Often the wisdom in a Sunday School classroom comes from the participants and not from the leader.
This past Sunday, my class was discussing the Animate:Practices episode with Phyllis Tickle talking about Sacraments. After a pretty light conversation, it turned to two questions: infant baptism and open communion. Almost everyone chimed in and had a good back-and-forth…and then one of them said:
The thing is with the Sacraments is that they get you into trouble. All of them are about boundaries and who can take it or experience it, and those things are where people get into trouble.
Sacraments with Requirements?
There’s a lot of truth to what my Sunday School participant said.
To define what we are talking about, Sacraments are specific practices (like baptism and eucharist) that are highly ritualized and have significant meaning. They are outward and visible signs of the invisible, inward, spiritual grace given by God. Sacraments are Christian practices that order our lives and give a structure that sustains Christian living. They are not necessary for salvation, but are means of grace that help inaugurate the Christian journey, signify turning points, and sustain the Christian life.
Actually, that’s the textbook definition (from my United Methodist ordination papers). The reality is that in the Christian tradition, Sacraments are incredibly divisive.
Even if we limit our consideration to the two most-shared Sacraments across Christendom (baptism and communion), there’s deep and wide variance:
- Baptism: Southern Baptists hold to believer baptisms only, Catholics believe in baptizing babies (but only if they will be raised in the Catholic faith), and most Protestants affirm infant baptism. Many traditions require a catechumenate process beforehand; some will call you down and baptize you previously unseen. Many fundamentalist churches recognize only submersion baptism, whereas I heard a story of a Presbyterian preacher who belatedly saw he didn’t have any water in the baptismal font and he baptized the child anyway with just air.
- Communion: Catholics believe the wine becomes Jesus’ blood, whereas others see it as a reminder (memorial) or the real presence (ie. non-icky) of Christ. Episcopalians use real wine while post-Temperance Methodists use grape juice, and Mormons use water. Catholics only serve to Catholics (in good standing), many denominations only serve to Christians, and Methodists practice an open table where one may not even need be Christian to partake but need only a desire to know Christ better.
Getting into Trouble
With so much variance and rules, there’s bound to be moments when one is excluded from a Sacrament. The visceral response to being excluded from a Sacrament is one shared by many, especially when it comes to Protestants attending a Catholic funeral or wedding or teaching at a Catholic school and being denied Communion.
It’s in those moments of exclusion–no matter how rigorously theologically maintained or pure of thoughtfulness the action is–that the Sacraments get us into trouble. We get into trouble when we cross a boundary or note that we are on the other side of a boundary, and no matter how deeply committed we are to our own faith tradition, it impacts us in ways that separate us from the holiness of God in that moment.
Sacramentality without Limits?
Because humans have codified and segmented Christendom through barriers and rules regarding water and wine, I wonder if we need to rely on something different.
If we humans have chopped up the Sacraments, can we still hold onto seeking Sacramentality?
Sacramentality is the belief that God’s grace has been received through participating in the activity instituted by God. Sacraments like Baptism and Communion are rituals that connect us to the church’s past as if threaded onto an ever-long tapestry, like Phyllis Tickle said in the Animate:Practices video.
But beyond the moment of the sacrament, sacramental living means approaching all aspects of life as a means for sharing and receiving God’s grace. We are empowered to live God-directed lives outside the context of the Church and its rituals. Regardless of how codified and segmented the actual Sacraments are, they are meant to empower us to take that sacramental living into the messiness of the world. Sacraments are not mountaintops but instead are pit stops that reconnect us so that we can go about our task of reconnecting our diaspora of a world. The grace conferred by these Sacraments empower our bodies to do good works for the Reign of God and continue to seek reconciliation, peace, and justice in the world (2 Cor 5:17-21) for all those that have bodies and all those who need to know the love of God.
Perhaps the Sacraments have layers of exclusion and particularity because we have the inverted belief that what we believe about the Sacraments defines how we live out our sacramental living beyond the altar space. I believe the opposite is more true: how we live sacramentally ought to define how we view our Sacraments. If we live a life of inclusion and grace, then why are our communion tables closed, or our baptisms by one particular “valid” method?
Does it matter? Grace is everywhere
In The Diary of a Country Priest, the unnamed Catholic priest has spent the bulk of his short life practicing the understanding of the sacraments on his rural parish. As he lay dying from stomach cancer, unable to himself receive the sacrament of last rites from a tardy neighboring priest, his last words are: “Does it matter? Grace is everywhere.”
Grace is indeed everywhere. The Sacraments connect to those thin places in the context of worship. There is abstract value in having insider language and meaning for the Sacraments. However, I believe there is concrete value in performing them in such a way that outsiders feel included and can see the transformation in our lives going forward.
Truly, the grace of God is known in all places. If our Sacraments do not affirm this reality, or have layers of exclusion built upon them, then what kind of grace do they really point to? The anti-grace of requirements, secret languages, and judgment of qualified and not? Or the unifying grace of people helping people, seeking the means of grace at all moments, and only occasionally turning to the moments when our grapes, wheat, and water touch the sky?
May we allow the grace of God to define our Sacraments in ways that the roped off corridors of humans cannot. And may all our Sacraments point to a life of celebration of our relationship with God whose grace knows no requirements, whose presence is found in grapes of all kinds, whose refreshment is found in all forms of water, and whose receiving line is always open, waiting for you.
Thoughts?
a few thoughts…
– I’m proud to call myself a United Methodist
– “Sacraments are not mountaintops but instead are pit stops.” (Spectacular line!)
– grace is indeed everywhere, and just as we celebrate incarnation and resurrection year round, there are special acts and special moments that hold greater capacity for meaning and grace
– let’s have three sacraments! (blessing infants/children, baptizing believers, and communion)
I would agree with Karl Kroger’s comments, but would add a fourth sacrament…. The Foot Washing…
John 13:14 – “If I, your Lord and teacher, have washed your feet, you too must wash each other’s feet (CEB)”
There’s a question-begging element to making a statement like “Grace is everywhere” and then proceeding to make broad claims about sacramental theology based on it. Is grace actually everywhere? Perhaps. But to make that as a plausible claim, you need to explain what grace is. (It isn’t as simple as it might seem due to the fact that we use the term so loosely.) I’d suggest you also need to explain what you mean by a sacrament, including some kind of description of why boundaries are inherently bad. That intimation is a bit strange to me—it seems so obviously false on its face that I may not understand how you are using it in your argument here.
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In other words, Jeremy, I think you have built something of a house with no foundation. I appreciate your interest in doctrine here; it’s just that you are wanting to start at step 4 or 5 rather than at step 1. Back up a bit, and you’ll avoid falling into the kinds of errors in theological reasoning that are otherwise avoidable.
I’m curious as to your confrontational language here, Andrew. While I don’t come out clearly above (since the piece is less UM-centric), I am firmly in support of the same level of openness that we have in the United Methodist Church with an open table and baptizing all ages in all methods. Do you find our lack of boundaries to be errant?
I think Andrew makes a good point. Your starting point is that boundaries are bad and get us in trouble. I don’t see a clear explanation for that. Surely some boundaries are bad, but are they all, by definition? You infer that they are all bad by citing the notion that “grace is everywhere.” But that falls a little flat with me. I would like to hear a Biblical explanation for that particular teaching. (I’m a member of the UCC, which has open communion, but I sometimes wonder about it in light of 1 Corinthians 11:28-29).
My starting point is that because of the boundaries that we place around the Sacraments, people feel like they get into trouble with them. Boundaries do NOT equal trouble (I might be unclear), but they lead to people getting into trouble, ie. through being denied communion or infants being denied baptism.
FWIW, I wasn’t referring to the UMC’s evangelical approach to its sacramental ministry, i.e., that Christ calls all to come unto himself. I was referring rather to what you actually wrote.
I don’t see what the fuss is really. All churches mentioned will allow one to partake of their sacraments following accepted forms of initiation. This is a normal practice among ancient religions; only very recently with religions such as the Bahai Faith do we see a move away from ornate initiation rituals. The Quakers as a rule do not celebrate any sacraments at all, but frankly I find that approach more than a little boring; sitting in silence for an hour seems on the outside to be an unwilling way to spend a Sunday morning.
The only real case where this becomes a religious issue is in the form of tribal religions in which admission to the priesthood or even the religion itself is hereditary. The Samaritans, the Druze, the Yazidi, the Parsi Zoroastrians (but apparently not their Iranian coreligionists) and the Mandaeans, exclude people from outside the tribe. For a time, the patriarchate of the Nestorian church in Iran and the Chaldean Catholic Church that broke off from it was also hereditary. I think that’s wrong, but I see nothing wrong with religions having a formal system of initiation to prepare one for their mysteries; nearly all do it, and those that don’t, like the Quakers, seem to be poorer for it. Indeed, consider the Freemasons with their elaborate system of degrees; despite their claims to the contrary, it’s clearly a religion, conceived to counteract the lack of mysticism in dry, stuffy eighteenth century Anglicanism, and the system of progressive initiation it uses, which is so evocative of the Mithras cults of the late Roman Empire, is a source of great spiritual comfort to its membership.
Really I think this only becomes a problem when people use their access to sacraments or other religious mysteries to lord it over others, for example, the Gnostic attitude towards the physicoi, and one senses a whiff of that in Scientology. Lastly I should say the vast majority of Christian churches accept each other’s baptisms as valid; among the mainline Protestant denominations one can migrate with impunity, and one can convert between the Catholic and Orthodox churches with relative ease. The only rough spot is if you want to go from being a Protestant to a Catholic or Orthodox, which generally involves drawn out processes like the RCIA, but no one will try to stop you. We should be thankful for the fact we don’t live in past centuries, where attempts to change denomination often resulted in death.