Some words are easy. Take, for example, ice cream. Unless you happen to be lactose intolerant or lost a loved one in the London Ice Cream turf wars, then ice cream probably just means for you a frozen dessert, and while there are ice cream agnostics and even a few haters, most of us love a bowl of that oh-so-bad but oh-so-good dairy wonder.
Then there are words that are hard, that are stained in blood, that seem at times to be too heavy to use. Words we think we might want to cast off.
For many today, secular and religious, priest is one such stained word. Systemic child abuse and cover-up in the Roman Church has sullied the word, but in truth it represents an institution that has a very long and very troubled history. Protestants tried to shake it off five centuries ago, the result of corruption and abuse in the Roman priesthood, though with limited success, and besides, we’ve had plenty of corruption and abuse of our own without the title.
The apostles and early church leaders were not called priests, as Jesus was considered to have transcended to Hebrew priesthood, though the priestly function appears to have been reconstructed pretty quickly, maybe even while those first followers were still alive. It is a tenacious word for a tenacious concept.
Three, four, five centuries before Jesus, even then it was a word associated with corruption. In Ezekiel we have a scathing condemnation of Jerusalem, a catalog that begins with the abuse of immigrants and the neglect of the poor and vulnerable, then this:
You are a land that is not cleansed, not rained upon in the day of indignation. Its princes within it are like a roaring lion tearing the prey; they have devoured human lives; they have taken treasure and precious things; they have made many widows within it. Its priests have done violence to my teaching and have profaned my holy things.
Our princes are still making widows and widowers, so there’s that…
In Micah we have this:
Hear this, you rulers of the house of Jacob and chiefs of the house of Israel, who abhor justice and pervert all equity, who build Zion with blood and Jerusalem with wrong! Its rulers give judgment for a bribe, its priests teach for a price, its prophets give oracles for money; yet they lean upon the Lord and say, “Surely the Lord is with us! No harm shall come upon us.â€
Scary that 2800 years later we again see Zion being built with blood and with wrong.
It is odd, then, that in this early Christian work, this sermon to the “Hebrews,†we find Jesus portrayed as a “high priest,†albeit modeled on a high priest from before the Mosaic priesthood, going all the way back to when Abram and Sarai, still with their original names, arrive at what would later become Jerusalem and are greeted by Melchizedek, the high priest of the Canaanite Sky God “El.â€
But what is priesthood? Rabbinic Judaism, formed after the destruction of Jerusalem in the First Century, never took it up. Protestants transformed it to the “priesthood of all believers,†though we have done a terrible job, especially of late, at helping Christians understand themselves in this way. And while Jesus was holy, he was not a priest as understood in his own tradition. He did not serve in the Temple, was not born into one of the clans or tribes given that power.
The key to unlocking priesthood is to see the priest through a cross-cultural lens, almost as an anthropologist.
While the Hebrews developed the unique office of prophet, the occasional constructive theologian called to speak for God and to God, it was the priest who routinely stood for and between the people and their God. He was the conduit of human anxiety, the actor performing rites to appease angry and unpredictable gods, the bringer of sacrifice. The blessings that were sought were concrete, rain and victory.
Drought and defeat might well have ended the Hebrew priesthood, had not the prophets come up with something new. Two things new actually. First, the prophets blamed the failure of blessing on their own infidelity. God could not fail or be unfaithful, so clearly it was Israel that had not kept faith.
Second, and most important, the expected blessings were decoupled from this existence, were projected into some unknown after-death existence, meaning that the priest could deliver the intangible. When you are delivering forgiveness or grace, there is no one with a scale checking to see if you have given full measure.
The original construction of Christian belief occurs at this hinge, this moment when divine economics and the role of the priest is changing.
So we find Jesus compared to a sacrificial priest of the primitive rites, the one who has to make a blood sacrifice to assuage divine fury.
Christianity claims that the crucifixion of Jesus, understood as a Hebrew sacrifice, was the last and full sacrifice, forever ending the cultic exchange. And yet, in the construction of the eucharist, Christians turned the common meal tradition that tied the community together back into a cult sacrifice, flesh and blood upon an altar.
We are right to reject a priesthood based on sacrifice and exchange, a priesthood that controls and doles out blessing. Of course it is corrupt and corrupting.
Yet, the church is a group of humans, and humans do what we do. We become, when we are together, a self-organizing system, a living example of what complexity science tells us will happen. We become, together, more than we are individually, a living body, as Paul taught, with many parts, many roles. And some of those roles involve leadership.
So what is a leader in this self-organizing system of belief if not a controller and distributor of blessing?
You will not be surprised to know that this question is always on my mind. After all, I fill a particular traditional leadership role in a church that is changing. Folks still want to hear false promises when a loved one dies, still think that the ordained must have some secret holy knowledge. But I am not a priest, do not stand between people and the divine, and so I have no secret knowledge. I do believe there is still a role for professional clergy in the Protestant tradition, but it is not that of magician or gatekeeper.
Half of the pastoral role involves interpretation. We are technical experts who help the people of God understand themselves in the context of our faith tradition, locating our concerns and our action on a map that stretches from Ur to Selma, that is incarnate in the person of Jesus and is realized in the slums of Calcutta and is chained to the White House gates.
But that is only half of the job, the job of retrospection and interpretation. The other half of the job is in seeing differently. The pastoral leader must see the divine breaking into the world, always and everywhere, and must see the divine potential in each of us individually, and in our life together as a community, as a nation, as a species. The pastor must see who we can be and must call us into that alternative reality.
While the first of these two roles, interpreter/historian/scholar, is technical and primarily that of the pastor, this second role, the calling and naming, is spiritual and is shared. It may be the job of the pastor to dream, to be restless and impatient, to see differently, but not just hers or his… This is the job of every leader, for to lead is to be out front, at-risk, to go forward into an always mysterious future.
Business guru Peter Block, turning his attention to questions beyond profit and loss, wrote a powerful book called Community: The Structure of Belonging. In it, he names these tasks for community leaders:
Create a context that nurtures an alternative future, one based on gifts, generosity, accountability and commitment.
Initiate and convene conversations that shift people’s experience, which occurs through the way people are brought together and the nature of the questions used to engage them.
Listen and pay attention.
Notice that none of these essential leadership traits have to do with the institution. None are about doing. There is not a check list or a job done. Ours is not a form of leadership where the job is ever done.
Leadership, the shared leadership in our church, in the United Church of Christ, is not about control or mediation. We are not priests. We do not sacrifice. While the pastor plays a special role, she or he shares what is essential with lay leaders.
I believe that Block’s model of community offers us a way forward as the priestly models fail.
The institutions of civic-denominationalism are dead. Those churches that survive will do so because lay leaders have joined with the pastor in, as Block describes, creating a context that nurtures an alternative future. What makes that community Christian is that it is an alternative future shaped by Jesus, not the sacrificial priest or lamb of God, but the faithful and messy and real, the experience of the divine in the man, rabbi, victim, victor.
May we be his, now and forever.