Youth and Adult Study – Week 3

Prayer –

God present to us in the Church and through Sacrament:

Thank you for this opportunity to gather and be your people in this time and in this place.

Open our hearts and minds to your word for us today and always. Help us to carry what we learn and what we experience into the world to your honour and glory. In Jesus Name. Amen

The premise of our time here together is to think about Church – what it is? How it works? Why the Church does the things that it does? And what is the individual Christian’s role in the Church.

As an aside, one of the issues we have as the Church in our world today is that western culture in general and Canadian culture in particular has become very atomized, which is a fancy way of saying that we place the role and rights of the individual over that of society as a whole or of communal structures, of which there are many but this includes the Church.

There are a lot of historic reasons for this, but it is certainly reflected in negative ways, especially in consumerism and in idolatries of money, celebrity and power. Another negative way it comes out is in that famous phrase “I’m spiritual but not religious.” We’re going to come back to that next week.

In my work in theology, my premise is, again from prior weeks, is that the Church is the people who gather to tell the Biblical story by living out or into the Biblical story. I further suggested that the way we live into the story is found every week in the three-fold pattern of worship. We begin by gathering in community and placing God in the centre of our community. But community is only the first part. We then go on to proclaim the word of God, and that will be our theme today, in word or scripture and in action or sacrament. And then we go out into the world to serve and that will be our theme next week.

Scripture –

Acts 8:26-39 –

26 Then an angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Get up and go toward the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” (This is a wilderness road.) 27 So he got up and went. Now there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of her entire treasury. He had come to Jerusalem to worship 28 and was returning home; seated in his chariot, he was reading the prophet Isaiah. 29 Then the Spirit said to Philip, “Go over to this chariot and join it.” 30 So Philip ran up to it and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” 31 He replied, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him. 32 Now the passage of the scripture that he was reading was this:

“Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter,
    and like a lamb silent before its shearer,
        so he does not open his mouth.
33 In his humiliation justice was denied him.
    Who can describe his generation?
        For his life is taken away from the earth.”

34 The eunuch asked Philip, “About whom, may I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” 35 Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus.36 As they were going along the road, they came to some water; and the eunuch said, “Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?” 38 He commanded the chariot to stop, and both of them, Philip and the eunuch, went down into the water, and Philip baptized him. 39 When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away; the eunuch saw him no more, and went on his way rejoicing.

Luke 24:13-35

13 Now on that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, 14 and talking with each other about all these things that had happened. 15 While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them, 16 but their eyes were kept from recognizing him. 17 And he said to them, “What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?” They stood still, looking sad. 18 Then one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answered him, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?” 19 He asked them, “What things?” They replied, “The things about Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, 20 and how our chief priests and leaders handed him over to be condemned to death and crucified him. 21 But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things took place. 22 Moreover, some women of our group astounded us. They were at the tomb early this morning, 23 and when they did not find his body there, they came back and told us that they had indeed seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive. 24 Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said; but they did not see him.”25 Then he said to them, “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! 26 Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” 27 Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.

28 As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on. 29 But they urged him strongly, saying, “Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.” So he went in to stay with them. 30 When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. 31 Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. 32 They said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” 33 That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem; and they found the eleven and their companions gathered together. 34 They were saying, “The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!” 35 Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.

Proclamation

Last week I said that we identify ordained clergy by two designations - Minster of Word and Sacrament or Teaching Elder. I also suggested that there was really no difference between these two designations. While proclamation is not precisely teaching, there is always an element of teaching in proclamation, especially in our context where people sometimes do not know the Bible stories. Also of course every time one approaches a Biblical text, there is always something more to learn and we are fortunate in that we live in a world where many scholars are learning more and more about these texts, the world in which these texts were composed and the audiences to which they were written.

I might also suggest that there are deep and meaningful connections between scripture and sacraments and that both of these activities proclaim, teach and live out similar aspects in our relationship with God and our relationship with each others as God’s people.

But this of course brings us to the question: “What is scripture?” Well, the theologian Karl Barth drawing on our Reformed tradition taught that scripture is “the Bible read publicly in prayer.” Every week at this Church we begin the Proclamation part of worship but saying a “Prayer of Illumination.” This is what raises the words of the Bible from marks on the page and gives them their power and makes them special. Another way to think of this is a formula we use in ordination where we promise to follow “scripture under the continual illumination of the Holy Spirit.”

Another thing that gives scripture its power is that it is a shared text. Generations of readers have prayed over these texts, explicated them, proclaimed them, built elaborate theological systems from them and thought about them. It is this continual dialogue that also forms part of the illumination of the Holy Spirit.”

So scripture as I have defined it is a large part, perhaps the largest part of our weekly service. We read from the scripture aloud and then we think about it together and enter into this dialogue with long tradition of proclaiming scripture to try to use it to: understand the world around us; to live our lives better; to think of where God is calling us as individuals and as a Church and as the world, and how to best live out that call. But still we have to have principals to understand scripture, to sift through all the generations of reading and interpreting and to pick out the good parts of those readings from the less than good parts.

To give a quick example, what do we make of the book of Joshua, or the book of Samuel? In these cases, God is portrayed as calling on the people to kill their enemies, right down to the children and animals that they find in enemy cities. What about in Ezra where God is portrayed as commanding men to divorce their non-Jewish wives and throw them out of the land? What about the passage that Paul wrote in which women are not to speak out in Church? Or is that what Paul really meant. Or perhaps even those words were added after the fact and not Paul’s words at all?

Our reformed tradition is to judge scripture by the standard of scripture. We find that based on the Sermon on the Mount – that is by privileging the words of Jesus – that we can dismiss God’s call to kill women and children and animals as not from God. Doesn’t mean we don’t read those passages or think about what we can learn from them but it does mean that we privilege some parts of scripture over others.

But this does beg the question of where do you start? One way to start is to look at the overarching narrative as I suggested two weeks ago. How does this story reflect God’s love for creation, love so great that he came into the world in the form of Jesus to live among humankind, as Jesus tells Nicodemus in John 3:16.

I would just like to talk of one very personal way that I read scripture. I believe the core of scripture with which to start to read the Bible is found in the two great parables of Luke: the prodigal son and the good Samaritan. Jesus taught that the Law and the Prophets hung on two propositions: that we love God, and that we love our neighbors as ourselves. The Prodigal Son speaks of our relationship with God, that we might stray but that we can always be forgiven. It also teaches us that love comes first from God. The Good Samaritan tells us that everyone is our neighbor and that we are to love everyone as God first loved us. These two stories dramatically illustrate Jesus teaching of how God relates to us and how we are called to relate to others. So I would submit we need to read all of scripture with these two ideas in the back of our minds.

Again sacraments are as much a part of the proclamation of God’s word and the sermon. To my mind both of these things have equal weight and value although there have been times in history where certain traditions have stressed one over the other, either preferring preaching on the one hand or sacraments on the other. The reason for this can be a fascinating look at Church history.

Presbyterians believe in two Sacraments, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper or Communion. The Lord’s Supper may also include foot washing but by and large two Sacraments. The Roman Catholic Church teaches there are seven sacraments. Our tradition recognizes two primarily because those are the two that are given directly in Scripture.

Roman Catholics also have a different understanding of what happens in the sacraments or how they work. The fancy technical term for this is efficacy, which comes from the same roots as our words effectiveness and efficiency. The basis of this is what I think as the metaphor of “mechanical” efficacy. This teaching asserts that the power of the sacraments is in their actual physical performance in time and space and God’s grace is imparted by bodily participating in them. This is the basis and importance for the Roman Catholic belief in the actual physical presence of Jesus in the elements. The elements may actually still taste and look and smell like bread or wine, but this taste, look and smell are in Aristotelean terms “accidents:” that is, they are not part of the essence or physical being of these substances because of their transformation by the Holy Spirit or God during their being blessed.

The Swiss pastor and theologian Urlich Zwingli developed and began to teach a different understanding of the sacraments. Out of pastoral concern for certain situations – babies who die before Baptism or people who miss out on the last rights, as particularly specific examples – Zwingli came to understand the sacraments as symbolic rather than mechanical. But in his mind symbolic in a special way: that is, as visible reminders of God’s grace. They effect us by helping us to remember the Biblical stories of Jesus, especially Jesus own baptism and the Last Supper on the Thursday before Good Friday and the crucifiction.

Luther adopted the Eastern Orthodox understanding of consubstantiation in which God is physically present in some fashion but the elements are also still just bread and wine. Reformed Christians influenced by Zwingli and Lutheran Christians tried but were unable to agree among themselves which interpretation was more biblical and more helpful in understanding the mystery of the sacraments. This division put the Reformation at a disadvantage to the continuing Roman Church and has resulted in divisions that have lasted even up till today.

Calvin would later try with only limited success to develop a compromise to unite Protestants. His understanding was not of simply memory or of a physical presence, but as both symbol and a spiritual presence. Whenever the sacraments are rightly practiced, then it is like God is with us. Of course, God is always with us so that’s not that much of a stretch. Calvin’s formula was a “visible sign of God’s invisible presence.”

Another way Calvin through and taught about this that I find personally very helpful is a the concept of “foretaste.” That is communion symbolizes and demonstrates the fruition of God’s dream for the earth and the eventual perfection of all of creation. By participating in communion in our Church, as well as in remembering our baptisms, we experience – even if for a brief moment – that day when the lion will lie down with the lamb and the child will put their hand in the adder’s nest, as Isaiah put it, or the city of Gold where there will be no more tears as John, puts it in Revelation.

One final thing about communion is that it is experiencing God through senses other than sight and sound. If communion is like scripture it is scripture written by God in creation using the gifts of creation, wheat and grapes and yeast, in a way that teaches us about God through all of our five senses, which I think is extremely important.

Baptism is somewhat the same. Again, Baptism is an issue on which different denominations are divided, which I will get into. But the symbolism of Baptism is pretty clear. The obvious symbolism is of washing away sin. Another symbol is that of dying to the world to be reborn, as a seed has to die to become a plant. Again we believe God is present in the event but the event is only the symbol of a deeper invisible spiritual reality and an indication of God’s eternal presence throughout our lives and grace to us as we live in this world.

One thing I haven’t discussed in Church History is the different between what is called the Magisterial Reformers and the Dissenting Reformers. The Magisterial Reformation, from the word magistrate or judge, are those movements lined up with governments, specifically the Lutherans and the bulk of the Reformed tradition. One of the great similarities between these groups and the Roman Catholic tradition is of course the maintenance of infant baptism.

Dissenting groups, which include Congregationalists, Anabaptists, -- the most prominent of which who are still present in the world are the Mennonites and the Amish – Baptists, Methodists, Quakers and others tend to be anti-government or sometimes theocratic and/or seperationist (removing themselves from mainstream society), although obviously it is a big movement with a lot of variations and flavors.

A major theological break between these two movements, in fact one of the first breaks, is the issue of who do we baptize. Many Dissenting groups including the earliest of them began to reject the idea of infant baptism, Anabaptist literally means re-baptizer and was actually a slur against these types of groups and this belief.

Dissenters came to this belief from their reading of the Bible. After all Jesus was an adult when he was baptized and most of the descriptions of baptism in the Bible are of adults. Obviously a missionary movement going into places where the gospel is being preached for the first time is going to have to baptize a lot of adults.

At the same time, there are references in Acts to new believers and their households being baptized. Household is not the same as what we think of, as immediate families of two or at most three generations. Household means all who live under a roof, which would typically mean extended families, slaves and economic dependents or freed and free employees. This is of course an argument for silence because extrapolating from these passages depends on your definition of household.

There is also an argument to be made that infant baptism is simply a Christian adaptation of the symbol inherent in circumcision, and some traditions especially in the East emphasize baptism either on the eighth day as in circumcision or before the eighth day, although obviously both boys and girls in these traditions.

I’m going to argue that the case for infant baptism rests on the idea that baptism is a demonstration of God’s grace. There is nothing we can do to earn God’s grace, it only comes to us as pure gift. Infant baptism represents and symbolized this in a very real and concrete way. Having said that as a denomination we still accept adults who have not been baptized before and so we practice baptism of both kinds, with subtle differences in the words and service depending on whether we are baptizing infants and adults. Specifically this means parents swear oaths on behalf of the child in infant baptism whereas those who are able to swear for themselves, older children, youth and adults make those vows for themselves.

As far as the form of baptism goes, we’ve already discussed some variations. The Latinate terms for these are “aspersion” which mean sprinkling of water and is the most common in our tradition, “affusion” which is becoming more popular among Presbyterians and “immersion.” Immersion can be either partial which is the form which seems to have been most common in the early centuries or full which is also called “submersion.” All of these forms are recognized as valid in the Presbyterian Church in Canada. Those who only recognize immersion or submersion place more importance on the symbol set of death and rebirth as opposed to washing. Our position is that the symbol set does not matter, what matters is the demonstration of God’s grace in action in the world, again which is also the rationale for infant baptism. Hence, while there is room for a range of beliefs, our ultimate undergirding understanding is that the form of Baptism is less important than the message of God’s grace that it illustrates and demonstrates.