Christ the High Priest ordains priests anew for service in His priestly kingdom in baptism. They are anointed to the priestly office by baptism into the things of the High Priest. His death and His life become the priestly possessions of those whom He anoints. They are then able to sacrifice their own life and offer their own death for the sake of others because they are losing not their true life or dying their true death, which they hold from the High Priest. They suffer every loss without any loss whatever. They die without losing life. They live without becoming subject to death. Both life and death remain irrevocable gifts from the High Priest, so much so that the priestly life is established in Him alone. The priests are then free to risk life, death, wisdom, service, humiliation, purity, and whatever other gifts are received from the High Priest at the need of the world.

The gifts that God bestows upon priests are at bottom both ours and not ours. They are ours as our raiment in the presence of God. The divine gifts of grace are like the priestly garments taken from the sacristy and used to cover human filth and sin, making the priest prepared to speak and act on behalf of His Lord the High Priest. The Lord Himself donates the coverings. Those who don them recognize that they have the privilege of their glory from the donor, not from themselves. They are ours because the divine donor gives them to us.

We priests also recognize that our service to others is simply to confer what the Lord has conferred first on us. We then give away what is not ours. Our gifts are most properly His. We are only instruments of delivery in the hands of the true giver. Through His donation, we become trustees of the most valuable foundation of grace. Whatever is of good comes from the one who established the foundation, and we have the privilege of giving it away. We are giving what is not our own. What fun it must be to deliver the largesse of a major non-profit foundation. There must be great joy in giving away what is not yours in the first place. Yet this is the joy of every priest who has been baptized into his office by Christ. If we feel not that joy, then we don't fully understand what we have been given to give away.

Like Christ the High Priest we are free to give away the form of divinity, by emptying ourselves and never becoming empty, by being filled up but never becoming full of ourselves. We are all equally children of God in Him and are all nothing. There is nothing to get puffed up about, when all is a gift. Now for the sake of others everything can be risked. Let's risk it.

Martin Luther