Sarx

What is ordination?

Is it a setting apart of a person for a job - saying the community gives them the authority to do the work God has gifted them to do?

Or is it the granting of the power to do a job - a job that couldn’t get down otherwise?

In Cam’s sermon from last week he made a point: that anyone can say the prayers. Anyone can stand around and wear funny robes. Anyone can read the Gospel, preach a sermon, pray for a newly married couple.

Process that for a minute: anyone can say those prayers. Jesus said, “whatever you ask in my name.” Not “Whatever you ask - except for certain things I’m going to reserve to a certain class…)

What is priest?

This drives home a point I was trying to make in my conversations about the hypothetical Christian community, Praxis-Asheville: If the doctrine of all believers sharing Christ’s eternal Priesthood is true… then here are the contexts in which each of us - ordained or not - is priest. Most especially, as in the Jewish tradition, around the home altar: the Table. The Host/ess is Priest/ess of hir own table and in the act of praying, that table becomes the altar of God on which the Bread and Wine are sanctified, broken, raised, shared and eaten.

Bp John’s ordination of me as Episcopus Vagans - quite literally true, for I have no See City - was an act of Charity. The idea was that if my Praxis concept took off, sooner or later someone would arrive that would feel more comfortable if there was a piece of paper around that said someone’s been ordained. And here was my piece of paper - if I ever needed it.

What is Priest?

The question is: if there’s my piece of paper, why does the whole concept of Ordination still plague me? Am I not already ordained? Or, for that matter - in all my journeys, getting initiations, have I not been ordained already?

There’s a crucial issue here.

For many in the Indy Sacramental Movement, there is a mechanical or magical aspect of Ordination: if I, with intention, lay hands on you then *poof* you’re ordained. As the Wiki Article notes, this is an attitude that has been around since the Donatist heresy - and it’s an important issue. If we view ordination as a sacrament - one that creates a difference in the person equivalent to the difference created by baptism - then we have a problem: you need to be very exact about when and where such an event has happened. You need exacting codes and canon laws. Why? Because you don’t want just anyone getting their hands on the Real Power (the Ordained parallel to the “Real Presence” of Jesus in the Eucharist). Otherwise, once the power gets out in the wild, free of the careful controls placed on it by the Church - strange people may do dangerous things with it and we will have no way to stop them!

This is what’s happened in the Indy Sacramental Movement: if you accept a mechanistic view of Holy Orders (or, perhaps, a viral view) then to declare my orders to be invalid and of no effect would require showing where, in the tag line from Arnold Harris Matthew and Rene Villate to me, the chain was broke. A line got crossed, but you have to show me where.

I’m not talking this argument, and I’ll explain why later, but I want to state the argument fully.

This is also what’s happened with the WomenPriests ordained in the Roman Catholic tradition. Rome has had to make a brand new rule in order to make it clear when the line of power broke: once someone moves to ordain a woman, that person is excommunicated. The proverbial house has dropped on their sisters and Benedict the Good giggles and says, “You have no power here. Be gone, before someone drops a house on you, too!”

These Roman positions are, of course, ignored by WomenClergy and the Indy Sacramentlists - just as these arguments have been ignored by Anglicans and Lutherans (and, until recently, by Orthodox). I point that out because it’s important: taking Catholic theory of magical power and framing it in a Protestant mentality has resulted in hundreds - literally - of bishops whose spouse (if) is their only parishioner. Most Indy Clergy have no parish. Most indy bishops are, like me, condemned to be Bishops of Our Mobile Homes, negotiating intercommunion agreements with other Self-Ruled dioceses, archdioceses and patriarchates. We are, essentially, the liturgical version of the Anabaptist movement, where everyone is ordained and equal.

I happen to like this movement for two very specific reasons:

1) Nearly everyone in the movement is, like me, a Church Geek. To see a picture of a chapel in this movement, or an Arch-Episcopal Oratory, is to see what becomes of having too much time and a devotion to churchery that many of us only spend on our blogs. Shopping on Ebay will make any spare closet a sacristy and any table of sufficient height can be as fully appointed as a papal altar.

2) Even if they don’t use the term, the entire movement is, essentially, “Liberal Catholic”, by which I mean they are up front and honest about not questioning their fellow clergy or communicant about their beliefs. Presenting yourself at their altar is enough for them. In this they are like 90% (at least) of all Orthodox, Roman, Anglican and Protestant clergy out there who, all protestations aside, know nothing about the internal life of their laity, nor the content of their belief system. The difference is that that Liberal Catholic clergy are honest about this. Yes, some Anglican, Roman, Orthodox and Protestant clergy are upfront about this breakdown as well, but the rest of us are dysfunctionally deluding ourselves.

Neither of these makes up for what I see as the crucial absence in the movement:

From the book of Acts forward, the community has recognised a need and petitioned for that need to be addressed in the creation of an ordained minister.

I’m no exception to the Indy-Rule: most of us are ordained in the total absence of a community and condemned thereby to saying mass in our private chapels; rarely - if ever - offering communion to another someone who happens to be there (usually a spouse or a close friend). In which case, there is no difference between us and what I described in Praxis Asheville: we are the host at our own dinner table, priest in our own house, offering communion to those around us. This is valid: as I made clear in the Praxis Conversation. At my own table I am Jesus, the Alter Christus, welcoming Matthew the Tax Collector into my house and showing him the divine Agape, the Hospitality of God.

But it’s not what we usually mean when we set out to ordain someone in the Anglican tradition.

What is priest?

If a priest is someone simply granted a magical function by virtue of the laying-on of hands, as some devoutly believe, then someone in my position is fully authorised and empowered by that magic to go out and do something - even if only “within my tradition” and not within the Roman (etc) Church.

If a priest is not someone granted a magical function - but rather someone whom the community empowers to act in a certain way, based on his gifts as discerned by that community - then I’m no more a priest (or bishop) than any of these stuffed, toy rabbits that I have in my bedroom: including one in a chasuble (save in the sense that I wrote of in the Praxis Conversation which I still feel is valid).

What is priest?

All of this came up in Cam’s sermon last week where he said that in this modern world - like in the case of the Israelites going into the promised land - there is much, so much to distract us from our purpose of being God’s Kingdom in the world. There is much, so much, to lure us away from our duties until we forget or duties.

So we have this little rubber band around our wrists, and a string tied to our finger, and post-it notes dotting the landscape of our days. That’s what Trinity is. That is what Clara is. That is what I am and Sare is and Barbara and Steve are becoming.

We have set aside certain places and certain people and certain institutions in which we have imbued our ancient, communal memory of who we are and whose we are. When we enter those places and engage with those people and invest in those institutions, if we allow them to and if they are doing what they are supposed to, we will remember what has been written in our hearts and what has been engraved upon our foreheads and what is indelibly tattooed upon our hands.

That is what all of this is for and if we are performing our task properly, the world will change around us. When we remember who we are and whose we are the world changes.

Clergy as Horcrux. Church as horcrux (minus the dark-magic implications). Holy Offices and Holy Places - no more holy than any other place - set apart as a part of us that remembers what it is we are supposed to be about.

So while anyone in their right mind could do the tasks and chores of those who we ordain to be deacons, priests and bishops; and while any old place or building could become a holy sanctuary; the ones we have are able to help us remember who we are and whose we are precisely because we set them aside for that very purpose. In setting them aside, we imbued them with the power to help us remember. In setting them aside we made them sacred.

I pointed out to Cam in an email that he came up with a very sacramental view of ordination, quite filled with wooji-wooji, even as he seemed to want to avoid wooji-wooji. But it takes a community on both ends of the process: one to send, one to receive, the worker; one to discern and one to validate the call of the worker.

John, at least (and some others) have their communities. It’s crucial to note that I have neither of these communities. I’m a vagrant.

And therein was my answer to my first conundrum.

What is ordination? It is a setting apart of a person for a job - saying the community gives them the authority to do the work God has gifted them to do. The community discerns the gifts - and begs God for a blessing to empower those gifts within the community.

I’m not comfortable with Cam’s answer by itself - it’s too psychological, despite it’s clearly-sacramental bias. I needed Donald’s email to round it out: to explain what the gifts might be, what the community seeks when it creates a priest. It’s not enough to say that she’s the leader of prayer…

I’ll hold that thought until next time.