Sacraments Everywhere

We had Communion in church this morning. I love communion. Your church may call it The Lord's Supper, The Last Supper, Eucharist, I don't know what.

I love communion. One of my favorite things about being ordained is being authorized to administer the Sacraments. Worship and Sacrament is my big thing. I think all that Church is rises from worship. And I think worship should always be sacramental!

It irritates me no end that so many of my Christian brothers and sisters think Christianity is something we're taught, like a philosophy or something. That heresy was condemned in the earliest days of the Church. We call it gnosticism: the idea that we are saved by special knowledge.

To pervert C. S. Lewis, I say Christianity isn't taught; it's caught, like the flu. Lewis said it nicer: "good contagion". You don't get it from books. As a 17-year pulpit veteran I can say authoritatively: you DON'T get it from sermons!

But we Protestants are the worst about exalting the sermon as The Point of worship. We place 'WAY too much emphasis on what Paul called "the foolishness of preaching" (I Corinthians 1:21)! That's one reason I like being in a more liturgical denomination. We recite the ancient Apostle's Creed every Sunday, or one of the creeds, and so we are no dependent on whatever the preacher comes up with at any given time. It's one thing to be blessed with a great preacher, as we are in my church. But everybody isn't! Woe to those churches whose worship is sermon-centered, if they are reliant on a poor preacher!

Best of all is the situation of the churches where the Gospel isn't just proclaimed every Sunday; it is also acted out, in the Breaking of the Bread.

I'm not a symbolist. I don't believe that the Sacraments are merely symbol. I believe God literally acts in Sacrament. I believe the Sacraments accelerate the function of grace. I can't prove it biblically. For every theologian who agrees with me, you can find one who doesn't.

The good news is, I'm a Methodist, a disciple of John Wesley. That means I'm an experientialist! It is my experience of the Sacraments that sends me so happily down this trail.

Theologians have writtens libraries full of books trying to explain what happens in the Sacraments. They fail, every time. They fail because they're trying to explain the inexplicable.

What happens when an infinite God touches a finite world? Mystery, that's what! Magic!

What happens when you try to explain in cognitive terms what happens when an infinite God touches a finite world? Linguistic nonsense! Language fails, and fails miserably, adequately to describe Truth.

For instance, God--one Person or three? The only true answer is Yes!

Jesus Christ--human or divine? Again, YES!

The priest blesses the bread and wine. What happens? Does it stay bread and wine and merely represent what Jesus did for us? Or does it magically become One Substance with the actual Body and Blood? How about the third, compromise idea--that Body and Blood magically appears hidden beneath the unchanged substance of bread and wine?

A lifetime of study and prayer, decades of administering the Sacrament, and I can say, with absolute confidence and authority: I don't know.

But I know when I eat the bread and drink the wine, I am a better man. I have taken Christ into myself, and somehow Christ has taken me into Himself. Everything is different, if only microscopically, if totally impalpably, if completely beneath any ability of human sense to measure.

The Roman Catholic Church recognizes seven sacraments: Baptism, Confirmation, Eucharist, Penance, Holy Matrimony, Holy Orders, and Extreme Unction (also known as Last Rites and Prayers for the Sick). We United Methodists only recognize two: Baptism and Communion, relegating the others to a lesser status as not being strictly necessary for salvation.

I think both lists are too short. I have found mystery and sacrament in many things. Some in the lists:

My marriage was earth-shakingly sacramental to me. So was my ordination. I will never forget how warm were Bishop Fitzgerald's hands on my head as I knelt before that assembly; I still hear his voice:

"William Franklin Thomas II, the Lord pour upon thee the Holy Spirit for the office and work of an Elder, now committed unto thee by the authority of the Church, through the imposition of our hands; and be thou a faithful dispenser of the Word of God, and of His Holy Sacraments."

Then they had me place my hand on a Bible and he said, "William Franklin Thomas II, take thou authority, as an Elder in the Church, to preach the Word of God, and to administer the Holy Sacraments in the congregation."

I have touched the sick and prayed for them, and felt the move of Grace.

I have sat in hospital waiting rooms, looking into pain-filled eyes and listening to stories of great sorrow, and known Grace to flow from me to those broken hearts.

I have smiled at a baby and had the baby smile back, and known that God has given Grace to the baby through me, and, through the baby, right back to me.

I have received Grace in movie theaters and in the car listening to the radio. I have felt Grace stir in a silent library, reading dusty, smelly books of literature, or history, or science, or music theory.

Grace regularly blows through my soul early in the morning when I open the garage door and step out under a dark, starry sky and feel that first touch of the morning air on my skin.

The first greedy gulp of ice-cold water into a parched mouth feels like Grace to me.

The flavor of my wife's turkey stuffing slathered in hot gravy (Oh, hurry, Thanksgiving!) exalts my very soul. Is that Grace? How can it not be?

Can your life be sacramental? Even the most mundane parts? Feeling sleep sweetly take your consciousness for a much-needed rest? Hot water flowing over your bare skin when you step into the shower in the morning? Driving in the still-dark morning to a job you don't like, feeling lonely and discouraged and futile, then realizing liquid balm from nowhere you can discern is pouring through your heart, soothing and comforting and encouraging, untily you're smiling and laughing and singing? Looking into your daughter's eyes across the table of a restaurant as she tells you what her creative writing classmates said about her latest story?

(Funny how life seems more magical, more sacramental, when I've been most faithful in my church attendance and Bible reading and prayer and "attendance upon the Ordinances of Religion", as John Wesley said.)

Can all these things be sacramental?

Can Grace actually be in these things?

Why not?