The Book of Common Prayer defines a sacrament as “an outward and visible sign of God’s inner and spiritual grace.” They convey the generous and gracious love of God to us (inner and spiritual) by tangible means (outward and visible).

The Church has two primary sacraments – baptism and Eucharist. The outward sign of baptism is water and the sign of the Cross made with chrism (blessed oil); the inner grace is new life in Christ. In Eucharist the outward sign is the bread and wine, and the inner grace is participation in God and being at one with fellow believers.

Five other sacramental rites are available in the Episcopal Church and are all vehicles of God’s grace, but are not rites that every Christian will necessarily be part of: Confirmation, Marriage, Reconciliation (private confession), Ordination, and Anointing at the Time of Death (“last rites”).

The word sacrament has to do with making something holy. The outward, tangible part of a sacrament reminds us that God uses the good creation he has made to be an avenue of divine grace and blessing for us.

To lament is to express grief, sorrow, or pain in an open and heartfelt way. It is not something our modern American culture tolerates very well; we always hear that we should be strong and carry on without complaint. There certainly is a time and place for that. But lamentation has deep Biblical and Christian roots. The Psalms are full of lamentation – both as individuals and as a people, a communal statement of anguish. Perhaps the most well-known and profound example of lament is Psalm 22 which begins: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus utters that Psalm verse when he is dying on the Cross.

Lamentation is a way of being honest before God and before one another. It says that something is not right, out of joint, broken and painful – whether that is in our personal lives, in public life, in the tragedies of disaster. Lamentation lays bare our hearts and allows room for the healing light and presence of God to come within us and among us. To lament is a very faithful way to pray.

A covenant is relationship between two parties, with rights and responsibilities on both sides – with the emphasis on the relationship. There are a number of different covenants in the Bible, and they have all been initiated by God. The best known is the relationship between God and the Hebrew slaves after they had been freed from slavery in Egypt. In the desert, on Mount Sinai, God promised that he would be their Lord if they would be his people. The commandments that God gave to the people through Moses were to be markers and patterns of life that would show they were living according to God’s ways (what we call the Ten Commandments).

Covenants are about loyalty and faithfulness, which is why the Prayer Book refers to “the covenant of marriage.” At the Last supper Jesus also referred to the bread and wine as the sign of the new covenant that God was making in the Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. The disciples and all others who would follow were being invited into a new and life-giving relationship with God.~ VGM+

Sabbath is the practice of regularly refraining from work and resting. It is about trusting that the world will go on, the sun rising and setting, without any help from us. Our trust is in God. God made the universe and gave it life, and God’s care for creation far exceeds any of our efforts to make things happen. In the Ten Commandments, given to Moses after the Hebrew slaves were freed from bondage in Egypt, God tell the people to “remember the sabbath day and keep it holy.” In the first story of creation in Genesis (the first book of the Bible) we hear that God made all things in six “days” (large periods of time), and on the seventh day, God rested. And so we are called to rest, as well.

In Judaism the Sabbath begins at sundown on Friday and extends until sundown on Saturday. Christians originally celebrated the Sabbath and the Lord’s Day, the day of Resurrection, on Sunday. Those two practices merged over time, as Gentiles (non-Jews) became followers of Jesus.

Sabbath, for Christians, is primarily Sunday and is to be a day dedicated to God in worship, rest, family time, even unplugging from the rest of the world. But any day or period of time can be taken as time to practice an intentional Sabbath for renewal, refreshment – physical, emotional, and spiritual. ~ VGM+

 ~ VGM+The word peace appears nearly three hundred and fifty times in the Bible. It is far more than the absence of war or strife. Nor is merely a polite “go along to get along” attitude. Peace is a state of wholeness and balance that comes from being in a right relationship with God and with neighbor – and within oneself. The ancient Hebrew word for peace was “shalom”, meaning wholeness, completeness, soundness, health, safety, prosperity, and serenity for an individual and for the community. It is still used as a greeting in modern Judaism. Peace is a positive state; the way God wants us to be. It is a value that is expressed in one of the blessings in our services: “The Peace of God which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God, and of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord.” ~ VGM+

Words of Faith
Words matter – what they mean, how we use them, the feelings they convey, the way they shape our experience of life. For centuries Christians have had a “vocabulary of faith” which was a collection of words and ideas that was generally understood by society at large and by believers in particular.

Over time that changed. Some words became very secularized; for example, in sports we hear about players making sacrifices for their team, but originally “sacrifice” meant “to make holy.” And then some Christian groups have taken faith words and defined them in ways that most Episcopalians would have trouble resonating with.

Add to all of that the perceived split between “public life” and “private faith” – and we have lost confidence in our ability to know and use the vocabulary of our Christian lives. That can make it difficult for us to think and reason clearly about our faith, and to express to others what it is we believe and why we behave as we do.

As we have been living through this time of health crisis, we know that whatever is on the other side of this will be different than what we started with. We will be different, and we will face some new challenges and realities.

It will be good for us to remember and renew and become confident once again in the words of our faith and our expression of the Christian life as we understand it in our Episcopal and Anglican tradition. To help us with this I’ll be sharing a word on most days, with a short definition or explanation of what it means, Christianly-speaking. I hope you find this encourages you to think about the words you say, the words you pray, and the way God is shaping, forming, and equipping you to do God’s work in the world.
Blessings, Vicki+

Grace
Grace means gift – God’s gift to us of love and blessing that we neither earn nor deserve. God offers us grace before we are even aware that we are in need of it; and God already loves us fully, before we even do anything to respond to him.
We often think of someone being graceful or moving with a quality of grace, like a dancer. That image conveys a sense of fluidity, ease, motion, even beauty. When we are on the receiving end of God’s grace we gain that sense of moving through life with greater ease and dignity because we know that we are loved to our very depths.