Double Betrayal: Becoming a lay person is not a punishment!

The reports coming out in the current scandal are unbearable to read. Yet, this sentence must seem unbelievably privileged if read by a victim. The victims would probably read reports all day if it meant not experiencing and enduring what those reports reveal. This evil was done to actual people. In the upcoming September edition of San Pedro Today, I’ve written about the church’s need to go to the world in confession. I’ve also begun conversations with some who have experienced violence and abuse in various ways in their past to help Trinity do everything we can to safeguard our community through holy policy, just procedures, and best practices learned from the Scriptures, the experience of victims, and other communities who are farther along than we are in this area. This kind of commitment to a safe and healthy community is close to the heart of Trinity’s statement: Welcome home.

Some of the recent reporting and language related to the clergy scandal has profoundly frustrated me as a sort of double betrayal of the people of God. Maybe it’s because I’ve been knee-deep in the spacious ways Paul talks about the gift of leaders to equip the ministry of the whole people of God in Ephesians 4. I was introduced to Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas in Miroslav Volf’s book, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Eerdmans, 1998). In his argument, he demonstrates effectively that there are no unordained Christians. That is, every Christian is ordered. Each one has a grace and calling and role in the assembly. Volf writes, “the person baptized is not only made into a Christian through baptism, but in the same act is also ordained; under invocation of the Holy Spirit, hands are laid upon her, and she is assigned to a specific ordo within the eucharistic gathering. This is why there are no unordained Christians” (Volf, 114).

During the recent scandals, I have heard that a possible punishment for bishops and priests caught up in this scandal might even include making them “laicized.” The original betrayal of the laity is bad enough, but to punish priests and bishops by making them ‘just’ laity is an evil betrayal of the calling of largest order in the church. This clearly communicates that the church defines the laity, at best, as non-clergy, or at worst as failed-clergy. Being a lay person is not a punishment. Peter is not writing to clergy members, but to the whole people of God in his first epistle when he says, “but you are a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people (λαὸς - laos) for his own possession...Once you were not a people (λαὸς), but now you are God’s people (λαὸς); once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy” (1 Peter 2.9-10).

Far too often I hear these sad words, “I’m just a lay person...” I’d like to come up with a snappy response like, “Oh, you mean you are just a chosen one, a royal priest, a holy nation that God has called his own laos?” Unfortunately, if the church continues threaten laicization as a punishment, who would want to live into the fullness of what it means to God’s people (λαὸς)? Mercy!