The Priest Part

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. But ordination is not a prerequisite for any of those ministries. And being ordained a priest doesn't make me competent at any of them.

Where priesthood 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.

In 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 that idea. However, in terms of being an Apprentice Priest, that's the direction I want to go. It will be a long journey with several pauses as I try to put my jumbled thinking in some coherent order.

That’s almost all I’m offering in this post. As a hint of things to come, I’ll cite the subtitle of a book published almost sixty years ago: The Priesthood of Adam and the Shape of the World. Pax et Bonum (peace and good) to you all.