I will never forget the night my journey to understand the sacraments began. It was 1999 and I was meeting with a small with my Lutheran church. I had recently had a strong personal encounter with Jesus Christ and had begun going to meetings in the Church with a passion and fire to learn and share about Jesus.
Then the leader, Byron, said something unexpected. He stated that we received the grace of God in the sacraments. This shocked and offended me. I was a good Lutheran and I knew that God’s grace was a free gift. The idea that some work, like baptism or communion, could communicate God’s grace to me sounded like “work’s righteousness” and I spoke up challenging Byron. He graciously told me that we could talk about it more after the meeting.
We did. Byron shared with me that sacramental grace was just as much a part of the Lutheran tradition as any of the solas. Luther believed that Jesus was present in the sacramental life of the church and so the sacraments were actually an encounter with Christ and a means of grace. This revelation flipped my world. I began to dig into understanding the sacraments. They became the center of my worship, the thing that kept me coming back to Church through my 20s and the primary drive which led me to join the Catholic Church 2 years ago.
One of the most tragic things about the division of the churches in the west after the Protestant reformation was the loss of an understanding of the sacramental dimension of God’s gracious working in the life of the church. Even my Lutheran upbringing left me unaware of this. Conversely this dimension of the life of the church was one of the central understandings of God’s grace and the Christian life for the first 1500 years of the church, and continues to be seen as the central location of Christian life in the Catholic and Orthodox churches. I think a lot of protestants (and even some Catholics and Orthodox) have trouble getting a handle on why we see them as the means through which God normally extends his Grace into our lives. As a result I recently wrote an article over at Theologues about 4 key dimensions to understanding sacramental grace!
I hope you can check it out, share it with friends, and let me know what you think!
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