One of the common reactions to the realization that one might be called to the ordained ministry is a sense of unworthiness, which as the event of one’s ordination draws nearer can develop into downright foreboding.  A deacon?  A priest?  Who, me?  In my own case, I wondered whether God wasn’t just setting the both of us up for a big disappointment—or worse.

In fact, I wasn’t sure whose expectations I most expected to fail:  other people’s, my own, or God’s.  In the end, I took the safe bet and counted on all three.  It’s not that I am a pessimist by temperament—quite the contrary…usually.  It’s just that when I imagined what it would take to make me a “good” priest, I began to understand why even so great a man as St. John Chrysostom ran away when his community tried to ordain him.

Yet, I had gotten myself in this fix, hadn’t I?  Well, that’s the trouble with being called:  on the one hand you are forced to put yourself forward for ordination (no one nowadays is likely to lay hands on you forcibly as they tried with old John Chrysostom), while on the other hand you most likely have the sense that not offering yourself for this sort of service is not an option.  Remember what happened to Jonah when he tried to shirk his call, after all.

God has a disturbing habit of calling the eminently unqualified.  Just read the Bible:  Moses, Samuel, Jeremiah, Mary, Peter.  Somehow, though, I did not find this fact consoling.  After all, these biblical figures were great men and women—they were, quite literally, of biblical proportions.  To reflect that Moses was a murderer, that Samuel, Jeremiah, and Mary were all called to serve God before most kids nowadays get their braces off, and that Peter blundered his way to martyrdom didn’t do much to reassure me of success despite my obvious lack of credentials.  That was then, this is now, after all.

The simple fact of the matter is that as soon as people hear that you are intending to become a priest or a deacon (or, after the fact, as soon as people see that you are one), they will begin to treat you differently.  They will expect you to have answers that, if you’re honest with yourself, you probably will never know.  They will expect you to live life on a higher plane, to be more “spiritual,” more “holy.”  Or worse, if they have been hurt by clergy in the past or suspect that most clergy are either hypocrites or abusers, they will have just the opposite expectations.  The truth of who you are, of course, will most likely lay somewhere in between hypocrite and saint, at least most of the time.

Believe it or not, there’s some good news and some bad news in all of this, and to end this essay on a high note, I’ll start with the bad news first:  You will never be able to predict or control other people’s expectations of who you are or who you should be—not now, not ever.  Any attempt to control how other people see you will end badly.  You will likely end up playing a self-limiting and imprisoning role, trying to be some ideal but inauthentic “priest” when who you should be is yourself, and/or you will end up isolating yourself and alienating others from the real you.  The good news is that once you give up on trying to stay on whatever pedestals people put you on (or, conversely, to climb back up on whatever pedestals people try to knock you off of), you will realize that the only expectations you really have to worry about are the ones you put on yourself and the ones God has for you.  And of those two, who do you think has the greater claim on your attention?

If you still don’t hear the good news in all that, however, consider this:  God never expects anything of us that God isn’t willing to help us achieve by the assistance of God’s unmerited, free, lavish, and love-filled grace.  Thus, when it comes to expectations, we are often our own worst enemy.  For either we expect something of ourselves that in truth God doesn’t truly expect of us (say, like doubling church membership by the year 2020), or we try to accomplish something God does expect from us without first availing ourselves of the sources of God’s grace available all around us.

The good news, then, is that as long as we remember to focus more on faithfulness rather than on success, and the more we remember that faithfulness is possible only through grace, the more likely we are to put all worries about expectations aside and simply get down to the business of carrying out the ministries to which God, in God’s infinite and frustrating wisdom, has called us.  Will this guarantee success?  Will this guarantee we will live up to others’ and our own expectations?  That’s not the point!  In ministry, nothing is guaranteed.  If it were, we’d have no need of martyrs or prophets, or just plain faithful people.  Rather, if we can learn in all our anxieties to reach out to the people, places, and things that are conduits of God’s grace, our ministries will not have been in vain—even if we end up failing in the eyes of the world, just as Jesus did.

And just what are those conduits?  For each person, they will likely be somewhat different, though the Church throughout the ages has pointed to some pretty stable sources:  the Word and Sacraments.  Grace also comes by way of friends, family, confessors, spiritual directors, therapists, and pets.  Grace may be found on retreat at a monastery or in the supermarket.  Grace happens.  In the end, it’s grace, not expectations, that matters.