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"A Sacramental Piety" Ephesians 5:21-33 21 Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. 22Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. 23For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church, the body of which he is the Savior. 24Just as the church is subject to Christ, so also wives ought to be, in everything, to their husbands. 25Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26in order to make her holy by cleansing her with the washing of water by the word, 27so as to present the church to himself in splendor, without a spot or wrinkle or anything of the kind—yes, so that she may be holy and without blemish. 28In the same way, husbands should love their wives as they do their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29For no one ever hates his own body, but he nourishes and tenderly cares for it, just as Christ does for the church, 30because we are members of his body. y 31"For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh." 32This is a great mystery and I am applying it to Christ and the church. 33Each of you, however, should love his wife as himself, and a wife should respect her husband.The popular image of John Wesley is that of an evangelist traveling on horseback from place to place throughout the British Isles preaching to people in the open air and inviting them to join a Methodist society in order to experience trust in Christ and to learn how to live for Christ. This image is certainly correct, but it is incomplete. It needs to be complemented by another image of Mr. Wesley–that of the Anglican priest who led the Methodists in one of the most influential sacramental renewal movements in the history of The Church of England. One of the chief characteristics of the Methodist Revival was the nurture of a vital sacramental piety in the lives of believers. Here in America Methodism is not renown as a Christian community that has a strong sacramental piety. Somehow the sacramental emphasis in the original British Methodism became muted in American Methodism. This loss of emphasis upon the sacraments in American Methodism is one of the ironies of American Methodist history. One of the primary reasons that American Methodists separated from the Episcopal Church and formed their own church was so that Methodists could have their own ordained ministers who would administer Holy Communion. (After the American Revolution there were few priests left in America, and therefore the Episcopalians, including the Methodists, were not able to receive the sacrament very often.) Yet the church that was established partly for the purpose of enabling the American Methodists to receive the sacraments evolved into a church that did not place as much emphasis upon the sacraments as Mr. Wesley had! The sacraments are essential for Primitive Christianity. The two sacraments, Holy Baptism and Holy Communion, are the Word of God made visible. In the washing with water in Holy Baptism the church celebrates God’s action of making us clean by forgiving our sins. In the breaking of the bread and pouring the wine, the church celebrates the self-giving of God to us in the self-offering of Christ on the cross, the love that is our spiritual food for living. Through these two mysteries we participate in the relationship that Christ has with his church. Ephesians 5:21-23 describes the mutual relationship between a husband and a wife in Christian marriage. Marriage is modeled according to the relationship between Christ and his church. As Pheme Perkins says in her commentary in The New Interpreter’s Bible, this passage in Ephesians "may say as much about our experience of the realities of salvation as it does about our view of marriage." In this passage, the author of the Epistle to the Ephesians refers to Holy Baptism as the "cleansing [of the church] with the washing of water by the word." Baptism is the sacrament of initiation into the church because it is the sign of God’s forgiveness of sins through our faith in Jesus Christ. Then the author speaks of how Christ "nourishes and tenderly cares for" his own body, the church. Christ’s nourishment of the church includes the gift of the Sacrament of Holy Communion. This is the sacrament for continuing our life in the church because through this sacramental action Christ offers himself to us so that we might "feed on him by faith with thanksgiving." (It has always been interesting to me that when the original fundamentalists listed what they called "the fundamentals" of faith they left out Holy Baptism and Holy Communion even though these were given to us by the Lord himself!) What were Mr. Wesley’s views of these two sacraments? John Wesley adhered to the doctrine of The Church of England as expressed in its 39 Articles of Religion. Therefore, he taught that both Holy Baptism and Holy Communion are "certain signs of grace, and God’s will toward us, by which he doth work invisibly in us, and doth not only quicken [that is, make alive], but also strengthen and confirm, our faith in him." This is the doctrine of the sacraments that is typical of this catholic or universal tradition of the Christian church. Beyond this basic doctrine of the sacraments, Wesley had his own particular emphases in his interpretation of both sacraments. Mr. Wesley’s attitude toward Holy Baptism reflects his concern as an evangelist to invite people to a personal experience of God’s gift of a new birth through faith in Jesus Christ. In his sermon on "The Marks of a New Birth" he acknowledges that a new birth is ordinarily associated with baptism because Jesus told Nicodemus in John 3:5, "Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of the water and the Spirit." After explaining that the "marks," or evidences of being born anew, are faith, hope, and love, Mr. Wesley addresses those who claim that they have been born anew just because they have been baptized. He invites them to experience now the reality of a new birth that had been promised in their baptism. He says, "And if [you] have been baptized, your only hope is this–that those who were made children of God by baptism, but are now children of the devil, may yet again receive ‘power to become the sons [and daughters] of God’…." While not denying the meaning of baptism as a sign of new birth, Mr. Wesley’s main interest was in people receiving new birth as a present experience through faith in Jesus Christ. Therefore, in regards to baptism, there is in Mr. Wesley’s teaching a tension between an emphasis upon the sacrament as a sign of God working invisibly in us and an emphasis upon a personal experience of faith as the actual appropriation of what is significant in the sacrament. The sacrament promises a new birth, but the question is whether or not you and I have experienced a new birth through faith in Christ. Yet it should be noted that Mr. Wesley is really not that different from other Christian teachers who also warned against presuming that we have experienced new birth just because we have been baptized. For example, Gregory of Nyssa in the 4th century warned the baptized against only seeming to be regenerated without actually being regenerated or born anew. In his "Great Catechism" Gregory asserts that "the water is but water" and not the bath that cleanses us if we were baptized but live as unchanged persons. Gregory says, "If then, you have received God [through baptism], if you have become a child of God, make manifest in your disposition that God is in you, manifest in yourself Him that begot you." Is there really that much difference between Mr. Wesley’s attitude and that of the renowned Father of the ancient Catholic Church? Because Mr. Wesley emphasized so strongly evangelical experience there was a danger that he might be seen as denying God’s action in the sacrament whereby we receive grace to be washed of sin, born anew as children of God, and initiated into the church. His evangelical emphasis could also be seen as undermining the validity of baptizing infants. Therefore, in 1756 he issued a version of his father’s sermon "On Baptism" that emphasized the nature of baptism as a channel of God’s grace and reaffirmed the validity of infant baptism. The spiritual legacy of Mr. Wesley’s approach to baptism is that Methodism embraces both a strong understanding of baptism as a real act of God in the church in which divine grace is given to us and a strong invitation to appropriate God’s grace signified in baptism by a personal trust in God through Jesus Christ. The sacrament of Holy Communion received much more emphasis in John Wesley’s ministry than did Holy Baptism. According to some analyses of his "Journal" it seems that he received the sacrament on an average of every other day, or at least 2-3 times a week, and often every day during high holy seasons such as Christmas and Easter. He urged the Methodists not only to receive communion every Sunday but also to practice "constant communion." What John Wesley called "constant communion" his brother Charles called "the daily Sacrifice." John and his brother Charles published a hymnal for the Methodists titled Hymns on the Lord’s Supper that contained 166 hymns. When the Methodist Episcopal Church was founded in America in 1784, he recommended that American Methodists celebrate communion Sunday. Mr. Wesley preached "constant communion"–and practiced what he preached – because he believed that the sacrament is a "means of grace" in which God gives us grace that pardons our sins and bestows power to overcome sin. He wrote, "This is the food for our souls; this gives strength to perform our duty and leads us on to perfection." Communion would not be such a benefit to us if it is were merely a memorial to Christ’s death, but it is a great benefit to us because it is one of God’s chosen "means of grace." If there was one emphasis in Mr. Wesley’s understanding of communion that did differ from that of The Church of England it was his accent upon the sacrament as a "converting ordinance." In his Journal on June 27, 1740 he wrote, "For many now present know, the very beginning of your ‘conversion’ to God (perhaps, in some, the first deep ‘conviction’) was wrought at the Lord’s Supper." Indeed, Mr. Wesley assumed that the normal way a person would come to experience personal faith in Christ was by praying, meditating on the Scriptures, and receiving Holy Communion. In his sermon on "The Means of Grace" Mr. Wesley describes how a person would come to experience personal faith in Christ. He is describing the journey to faith to someone we would call a "seeker," but Mr. Wesley called him "a stupid, senseless wretch." He says this person experiences "God [coming] upon him unaware" and pricking his conscience. Then he begins seeking how to find God. Mr. Wesley says if this man "finds a preacher who speaks to the heart, he is amazed, and begins searching the Scriptures." "The more he hears and reads, the more concerned he is; and the more he meditates [on the Scriptures] day and night." Maybe he finds some other spiritual literature that helps him. Then the seeker begins to pray to God although he hardly knows what to say. He wants to pray with other believers in church on Sunday. In church he observes others going up to the Table of the Lord. At first he is hesitant to receive the Lord’s Supper, but eventually he goes because he realizes that Christ commanded us to "do this." And Mr. Wesley concludes, "And thus he continues in God’s way, in hearing, reading, meditating, praying, and partaking of the Lord’s Supper, till God, in the manner that pleases Him, speaks to his heart, ‘Thy faith hath saved thee. Go in peace.’" Mr. Wesley could hardly conceive of someone coming to faith in Christ without participating in Holy Communion as one of the means of grace. In Mr. Wesley’s attitude toward Holy Communion, just as in the case of his attitude toward Holy Baptism, he was an evangelical who was also rooted in the catholic or universal Christian doctrine and practice. Mr. Wesley’s attitude toward the sacraments helps us to see what is distinctive about Methodism. Methodism is a form of evangelical catholicism or catholic evangelicalism. Methodism, when it is at its best, is evangelical. By evangelical I mean that emphasizes the evangel or the good news of God’s love in Jesus Christ for all people; it emphasizes that we need to accept this good news by faith in our own personal experience; and it emphasizes that we shall want to share with others what we have experienced. Methodism, when it is at its best, is also catholic. By catholic I mean that Methodism sees itself as part of the universal church of Christ. Methodism teaches what all Christians have always believed everywhere. It seeks to root people in the rich resources of the universal Christian tradition. Those resources include the creeds, the sacraments, and the tradition of Spiritual disciplines. There are other evangelical churches, perhaps more evangelical than we are, but they are not as grounded in the catholic tradition as we are. There are other catholic churches, perhaps more catholic than we are, but they do not possess the evangelical spirit of Methodism. What distinguishes Methodism is that it is a part of the church that is able to be both evangelical and catholic. If we Methodist Christians have any distinctive mission on earth to which the Spirit of God has called us, it is to envangelize people of all ethnic groups and social classes and to ground them in the larger, rich Christian tradition. Can we American Methodists recover the sacramental piety bequeathed to us by Mr. Wesley? We are seeking new ways to make disciples of Christ and to renew the church. We are willing to experiment with new forms of worship, to initiate creative new programs, and occasionally, to try gimmicks to accomplish our mission. But have we missed something? Are we neglecting the very means of grace God has given to us in Jesus Christ? Do we magnify the meaning of Holy Baptism which is realized in personal evangelical experience? Are we missing a chance to awaken and to nurture faith in Christ because we do not provide people with constant opportunities to receive the Sacrament of Holy Communion? Once during one of the annual conferences of early Methodism, Mr. Wesley asked, "Why are not we more holy? Why do we not live in eternity? Walk with God all the daylong? Why are we not all devoted to God? Breathing the whole spirit of Missionaries?" He answered, "Because we are enthusiasts; looking for the end, without using the means." Those means of grace we can use to grow spiritually and to become a Missionary Church are prayer, searching the Scriptures, Christian conversation, and the sacraments by which God works invisibly in us to enliven, strengthen and confirm our faith in Jesus Christ. In the last hymn in John and Charles Wesley’s Hymns on the Lord’s Supper, Charles Wesley prayed for the church to recover the practice of baptism and constant communion so that it could fulfill its mission to the world, and he referred to the church as Christ’s bride as it is mentioned in Ephesians 5:21-23.
Reprinted from the May 2003 Virginia United Methodist Advocate
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