Everything is a Sacrament of God’s Presence - and Chiefly at the Eucharist
Water
Oil
Bread
Wine
Salt
Cross
Icon
Wood
The church
A couple
Rings
Priest
Collar
Bishop
Staff
Hands
Prayer
Repentance
Song
Incense
Flowers
The sea
Fish
Mountains
Plains
Cities
Towns
Dogs
Cats
Fields
Cattle
Rats
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“For the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity…”
The sacraments are outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace. This is Augustine. And every sacramental fellowship agrees, eastern and western.
All outward and visible material things exist because of the love of God in creating and sustaining the world.
Therefore all material things are capable of signifying God’s presence. All things, spiritually speaking, are sacraments because God is present in the living of all things God made.
But preeminently is God present in the Incarnation of the Son of God.
The Word became flesh to make us “partakers of the divine nature”: “For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God.” “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God.” “The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods”.
Therefore the human being as embodied person is a sacrament of the presence of God.
All of this is summed up in the Eucharist when the Body of Christ gathers in dwellings of wood and stone or in fields, on mountains, at the shore or at sea, gathers in prayer and song and unity, gathers around bread and wine and calls for the Lord to sanctify them as his body and blood and together believes that we are in communion with God chiefly at such times.
The sacraments are outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace. This is Augustine. And every sacramental fellowship agrees, eastern and western. And where grace is, god is present. All agree on that, too. The Eastern and Roman and Anglican and Lutheran churches all believe in Christ’s presence in the bread. Because Jesus promised to be present.
“Now as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to the disciples and said, “Take, eat; this is my body.” And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, saying, “Drink of it, all of you; for this is my blood of the[c] covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. I tell you I shall not drink again of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.”
“Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a man examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For any one who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself.”
Radical protestants like Jesse and Glenn remove the supernatural presence of god’s grace from the natural world. Presumably they believe that God has the power to work miracles by intervening in the created world. But for them, because of their need to desacralize existence, such an act of god is whimsical, punctual only in the sense that god breaks the barrier between heaven and the despoiled world and then retreats back again. But this is merely primitive magical thinking.
ReplyDeleteChristian belief lives in a reality that depends upon god’s ongoing concern, care… LOVE of all creation. If god were to remove loving presence, the material world would disappear. The supernatural is always involved in reality. Always moving. The Spirit infuses all of life.
Therefore, we, by god’s grace members of Christ’s body in the Incarnation, are ourselves agents of god’s divine love, are fed and motivated with the spiritual reality of being bearers of God the Holy Spirit. The supernatural is woven into our Will, our Acts, our Speech, our Effects. Our love. We don’t always choose to live out divine presence. But that no longer negates the fact, as it did before Christ won the victory over death. The wages of sin is no longer death.
When we understand what life in Christ gains us, we understand that grace is god’s livingness, god’s life in the created cosmos. Grace is god’s life on earth. For at the end of creation, when all that has been made has served our purpose, grace will no longer exist. We will be with god.
And since all this is true, believing in the bodily presence of the Son of God in the Eucharist - as he himself and Paul his Apostle to the Gentiles said was true - is nothing more than believing in the Incarnation and in the truth that, being redeemed, we share with Jesus in it.
To reject the presence of Christ in the bread of the communion table is to deny the Incarnation.
If the Morning Star, the Son of God, the Word who was with God, and is God, who was in the beginning with God, through who all things were made and without him was not anything made that was made, if Christ can come in human flesh, human bone and human blood, to redeem us all from death, surely Christ can come in bread to sustain us. Who, what kind of Christian would deny him?
ReplyDeleteThe very reason that in the Lord’s Prayer, we pray not for “daily” bread. That isn’t the Greek word. We pray for epiousion - super being, or super substantial - bread.
Let him who has ears to hear, hear.