Sounds like grace at work.

As far as the mystics you refer to, I can’t recall any. You don’t mean the tendency we have to think of and refer to the Holy Spirit as our beloved, do you? I personally just feel that there is no earthly comparison as all descriptions fall short.

Annie

In a similar conversation in an Episcopal blog nine months ago I said the same thing!

I don’t think it’s too far-feteched, it seems to me that one of the trends at the moment in TEC is exactly this type of low Christology, which ultimately leads to thinking Jesus doesn’t matter in the economy of grace when taken to its final end–God will save anyway… Well, yes. Through Jesus Christ whose love cost everything. There seems to be know sense of turning about in CWOB, though I acknowledge I know some who have become Christian because of it. But only in tandem with catechesis as follow up, and then Baptism. In my community, what has struck me, is that those who first came and CWOB’ed and then decided to become Christian, stopped receiving at that point until they were properly catechized and baptized.

You’re right, God first serves us, as I mentioned, we cannot save ourselves, but our response to God matters–our response of course being so only because of the Spirit’s already at work. And the “our” is often others on our behalf.

Too high Christologies tend to docetism, that God couldn’t possibly take on a nasty mutable body.

Or gnosticism! There is far too much risk of it in our church, too.

Too low Christologies tend to say the same thing in a reverse sense, that God didn’t take on a body, but was only a human being, that Jesus was simply some great man, prophet, teacher, or some odd admixture demigod (Arianism and Adoptionism).

I think this is getting too far fetched. I was thinking of bowing to Christ and Christ as servant the other day and it began to seem to me that the only way Christ would want us to bow is in pure adoration–all love! Where did he walk, who did he speak to? Was he too good for anyone? Didn’t he come more to assure the poor and downtrodden, the oppressed, the needy of justice? I think the wonder of it is that we have a God that is not too good to stoop to help a vagrant out of a gutter. Not an ordinary man! But someone so loving, so generous, so kind that he would lay down his life to help us all. I’m sorry, but thinking that he wasn’t about clean linen isn’t forgetting who he was.

It’s not that we’re saying God withhold’s his grace from any, but we make a commitment to a way of life that may cost us everything.

I hang out with too many Lutherans! It isn’t what we do. But beyond that–when? Before baptism? Before our first communion? Before confirmation? I’m afraid this statement doesn’t fit at all with my understanding of our relationship with God. Again, I will say that I had been baptised and confirmed before I ever took my first communion, but the impact of that communion–though amazing–was not the same as what it is now.

I’m not sure if I like your lover analogy, either. I think it is a bit too groupy . . .

Annie

Again, normative practice due to theology (systematics) and the pastoral situation are going to collide here, but I think we want to aim for making disciples and that requires a commitment.

Now of course we have to understand things in historical context. The Quakers don’t have sacraments in part because of a state Church reality in which sacraments were largely beholden to the English state, that should keep us Anglicans a bit humble. And yet, Quakers in my experience are highly sacramental in their understanding of their bodies as locus of God’s working out of salvation.

Fr. John-Julian makes my central point, which I wanted to get up but haven’t yet coherently in a post. Maundy Thursday is in keeping with the practices of traditional desert hospitality, only here, God serves us, washes us, feeds us. Washing was the opening of desert hospitality and a real commitment to a way of life that is at odds with the world-eat-world mentality, that you serve the lost one, the wandering one, provide him or her with bath and meal, is the recognition of turnabout to a vision different from “red in tooth and claw” and of dependence on another for continued existence and survival, here the Wholly Other. Baptism is our initiation into “seeing things God’s way”, is our commiting to this way of hospitality in a world that tells us its “all about getting ours”. And the commitment made to this way is a struggle, after all, who among us wouldn’t simply want to get ours? In that sense, vows (married, union, religious), are grounded within this fundamental Christian commitment at Baptism. That commitment is nurtured by ongoing feeding, in this case upon the body and blood of our Lord, the new humanity, the divinized humanity, which is the grace and food for the struggle, pilgrimage, journey to live out God’s way of hospitality in the daily.

I think again thought bls has hit on part of the issue, that we cannot isolate Sacraments from overall flow, what she’s been calling the liturgical.

I’m going to argue that a meal with others is incredibly intimate–it is a “getting to know you” moment. Alexander Schmemann argues as much in speaking of our fall first through eating and our being raised through eating as well. Eating is. (And at the biological level, sex itself likely evolved through eating, just food for thought). But I concur with Fr. John-Julian, being communed is closer to making love. What if we saw all eating thusly through that lens? Many a gay man has written a poem on Communion in just those terms.

The Lord’s Supper in this instance isn’t then simply about reenactment of the Last Supper, but here, God serves us now, this is our supping on the Lord, on the Resurrection.

And the Eucharist is not merely the Last Supper redux, as some Protestant friends would have it with their “Lord’s Supper”.

By the way, NO one received Holy Communion with ANYONE else until after the Resurrection (otherwise, they WERE cannibals, as the pagan Romans suggested) and Jesus never celebrated Mass (except perhaps mystically on the cross). Maundy Thursday was merely Liturgics 101 - and, aha, even that began with a washing, didn’t it?

I really do think that we need to keep systematic theology and pastoral theology clearly distinct here. ST need not supersede PT in every conceivable circumstance — nor should PT be allowed just to sell ST down the river. Via media really does have something to commend it.