Living Wittily

Non sacramental experience and the Church’s loss

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A sacrament has been described as like the experience of encountering the expression on someone’s face. We look and find ourselves looked upon. The smile, the eyes, convey the living personality behind the face. A sacrament is a sign that carries with it the living reality of what it signifies.

So why is it that few contemporary books on spirituality, prayer and Christian life mention sacraments or communion at all? The best known introduction to Christian faith, the Alpha course, completely omits it. Contemporary worship songs show little interest in it. For a great  many people today an encounter with Christian worship and prayer will be a non-sacramental experience.

These words are from David Runcorn’s very fine Spirituality Workbook (London: SPCK, 2006), 68.

41kz59mvfxl__aa240_ This is one of the most enjoyable, articulate, spiritually sensible books I’ve read on spirituality for a long time. Runcorn aims at providing an integrated vision of Christian spirituality, based on a course of lectures given over some years to some very fortunate generations of students of Trinity College, Bristol. I’ll do another post later on the Scottish Baptist College blog and outline the contents and overall usefulness of this book. But reading it this morning I was halted by his beautiful description of sacrament, and by his justified complaint about the inexplicable neglect of Holy Communion at a number of levels in our contemporary practice.

As a Baptist I already worry about the downgrading of the Lord’s Supper, so often appended to the service, at times stripped of liturgical depth, lacking spiritual beauty and omitting careful setting in the context of worship of the One whose real presence is an assumption of every community of believers gathered in Jesus name. Partly that’s because there is a fear of sacramentalism, and a corresponding insistence on simplicity, insisting it is only bread and wine, and avoiding any suggestion that anything happens of a miraculous nature – they are mere symbols, memorial elements.

Dechaunaclatejuly3 And yet. Broken bread and poured out wine were Jesus’ own chosen vehicles to convey the truth and grace of who He is. Our fear of sacramentalism too easily becomes evasion of mystery, and reducing sacrament to mere symbolism empties the gifts of bread and wine of that rich evocative giftedness that transforms bread into nourishment and wine into healing and refreshment. Even our prayers of thanksgiving for the bread and wine, which at their best are a grateful remembering of Jesus’ death, can become reduced to mere remembering of Jesus’ death. That is, at the communion table, when we break bread and share it, pour wine and drink it together, we are not merely remembering, we are proclaiming – the death of Jesus Christ – but also the resurrection of Jesus, the life-giving gift of the Spirit to the community of Jesus Christ for the renewal of creation, the love of the Father and Creator revealed in created things, and the future hope ’till he come’, and when God will be all in all. The Gospel is a richly textured, theologically overwhelming story, which in bread and wine, in the community of Jesus, is ineffable truth condensed through faith and love into an affirmation of the redeeming activity and presence of the Triune God.

So yes. I think Runcorn is right to warn us of contemporary Christian worship, praise songs, evangelism that provide a non-sacramental experience. The inexplicable yet inexhaustible love of God in Christ, embodied in the human life of Jesus, given in love and in mercy broken, forever living in the reality of the Risen Lord, creatively, subversively, transformingly active in a renewed and reconciled people, pushed out into a world groaning with impatience for redemption, yes, all of this, and far more, is implied in the sacrament of Holy Communion, the celebration of God in Christ reconciling the world to himself.

A communion service that captures something of all that rich spiritual complexity, and a community that vitally and joyfully lives out of sacramental experience as God’s gift of himself in Christ through the Spirit, may be one of the most effective occasions for witness available to a church, perhaps too often looking for more dumbed down, marketable and convenient diets of worship.

Comments

4 responses to “Non sacramental experience and the Church’s loss”

  1. Andrew avatar
    Andrew

    An excellent comment throughout, but what I see too often are people who take part in the sacraments within the confines of a church setting and do not take them outwards into the community – they lack a witness.
    It is the ritualism without any visible form of works that the people who you describe see as a contradiction in how they are seen and heard to live. I therefore think that people such as the Salvation Army and Quakers are MORE sacramental in the daily lives lived by them. They remember the Jesus on the cross, and the Ascension by trying to live every moment as a witness. Maybe the balance is just wrong at both positions far too often. Just my thoughts…..

    Reply
  2. Andrew avatar
    Andrew

    An excellent comment throughout, but what I see too often are people who take part in the sacraments within the confines of a church setting and do not take them outwards into the community – they lack a witness.
    It is the ritualism without any visible form of works that the people who you describe see as a contradiction in how they are seen and heard to live. I therefore think that people such as the Salvation Army and Quakers are MORE sacramental in the daily lives lived by them. They remember the Jesus on the cross, and the Ascension by trying to live every moment as a witness. Maybe the balance is just wrong at both positions far too often. Just my thoughts…..

    Reply
  3. Jim Gordon avatar
    Jim Gordon

    Thanks for your comment Andrew, and for calling in and being part of the discussion. Of coue I agree that ritualism is an empty gesture if it is simply repetitive religious practice that has no purchase on how we live. But baptism and the Lord’s Supper, as portrayed in the New Testament, are dynamic occasions of spiritual import aimed at transformative living. And while I also agree that a faith that holds to the reality of God as creator, and confesses that the eternal word became flesh in incarnation is by definition sacramental, I also think that the Lord’s Supper is integral to New Testament Christianity as prcisely a reminder that God was in Christ reconciling the world, the created world, to himself. Hence bread made from grain and wine from grapes which point to the reality of Christ’s body broken in sacrifice, make the Lord’s Supper God’s gift to the church, the regular reappropriation in faith of all that God has and is doing in Christ, through the Spirit, in our world.
    My original post was really a complaint not so much about ritualism, as our tendency to be SO worried about ritualism, that we evacuate God given occasions such as the Lord’s Supper, of their intentional spiritual intimacy and transformative power. And when that happens our lives are deprived of a means of grace, and we relinquish one of the intended blessings of Holy Communion, to enable communion, community and communication, with each other and with the Risen Lord.
    But your point is an important corrective, and a proper appeal for balance.

    Reply
  4. Jim Gordon avatar
    Jim Gordon

    Thanks for your comment Andrew, and for calling in and being part of the discussion. Of coue I agree that ritualism is an empty gesture if it is simply repetitive religious practice that has no purchase on how we live. But baptism and the Lord’s Supper, as portrayed in the New Testament, are dynamic occasions of spiritual import aimed at transformative living. And while I also agree that a faith that holds to the reality of God as creator, and confesses that the eternal word became flesh in incarnation is by definition sacramental, I also think that the Lord’s Supper is integral to New Testament Christianity as prcisely a reminder that God was in Christ reconciling the world, the created world, to himself. Hence bread made from grain and wine from grapes which point to the reality of Christ’s body broken in sacrifice, make the Lord’s Supper God’s gift to the church, the regular reappropriation in faith of all that God has and is doing in Christ, through the Spirit, in our world.
    My original post was really a complaint not so much about ritualism, as our tendency to be SO worried about ritualism, that we evacuate God given occasions such as the Lord’s Supper, of their intentional spiritual intimacy and transformative power. And when that happens our lives are deprived of a means of grace, and we relinquish one of the intended blessings of Holy Communion, to enable communion, community and communication, with each other and with the Risen Lord.
    But your point is an important corrective, and a proper appeal for balance.

    Reply

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