Clergy as icons of faith
or why you can't really get ordained on the internet
“I was looking for a quick and cost effective way to be ordained so I could perform my older brother's wedding ceremony. The ordaining process was super easy, and didn't cost a thing!”
This is called licensing. By all means, officiate at your brother’s wedding. But please, Universal Life Church (from whose website I copied this quote), don’t call it ordaining.
The reason I struggle with this is not just because I am an ordained person in a religious tradition (the Episcopal Church). It’s because it reduces the essence of ministry to an administrative function, rather than a spiritual one.
It removes the vocational aspect, the manner in which those who are duly ordained bear the image of God into the world.
I’m quite confident that those who are ‘ordained’ on the internet in order to perform a wedding are not ready to vow, as I (and every other Episcopal priest) did:
“to nourish Christ's people from the riches of his grace, and strengthen them to glorify God in this life and in the life to come.”
Not all traditions have such formal processes for ordination.
Many pastors do not have seminary degrees, many denominations and congregations do not have a formal ordination process or ceremony, and - as the Universal Life Church knows very well - many, many lay people perform the same functions those who are ordained.
But those who are ordained clergy - not just ceremony officiants - do have something very important in common…
Being ordained is more about what we represent
than about what we do.
I’m reading through Ministry Matters by Michael Plekon, and in the introduction he talks of clergy as icons. He uses an icon as the cover art for book. He’s very intentional about the word and its definition:
”Icons do not just depict a figure or a scene but have us look at Christ, one of the saints, or a biblical passage in a most elemental way. As a result, some have called icons windows for the sacred to shine in on us.”
Plekon talks of clergy being icons of faith - we are the windows through which people see God.
That’s a very tricky thing. And strangely - this is the very strangest and most important of ordained life…
it’s nothing personal. It’s (mostly) not about who we are as individual people. It’s about what we’re called to bear into the world, for the sake of others.
If you were lucky enough to be at the General Theological Seminary when the late, great Father J. Robert Wright was teaching, you would remember him saying this: “of course lay people can do the same things as ordained people in the church.
But first they have to be formed and trained in the Christian faith and traditions; then they have to be selected by the community as someone to represent them; and finally, they need to be sealed by the Holy Spirit. That’s what we call the ordination process.”
Being ordained doesn’t make me - or anyone else - a better person. It makes us the bearers of the faith tradition for the community. It doesn’t mean lay ministry is not important - it’s crucially important for all ministers to live out our callings. It simply means that we’ve been formed and set aside to represent something of the love of God for others.
You can’t be ordained without a community to uphold you. You can’t be ordained without God’s presence to sustain you.
That’s the job, really. To let ourselves be icons, let something shine through us, and recognize that it’s not really about us at all.
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William Countryman used icon language for priesthood too in Living on the Border of the Holy. Standing at the altar my prayer is that I stay out of way of the Spirit.
This reminds me of Rev Elizabeth Edman's quote from her book "Queer Virtue":
"A priest is someone who stands in a place of remarkable vulnerability, and by doing so, invites other people to enter the sacred."
Thank you!