We have deacons, priests, and bishops in order to sustain human participation in the mission of God. Photo: Michael Hudson

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge & shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

From “God’s Grandeur”
-Gerard Manley Hopkins

In his Hobart Lecture of December 2000, Archbishop Michael Peers spoke of the ordained ministries of the church as “refracting” the ministry of the baptized. Ordained ministries focus and illuminate characteristic elements of baptismal ministry-diaconal, priestly, episcopal. He acknowledged the corrosive effect of clericalism, in which diaconal, priestly and episcopal ministry were understood as the property, or even as the entitlement, of those ordained to the office of deacon, priest, or bishop. And he challenged his hearers to understand the complex and vital relationships among ordained ministries, the ministry of the baptized, and the mission of God-the missio dei.

The relationship between the mission of God and the ministry of the church ought to be a close one. It does not seem to have been Jesus’s intention to establish a new set of religious propositions and ritual practices. Instead, one can easily read the gospels as an account of God working in Jesus to renew the relationship between (on one hand) religious belief and ritual practice and (on the other) God’s active and purposeful presence in the world. In contemporary Judaism, that purposeful presence is often expressed as tikkun olam, “repairing the world.”  At a recent bar mitzvah celebration, the young bar mitzvah elaborated at length on why a loaf of bread is more miraculous than manna. “Manna,” he said, “is God’s work alone. A loaf of bread requires human participation, and the sharing of a loaf of bread requires human consent to partnership in God’s work of tikkun olam.”

Human consent to partnership in God’s work of repairing the earth is a way we might talk about the ministry conferred in baptism, and about the ordained ministries that illuminate, refract, and serve that ministry. We have deacons, priests, and bishops not simply to sustain a set of ritual practices, not just to affirm a set of religious beliefs, and certainly not merely for the purposes of institutional survival and order, but to foster ritual practices, to affirm religious beliefs, and to sustain a common life that supports human participation in the mission of God, the repairing of the world.

Of deacons, priests, and bishops, the most familiar to ordinary Anglicans are priests. In most congregations on most Sundays, it is a priest who presides at worship, and a priest who preaches. In fact, the priest who serves as rector of a parish is often simply “our minister” to the people of that parish. Up until recently, a deacon has been simply someone waiting a while to be a priest, so renewal of the diaconate is a welcome and helpful initiative taking root across our church. And a bishop is, for most Anglicans, a distant administrator and, on occasion, a visiting celebrity with exotic accessories. It is those ordained to the order of priests who are visible day by day and week by week in the lives of Anglicans, and an exploration of how their ministry contributes to God’s mission can yield insight that will strengthen the whole people of God as we serve that mission.

In 1918, Gerard Manley Hopkins published perhaps his greatest poem-“God’s Grandeur.”  It sets out with a high and hopeful tone: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” then pauses to acknowledge the hard reality of a trodden, trade-seared, toil-smeared bare-soiled wreck of a world. And yet…

…for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs-
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast & with ah! bright wings.

The priestly ministry of the church is a witness to the holy in the life of the world, for the sake of the world, and the local ministry of those ordained priests is to foster the participation of all the baptized in that witness. This holy to which we are called to bear witness is not a sequestered node of ethereal perfection, held safely apart from the smudge and smear of the world. It is instead, a promise that smudge and smear are not all that the world can be, that bare soil is not the last soil, and that business as usual, with its claim to inevitability, is not the only business afoot.

The priestly ministry of the church is a witness to what Jesus called the kingdom of God, a kingdom founded not in stuff, status, and power, but in those other qualities, the ones we name, often unreflectively, at the beginning of our weekly celebration-“The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.”  These words mean more than we mostly take them to mean, I think. Most of the time, we recognize them as a signal that worship is about to begin, registering them as religious words without recognizing that they are laying a claim on this time, this place, and we who gather in them. This isn’t just 160 William Street in Oakville anymore. Now this is a holy place, governed by the ethic of the kingdom of God, an ethic of grace over entitlement, of love over hostility and indifference, and of fellowship over the lonely pursuit of personal aggrandizement. From the first words uttered by the presider, we are told to expect a transforming encounter with God, and with the kind of holiness that holds out an alternative to the accelerating devolution of the life of the world into violence, fear, indifference, greed, and want.

At a recent ordination the preacher, the Rev. Canon Dr. David Neelands, distinguished priestly ministry from clerical ministry. We can no longer, he asserted, ordain clergy-persons charged with managing the institutional life of a local congregation. He challenged the ordinands to resist the strong enticements to function as clergy. Much of the reward system of our church continues to favour clergy managers over priestly refractions of baptismal ministry. And for sure, functioning as priests who refract the priesthood of the whole people is harder work than counting the liturgical, pastoral, and financial beans of a diocesan franchise.

The truth is, though, that the world doesn’t need well-run Anglican franchises. Most of a generation raised in the ethic of such franchises have taken leave of them, and their aging parents are puzzled, and often deeply troubled, by that exodus. The world needs hope, needs desperately to hear that there is still a Holy Ghost brooding over the bent world “with warm breast and ah! bright wings.”  That is not to say that we do not need to make careful use of resources, to be thoughtful in our planning and our practices. It is simply to say that careful use of resources and thoughtful planning are useless without reference to God’s presence and purpose in the life of the world.

There is something loose in the life of the world, something that intends the mending of what has been torn, the redemption of what has been wasted, the healing of what is broken, the reconciliation of what is estranged, the gathering of what has been scattered, the finding of what has been lost. This holy something is the business of priesthood, not just for those ordained to that order, but for all who are baptized into the working, serving, witnessing Body of Christ, called to ministry in God’s mission in and for the sake of the world.