among you and are over you in the Lord and admonish you, and to esteem them very highly in love because of their work. Be at peace among yourselves.
1 Thessalonians 5.12–13
In the long-gone days of black and white TV, those in Britain who could gather round the flickering screen were gripped by the weekly series Gunsmoke, in which an embattled US Marshall kept the lid on a lawless town of the Wild West.
His name was Mr Dillon, and he was wise, strong and true, but was always in danger of being upstaged by his faithful Deputy, Chester Goode, an eager young man with a pronounced limp, often to be found putting on the coffee pot when not shoring up the walls of the jail. Chester was always ready for the next hail of bullets from the boys of the Crazy Y ranch who liked nothing better on a Wednesday afternoon than shooting up the town.
When any of us is called to be a presbyter of the Church of God, we should never forget for one moment that we are merely deputies of the bishop; faithful Chesters to his Mr Dillon. Whereas bishops and deacons have an undisputed place and a clear role in the pages of the Christian scriptures, presbyters remain murky and indistinct, stand-ins and workhorses for those above them. Only gradually, as the Church evolved, did the presbyter acquire definition as a distinct order.
Deputies we remain, however, and as such we must be content to make a lot of coffee and shore up many walls. We are the best the Church can manage when the bishop is too busy to show up. Let’s not get ideas above our station.
I served for 12 years in a West Yorkshire parish, and I often think the Church should make part of basic training for all ordinands a spell among the moors and mills, where ‘not impressed’ is the most common verdict on practically everything. The coal merchant contacted by Alan Bennett, illustrious son of Leeds, responded to a request for further supplies with the words: ‘Well, I don’t care how celebrated you are, you’ll never be a patch on your dad.’2 That’s the way it is in West Yorkshire, and it is a fabulous place for priestly formation.
One way we can get ideas too big for our boots is to bang on about being ‘priests’. The designation ‘priest’ is seductively attractive for its mystique of cultic powers and is immediately translatable into many different cultures and eras of world history. There is a tingle down the spine to be had from thinking of oneself keeping company with the parson whom Chaucer so admired on the road to Canterbury, or with Teilhard de Chardin or Maximilian Kolbe, or even Zechariah, father of John the Baptist. ‘You are a priest for ever according to the order of Melchizedech’, says Psalm 110, and I remember how, waiting in the wings for ordination, I shamelessly applied to myself those words addressed to the Lord’s Anointed, so breathlessly eager was I to be admitted to the sacerdotal elite.
‘Priest’ is easily understood, is common currency among world religions, and is very useful when the chips are down, whether with hospital security or immigration official. It is just a bit unfortunate that ‘priest’ is, strictly speaking, unhelpful and inaccurate in the context of the Body that we are ordained to serve. ‘Presbyter’ speaks more accurately of shared oversight rather than cultic role, and of the emergent Church of the communities of the New Testament.
Sadly, in the 2005 revision of the Ordinal the Church didn’t have the courage of its theological convictions. With all our talk of the importance of the baptismal covenant, and of the priesthood that resides in the whole eucharistic assembly, some measure of balance would have been restored had the service been headed ‘The Ordination of Presbyters (also called Priests)’, rather than the reverse. Admittedly it was over three centuries ago that John Milton wrote, ‘new presbyter is but old priest writ large’, and yes, here I am spitting in the wind. We can but try.
The last decades of the twentieth century, following the Second Vatican Council, saw a remarkable recovery of the building blocks of the early Christian communities, in which a sense of the Spirit’s anointing of the whole people of God was glimpsed like the sun bursting forth between the clouds.
No matter how hard the reactionaries try to stuff the toothpaste back into the tube, the secret is out. The vision of Christ’s Church is of a sanctified body of men and women, anointed by the Spirit and equipped for ministry, each with a particular vocation and ministry.
This is not to give houseroom to that Reformation notion of ‘the priesthood of all believers’ (some kind of clericalist nightmare in which every person is his own pope), but instead to celebrate the New Testament vision of the people of God, gathered for worship and action, who become the ‘living stones’ of a new kind of temple, and who together become ‘a holy priesthood’, called ‘ to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ’ (1 Peter 2.5), replacing the sacrificial priestly caste of the Old Covenant.
To allow room for this heady vision to grow in the hearts and minds of God’s faithful, those of us called to model in our persons the priestly life that belongs to the whole body need to be generous in heart, not clutching priesthood tightly to ourselves, for ‘you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation’ (Ex. 19.6). Let us sit lightly to titles and customs suggestive of privilege, so that the whole field, not just a sheltered corner patch, may know the gracious rain of God’s life-giving promise. ‘Shower, O heavens, from above, and let the skies rain down righteousness’ (Isa. 45.8).
Clergy come in different species, and one of the least attractive in plumage (despite its habit of continually puffing out its chest) is the bishop-basher. These creatures seem to spend a lot of time despising or resisting or circumventing those to whose office they so unrelentingly yet covertly aspire. They strut around proudly yet pathetically as they do damage to the Body of Christ.
Wherever it springs up, the instinct to take our bat home the moment the bishop or synod takes some action of which we don’t approve, reveals a total inability to grasp the notion of order and authority in the Church, a failure to understand our own Anglican tradition.
We do not defy our bishop’s authority, or go in for breakaways and secession. We do not do deals with bishops in the middle of Africa instead of our own, or demand of our bishops that they line up with open hands extended so that the ‘tainted’ may be identified and shunned. Schism is not our thing because we lack the spiritual arrogance to believe that ‘truth’ or ‘purity’ takes precedence over love in the company of followers of Jesus of Nazareth.
In any case we are too busy to waste time getting hung up over the foibles of bishops, or the lack of favour they show us. I am astonished by clergy who have the energy to be angry with their bishop (a favourite American pastime it seems). Have they no work to do?
We honour those ‘set over us in the Lord’ first because we honour the Church that has given both bishop and presbyter this incredible privilege. Any system of appointment or election of bishops will have its drawbacks and produce its misfits, but let us ponder our own ‘worthiness’ for the offices we hold, lowly though they may be, before we throw stones at others. We honour them also, and ‘esteem them very highly in love’ because they face an impossible task, but in faithfully attempting it they let the rest of us off the hook. The buck stops with Marshall Dillon, and there are times when the menial tasks of putting on the coffee and shoring up walls seem not such a bad deal.
As well as being bishop’s deputies, we are blessed by being part of a whole army of fellow-workers. Dull would he be of soul, as Wordsworth might have said, who is not stirred by being part of a body of diocesan clergy processing in to the Maundy Thursday Chrism Mass under the paternal, watchful eye of their bishop. Even the penchant of Anglican clergy for calf-length albs, ropes tied beneath beer bellies, and lurid stoles proclaiming their person rather than their calling, is not enough to dispel the thrill of such being and belonging.
