Sacraments- Cursillo talk

Sacraments

After I had finished university I took a job that involved a lot of time driving around in a van with another guy. He wasn't a believer, but his wife was. After spending half a year driving around together we started having a lot of discussions about Christianity. One morning we were going out to a call when my friend turned to me and asked, “what is communion?”

Well, If you want to get me going just ask me a question like that. I had also done a presentation in university on the religious aspects of the Eucharist the previous year, so I had all kinds of ideas in my head. I started talking about how Christians are the Body of Christ and how in the Communion we receive the Body of Christ, so St. Augustine said that in the communion we receive our own mystery. I spoke about how as we eat from one bread, and drink from the cup of our one Lord we are unified as one people. I went on like that for a while. My friend looked interested, but a little confused.

Eventually we got back to the shop for lunch and as we walked into the lunch room our boss asked us what we were talking about. My friend asked our boss, “what is communion?” To which our Christian boss replied, “the body and blood of Jesus”.

I'd missed that part. It was the obvious answer, but what I was saying was true as well.

The Sacraments are mysteries. We sometimes say something is a mystery when we are too lazy to answer a question. “Why is the sky blue, daddy? It's a mystery”. But when we speak about the Mysteries in Christianity, we are speaking about things that are “infinitely knowable”. We can spend our whole lives investigating them and we will always have new discoveries to make more to say. We will never be able to say all that can be said on the topic of Communion, or Baptism. Of course the reason for this is because God is in it. So whatever we say here, there will always be more to say.

A common way to understand a Sacrament is that it is an “outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace”. They involve stuff. Sacraments involve bodies and water, or bread or wine. They involve human action. That's all the outward and visible. But, we also have God promise that He will act in the Sacraments. So through and in that outward and visible stuff God is also working in it to draw us deeper into himself.

The Sacraments are places where God promises to meet us. They have been given to us by God, and we receive these sacraments with our faith. They involve water, bread, and wine or juice, and so they are available to all levels of society- No matter how rich or poor a person is. God comes to us humbly- through water, and in Bread and wine. He doesn't come to us in Gold, or in the smashing of atoms. We don't need a particle accelerator, or a special radio transmitter that can send and receive message from outer space. The God of the universe humbles himself and comes to us through water, and in bread and wine. This isn't even us reaching out to him, The Sacraments are God reaching to us. They are God's gifts to us. And we receive them, and they become fruitful, when we receive them with faith.

The various denominations sometimes disagree about how many Sacraments there are. I read somewhere that St. Augustine said there are thousands. I kind of like that idea. And in some sense it is very true because God is always reaching out to us using the people around us and the creation surrounding us. 99.99% of Christians agree on two foundational Sacraments- Baptism and the Lord's Supper (Eucharist, Communion, Mass). They are two that are shown obviously in the Bible.

There are others, but they wouldn't make sense without these two foundational sacraments. The others really have to do with building up the Church, or pointing to some deeper truth about the sacraments. Baptism is how we become the people of God. It is how we become the Church- the body of Christ. The Eucharist is the meal that sustains us as the church. The Eucharist is where Christ promises to be with us intimately, and where we are spiritually united to each other. Traditionally there are five others. Reconciliation is where we confess our sins and return to Christ and the community. The priest pronounces the forgiveness Christ promises to all those who return to Him- so really it is a way or returning to our Baptism. Confirmation is where a person commits themselves to the vows made at their baptism, and so again, it is a return or going deeper into one's baptism which may have happened before we could speak for ourselves. Ordination of deacons, priests, and bishops builds up the Church through giving it spiritual leadership. The anointing of the sick is a prayer for God's healing, strengthening, and forgiveness for a member of the Church. Christian marriage is a sacrament in that it is to show to the world the intimate love and care between Christ and the Church. The Sacraments all point to the New Covenant relationship we have with the Risen Christ.

All the sacraments really have their foundation in Baptism and the Eucharist. As I said, Baptism is how we enter into the church. It is through Baptism that we become the Children of God. Our identity changes and our reality changes. Some of you might have seen the movie the Matrix. Do you remember when the main character Neo is given a choice. The one who comes to save Neo from the illusion holds out two pills. He can remain in the illusion, or he can enter into reality. It's Neo's choice. He chooses to leave the illusion and enter into reality. He soon finds himself on a futuristic ship where he is in a battle to save humanity from the robotic powers that desire the enslavement of humanity.

Just like Neo we are presented with the option. Do we want to remain in the illusion, or do we want to enter into reality? Through Baptism we make the choice to leave the illusion and enter into reality. We put our faith in God (The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) to save us from the illusion and we join God's forces to fight against the powers that are trying to enslave humanity. We might not remember our baptism, but even as a child we might have been presented for baptism by those who were resisting the illusion to take up the family mission. We can claim that baptism by our faith even if we don't remember it. The grace God made available for us to claim with our baby faith we can still claim with our adult faith. In our Baptism we reject those forces of darkness and slavery and become God's Children, working for his mission. The water of Baptism washes away the sin that connects us to that illusion and those powers. The washing is also a protest against those powers showing whose we are now. We stand with the risen Christ against those forces of destruction. In baptism, we walk through the waters of the Red Sea following God to the Promised land and leaving behind slavery and the Egyptian army. In Baptism, we enter the tomb of Christ and die with him, but then rise with him in his resurrected life. We never get to the end of our Baptism, we just go deeper and deeper into it. In Baptism God promises us forgiveness of sin and new life that will never end empowered by God's Spirit. The more we contemplate it, the more there is to contemplate.

The Eucharist (Lord's Supper, Holy Communion, Mass) is what feeds us in this new life.. We have left the illusion and joined God's forces. This meal is the ration that gives us power and strength to continue on. In the bread and wine we participate in the Last Supper. Through is we receive the presence of the risen Jesus Christ- his Body and his Blood which he sacrificed for us on the cross. The life he poured our we then receive and we become the Body of Christ, and are unified to God, but also to every other Christian in the world who has ever lived because there is only one Lord, and one Body. When we worship and celebrate the Eucharist as the Body of Christ, time ans space are transcended and we are in the presence of angels and the whole host of heaven, with all believers who have gone before us, and in a mysterious but true way, with all Christians around the world.

As the Body of Christ we inherit his mission in the world to resist the forces of darkness and injustice and to take part with Christ in rescuing others out of the illusion. We become people God uses to spread his kingdom. We become part of God's recreating by spreading justice, and allowing God to speak His love through us to those around us. That means that by virtue of our baptism and by being a part of a Eucharistic community we all have a ministry that is a part of our daily life. It is a part of our church, sure, but it is also profoundly a part of our work life and our family life. The illusion is all around us. Those powers have people trapped all around us. But we are called to work quietly under the radar spreading the kingdom- wiping away tears, mending broken hearts, giving help where there was none, pointing to hope, becoming people who God uses to bring peace to hurting people. We become people who God uses to bring others to Himself.