To serve as a priest is a complex vocation. Different aspects have been emphasized in different times and places throughout history. Within living memory, priests of the Episcopal Church have been invited and sometimes summoned to view their ministries according to many models: shamanic sacramentalist, convicting homilist, forward-thinking leader, pastoral caregiver, justice advocate, fruitful evangelist, executive officer, midwife of parish rebirth, and still others.
Each of these models has legitimacy. Whichever one is chosen, some priests are skilled in this area or can become so, while in the case of other priests, this may not their gift, even if they endeavor to become proficient. When a single model or small group of models is focused upon too much, too exclusively, the priest may end up a failed sorcerer, rather than a confident servant of the gospel. Individuals and communities can make serious mistakes in this regard. So too can the larger church in promoting one model to the neglect of others for a time that can feel like eternity.
The promotion of fads often reveals itself as a foolish thing to do. This promotion may be driven by fear. It happens often with the jaws of laity and clergy all firmly set. An obsession with any model, much less with a fad, squeezes the life out of that aspect of ministry. It also denies that ministry belongs to God, that in the end, Christ is the one priest. What the world calls failure may prove to be faithfulness, while apparent success may result from unacceptable compromises, marked by a wholesale hardening of hearts.
Theology in the literal sense must include positive and negative aspects. Positive theology features grand and life-giving assertions that point to creation and re-creation in all their splendor. Negative theology, on the other hand, refuses to rest content with verbal or iconic formulations alone, but takes seriously ignorance, ugliness, and sin. True wisdom appears as a cloud of unknowing, not easily penetrated.
If this is what theology includes, then what about ministerial priesthood? Many models have their place, but none have the last word. Elevating any of them too far amounts to the erection of idols. To be faithful, or even close to faithful, means to be a fool, a model that relativizes the others. There is scriptural warrant for this, but like other topics in negative theology, the foolish priesthood is often unrecognized, overlooked. Like the stone-heavy holiness of God, the dark-as-midnight dereliction of the cross, the Spirit’s relentless burning empowerment, the foolishness of Christian priesthood is something we often prefer to overlook. Many are fools of one kind or another, at one time or another. But who wants to be a fool?
Does any seminary, scrambling for economic survival, offer a Doctor of Ministry degree in Foolish Priesthood? Yet the Father loves foolish priests. His Son served as one here on earth. And foolish priests are still made under the pressure of the Spirit. The molding of them takes place not so much in respectable theological schools and cathedrals as in recovery programs and those ministries that the ordained increasingly undertake in addition to their ecclesiastical day jobs. There the priest is often more at risk and the gospel is often more likely to happen.
The literature on foolish priesthood is scant throughout the centuries. It is especially so in our time. One place where priestly foolishness shines out is in “On Those that Deserve It,” a poem by Francis Quarles (1592-1644). This poem is a bitter reflection on controversies that inflamed the Church of England and English society in the early 17th century:
O when our clergy, at the dreadful Day
Shall make their audit, when the Judge shall say
“Give your accounts. What have my lambs been fed?
Say, do they all stand sound? Is there none dead
By your defaults? Come, shepherds, bring them forth
That I may crown your labours in their worth.”
O, what an answer will be given by some!
“We have been silenced: Canons struck us dumb:
The great ones would not let us feed thy flock,
Unless we played the fools and wore a frock;
We were forbid unless we’ld yield to sign
And cross their brows — they say, a mark of thine.
To say the truth, great Judge, they were not fed,
Lord, here they be; but Lord, they be all dead.”
Ah, cruel shepherds! Could your conscience serve
Not to be fools, and yet to let them starve?
What if your fiery spirits had been bound
To antic habits, or your heads been crowned
With peacock’s plumes, had ye been forced to feed
Your Saviour’s dear-brought flock in a fool’s weed?
He that was scorned, reviled, endured the curse
Of a base death in your behalf — nay worse,
Swallowed the cup of wrath charged up to th’ brim —
Durst ye not stoop to play the fools for him?
The setting is the Day of Judgment, specifically the final judgment for clergy of the Church of England who are the poet’s contemporaries.
They are called upon to render an account of their ministries. Ministerial success on this occasion has nothing to do with budgets, statistics, or building projects. Instead, success is a matter of life and death.
The Judge says,
“Give your accounts. What have my lambs been fed?
Say, do they all stand sound? Is there none dead
By your defaults?”
The image of clergy as shepherds prevails here. The tone is both terrifying and oddly hopeful.
Next comes the answer of “some” of these shepherds. The tone is sour and self-justifying. They were silenced by the authorities because they refused, as a matter of conscience, to keep certain church practices that seemed to them to be “playing the fool.” These practices including wearing surplice and cope and marking the newly baptized with the sign of the Cross.
The Canons of 1604 mandated these practices and some of the Puritan clergy still within the Church of England preferred deprivation or suspension to conformity. Thus in this poem, these clergy claimed that “Canons struck us dumb” and as a result sheep died because they were not fed.
We may be affronted by the stubbornness of both sides in this confrontation. But Quarles’s poem is of more than historical value if we heed what the Judge says in response. Concern for the lives of the sheep should have exceeded self-concern over appearing as fools in one’s own eyes. Feeding the Savior’s “dear-bought flock in a fool’s weed” is not something reprehensible; it should be viewed as an absolute honor.
Why? Because Christ chose to suffer for us, and not to some shallow level. He not only accepted death, but “the curse of a base death in your behalf.” He did not simply sip the bitterness of liquid wrath, but drained “the cup of wrath charged up to the brim.” In comparison to this indescribable kenosis, a slightly burdened conscience seems a very little thing if it opens many doors to preserve the lives of Christ’s sheep.
What light does all this shine upon the requirements for foolish priesthood four centuries after Quarles? Perhaps we can admit that we do not always know what we are doing, but we know the one that we can trust. Models for priesthood illuminate the pathway only slightly. Take them too seriously, regard them too narrowly, and they become stumbling blocks, stones over which to fall.
Church structures can (possibly) be maintained by professionals, but what transforms the world are those who follow, however awkwardly, Jesus the Holy Fool. The only worthwhile king is one who has been resurrected.
For Further Reading
Francis Quarles was a prolific poet and popular in his time. Many of his works are available in modern reprints. A selection of his poems appears in the two-volume anthology, Chapters into Verse: Poetry in English Inspired by The Bible, assembled and edited by Robert Atwan and Laurance Wieder (Oxford, 1993).
