In response to Ted Wardlaw’s well written review of Barbara Brown Taylor’s last book “Leaving Church,” in the February 19th Outlook, I feel compelled to hoist a warning flag. As I understand it, the protestant reformation, built on the accessibility of the text and the flattening of ecclesiastical hierarchy insisted the priest was not needed to mediate God’s presence between God and the people.
As I read “Leaving Church” I rediscovered my own discomfort with the “office” of the priest and the temptation to return to form. Barbara’s lament that she had to give up too much of her humanity in order to maintain the priestly role, symbolized at the books end by that powerful story of getting thrown into the pool at her going away party, should be a prophetic word for each of us. As she discovered too late, it was not until she defrocked herself that she felt included in the communal waters of Baptism.
To claim, as Ted does, that we “ordained” are the sacramental, theological, or homiletical “go-between” is to claim too much our priestly role as mediators of God’s grace whether through the dispensing of the mass or the twenty-odd minutes of a well crafted and highly polished sermon. I fear, in the mainline church at least, with our stress on what John Leith used to call “pretty preaching” that we are focused on the wrong side of the chancel.
If the medium is the message, as the incarnation teaches, then the role of “preacher” might best be served by first acknowledging that we “preachers” are just as muddled and in need of God’s grace and love as are those to whom we preach; maybe more so.
Barbara Taylor once suggested in a preaching class I attended that we read “With Ears to Hear Preaching as Self Persuasion,“ by Robin R Meyers. I suspect it was a foreshadowing of her own conflicted role as priest. As I remember, she suggested we view our preaching, not so much like the Moses who acted as the mediator between Yahweh on the mountain top and the people in the wilderness, but rather the Moses who stood before the great “I Am,” at the burning bush trying to wrangle out God’s name while looking for a way to hedge being called in the first place.
When Martin Luther celebrated his first mass in the spring of 1507, the mystery of it all, along with his own existential guilt, induced some kind of fit as he collapsed in the choir crying, “it’s not me, it’s not me” Luther’s father had just made a gift of twenty silver gulden’s to see his son being made a priest and was deeply shaken by his son’s embarrassing behavior. That too was a foreshadowing. In less than twenty years, Luther wrote of the professional priesthood in “The Misuse of the Mass,” “Behold the noble, precious senseless priesthood even among the heathen?. . . O dear Lord Jesus…!”
His vision, and the New Testament’s as I read it, points to an ecclesiology where each Baptized member “priests” each other. This means the people will have to tear away, not only from our dependency on Rome, but also from our dependency on the “office” of preacher as the harbinger and mediator of God’s Word, no matter how well trained and gifted she is. This will lead not to an “emerging church” as much as it will a “re-emerging” one.
Dr. W. Stephen Goyer
Pastor- Riverside Presbyterian Church
Jacksonville, Fla.
