Yesterday we saw that God’s relation with his people entails
encountering them through the Aural/Literary Word (preached and written), the
Liquid Word (Baptism), and the Edible Word (the Lord’s Supper). But I left the
“what does this mean” question hanging for today.
I call this “living between the Font and the Table.” Here a blog
post I wrote on this several years ago.
The Sacraments are Boring and Irrelevant
The sacraments for us Protestants number two: Baptism and
Eucharist or Communion or the Lord’s Supper. In all honesty, these rituals hold
little purchase on our hearts and minds these days. Baptism, for those churches
that baptism infants, is often little more than pious baby worship, and hence,
idolatrous. And most of us have little idea of what the Eucharist is about. And
often the little we do know is that it’s somber and sorrowful, with little
scraps or cubes or wafers of bread and a thimble full of juice or wine passing
for a “feast,” supposedly re-enacting the Last Supper, and it makes us late to
the restaurant after worship for Sun
There’s got to be more to them than that, though, isn’t there?
What happens when we celebrate them? Are they mere symbols of something else?
That’s a common misconception that needs to be debunked. They are indeed
symbolic but through them God also communicates the reality to which they
point. Flannery O’Connor, in her usual direct and frank way, cut through
flowery talk about the wonderful “symbolism” of the Eucharist among some of her
social circle in New York. “If it is just a symbol, to hell with it,” she
said.
What is a Sacrament?
God Word comes to us in aural,
liquid, and edible forms. We have tried for the most part to live off the
aural Word (sermon, Bible study) without integrating then liquid Word and the
edible Word into our lives. But it is just these forms of the Word that
offer help for a dehydrated and emaciated church.
The sacraments, according the PC(U.S.A.)’s “Directory for Worship,” “are
God’s acts of sealing the promises of faith within the community of faith as
the congregation worships and include the responses of the faithful to the Word
proclaimed and enacted in the Sacraments.” (Book of Order,
W.3.3600). Through these actions of washing and sharing a meal God
through the Spirit communicates the reality of Christ’s presence in and among
us.
While this is all formally correct,
it leaves open the very matters that need concretization: what promises?,
which community?, what does God do here, and how do we respond? These are
the things I want to reframe for us in light of the nature of the church as
God’s Subversive Counter-Revolutionary Movement (SCRM).
A
Fresh Image
If we consider the church as
SCRM, I propose we can and should see the sacraments, the font and the table,
as “Boot Camp” for induction and training for the task we are called to
undertake and provision or rations for us engaged in the struggle. Before
you laugh and blow this off, read on and let me unpack this proposal a bit.
Baptism
What happens in Boot Camp?
1. You get a new “Father” (actually in the U.S.
military you get a new “Uncle”!)
2. Your old civilian identity is broken down
3. Your new identity is inculcated
4. You become part of a new family
5. You have a new inheritance (or goal)
6. You receive new resources and learn new
skills
7. You have a new vocation and way of seeing the
world
Living wet under the liquid Word
of the font of baptism delivers to us an identical set of realities and thus, I
would argue, serves admirably as an induction and boot camp training for those
baptized/inducted into God’s SCRM.
This statement on baptism from the
Presbyterian A Declaration of Faith (ch.6, par.5, ll.111-120)
summarizes the biblical material very well.
“We believe that in baptism
the Spirit demonstrates and confirms God's promise
to include us and our children in his gracious covenant,
cleansing us from sin,
and giving us newness of life,
as participants in Christ's death and resurrection.
Baptism sets us in the visible community of Christ's people
and joins us to all other believers by a powerful bond.
In baptism we give ourselves up in faith and repentance
to be the Lord's.”
It is not difficult to see
the seven items listed and illustrated above from Boot Camp. Let’s look
at them.
1. You have a new “Father”
2. Your old identity and way of life is done
away with
3. You are given a new identity
4. You are part of a new family
5. You receive a new inheritance
6. You get new resources and new
skills
7. You have a new vocation and way of seeing the
world
“But seek first the kingdom of God
and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”
(Jesus, Matthew 6:33)
“Pray then in this way: Our Father
in Heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth
as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not bring us to the time of trial,
but rescue us from evil.” The Lord’s Prayer (Jesus, Matt.6:7-13)
Like induction into the military,
baptism is a decisive change in a person’s life. This change is profound
and follows one throughout their lives. If we do not continually refresh
ourselves by memory and reaffirmation of our baptisms, we rapidly dehydrate and
grow useless. Let us, then, call baptism the “beginning that never ends.”
We can illustrate it like this:
Baptism/The Beginning that Never Ends . . .
The first verse of the hymn
“At the Font We Start Our Journey” captures this well:
At the font we start our journey
in the Easter faith baptized;
doubts and fears no longer blind us,
by the light of Christ surprised.
Alleluia! Alleluia!
Eucharist
Baptism (both experienced and
remembered) slakes our thirst for a whole new way of being. It inducts us
into a new community, God’s SCRM, intent on journeying toward God’s new
creation and setting up signposts of and toward it on the way. While on
the way it the Eucharist that are our “rations,” our nourishment and
sustenance.
This edible Word and the community
which shares it together experience the various graces of the table.
1. At
this table celebrating this meal we experience and provide a preview of the great
banquet Jesus promised when he told his followers:
“. . . many outsiders who will
soon be coming from all directions—streaming in from the east, pouring in from
the west, sitting down at God's kingdom banquet alongside Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob.” Jesus (Matthew 8:11)
2. At
this table celebrating this meal we experience provision for present need:
“But Jesus didn't give an inch.
‘Only insofar as you eat and drink flesh and blood, the flesh and blood of the
Son of Man, do you have life within you. The one who brings a hearty appetite
to this eating and drinking has eternal life and will be fit and ready for the
Final Day. My flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. By eating my flesh
and drinking my blood you enter into me and I into you.’” (John 6:53-56, The
Message)
3. At
this table celebrating this meal we practice the skills needed for carrying out
the subversive counter-revolution for which God has called us. I note
four here:
-In a world of alienated and lonely people, we learn the grace
of undeserved welcome and friendship at the
table of the Eucharist.
-In a world wounded and terrorized by violence, we learn to make
peace at the table of the Eucharist.
-In a world discouraged and haunted by futility, we learn hope at
the table of the Eucharist.
-In a world reckless and wasteful of creation’s resources, we
learn stewardship at the table of the Eucharist.
“The Eucharist,” writes Peter
Leithart, “is not merely a ‘sign’ to be examined, dissected, and analyzed
but a rite whose enactment disciplines the church in the virtues of Christian
living and forms the church and thereby molds the world into something more
like the kingdom it signifies.” This is, as he puts it, “how the Eucharist
makes the church.” Harold Daniels summarizes the impact of sharing the
Eucharist regularly with a striking image: “It transforms us into icons of
Jesus’ compassion in the world seeking to heal it of its brokenness. This
is the mark of living in the reign of God into which we are called, and which is
yet to be in its fullness.”
A somewhat whimsical (though no
less true) way to illustrate this is to take the four actions of the Eucharist
as Kingdom or Communion Calisthenics. Jesus institutes this meal with
four actions: receiving, thanking, breaking, and giving. Let’s
imagine them as a patterned set of calisthenics.
-We begin by lifting our empty
hands out over our heads with our palms up. By this we embody the
emptiness, openness, and receptivity that begins everything Christian.
-Our next move is to lower our
arms and bring our hands together in front of us in a posture of prayer.
Thanksgiving is first response a Christian makes to the gifts and graces
received from God.
-Next we move our hands apart as
if tearing a loaf of bread. We signal with this action our commitment to
be broken, to die both figuratively and, if necessary, even physically in
following Jesus Christ and serving God’s mission in the world.
-Finally, we spread open out to
our sides, a gesture of the giving which constitutes the lives of witness.
Sharing, and caring we offer to others in and for the sake of Jesus.
Next, imagine going through these
gestures repeatedly in sequence and at an ever faster pace. With enough
practice and time such actions will be inscribed into our muscle memory and
become more and more second nature to us.
And that’s just the point, isn’t
it? Eating these “rations” of the Eucharist with the rest of GSCRM is a
necessary part of the equipping/training for faithful service. Leithart
sees this clearly when he describes how this meal witnesses to Christ’s
death: “. . . there is no reason to assume that the proclamation
takes place by the minister’s manipulation of the elements. Since the
Supper is the communal meal as a whole, the fact that we eat together and the
way we do it, that is what “proclaims the Lord’s death.”
Without these rations we will quickly become famished, emaciated, and unable to
act!
Regular (weekly?) celebration of
this feast, then, is a non-negotiable for God’s people. The most frequent
argument against weekly observance of the Eucharist is that if celebrated too
often the Supper will no longer be “special.” This is specious, of
course. First, who ever said it was to be “special” in the sense that
frequency of celebration ruins its effect? It is “special” in the sense
that God has given us this gracious and remarkable provision that enables just
what asks us to do! I would think we would be eager to eat this “special”
meal as often as possible! And secondly, the Eucharist is a meal of
communion and intimacy with the triune God. I don’t want to be indelicate
here, but I wonder what we would make of a couple who only shared marital
intimacy once a month in order to keep it “special”? Since it
prefigures and provides a foretaste of the great banquet, when God’s kingdom is
fully come, let’s call the Eucharist “the end that has already
begun.”
. . .
Eucharist/The End that has Already Begun
The hymn “At the Font We
Start Our Journey” sings the Eucharist this way:
“At the altar we are nourished
with the Easter gift of bread;
in our breaking it to pieces
see the love of Christ outspread.
Alleluia! Alleluia!
Life embraced yet freely shed.”
Living
Between the Font and the Table
All this, then, bring us to the
final stage of my proposal. Imagine you worship space. The pulpit,
the place where God’s Word is heard (the aural Word) is the first and primary
“space” where GSCRM gets its “marching orders.” Next, imagine the space
between the font and the table as a kind of “force field.” The graces of
the font (as outlined above), our “beginning which never ends,” interpenetrate
us from one direction. Those of the Table (as outlined above) do the same
from the other direction. This is the “space” from which we receive,
learn, practice the graces to align our priorities, passions, and practices
with God’s and engage the struggle with the principalities and powers for which
God called us and which constitutes our subversive, counter-revolutionary
action on God’s behalf.
Baptism/The Beginning that
Never Ends. . . Church . . . Eucharist/The End that has Already Begun
Between
the Font and the Table is the place where the Church is made and kept the
Church; the place we know we will meet the Risen Christ and receive his life
for us and for the world. In other words, it is between the Font and the
Table, where in baptism, Christ’s life becomes ours, and at the table, our
lives become Christ’s, that we are formed into Christians and learn how to live
faithfully in the world.
The final verse of “At the Font We Start Our Journey” follows us from the font
and table into the world:
“At the door we are commissioned,
Now the Easter victory’s won,
To restore a world divided
To the peace of Christ as
one.
Alleluia! Alleluia!
Easter’s work must still be done.”
Conclusion
Our lack of a vital sacramental
life in North American Christianity (even for many in “high” churches that
practice weekly Eucharist) has several roots. Our (mis)understanding of
the church is the one of the primary ones. If we envision the church as a
settled institution to which we seek to attract others with the larger goal of
extending the expanding the institution’s life, the sacraments can be little
more than opportunities for private devotion, rites of passages, or meaningless
relics we observe to satisfy some antiquarian rule or principle.
Until we see the church in its
biblical profile as at least something like what I have called God’s SCRM, the
sacraments cannot attain their full importance or vital function. A
richer sacramental life will not happen simply by instituting weekly Eucharist
celebration or calling more attention to baptism. Those are things that
need to arise out of a new vision of who and what the church is and what it is
called to do. The agonistic vision I have sketched is something like a
view of the church in which such rituals have a large and critical role to
play.
This brief essay cannot deal with
all the questions, observations, or criticisms it is likely to occasion.
But there is one further question I want to leave you with. Is it not
possible, even likely, that if you cannot envision the sacraments functioning
as I have sketched here in your church, if, in other words, there is not a
“fit” between the sacraments (as outline here) and ethos and life of your
church, that something is fundamentally wrong with the vision of church at work
in your congregation? And if so, might not the sacraments be a catalyst
to a rethinking of the way you are and do church? It is in this sense
that I think only the sacraments can save us now!
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