A Should’ve Asked Question

When we bring new people into the faith, we often ask them to memorize a short phrase from the back of the Book of Common Prayer. A phrase that many of us can rattle off with little trouble. At least the first half of it, anyway.

We sit, Prayer Books in hand and flip back to the Catechism and we see one of the most pertinent questions of the faith staring back at us from the page:

What is a sacrament?

And on cue, many of us will rattle off the words we were taught:

The sacraments are outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace

Why we can rattle it off isn’t because we were taught it so well, but because the words themselves are stunning: they are seared in our minds. Their dance evokes and demonstrates.

outward and visible signs

inward and spiritual grace

It is like a Cranmer mic drop. The dude nailed it. How could we not love the sacraments like that? Outward/Inward, Visible / Spiritual, Signs / Grace. Boom, boom, boom!

Of course, the astute Episcopalian knows we’ve only said the first half of the line. It is the better half, but it is only half. The whole thing says:

The sacraments are outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace, given by Christ as sure and certain means by which we receive that grace.

So, as we teach this thing about the sacraments, we are sharing this dance about what a sacrament is and why it is important that we practice it. That the modernist obsession with literal truth and factuality is all mixed up for us with the experiential being the source. That we don’t believe the sacraments are literal, but they reveal the truth, but only in the experiencing and the doing and our corporate participation in them.

the deeper question

Just as we obsess about understanding what a sacrament is, we obsess about the tradition imbedded in them. It is not farfetched for me to say that virtually every conversation I have with people about practicing the sacraments begins, not with what they mean and why we do them at all, but about how our practice relates to the practice 50 years ago. Not even 500. Just back “when we were kids”.

I’ve written about the challenge of the sacraments before. I am particularly interested in the internal conflict of our expectations in maintaining the traditions at the heart of our sacraments: including our struggles with an open or exclusive table and a freely given vs. rigidly won baptism.

Of course, for us, these are ancillary questions, only appropriately answered after the more basic and significant ones are dealt with. First among them is this: Shouldn’t we treat sacraments alike?

a new perspective

I didn’t always think the way I do. I was trained to look at our sacraments (or more precisely, our 2 sacraments and 5 sacramental rites) individually and particularly. Here’s what we do when… Here’s what we’re talking about when we discuss… and so we focus on Baptism itself and Eucharist itself and Marriage itself.

Then I visited with a bishop who blew my mind.

It was a different sort of bishop interview. It was tough, direct, even challenging. I was asked about my feelings around the sacraments and I remember being asked about Confirmation.

I was just coming off an intellectual high of tremendous diocesan reform around confirmation. We didn’t just move to a diocesan confirmation style: we examined the whole process and expectations. We developed a set of diocesan expectations and mores around confirmation. It was a pretty big deal and one in which I was very interested.

And to understand why we were doing it, you need to know only two things: we understand confirmation to be “an adult affirmation of faith” and we were seeing little evidence of that truth in the existing practice of it.

So I’m sitting with this bishop and getting peppered a little about my thoughts and pastoral expectations, and I’m a little off my game already, so the confirmation question comes up and I’m thinking like a good priest, two years out of seminary and high on systemic change and I talk about preparation and maturity and putting the work in.

And the response I received was

“If a person came to me on a Sunday morning, asking to be baptized, I’d baptize them then and there.”

Saying I was stunned is only half of it. My whole thinking about the sacraments was shattered.

the real question

The purpose of the question and the response was to get me to think. And, I think now, to get me to examine the internal conflict in the interior / exterior | signs / grace paradoxes.

It also sparked a sense of an inner harmony in the sacraments. A sense that these things have a lot in common. They aren’t independent rituals with exclusive character, but a whole host with common character. They aren’t merely interlocking symbols, but matching and comparable experiences of a singular relationship with the nature of GOD.

In other words, how we treat Baptism should resemble Confirmation and vice versa. Not simply because they are related sacraments, but because they relate to one another as embodying a common sacramental character.

So our question, asked in two slightly different ways, Shouldn’t sacraments be alike? is necessary for our very defining of what the sacraments actually are. We hold them together or not at all.

This provokes some fascinating territory, because the comparison between baptism and confirmation is too easy. Compare them all. Eucharist. Ordination. Holy Matrimony. Unction. Reconciliation of a penitent.

So many of us sit here and judge one another about how seriously we take our sacraments or how we practice them in our churches, but really, we fight knowing that some of these we’re willing to do at the drop of a hat, some after weeks of preparation, and still others after many years of training. Some we give to one another with great generosity and others we control and hold tightly to because we fear their power and unwise use.

Any discussion about the sacraments begins here, in this space of interrelatedness and internal conflict. It begins, not with what I think of the sacrament individually, but what I think of sacraments and the sacramental collectively. What they all say about each other.

Then I can go back to that definition we described above. About the “outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace”.

Then we can really talk about our subject. Like Marriage. Eucharist. Baptism. And do so with some consistency and integrity.

 

You may also like:

What is a sacrament?
The Messy History of Sacraments in 6 Questions
Choosing Sacraments
You aren’t supposed to understand the the sacraments
What you don’t understand about the sacraments