THE ROLE OF THE CLERGY

Train a child in the way he should go,
and when he is old he will not turn from it.
Proverbs 22:6

I AM the Way and the Truth and the Life.
No one comes to the Father except through Me.
John 14:6

When I was a child, I talked like a child,
I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.
When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.
1 Corinthians 13:11

Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts,
since as members of one body
you were called to peace.
Colossians 3:15

These passages have great meaning for the Christian Church for they embody the charter for the Clergy—a manner of falsework, if you will, designed to support the main structure of the Church during its construction. Once that process is complete, having served its intended purpose, the Clergy will pass away.

This passage also has great meaning for the secular states of the world, for in it one finds God’s reasons for the institutions of government that they embody, however wrongly. When one is a child, s/he must be trained in the way s/he should go. That “way” is Christian discipleship. This training requires a measure of authority. Later, when the training is complete, the mature person can enjoy a measure of autonomy.

The process of turning a natural man into a Christian man is in some respects a bit like turning a mustang bronc into a saddle horse. First you have to catch him, then you have to break him, then you have to show him who’s boss. Once these things have been accomplished, training becomes relatively easy.

Again, the process of turning a natural man into a Christian man is in some respects a bit like turning a Porterhouse steak into a more muscular physique. First you have to grill it, then you have to eat it, then you have to digest it. Finally, its protein and its carbohydrates must be given places in the new muscle tissue that you are forming. Once in place, their training will begin and will culminate in the physique you desire.

By now, you must be either nodding your head in agreement or scratching it and muttering, “Huh?” If you’re a Christian and you’re being trained in The Way, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Otherwise, all this prattle must be completely baffling. Take heart: I shall explain all.

To begin with, God created humanity to be a tangible expression of Himself. As such, each individual person is like an individual cell of one vast Body. As in a human body, each cell is “displastic” (that is, “without form or function”) until it is “assigned” a place in the Body. Once its place has been assigned, its training begins: cells that will serve in the Nervous System become neurons; cells that will serve as transports become Blood Corpuscles, and so forth.

With the Fall of Man, a strange thing happened to the cells of God’s body: they began to acquire minds of their own. First the Body had a mind of its own—which was God’s intent—but then each cell of His Body began to think of itself as...well, a Self. Instead of being selfless elements of one unified whole, they began to seek their “own” interests rather than serve the common interests of the Body. You might say that God had cancer.

What to do? Usually, when someone develops a cancer, the physician either kills the rebellious cells with drugs or radiation, or s/he banishes them from the body via surgical removal. When the rebellion has metastasized throughout the body, it is deemed “inoperable” and hence “terminal”; the patient is given painkillers and is left to die.

“But God so loved the world” that He refused to allow His body to die, even though He could easily abandon it to its fate and create a new one in its place. Instead, He put His own Mind into a second Body—His Son—and sent it to retrain the rebellious cells (or whichever among them would allow themselves to be trained) to function as a Body instead of continuing to live (and die) as an entropy of mutually destructive selves. Then, instead of killing His cancerous Body and effecting a whole-body transplant of His essence into the Son, He amazed all creation by transferring the cancer from the disease-ridden Body to the Son and destroyed it by allowing the still-rebellious cells to murder Him by nailing Him to a cross!

But God still wasn’t finished. Next, He resurrected His Son and made Him the Head of His New Body. The remaining members of the New Body would regenerate from the cells that allowed themselves to be retrained. Into each of these, He put a measure of His own Spirit to act as a sort of “anti-autic” drug: whenever a cell began to behave as a Self, the Spirit would remind it that it was actually a member of something greater. By feeling the pain of separation, it would be motivated to return to the Body and to abandon its Self-ish ways.

As a final stroke of loving genius, God sent His Spirit into all of the World—the entropy of rebellion—and caused the penitent cells to call the still-rebellious ones to repentance! If they will turn, they will be saved and all will be as it was! Sadly, if they will not turn, they are already cut off and will eventually die. They are like the branches of a tree that has been pruned: cut off from the source of their life, they may continue to grow for a while; they may continue to put out buds and even appear to “fruit” for a while. Yet, like a branch that has been pruned from a tree, they are cut off from the source of nourishment that was once their head; though they give themselves to their young, their strength is not replenished and they die. If perchance they turn and are saved, though, they will live forever.

Today, Christmas Day, we celebrate the Birth of the Son of God. The World has no reason to celebrate this Birth; that would be like Robespierre and his Rebels celebrating the birth of the Dauphin—a rebirth of tyranny in the France that they had just liberated! Ridiculous! We who celebrate are not The World; we are The Church—penitent sinners called out of the World to be the regenerate Body of Christ. We do not celebrate Santa Claus bringing us a bunch of gift-wrapped crap with which to clutter our homes; we celebrate God’s sacrifice of His Only Son to redeem us to Himself as His glorified Body.

While the World celebrates Independence and Self, the Church celebrates Unity and Communion. While the World eagerly awaits a fat guy in a red suit who will bring them lots of “stuff” with which to masturbate, the Church commemorates the Gift of True Love and awaits the return of the Bridegroom to claim her as His Bride. While the World celebrates its orgy of self-indulgence, the Church celebrates the death of self and the resurrection of True Life, to the everlasting glory of God.

The World will read what I have written and will say, “Ridiculous is right! This guy is completely off the map! Even the Mormons sound sane, next to him!” Then they will ask, “If God wanted to reconnect with the World, why didn’t He just come and pour out His Spirit? Why all this business with a cross and a sacrificial lamb? Surely the Author of Life isn’t afraid of a little bit of terminal cancer!”

The Mormons indeed sound “sane” next to sound Christian doctrine when it is the World that is listening. That’s because their “Gospel”, if it can be called that, is really a rationalization of the very selfism that results from sin in the first place. The “angel”, Moroni, calls his followers to evolve into gods. What could be more selfist than that? God already acknowledges that a man who claims there is no God (god) is in essence a god unto himself. How better to complete such rebellion than to appeal to the vain glory of the selfists by offering to confer godhood on them? It is the very antithesis of Christianity, yet Mormons claim to be Christians in their own right!

The reason that God did not simply “pour out His Spirit” on the World is that sin cannot coexist with the perfection of God. In His Presence, rebellious cells would be instantly annihilated. It is not His purpose to destroy humanity; rather, He wishes to save it. Therefore, a sort of “go-between” that would insulate our sin from His scorching gaze was necessary. That go-between (or “middleman”) was Jesus Christ. Absolute God in His perfection and yet absolute Man in his humanity, Jesus was unique. Only by ignoring some aspect of His Nature can His uniqueness in the history of the World be questioned. Like an Adam-Who-Never-Fell, Jesus was as human as any of us yet He lived a sinless life of complete devotion to His Father...just as each of us should do.

The Lamb of God—or, more accurately, the Scapegoat of God—takes away the sins of the World by receiving the brunt of the World’s entropy and then dying. By dying, the Lamb kills its inherited sinful nature. By being raised from death, the Lamb—or, at this stage, the Lion—triumphs over death by claiming everlasting life. Put another way, the Lion of Judah triumphs over death by reconnecting with God, the Source of all Life. In the end, God again will be manifest in His Church: Body, Soul and Spirit.

Certainly, God is not afraid of a bit of terminal cancer. As He is Existence Itself, He cannot die. It is we who would die in His presence, not He who would die in ours. "For God so loved the World that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believed in Him would not perish but have everlasting life."

In time, the cells of the Body will respond perfectly to the promptings of His Mind and Spirit. Then, each will exist as an autonomous unit, answerable directly to God Himself. For now, though, the Clergy exist to provide authority to the Church while it is being rebuilt in the image of Christ. Like an invisible chain of command, they serve the ones who are new to the Body with leadership until such time as they can walk in the newness of life without such guidance. At that point, they may become clergy themselves; more likely, they will be grafted into some other organ of the Body. After all, if all the Body were a brain, how would it move? How would it feed itself? Anyway, the Clergy are not the brain of the Church—they are its peripheral nervous system. Christ is the Head, and therefore the Brain, of the Church.