Sacramentally Speaking
The season of Epiphany follows that of Christmas. It is not just some “filler” time between the glorious celebration of the Feast of the Incarnation at Christmas and the penitential season of Lent. Each of our Gospel readings for Epiphany reveal, or make manifest, the Incarnate One present in a place and time in history. Rather than focus on the parables of Jesus in this Church season, it is the reality of the Divine entering into the material world that is given recognition. Early 20th century Church of England theologian and priest O.C. Quick was right to proclaim, “the life of Jesus Christ is seen at once as the perfect sacrament.”
The sacramental life of the Church was reemphasized with the publication of the “1979 Book of Common Prayer.” When liturgical scholars rediscovered the foundational roles of both baptism and communion in the early church, the “new” prayer book brought back the Eucharist as the primary worship on Sundays and, whenever practical, baptism was envisioned as part of the worshiping community, not just a “christening” ceremony.
You, like me, may have been raised in the days when we were drilled in Sunday School that “the sacraments are outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace,” with our understanding of sacramental theology probably limited to knowing that baptism and Eucharist are sacraments – and that is about it. And, in a sense, that is probably as good as it gets since we received that definition from none other than St. Augustine, one of the more brilliant minds of the Church.
Yet, really, what is a sacrament? A hint may come from the word’s origins. The word itself came from the Latin word, sacramentum, which "The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church" reports was used to translate the original Greek word, mysterion, into the Latin sacramentum. In other words, sacraments are one of the ways Christians may enter into and participate in that mystery of God and Christ that we see referenced throughout the New Testament and especially in Paul’s letters. Through tangible materials such as water, bread and wine, God’s presence is invoked through the Trinitarian formula (“In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit…”), and the physical and spiritual realms again unite as they did in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. This grace is what happens to us at baptism, and every time we put out our hands and have someone place in them a piece of bread, saying, “The Body of Christ, the bread of heaven.”
Maybe I should have just stopped at Frederick Buechner’s description, that “[a] sacrament is when something holy happens.” Perhaps, it is as simple as that.
