Introduction to the Episcopal Church
Session
8
Understanding
the Book of Common Prayer (BCP)
Part
4: The Sacraments
The
Book of Common Prayer is a strategy of prayer to invoke God upon the times of
our life. Another human experience of
time might be what is called eventful time or life crisis time or “rite of
passage” time. I believe that the BCP
provides a prayer format to deal with this nuance or mood in our experience of
time. Arnold van Gennep developed a
theory of a rite of passage. For so many
years developmental psychology limited a majority of its effort to child
psychological development until scholars began to acknowledge that
psychological development occurs over one’s lifetime. A rite of passage involves the way in which a
culture facilitates or initiates members into distinct status change as a
person gets older. The BCP in its
presentation of how time is experienced presents a corresponding liturgical
format for rite of passage time, eventful time or crisis time. In short, the presentation of the liturgy in
the BCP of the seven sacraments represents the church’s efforts to invoke God’s
presence in our lives as we age. The sacraments are
an honest confession that we age together within a community. I believe most people and some clergy treat
the sacraments as compartmentalized religious acts that one does to “obey” the
church. My contention is that the sacraments
are the honest attempt of the church to be “inter-generationally” supportive of
one another as we age in community and as we invoke God’s presence within the
life experiences that come to us at various ages.
I
have tried and probably failed to teach the anthropological soundness of the
sacraments. Meanwhile outside of the
church, first word, first step, first day at school, driver’s license,
graduation from high school, graduation from college, first major job in a
career, marriage, birth of a child, empty nest, male pattern baldness, gray
hair, menopause, retirement, assisted living, skilled nursing; these rites seem
to be the telling rites of passage and the church has failed, I have failed, to
show how the sacraments are so interwoven with our lives as to be
unavoidable. And if we live
sacramentally, we live our lives as if God and the community of faith care
about our lives and we prayerfully alone and together invoke the presence of
God as we live into authentic tasks and crises that define the human adventure.
What
I will endeavor to show in the next sessions is how the sacraments provide a
structure of support and initiation in living with authenticity into the crises
that confront us in life. Sacraments are
not magical ceremonies that end after the ceremonies; the ceremony is but the
gateway into the duration of the life crisis that is expressed in the
sacramental liturgy. The sacraments have
undergone changes in the history of how the church has prayed together because
the effort to care for the people who come to pray has influenced our church to
have the sacraments be a pastoral support for those who are aging together in
different ways in the church.
Exercise:
Think
about your secular rites of passage.
Think about your experience of the sacraments in the church. Baptism. Eucharist. Confirmation.
Reconciliation. Prayer for the Sick.
Holy Matrimony. Ordination. How have you availed yourself of the
sacraments? Have the sacraments been a
support for your life of faith within the church and outside of the church? Are we embarrassed to make a confession or
ask for a prayer when we are sick?
Ordination, does that mean the clergy do all of the “real” ministry of
the church?
Father
Phil
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