The Old Order

I started my morning by seeing a post from a Facebook friend who is also a Presbyterian Teaching Elder about the mascot of a minor league baseball team, the Fresno Grizzlies.  Parker T. Bear has been "ordained" and is legally able to perform weddings and vow renewals, and will be doing so at a Grizzlies game on such and such a date.
I will admit, that this sort of clenches me up a little.  It's not the whole fly-by-night ordination thing.  I have known a handful of people who did that in order to officiate at weddings for friends, okay, whatever, it's not the same thing as getting a Master of Divinity Degree, jumping through all the hoops of the ordination process of a denominational body and actually becoming ordained by a honest to goodness church.  It's mostly a legal thing, akin to becoming a notary these days, you pay your fee and someone says you can sign the Marriage License.
It's no big news that folks today don't exactly see the church as the center of their lives anymore, but when one of your time-honored professional roles can be fulfilled by a dude in a bear suit at a minor league baseball stadium...
Well, this is just sort of embarrassing, not just for me, but for the human race in general.
I am learning, well let's say practicing, the humility that it takes not to be offended by stuff like this.  But honestly, sometimes I wish there would have been some sort of catastrophic rupture in the continuity of our society that caused this sort of ludicrous lapse in human participation in the sacred, instead of a just a long slow decline.
I will turn to the world of Star Wars for an illustration, as I so often do.  Consider with me if you will, the Jedi Order.  When most of us first encountered the Jedi, it was in the person of one Obi Wan Kenobi, played (apparently somewhat reluctantly) by Sir Alec Guinness.  "Old Ben Kenobi," had been living in exile as a hermit in the wasteland of the desert planet Tattooine.  Young Luke Skywalker seeks him out because of a cryptic message he finds in his newly purchased R2 unit.  Obi Wan saves Luke from the Sand-people and introduces him to the force.  Kenobi, in episode IV, is the classic mystic wizard character, a practitioner of a way of being that has vanished from the universe thanks to the treachery of the Dark Side.  He plays much of what he knows pretty close to the vest, and is alluringly powerful.
In the back story, the Jedi were once a powerful force in the galaxy far, far away.  They were the masters of the Force, and keepers of the peace.  They were mostly wiped out when the clone armies of the Republic executed Order 66 (where Lucas falls one digit short of going full on Revelation), except for Obi Wan, Yoda, and the twin babies of Anakin Skywalker, who essentially "dies" when he becomes Darth Vader.  Luke and Leia Skywalker are separated and hidden from their father.  Leia is adopted by Senator Bail Organa and grows up on Alderaan.  Luke draws the short straw and gets sent back to Tattooine where we first found Anakin in first prequel (but we're not going to talk about that).  Luke is raised by Anakin's half brother Owen (which seems like sort of stupid hiding place to me, but then again Vader and Leia seem to actually have met before, so maybe it was sort of a hide in plain sight sort of deal).
Anyway, the Jedi were once this great and powerful hybrid of religion and an army, which is always a volatile combination.  But their power became blind when the Sith, practitioners of the Dark Side, began to manipulate the course of events.  The Dark Side is more adept at stealth and misdirection, the Dark Side has no trouble wielding power to subjugate others and maintain their position.  The Dark Side has no trouble harnessing fear and anger, and in fact that is the true source of their power.
The Jedi, by comparison, seem always hampered by rules and disciplines.  They learn that they have access to the most powerful thing in the universe, and then they are told all the things they're not allowed to do with it.
As a kid, I found parts of The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi to be profoundly frustrating, because it seemed like there were just too many rules keeping the Jedi from kicking butt and setting things right, until you got to the end and the "point" was driven home that those impulses to protect and dominate were in fact the path to the Dark Side. The prequels, for all their flaws did a fair to middling job of fleshing out the problems that confront Force users.  Superhero stories have largely focused on what I call Stan Lee's Razor (not the thing he shaves with see Occam's Razor) that we find first in The Amazing Spiderman, "With great power comes great responsibility."
Jedi are constrained by the Force to maintain a rigorous path, in order to safeguard the rest of the galaxy from the consequences of them abusing their power.  They are not to have attachments, including family, they are not to own property, or seek positions of power, they are not to use their power for attack, only defense.  It's hard to see how this scheme could possibly have failed.
In all honesty, it would have worked okay, if they always remained a monastic order, separated from the world and un-entangled as a group, the same way they demanded of individuals.  But they didn't, in the prequels you see the Jedi Order right in the thick of everything, a big fancy temple on Coruscant, engaging in politics and intrigue and wielding no small amount of power and influence.  Kind of like the Church in the not so distant past.
In A New Hope, you see the Jedi in the wake of the collapse of all that, and it may be my personal bias at work here, but they are so much better for it.  I mean they are a much better story as the few beacons of the Old Ways (a more civilized age) than they were as yet another arm of the bureaucracy confusing the status quo with true justice and peace.
Obi Wan Kenobi in the Junland Wastes of Tattoine and Yoda in the swamps of Dagobah were probably what the Jedi always should have been.  Mystic teachers of the divine force at the center of all that is (I'm purposefully ignoring all that stuff about midichlorians, so just don't go there).  The distillation of what they needed to teach Luke was essentially the same thing all true Religion seeks to teach: let go of yourself, your ego, your hates, your prejudice, and give yourself to God (or Allah, or the Buddha nature or whatever).  As a Christian I would say it like my Lord says it: "Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it." (Mt. 10:39 NRSV)
So, you know, maybe a guy in a bear suit wearing a clerical shirt is a little bit of kick in my pride.  But maybe my pride needs kicked.  Maybe the loss of influence and status of the Church in our society is hard to live through, but maybe it's necessary for the Way of Jesus to become what it is supposed to be all along: an alternative to the endless cycles of power, violence, sin and death.
I'm still waiting for my lightsaber though.