Rev’d Dr. Leander Harding

This is something that I wrote shortly after I came to Trinity. I am posting it because I keep the Feast of Pentecost as the anniversary of my ordination and this piece tells the story of that day.

Ontology vs Function

In the Church, Ministry and Sacraments class at Trinity we spent one three hour session on the theology of ordination. The hoary question of whether ordination is a functional reality or an ontological reality was hotly debated by the students with surprisingly strong feelings on both sides. Strong Evangelicals hear the language of ontological change as a claim to a superior and super-holy status with magical powers. It sounds superstitious and magical and the worst sort of works righteousness to them. The more Catholic minded hear the functional language as a denial of any real change made in the individual by the power of the sacrament and as an understanding of the ordained ministry that has no way of comprehending the mystical dimension of holy order. Functional language sounds secular and earthbound in Catholic ears.

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The Priesthood and SacrificeSermon Preached at the Ordination of John Mason Lock
At All Soul’s Episcopal Church, Oklahoma City
May 9, 2009

In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen

I’m Fr. Leander Harding, and I’m very grateful to be here today. I was one of John’s teachers at Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge. I am very grateful to the bishop, and to Father Bright, and to John for inviting me to be a part of this wonderful day today, this day that comes after a long period of preparation. I want to talk this morning about an aspect of the priesthood; I want to talk about how it is that the priest offers sacrifice.

This is a controversy that is in the church. Should we even have priests in the church? Should we call them priests? This is something that is disputed in the church. There has been a tremendous ambivalence about the priesthood the whole time that I’ve been ordained. It’s understandable that there should be somewhat of an ambivalence and a hostility towards the priesthood outside of the church, but the whole time that I’ve been ordained, there’s been a kind of crisis of identity and ambivalence about the priesthood within the church. And sometimes that masquerades as a concern for Reformation theology, and sometimes it masquerades as a concern for egalitarianism: we don’t want to have something that isn’t democratic enough. I think mostly it’s just a camouflage for an allergy to the supernatural.

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The grinding down of the family is not merely the result of opting for a contractarian model but of inviting the state to take control of marriage in the name of individual freedom. Freedom, of course, is just what is being lost, as the neo-liberal state evolves its tyrannical power by hollowing out a place for itself inside the husk of human-rights discourse. The advent of same-sex marriage makes bastards of us all, and as a nation of bastards we are all wards of the state.

How so? The change in definition uncouples marriage from procreation. From now on, then, no one will be born a bastard and everyone will be born a bastard. From now on, the connection between biological parenthood and legal parenthood will be supported by no institution. The claims of blood will not have the same standing at law that they once did. Natural relationships will not be primary at law; legal constructs will take their place. . . Everyone, for legal purposes, will be first of all a ward of the state, and the state will become our primary community, as Rousseau intended it to.

Douglas Farrow in Nation of Bastards: Essays on the end of marriage