“The opposite of remember is dismember.” These two posters or aphorisms from Sister Corita Kent’s Footnotes and Headlines: A Play-Pray Book (1967) have stuck with me all of these years. They should prompt any Christian to think about the importance of the sacraments. And since the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has been engaged in an in-depth study of the sacraments, which has issued in recommendations about their celebration, it behooves us to pay attention to the remembering and dismembering that are at stake in the importance we place on the sacraments.
Emil Brunner could hardly have been more emphatic about their importance when he wrote: “Without the sacraments the Church would have disappeared long ago, and with the passing of the Church would have gone also Christian faith and the Bible.” At the table and the font we keep being reminded of our identity and “re-membered” (to use one of Wendell Berry’s favorite words) as the body of Christ. The preacher may be lousy, the choir may sing off-key, the church schoolteachers may do a slap-dash job; but “as often as we eat this bread and drink this cup,” we retain an awareness of who and whose we are. These sacramental celebrations are radical religious rites because radical means “going to the root or foundation of something” (Oxford American Dictionary) and they dig to the roots of community identity. Because they are radical in this sense and essential to our being continually “remembered,” they are conservative. However, they are also revolutionary in that they may be counter-cultural in the settings of their celebration.
Radically communitarian
Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are radically communitarian in a society that is radically individualistic. Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post wrote shortly after 9/11, “The disease of the modern world is disconnection — from nature, from kin, from community, from the rest of the world. For the moment we feel connected again” (“2001: An Inner Space Odyssey,” The Courier-Journal, Sunday, December 30, 2001, D4). It wasn’t long before a New Yorker cartoon depicted one subway passenger saying to another, “It’s hard, but slowly I’m getting back to hating everyone.” Princeton’s Michael Walzer has dubbed us “perhaps the most individualist society in human history” (On Toleration, 1997, 100).
In contrast, our sacraments necessitate community connection. You may feel close to God on your sailboat or on the golf course, but you can’t receive sacraments there. You may get religious messages and enter religious chat rooms on television or the Internet, but you don’t get baptized or commune. Sacraments are “get-togethers.” Let us remember that the early Christians were suspected of incest because of their regular love feasts with their “brothers” and “sisters.”
We get the bread and wine by having it handed to us. We need each other. We don’t do private baptisms. In medieval Europe, infant baptisms were regularly performed in the presence only of midwives and godparents. Parents almost never attended. John Calvin, by contrast, insisted that parents present their children in services of public worship. In our Reformed tradition, not only do the parents take vows, the congregation does too. It pledges support of the parents and the child. The little one is part of the church family too.
Individualism is not all bad. It connects to some of those radical political rights we prize as Americans. But when it leads us to make our self-fulfillment the be-all and end-all of life; when it leads us to believe that we are totally self-possessed, our own persons, it is bad. Our church’s Brief Statement of Faith, echoing the Heidelberg Catechism’s first answer, begins, “In life and in death, we belong to God.” To people proud of their autonomy and independence, it seems un-American to think of our connectedness, but the sacraments never fail to remind us.
Martin Luther pointed out that infant baptism underlines the character of all baptisms. We do not choose God’s grace; it is a gift. In baptism, we rely on “alien righteousness,” that of God in Christ, not ours. We acknowledge that a child has been born into the orbit of the Holy Spirit in the Christian community through no virtue of her or his own, that the child will be beholden to the faith of others and surrounded by the intercession of others. Thanks be to God that this baby doesn’t start from scratch. He or she will not someday decide to be a member of the church, but rather to remain or not remain a member of the church. This baby will not be an utterly self-made man or woman, no matter how much initiative she or he shows and how much success she or he achieves.
This distinction is especially crucial in a world where increasingly relationships are reduced to advantageous connections for advancement and community is often reduced to a “commodity” (See Robert Reich, The Future of Success, 2000) as one pursues his or her self-chosen path to success. Baptism affirms that our most important connection is our membership in the household of faith, from which we get our primary identity. We had better believe it — that is, if we want to be Christians!
Radically egalitarian
The church’s sacraments are also radically egalitarian in a world that still maintains its pecking orders and perpetuates its hierarchies and subordinations. In a fast-food culture where people arrange power lunches, where half of the global village suffers from hunger and malnutrition, and where only a third of American families eat together regularly, the communion table is striking. Everyone has a place at the table, everyone has enough to be nourished, no one eats too much, and people can take their sweet time. Now that’s radically egalitarian!
Baptizing babies is also radically egalitarian because it affirms the infinite value of every child of God. In the near-sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham (Genesis 22), there was a great breakthrough for Israel. They did not have to sacrifice their first born to assure the fertility of their families, just as offering the first fruits of their crops and herds assured future fecundity. The peoples around them practiced child sacrifice of this kind as a religious rite, and there are at least eleven references in Hebrew Scripture that warn about its creeping into Israelite religion. We might say that Abraham initially got it wrong; he was supposed to hand his child over to God, not offer him up as a sacrifice. God straightened him out and circumcision was probably seen as offering a small token part instead of the whole person.
In Jesus’ day, children were discounted, especially female children. Without a father’s stamp of approval, they were nobodies, as John Dominic Crossan asserts (Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, 1994). A letter from an Egyptian worker of that time laboring away from home to his pregnant wife reads, “If it’s a girl, cast it out.” When the disciples wanted to send the children away, Jesus said a shocking thing: Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs (Mark 10:14).
French theologian Gabriel Vahanian remarked to me one day in Strasbourg what a revolutionary thing it is for us to baptize girls in a world where females are, more often than not, second-class citizens. Paul’s words to the Galatians use a baptismal liturgy from the early church: As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Jesus Christ (3:27, 28). At the Day of Pentecost, when the earliest community of faith was baptized with the Holy Spirit, the believers were told that their sons and daughters, including their men and women slaves, would prophesy (as promised by the prophet Joel). Well beyond what the framers of our U. S. Constitution envisioned, that is radically egalitarian!
Baptism is in effect the ordination of every Christian to ministry. Martin Luther, who proclaimed the priesthood of all believers, insists that every baptism not only signifies the justification or forgiveness and acceptance of every recipient but also the priestly status. In his words, everyone “who comes crawling out of baptism has thus been consecrated a priest, bishop, and pope.” Now that is radically and dangerously egalitarian! Let the implications of that claim sink in, and pretty soon patriarchy and hierarchy and subordination of women are in trouble.
Radically monotheistic
These rites or sacraments are also radically monotheistic. By that term, H. Richard Niebuhr referred to the God beyond all of our images (mental or otherwise) of God and all idols we substitute for God, be they tribal, national, or economic. Scholars have observed that Abraham would have been a god for many ancient religions. People worshipped their ancestors. In the Genesis stories, however, it is clear that Abraham takes his orders from elsewhere, and his failings get frank coverage along with his exemplary virtues.
In the time of Jesus, family connections were everything. The honor and shame system was experienced in family and sanctioned by family. Crossan calls it “groupism based on kinship and gender.” Jesus challenged this family loyalty by subordinating it to reign of God loyalty. When told that his family members are calling for him, he replied, Whoever does the will of God is my mother and sister and brother (Mark 3:35). When someone says to him, “Blessed are the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you,” his response is, Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it (Luke 11:27-28). Due to the demands of kingdom loyalty, he warns that fathers and sons and mothers and daughters may be set against each other (Matthew 10:35).
The new identity that comes with baptism involves a reordering of loyalties. As surely as the family ties and forms of Jesus’ day should not be idolized, so the 19th century Victorian nuclear family, which is often thought to be a Biblical mandate, should not be idolized. The biological family is not God, and neither are parents or children.
After they had waited so long for him and pinned all their hopes on him, Isaac was surely the apple of Abraham’s and Sarah’s eyes. The near-sacrifice story could have been a stark way of insisting that he was not to be idolized. He was God’s child, not their possession. In a parallel way, the baptism of our children in the church is a form of “disowning” our children. William May, one of our preeminent contemporary Christian ethicists (and a Presbyterian), calls it a “handing over” (“Liturgy for life: the political meaning of worship,” Christian Century, August 29-September 5, 2001). We are no less responsible for them, and some parents are all too willing to hand their children over to others in troublesome ways. Still we are acknowledging that they are not our possessions, but God’s gifts, of which we are the primary stewards. .
If we are to do justice (and love) to our children without idolizing them, we must also avoid playing God with them. To cite William May again, “The sacrament asks parents to relax their obsessive hold of their child. … Baptism asks parents to see their child at a disquieting, yet quieting, distance; that is to accept it as a child of God.” They are to brace themselves “to free the child for a public identity beyond their final reach and control.”
Parents are tempted, May observes in an earlier article, to assume that there are only two realities in the world: their love for their children and the suffering from which they want to protect them. We may convince ourselves and our children that we can protect them from all misfortune and malevolence — from deadly diseases, bad grades, bad neighborhoods, wrong schools, bad marriages, mistaken career paths, etc. When we don’t measure up as saviors, we may give the impression that there is none. He writes, “What an anomaly it must be for a child to see his parents attend a church or synagogue and yet betray by the worry written across their faces their great secret fear that God is dead.” (“The Metaphysical Plight of the Family,” Death Inside Out, edited by Peter Steinfels and Robert M. Veatch).
When we have our children baptized, we acknowledge not only that they are not God and we are not God; we make the radically monotheistic claim that there is God. In “handing over” our children, we are saying that we, and they, are in God’s hands as God’s children in the company of God’s people. For our versions of household gods to be found wanting does not mean that we or our children have no better “refuge and strength.” We all are only human, but God is still God — at least that is what radical monotheists believe.
Holy communion also challenges our idolatries and reinforces our primary citizenship in the commonwealth of God. People will come from east and west, and from north and south, and sit at table in the kingdom of God (Luke 13:29). At that celebration, we remember again who we are. Our citizenship in this kingdom puts every political, economic, or religious loyalty in a subordinate place to the sovereignty of God. The early Christians were suspected of being atheists because they had no images of their God. And they also did not consider it an innocuous gesture to offer a pinch of incense to the emperor. In fact they were radical monotheists. Radical monotheists can be patriotic, but not super-patriotic.
Conclusion
Are we really sure we want to continue with these radical religious rites? After all, they are radically communitarian in a radically individualistic society, radically egalitarian in a society that persists in propping up its pecking orders, and radically monotheistic in a society bowed down to lesser deities and distorted images of the one we claim to worship. If we take them seriously, they could make us unpopular, out of step with the times. Don’t we need to think twice about putting our children at risk by bringing them to the font and the table with us? Maybe we should avoid influencing them in ways that could hurt their upward mobility. Maybe we should just let them wait until they really know what they are doing so they can make up their own minds as religious consumers about which rites will best serve their purposes. Shouldn’t these rites give us pause? If they do, maybe they will make us take the Gospel to heart! If they do, we may truly be regularly “remembered” as the body of Christ as we celebrate our primary identity as a community of faith. So help us, God!
Eric Mount Jr. is Rodes Professor Emeritus of Religion, Centre College in Danville, Ky.
