Walk in Love: Episcopal Beliefs and Practices

by Scott Gunn

We are encouraged to make connections between our Sunday prayers and our daily lives. We are encouraged to be generous in our offerings as God has been generous to us.

Christ-like love is not about us; it is about God and our neighbors. It is impossibly generous.

We'll never manage to love this way on our own.

Jesus Christ was Perfect Love enfleshed. Jesus showed us who God is and how we are to love. Jesus' love is expansive: He especially loved the unlovable and people at the margins of society. Jesus' love is honest: He always told the truth. Jesus' love is invitational: He wanted to draw people into his way of life and love.

The love of Christ cares about people, but it cares nothing for power, for might, or for prestige.

We celebrate this new life at Easter, but we celebrate more than the power of something that seems impossible. We celebrate that in the raising of Jesus to new life, we see God's love is stronger than death, stronger than fear, and stronger than anything that can happen to us in this earthly life.

Like those early Christians, we are trying to figure out how to follow Jesus in our own imperfect way. Fortunately, we have the Holy Spirit, God's abiding presence, who can lead us into all truth.

Anglican Christianity is a way of following Jesus that is rooted in the Bible and the sacraments of the church, united by shared ways of praying.

This course, Practicing Our Faith, is part of a three-year set of courses; the others are Celebrating the Saints and Exploring the Bible.

As a child, saying such big, beautiful, mysterious words felt holy to me, a reminder that I love and follow a God who is big and beautiful and mysterious.

God doesn't want lip service; God wants life service. An intimate, unbreakable connection exists between the words that we say in prayer and the things that we do in our daily lives.

In the Episcopal Church, prayer, belief, and action are intimately tied together.

In the wake of the Reformation, Cranmer and others believed that prayer, like scripture, should be available to all people, clergy and laity alike, and that people should be able to read and understand the prayers of the church in their own language.

Our liturgy—the words and actions of worship—is not about "each man for himself," or about how "I like to pray" or even how the priest likes to pray. Instead, we are keeping a tradition of worship that stretches through time and is shaped by a tradition of prayer that has been passed down from generation to generation.

Liturgy was an offering for the good of all people, for the public. In this way, our liturgies are meant to be public works, that is, offerings for the good of the whole world.

Note that this promise doesn't say prayer but rather "in the prayers." In baptism and confirmation, we commit to more than a general idea of prayer; we promise to pray like this and in community.

The truth is that these different actions and postures of prayer help us to engage our whole selves in worship. They are ways of living out the truth that we praise God "not only with our lips, but in our lives."

What we pray is incredibly important, because it both shapes and reflects what we believe. And what we believe is incredibly important, because it both shapes and reflects how we live. Prayer changes us, in deep and meaningful ways.

Prayers that we pray often and repeatedly become so much a part of us that we remember them on an instinctive, visceral level.

Prayer changes our brains and our behavior. What we say and do on Sunday informs and shapes how we act and think on Thursday and Monday and every other day. When we spend our time in prayer focused on gratitude, we become more grateful people. When we pray for peace, we begin to act more peacefully. Our prayers become a deep and meaningful part of us, words that are truly learned "by heart," being taken into ourselves and shaping us.

sacraments are an external manifestation of something that happens internally. To put it another way, they are earthly signs of heavenly activity. For example, when we baptize someone, the outward sign is water, but, inside, the person is changed.

He took an existing practice and completely redefined it. In

(Matthew 3:13-17)

At his own baptism, Jesus was blessed by God's presence for all to see. This dramatically introduced the coming of the Holy Spirit in baptism, and Jesus continued to teach this as the way of beginning a new life of faith.

From that moment in the Jordan River, Jesus and his followers continued—to this very day—a baptism that i...

Therefore, we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. (Romans 6:3-4)

First, baptism is the way to enter into the church, the Body of Christ Jesus. Second, in baptism, we die to our old selves and rise to new life in Christ.

Let us look at each of these actions.

Though not every Christian will see the complexity of baptism in exactly the same way, baptism is the one sacrament that nearly all Christians recognize as universal.

believing that God's grace is present in the sacrament even when we do not understand how or what is happening.

While God may very well be working in our lives before we are baptized, it is this sacrament that unites us with Christ and his church.

Christians have long taught that baptism is not to be offered coercively, but only to the willing.

Sponsors and parents are agreeing to a lifetime commitment of raising the child in the Christian faith. This is one reason why it is important for parents and sponsors to be active, practicing followers of Jesus.

It is important to note that we pledge to show the child (and others) how to be like Christ through "prayers and witness." That is, we teach and others learn through both our prayers and our actions. We must live our lives in a way that shows others who Christ is and how to be like him, and we must be people of prayer. These are the promises we are making. They are a tall order, which is why we say, "I will, with God's help."

In the service of baptism, we consciously acknowledge the reality of evil and then actively turn away from it.

To trust in Christ's love and grace is to know that we are loved no matter what we do, that Jesus is with us in whatever we face. To accept him as our Savior is to know that our salvation will not be found in power, money, prestige, family, or friends but only in Jesus Christ. To "follow and obey" acknowledges that we don't have the answers, but that we find our direction, our compass, our hope in our Lord Jesus Christ. The depth and radical nature of these promises takes a lifetime to understand and fully embrace.

In these promises, we make extraordinary, impossible commitments that we will never manage to get totally right, especially on our own.

We are saying that we will participate in Christian worship, attend classes to learn about our faith, join in the celebration of Holy Eucharist, and pray daily, both as a community and as individuals.

Our world is full of things that take us away from God (money, power, selfish desires). In this promise, we acknowledge these things and say we will resist them.

We also admit that we're going to get this wrong and promise that we will try again. Our faith gives us as many do-overs as we need. What we promise here is to try our best.

We Christians are called to respect and to treat with dignity every single person on this planet as a beautiful being who bears God's image.

When people are baptized and receive Holy Eucharist in the same service, it shows the indissoluble connection between these two great sacraments.

taken. In the Holy Eucharist, we are summoning the presence of the Word made flesh among us, the Christ who was present at the moment of creation.

There was danger that they would be too casual—that they would not discern Christ's presence or that some would eat before others, creating a hierarchy at precisely the moment when Jesus is calling all into mutual obedience in community.

the presence of shelves and shelves of books on the eucharist (and more to be written still) is evidence that we might not have it totally figured out. Approaching the sacrament with childlike wonder might be the best model for all of us.

As Episcopalians, we believe that Jesus Christ is really and truly present in the bread and wine as they are blessed and shared by the priest and people.

Anglicans have not been keen to adopt dogmatic positions, simply saying that the consecrated bread is the Body of Christ and leaving it at that—although it's not hard to find Anglicans with various positions on this issue.

The Divine Liturgy reminds us that we do not gather to deny the pain or needs of the world but rather to offer our prayers and our lives for the deepest needs of the world and all people.

When we call our service the Mass, we are reminding ourselves of the importance of going out into the world to do the work we have been given to do.

In other words, in the act of expressing our profound gratitude to God for all our blessings, we offer back to God our very selves, as well as the visible gifts of money, bread, and wine.