As Close to Christ as We Can Get (xii)

FPC, Lowville, NY

This is the twelth posting in a series working on what it means to be a church, based on eight criteria the Mars Hill Church uses to define its branch congregations as churches. The series began (here).

We turn now to the fourth criterion used by the Mars Hill Church to define its branch congregations as "churches," which is, "The church is where the biblical sacraments of baptism and Communion are performed regularly."  This seems quite straightforward as long as we don't specify the number of "biblical sacraments" or go into such things as the centuries' long debate on how Christ is present or not present in the Lord's Supper.  In nearly all cases, the sacraments have been key elements in the life of local churches in spite of all of our differences in our different understandings and practices of them.

Something I have shared regularly with the churches I've served is that the sacraments of baptism and communion, esp. communion, are as physically close to Christ as we can get.  They are more than "merely" an act of remembering.  They embody key moments in the ministry of Christ that led to the birth of the early church.  When we look at the Table, we see Jesus with his disciples on that chaotic last night.  In the cup and bread, we see and experience the crisis and the agony of Jesus' last hours.  In a sense, however incompletely, we become time travelers who are transported back to the first century to participate in the events of Jesus' last evening.

In our modern world, we've pretty much lost a true sense of the holy, but as best we can we should remember every time we come to the sacraments that for a moment we stand on sacred ground and in sacred time and space.  If we go into these things with our eyes open and hearts focused (mindfully in Buddhist parlance), we encounter Christ and look for a moment into the core of our faith.  Amen.