THE MEANS OF GRACE
When one thinks about the concept Christians refer to as the means of grace, it appears to be a contradiction in terminology. If grace is defined as the unmerited favor of God bestowed upon sinners (all of human kind) and cannot be earned but is something freely given,what is meant by its means?
Means implies the conditions by which things are conveyed; as such, it implies control.
How then is grace freely given if conditional and controlled?
The means we are talking about generally refer to the sacraments known as Holy Baptism and Holy Communion in most liturgical church; whereas, the means of grace in other denominations is conveyed through living a righteous life that beckons others to follow Jesus and find salvation from their sins.
In this post, I am directing my comments on the two sacraments most mainline Christians identify as being instituted by Jesus, Holy Baptism and Holy Communion.
Are these the only two conduits by which grace is administered?
I believe most thinking Christians would say no; that grace, God's favor, God's love extends to all; that Christ died for all. Some might add that it is not that God withholds grace, but rather that people can refuse it because God has given us free will to do so - fair enough - but then how is grace freely offered to all? Can grace be refused by one who knows nothing about it and does not have access to its means? How much of grace can we actually comprehend that allows us the choice to accept or refuse it?
What is grace? Is it a something that can be accepted or refused; does it have means, need a means, or is it something that simply is - something that we more or less have become aware of in the past two thousand years?
Theologically speaking, I believe God's grace has always been in abundance, like the air we breathe; that it has been around since the Big Bang of creation. Trying not to take it in is much the same as holding one's breath. The problem, it seems to me, is not in our ability to refuse it, but rather in our inability to recognize and use it as God intended. That's where Jesus and others come in.
GRACE AS KENOSIS
God is a minimalist. Creation begins with an infinitesimal and immensely dense particle of unimaginable energy that possessed a desire to release itself, to empty itself of its abundance; ergo, the universe we live in. I say desire because I know of no other word that humanly comes close to explaining its being triggered. I also say desire because in that infinitesimal small particle was contained the probability of everything that exists, including what we call the physical and the means by which we perceive it. Along with the physical is the perception of the spiritual, the affectionate, and the intellectual.
Scientists might argue the latter because it relies on ambiguous proof, but they cannot argue that the idea of spirituality, affection, and intelligence exist and are a product of what evolved from this initial creative act; that such potential was present in the moment the universe was released. I'm not talking about intelligent design, but rather what appears to be by all accounts (including the biblical account) a random kenotic act initiated by something close to what I have described as a desire to be. This inexplicable desire that triggered creation I equate with God. God emptying Godself to be that being in which we live and move and have our being. [See Acts 17.]
Most religions identify, in some manner, that God is love because ultimately love is a kenotic act, the emptying of self to allow for the other that is manifest in the physical, spiritual, affectionate, and intelligent perception of existence. It is a paradox that expands as it expends, and that is where we come in for we are both the recipient of its expenditure and the result of its expansiveness; all of which can be defined and understood as grace.
GRACE CONTEXTUALIZED
Grace, as Christians proclaim it, is God's love defined contextually. Grace as God's unmerited free gift of favor bestowed on "believing" sinners is largely a Christian concept related to the crucifixion of Jesus, of Jesus emptying himself to allow for the other in the act of Jesus forgiving those who crucified him; making room for them and for all. " Christ died for all" is considered the first creed of Christianity. Jesus emptied himself so that all find themselves in the risen Christ or perhaps creatively speaking find themselves in the rising Christ.
In the scope of cosmic events, the crucifixion is an extremely narrow act that exposes the minimalist nature of God which expands as it expends in order to create, or in Christian lingo, to bring about a new creation. If that sounds paradoxical, it is. Paradox is the sign of Christ and the modus operandi of God.
What does this mean?
God is an action; as such, God is always in action. God is a pronomial verb. It is impossible to wrap our finite minds around this and that is where temporal context becomes important for us to even begin approaching something like an understanding. To apply human concepts as descriptors of God runs the risk of seeing God as one of us instead of seeing God as one with us. Seeing God as one of us results in God being seen as a person or individual that can be manipulated apart from us - in what can be understood as the idolization of God. God cannot be idolized. To idolize God is to nothing less than an attempt to separate God from us and an attempt to manipulate God.
The meaning of who and what we are in relation to the who and what God is and has been is being doled out in snippets throughout our history. God's love is too immense to perceive its fullness with our senses and limited intellect. We see through a glass darkly precisely because we cannot bear the full light of God's creative reality. We have come to understand God through human activity and the human story because at our very core God, the Spirit of God, the essence of our life force is present and we are caught up in the presence of God. God is both too near to be seen and too other to be fully comprehended. This is where the sacraments come in as a means to understand and embrace a reality too immense to take in.
SIGN, SYMBOL, SIGNIFICANCE
The means of grace is properly understood as the means through which we understand, perceive, and embrace the grace that is the Love of God, that is God understood by the followers of Jesus as expressed in the risen and rising Christ.
Water, oil, light, bread, wine, and spoken word are the elements that make up the two sacraments that the Church identified as instituted by Jesus the Christ. The three most basic elements in these two sacraments are water, word, and light.
BAPTISM
Water, Word, and Light
" In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. 4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. 5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. 6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. [Genesis 1:1-6 AKJV]
The Big Bang in Bible-speak is very minimalist. Water is equated with the void, a state of undefined fluidity that includes the potential for the solidified earth. Light is fluid also and can be defined as both particle and wave, all of which is described by science as contained in an infinitesimal particle of immense potential called a singularity. Within this singularity and encasing it was a force or its force that is identified in the biblical account as the Spirit of God, a desire to be which becomes expressed (spoken), breaking open this particle in a flash of rapidly expanding light and matter from which our story evolves.
All utterances in the universe is a language; is an expression of desire, a desire to be, a desire to know, a desire to be known, a desire to understand and be understood. Let there be light, the most essential utterance was the element needed to bring about life. It was an immensely explosive utterance that continues to resonate throughout the universe. We can still hear it as a static hum via radio wave. In essence, it was and is God saying, "Let there be life."
Baptism, the first of the two widely acknowledged Christian sacraments uses, in liturgical churches, water, word, and light. It is the initiation rite into the Church, the Body of the risen and rising Christ. The initiate symbolically enters into the death of Jesus as symbolized by immersion into the void of formlessness of a time before creation to be recreated in the image of Christ by the spoken desire of God to be one in and with Christ as a daughter or son of God within the body of Christ, a reassignment of Paul's definition of God as that being in which we move and live and have our being.
The initiate is frequently marked with oil as sign and seal of the Holy Spirit, the life giving desire of God. This new life in Christ is symbolized by the lighting of a candle from the Pascal candle, a symbol of the light of the risen Christ, the same light that brought creation into being as described in the first chapter of the Gospel according John.
The significance of this sacrament is in recognizing the grace being dispersed throughout the known universe since the dawn of creation. The Nicene Creed has an odd phrase that captures this dispersion of grace as it relates to humankind. Talking of Jesus as the Christ it states,"...who for us men and our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnate..." is a way of saying Jesus is our exemplar, a mirror of who we are, held up to help us grasp the fact that we embody the Spirit of God like Jesus who saw grace as something to live into and disperse, to empty himself and ourselves of in order to allow for the other.
As such grace became recognizable and reaffirmed in the kenotic act of Jesus on the cross that led to his expansion as the Christ in what is known as resurrection. The significance of baptism is also that grace is recognized as a call to utilize this kenotic act of creation, to engage in the process of expending in order to expand the recognition of God's grace, what Jesus referred to as the kingdom of God. By in large the significance of Baptism is a sign and symbol of the intitiate's recognition of being embodied in the Body of Christ; embodied in that being in which we live and move and have our being, and expressing a desire to live it out, to be Christed or Christened.
HOLY COMMUNION
That the Lord Jesus the same night in which he was betrayed took bread: 24 and when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me. 25 After the same manner also he took the cup, when he had supped, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me. 26 For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord’s death till he come. [1Corinthians 11:23b-26 AKJV]
Bread, Wine, and Word
The apostle Paul's account of Jesus's spoken words that instituted the rite of Holy Communion at The Last Supper are probably the earliest record of those words, recorded long before the writers of Mark, Luke, and Matthew wrote about them in the Gospels of those names. The sacrament of Holy Communion is perceived as the most sacred of the sacraments by most Christians and is central to most worship services in liturgical denominations; such as, Roman Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, and Orthodox. For most it is an every Sunday service, but for many less liturgical denominations it is an occasional service intended to highlight its importance and sacredness. Regardless of the practice within a denomination, Holy Communion is highly controlled and in some it is not freely given to all (even while claiming Christ died for all) unless the person is baptized or baptized and belonging to that particular denomination. On the other hand, in some local churches, Holy Communion is offered to all who seek to know God in Christ - still somewhat conditioned by the intention of the individual receiving it.
Conditions abound where this sacrament is concerned; in part, because Paul in the same letter where the words of institution are recorded he addresses people who were treating it simply as a shared meal, eating as much bread, and drinking as much wine as was available (some to an apparent state of intoxication). Explicitly Paul advises eating a meal at home before engaging in this rite. Paul in his typically overstated way puts the fear of God into those who take this sacrament lightly, saying that those who take unworthily take it to their own condemnation.
Unfortunately, that is what stuck regarding this sacrament and from that moment on it has been overly guarded and protected on the premise of preventing some from unworthily taking it and condemning themselves. Paul's overstating his warning has done damage to his explanation of this sacrament by occluding what he actually is saying about it in his recitation of Jesus' words of institution. So let us return to what Paul is quoting as Jesus' original words.
We tend to overlook the two simple elements used in this sacrament, bread and wine. I say simple because bread and wine strike us as common - minimalistic. In fact, the practice in most churches is to reduce the bread to a thin wafer and the intake of wine to sip or dip of the wafer into the wine or just the wafer of itself - minimalism to the max. There is a great deal of symbolism involved in these two "simple" elements. Bread and wine, however, are not merely "simple." Bread and wine are creations; human creations made from what God created, the earth, wheat, water, grapes, sunlight, and yeast. In essence these "simple" elements are an expansion of what God expended at the dawn of creation and is being expanded by human creativity. To make these elements humans take a little of what God has expended and making more of it - expanding it.
Jesus takes these God and man made elements and recreates them by a spoken desire to be one with those who are eating and drinking bread and wine with him. In essence he creates a new meaning by which to recognize the grace that creates and sustains all life, "Take eat this is my body, broken for you... This cup is a new testament in my blood; this do, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me."
It is impossible to grasp the fullness of God's grace - so we have Jesus in whom the fullness of God's grace is understood as being presented in a way we can recognize and understand, that we are products of a desire, of a grace, and of a love which resulted in who we are and which continues to create and sustains creation and God's creative activity in the hope and faith that nothing God expends and that nothing God expands is ever diminished but rather continually recreated in the risen and rising Christ.
At the end of Jesus' words of institution Paul adds his brief understanding of this sacrament, "For as often as ye eat this bread and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord's death till he comes." As minimalistic as this is, it is cosmic in scope and reflects the kenotic creativity of God as being fully expressed in the kenotic act of Jesus on the cross which brings us to the significance of this sacrament.
Paul's explanation sounds straightforward and simple enough as reflecting the doctrine surrounding the Jesus's crucifixion for the past two thousand years as a sacrifice meant to fulfill the requirement of the Judaic law of the time as way of atoning for one's sins. As such, in partaking of this sacrament most believe it to be a reiteration, a recall of Jesus' sacrifice that results in forgiving the sins of those who sincerely receive it as such. Is that what Paul is really saying? Perhaps.
Paul was a product of Pharisaical Judaism and the Greek culture of his time. His view of law, justification by faith, and grace were shaped by those times, but we see in his epistles that Paul was far ahead of his times and expanded the concept of grace far beyond what most of his contemporaries were comfortable with. What intrigues me with Paul is in his writings he frequently comes across as saying more than what he is appears to be thinking about at the time which comes through as his occasional odd way of putting things.
The context in which Paul states some things occludes the message or the explanation he is trying to make. For example, the context of Paul's explanation of Jesus's words of institution are placed in a scandal involving the practice of what we call Holy Communion in the early church at Corinth and his condemnation of those who take this sacrament unworthily. Unfortunately, what sticks is our human attraction to the scandal rather than his explanation of this sacrament. It's more important to set aside Paul's zealot endeavor to quash turning the sacrament into a Sunday afternoon picnic in order to spend some time unpacking what he is saying in his brief explanation of this sacrament.
First, it is important is to understand what Paul is not saying. As much as Paul utilizes the word and concept of grace throughout his epistles, he does not associate grace with this or any sacramental rite as something that will be bestowed on one who participates in them. For Paul, Holy Communion is about the kenotic creativity of God in Christ.
Holy communion is a participation in Jesus's kenotic act of making room for the other, of emptying self, of breaking self open, and pouring self out for the other - "For as often as ye eat this bread and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord's death." In doing so, the result is that in such intentional expending of self like Jesus, of living into kenosis as symbolized in this sacrament, one commits to the other people sharing this bread and drinking this cup, to forgive them, as Jesus does to the last drop of life. One and all are saying that he, she, they, and we are a sign and part of the same kenotic act of Jesus, being one with the rising Christ - "Until he comes."
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In conclusion I believe that the sacraments do not bestow grace upon an individual, but rather that the sacraments afford the recipient of them recognition of the grace of God, the love of God that has been in existence since the dawn of creation and revealed and reaffirmed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as the Christ. The sacraments encourage and remind the recipient to live grace out as a kenotic creative act in making room for the other, as expanding the rising Christ.
Until next time, stay faithful.
Norm
