October 16, 2016
True North | Sacraments
- 1 Corinthians 11:1-12:13
- Rev. Dr. Jerry Deck
I’m not sure what you think about when it comes to the sacraments (or if you think about them much at all), but one of my first memories as a kid of the sacrament was a feeling of, “Ah, man.” I remember walking into the church seeing the trays of cups and bread on the Lord’s Table and thinking, “Church is going to go really long today.” (I won’t ask how many of you think that when you see trays on our table or when you hear that we’re going to have a baptism.) Growing up, and even into young adulthood, the sacraments for me mostly meant I was going to be really hungry by the time we got out of church.
Having pastored now for a little over a decade I have discovered that when it comes to the sacraments there are a lot of different thoughts about them and the vast majority of those were shaped by how we were raised. Some people think there are 7 of them and others only 2. Some call this thing we gather around for communion an altar and others call it the Lord’s Table. Some call this practice communion, some the Lord’s Supper, some breaking bread and some the Eucharist. There are those who think it’s best to be served right where they sit, those who like to come up and dip the bread in a cup and others who like to hold out their hands and have a pastor or priest place the wafer in their hands. Some think that baptism should be done by a few drops of water, others think you should be dipped in water and the rest think you need to have your whole body dunked. There are those who believe that babies should be baptized (and as quickly as possible) and others who think there’s no way babies should be baptized.
There are so many options when it comes to the sacraments and what I have discovered is that people feel pretty strongly about whatever it is they believe. I’ve shared before that probably the greatest conflict I had at my church in Chicago was around whether we should dip bread in the cup or not. I mean some people were really, really angry. In my own personal life I have experienced how both the sacraments can lead to really uncomfortable situations. Megan and I both have family members that are none too pleased that we have our children baptized as babies and, quite frankly, I can remember some of the nerves we had when we told them that they were going to be baptized. And one of the most uncomfortable I’ve ever been in a worship service was when I was at a Presbyterian Church in Edinburgh and we got in a circle to take communion and they began to pass the chalice around for each of us to drink. I wouldn’t say I’m a germaphobe (okay, just a little bit), but I will say that as I realized that I was going to have to drink out of the same cup as every stranger around me I was overcome with anxiety. Do I just pass it along and make everyone think I have unconfessed sin and couldn’t take the cup, do I fake as if I’m drinking and hope I could fool people, or do I take my chances and drink everyone’s germs around me?
So, there’s a lot of baggage around the subject of the sacraments. And while we can’t answer all the questions and while I know that even what I will say today won’t satisfy everyone, it’s important from time to time for us to reflect on the importance of the sacraments and to also look at what a Reformed understanding of the sacraments are.
Perhaps the first thing to know is that the word sacrament comes from the Greek word sacramentum which means mystery. I really like that because it starts us off with this sense of realizing that the sacraments are somewhat mysterious. That doesn’t mean that we can’t learn more about them, but it does mean that in the highly rational, logical world in which we live there is something about the waters of baptism and the bread and cup that defy our completely understanding them. One way though to define a sacrament comes from Augustine who said that the sacraments are a visible sign of an invisible grace. Sometimes when we talk about spiritual things we can begin to think that spiritual things are restricted to things we cannot see, but in the sacraments we are reminded that matter matters! In other words, as we’ve said a few times in this series, that the world God created, and the things in the world like water and wheat and grapes should be a part of our spiritual lives, not extracted from it. And one of the great things about the sacraments is that they are things that we can see, touch, smell and even hear. They speak to all of our senses, which is a helpful reminder that our faith is much more than just an intellectual exercise. Our Christianity should embrace all of who we are.
And the reason why we do these sacraments is because Jesus told us to. He told the disciples, by his action and his words, that we are to baptize people in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And then he told them, as we are reminded in our Corinthians text, that we are to break bread and drink the cup in remembrance of what he has done for us. The reason why, if you’re curious, why we in the Reformed movement only consider baptism and the Lord’s Supper to be sacraments it’s because we think that the sacraments are only those things which the Lord commanded, they involve something physical (like bread or water) and they are symbols for something much greater than themselves. We don’t consider marriage to be a sacrament because Jesus didn’t tell people to get married and we don’t consider something like penance or repentance to be a sacrament because there’s no real physical symbolism. That doesn’t mean marriage or repentance aren’t important (by no means) it just means that we don’t consider them sacraments.
Before we look at baptism and the Lord’s Supper more specifically let me say one more thing about the importance of the sacraments which is that they are a way for us to practice our participation with Christ. What I mean is that in the waters of baptism we are reminded of the dying and rising of Christ. We get to see the water that is poured over the child or adult and remember the grace of Jesus that is poured over us. In the Lord’s Supper we get to visibly participate externally and internally in the brokenness of Jesus, in his dying on the cross, in the promise of his resurrection. Sometimes these “rituals” can be seen as being boring or there can be a mentality that we don’t want to do them too often lest they become trite or mundane, but the sacraments aren’t there to be an emotional experience, they are there to be a shaping experience. In other words we keep doing them so that when you go out into the world you have either seen it done frequently (like in baptism) or you have done it frequently (like in the Lord’s supper) so that when you turn on the water of your shower or when you sit down at the Olive Garden and are given bread sticks, you can’t help but remember what we have done in here and, even more significantly, what God has done for you.
It’s a bit like what happened when I read the Harry Potter books. (Yes, I realize that not everyone thinks Christians should read those, but I did!) After reading those books and being captured by that story I couldn’t help over the next few days to go out into my story (ie the world in which I live) and begin to see Harry Potter’s world in it. Is that a normal person I just passed by or was it a wizard? If I tap on that brick will the wall open up and Diagon Alley will appear in front of me. If I say, “Accio remote control” will the remote control fly over to my hand? My point is that when we participate in something like the Lord’s Supper every month that should begin to shape us so that when we see someone breaking off bread someplace or pouring a glass of juice or a bottle of wine our minds go back to what Jesus has done for us. That’s the beautiful power of the sacraments.
So, let’s take a closer look at baptism. In baptism, as we said earlier, we are reminded of what Jesus has done for us in his life on earth, in his death and in his resurrection. It has been pointed out that Jesus’ life is bracketed and filled with water. The beginning of his life on earth when he was in Mary’s womb. The beginning of his ministry when he was baptized in the Jordan. The calling of his first disciples around the Sea of Galilee. His first miracle was turning water into wine. His walking on water. Meeting the Samaritan woman at the well. Healing the paralyzed man by the pool. Making the blind man see by making clay out of his saliva. Washing the disciple’s feet. Asking for water as he hung on the cross. Showing his disciples that he had been resurrected as they fished in the Sea of Galilee. Jesus was constantly at work in and around and through water. So it is wholly appropriate that we use water as a testimony to the work of Christ in our lives.
Baptism has been called an initiation in the journey of the Christian faith. It is a marker that identifies us publicly as having been washed over by the grace of Jesus. It means that we have a new identity. Following on the heels of last week’s sermon on our identity in Christ it is a reminder that our identity is found first and foremost in Jesus. As we’ve discussed before, that’s the reason why traditionally when we are baptized we use only the first and middle name because now we are a part of God’s family.
As a part of that we are reminded that baptism is also an initiation into the community of faith. It’s why, as the 12th chapter of 1st Corinthians points out, we are baptized into one body in which there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free. In other words, the most important attribute is not what we do or how old we are or what family we were born into, but instead that we are a part of the family of God. That’s why, after we do baptisms here at ZPC, we ask you all to come forward and to welcome the baptized person into the body of Christ. It’s also why we always ask the congregation to publicly affirm that they will support and nurture the person who is baptized. While John Calvin was not necessarily against having a godparent, what he believed we should stress much more strongly was the importance of the community of the whole body in helping the faith of the one being baptized.
And the reason why we in the Reformed tradition baptize infants is because we see in scripture that whole households were baptized which we assume means that adults and children were baptized. While adult baptisms convey clearly the sense of turning toward Jesus and being washed clean of our sin, the baptism of children serves as a beautiful symbol of the fact that God and God alone initiates our relationship with him. It also though serves as a reminder that baptism is a beginning of our faith journey and not its’ end. Sometimes baptism can be seen as an end in itself, but it is really just the start of a life spent growing in our understanding of who God is, of we are and of what God calls us to do.
But another thing that infant baptism does is that it is a vivid reminder that, as baptized children of Christ, not only do we have something to teach them, but they have something to teach us. I’m reminded of this at least weekly by my children. Our 3 year-old-baptized child of God is an especially important to teacher to me. Her faith oftentimes puts mine to shame. In just the last week she asked whether or not we knew that God had appeared to someone in a burning bush, but then also asked whether God got burned at all by doing that. The miracle is so real to her which is a great reminder to me that of the realness of God. And then as we drove around a few days ago she was looking out of her window and up at the sky, and wondered out loud if we might see Jesus’ legs and feet coming down from the heavens. If only, I thought, more of us were looking for Jesus like this. And while we baptized adults certainly have something to teach these young children, we must never fool ourselves into believing that we do not have much to learn from them. We are baptized into one body-rich and poor, black and white, old and young.
Of course, it is also in the Lord’s Supper that we are shaped to understand more deeply that we are one body. This is what the early church in Corinth seemed to be struggling with. It appears that they were acting as if communion was their own private meal. Eating the bread and drinking the cup was not bringing them closer to one another, was not signifying that they were now one body, but was simply something for their own private faith. As Richard Hays points out, in so doing they were publicly declaring that the death and resurrection of Jesus was not changing them and how they related to others, but keeping them just as they had been before. That rather than communion pointing themselves and others to what Jesus had done on the cross and to the dying of the divisions that were so pervasive it became merely a private act to fulfill their own private needs.
In the Lord’s Supper we are directed towards the sacrifice that Jesus made for us. As we talked about a couple of weeks ago, forgiveness is painful and when we participate in the eating of the bread and the drinking of the cup we are allowing the sacrifice of Jesus to enter, not just our minds but also our bodies. And while we do not, like some traditions, believe that these things become the actual body and blood of Jesus, we do believe that we experience the real spiritual presence of Jesus each time we gather around this table.
One helpful way to look at communion is to think of it in what has been coined the 4-fold act of the Eucharist. It’s contained in what we say each time we have communion. That Jesus took the bread and after blessing it, he broke it and gave it to his disciples. Take, Bless, Break, Give. It is beautiful imagery for what Jesus did on the cross 2,000 years ago and what he continues to do in our lives today.
Eugene Peterson, in talking about this 4-fold act, talks about how each of these verbs has great significance to how Jesus looks at us. First, that Jesus takes what we offer him, including our very selves. He takes us just as we are. Not after we’ve had time to clean up to get right, but just as we are. And then in the blessing Jesus offers us to the Father with thanksgiving, not after he’s inspected us for flaws, but again just as we are. And then he breaks us, not in a way that is harmful to us, but he breaks us away from those things that are harmful to us. Perhaps, as we said last week it’s a breaking away from our belief that our worth and value come from what we do rather than who we are in Jesus. Maybe it’s breaking away from the story that the serpent keeps whispering in our ear. Whatever it may be Jesus breaks away those things which keep us from him and from our neighbor and then he gives back with abundant generosity. Peterson uses the imagery of the boy who brought 5 loaves and 2 fish and that Jesus blesses those things in abundant ways so that 12 baskets are left over. In other words, the generosity of Jesus flows through who we are and what we have offered to him and ends up being so much more than what it once was, then what we once were. That every time we gather around this table we remember not just the taking, blessing, breaking and giving of the bread and the cup, but how we are taken, blessed, broken and given by Jesus and how we and the community around us are changed because of that.
I want to close with one more attribute of the Reformed understanding of the sacraments that might just be my favorite one and one that we talked about recently at the all-church retreat. Last year about this time I took a trip with my dad and sister to celebrate his 70th birthday. We were looking at where he grew up in the St. Louis area and while we were doing that we decided to have dinner with a cousin of mine who we don’t really know all that well and with her husband whom I had never met. We were getting close to where they lived when my dad said, you know maybe we shouldn’t show up empty-handed. Why don’t we grab a bottle of wine before we get there. So, we stopped at a grocery store and, as you may recall, my dad likes to watch his pennies so we got a bottle of wine that, while it wasn’t $2 buck chuck it was certainly not high-class. It was just a very ordinary, pretty low-priced bottle, but since we didn’t even know if they drank wine, we thought it would work fine.
We arrived at their house and as we walked in Dad handed my cousin the bottle of wine and she smiled and thanked us. A few minutes later we walked into this immaculate kitchen that we hadn’t really been expecting and we were met with a large picture of my cousin squashing grapes for making wine out at a vineyard in California that their friend owns. We slowly began to look around and I noticed an incredibly fancy wine opener, like I’ve never seen before, and then a giant glass bucket full of hundreds of wine corks. As the conversation continued my cousin’s husband began telling us about how he and his family would have wine tastings where they would close their eyes and have contests to decide if they could figure out not just what kind of wine it was, but where it was from and perhaps even the year the grapes were harvested. You should have seen my sister, dad and I looking at each other and then looking over at the bottle of wine we had brought, the incredibly ordinary and now remarkably embarrassing bottle of wine.
But the beautiful thing about the sacraments is that they are supposed to be incredibly ordinary, perhaps even embarrassingly so. Water, not straight from the Jordan, but straight from kitchen faucet. Kirkland brand grape juice from Costco or 2 buck chuck from Trader Joe’s not something fancy from France and in an important year of grapes. Bread, not imported from Italy or some other far-off place, but from Marsh. Why? Because it is a reminder that, yes we are ordinary, run-of-the mill people and yet God does something beautiful through the ordinary stuff of water, juice, bread and us. Nothing should keep us from coming and eating the ordinary bread and drinking the ordinary juice, because it is in that ordinariness and in our ordinariness that God loves to work. And it is in the ordinariness of water that we are transformed.
Taken, blessed, broken and given is a beautiful image for our journey of faith. A faith that is initiated in the waters of baptism. These very real, tangible sacraments are crucial in our faith walk because they allow us to experience the grace and love of Jesus with all of our body. As a part of that this morning we decided that we’d like all of us to be able to do more than just hear the message on sacraments but to experience it as well. We want you to be able to touch the water and to remember your own baptism and to hear the important words of baptism that remind us that we are children of God. And so, as you feel led I would invite you to come up here, whatever your age, whatever your station of life, whatever you address and be reminded that you are God’s child and that you have been created beautifully ordinary, by a God who loves you.