Congratulations on the completion of your full initiation into the Church and although your Catechesis will now cease, you have in front of you the opportunity for even greater learning and understanding. As a jumping off point for this as you begin to work on and perfect your faith, tonight I would like to do a short review of the rituals/rites/Sacraments that each of you have participated in throughout your initiation and hopefully give them additional meaning moving forward in your faith and call you to continued study. Your growth in the faith does not stop at initiation.
Beginning the process, each of you were Baptized and, in that Baptism, you became inserted to its timeline, the Christian timeline and you were sealed to Christ by both the water and the sign of the cross on your forehead. Although not, explored extensively in your preparation, the act of Baptism has a long history beginning with the waters of Genesis, the flood of Noah, the parting of the Red Sea, the Israelite crossing of the Jordan and right down to John the Baptist baptizing Christ in the Jordan and the Spirit of the Lord descending upon Him. Water in the Bible can be seen as a spiritual element whereby God interacts with mankind. In the case of Noah, God wiped his sinful creation from the earth, saving only 8 to replenish the earth . In much the same way, your baptism wiped the stain of “original sin” from you and implanted the Holy Spirit within you as guide. In that sense, you made it over the first hurdle that Christ set before us in John 3:5 (read verse here). However, you journey was not yet complete.
In your next step, you were Confirmed, meaning that you were confirmed both to the Church but, also to Christ. In that rite, two major things happened, the first being the anointment with the Chrism Oil (I bet you can remember that smell, I still do and wished I could smell it every day, even today) and secondly, you received the Gifts of the Spirit. With regard to being anointed, there are two major reasons for anointing in the Bible. The first the anointing of a leader, of a King and in that sense, you were anointed as an heir into the Priesthood of Christ our King . In your Baptism, you set aside the “old you” to walk a new path and the continuation of that path was and is, to receive what Christ offered you on the cross, which was life in Him, eternal life with him and the anointing further seals you into that relationship with him. The second half of anointing in the Biblical tradition is for the dead. The dead’s entire body was anointed with sweet smelling oils prior to be wrapped in funerary clothes and buried. Multiple examples of both can be found in both the Old and New Testaments and so in this way, you are once again inserting yourself into the Christian timeline once more, becoming participatory in it from its beginning and even right up to the end, when we shall be raised in Christ at the end of time as we know it. In this act, as mentioned earlier, you also received the Gifts of the Holy Spirit as a means of sustaining you on your journey in Christ. These are important in so much as they will provide you with wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and the fear of God for the rest of your life, should you choose to employ them. Remember, they are a gift and as such, they are not imprinted upon you, you will have to seek each of them in your spiritual life with the assistance of the Holy Spirit.
Having been Baptized and Confirmed, you now approached the Altar of our Lord to complete your initiation, the Sacrament of the Eucharist. Once again, you were inserting yourself into a timeline of pseudo Eucharists that existed from the times of the Old Testament and were always pointing directly at the coming meal that was to take place in the upper room with Jesus. In many ways, we can look at the manna from heaven as provided by God during the Exodus as eucharistic an little doubt can be had about the wine and bread offered by the High Priest Melchizedek directly pointing to the Eucharist celebrated by Christ with his disciples. The Eucharist, just like your Baptism via water and your Baptism via the Spirit at Confirmation, is ordered to our lives by Christ himself. We need look no further than John 6 to gain a fuller understanding of this. In feasting upon the transubstantiated body and blood of Christ, “often” you are maintaining his presence in your life and as such you are participating with him, in him and through him in what will be your eternal life.
So, as I conclude this short little talk, I hope that you have come to understand that in each of the Sacraments, you have become participatory in the history of not only our savior but, also a history that proceeds from His Father since the beginning of creation. The Sacraments as we know them now were always in the process of becoming prior to the Word Incarnate and became fulfilled, exemplified and ordered to our lives through his birth, life, death and resurrection. Oddly enough, if you take the time to truly study the history leading up to Christ, you find them quietly in the background, again and again. Tonight, much of what I have presented to you with regard to the Sacraments was taken directly from the thoughts of Jean Danie Lou in his book, The Bible and the Liturgy. If you would like to explore his thoughts and the history of the Sacraments, I would highly encourage you to pick it up on Amazon.com. It is relatively easy read and far more eye opening with regard to the participatory nature of the Sacraments but also their historical origins as “Signs”. In days past and more specifically the days of some of the early Church Fathers, your Catechesis in the two weeks leading up to your Sacramental completion on Easter Day would have been far more significant, almost to the point of rigor but, hey times have changed. Therefore, I would like to propose to each of you a once a month “book club” study of Danie Lou moving forward, if you have any interest. Let me see how many of you by show of hands might be willing to give up an hour a month to go through the book chapter by chapter? Great, I think you will find it intellectually stimulating and also spiritually rewarding and for those of you seeking to work in the missions field someday, I think you will find the information handy.