Sheep without a shepherd

It’s truly ironic how eloquence or any other personal excellence can be a trap that keeps one from entering the Kingdom of God.

There are people who imagine that Christianity, or any religion, is just an organized framework whose purpose is to elevate humanity from lower to higher cultural levels, and that when this goal has been achieved, the usefulness of religion is finished. To them it seems entirely justified that religion should wither away or be maintained only for sentimental, historical or artistic reasons. Look around you, and see if there isn’t evidence that actually substantiates their view. And it isn’t just people who’ve left the Church (because they feel that they’ve “graduated” and no longer need organized religion) who think this way; it’s also people who still “go to church,” indeed even people who “run the whole show.” For this last group, religion is to be maintained for an additional reason—because it makes good business sense.

After a long wait of many weeks during which appointments were made and then broken, I finally made it to my first meeting with a new priest, a man of marked intelligence and, though a recent convert, fully fluent in the Greek language and conversant in all of our many customs and traditions, a literal genius. The bishop must’ve thought he was really doing us a favor to send us one like him, who could preach circles around our Greek assistant pastor (who wasn’t deemed ready to take over the responsibilities of so great a parish, when our former proistámenos was “rewarded” for his good job of raising money by being transferred to a larger community in California). It must’ve been thought best to let the assistant pastor stay on for the time being, so as not to traumatize the parish by transferring both priests at the same time.

Initially impressed by his eloquent sermons, I was beginning to exercise some caution after noticing that our new proistámenos (yes, this honorific title, usually reserved for pastors of long and faithful service, was bestowed on him quite soon) was in the habit of leading scripture by his own ideas, instead of letting his ideas be led by scripture. Knowing this to be a common failing of beginners kept me from passing premature judgment on his ministry which was only starting—he had never been in charge of a parish before. My meeting with him, I thought, would be a good opportunity for us to share our spiritual life stories with each other, what I usually call our testimonies. I hoped it would let us see each other a little more authentically, because talking dispels mere imagining about another.

Outside, maybe in a nearby park or some other “neutral” location, was where I wanted to meet, but he wanted to get together in his office, so I consented. At the time I didn’t realize this was a security measure he had to take. Part of the mystique of the professional clergyman is to always keep the parishioner aware of his position as laity, and office visits are one of these methods.
So we began our visit.

We both shared a little bit about ourselves, his journey to Orthodoxy, my pilgrimage to Christ. He had come from a Baptist type “tradition,” whereas I had been brought up in a Catholic type “tradition,” though not Roman Catholic. I put tradition in quotation marks because this is not the way I talk about faith.

To me, faith is not a “tradition” but rather a living and ever-present reality, or it is nothing at all. You can’t pass it down to your descendants directly; it’s something that must be apprehended, accepted and applied afresh in every generation. Knowing this, I can accept all the externals of the Orthodox faith for what they are—a complete tool kit for working out the details of one’s Christian life in accordance with scripture, within a community in which salvation is possible. The background “music” of my life is this Orthodox faith, it’s always the “given” in every equation, it’s always been that for me at some level or another, and it’s the only dependable feature of human life I’ve ever known, it’s always there, dead or alive.

So we talked, and talked, and talked.

Little did I suspect at the time, that I’d finally found a person who could talk more than me. To be fair, I think I talked more in that meeting than did the dear young father, although he’s won the war of words since then, if lengthy discourse is the criterion.

After the exchange of our pasts, the talk moved on to our presents. He told me how he had many plans for the parish, many changes, but that he would not be able to introduce them all at once, but only gradually because, as we all know, Orthodox don’t like change.
(A fast change in Orthodoxy, they say, takes about four hundred years. I hope that’s a joke.) On my side, I shared with him some of the things I was doing at the time, especially the Bible-reading ministry downtown that I shared with my co-laborer Brock. I also had brought with me a sampling of some of the booklets I publish and give away to people on request. I like to write.

As he was a new priest, I wanted to assure him of my support for him in his new ministry. In my dadly sort of way, I tried to lay before him some ideas about ministering in our community, reminding him that to be a presbyter in the Church is a call to love the people and serve them in such a way as to draw them to the life of salvation. He was now God’s bondservant, with no private life really, but only what was granted him from above; but that God would be faithful to supply all his needs and be strength in his weakness at all times and in every circumstance, so he need never be anxious about anything.

What’s more, I told him, there were many persons like myself, who already knew how to minister to others, who could teach, who could pray, who had various talents to use in building up the Body of Christ at our church, and were only waiting to be asked to help (not that many weren’t already doing things on their own inside church or outside it).

An important part of a presbyter’s job, I told him, is to know his congregation, to know who within it can accept a share of the ministry, so that a community consists of one or more presbyters assisted by ministry teams made up of laity. One or two priests cannot minister to eight hundred families. That’s not how the Church was set up to work in the first place. In some Orthodox communities, like the Ethiopians, roughly ten per cent of the men are ordained to some kind of ministry. So I tried to encourage him to start seeking out people to share his ministry with, and even offered the idea that he should find a small group of dedicated servants of God to pray with him regularly two or three times a week, with the sole purpose of asking God’s direction and blessing on the parish.

Then, he interrupted me at one point and said the most alarming thing I’ve ever heard come from the mouth of an Orthodox priest. He said, “But I am afraid of the people. I can’t trust them.” He elaborated, and again said (speaking for priests in general), “we are afraid of the people, we can’t trust them.”

I was stunned. Here I was, having just revealed my spiritual life, my ministry and prayer concerns, my essential faith to one whom I regarded as my priest, and now I was hearing that, as one of “the people,” I was a threat, I could not be trusted. The meeting made an abrupt turn at that point as I tried to understand better what he meant, but try as I might, I could not make sense of what he was telling me. Perhaps I didn’t try hard enough. Perhaps we were both tired out. The meeting had run over limit, the one hour morphing into two and a half. I should’ve warned him that I run on kairós time, not on chrónos time. I don’t think I even had a watch on that day.

Not faulting this priest, but just to bring up the point that he made, if it is true in any sense, for anyone, even if only for him, I have to ask, what then is the purpose of ministry in the Christian church? What does a man do, that we should call him “pastor,” or “father”?

One title means shepherd, the other means, well, begetter. In Orthodoxy we know that the presbyter, or priest, is a human icon or image of Christ among us, and that the honor we show him as priest is directed to the prototype, Christ the Great High Priest, and the mysteries we receive at his hands are actually received from Jesus. At least that is what I was taught by the priests who handed over the Orthodox faith to me. In every mystery Jesus is there—in Communion He gives Himself to us, in Baptism He baptizes us, in Marriage He pronounces the blessings over us, and so on. This is part of the reason and purpose of the ministry in the Church, but not all.

When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd. So he began teaching them many things.
Mark 6:34 NIV

Lord, we are still that large crowd, so have compassion on us, because we are like sheep without a shepherd.
Speak, Lord, for your servants are listening.