This pamphlet uses familiar Episcopalian language for liturgical ministers. Many newcomers to St Gregory’s find this language new; others ask how Episcopalian ministers differ from those in their home denominations. Such questions have special importance in today’s ecumenical context, where grassroots relations, including sharing church members across old boundaries,can build a practical local basis for reunion. In fact the Church’s ministry has sparked debate, redefinition, reform and schism throughout history, and language confusion has played an important role. A word-study can help untangle this, and uncover the longtime unity of ministry which almost all churches share today. The following summary may serve Episcopalians and non Episcopalians who must sometimes wonder whether we are talking about the same things.

Much past conflict has arisen from confused analogies to Old Testament ministers, and chiefly to the COHEN. This hereditary Hebrew clergyman originally cast lots to determine God’s judgment decrees (tôrah), and so came to oversee temple sacrifices by seeing to it that people offered these as God had commanded. It is important to recognize that the biblical cohen only consulted, while others sacrificed; even after the exile he offered no sacrifices except on the Day of Atonement, when he scattered sacrificial blood in the sanctuary. Active religious leadership, as we would recognize it, belonged instead to the king, who was anointed (messhiach in Hebrew, christos in Greek, hence MESSIAH or CHRIST in English) with divine power, and bore the title “Son of God.” During the Jewish monarchy the cohen obeyed the king in all religious matters, even when the king commanded idolatry! After the Maccabean restoration, and only then, the chief cohen took on part of the missing king’s religious authority, while people waited for real royalty to return.

Rabbis of Jesus’ time debated how that might happen. Some awaited a single warrior king, like David; others, a renewed kingly nation (laos in Greek, hence the English “laypeople”) pure as the cohen is pure. Both groups called this deliverer “royally anointed” (Messiah/Christ). The gospels indicate Jesus dismissed any suggestion he was a king; nevertheless New Testament writers naturally use the language of popular messianic hope to describe Jesus’ victorious death and resurrection. Paul’s usage proved influential in New Testament times, and long afterward. He probably never met Jesus in the flesh (2 Corinthians 5:16) and never discusses Jesus’ teaching; instead, Paul treats familiar rabbinical questions in the light of his own new faith. Paul reckons that God declared Jesus king (“Son of God”) at the resurrection (Romans 1), and that Christians share Jesus’ kingly work and identity as members of the messianic body (Galatians 6; Colossians 1; 1 Corinthians 10 & 12). In other words, Paul argues that through Jesus, God has fulfilled both rabbinical notions of the hoped-for Messiah.

Other New Testament writers combine the images of king and cohen to similar effect. The Letter to the Hebrews says Jesus the royally anointed (Christ) has taken over the cohen’s one active sacrificial job by offering his own blood in God’s true sanctuary (Hebrews 10). In other words, Jesus’ death has restored the ancient kingship with all its true religious authority, of which the post-Maccabean high-priesthood had consciously preserved a living shadow. Later letters underscore Christians’ share in Jesus’ messiahship, as a royal cohen-ish people (Ephesians 4; 1 Peter 2). In sum, first century Christians saw the ministries of anointed king, purified laos, and sacrificial cohen as the united work of Jesus and his Church.

Christian institutions developed independently of these scriptural images, however, and reshaped them. At first Jesus’ followers at Jerusalem made his brother James their leader, much as Muslims would one day vest authority in a succession of Mohammed’s blood relatives, called caliphs. There James presided over “the Twelve,” a body Jesus had chosen to symbolize a restored laos of twelve tribes: together these decided institutional questions for the growing churches. And from there the gospel spread among Jewish synagogues throughout the Roman empire,carried by countless APOSTLES. (Unlike later ages, the New Testament period did not reserve this name for”the Twelve,” but simply continued here the familiar Greek Old Testament translation for the Hebrew shaliach, meaning anyone on an authorized errand.) At the same time the apostle Paul and his fellow-apostle helpers added new gentile synagogues to their number. Suddenly, however, the Christian caliphate with its council of the Twelve vanished, after James’ murder and the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 a.d., leaving Christian synagogues elsewhere to work in conventional synagogue ways. Hence the Christian liturgical ministers we know spring from Jewish synagogues, and not from any distinctive creation by Jesus or the early Church.

If anyone is devout and a lover of God, let him enjoy this beautiful and radiant festival.
If anyone is a wise servant, let him, rejoicing, enter into the joy of his Lord.
If anyone has wearied himself in fasting, let him now receive his recompense.
If anyone has labored from the first hour, let him today receive his just reward. If anyone has come at the third hour, with thanksgiving let him keep the feast. If anyone has arrived at the sixth hour, let him have no misgivings; for he shall suffer no loss. If anyone has delayed until the ninth hour, let him draw near without hesitation. If anyone has arrived even at the eleventh hour, let him not fear on account of his delay. For the Master is gracious and receives the last, even as the first; he gives rest to him that comes at the eleventh hour, just as to him who has labored from the first. He has mercy upon the last and cares for the first; to the one he gives, and to the other he is gracious. He both honors the work and praises the intention.
Enter all of you, therefore, into the joy of our Lord, and, whether first or last, receive your reward. O rich and poor, one with another, dance for joy! O you ascetics and you negligent, celebrate the day! You that have fasted and you that have disregarded the fast, rejoice today! The table is rich-laden; feast royally, all of you! The calf is fatted; let no one go forth hungry!
Let all partake of the feast of faith. Let all receive the riches of goodness.
Let no one lament his poverty, for the universal kingdom has been revealed.
Let no one mourn his transgressions, for pardon has dawned from the grave.
Let no one fear death, for the Saviour’s death has set us free.
He that was taken by death has annihilated it! He descended into hades and took hades captive! He embittered it when it tasted his flesh! And anticipating this Isaiah exclaimed, “Hades was embittered when it encountered thee in the lower regions.” It was embittered, for it was abolished! It was embittered, for it was mocked! It was embittered, for it was purged! It was embittered, for it was despoiled! It was embittered, for it was bound in chains!
It took a body and, face to face, met God! It took earth and encountered heaven! It took what it saw but crumbled before what it had not seen!
“O death, where is thy sting? O hades, where is thy victory?”
Christ is risen, and you are overthrown!
Christ is risen, and the demons are fallen!
Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice!
Christ is risen, and life reigns!
Christ is risen, and not one dead remains in a tomb!
For Christ, being raised from the dead, has become the First-fruits of them that slept.
To him be glory and might unto ages of ages. Amen.

Even when all despaired at the hour when Christ was dying on the cross, Mary, serene, awaited the hour of the resurrection. Mary is the symbol of the people who suffer oppression and injustice. Theirs is the calm suffering that awaits the resurrection. It is Christian suffering, the suffering of the church, which does not accept the present injustices but awaits without rancor the moment when the Risen One will return to give us the redemption we await.

Let us give diligent heed to the study of Scripture. For in the tumult of life it will save you from suffering like those who are tossed by troubled waves. The sea rages, but you sail on with calm weather; for you have the study of the Scriptures for your pilot; this is the cable which the trials of life do not break asunder.

Let our soul weigh anchor in the reading of Scripture. For the study of Scripture is a haven without waves, a tower that is unshakeable, a glory that cannot be wrested away from anybody, a weapon that cannot be defeated, a joy that does not pall. In reading Scripture, the soul is relieved from harm, and enjoys much calm and peace.

Perhaps you have the curiosity to know what people who confess before a Christian priest find in it. I reply simply that we find Christ in it. Christ makes himself most effectively present for different purposes in different ways. To feed us with his body, he gives us bread and wine. To inform us with his mind, he gives us the Scriptures. To confront our sins, and to speak our pardon, he uses of a man of flesh and blood. You know that our Church offers you the opportunity, and does not constrain you to use it, unless you are so defeated in your life as to forsake the altar. Then it is a duty to seek the priest. Otherwise it is open to your free choice. And I wish I could convey to those who do not know by experience, how much happiness, and what live-giving power, resides in this sacrament.

‎Where else in our society are all of us — not just a gnostic elite, but everyone — called to be social critics, called to extricate ourselves from the powers and principalities that claim to rule our daily lives, in order to submit ourselves to the sole dominion of God before whom all of us are equal? Where else in our society are we all addressed and sprinkled and bowed to and incensed and touched and kissed and treated like somebody — all in the very same way? Where else do economic czars and beggars get the same treatment? Where else are food and drink blessed in a common prayer of thanksgiving, broken and poured out, so that everybody shares and shares alike?

If someone has no intention of raising a child in Christ—if they have no intention of attending church, praying as a family in the home, teaching the Bible, encouraging questions about the faith, and giving their children every opportunity to experience the life of the Church—then they should in no way bring their child to be baptized.

When we decide to baptize a child we make the most solemn of promises to God. We are promising to do everything in our power to bring that child to Christ, and this is a promise that we can only make if we are doing everything we can to draw near to Him ourselves. Children take seriously what we take seriously. If they grow up in a home in which conversations about Christ, prayer, and reading from the Bible and the lives of the saints are part of normal daily life, they will feed off this as much as the food we put on their plates at the dinner table…

As a priest, I see just how real the life of faith is to children when they approach the chalice to receive communion. It is in their eyes, and I am humbled. When they see that we are excited and involved, they will become excited and involved. Raising a child in Christ is simple. Just be a child yourself in Christ. Take it seriously. Children take faith very seriously, and we should either honor that faith ourselves or we shouldn’t baptize them.

Jesus is the action of God coming towards man to save him and lead him to the Father. In Him, therefore, is revealed the fullness of the mystery of God’s love. But He is also the Man who, raised up by God, mounts towards the Father and thus fulfills the vocation of man. He is at once – let us repeat – the movement of God towards man and the movement of man towards God.

So perhaps Jesus has decided to publicly align himself with John’s ministry. He may also have wanted to perform a kind of public ritual to inaugurate his own ministry.

But there is another possibility, which is that Jesus has decided to enter even more deeply into the human condition. Though sinless, he participates in the ritual that others around him are doing as well. He participates in this movement of repentance and conversion not because he needs it, but because it aligns him with those around him, with those anticipating the reign of God—in other words, everyone. It’s an act of solidarity, a human act from the Son of God who casts his lot with the people of the time. It has less to do with his original sin, which he does not carry, than identifying with those who carry that sin, like George and I experienced at the Jordan. The divine is fully immersing himself, literally in this case, in our humanity.

There is also the sense that Jesus is “taking on” the sins of humanity. In his book on baptism “Everything is Sacred,” Thomas J. Scirghi, a Jesuit theologian, compares Jesus’s sense of sin to the shame that a parent might feel should their child be guilty of criminal behavior. There is no sin, but still the parent feels the suffering that was caused by their child. As Karl Barth wrote, perhaps no one was in greater need of baptism than Jesus because of this “bearing” of our sins.
In this act of radical identification with humanity, Jesus is publicly confirmed by God as his divine Son, in a public way. In his deep humility he is exalted. There is a parallel to his later crucifixion to: as he humbles himself in baptism and is rewarded with the confirmation of the voice; his humbling of himself at the crucifixion leads to resurrection.