The diaconal ministry of the baptized is a profoundly hopeful ministry.
This is the last of three articles by the Ven. Dr. Thompson on the orders of ordained ministry—priests, bishops, and deacons. The first installment presented the ordained ministries as refracting the ministries conferred in baptism, then focused on the ministry of priests. The second installment focused on episcopal ministry, and now we turn to diaconal ministry of the baptized.
Three losses characterize the human predicament in these early years of the twenty-first century. These losses—the loss of the holy, the loss of communion, and the loss of mission—haunt our contemporary landscape.
As it turns out, these losses are not unique to us or to this time. They are, in fact, part of a universal rhythm of grief and grace woven into the human story. And because our losses are part of that rhythm, our ancestors have endowed us with resources—traditions and stories, songs and prayers—that allow us to endure and address them. Sadly, we have not always treasured those endowments, and so a community once uniquely equipped to address the hunger provoked by these losses has unwittingly relinquished much of that capacity.
Churches have settled into forgetfulness. Traditions and stories, songs and prayers that once sounded across the life of God’s people like “Reveille,” awakening them to the coming day, now feel more like a lullaby.
In Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard probes the loss of the holy in the lives of churches:
Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning.
The holy, the undomesticated wild mystery that runs through the life of the world, has in many places—even in churches—been driven underground, usurped by gods who can be tamed, but cannot save.
They have mouths but do not speak; eyes but do not see.
They have ears but do not hear; noses, but do not smell.
They have hands, but do not feel; feet, but do not walk;
and they do not make a sound in their throat. (Psalm 115)
As I wrote in the first of these reflections (Fall 2008, “A Witness to the Holy”), attention to the holy finds itself expressed and refracted through the ministry of ordained priests, but it is the responsibility of the whole community of the baptized. Recovering our capacity for the transformative encounter with the holy depends in no small part on the capacity of those ordained priest to invite the whole community of the baptized into this dimension of the ministry conferred in our baptism. But it depends also on the willingness of that community to take up that invitation and, as I wrote several years ago, to visit the house of a dangerous God, to risk the unsettling encounter with an undomesticated wild mystery of a God who runs through the life of the world for its healing and renewal but not for its ease.
The second of the losses is the loss of communion. As our proximity in a global human village brings us into contact with the Other, a global village in which we ourselves are Other for so many, we are more and more in need of evidence that our Other-ness need not make us enemies, need not lead to violence and hostility. Where values diverge, where practices among one group are in conflict with practices in another, a human capacity for communion, for sensing a common life even and perhaps especially where diversity and divergence are obvious and persistent, will make the difference between a good future and no future at all.
But one need only explore recent events among Anglicans to discern that, as the world hungers for a sense of human communion—that is, of people and communities working with diversity toward a common life in service of the common good—the churches are no safe place for such hopes. Some of the same Primates who said in 2000 that “when we turn away from one another, we turn away from the cross of Jesus” now turn away from the very presence of Jesus in the blessing, breaking, and sharing of bread with those of whose leadership and discipleship they disapprove.
In a world of alienation, distrust, hostility, and indifference, God calls the community of the baptized to offer an alternative vision of human interactions: communion instead of rivalry. That some of those ordained bishop use that office to obstruct rather than refract the light of communion is nothing short of scandal. That others find Christ’s accomplishment of communion, in the sacrifice of love on the cross, more compelling than their need to prevail in doctrinal squabbling, is a sign that the office still functions to refract the light of communion.
The third loss is the loss of mission. Remarkably, the church has become, in many ways, an association of religion clubs, each franchise desperately committed to competing for a larger share of a shrinking market. Religion clubs concern themselves with producing an acceptable religion product, either for existing members—who often prefer things to stay more or less the same—or for the prospect of new members, in whose name have been proposed and enacted many changes that failed to draw them into club membership.
In his 1994 book, In Over Our Heads, Robert Kegan asserts that, until some time in the twentieth century, the final stage of human development involved learning to cooperate with others. The end toward which such cooperation would lead was a matter of what he calls “a community’s collective intelligence.” Purpose, that is to say, was provided, mission was transparent and in place. In contemporary society, purpose is no longer provided by the community, and mission is neither simple nor clear. This creates what Kegan calls an “extraordinary cultural demand” that each person create internally what once was given by culture—a sense of the purpose toward which we might direct our lives. We have lost our mission, and must somehow create it for ourselves.
Religion clubs have nothing to offer in the face of the human loss of mission. They enact the same selfishness and inward-turning purposes that plague so much of the life of the world. They divert God’s gifts from God’s transforming mission into institutional self-preservation for which no Messiah, no matter how kind, would offer his life. And they offer no contradiction to prevailing narratives of the age, narratives in which selfishness is the only reasonable response to a world of rivalry for scarce resources.
In fact, it was not for, but against the instinct of self-preservation among the leaders of the temple that Jesus acted during his ministry. That ministry took up the proclamation of his cousin John, a proclamation of a new kingdom, of a new creation, of a new life, but not of a new religion club. In Luke’s gospel, he echoes Isaiah and takes upon himself the Spirit-driven work of freedom for prisoners, liberty for the oppressed, sight for the blind, good news for the poor. He enacts the Kingdom of God in healing and in driving out demons, proclaims it in teaching and parable, clothes himself in its ethic of compassion and justice, and serves it in his body absolutely and at enormous cost in his passion and death.
In all of this, Jesus lives out the servant ministry conferred in baptism and held as a common vocation by the whole community of the baptized. This ministry, refracted through the life and ministry of those ordained deacon, is not simply a ministry of serving others, but is also a ministry of disclosing, proclaiming, enacting and serving the Kingdom of God, and offering it as a living alternative to the kingdoms of this world, governed as they are by indifference, hostility, entitlement, and lethal rivalry. Diaconal ministry joins the community of the baptized to the mission of God, who seeks the transformation of the world, and offers Jesus into our midst to proclaim and enact that transformation among us.
Like the orders of priest and bishop, the order of deacon serves to recall the church to a vital dimension of the ministry conferred in baptism—the dimension by which God’s mission offers purpose and freedom. The diaconal ministry of the baptized is a profoundly hopeful ministry, because it both proclaims and enacts the extraordinary truth that our lives have a purpose that we need not invent, that we cannot purchase, and that we share with others in such a way that even the most modestly gifted life can contribute to the common good, and to the dream of God.
