The Sacraments in Biblical Perspective

Interpretation: Resources for the Use of Scripture in the Church

Ronald P. Byars

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781611641493
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Rituals & Practice

The third volume in the exciting new Interpretation series offers a comprehensive look at the theology of sacraments. For many church people, worship is about preaching and music. Baptism and the Lord's Supper are occasional additions to Sunday services. Recognizing that church-goers are uncertain about the need for sacraments, Ronald Byars describes the possibility that the very doing of worship--the actions observed, the postures assumed, the sound and sight of water, the smell and taste of bread and wine--will subtly alter the temper of the heart and the mind. If we encounter the sacraments honestly, they lead us to the very heart of the gospel.

CHAPTER 1

River Jordan:
The Gospel in Water

Luther’s “Flood Prayer”

Martin Luther composed for his baptismal liturgy a prayer called the Sindflutgebet, or “flood prayer.” The prayer evokes Old Testament texts as well as texts from the New Testament. It recalls the universal flood, recorded in Genesis, from which Noah and his family were carried to safety in the ark. The prayer rehearses the exodus story of Israel’s escape from Egypt through the waters of the Red Sea. It calls to mind Jesus’ own baptism in the Jordan River, described in the three Synoptic Gospels and, somewhat differently, in the Gospel of John. Luther’s prayer has served as a model for most of the newer baptismal prayers in the service books of several denominations. (See, for example, the Presbyterian Book of Common Worship; Book of Worship: United Church of Christ; The [Episcopal] Book of Common Prayer; Celebrate God’s Presence: A Book of Services for the United Church of Canada; Common Worship: Services and Prayers for the Church of England; Evangelical Lutheran Worship; The United Methodist Book of Worship.)

Almighty and eternal God, according to Your strict judgment You condemned the unbelieving world through the flood, yet according to Your great mercy You preserved believing Noah and his family, eight souls in all. You drowned hard-hearted Pharaoh and all his host in the Red Sea, yet led Your people Israel through the water on dry ground, foreshadowing this washing of Your Holy Baptism.

Through the Baptism in the Jordan of Your beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, You sanctified and instituted all waters to be a blessed flood and a lavish washing away of sin.

We pray that You would behold this child according to Your boundless mercy and bless him with true faith by the Holy Spirit, that through this saving flood all sin in him, which has been inherited from Adam and which he himself has committed since, would be drowned and die.

Grant that he be kept safe and secure in the holy ark of the Christian Church, being separated from the multitude of unbelievers and serving Your name at all times with a fervent spirit and a joyful hope, so that, with all believers in Your promise, he would be declared worthy of eternal life; through Jesus Christ, our Lord. AMEN.

(http://ematthaei.blogspot.com/2006/08/luthers-flood-prayer_11.html, accessed October 11, 2010)

Thanksgiving over the Water
(Book of Common Worship [1993])

We give you thanks, Eternal God, for you nourish and sustain all living things by the gift of water. In the beginning of time, your Spirit moved over the watery chaos, calling forth order and life.

In the time of Noah, you destroyed evil by the waters of the flood, giving righteousness a new beginning. You led Israel out of slavery, through the waters of the sea, into the freedom of the promised land. In the waters of Jordan Jesus was baptized by John and anointed with your Spirit. By the baptism of his own death and resurrection, Christ set us free from sin and death, and opened the way to eternal life.

We thank you, O God, for the water of baptism. In it we are buried with Christ in his death. From it we are raised to share in his resurrection, through it we are reborn by the power of the Holy Spirit. Send your Spirit to move over this water that it may be a fountain of deliverance and rebirth. Wash away the sin of all who are cleansed by it. Raise them to new life, and graft them to the body of Christ. Pour out your Holy Spirit upon them, that they may have power to do your will, and continue forever in the risen life of Christ.

To you, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God, be all praise, honor, and glory, now and forever. Amen.

The Church of England’s Common Worship evokes Noah’s flood and the drowning of the Egyptian soldiers at the Red Sea as it vividly petitions God, “Drown sin in the waters of judgement” (Common Worship, 365).

Several of the denominational books expand the biblical allusions, referring, for example, to the water in which human beings are suspended before birth. The United Methodist Book of Worship includes the line, “In the fullness of time you sent Jesus, nurtured in the water of a womb” (UMBW, 90). The baptismal font as womb as well as tomb is an ancient and vivid image. The United Church of Canada’s Book of Services has a similar reference, and adds the petition, “Pour out, O God, your Holy Spirit upon this water, that this font may become your womb of new birth, our fount of blessing and source of grace” (Celebrate God’s Presence, 344).

The United Church of Christ Book of Worship includes other water references from Scripture: “Jesus was baptized by John in the water of the Jordan, became living water to a woman at the Samaritan well, washed the feet of the disciples, and sent them forth to baptize all the nations by water and the Holy Spirit” (Book of Worship, 141).

The post-Vatican II Roman Catholic blessing of the water in the baptismal rite for adults follows the same form as Luther’s flood prayer, and adds another image from Scripture: “Your Son willed that water and blood should flow from his side as he hung upon the cross” (The Rites of the Catholic Church, vol. 1, 201).

Common Misconceptions of Baptism

In December 2004, the BBC reported that David Beckham, the British soccer star, and his wife Victoria “hosted a star-studded christening for sons Romeo and Brooklyn.” Victoria Beckham planned the ceremony, which took place in a chapel built especially for the occasion. According to the BBC, the chapel had two Buddhist shrines at its entrance. After Brooklyn was born, David Beck-ham had remarked, “I definitely want Brooklyn to be christened, but I don’t know into what religion yet” (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4120477.stm).

If the Beckham “christening” event seems a bit incoherent, that is nevertheless hardly unique, except perhaps in its flamboyance. The church has not typically done a good job of interpreting the sacrament of baptism, either to its own members or to the general public. Those who seek baptism for themselves or their children, or who observe a baptism in church, tend to fill in the blanks for themselves, interpreting the meaning of the sacrament on their own, with help from the general culture. Baptism as culturally interpreted may be understood to be, variously,

a charming ceremony by which a family publicly celebrates the birth of a child;

a rite parents submit to, either to appease the grandparents or perhaps to ensure the child against some peril in this life or the life to come, if there should be one;

in cases of an older child, a sort of Christian bar or bat mitzvah, a coming-of-age rite of passage timed to occur when a child reaches the cusp of puberty;

any of several other possibilities learned either from folk customs or from treatment of baptisms (or “christenings”) in popular culture

In most cases, those who come to the church seeking baptism for themselves or their children at least outwardly conform to the expected churchly forms, whatever their personal understanding of the rite. Only a very few build their own chapels and design their own ceremonies!

The challenge to the contemporary church is clear. We have to be deliberate and intentional in unwrapping the layered meaning of the sacraments, both for newcomers to the church and for continuing members. While baptism has multiple meanings, it is not open to any and every possible meaning. The example offered by the Beckhams no doubt stems from good intentions and from the barest acquaintance with the church’s baptismal practice. However, neither good intentions nor lack of information justifies a rite that is only distantly related to the church’s understanding and use of the sacraments with which God has entrusted it. Living as we do in a cultural moment marked by widespread biblical illiteracy, it is apparent that the church can no longer depend upon society in general to teach the basics of the faith (if it ever could), nor may it even place too much reliance on occasional exposure to the church’s worship or its offerings of instruction for children. What would seem to be required would be an intentionality that grows out of the awareness that the church finds itself in a new cultural position in which we need to learn to think like a minority rather than like a majority (whatever the numbers involved).

A good point to begin reflection on the sacrament of baptism is the Gospel stories of Jesus’ own baptism at the hands of John the Baptizer. For at least the first three centuries of the church’s life, it was this story that provided the primary model for the rite of baptism, as well as for understanding it and teaching about it. The background for that story begins with John, an Elijah-like character drawing crowds to hear his preaching and witness his baptizing.

An Opening Out of an Old Story

The story of Jesus Christ is one that is drenched in Old Testament precedents, images, and language. It is not a brand-new story as much as it is an opening out of an old story—one that begins with God’s choosing of Abraham and his progeny, and God’s choosing of David and his royal succession. John the Baptizer is an Elijahlike prophetic figure who points like an arrow to Jesus, identified as God’s “son,” borrowing an Old Testament image. Jewish people would recognize and resonate with language about repentance, confession of sin, a heavenly voice, and the anointing of the spirit. The baptismal waters, according to the testimony of Mark and Luke, are a washing of repentance and the forgiveness of sins, powerful themes carried forward and developed in Christian proclamation and practice.

John the Baptizer

Matthew 3:1–12; Mark 1:1–8; Luke 3:1–6; John 1:6–8,19–28

(We will begin with Mark, since that Gospel served as one source for both Matthew and Luke.)

Mark 1:1–8

Baptism plays a prominent role at or near the beginning of all four Gospels. Gordon Lathrop has suggested that all four follow the same shape:

baptism,

narratives,

meal and passion,

resurrection and sending . . .

Such a list is, in exactly this order,

recognizable to us as the emerging shape

of the Christian Sunday meeting.

(Lathrop, “Worship in the Twenty-first Century,” 283)

The question might be whether the Gospels shaped the liturgical order or liturgical practice shaped the Gospels. It is quite possible that the answer is both. In any case, it is obvious that baptism is not a marginal matter for the Gospel writers. Baptism stands at the beginning of the Christian life, and at the beginning of the gospel story.

The Gospel of Mark opens with a quote that is a blend of the Old Testament books of Malachi and Isaiah (even though the introduction says, “As it is written in the prophet Isaiah”).

Malachi-Isaiah as quoted in Mark		Original Malachi
“See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness . . .” (Mark 1:2–3)		“See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple.” (Mal. 3:1)

The “wilderness” reference is indeed from the prophet Isaiah. “A voice cries out: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD’” (Isa. 40:3). Mark immediately identified the “messenger” mentioned in Malachi 3 as John the Baptist. “John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Mark 1:4).

The fact that John’s ministry took place “in the wilderness” is not merely circumstantial, either. For Israel, a primary formative experience had been the forty years of wandering in the wilderness, somewhere between Egypt and the promised land. John may have been by nature more at home in wilderness places at the margins of society, but at the same time the wilderness venue suited his message perfectly. John intended his hearers to understand that their generation stood poised at the beginning of a new sort of exoduslike transformation, a shaking off and leaving behind of the sins that had exiled them from God, a lifting of the eyes toward a renewal of the covenant of promise. Baptism served as a personal revisiting of Israel’s experience at the Red Sea, a crossing over to safety, or even their crossing of the Jordan under Joshua’s leadership, when they finally laid claim to the land of promise.

Wilderness, by definition, is a wild place, an untamed, in-between place, as it had been for Israel en route to the land of promise and as it was for those who had come out to hear John and witness what he was doing. It is a watershed sort of place, where people are both leaving something behind and moving toward something new. Most of us have experienced wilderness moments. We have spent time in a place where the landmarks are missing and the threats are real, though not so apparent as to be easily avoided, and we have found ourselves standing bewildered at some sort of intersection. Not only individuals but groups find themselves in those in-between moments, and that includes the church, for which the twenty-first-century social and cultural environment has been changing rapidly.

Centuries after the times of prophets seemed to have died out in Israel, John preached with a prophetic voice. Why wasn’t preaching enough? Why did he accompany his message of repentance with a summons to baptism?

Hebrew prophets were known to accompany their prophetic messages with symbolic action. The prophet Ezekiel reported that God had told him to construct a model of Jerusalem under siege:

Then lie on your left side, and place the punishment of the house of Israel upon it; you shall bear their punishment for the number of days that you lie there. . . . When you have completed these, you shall lie down a second time, but on your right side. . . . See, I am putting cords on you so that you cannot turn from one side to the other until you have completed the days of your siege. (Ezek. 4:4–8)

The sign acts continued as Ezekiel dramatized prophecies of the siege of Jerusalem.

Similarly, the prophet Isaiah heard God tell him to walk naked through the streets of Jerusalem: “Then the LORD said, ‘Just as my servant Isaiah has walked naked and barefoot for three years as a sign and a portent against Egypt and Ethiopia, so shall the king of Assyria lead away the Egyptians as captives and the Ethiopians as exiles, both the young and the old, naked and barefoot, with buttocks uncovered, to the shame of Egypt” (Isa. 20:3–4). In the same prophetic tradition of word plus sign, John came baptizing, a ritual washing that dramatized his message that the nation was in need of radical cleansing. Words matter, and using them skillfully can have a powerful impact. However, human bein...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Series Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction: The Challenge of the Sacraments
• The Sacrament of Baptism
• Chapter 1. River Jordan: The Gospel in Water
• Chapter 2. Marking the Transition from Death to Life
• Chapter 3. Baptism: Life, Spirit, and Covenant
• Chapter 4. Early Baptismal Theological Themes and Developing Rites
• Chapter 5. The Spirit Clothes, Marks, Seals, Converts, Nurtures, and Incorporates
• The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper
• Chapter 6. Do This
• Chapter 7. When the Meal Goes Wrong: Apostolic Critiques of Practice
• Chapter 8. Real Presence
• Chapter 9. You have Prepared a Table
• Bibliography
• Scripture Index
• Subject Index