With its great heritage from English mystics, the Episcopal Church has been “spiritual” since before it was trendy, and modern Episcopalians have been in the forefront of exploring practices beyond Anglican boundaries. Yet, perhaps only rarely do they grasp the implications of the theology embedded in these practices or in the liturgies of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, which has shaped Episcopalians in this country with its emphasis on baptismal spirituality and the centrality of the Eucharist. Julia Gatta wants to change that with her book, Life in Christ.
Applying her years of experience as pastor and spiritual director combined with her study of the spiritual wisdom of the past, she explores common Christian practices and their underlying theology through an Episcopal lens. In the tradition of Esther de Waal, Martin Smith, and Martin Thornton, with particular reference to scripture, the Book of Common Prayer, and the wisdom of the Christian spiritual tradition, she illuminates methods readers may already be practicing and provides insight and guidance to ones that may be new to them.
With its great heritage from English mystics, the Episcopal Church has been “spiritual” since before it was trendy, and modern Episcopalians have been in the forefront of exploring practices beyond Anglican boundaries. Yet, perhaps only rarely do they grasp the implications of the theology embedded in these practices or in the liturgies of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, which has shaped Episcopalians in this country with its emphasis on baptismal spirituality and the centrality of the Eucharist. Julia Gatta wants to change that with her book, Life in Christ.
Applying her years of experience as pastor and spiritual director combined with her study of the spiritual wisdom of the past, she explores common Christian practices and their underlying theology through an Episcopal lens. In the tradition of Esther de Waal, Martin Smith, and Martin Thornton, with particular reference to scripture, the Book of Common Prayer, and the wisdom of the Christian spiritual tradition, she illuminates methods readers may already be practicing and provides insight and guidance to ones that may be new to them.
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Overview
With its great heritage from English mystics, the Episcopal Church has been “spiritual” since before it was trendy, and modern Episcopalians have been in the forefront of exploring practices beyond Anglican boundaries. Yet, perhaps only rarely do they grasp the implications of the theology embedded in these practices or in the liturgies of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, which has shaped Episcopalians in this country with its emphasis on baptismal spirituality and the centrality of the Eucharist. Julia Gatta wants to change that with her book, Life in Christ.
Applying her years of experience as pastor and spiritual director combined with her study of the spiritual wisdom of the past, she explores common Christian practices and their underlying theology through an Episcopal lens. In the tradition of Esther de Waal, Martin Smith, and Martin Thornton, with particular reference to scripture, the Book of Common Prayer, and the wisdom of the Christian spiritual tradition, she illuminates methods readers may already be practicing and provides insight and guidance to ones that may be new to them.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819233110 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Church Publishing, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 07/17/2018 |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Sales rank: | 513,166 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Reliving Christ's Death and Resurrection
"What do you seek?" Answer: "Life in Christ."
— Admission of Catechumens
Life in Christ begins with baptism. With this sacrament, which many of us received as infants or children, the goal of the mystics — union with God — is already given to us, at least germinally. Yet living into this grace and letting it mold us over the course of our lives will cost us, as T.S. Eliot once said of the mystical way, "not less than everything." And a mature Christian spirituality demands nothing less than making the baptismal identity we received, at whatever age, our own. It requires us to embrace its astounding grace and its demanding commitments day after day and year after year. As we begin our exploration of Christian spirituality, we need first to plunge into the mystery of baptism to experience its depths. Before we can see why baptism shapes Christian life as definitively as it does, we must peel back the layers of cultural conditioning that trivialize it. Many people regard baptism as merely the occasion for a family celebration of a baby's birth — a worthy enough sentiment in itself, but one that falls far short of the spiritual reality of baptism. We have to overcome the impression that the rite of baptism simply issues a membership card in the church, without pondering what it means to become a living member of the living Christ.
Many religions have developed rites involving water. Rituals designed to enact, one way or another, an aspiration for interior purification have often drawn upon the inherent symbolism of this cleansing agent. By the time of Christ, elements within Judaism seem to have evolved forms of proselyte baptism: that is, as part of their initiation into the Covenant people, Gentile converts underwent a ritual bath, by which the filth of paganism was symbolically washed away. When John the Baptist appeared offering a "baptism of repentance," he was most likely building upon this and other ablutionary precedents. Yet the baptism he urged upon his contemporaries also differed significantly from these earlier models. For John's baptism was not intended for Gentiles but for Jews, at least for those who were aware of their need for inner cleansing and renewal. Above all, John's baptism was preparatory and temporary. It was a baptism full of expectation, anticipating its own fulfillment in another, messianic baptism: "I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me. ... He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire" (Matt. 3:11).
It is remarkable that Jesus begins his public ministry by submitting to John's baptism of repentance since the New Testament and subsequent tradition never attribute personal sin to Jesus. What is Jesus doing in such a compromising situation? He is emphatically taking his stand with human beings in their sinfulness. He is defining the radical scope of his ministry from the outset. It is a position that will elicit criticism throughout his life as Jesus dines with public sinners and, finally, suffers a shameful and ignominious death, crucified between two criminals. His life and ministry and, at the last, his death address our desperate plight: "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick" (Matt. 9:12).
When at his baptism Jesus embraces humanity in its sinful condition, the Father embraces him: "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased" (Mark 1:11). The voice from heaven identifies Jesus as Son and beloved servant (Is. 42:1), thus ratifying all that is about to happen in Jesus's ministry. The descent of the Spirit tells us that with the coming of Jesus a new creation is springing into life, even as the Spirit of God moved over the face of the waters in the beginning of creation (Gen. 1:2). The baptism of Jesus is thus both a commencement and a completion. It begins Jesus's public ministry in an electrifying Trinitarian epiphany as God the Holy Spirit descends on Jesus and God the Father manifests him as the Messiah, the Christ. And it brings stunning fulfillment to all the messianic expectation bound up in John's preaching and baptism. The baptism with the Holy Spirit foretold by John is here revealed and established.
Jesus fulfills the course presaged in his baptism through his death and resurrection. After his glorification, the Spirit is released upon Jesus's disciples, transforming them. Having accomplished the mission for which he was sent into the world and anointed at his baptism, Jesus's own pattern of baptism in the Spirit/death/ and resurrection becomes the paradigm for his followers: To be a Christian is to live the Christ-life, share the Christ-death, and enjoy eternal communion with the Father and the Spirit.
"Repent, and be baptized every one of you" (Acts 2:38)
Several New Testament texts work out various implications of participating in Christ's new life through baptism. These passages, written in the middle or latter part of the first century, were enriched by the experience of the church, which had already been living into this reality for a generation or two. A key text for understanding baptism, and an obvious place to begin, comes from St. Luke's description of the very first post-resurrection baptisms in the church (Acts 2). It is significant that these occur on Pentecost Day and are intimately tied up with a series of events that, as they unfold, establish enduring patterns of grace and living.
The time is Pentecost or the Jewish Feast of Weeks. The place is Jerusalem, the holy city — the destination of pilgrims drawn from every quarter of the Hellenistic world. Luke first focuses our attention on the small community of disciples who, after the Ascension of the Lord, have gathered in prayer, awaiting the promised Spirit: the Twelve, certain women disciples, Mary the mother of Jesus, and Jesus's brothers. The messianic baptism by the Holy Spirit and fire foretold by John the Baptist suddenly comes upon them. Violent wind and flames of fire convey the sheer power and burning intensity of the Spirit's interpenetration, a shared experience of God. Those assembled will never be the same.
What had been a personal event for Jesus at his baptism now becomes communal. With a kind of ripple effect, the grace of Pentecost presses beyond even the original community of disciples. The apostles immediately leave their shelter and begin preaching about Jesus — a very risky business. Something has happened to them: the entirely natural fear of death, common to all sentient beings, has lost its power. Peter, spokesman for the group, explains the new situation. He recalls the crucifixion of Jesus, a well-known event that took place a mere fifty days earlier at the time of Passover. But then Peter announces, for the first time in a public forum, the heart of the gospel: "This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses" (Acts 2:32).
Here is a transformation within a transformation. The disciples are now fearless in the face of death because death has, as St. Paul would put it, lost its sting. The resurrection of Jesus changes everything. Life is no longer confined to the familiar cycle of birth, growth, decay, and death. Something utterly new has happened. Across centuries and cultures there have evolved innumerable myths of death and resurrection, beliefs in reincarnation or the immortality of the soul, and stories of the "afterlife"— all of which attest to a profound human longing. We might cynically or resignedly dismiss these yearnings as mere wishful thinking or the stuff of fairy tales. But in the resurrection of Jesus, God reaches into our deepest hopes and fears. Death does not have the final word. The risen body of Jesus, radiant prototype of the new creation, leads the way.
The raising of Jesus also illumines our moral state of affairs. Surveying the ascendancy of power over justice and privilege over fairness, we might well conclude that "good guys finish last" and wonder along with Jeremiah, Job, and many of the psalms, "Why does the way of the guilty prosper?" (Jer. 12:1). Yet the Bible consistently affirms that God is just. The justice of God is played out in the Pentecost scene when Peter confronts his listeners with their role in Jesus's execution: "This man ... you crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law" (Acts 2:23). There must be moral accountability. Like the apostles themselves, who abandoned or denied Jesus, the crowd gathered in Jerusalem cannot pretend innocence. And so Peter's announcement that "this Jesus God raised up" simultaneously convicts and liberates them from both personal guilt and shared culpability. What is more, God's action in raising Jesus is harbinger of the final undoing of injustice and the ultimate defeat of evil. Thus when Martin Luther King Jr. confidently asserted that, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice," his reading of history was shaped in part by this vision of faith.
What Acts goes on to relate is a blueprint of the conversion process. First, the gospel is proclaimed, and this proclamation has a transforming effect. The crowd is stirred, indeed pierced, by the gospel message: "Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart" (Acts 2:37). The Spirit, which had invaded the disciples, now moves the assembly to compunction of heart, a rending conviction of sin. Yet they do not stay there, paralyzed by remorse and immobilized by sorrow. They immediately ask the apostles an eminently practical question: "What should we do?" What to do about guilt? What to do about this resurrection? How do we connect with it? Peter replies with a fully practical response: "Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit" (Acts 2:38). This is where Christian life — life in Christ — begins: with baptism. It addresses the most crucial issues that confront human beings: life and death, sin and guilt, justice and injustice, forgiveness and hope.
The gospel is proclaimed and the people respond. Baptism is the way forward. This is how we take on a new identity: the paschal mystery of Christ's death and rising becomes ours. So baptism is both a gift of God and our faithful response to the pressure of the Holy Spirit who leads us to conversion in the first place. Is baptism God's work or ours? It is both. God initiates, yet does not override our free response as human beings who have been invited to cooperate with the divine action. This dynamic synergy of God's grace coupled with our effort, which begins at baptism, characterizes all of Christian life. In many cases, we are more aware of one side of this partnership than the other. Sometimes hard human labor or struggle seems paramount. At other times, we can seem almost carried away by grace. But even then, grace needs to find a receptive home. Like a double helix, divine action and human response are inseparably intertwined.
In the case of adult baptism — certainly the typical situation envisioned in the New Testament and early centuries of the church — baptism entails a deliberate personal commitment to Jesus Christ springing from faith in his saving death and resurrection. In the baptism of an infant or young child, the gracious gift of God towards one who cannot yet make a personal response of faith is evident. Yet faith remains an essential component in infant baptism as well. Here it is the faith of the believing community, embodied above all in the covenant promises of the parents and sponsors, which creates the pastoral milieu in which this sacrament can be responsibly administered.
In every case except emergency baptism, the church requires prior catechesis of all parties: whether adult candidates, parents, or godparents. This instruction involves basic teaching: "Conversion of mind" or the capacity to view everything afresh with the eyes of faith is one aspect of conversion. Catechesis also begins the process of learning distinctly Christian habits, practices, and virtues. This formation cannot be hurried. It takes time to learn a new way of thinking and to unlearn old habits of mind and behavior. New Christians and their sponsors need to understand the faith articulated in the creeds, grasp its internal coherence, and experience this faith from the "inside"— as an inner dynamic creating order, insight, beauty, and direction in one's life. Christian formation also entails shedding obsolete and defeating patterns of thought and conduct.
St. Paul insists that baptism forges a union with Christ in his death and resurrection: "Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death ... so we too might walk in newness of life" (Rom. 6:3–4). How did Paul come to think of baptism as a "burial" with Christ? The metaphor of death and burial would have suggested itself naturally enough since all baptisms at the time took place by immersion in "living water"— a lake, river, or stream. When the church expanded into climates and regions in which baptism in natural bodies of water was no longer practical, for many centuries churches still built baptisteries (some of them very beautiful) so that baptism could continue to take place with complete immersion of the candidate. Baptism by immersion can be frightening, as the candidate "goes under" three times in a symbolic dying with Christ. Fortunately, some churches have maintained this arresting tradition, including the Eastern Orthodox, and the practice is being revived in some places in the Episcopal Church. One parish church in rural England recently recovered from its neighborhood an old stone watering trough once used for horses, moved it in front of the church, and now uses it for immersion baptisms. The coffin-like shape of an animals' watering trough suits perfectly the action of being buried with Christ in baptism.
For tomb it is. Some traditional icons of the baptism of Jesus show him fully surrounded by dark waters, foreshadowing his own entombment. St. Paul contends that baptism into the "death of Christ" spells an end to the deathly grip of sin over a believer's life, its power to control our choices and actions: "We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin" (Rom. 6:6). If St. Peter counseled those assembled in Jerusalem on Pentecost to "repent, and be baptized every one of you ... so that your sins may be forgiven," Paul presents the repentance enacted in baptism as a crucifixion of sin. The language of crucifixion, of course, underscores the spiritual union with Christ in his particular form of death that is accomplished by baptism. What Christ achieved on the cross for our salvation is now part of the believer: he or she has been immersed in this grace. Crucifixion language also highlights the suffering entailed in renouncing sin and struggling against it daily. Repentance is no easy matter. There are layers and layers to sin and thus to repentance, many of which we discover only after years of effort, and countless humiliating lapses. Baptism begins the process of a "death to sin," but it is a death Christians feel every day.
Baptism thus sets us on the "purgative way," a painful cleansing from sin that lasts a lifetime. Writing of the petition "Thy kingdom come," Evelyn Underhill insists that its advent demands costly inner purification: "None can guess beforehand with what anguish, what tearing of old hard tissues and habits, the Kingdom will force a path into the soul, and confront self-love in its last fortress with the penetrating demand of God." As the Spirit gradually sets us free from destructive patterns of "thought, word, and deed," we come to realize just how bent we actually are, and how all-embracing and utterly necessary to us is the gift of grace. Indeed, it is only by grace that we can even begin to see sin for what it is and how deeply its malignant roots penetrate us. Life itself has a way of repeatedly holding a mirror up to our disordered desires and habitual failings. So as we move out of the pseudo-innocence characteristic of the secular mind-set, our awareness of the distortions of sin — in ourselves and in the world around us — grows rather than diminishes. Even though our personal entanglement in sin may become objectively diminished over time, grace clears our vision to see things as they are.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Life in Christ"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Julia Gatta.
Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface,
Introduction: The Heart's Longing,
1. Reliving Christ's Death and Resurrection,
2. Communion with Christ,
3. Sanctifying Time through the Liturgical Round,
4. Prayer in Solitude,
5. Practices for the Journey,
What People are Saying About This
“This beautiful book will draw you into the spiritual depths of the sacraments. It will reveal Christ in the midst of your community. It will transform your experience of Sunday morning. A must-read.”
—Margaret Benefiel, author, Soul at Work and The Soul of a Leader
“The thrust of this wonderful guide to spiritual formation is summed up in a favorite French word, approfondissement, ‘being taken deeper.’ Julia Gatta has a wealth of pastoral experience in leading people into the profound meaning of our sacramental life in community, and helping people become more ‘rooted and grounded in love’ through the patient exploration of prayer and tried and tested spiritual practices. She shares this experience with us seriously, without a trace of sentimentality, but with a joy she encourages us to expect as we experience more and more what we already have and who we already are as the baptized, ‘in the deep end’ with God.”
—The Rev. Martin L. Smith, retreat leader and author
“Life in Christ is a wonderful and wise introduction to the spirituality of worship, centered on the Paschal Mystery, our immersion in it in Baptism, and our week-by-week celebration of it at Eucharist throughout the liturgical year. Throughout, it examines the connection between the dominical sacraments and our spiritual lives as Christians.”
—Juan M.C. Oliver, Custodian of the Book of Common Prayer