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"Living Sacramentally" or
"The Sacramental Principle" As I mentioned last Lord's Day morning, the text we have before us is of very great importance, setting as it does the stage for what comes after it in the history of salvation and the record of that history in Holy Scripture. Last time we considered these 14 verses as a prime example of the biblical dialectic between divine sovereignty in grace and human freedom and responsibility. This morning I want to take notice of another fundamental biblical perspective or way of looking at life and salvation that is also signalized in this passage. I am speaking of the sacramental character of godly life. Now, we have before us the institution of a particular sacrament, viz. circumcision. But I intend to deal with the sacrament per se, circumcision and its NT partner, baptism, In another sermon. This morning I want to deal with the underlayment of the sacraments, the substructure, the reality that lies beneath and that explains and provides for such a practice as circumcision or baptism or the Lord's Supper. I am speaking of what we might call "the embodiment of truth" or, perhaps the "sensualizing" of truth --there, we've made up a word-- or, perhaps, the incarnation of ideas, their expression or at least their force communicated in some concrete or physical way. Many of you are familiar with the opening chapter of Bunyan's second great allegory, The Holy War. In that chapter, setting the stage for what is to follow, introducing the characters as it were, Bunyan tells us of a country called "Universe" in which there was located a "fair and delicate town" called "Mansoul." And of this town he tells us that it had five gates "in at which to come, out at which to go, and these were made likewise answerable to the walls; to wit impregnable, and such as could never be opened nor forced, but by the will and leave of those within. The names of the gates were these, "Ear-gate, Eye-gate, Mouth-gate, Nose-gate, and Feel-gate." In that imaginative way Bunyan tells us how it is that influences come into the human soul, how truth is received, and love, and everything else. The five senses are the avenues by which all reality, but especially spiritual reality is conveyed to the soul. Now Bunyan wouldn't have said that they are the only avenue, the Spirit of God does not need our senses to change our hearts, he works below, deeper still than our senses. But, once he has made us new creatures in Christ, he uses our senses primarily and the Scripture emphasizes this fact: faith comes by the hearing of the Word; "blessed is the one who reads (which requires seeing, of course) the words of this prophecy" (Rev. 1:3). Indeed, so fundamental is this outlook in Holy Scripture, that the senses are also used as great metaphors of spiritual experience and knowledge: "taste and see that the Lord is good;" "they tasted the goodness of the Word of God;" "Look unto me, all the ends of the earth, and be saved, for I am God and there is no other;" "if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him and he with me [two senses in one image!];" "men whose hearts God had touched;" and so on. Now, we cannot actually see God, we cannot taste his Word, we cannot hear his voice; we cannot hold or touch his hand and he does not touch us in that physical way; we cannot smell his breath. All of these realities of the unseen world are extra-sensual to us. But, God has so designed human life that spiritual, invisible, extra-sensual reality can be communicated, its impressions conveyed by sensual means, by means susceptible, accessible to our five senses. The sacraments are only one example of this connection between the seen and the unseen, the sensual and the spiritual, the world of flesh and blood and the unseen world of God, the angels, heaven, and eternal life. But they are one important example. As a matter of fact, the Bible is shot through with not only the reality of this connection between the physical and the spiritual, of this way of conveying spiritual reality, it meaning and its force, through physical means. And, as with everything else of supreme importance in our faith, this fact poses a great danger and a great stumbling block. All through the OT and all through the history of the church since Pentecost these physical means introduced to us and commended to us in the Bible have been perverted, in disobedience to the Scripture, into forms of idolatry and superstition. No longer is the water of baptism a visible sign and seal of divine grace, but grace is imagined to be in the water itself. The Supper becomes the actual sacrifice of Christ over and over again and the very act of physical participation --eating and drinking-- is supposed to make one a participant in the righteousness and salvation of Christ. And, as could have been predicted by anyone acquainted with the ways of human nature, in reaction to these superstitions and perversions, others have wanted to purify the faith and the Christian life of all that is sensual, or, at least, as much as it possibly can be purified, some going even so far as to eliminate the sacraments altogether. C.S. Lewis, in what I take to be an extraordinarily illuminating analysis of this tension and this polarity and the swings of the pendulum in Christendom from the sensual to the spiritual, says this:
What a perfect description of the actual situation. American protestantism, before our very eyes, is becoming like no religion at all, like a theater or a concert or a sales convention. More and more there is nothing particularly distinctive about its worship, even its message in many ways. And, notice, the sacraments, for example, have almost disappeared from view in this religion. You never see Christian baptism or the Supper on Christian TV! This swinging between superstition and a kind of gnosticism, a kind of spirituality that ignores or minimizes the physical expressions of the faith, is one way of telling the entire history of the Christian church in the world. I grew up myself on the gnostic side of the spectrum. There was little embodiment of our faith in church or in life, few practices that brought in the senses in aid of religious impression and conviction and experience. And I will tell you candidly that only in recent years have I come to see how much attention is paid in Holy Scripture to this connection between the sensual and the spiritual, and at how many different levels. Here you have circumcision -- a dramatic physical rite that is made a powerful seal, a seal in the body itself, of the relationship between the invisible God and his people. We have already in Genesis been introduced to sacrifice, but will have an almost overwhelming attention paid to it later in the Law of Moses. Powerful acts -- the laying of one's hands on the head of a lamb or goat, the slaying of the animal, the sprinkling of blood, and the like -- strongly sensual experiences: incense, great feasts with food and drink to make the heart glad, holidays, and celebrations. And then there is the tabernacle and then, still more the temple. Visual, architectural representations of the presence of God. When Solomon built the temple it was far and away the most spectacular building in the world, the most beautiful, the most lavishly and expensively appointed. It was a visual feast of fine art, sculpture, engraving, the weaving of fabric, and so on. And, in connection with that worship, not only priests in their distinctive clothing, but great choirs, orchestras, magnificent music. Don't tell me the faithful Israelite was not moved with a sense of the glory of God to see the temple and hear its grand music! One can know God without any of this, of course. David was in close fellowship with God when he was hiding in the wilderness, hunted by Saul. But he himself could not wait to embody his faith in the building of the temple, and when that was forbidden him, to bring the ark of the covenant with music and dancing into the city and to the temporary sanctuary, which was lavish in its own right! All of this is hugely important. Think of it this way. A man can love and marry a woman without buying her a diamond ring -- or without taking whatever outward step is taken in his culture, but men do buy such rings, because, God having made them as they are, the love that is in their hearts must be shown, must be demonstrated, must be declared, must be experienced with the hand and the eye. The physical not only expresses the spiritual, it completes it, it conveys the force of it, it makes the impression of it accessible and so the more powerfully felt and enjoyed. Or, take a still more profound example. A man can love his wife without having sexual relations with her. He or she may become ill, medical treatment may have made such a thing impossible, or the like. Love can exist without this expression. But ordinarily and properly and wonderfully the love of the heart becomes and must become the love of the body, and the body not only expresses the love of the heart, but enlarges it and offers the fuller enjoyment of it. In the same way, one can have a heart full of praise while remaining completely silent. But singing the praise, especially with a great congregation, especially to magnificent music beautifully played, when there is true faith, connects the spiritual world to the physical in a most fruitful and wonderful and powerful way. Faithless men and women can enjoy these things as well, but they get no access to the unseen world of grace through them as the man or woman of faith does. Another example would be the fear of God and reverence for God, which obviously must exist as a state of mind and heart, but which in Holy Scripture also become postures of the body, kneeling, for example. God is everywhere, of course, and it might be argued how can we kneel before him as if he were in our place? But it matters not! The connection between the spiritual and the physical needs to be served and is authentically served when Christians fall to their knees before the High God. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters cites Coleridge as one who spurned this principle of the physical embodiment and expression of spiritual reality. He has Screwtape saying to Wormwood,
And the Bible leaves us in no doubt of this. Whether here on earth or in heaven, according to Revelation, salvation, the knowledge of God, joy, peace, forgiveness, obedience, consecration, reverence -- all are turned into delightful smells, solemn ritual actions, sumptuous meals, gorgeous buildings, glorious music and art, and celebrations and parties of various kinds. No one can fully explain this -- why God's grace and deliverance to be turned by his people into feasts with good food and gift-giving, why his praise is turned into music and song, why his covenant is accompanied by sacraments, why reverence becomes kneeling, joy becomes dancing, and his glory becomes great church buildings. But so it has been from the beginning with the blessing of Holy Scripture. God made us this way and made us for this. As Thomas Howard has written of the American evangelical resistance to this principle of physical embodiment, especially in worship:
We might, of course, work to rid ourselves of all such acts and motions and outward states and responses, but why would we when the Scripture so obviously encourages them all: not just repentance but sackcloth and ashes, not just joy in the presence of God but leaping and dancing before the ark of the Lord. It is absolutely in keeping with the entire world-view of Holy Scripture that God should have appointed a sign and seal, a physical embodiment of his covenant for Abraham and his descendants. And in that provision he recommended to us that we live our lives "sacramentally," embodying our faith and love and hope in other physical ways. The early Christians did this by eschewing cremation and other forms of disposing of the human body after death and instead burying their dead with prayer and song and so embodying their hope of the resurrection and everlasting life. They often did even more, clothing the dead in shoes and burying them with head to the west and feet to the east so that at the resurrection they would rise facing their returning redeemer ready to walk with him. They did not do this because they thought that this was intrinsically necessary or that it would be confusing for those rising on that day not to see the Lord when they first opened their eyes or because otherwise they would get their feet wet, but because their great faith cried out for physical shape and deserved an expression appropriate to the life of this visible world and because they wanted to bear witness to that faith in the invisible in this world of sight and sense. (Julian the Apostate) And the modern church is forsaking this practice too! And in those practices and customs they were simply following the Bible's lead. And so was Mrs. Schaeffer in her book, Hidden Art, very popular years ago. She was effectively saying in that book that God was beautiful, that our faith was beautiful, that God's creation was beautiful, and that Christians ought, therefore, as an act and expression of their faith create beauty in all manner of ways: in the way they decorate their homes, set their dinner tables, fill their houses with music and so on. My sister thought similarly. It was her dream to live "sacramentally." That is, she did not, for example, simply want to be committed to the intellectual and spiritual nurture of her children. She wanted to gather her family at the evening table, loaded with good food and drink and beautifully set, and in that atmosphere of goodness and delicacy and beauty speak together of true and beautiful things and so bless her family and make it holy and happy. Exactly the picture Scripture itself paints in Psalm 128. I cannot begin to tell you in how many ways each of us can live sacramentally -- from loving others with gifts, to setting a family table, to burying our dead -- all as acts and expressions of Christian faith, all as embodiments of unseen realities known to us by the Word and the Spirit of God. But it is our joy and our privilege and our responsibility so to live. And when we do our faith and love and joy as Christians will be the stronger for it and our witness to our children and to the world. The God whom we cannot see, made himself visible to us in his Son. The faith we cannot see was made more visible in a thousand ways in the Bible. Someday the Lord Christ and the unseen world will all be visible to the eye and we will be able to touch him. Meantime there is much that can make it seem as though we are almost touching him, almost seeing, almost hearing, almost smelling the City of God. |
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