One of the vows I take at ordination and reffairm each year as a brother in my religious Order, the Order of St Luke, is: "I will seek the sacramental life". Our "Rule of Life and Service" explores what that means in this paragraph: "We are called to become aware of God's presence through eucharistic living. We seek to live out our baptism into Christ’'s death and resurrection. We receive with gratitude all that God has given us and offer it up to God. We receive it again from God, transformed to use for the sake of the world. We join the Church though the ages and around the world in recognizing that all time is in God's hands. As we faithfully pray the Daily Office, and live so as to embody our prayers, we endeavor to live the sacramental life. By so doing, we seek to be formed as a means of grace for all those we meet and serve in Christ's name".
What does it mean for me to live out that vow?
I think it involves how I move and act in the world. And, what's more, I think it's a vocation that isn't limited to just me, my sisters and brothers in the Order. I think it's the essence of living Christianly in the world.
Today each of us will wander out into the world. And around us we'll find all sorts people and all sorts of situations. It's a fractal, messy, and chaotic world out there.
It's not all bad. There are flowers out there. And beautiful things. Right now, as I write, the sun is preparing to rise, and the daily chorus of birds is greeting the sun. It's a beautiful world.
But there's ugliness. It's also a broken, sad, conflicted and dying world.
So I try to live sacramentally -- walk around and act in the world as Jesus walks and acts. I try, given what I find out there, to bring grace and beauty into the world.
And to do this, I've learned, I have to listen.
Listening. It's something for which we Christians aren't exactly known in our culture. We're good with words -- lots and lots of words. But what about listening?
Living sacramentally means I'll need to take the time to listen and learn about the people around me. Who are they? What are their dreams? Where do they hurt? And then, once I know the materials and rhythms of their experience, I'll try to move and act in a way to bring beauty and grace into their lives.
And into the world. I might bring grace and beauty to a dead patch of urban ruin. Or a bit of color into an expanse of grey.
You see, this is one of those lessons I learnt from Bonhoeffer. We Christians are all-too-eager to condemn the world's sin, without hearing its confession, its "groaning for redemption" as St Paul put it in Romans 8. Far from deserving condemnation, those of us who live sacramentally know there's a Beauty and Loveliness behind and within all the brokenness.
So living sacramentally may mean nothing more than picking up a little trash. Leaving the world cleaner rather than dirtier because we cared and loved. Thereby nudging the world closer to the New Heavens and New Earth that is its destiny. Think Revelation 21-22.
We humans are so good with our hammers, aren't we? We like a good crucifixion. Whether it's Jesus or the world or others. We'll nail you to any ole tree. What if, instead of hammers (and saws, bulldozers, and nails), we carried into the world -- and into others' lives -- we didn't use force to bring change? We're good at cutting everything down and building something artificial, imposed, and unnatural. Something we'd like to see but might not fit the person or environment. What if, instead, our touch was light and healing, like Jesus'? Think Matthew 8-9, for example.
What if we gave up the domination, owning and controlling game?
Because, the one thing I've learnt about living sacramentally is that I can't control the outcome. Once I've done my "work" for the day -- trying to bring a little bit of beauty, peace, truth and grace into the world -- I relinquish control. Living sacramentally means letting it all go. And letting God.
Most of us turn that into trite spiritual advice. But I find it's not advice. It's truth. We can't, by ourselves, hold all the brokeness together. All we can do is try, for a moment in time, to hold two broken pieces together in a way that is beautiful, redemptive, and hopeful.
That's living sacramentally.
One of the first lessons I learnt as a young pastor: The fruits of our fragile, transient and gracious labors will rarely last beyond the moment, which brings a sense of sadness and loss, but it hints and gestures at what is possible, at that Beauty that sits behind all things.
Living sacramentally means offering everything up to God. And receiving it again, transformed into something beautiful. It starts with water (Baptism) and bread and wine (Eucharist) and books (Bibles), but it hardly ends there.
In the face of what Ecclesiastes calls hebel (think Ecclesiastes 9.7-10a) -- the fleetingness of life -- our goal isn't to build lasting monuments to the ego, to somehow "fix" everything.
We are, rather, to live sacramentally. We are to live as signs and portents of the grace that is at hand in any given moment, even in the ruin, the boredom, the loss and the trauma. The Kingdom of God, Jesus said, is in our midst (Luke 17.20-21).
Living sacramentally means living in such a way that the Kingdom of God becomes obvious, undeniable, real. Here and now. In our very midst.
We are to live beautifully, hopefully, redemptively, and graciously. We must, in the words of Wendell Berry, be a people who practice resurrection.
Which means, fundamentally, rethinking how God works in the world.
The idea I have is that God acts in the world in a way that is non-coercive but ordering and creative. I'm thinking here of the Spirit of God hovering over the deep in Genesis and bringing order out of the chaos (Genesis 1). God is creator here in an artistic sense, working on rough, disordered raw material. God is that creative, artistic Spirit at work bringing beauty into existence.
The idea I have in mind is that God's power and activity in the world is this creative, ordering, nourishing force that swims against the tides of entropy, death, decay and disorder.
And because the force is loving, non-coercive, non-rivalrous, non-competitive, and non-violent it is ever vulnerable to the dark tides of life. Consequently, this loving, creative force is fragile, episodic and transient.
But this force is always present, always working, always inserting itself, always interrupting, always haunting, always calling, always healing, always whispering, always nourishing, always mending, always enchanting, always singing, always knitting, always soothing, always caressing, always weeping, always laughing, always composing, always painting, always nursing, always creating.
It is that Divine Spirit hovering over the face of the chaotic deep calling life and goodness into existence.
That goodness we call sacrament.