L. Wm. Countryman Grace Cathedral, SF

SERMON FOR THE ORDINATION OF BILL TREGO TO THE PRIESTHOOD

February 12, 2025

Readings: Isaiah 6:1-8; Psalm 132:8-19; Ephesians 4:7, 11-16; John 10:11-18

What are priests for? Well, think about that story we just heard about Isaiah meeting God in the Temple. God’s presence has been made visible to him. He is looking straight at God. Even the Seraphim don’t do that. Yet, somehow, by the grace of God, he survives the experience intact—body, mind, and spirit. And he doesn’t just survive. He still has the ability to think and understand and respond. 

All the same, I amine that Isaiah was wishing that there was another human being present, one who had been there vored, so to speak, one who could take hold of his arm and whisper some encouragement and advice in his ear. I would bet he was wishing for some really venerable, experienced, probably old priest to come to his aid. 

Because that’s what priests are for. A priest is a person who’s been in the presence of God and come out of it with a deeper knowledge of God and human life—someone who can help the rest of us understand our experience of God. As long as human beings have been aware of the Divine, we have looked for people like that, whether we called them “priests” or by some other title. People who have “been there” and come out more whole and more human than they went in. People you can talk to about your own confusions and uncertainties. 

And where do we go to find such people? We look around us—for people who seem to have some wisdom about being human, some understanding of human limits and possibilities, some reverence for the holiness of the world we live in, and a lot of empathy for our human uncertainties and failings. They don’t have to be ordained. They don’t need to have a title. The priests who have nourished my faith over my eight decades were not all ordained persons, though some of them were. They were just faithful people who had encountered God. They weren’t all living in my time, either. Some of them I met in books. And they weren’t all Christians. Take Isaiah, for example. He’s still with us through the story of his life and through his prophetic preaching. Priests come to light among us because the rest of us sense that they know something worth hearing. 

The greatest of such priests is a certain Jesus of Nazareth, son of Mary, a person completely open to God and completely identified with us mortals. Christians have always recognized Jesus as the one perfect priest, and we have known also that we share in Jesus’s priesthood. Since Christ is our priest, the Church, as Christ’s Body, is priestly, too. And each of us is part of that priesthood. I think of the great window over the altar in Good Shepherd Church: Jesus carrying a lamb—the least of the flock—on his arm, neglecting no one, gathering us all together in the presence of God—a good image of the Christian priesthood

In saying all this, I don’t mean to diminish the value of what we’re doing here today in ordaining Bill Trego with the title “priest.” The life of faith is always a priestly life. But we are human and therefore forgetful. We need to be reminded and strengthened in this priesthood all through our lives. It’s way too easy to drift away and embrace some other image of human existence, one interested only in myself— my life, my well-being, my importance—and neglectful of the priestly life we share with one another. And so the church gives us models, reminders, signs. It chooses a few people, people who have shown that they are already serving as priests in the fundamental sense—and ordains them with the title “priest” to be a sacramentof our shared priesthood. These people will minister at the altar, offer the eucharistic sacrifice, the sacramental rite of our communion with God and with one another—the bread and wine of Christ’s body and blood. Through sharing in this sacrament, we are all renewed, over and over, in our priestly ministries—strengthened by the sacramental rite of our communion with God and with one another—the bread and wine of Christ’s body and blood.We are all strengthened to live as priests to one another and to the world around us.

We live, right now, in a world that needs priests as much as it ever has in its long history. And we say to Bill Trego, “You have long served as a priest alongside and with us. Be for us now also a sacrament, a sign, a reminder, so that we as the Christian community may deepen our priesthood and work together to proclaim the mystery and wonder of God’s love in this confusing world.”