/ sacraments
The Rt. Rev’d Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham (England), on a theology of the Eucharist.
The Rt. Rev’d Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham (England), on infant baptism.
“I have a cousin in Vancouver. He and his wife sat me down for dinner one evening just before their child was born, and they said, ‘We’ve got a question for you?’ They were a bit shy about it because they weren’t explicit, deeply confessing Christians, but they wanted to kind of find their way in. They said ‘We want to know how old does a child have to be before the child can actually know anything about God?’ And I think they were expecting me to say ‘About six or eight or ten’ or something like that. I said ‘O, about three minutes.’ And they stared at me.
I said, ‘Well you’ll find if the child is born even reasonably healthy, that you will be able to establish a very intimate relationship with that child from those very, very early moments. The natural focal point of a newborn child’s eyes is the distance between the breast and the mother’s eyes, so that the natural thing that the child does is to establish eye contact with mom while feeding at the breast. And I remember establishing eye contact with my children very very early on in their first minutes. And there’s this extraordinary sense of knowing which passes between parent and child.’
And I say to myself, and I said to my cousin, ‘If that is so between the human parent and the child, are you really going to tell me that the living God who created heaven and earth and made whales and waterfalls and little penguins and all the rest of it, cannot establish contact with a lovely little creature who bears his image, but has to wait until that lovely little creature becomes five or six or seven or ten? Forget it! God has ways of making himself known intimately to children from their earliest days. And perhaps one of the dare I say sacramental ways by which God does that is precisely by the loving welcome of the Christian community.
Now of course children can’t articulate it. The five-minute old baby can’t put her hand up and say, ‘Okay, I believe in the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.’ But I actually suspect—and I’m being very serious here—I suspect that some of those little children, to the God who knows the hearts of all, have a deeper and fuller faith than a lot of people who say those words every Sunday but have long since allowed them to drift off into the distance somewhere.”
This is a wonderful talk, every bit of it.
The Rt. Rev’d Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham (England), on the sacrament of baptism, continued. Referring to St. Paul (in Romans 6) appealing for faith on the basis of baptism, he speaks of doing the logical sums of baptism and λογιζεσθε, the need for the baptized to reckon themselves, to figure it out—it being baptism. He says, “Of course God welcomes us as we are, but God’s welcome never leaves us as we are. God’s inclusiveness is always a transforming inclusiveness…. Baptism is about dying, and then rising again, not somehow evading the challenge and getting in without any dying and rising to be done. As C. S. Lewis was always fond of emphasizing, there is nothing in this world which cannot die and be raised into God’s new world; but there is nothing in this world which will make it into the new world if it does not die and be raised.”
Tomorrow, Wright on infant baptism.
The Rt. Rev’d Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham (England), on the sacrament of baptism.
Verba visibilia
The promises of God are unfurled in the sacraments. God promises to cleanse us from our sins, to wash away our sins, if we put our trust in Jesus Christ; and then to his word of promise he adds the water of baptism as an outward and visible sign of his promise of cleansing. God promises that he will go on forgiving our sins if we repent and believe in Jesus because Jesus died for our sins on the cross; and to his promise of continuing forgiveness he adds the bread and wine of communion as an outward and visible sign of the promise that he died that we might be forgiven.
Augustine wrote about baptism, “If you take away the word, then the water is neither more nor less than water. But God has added the word to the element of water, so that the word and the water go together, the promise and the sign go together, and the result is a sacrament. For a sacrament is a visible word.” Verba visibilia. God has not only spoken a word, he’s made it visible in the water of Baptism and the bread and wine of the Eucharist.
God speaks to us in scripture and makes his promises visible in sacraments. And so God evokes our faith by making his word visible. Sacraments are means of grace only because they are means to faith. They arouse our faith so that we can lay hold of the promise that is dramatized in the sacrament.
One of the 16th century Homilies of the Church of England says sacraments are “visible signs … to which are annexed promises.” Visible signs with promises attached.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was involved in the Count Von Stauffenberg plot for the assassination of Hitler was imprisoned and was finally executed in the Flossenburg concentration camp at the direct orders of Heinrich Himmler. About a year before he died, while in solitary confinement, he wrote these words in a letter to his parents: “I was just sitting down to a dinner of turnips and potatoes when the parcel you sent me by Ruth as a present for Pentecost arrived. Such things as your parcel give me greater joy than I can say, for although I am utterly convinced of your love, and that nothing can break the bonds between us, I seem to need some outward token or sign to reassure me. In this way material things become vehicles of spiritual realities. I suppose it’s rather like our need for sacraments.”
Love (III)
Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack,
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lack’d anything.
A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?
Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and tast me meat:
So I did sit and eat.
George Herbert
Praise to the Rituals that Celebrate Change
Praise to the rituals that celebrate change,
old robes worn for new beginnings,
solemn protocol where the mutable soul,
surrounded by ancient experience, grows
young in the imagination’s white dress.
Because it is not the rituals we honor
but our trust in what they signify, these rites
that honor us as witnesses—whether to watch
lovers swear loyalty in a careless world
or a newborn washed with water and oil.
So praise to innocence—impulsive and evergreen—
and let the old be touched by youth’s
wayward astonishment at learning something new,
and dream of a future so fitting and so just
that our desire will bring it into being.
