I was scared of them as a kid. I lived just down the street from St. Francis Seminary on Staten Island. My buddies and I would jump the fence and play ball on their courts and fields. I guess we figured them for praying not playing. They never ever came near and chased us away, but we were always kind of weirded-out when we saw them in their long black gowns, walking with hands folded in front of them. Even my Catholic friends were kind of shy of them.

These days we are sadly aware of other reasons to be scared of priests. We are all grieved by daily news reports of priests that have abused their office and taken advantage of young people who trusted them. Bishops who have not taken these sins seriously enough incense us too. Protecting victimizers at the expense of victims is not mercy; it is injustice. The stain seeps into the whole church and especially onto all other priests who faithfully tend their duties and keep their vows.

I talked with my friend, Father Ramon Alvarez, the rector downtown at the Cathedral of Guadalupe. He asked for prayer for the church and his fellow priests. I want to do more than that today. I want to say a word of praise for priests. I’ll turn this in a Baptist direction in just a moment so hang in there with me, but the crisis in the Catholic Church is a crisis for the whole Body of Christ, not just for the Catholic expression of it. So let me just be one voice of encouragement among the many shrill voices of accusation being heard all round.

The priestly calling is high and noble, and those who commit their lives to God and the church challenge all of us to consider the very nature of human ambition itself. They sacrifice marital intimacy, family, and financial gain. Their lives are not their own: they are living metaphors, human figures for us of the way Christ is the bridegroom and the church his bride. Our prayers and our compassion go out to all who serve God faithfully, and our sympathies go out to all who have suffered disillusionment at the hand of priests who have failed to guard the trust of their office.

Prescriptions for healing the Catholic Church these days include the reexamination of the priesthood altogether, or at least the requirements of celibacy and singleness. It is not our job to tell the Catholic Church what it ought to do to clean up its house when we have our own housekeeping to tend to. We have priestly issues too, but for us they are not merely matters of clergy conduct. Baptists believe that every member of the body of Christ is a priest. We do not have a caste system of clergy and laity that grants priestly status to clergy and pedestrian status to everyone else. We don’t believe that pastors are closer to God than plumbers, or that paid Christians ride first-class to heaven while those who sit in pews on Sundays travel coach. We take St. Peter at his word when he says that we are all of us as the body of Christ a royal priesthood.

Martin Luther recovered this for the church in the great Reformation of the 16^th century. All of us who are Christians are priests, he said, …and ministers of the word. Baptists grabbed onto that like a dog on a bone. When we use terms like minister in the Baptist church, we should never mean only ordained clergy who serve on staff. In baptism every Christian is not only blessed by assurance of salvation that comes from the Holy Spirit but also ordained and anointed for priestly ministry in the Body of Christ. Clergy are to us simply full-time vocational ministers that devote themselves to helping the rest of the church’s ministers fulfill their ministries. We are not substitutes for your ministry; there is no American League designated minister rule where we pray and serve the church for you while you play the field or the market and pay the bills.

Along the way, though, this revolutionary democratizing idea of believer priesthood got hijacked by terrorists. Their cause was anarchist: they would not reform to priesthood to include everyone, they would abolish it altogether – and the church with it. The American poet Walt Whitman was one of them. In the preface to his collected works, Leaves of Grass, Uncle Walt declared: There will soon be no more priests. Their work is done. …Every man shall be his own priest. [Quoted in Roger Housden, Ten Poems to Change Your Life (Harmony, 2001), p. 34.] In his poem “Song of Myself,” he lists all the obligations of relationships in life, all the carryings-on of culture and family and human loves, all the ways one interacts with others, and then concludes, But they are not the Me myself. …I believe in you my soul, …the other I am must not abase itself to you,/ And you must not be abased to the other.

Walt Whitman wanted to be his own priest, to priest himself through life and all the way to heaven. The solitary individual, without the need of anyone or anything, is the glory of God, he thinks. And at times that is the way Baptists have sounded when we say we don’t need any priests getting between us and God. We believe in the priesthood of every believer, we say, but by that we all too often mean something Uncle Walt would approve but St. Peter and Brother Martin wouldn’t recognize.

Question: Has anyone ever been able to go it alone as a Christian? This attitude of Ain’t nobody but Jesus going to tell me what to believe! sounds like faithfulness but ends up fruitless. For instance, how did you find out that God loved you enough to send his Son to die for you? Didn’t someone tell you that? Oh, you read about it in a Gideon Bible all by yourself in a hotel room? Well, who put the Bible there for you? And who kept those words alive and published? The church. Christians. You needed someone to priest you into faith.

Remember when you learned to ride a bicycle? Jillian is our youngest child – and I think she’s always liked it that way. Maybe that’s why it took her so long to learn to ride a bike. We – no I – did the training wheels things, moving them up, higher and higher. I did the dad in the alley thing, running along behind, keeping my hand on the banana seat all the way. But it seemed like Jillian knew that if she learned to solo, she’d have to ride without her dad huffing and puffing behind her – and that meant she wouldn’t be a little girl anymore.

Now it would have been cruel for me to have thrown Jillian out there on a two-wheeler and told her to do her own thing. She’d have failed for sure. She needed priesting. And the same is true for each of us and all of spiritually. We need help to find our way, companions on the journey, people running alongside, Pushing us gently, holding on to us when it looks like we are losing our balance, cheering us on, telling us we can do it.

A teacher is a kind of priest. An English teacher, for instance, knows a student doesn’t learn what a metaphor is by reading a book or even by memorizing a dictionary definition. The teacher’s goal is not to control the mind of the student but to lead her to see metaphors for herself until she gains metaphor mastery. The teacher priests the student along to see what she could not find for herself – the truth or beauty to which they are both subject and both happily joined.

Carlyle Marney was a Baptist preacher people sometimes had trouble understanding. Alas, a kindred spirit, don’t you know?! He often spoke over people’s heads, but he thought it was a good thing for people to raise their heads now and then. Anyway, he did offer one memorable phrase on this Walt Whitman-style believer priesthood thing. He called it bastard individualism, like the idea that every tub has to sit on its own bottom. We cannot be our own priests. We are priests to each other, he said. Priests relate people to God and God to people. And the people around you there in the pew, next to you – they are priests to you, or can be, if they act the part and if you let them. That every Christian is a priest does not mean that we are competent to go it alone with God; it means that we are competent to deal with God for our neighbor.

Last week, our guest, Curtis Freeman, told us that Marney’s last book, which is titled, Priests to Each Other was supposed to be titled Priests at My Elbow. In other words, ordinary Christians can do extraordinary priestly work in leading you and me to God. They can heal us and encourage us and pray for us and make us believe by their care for our souls that God really loves us. You don’t have to look behind a pulpit or communion table or in a baptistery or confessional booth to find a priest. Just look as far as your elbow.

When our late beloved friend Finley Graham was alive, he taught the Ambassador Class. In his last years that great missionary and Bible scholar with the massive memory was being deserted by his own mind. His classmates loved him, though, and they determined not to desert him too. So they all studied their lessons, and if Finley got stuck and disoriented, they would go right on until things clicked back in for him. Priests at his elbow they were.

Sometimes priests turn out to be other than you think. My friend Kenny Wood is a preacher/writer/therapist and generally the most creative and confessional person I know. His sermons and weekly newspaper columns are flooded with stories of his own life. He recently wrote about how your sins follow you long after the fact. He was convicted of shoplifting as a young person and discovered as an adult that it always turn up on a background check, making it difficult for him to get a job. A local minister in McAllen read the column and wrote to say, Now I understand why your columns are superficial. You’re a thief. The man cut him up for not using his column more boldly to win people to Jesus. Kenny said he felt about a foot tall. But then an elderly woman called to tell him something the column reminded her of. She asked Kenny if she could pick him up and show him something. They rode out to a brick house and stopped in front. She told him that years earlier someone had spray-painted in large black letters across the brick the word THIEF. It was there for years and no one ever got used to it. But now there was no graffiti in sight. Someone had sandblasted the letters off and in their place had placed a large iron cross. The word was gone, the stain removed. As they stood before that house the elderly stranger turned to Kenny and began to trace the letters on his chest: T-H-I-E-F. Then she waved her hand over them and declared, like a priest absolving him of all guilt, “GONE!” I realized right then, Kenny said, that there are more ministers in this town than we know, and a few less than we think.

You won’t find better priesting than that. If you need a priest and you can’t find that elderly lady in McAllen, you might check for one at your elbow. Or better yet, you could be one to the elbow next to you.