Apr 24 | Our Walking Song: Anglican Sacraments as Restored Relationships

“[Anglicans] are…a deeply praying people. We pray constantly throughout the day. We believe our healthy spirituality depends on continuous prayer. Our people are also a mystic people. Finally, we are a people deeply immersed in the world – we get our hands dirty.”[1]

Anglicanism is a faith that, at its best, walks while singing. Walking is what it does in daily life, moving forward along whatever road it has been given and (again, at its best), choosing to live the life (walk the walk) it proclaims through its singing: the life of the kingdom of God. Neither of these two actions, in the Anglican mind, should be separated.

Our walking song is our sacraments. A song is something that is appreciated with the mind and emotions, but a song also involves the body. A person does not need to be trained or even particularly talented to produce a song, but the beauty and transformative power of a song is enhanced when training, talent, or mindfulness are present. Our hope is that our song (which should really be called a hymn, as the able performance of it should point to God and not to ourselves) is sung in harmony with God’s voice and brings about transformation in the lives of all who pass by on the road we walk.

Our walking hymns may be sung with great awareness of their context in the world (on the road), but they are not the same as the hymns of the world. I feel that in their uniqueness, they call attention to profound models of justice. This justice is a natural outgrowth of Anglican spiritual practice as grounded in regular liturgy and in theology developed in, nourished by, and sustained by liturgy.

Once, regular religious observance was seen as part of the bounden duties of a good citizen. It was morally edifying and necessary for good character formation. It would help to contribute to a more stable society, which was envisioned as homogenous, socially structured through a certain form of hierarchy, and ideally Western. Today, at least in Vancouver, this is no longer the case! Religion in general stands in opposition to the slowly changing tides of this region. Spending time singing songs on the road is seen as distracting from the main objective, which is to carve out a place for oneself using all the tools at one’s disposal. Some even consider it distracting from providing for others on the road. However, most Christians and Anglicans in particular proclaim that singing songs of hope cannot be separated from providing for others on the road. Our sacraments provide an alternative worldview, one that at its best is holistic, affirming, transformative, and evocative, calling into reality through our practice the fulfillment of God’s reign. By singing “We shall overcome,” we have and will overcome.

The sacraments of the Anglican Church proclaim, point to, and enact the justice of God’s reign in many ways. For this paper, I have discerned three. The first way is transcendence. The second way is reconciliation. The third way is a form of incarnational wholeness. All three of these are deeply linked – rich harmony lines for our walking song. All three call us into relationships and lives built on justice as “most basically the pursuit of authentic relationships with God, other persons, and with created order itself. From a Christian perspective, the striving for authentic relationships – or justice – ultimately aims at the full mutuality of trinitarian love.”[2] They teach us to see a world outside our own self-interest, to work for and worship in the spirit of reconciliation, and to hallow and treat with dignity the creation of God.

Transcendence

All sacred activity is grounded on the notion that a reality exists outside of what can be immediately perceived by the senses and the rational mind. Rudolf Otto described it as “non-rational” rather than “irrational,” standing not in opposition to rationality but beside it as alternative.[3] The search for the sacred and ritual encounter with the divine is by definition linked to transcendence of one’s self.

Transcendence is often set up against immanence, but they do not necessarily need to be mutually exclusive in the case of sacredness. As human beings we can seek to transcend the human-created barriers we erect against each other. Jesus did this through his intentional and loving encounters with the unclean and socially unacceptable and Christians are called to do the same. However, the call to transcend moves us beyond even what we can do on the earth. Here, the sacraments mediate our relationship with God, drawing God closer and pushing us forward. While some sacraments do call us to transcend boundaries (all baptized Christians are welcomed at God’s table in the Eucharist of the Anglican Church of Canada; baptism unites us with the priesthood of all believers in every age), many of them teach transcendence through being, paradoxically, both identity bestow-ers and identity transcend-ers.

We are all born into identity. Our genetic makeup gives us a visual and physical identity, and many years of learning and reflection give us a more conceptual identity. Each sacrament bestows or reinforces an identity that we (generally) choose voluntarily. This identity transcends the identities that we are given by circumstance and helps us see, sometimes fleetingly, how God sees us. In baptism, we are brought into the new life of Christ, the life of wholeness as celebrated in liturgy, which transcends who we are as physical beings by putting us in contact with the priesthood of all believers and the great cloud of witnesses. In confirmation, we call upon the Holy Spirit to affirm this identity and continue to strengthen us in our baptismal wholeness and calling. In Eucharist, we all eat from one loaf, each taking separately but knowing that in Christ we are one bread, one body, which died and will be raised, transcending separateness into wholeness. In healing and reconciliation, we affirm ourselves as people in need of care in our brokenness, and transcend by proclaiming the possibility and the eventual certainty of being made whole. In marriage and ordination, we come as singular people, but leave as deeply committed to others, transcending ourselves to become either “one flesh” or the mediator and caretaker of the people of God, no longer existing simply for oneself but for God and God’s people in a radical, cruciform way.

In none of these sacraments is our previous identity denied in a healthy spirituality. This is why it is important to use the concept of transcendence. We are still ourselves, but at the same time, we are more.

Reconciliation

Anglicanism is not a confessional faith. Although we share the creeds, the Thirty-Nine Articles, and the Books of Common Prayer and their revised offspring, we are a faith of incredible diversity. As a people of context and diversity, there is a great need for mutual learning and continued dialogue (multilogue?). In the 20^th and 21^st centuries, Anglicanism has sought to extend its spirit of reconciliation to where it discerns a prophetic calling for it. In some ways, this spirit of reconciliation is quite counter-cultural. That the Anglican Church remains together to some extent, despite persistent cries to leave those who disagree behind from outside and inside the Church, is amazing in our individualistic culture. My friend Rev. Canon Douglas Williams once said, “Anglicans are good at being heretics, but we don’t like being schismatics.” We’re more than happy to take each other to court over the ownership of church buildings or whether the altar should be fixed or movable, but when a group decides it’s had enough and splits away, it’s far more likely to continue to refer to itself as Anglican.

Sacraments are a profound expression of reconciliation, mostly for the same reason that they are an expression of transcendence. Eucharist and baptism not only call us to transcend our identities, but reconcile us by claiming that we are not apart from God but fully in relationship. Eucharist in particular proclaims that in the coming of Christ, all things will be “reconciled and made new.”[4] The reconciliation of a penitent is the most obvious sacrament of reconciliation, although it is quite worthwhile to note that a lot of attention is often paid to the penitent, and not as much to the victim.[5] Opposite-sex marriage, likewise, can be seen as a form of reconciliation between the sexes, as demonstrated in a moving liturgy at VST in October of 2012 that used movement, song, and Eucharist to address Jesus’ troubling teaching. Same-sex marriage, as a covenantal relationship, can be a reconciliation with and affirmation of one’s own sexual identity. In these sacraments, we proclaim a God who, in reaching out to us and inviting our reaching back (transcendence) provides love and acceptance (reconciliation). Reconciliation transitions nicely into the last way, which is incarnational faith.

A Body-Positive, Incarnational Faith

Anglicanism has always celebrated the incarnational reality of Christ. Its Eucharistic prayers refer consistently to the good work of God in creation and Jesus’ life as a physical being.[6] In this it seems to have a soft (and sometimes not so soft) echo of its creation-positive Celtic roots ringing throughout the song of the sacraments.

In Anglican theology and practice I have found this incarnational preference highlighted not only in enacted church sacraments but in the desire among many Anglicans for beauty in worship. The stunning churches of England are enhanced by beautiful choral music, clergy and altar vestments are hand sewn by faithful artisans, and “holy hardware” is lovingly cared for over years and years. Where many Reformation era theologians saw excess and profanity, many Anglicans saw in this beauty a foretaste of the beauty of the kingdom. Over the years, vessels, vestments, and buildings have changed, but the attachment worshippers have to these objects, no matter how beautiful or how homely they are, testify to the need and love for something physical to be seen and touched in worship.

Anglican sacraments are profoundly body-aware, if not always explicit in body positivity. The practice of daily prayer and frequent Eucharist hallow the day-to-day present life and the need for sustenance both physical and spiritual. Marriage hallows daily life and the bodies of two people joining together; healing and reconciliation receive people into wholeness. Baptism affirms the reception of the new and offers new clothing for the person to put on – not rejecting the old but sanctifying it as it is. Ordination shows in a profound way the unique hallowing of a holistic life as belonging to the church, and the care taken in selecting individuals shows the care the church has for those who seek this path. Confirmation, through the laying on of hands, also offers the strength of the Spirit for all, and hallows the prayers of the community for the one being confirmed. In this emphasis on corporality, there also run through the prayers a sense of mortality and death. Our combined Catholic and Reformed history employs the language of death in our Eucharistic prayers; in baptism death prefigures resurrection and reception into the community; the priest, as Rev. Harold Munn has articulated it, must model, among other things, death to a congregation and knowingly accept this at the sacrament of ordination; the penitent must die to the old way of living in sin; the bride and groom die to a life lived only for themselves. This is perhaps the most counter-cultural statement the Church makes, living in a world in which aging and death have become the last great taboo.

In these three manifestations of sacramental justice, Anglicanism has found an ethics to aspire to. Aspiring to them is generally the most we can promise. It is significant that in Anglican liturgy, unlike the structure of many Reformed liturgies, the confession does not come at the beginning, but in the middle, and in the Book of Common Prayer is prefaced by “comfortable words”. God welcomes us by way of being present, speaking to us through scripture and sermon, and hearing our prayers. It is then that we make our confession, and what follows it? Present day and eschatological joy in the Eucharist meal. Immediately following that is our commission to go out proclaiming what we have experienced. In our joyful feasting and our time together, we are invited into new relationship, and called to extend the invitation to the whole creation.

Let us sing on the road, remembering that Jesus may be among us, only to be known for certain in the breaking of the bread.