Lost time, lost space

The first creation account (Genesis 1:1-2:3) is obviously structured around the seven-day week, and that gives it the theme of time.  The goal of creation in this account is the seventh day, the day of rest.  God rests from his completed task of creation; humanity, by implication, rests with him.  The seventh day is sanctified: the Sabbath.

The second creation account (Genesis 2:4-25) is geographically structured, and consequently we can reasonably say that the theme of the account is space.  The goal of creation in this account is the garden-sanctuary of Eden, the place where humanity is to dwell in God's presence.  The Lord walks in the garden which Adam keeps and guards.

Time and space - and concretely that means this particular day or hour and this particular location - are seen in these two accounts as gifts of grace.  And by 'grace' here we mean grace in all its fullness: which is to say, time and place are given so that in them relationship with God can be given.

And yet for us time and space are experienced as frustrations and limitations.  Time slips away too quickly, and we feel that something of ourselves slip away with it.  "The past tempts us, the present confuses us, and the future frightens us.  And our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast, terrible in-between."  Or then again, time drags, and we wonder how it can be so vast and empty.  Meanwhile, we find ourselves in one place wishing we were in another, staring at our screens as if they could transport us to the places they show.  People we love are scattered around the world.  We all have cars, which means we can go places, but instead of liberation that creates a new network of responsibilities: we really must visit so and so and get to such and such a place this year.  We find ourselves bewildered and rootless.  We want to belong to a place, but we don't want to be tied down.

In Deuteronomy, Moses describes the curses that will come upon the people of Israel if they are faithless and betray God's covenant.  It is striking to me that those curses include these verses:

“And the Lord will scatter you among all peoples, from one end of the earth to the other, and there you shall serve other gods of wood and stone, which neither you nor your fathers have known.  And among these nations you shall find no respite, and there shall be no resting-place for the sole of your foot, but the Lord will give you there a trembling heart and failing eyes and a languishing soul.  Your life shall hang in doubt before you. Night and day you shall be in dread and have no assurance of your life.  In the morning you shall say, ‘If only it were evening!’ and at evening you shall say, ‘If only it were morning!’ because of the dread that your heart shall feel, and the sights that your eyes shall see.

Space as a curse - the land of other nations, with not so much as a place to put down your foot.  Time as a curse - longing for night during the day, and for morning in the night.  What Moses is describing here is just life, fallen life.  Life outside Eden.

Until the redemption of creation, this is going to be our experience.  But I have been thinking about what we might do, as Christian communities, to find time and space as a source of blessing again.  Sabbath, of course, whatever that might look like for us.  (Can I suggest that it needs to be communal if it's to be anything - which is naturally difficult in a world which never stops.  We will need strong church cultures of rest here).  And perhaps a commitment to be present, to be here.  Did it ever occur to you that the biggest encouragement you can be to Christian brothers and sisters on a Sunday is just turning up to church?  Being there matters.

One day our time will be caught up into God's time, and our space will be sanctified again by God's direct presence.  Until then, we can enjoy God's good provision best by living as witnesses to the fact that in Christ this is already so.

Thoughts on Holy Communion for evangelicals

1.  There is a real danger that in our strong desire to put some distance between us and Rome we devalue the sacraments in general and the Eucharist in particular.  In particular, to avoid a mechanical approach to grace we can end up denying that the Supper is a means of grace at all.  This is not the position of our Protestant forebears, nor is it sustainable from Scripture.

2.  Whilst we're pretty hot on the Supper as a memorial ("Do this in remembrance of me"), I think we are less good on the Supper as a participation together in Christ.  Maybe it's because at this point we hit something we can't quite explain: how is this bread and wine a sharing in Christ's body and blood?  My guess is a) we probably don't need to explain it so much as experience it and b) there are some useful parallels in 1 Corinthians 10 that will help us to think it through, especially the parallel with "Israel according to the flesh" which participates in the altar by eating the sacrifices.  I've written about this before.  I take it that this means primarily that by eating from the sacrifice together the Israelites were enjoying the benefit of the sacrifice - namely, fellowship with God.  As we together feed on Christ by faith as he is represented in the bread and wine, we enjoy together the fruit of his sacrifice: relationship with God and with each other.

3.  The words "each other" are pretty important.  Paul's warning that a person ought to examine themselves before taking the Supper have often been, for me, the occasion for uncomfortable introspection.  Is my heart right?  Am I eating and drinking worthily?  But now it seems to me that the context is against this interpretation.  The problem in Corinth is that the rich are eating a leisurely and satisfying meal while the poor arrive late and go without.  For Paul, this is a blaspheming of the Supper; in fact, it is not the Lord's Supper at all.  It can't be, because it doesn't fit.  How can we selfishly celebrate a meal which commemorates the Lord's great self-sacrifice?  It empties the meal of its meaning by contradicting it.  But note that the point is not: examine yourself to see whether you are internally ready to partake.  The point is: check yourself to see whether you are recognising the body, the community for which Christ died, and celebrating appropriately.

4.  In terms of practice, I suspect the standard evangelical approach to Communion is a bit too 'head down, keep quiet, me and Jesus'.  How do we reflect the communal nature of this meal?  How does our practice reflect the fact that because we partake of one loaf we are one body?  Last week at CCC we took Communion together seated around a table, facing each other, with a time of open prayer for people in the church, our mission partners, and the church universal.  It was good.

5.  I have questions about the intersection of objective and subjective in Holy Communion.  I wonder whether we often lay a great deal too much stress on how Communion makes us feel.  It seems to me that Paul sees the sacrament as something much more objective - a proclamation of Christ's death.  There is, of course, subjectivity; each individual eats!  But I don't see too much emphasis on how the Supper makes us feel in the NT.

6.  On the subject of proclamation, Paul does seem to think that the Supper is a sermon in itself.  I don't think it needs to be surrounded by lots of words, just enough to make it clear what we're remembering and celebrating.

7.  I wonder if our emphasis on memorial sometimes misses out the formative aspect of Communion.  Back to ancient Israel: the remembering and the celebrating together was what continually re-formed the people as the people of Yahweh, the people of the Exodus and the Covenant.  I think as we gather around the Communion table we are re-formed as the people of the cross and the resurrection.

8.  If the Supper is (one of) the means by which God communicates his grace, the way in which we enjoy fellowship in the fruits of Christ's sacrifice, and the way in which we are re-formed as the people of God, I can't see why we wouldn't celebrate it as often as possible.

10 thoughts on baptism for baptists

1.  In the NT, baptism is not (part of) the answer to the question 'what should I do now that I have become a Christian?'  Rather, it is (part of) the answer to the question 'how do I become a Christian?'  See, for a paradigm, Acts 2 and the response to Peter's Pentecost sermon.  That means, amongst other things, that if we deny or delay baptism in a particular case because we are waiting to see more evidence of Christian living, we are very much expecting the cart to move without the horse.  It ain't right.

2.  When we use language like 'just symbolic', as if that could be opposed to something more 'real' and 'substantial', we fail to understand that all of human life is lived by means of symbols.  This is especially true of the Christian life, the substance and reality of which are not to be found in the individual believer, in the church, or indeed anywhere in all this earthly world, but are rather seated at the right hand of God in the heavenly places - which is to say, the reality and substance is Christ himself.

3.  We can't rebaptise people.  It's not on.  If you are really convinced that the baptism of an infant is not valid (on which, see below), we need to say that the person has not been baptised, and therefore this is their first, one and only, baptism.  "We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins."

4.  When we frame baptism as the first step of obedience after conversion, rather than as a part of conversion, we are in danger of tying ourselves in knots over the validity of baptism in any particular case.  Suppose someone is baptised at 14 on profession of faith.  At 17, they have what they interpret as a conversion experience and request baptism, because their first baptism did not follow faith and was therefore not valid.  Should we baptise them (again)?  At 20, at University, they realise that they've only now really owned the faith for themselves rather than living in the shadow of their parents' faith.  Should their University church now baptise them (again)?  What if they backslide in the years following Uni, and return to the church sensing that this is their real conversion - another baptism?  I hope the answer in every case would be no!  But can our theology of baptism support this answer?

5.  If we distinguish between the validity of a sacrament and its ideal form, we can make some sense of this.  Ideally, baptism takes place at the point of repentance and faith; this is the pattern of Acts, and makes most sense of the incorporation-into-Christ-in-his-death imagery of baptism.  But where it happens years before or years after repentance/faith, it can still be a valid ordinance.  I'm not sure there is much more required for the validity of the sacrament than baptism into the Triune name, with the intention of teaching the baptised person to obey all that Christ commanded (Matt 28).  For this reason, I think we ought to accept infant baptism as valid albeit irregular baptism.

6.  A less individualistic view of baptism would help us.  Too often we make baptism a Pelagian ordinance: the reason we don't baptise babies is because everything is suspended on the choice of the individual!  There is some truth to this - we, I think rightly, ordinarily expect the baptised to understand what they are doing to some extent, and to desire baptism.  But this doesn't mean it is just down to the individual to decide whether they should be baptised, or down to the individual to decide whether their baptism was valid.  The church has a commission to baptise, and it is down to the church to decide if someone is ready for baptism, and to acknowledge the baptism of individuals.

7.  I think one of the reasons the apostle Paul regularly points people back to their baptism as constituting their identity is because baptism is an objective, tangible thing.  We are in danger of undermining this when we make baptism all about the individual's state of heart and mind.  Baptism is about Christ.  Therefore, the person baptised can look back at their baptism and see Christ at work.  Of course their faith is necessary, but this is exactly how they exercise faith in the present: to remember that they are baptised.  I think people baptised as infants can still be encouraged to exercise this sort of faith.

8.  Because baptism isn't primarily about the individual but about Christ, we shouldn't require people to deliver a testimony at their baptism.  Their entry to the water is testimony enough.

9.  Because baptism is into Christ, and therefore into his body, everyone who is baptised should be enrolled as a church member as a direct result.

10.  Nobody should be taking Holy Communion if they haven't been baptised.  Get born, then eat food.  This is the consensus of the Church from earliest times: "But let no one eat or drink of your Eucharist, unless they have been baptised into the name of the Lord."  If you think someone is ready to take Communion, they are ready to be baptised.  Do that first.

The Significance of Sacraments

I've been doing lots of reading in preparation for preaching a series at CCC on the subject of sacraments.  You can get the first sermon of three here, which is sort of introductory; the other two will deal with Baptism and Holy Communion in more detail.

I've had quite a few thoughts, but one that I keep coming back to is that I suspect we often ask the wrong questions about sacraments.  A key question we tend to ask is 'how does it work?' - how does baptism work?  How does the Supper work?  That tends to reduce the sacraments to mechanisms.  Or, perhaps to avoid the sacrament-as-mechanism, we insist that the sacrament doesn't work - it doesn't do anything, it is merely an illustration of the gospel.  It doesn't add anything to the sermon except a bit of a visual reminder for those of you who appreciate that sort of thing.

I wonder if a better question might be 'what does it mean?'  What does it mean for the whole of creation that the Son of God entered into the cosmos and took on flesh?  What does it mean for this bread and wine that the minister will speak over it the words which the Son of God himself spoke, in space and time, over similar bread and wine?  What does it mean that we together will eat that bread and drink that wine?  What does it mean for our ordinary meals that they occur in proximity to this holy meal?  What does it mean for the ordinary stuff of our existence that this particular stuff has been set apart by God's promise and command to be more than 'just stuff'?  Can anything be 'just stuff' anymore?

For me, at least, that has been a much more fruitful line of enquiry, and in particular has led to wonder and worship at the sacraments and by implication the presence and power of Christ in creation.  And that seems like a good thing.