Sacraments are defined in the Catechism of the Episcopal Church as outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace. Our particular sacraments we name are Baptism, Eucharist, Unction (anointing of the sick), Marriage, Confirmation, The Reconciliation of a Penitent and Ordination. There are seven of these signs of the holy in the church, but we of course remember that the number seven in scripture takes on symbolic significance. The disciples asked Jesus, “How many times must we forgive….as many as seven?” Jesus answered, “Not seven but seventy times seven.” So the seven “official” sacraments are the mere tip of the iceberg. All things point to the essence of who God is…all things, animate and inanimate, (physicists tell us now that there is no difference)…all things living sacraments drawing us into the beauty of the divine…beauty not found in the aloof ethereal void….but beauty found in the common things of earth. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” Gerard Manley Hopkins writes. The liturgical life of the church is a procession of signs that tell us who God is and therefore who we are. The two are profoundly and intimately related.
I was told by my priest when I was growing up that the Eucharist was the principal sacrament: A family meal in which all partake as equals, in which all are nurtured for the way ahead, in which all are empowered for God’s work in the world. And then after the publishing of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, Baptism rose to a central place in our liturgical life: Death to self by water (I’m reminded of the opening scene in Shakespeare’s Tempest: a profound image of the transforming power of such a common thing as water); and then new life that water brings, indeed there is no life without water….Baptism, a transformation by water into a new life of sacrifice for the good of the whole.
These are indeed central to our lives as people of faith; because we have to see the truth to believe it: sacraments the outward and visible signs of truth; but I want to suggest perhaps one more among the infinite number of sacraments in our world that is at the heart of the spiritual matter: The Church….the Church, the community gathered in the faith, the people of God outward and visible signs of God’s very life in earth….the people of God, living sacraments bearing God’s transforming and saving life in earth….the people of God, called by the ancients ecclesia, the assembly gathered, strong together, the whole greater than the sum of its parts, bearing the mundane elements of the kingdom to a world needing to see and believe that there is yet hope…mundane elements of the kingdom like mercy and compassion; food and water and shelter for the dispossessed; and healing care for the diseased; things like justice and dignity in equal portion…these the rudiments of God’s kingdom transforming our world, recreating the world into the way God imagines it to be. Let us be as the people of God outward and visible sign enough for the world, beginning here at the corner of Ann and Government streets, outward and visible sign of God’s saving love now and among us. That would be something to see.
