Week 6 - Sacramental Living

This week, in our final week of class, we will look at what it means to live Sacramentally.  In our denomination, we uphold 2 sacraments as the actual sacraments that Jesus both performed and passed on to us through his disciples.  These are the Sacraments of The Lord's Supper and Baptism.

The reason that these sacraments can be considered a spiritual practice is the very fact that if we allow them to do so, these sacraments can seep their way into everyday life and re-shape the way that we go about our days and weeks and year.  The sacraments can define for us, if we allow them, three very important things about ourselves: our identity, our unity, and our common call.

The Practice

This practice consists of not allowing things to go by without them being related in some way back to our sacraments.  For instance there are two things that we encounter everyday that can very easily remind us of our sacraments and therefore our identity, our unity, and our common call:  Food and Water.

Food

Food reminds us of The Lord's Supper, the great spiritual feast that fills our hearts with the Holy Spirit.  It is here that we encounter Christ all over again every time that we partake in the Supper.  When we eat food on a daily basis, we are both reminded of the last time we took the Lord's Supper and given a prelude to the next time that we will take it.  All that is required of us is to acknowledge the fact that simple meals can indeed remind us of this.

Water

Water reminds us the sacrament of Baptism, the time at which we are brought into God's family.  It is in this sacrament that we receive our identity as God's beloved children and are ingrafted for eternity into the Body of Christ.  The Holy Spirit vows to walk with us for the rest of our lives and as willing participants in this journey, the congregation takes a similar vow to love, support, and care for these individuals who receive the sacrament.  When we encounter water, we can be reminded of our baptism and the volumes that it speaks into the remainder of our lives.

So, in these mundane, everyday items of Food and Water, we can take The Bread of Life and the Cup of Blessing all over again.  In these mundane, everyday items, we can receive the waters of Baptism all over again.  In these mundane, everyday items, we can, if only we allow it, receive our identity, our unity, and our common call.

Your Assignment

The assignment for this week is to go forward and live out your life seeking the echoes and preludes of the Sacraments that surround you everyday.  They are easy to miss, because like the air we breathe, they are all around us.  But if we stop to consider where in our lives we might find these gifts of God for the people of God, we begin to notice that the Spirit walks with us always.

So, search out the Sacraments in your life and determine those things that you encounter in everyday life that act as an echo of or a prelude to the table and the font.

Go to it with joy!