A Ramble About Sacrament

On this trip, I have had the experience of attending several different churches. There was Kingman Christian Church in Kingman, AZ. There was First Baptist Church of Oak Creek, WI. And this morning, we attended Central Christian Church in Beloit, WI. These church experiences and services are as far varied from one another, even as they can be varied from a Catholic Mass. Oak Creek was a very conservative hymn and King James Version only church. Kingman Christian was a little more contemporary, yet still traditional service. Central Christian was something else altogether. Part of the church had been designed by retired Disney imagineers, and I could see the similarities in design with say Downtown Disney. The service was very contemporary, and took place in a sanctuary which reminded me of a theater with full multimedia screens, stage lighting, and even light smoke for atmosphere.

As I was contemplating the service this morning, I was also contemplating God's Grace, and how I had seen it active and transformative in people's lives in all three churches, as well as the churches and parishes of my own adopted Old Catholic faith tradition. In order though to explain the fruit of my contemplaton, let me explain what I mean by Grace (with a capital “G”).

In the Catholic/Orthodox Sacred Tradition, Grace has far more of a meaning than just God's unmerited favor. Grace is a part of what are called His “uncreated energies,” which also includes His love, mercy, power, etc. These energies are explained as the “presence of God outside of His Persons,” and where the Persons of God are transcendent, His energies are immanent. One illustration is that if God in His Trinity is like the Sun, the uncreated energies of God are like the rays of the sun. And it is His energies when made active within us which causes the transformation of theosis, or deification, being made like God and in union with God. We aren't made one with His Essence, but with His energies, so that while remaining separate, we are also made one with Him.

The definition of a Sacrament (or “Mystery” in the Eastern Church) is “a visible sign of an invisible Grace.” That is that the Sacraments of the Church are actions which when performed and received by faith make His Grace, His energies, active within us to a salvific or transformative purpose. According to the Sacred Tradition of the Church, in order for the Sacrament to have any (positive) effect, it must be accompanied by faith on the part of both the recipient, and the person celebrating or performing the Sacrament. One example of this from Scripture is when Jesus performed miracles of healing, He repeatedly said, “your faith has made you well,” or “your faith has saved you”, and when He entered a town that didn't believe in Him, He could do practically nothing in the way of demonstrations of power except for a few minor healings.

One way to think of it is this, Grace is like an energy field. Because God is omnipresent, everywhere at once, so also are His uncreated energies. But with respect to any individual person, Grace remains inert until that person engages and acts on faith in Jesus Christ. Then His energies become active like electricity which has finally been allowed to flow through a completed circuit. This in turn enables the person to engage with God even more by faith which in turn increases the voltage, so to speak.

Without faith in the Sacrament, the act of Sacrament is fruitless because Grace hasn't been made active. Conversely, actions which are not strictly one of the seven recognized Sacraments, when undertaken with and by faith, are themselves Sacramental in nature such as prayer, charity, Scripture reading, and others because they also make Grace active.

It is for this reason that when our enemies, the world, our own flesh, and Satan and his demons attack us, they do so with the goal of separating us from faith in some way. Like the storm which Peter set out in to walk on the water towards Jesus. He did so believing that Jesus would enable him to walk on the waves, and it was only when he took his focus off of Jesus and looked at his surroundings that he began to sink. The storm distracted him and it pulled him away from his faith in Jesus at that moment which began to render His energies around Peter inert in proportion to his distraction or loss of faith.

Our enemies do not want us to experience deification. Our enemies do not want us to be transformed by His Grace into the image of Christ. The surest route to keep the Christian from this is to distract, tear down, and interrupt our faith in Christ as much as possible with an eye to unseating it altogether which would render His transformative Grace around us inert with respect to us. We must cooperate with His Grace through faith, or the transformation is slowed or even stopped.

This was the logic of Paul's warning to the Galatians that they had “fallen away from Grace.” They had turned away from faith in Jesus Christ to the actions of the Mosaic law and trusting in the Mosaic law to transform and save them, and not Jesus Christ. This rendered His transformative Grace inert in proportion to their drifting away from faith in Christ.

God's primary goal with each of us is that we become one with Him by Grace through faith in Jesus Christ, and He doesn't play favorites. I myself was moved by Him from being an Evangelical Protestant to a Roman Catholic and then to an Old Catholic. I have known people who were Catholic and were moved by God into Evangelical Protestant churches. I have observed that God will lead people from one faith tradition within the Church to another, because faith may be hindered in the first, and yet grow madly in the second for that person. God knows that it is faith in Him which must be encouraged to grow and be acted upon in the person's life. And, He seems to be willing to do so by any means necessary. If a person has responded to Him by faith, but then seems unable to grow in the church where he or she began, then God is not averse to uprooting them and putting them into a faith tradition of the Church where their faith can grow and mature.

I have also observed that God seeks to remove impediments to faith from our lives, and what may have encouraged growth at one time, He removes later on to encourage more growth. Jesus sad that His father was a vinedresser and every branch in Him which doesn't bear fruit, He removes, and every branch which does bear fruit He prunes so that it will bear more fruit. Often, He prunes those things that we come to rely on instead of Him, even if He gave them to us in the first place (not that there isn't anything in our lives that He didn't give us, but some things tend to be more apparent in this regard than others). He may answer a prayer for someone to have a good paying job, thus increasing the person's faith. Later on, because that person is trusting in that job more than Him, He may remove that job to force the person to trust in Him again. He may bring the person to a particular book, or theological teaching in order to help that person's faith mature. But there are times when we put more faith in the book or theological teaching than we do in Him, and He must then prune those things (sometimes painfully) as well. The goal in everything He brings us is to encourage our faith in Him to grow, which thereby increases the activity of the Grace around us to transform us into the image of Christ, which is His ultimate goal with us.

It is a mistake to think that only one faith tradition has a monopoly on Sacrament and on Grace, because God uses everything He thinks fit, not we think fit, in order to move us closer to Himself.