“Sacraments ordained of Christ be not only badges or tokens
of Christian men's profession, but rather they be certain sure witnesses, and
effectual signs of grace, and God's good will towards us, by the which he doth
work invisibly in us, and doth not only quicken, but also strengthen and
confirm our Faith in him.
There are two Sacraments ordained of Christ our Lord in the Gospel, that is to say, Baptism, and the Supper of the Lord.”
– Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, Article XXV. Of the Sacraments (1571)
Anglicans recognize that “Other sacramental rites which evolved in the Church include confirmation, ordination, holy matrimony, reconciliation of a penitent, and unction” (An Outline of the Faith commonly called the Catechism, 1979 Book of Common Prayer), but have not generally counted them as sacraments on a par with baptism and Eucharist.
Baptism
“The crushing suffocation of sin, the rage that sweeps over us like torrents, the weakness that undermines all resolve, the pitiful self-righteousness that cannot ignore how tinny it all sounds, the smallness and meanness, the icy darkness of cruelty: Christ has tasted all this in His baptism for us and for our sake.”
– Katherine Sonderegger (1950 - ), Systematic Theology Vol. 1
“Christians will be found in the neighbourhood of Jesus – but Jesus is found in the neighbourhood of human confusion and suffering, defencelessly alongside those in need. If being baptized is being led to where Jesus is, then being baptized is being led towards the chaos and the neediness of a humanity that has forgotten its own destiny.”
– Rowan Williams (1960 - ), Being Christian
“Christians are baptized ‘into a life summed up in love,’ even though we have to spend the rest of our own lives learning how to do it. Love, therefore, is the budding-point from which all the rest come: that tender, cherishing attitude; that unlimited self-forgetfulness, generosity and kindness which is the attitude of God to all His creatures; and so must be the attitude towards them which His Holy Spirit brings forth in us . . . To be unloving is to be out of touch with God. So the generous, cherishing Divine Love, the indiscriminate delight in others, just or unjust, must be our model too. To come down to brass tacks, God loves the horrid man at the fish shop, the tiresome woman in the next flat, the disappointing vicar . . . and the contractor who has cut down the row of trees we loved, to build a row of revolting bungalows. God *loves*, not tolerates, these wayward, half-grown, self-centered spirits, and seeks without ceasing to draw them into His love. And the first-fruit of His indwelling presence, the first sign that we are on His side and He on ours, must be at least a tiny bud of this Charity breaking the hard and rigid outline of our life.”
– Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941), The Fruits of the Spirit
"The sacrament of baptism is a lifelong commitment immersed in the reality of the triune God and daring to live the teachings and the ways of Jesus of Nazareth. It is a commitment to renounce, reject, and actively oppose in our lives and in our world anything that rebels against the God who the Bible says is love. It is a commitment to renounce anything that attempts to separate us from the love of God and from each other. It is a commitment to renounce anything that hurts or harms any human child of God or this creation."
– Michael Curry (1953 - ), Opening remarks for Executive Council, June 25, 2021
"In Jesus, God shows what it looks like to be vulnerable, humble, and self-giving. In him, we see one who did not run from the things that broke his heart, nor did he first calculate what he would gain from a situation. Jesus sought instead to give away his life, that he and others night flourish as God intends. And before you say, 'Well, he was God; of course he did. What's that got to do with us?’, know *how* Jesus did it. In the very first chapter of Mark, Jesus heads from Nazareth to be baptized by John in the River Jordan. Just as Jesus comes up from the waters, the heavens break open and the Holy Spirit descends on him like a dove. 'And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased"' (Mark 1:10-11). Everything that follows is powered by the Holy Spirit and by the love of God.
The same Spirit that Jesus received now rests on anyone who follows him. God invites us into covenant, whereby the power of the Spirit we can allow our hearts to break, and then take the pieces–our lives, our love, our privileges–and share it all like a broken loaf of communion bread."
– Stephanie Spellers (1971 - ), The Church Cracked Open
There are two Sacraments ordained of Christ our Lord in the Gospel, that is to say, Baptism, and the Supper of the Lord.”
– Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, Article XXV. Of the Sacraments (1571)
Anglicans recognize that “Other sacramental rites which evolved in the Church include confirmation, ordination, holy matrimony, reconciliation of a penitent, and unction” (An Outline of the Faith commonly called the Catechism, 1979 Book of Common Prayer), but have not generally counted them as sacraments on a par with baptism and Eucharist.
“The crushing suffocation of sin, the rage that sweeps over us like torrents, the weakness that undermines all resolve, the pitiful self-righteousness that cannot ignore how tinny it all sounds, the smallness and meanness, the icy darkness of cruelty: Christ has tasted all this in His baptism for us and for our sake.”
– Katherine Sonderegger (1950 - ), Systematic Theology Vol. 1
“Christians will be found in the neighbourhood of Jesus – but Jesus is found in the neighbourhood of human confusion and suffering, defencelessly alongside those in need. If being baptized is being led to where Jesus is, then being baptized is being led towards the chaos and the neediness of a humanity that has forgotten its own destiny.”
– Rowan Williams (1960 - ), Being Christian
“Christians are baptized ‘into a life summed up in love,’ even though we have to spend the rest of our own lives learning how to do it. Love, therefore, is the budding-point from which all the rest come: that tender, cherishing attitude; that unlimited self-forgetfulness, generosity and kindness which is the attitude of God to all His creatures; and so must be the attitude towards them which His Holy Spirit brings forth in us . . . To be unloving is to be out of touch with God. So the generous, cherishing Divine Love, the indiscriminate delight in others, just or unjust, must be our model too. To come down to brass tacks, God loves the horrid man at the fish shop, the tiresome woman in the next flat, the disappointing vicar . . . and the contractor who has cut down the row of trees we loved, to build a row of revolting bungalows. God *loves*, not tolerates, these wayward, half-grown, self-centered spirits, and seeks without ceasing to draw them into His love. And the first-fruit of His indwelling presence, the first sign that we are on His side and He on ours, must be at least a tiny bud of this Charity breaking the hard and rigid outline of our life.”
– Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941), The Fruits of the Spirit
"The sacrament of baptism is a lifelong commitment immersed in the reality of the triune God and daring to live the teachings and the ways of Jesus of Nazareth. It is a commitment to renounce, reject, and actively oppose in our lives and in our world anything that rebels against the God who the Bible says is love. It is a commitment to renounce anything that attempts to separate us from the love of God and from each other. It is a commitment to renounce anything that hurts or harms any human child of God or this creation."
– Michael Curry (1953 - ), Opening remarks for Executive Council, June 25, 2021
"In Jesus, God shows what it looks like to be vulnerable, humble, and self-giving. In him, we see one who did not run from the things that broke his heart, nor did he first calculate what he would gain from a situation. Jesus sought instead to give away his life, that he and others night flourish as God intends. And before you say, 'Well, he was God; of course he did. What's that got to do with us?’, know *how* Jesus did it. In the very first chapter of Mark, Jesus heads from Nazareth to be baptized by John in the River Jordan. Just as Jesus comes up from the waters, the heavens break open and the Holy Spirit descends on him like a dove. 'And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased"' (Mark 1:10-11). Everything that follows is powered by the Holy Spirit and by the love of God.
The same Spirit that Jesus received now rests on anyone who follows him. God invites us into covenant, whereby the power of the Spirit we can allow our hearts to break, and then take the pieces–our lives, our love, our privileges–and share it all like a broken loaf of communion bread."
– Stephanie Spellers (1971 - ), The Church Cracked Open
“Baptism
reminds us that there’s no ladder to holiness to climb, no self-improvement
plan to follow. It’s just death and resurrection, over and over again, day
after day, as God reaches down into our deepest graves and with the same power
that raised Jesus from the dead wrests us from our pride, our apathy, our fear,
our prejudice, our anger, our hurt, and our despair.”
–
Rachel Held Evans (1981-2019), Searching for Sunday
Eucharist
“We receive Christ Jesus in baptism once as the first beginner of our life, and in the eucharist repeatedly to bring our life by degrees to its completion”
– Richard Hooker (1554-1600), Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity
“. . . they saw their Lord and Master with hands and eyes lifted up to heaven first bless and consecrate for the endless good of all generations till the world's end the chosen elements of bread and wine, which elements made for ever the instruments of life by virtue of his divine benediction . . . They had at that time a sea of comfort and joy to wade in, and we by that which they did are taught that this heavenly food is given for the satisfying of our empty souls, and not for the exercising of our curious and subtle wits.”
– Richard Hooker (1554-1600), Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity
“It was one special end why the Sacrament itself was ordained, our comfort; the Church so tells us, we so hear it read every time to us: He has ordained these mysteries of His love and favour, to our great and endless comfort. The Father will give you the Comforter. Why He gives Him, we see; how He gives Him, we see not. The means for which He gives Him, is Christ—His entreaty by His word in prayer; by His flesh and blood in sacrifice, for His blood speaks, not His voice only. These means for which; and the very same, the means by which He gives the Comforter: by Christ the Word, and by Christ’s body and blood, both. In tongues it came, but the tongue is not the instrument of speech only but of taste, we all know. . . That not only by the letter we read, and the word we hear, but by the flesh we eat, and the blood we drink at His table, we be made partakers of His Spirit, and of the comfort of it.”
– Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), Sermons of the Sending of the Holy Ghost preached Upon Whit-Sunday, Sermon III
“As for the
Lord’s Supper, that is not only a sign and remembrance of Christ and his death,
but it is actually the giving Christ, and all the fruits of his death, to every
worthy receiver.”
– The Whole
Duty of Man (1658), Anonymous
“And if this Charity
be so necessary in all our services, much more in this, where by a joint
partaking in the same holy mysteries, we signify our being united and knit, not
only to Christ our Head, but also to each other, as fellow-members. And
therefore, if we come with any malice in our hearts, we commit an act of the
highest hypocrisy, by making a solemn profession in the Sacrament of that
Charity and brotherly whereof our hearts are quite void.”
– The Whole
Duty of Man (1658), Anonymous
“The doctrine of the church of England, and generally of the Protestants, in this article, is,--that after the minister of the holy mysteries hath rightly prayed, and blessed or consecrated the bread and the wine, the symbols become changed into the body and blood of Christ, after a sacramental, that is, in a spiritual real manner: so that all that worthily communicate, do by faith receive Christ really, effectually, to all the purposes of his passion: the wicked receive not Christ, but the bare symbols only; but yet to their hurt, because the offer of Christ is rejected, and they pollute the blood of the covenant, by using it as an unholy thing. The result of which doctrine is this: It is bread, and it is Christ's body. It is bread in substance, Christ in the sacrament; and Christ is as really given to all that are truly disposed, as the symbols are; each as they can; Christ as Christ can be given; the bread and wine as they can; and to the same real purposes, to which they are designed; and Christ does as really nourish and sanctify the soul, as the elements do the body. It is here, as in the other sacrament; for as there natural water becomes the laver of regeneration; so here, bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ; but, there and here too, the first substance is changed by grace, but remains the same in nature.”
– Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667). The Real Presence and Spiritual of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament
“Week by week
the Eucharistic Feast, inexhaustible centre of mystic experience, incandescent
with the love of God, welcomes the faithful to the vision of Eternal Truth
behind the Sacramental Veil.
What are the social emphases in this crowning Feast, wherein our triumph and our sorrow meet, and the personal life of the soul finds its most sacred expression.”
– Vida Dutton Scudder (1861-1954), Social Teachings of the Christian Year
“The
command, after all, was Take, eat: not Take, understand. Particularly, I hope I
need not be tormented by the question ‘What is this?’ – this wafer, this sip of
wine. That has a dreadful effect on me. It invites me to take ‘this’ out of its
holy context and regard it as an object among objects, indeed as part of
nature. It is like taking a red coal out of the fire to examine it: it becomes
like a dead coal.”
–
C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), ‘Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer’
“This
new life is spread not only by purely mental acts like belief, but by bodily
acts like baptism and Holy Communion. It is not merely the spreading of an
idea; it is more like evolution – a biological or super-biological fact. There
is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a
purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and
wine to put the new life into us.”
–
C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), ‘Mere Christianity’
“In the Eucharist, with the Risen Jesus present as our food, we are worshipping with the saints and angels in heaven. But the risen Jesus who is the heart of the heavenly worship is also a Jesus who was crucified, and we share in heaven’s worship only as sharing also in the Jesus who suffers in the world around us, reminding us to meet him there and to serve him in those who suffer. Indeed in the Eucharist we are summoned by two voices, which are really one voice: ‘Come, the heavenly banquet is here. Join with me and my mother and my friends in the heavenly supper.’ ‘Come, I am here in this world in those who suffer. Come to me, come with me, and serve me in them.”
– Michael Ramsey (1904-1988), Quoted in Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness, Rowell, Stevenson, Williams, ed.
“When I was ready to give up on the Church, it was the sacraments that pulled me back.
When my faith had become little more than an abstraction, a set of propositions to be affirmed or denied, the tangible, tactile nature of the sacraments invited me to touch, smell, taste, hear, and see God in the stuff of everyday life again. They got God out of my head and into my hands. They reminded me that Christianity isn’t meant to simply be believed; it’s meant to be lived, shared, eaten, spoken, and enacted in the presence of other people. They reminded me that, try as I may, I can’t be a Christian on my own.
Perhaps the most powerful of those sacraments is communion.”
– Rachel Held Evans (1981-2019), The Table. . ., rachelheldevans.com, July 15, 2014
“‘The blood of our Lord Jesus Christ,’ she says, raising the silver chalice to our lips. Receiving from her is my favorite part of Sunday services. She always says her line with such joy, like it is the greatest thing in the world, which, of course, it is.”
– Lauren Winner (1976 - ), Girl Meets God
– Lauren Winner (1976 - ), Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God
“The creation in all its intricacy and ambiguity is placed on the altar. We place ourselves there, too, even though we can scarcely fathom the mystery of ourselves any more than the wildness of creation. We present the totality of our lives with the bread and wine. We may be eating the ‘bread of adversity and
the water of affliction (Isaiah 30:20); we may be content and thankful; we may be confused or exhausted. We may have daily work, cares, and relationships to bring to the altar. To present these things at God’s altar is to present ourselves. We present them so the bread and the wine will be transformed into Christ, and that we ourselves will become Christ anew. Jesus ‘takes’ the bread and the cup from us. We await transformation.”“The
blood of our Lord Jesus Christ,” she says, raising the silver chalice to our
lips. Receiving from her is my favorite part of Sunday services. She always
says her line with such joy, like it is the greatest thing in the world, which,
of course, it is.”
–
Lauren Winner (1976 - ), Girl Meets
God
– Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800-1882), The Holy Eucharist a Comfort to the Penitent
Sacramental Perspective
Through the lens of the sacraments, we begin to see that all of creation is indeed sacramental – all material reality is charged with spiritual significance.
“Christ, the
Word of GOD, by Whom the world was made, has made it sacramentally, and we must
take it as we find it. It is sheer blasphemy to do otherwise. To shut our eyes
to the beauties – or the facts of nature, to pretend to be ashamed of the human
body, to go hankering after messages from disembodied spirits, when there are
men and women, excellent spirits, with marvellous bodily organizations to
express them, ready to hand – this may be very religious but it is utterly in
contradiction to the sacramental way in which God has made the world.”
– Stewart
Headlam (1847-1924), The Laws of Eternal Life, Studies in the Church
Catechism
– Rowan Williams (1950 - ), Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel
“What else do the sacraments teach us but that we dare not approach heaven by leaving creation behind? Indeed, Catholicism [including Catholic Anglicanism] insists that to be with God we must be willing to subject ourselves to the simplest objects of creation: water, grapes, grain and oil. Strange to think that the same ingredients used for baking a pie can be used for filling the faithful with God’s grace. Alongside the wood of the cross, those four ingredients are the earthly elements of our salvation. Without them we are lost.
Part
of the wonder of the sacraments is that they also request that we trust
creation. Catholic tradition insists on the absurd idea that we must trust that
water, grapes, grain and oil can convey us to heaven. How easy to believe that
God wants to save us; how hard for some to accept that he does so by washing us
in the ordinary water of baptism. I believe that when I swallow consecrated
bread and wine, I receive the Body and Blood of Christ. But that belief rests
on my accepting the strange notion that the One through whom ‘all things in
heaven and earth were created, things visible and invisible' (Col. 1.15) can be
conveyed to me by ordinary baked wheat and fermented grapes. Can the same oil
that I use to cook a meal be saturated with the Holy Spirit when used to anoint
a priest or the sick?”
– Mark Clavier (1970 - ), A Pilgrimage of Paradox: A Backpacker’s Encounters with God and Nature
“In a general sense you may say that the whole universe is sacramental – that is to say, all material things have some spiritual meaning. They convey to us some vision of beauty and truth and good. The whole universe is a Sacrament of God. So it is that all our great poets of nature are sacramental.”
– Charles Gore (1853-1932), The Holy Communion
“Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.”
– C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), The Weight of Glory
– Mark Clavier (1970 - ), A Pilgrimage of Paradox: A Backpacker’s Encounters with God and Nature
“In a general sense you may say that the whole universe is sacramental – that is to say, all material things have some spiritual meaning. They convey to us some vision of beauty and truth and good. The whole universe is a Sacrament of God. So it is that all our great poets of nature are sacramental.”
– Charles Gore (1853-1932), The Holy Communion
“Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.”
– C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), The Weight of Glory
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