"You can believe in God without going to church."
I have lost count of the number of times that I have heard this remark. The same goes for its partner, "I can worship God without going to church." Together they might be called The Credo of Lapsed Church-Goers. If you are a priest, listening to this particular credo comes with the territory. But I am sure that clergy are not the only ones to be on the receiving end of such statements. Any Christian is liable to be put on the spot in this way, when it becomes known that she or he regularly attends church.
And how do you respond? How have I responded? In all my 20 years as a priest, this credo nearly always caught me off balance. What is the problem? In my own case, a great deal of the block arises from the merits of the lapsed church-goer's credo. For the claim that it makes is true -- about as self-evidently true, so soon as it is stated, as any claim can be.
Of course one can believe in God, of course one can worship God, without going to church. You and I do so. We don't need to drive or walk to a church once or twice a day in order to read the Scriptures and pray and meditate; we do such worship in our homes and in other places besides churches. Indeed, if someone were able to worship God only when inside a church building on a Sunday morning, we might wonder whether that person has really "got" what Christianity is all about. But if the credo of the lapsed church-goer is true, why should the rest of us bother to attend church at all?
There are moments when it is good for Christians to step back and ponder the purpose of our practice, or rather to boldly go where so few have the inclination or take the time to go and -- horrors! -- do theology. In short, the beginning of planning for a new church year may be a season when it is good to consider why -- why we do what we do Sunday after Sunday, weekday after weekday, season after season, year in and year out.
And what is it that we do? Before, after, and in the course of all the activities that fill a Christian community's life through the year, we do the Holy Eucharist. It has been noted that the frequency of the Eucharist as the principal service on Sunday is a fairly recent development in Anglicanism. How this came about is not my concern here, nor is it my purpose to enter into controversy over whether or not it is a good thing. The fact is, the Eucharist is what most Anglicans do before, after, and in the course of all the other activities that fill their communities' lives through the year.
Nor is it anything less than a true reformation of the church that baptism has come once again to be celebrated as a part of the principal Sunday liturgy, no longer relegated to the duller stretches of Sunday afternoons. Perhaps we are beginning to own -- and own up to -- the significance of a principle that our tradition has always acknowledged, that baptism and the Lord's Supper are the two sacraments that are "generally necessary to salvation." Salvation is as great a work as the making-be of "the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home" -- and why should the church, of all communities, consent to hide its celebration of salvation in a corner?
But what does "salvation" itself mean, and why are the baptismal and eucharistic liturgies "generally necessary" for sharing in whatever it means?
Sacraments as 'things'
First of all I should acknowledge that the Prayer Book Catechism does not speak of the baptismal and eucharistic liturgies as "generally necessary to salvation"; it says only that the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper are such. To speak in these terms, however, is to reduce the two sacraments to the status of things; and in the past theologians have all too often extrapolated from sacraments-as-things to the question of the bare minimum of matter and form required to constitute a valid sacrament-thing. This has led some people to think that it is okay to celebrate the bath of regeneration and rebirth with an eye-dropper, and that all they need in order to confect the body and blood of Christ is to recite the bare words of institution and nothing else. Something is missing here, and it is not simply common sense. It is the failure to recognize that a sacrament is, first and foremost, an event, an action, a doing. To be sure, our tradition (of which the Scriptures are a fundamental element) tells us that we will need certain materials -- water and oil, bread and wine -- and that we will need to include certain formulas when we do the sacraments. But baptism and the Eucharist do not exist in a liturgy-free zone somewhere "out there," from whence they may be plucked and inserted into a liturgical celebration, according to need or desire. We may -- and in the age to come we certainly shall -- have a liturgy without a sacrament, but we cannot have a sacrament without a liturgy. So it is not just the thing we call baptism, and the thing we call the Eucharist, which are "generally necessary to salvation." It is the whole liturgical action of baptizing, and the whole liturgical action of eucharistizing, that are "generally necessary to salvation."
But again, what do we mean by salvation? The Second Letter of Peter, for instance, proclaims that God "had given us ... his precious and very great promises, so that through them you ... may become participants of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4.) Of course, what participation of the triune life of God might actually be, much less "feel like" (if such a phrase is not a theological oxymoron), is not to be had on the cheap. "Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is" (1 John 3:2). We walk as yet in a realm of images, in a territory of likenesses, amid shadows of what we shall be. But there are no shadows without light to cast them, and the images and likenesses of our participation in the divine nature really do convey the life that they betoken. That is why we have sacraments; that is also why we have the liturgy.
Yes, of course we can believe in God, of course we can worship God, without going to church. But we cannot share in the life of God without going to church, without sharing in liturgia, in the public and corporate worship of the people of God. For the three-personed God, the Source of all being, the eternal Word made flesh, and the Holy Spirit, seeks to make us partners of a transcendent communion through "the mutual society, help, and comfort" that is our communion with one another in the gathered body of Christ.
