach us
how to think about God, about ourselves, about our world, even
about our enemies,
then we may be sure our faith will continually wobble and may finally
expire,
perhaps unnoticed by us and by the world.
Ned, teach the faith and in teaching the faith, live the faith.
All this dear friends I have dared to preach in the name of the Father
and of
the Son and of the Holy Spirit, One God, Mother of us all.
© Joe R. Jones
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