5th Sunday of Easter, Year A
Previous Years: 2020 || 2017
Preached at the Church of the Assumption in Bellingham, WA
Recording
https://moorejesus.podbean.com/e/we-need-deacons/
Transcript
Thanks to T.V. for editing this transcript.
Our first reading today gives us the story of the institution of the diaconate. Some of you will be excited about this and others will not. But today you all get a homily on sacramental theology.
In the Old Testament there are three offices, three very important roles played by people. One is the office of priest instituted by Moses through Aaron. All of the sons of Aaron are priests of the temple, and the priesthood of the Jews was incredibly important. The entire Jewish religion revolves around the temple sacrifices and the high priest, the head of all of the priests was incredibly important. So, we have the priest in the Old Testament and we also have the prophet. The prophet was often the one that “balanced out” the priesthood. Sometimes the priesthood could become too ritualistic, too focused on doing exactly what was prescribed in the law but forgetting why they were doing it. The prophetic office would call people back to the Covenant, back to fidelity to God. And then there was also the kingly office. We see that office in Saul and David and Solomon and all of their successors. The King of Israel was a very important figure, one anointed by God for a ministry. So we have all of the Old Testament balanced between these three forces the priesthood, the prophets, and the kings.
Jesus is the fulfillment of all three. He is the new Moses. He is the fulfillment of the Jewish priesthood, our new high priest.T he letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament spells all of this out in explicit detail. Jesus is the new and final prophet, so Saint John the Baptist is often said to be the last of the Old Testament prophets. And Jesus is the final word of God, the last word that God has to speak, the fulfillment of all prophecy. After him we do not need additional revelation or words from God. And Jesus is finally also the new and permanent David, the successor, the son of David, who sits on the throne of David for all eternity. In himself, Jesus is what all three of these offices were pointing toward. He is the perfect priest, the perfect prophet, and the perfect king.
When we are baptized, we become everything that Jesus is. So for example, we become divinized. We share now in the internal life of the Trinity. We are brought into the life of God through our baptism. We share in the resurrected nature of Jesus. We are given his resurrection. In baptism, we become a member of the Church because the Church is the body of Christ. So in our baptism we become a part of the Body of Christ, which is the Church. We are made sinless because Christ is sinless also. We are given the three offices of Christ. We in our baptism are made priest, prophet, and king as Christ is priest, prophet and king. To be a priest means to offer sacrifice for the sake of the people.
So all of you are priests, all of you offer sacrifices for the sake of the people. Most of the time that looks like selfless acts of charity. I do this thing for someone else, I offer this sacrifice. That old idea of offering it up when you suffer, don’t just suffer in vain, but offer it up for something. That’s what priesthood looks like. You take your suffering, you offer it up to the Lord, and in so doing, you offer it for the people. For those that you’re praying for, all of you are prophets. You’re called to preach the gospel. I talk about this all the time, that’s what evangelization is. But you’re called to preach the Word of God, and then finally, you’re all kings. A king is one who is responsible for arranging the society, arranging the kingdom for the benefit of all. The king is the one who is responsible for justice. So all of you, by being kings in the image of Christ, are called to bring justice into the world, to arrange the world around you in justice.
Now, there’s a difficulty here, particularly when I tell you that you are all priests. As Catholics, when we hear the word priest, we picture the guy in funny clothes up front. Vatican II gave us a very helpful way of seeing this, the distinction between what we would call the baptismal priesthood and what we would call the ministerial or the ordained priesthood. And essentially, the division is that all of you are priests, prophets and kings for the world. You offer your sacrifices up for the world. You preach the gospel to the world, and you work for justice in the world. But because God loves you and does not want to leave you alone, he knows that you, being priests, prophets, and kings for the world is going to be difficult so he gives you the gift of the ministerial priesthood. He wants to make sure that as you act as priests, prophets and kings for the world, you have somebody who can minister to you as a priest, prophet and king.
From this idea comes the question of what’s the ministerial priesthood or the ordained priesthood? Those of us who are ordained are baptized. We have the offices of Christ through our Baptism. But then in ordination we are given the offices of Christ for the Church. Priests and bishops are ordained “in persona Christi capitis”, meaning in the person of Christ, the head, which means the head of the Church, the one who is responsible for the Church. So, while you make sacrifices for the world, preach to the world and work for justice in the world, it’s my job to offer sacrifice for you, to preach to you, the Church, the baptized, and to work to arrange and order the Church for the benefit of all. This is why in our theology, it’s not just a discipline,it’s not just a law, but it’s theology that the priest is the one responsible for making decisions for the community. As Catholics, unlike Presbyterians or a lot of non-denominational churches, we don’t have a board of directors. We don’t take votes of the community because the authority to arrange the community is in ordination. The priest is the one who arranges the community for justice. Similarly, it’s the ordained priest who preaches at Mass. Laity are not allowed to preach at Mass because this is a Church function. As a ordained Priest you’re required, you’re commanded by the Lord to preach to the world. But in the context of the Church, it is the priest who preaches. It’s the priest who serves as the prophet. And then finally, it is the priest, and only the priest who offers the sacrifice of the Mass. Again, this sacrifice is offered for you,it is for your benefit, which is why the priest does it for you. SYou then can go out into the world and offer sacrifice for everyone around you: your family, your friends, your coworkers.
So that’s been an eight minute discourse and we still haven’t talked about deacons. Where do they fit in? Well, we see it in the Acts of the Apostles this morning. We see how the deacons are brought in. We have the apostles and they are the head of this Church. They are responsible for being priests, prophets and kings for the new community of believers. But they find that they are not doing their job very well.
You have two groups in the early church, the Greek speaking Jews and the Hebrew speaking Jews. The Hellenists are the Greek speaking ones and are complaining that their widows are being ignored in the daily distribution of bread. Widows were a difficult place to be as they didn’t have anybody to take care of them. They were often destitute, and so the church was taking care of her widows. But the Hebrew widows got more attention just because that was the primary language in the area. The Apostles hear this complaint and they say, you’re absolutely right, this is wrong. We need to fix it, but we don’t have the time to do so. If we were to spend all of our time worrying about who got bread, then we wouldn’t have the time to dedicate to the Word of God and preaching the Gospel. And so they say this is what we teach as Catholics under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. We need helpers. We need people to help us in our ministry so that we can keep our focus on the bigger things and can continue to do what we are called to do for the Church. We need helpers who can help us with the daily distribution of bread. And so they select seven Greek speaking men and they ordain them.
That’s what it means by saying the laying on of hands. They ordain them. They give them essentially part of the Spirit given to them by Jesus. The Apostles are given this ordination by the Lord, and then the Apostles give part of their Spirit to the laying on of hands, to these helpers, to these deacons. The diaconate, over time, evolved from here. Originally, they were kind of ministers of charity in the community. And from there in the early church, for the first 7 or 800 years, deacons were in charge of the money as the church began to have resources. People began to make donations and they began to have buildings. After the legalization of Christianity, it was always the deacon who ran all of the finances for the diocese, or the Church, or the local parish. An archdeacon in every diocese was the chief financial officer, the chief administrator of the diocese, answering to the bishop. The bishop has the fullness of the kingship of Christ for the Church, thus he had this archdeacon function as an assistant. We also see within 150-200 years, that deacons begin to serve at the altar. You don’t see it today because the Mass is highly simplified. But back then there was a lot involved with bringing up of the gifts. There were gifts that weren’t just bread and wine and had to be taken and put somewhere and properly arranged in the altar which took a lot of time. Today we have a very brief echo of this, because the deacon is the one responsible for setting the altar. Because it was a big need for the priests we needed somebody to organize all of this so that we could come in and offer the prayers.
In general then, what the deacon is, what the diaconate is, is it’s a blank check to the Church. Unlike volunteers or even parish employees, we have many, many dedicated volunteers, people who give a ton of time to the church, and we couldn’t do what we do without them. We have incredible employees at the parish. They take a pay cut just to work for us. They’re very dedicated. They do this in Faith, but unlike those two groups of people, the deacon loses his freedom. A volunteer has the freedom to step back. An employee has the freedom to find a different job. But a deacon, because he is ordained, makes a permanent promise of obedience to the Church. He does whatever the Church asks him to do in the person of his bishop, or in the person of his pastor. The deacon goes where he is called. He is responsive to the needs of the people because remember, the deacon is ordained. He’s instituted by the Apostles for the pastoral care of the people. So it comes down to what do the people need so that the priest can be a priest to them and can receive pastoral care like these widows when they need it.
That question is different every year, every decade, every generation. But the deacon is always there to step in and do what the Church asks him to do, to fill the need to take care of the people. The priest takes care of the people. Absolutely. But the deacon does so oftentimes in a more concrete way. We have a deacon in our community, Deacon Larry. He’s an incredible, fantastic deacon. And we talk regularly to confer on what the people need. Many of you have benefited from his ministrations. You’ve been able to go to him perhaps when I or my predecessors have been unavailable. He knows you better because he’s been in this community longer than I or my predecessors ever were. He’s there to address your pastoral needs, but again, not in freedom, but in obedience. He has given a blank check to the Church, and we cash that check over and over and over again. The charism of the diaconate, again, is marked by that total gift to the Church. I can tell you the happiest day of my entire life was my ordination to the diaconate, not my ordination to the priesthood, although that’s a gift that I continue to be thankful for. My ordination to the diaconate was a year before my priesthood, and that’s the day where I knew I was under obedience to the Church. That was the highest desire of my heart, was to give my entire life to the Church and do whatever she asked me to do.
When we call deacons, we’re asking for men with that kind of heart. I don’t know what the needs of the people are, but I am ready to fulfill them whatever they are not in the freedom of a volunteer where you can pick and choose, or the freedom of an employee where you can go to another opportunity but in the freedom of Obedience. I’m giving my life, just tell me what to do.
All of this matters in a very concrete way right now, because the Archdiocese of Seattle is calling a new deacon class, something we only do unfortunately it seems, once every 6 or 7 years. It’s now time to ordain new deacons for our archdiocese and unfortunately, because we need to make sure these men are ready to care for the people, they go through a lot of formation. They learn theology so that when a priest ask them to preach so that they perhaps can have a weekend off of preaching, the deacons don’t preach heresy. They have to go through human formation so that when somebody comes to them in their need, the deacon doesn’t pour his baggage on them. This process is a five year process. Men who say, today I’m ready to try this out or to discern, won’t be ordained until 2028. But the archdiocese is calling them today, specifically, men between the ages of 35 and 56.
You won’t find this on the archdiocesan website, but the way I think about it is, we’re looking for men aged 35 to 56 who are willing to give a blank check to the Church. That blank check is whatever we need, whatever the people in our parish need, ready to step up and serve so that the priests can do what they have to do, and help to be sure the people of the Church receive pastoral care. For 4 or 5 months now we’ve been going through an inquiry process, men asking questions and seeing if they want to apply for this or not. Right now, we have one man in the entirety of Whatcom County who has taken us up on that offer, and I don’t think that’s enough for the pastoral needs of the people here. There are seven from the Skagit Valley and only one from Whatcom County, and our population is much greater. If you’re a man between 35 and 56, I want you to discern it, I want you to pray about it. Whether you think the answer is going to be yes or no, at least ask God and see if he is calling you to the diaconate.
If you are not a man between 35 and 56, ask yourself this question. Is there anybody in this community that has been my blank check that I’ve been able to go to in my time of need, and who is willing to say yes and to be with me and to walk with me? If there is somebody in this community who has done that for you, think about encouraging him to consider the diaconate. He may not have thought about it for himself but hearing it from you, that what he has done for you is what a deacon is called to do for the entire Church, may be the encouragement he needs.
I love Deacon Larry. It has been an incredible blessing to work with him. He’s in St. Louis this weekend so I can say whatever I want about him while he’s gone. He’ll be the first one to tell you this, he’s getting older and is slowing down. He’s still got plenty of life in him but six years from now, when we’re ready to have another deacon, he might be ready to step back in a very significant way. And it’s important for me to have somebody to step into his place, because it’s important that the pastoral needs of our people are always taken care of. You know that with the decrease of priests relative to people, that you may not receive the same level of pastoral care that you need or want. It’s sad for me but it’s the reality that we have. And I need you and want you to receive that pastoral care. And the more we have deacons, the more these men step into that ministry, the more I know that you will be taken care of.
Fr. Moore 