Archives For Sacraments

Poetry Monday – ‘How to be a poet’

October 9, 2012 — Leave a comment

Wendell Berry is one of my favorites.  In so many ways he pushes back against the tendency in our western world to separate God from his creation.

This poem begins with the need for solitude and silence:

How To Be a Poet
(to remind myself)

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.

You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill — more of each
than you have — inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity.

The last lines of the second stanza remind us of the sacramental nature of the created world:

There are no unsacred places;
There are only sacred places
And desecrated places.

Take a moment to read the whole poem here at The Poetry Foundation site.

In Poems, Poetry, Sacraments
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Baptism – A reminder from John Calvin

September 4, 2012 — Leave a comment

Sunday was our annual Labor Day weekend celebration of baptism. Twenty unique and varied testimonies with the common theme of Jesus, the one who redeems and restores! Recently I taught on Remember Your Baptism (download or listen here.) Here is a short description from John Calvin that is worth the time it takes to ponder his words well.

For inasmuch as [baptism] is given for the arousing, nourishing, and confirming of our faith, it is to be received as from the hand of the Author himself. We ought to deem it certain and proved that it is he who speaks to us through the sign; that it is he who purifies and washes away sins, and wipes out the remembrance of them; that it is he who make us sharers in his death, who deprives Satan of his rule, who weakens the power of our lust; indeed, that it is he who comes into a unity with us so that, having put on Christ, we may be acknowledged God’s children. These things, I say, he performs for our soul within as truly and surely as we see our body outwardly cleansed, submerged, and surrounded with water. For this analogy or similitude is the surest rule of the sacraments: that we should see spiritual things in physical, as if set before our very eyes. For the Lord was pleased to represent them by such figures—not because such graces are bound and enclosed in the sacrament so as to be conferred upon us by its power, but only because the Lord by this token attests his will toward us, namely, that he is pleased to lavish all these things upon us. And he does not feed our eyes with a mere appearance only, but leads us to the present reality and effectively performs what he symbolizes.
(Calvin, Institutes, IV.15.14)

In Gospel, Make Disciples, Sacraments
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C.S. Lewis and being Called into Communion with the Trinity

October 12, 2010 — 2 Comments

Matthew 3:13-17, Jesus’ Baptism, pulls back the veil for us on life in the Trinity.  Furthermore, as Christ-followers, we are called to join in that life.  The Eastern church, doesn’t use the words “sanctification” or “glorification” but rather Theosis or even divinization.  This is not heresy or taking on the essence of God but rather the Bible’s description of the goal of Christ-likeness.  In the sermon on this text, I quoted Kallistos Ware:

“Our Lord saves us by becoming what we are, by sharing totally in our humanity, thereby enabling us to share in what he is.  Thus through a reciprocal exchange of gifts he takes our humanity and communicates to us his divine life, reestablishing that communion between Creator and creation which sin has destroyed.”

You can listen to the sermon here. I’d like to also strongly recommend an article on C.S. Lewis that takes this theme further and gives wonderful insights into Lewis’ own spiritual life and how he sought to communicate the depth of Christian experience through all his varied writings.  It is well worth reading! It is a download from Emmaus Journal called “Shine as the Sun: C.S. Lewis and the Doctrine of Deification” that you can access by clicking here.

If you would like to hear the author, Chris Jensen, discuss the same topic, you can go to the Ancient Faith Radio Podcast called The Illumined Heart.

In C.S. Lewis, Disciplines, Eastern Orthodoxy, Sacraments
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Baptism and ‘Being who we really are’

July 19, 2009 — Leave a comment
early catacomb wall drawing

early catacomb wall drawing

I’m posting a brief introduction on Baptism from the Covenant Worship Book that describes some of the biblical and theological foundations underneath this sacrament.  In a recent teaching (July 12, ’09) I’m sure I left folks with more questions than answers!  Though that is not always bad, if is important that everyone knows that we’re eager to discuss those questions and have a clear understanding of how the church sees baptism as a vital part of our discipleship as Christ followers, not just as a beginning but as an on-going paradigm of “being who we really are” in Christ! So please contact me as we prepare for our next baptism.  Here’s the article

In Jesus Christ the Word of God was clothed as human flesh (John 1:14). Christians have proclaimed this act of God as a confirmation of God’s promise to send a deliverer and as a conveyance of God’s very own self to humans. Some theologians speak of Jesus as the sacrament of God.

The term sacrament has been used to render the Greek term mystery. As understood in ancient times, the term mystery did not refer to a problem in search of a solution. A mystery was something that had been hidden but then became a public disclosure. In Ephesians 3 St. Paul refers to the mystery that had been hidden—that is, the inclusion of the Gentiles among the people of God—that now had become a public fact. In a more technical sense, a sacrament was a sacred oath a soldier took to Caesar or a security deposit placed before a judge in the Roman court system.

More conventionally, the sacraments have been called outward signs of an inward and invisible grace. Precisely in the administration of the sacraments something goes public, a mystery is disclosed, something is being communicated and something pledged. After Cain had murdered Abel, God put a mark on his forehead confirming a promise that Cain’s life would not be destroyed. God’s promise never to destroy the earth again with a flood was confirmed to Noah by a rainbow. At the circumcision of Isaac at eight days of age, there was confirmed to Abraham and Sarah a promise that through the generations that succeeded them the entire world would be blessed. In that same act a new identity was conveyed and confirmed to Isaac: that he was the first of the generations that would serve God’s plan of universal salvation. Continue Reading…

In Ancient-Future Faith, Sacraments
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