The Sacramental Life: Encountering the invisible God in the visible world

In this sermon, our pastor, Ian Forest-Jones, concluded the sermon series, The Balanced Christian Life, by describing how the Incarnational Tradition focuses on the relationship between the invisible spirit and physical reality, helping us to see God’s divine presence in the material world in which we live. God manifests himself in his creation, even in the midst of mundane activities, whenever and wherever we acknowledge God.

This sermon was delivered on 17 March 2024.

In this sermon series, The Balanced Christian Life, we have learned the Contemplative Tradition is a life of loving attention to God and through it we experience the divine rest that overcomes our alienation; the Holiness Tradition is a life that functions as it should because through it we are enabled to live whole, functional lives in a dysfunctional world; the Charismatic Tradition is a life immersed in, empowered by, and under the direction of the Spirit of God and through it we are empowered by God to do his work and evince his life upon the earth; and, the Evangelical Tradition is a life founded upon the living Word of God, the written Word of God, and the proclaimed Word of God, and through it we experience the knowledge of God that grounds our lives and enables us to give a reason for the whole that is in us.

The one element remaining is to understand how the streams of all of these traditions function in ordinary life, which is the task of the Incarnational Tradition.

The incarnational stream of Christian life and faith focuses upon making present and visible the realm of the invisible spirit. This sacramental way of living addresses the crying need to experience God as truly manifest and notoriously active in daily life.

The Example of Bezalel

How then do the friends of Jesus train for living a sacramental life? A good place to start is by following the example of Jesus. Nothing can ever approach the perfect and unrepeatable reality of Jesus’ incarnation. Jesus, the Christ, is incarnation itself. We bow under the mystery of it.

Nor should we neglect to mention the role of Mary, mother of the Messiah, who was given astonishing news:

The angel replied to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore, the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.

Luke 1:35[1]

God made manifest to the world, through a simple Jewish girl from an obscure village ‘out back o’ Bourke’, that he is with us, Emmanuel, in the person of Jesus. Mary’s word of obedience must ever be our word, we who seek to live sacramentally:

“See, I am the Lord’s servant,” said Mary. “May it happen to me as you have said.” Then the angel left her.

Luke 1:38

Both Jesus and Mary made present and visible the realm of the invisible spirit, and thereby expressed the Incarnational Tradition in its fullness and utter beauty. Unfortunately, these were extraordinary events in human history. We shall never come close to their example of the Incarnational Tradition.

For a more realistic example we can follow, we need to look back to when Moses led the Israelites through the Sea of Reeds to Sinai, the mountain of God.

Up to this point the people had seen the manifest presence of God in a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. Through giving the Ten Commandments and instructions for the construction of the Tabernacle and the Ark of the Covenant, God ordered human activity. In divine cooperation with this human effort, God allowed his glory to be “housed” in the Tabernacle.

The Lord also spoke to Moses: “Look, I have appointed by name Bezalel … I have filled him with God’s Spirit, with wisdom, understanding, and ability in every craft to design artistic works…

Exodus 31:1–5

The instructions for the Tabernacle were given to Moses and included a crucial point: God chose a skilled artisan and had him use his artistry to show forth God’s manifest presence to the people. Bezalel worked as an artisan and it was through his vocation that he was to demonstrate the presence of God. He was described not only as a skilled artisan but also as one “filled with the Spirit of God”. Bezalel was the first person in the Bible described in this way.

With him was Oholiab son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan, a gem cutter, a designer, and an embroiderer with blue, purple, and scarlet yarn, and fine linen.

Exodus 38:23

God inspired Bezalel to teach other skilled workers so that a large team was involved in the building of the Tabernacle. In addition the people were urged to help:

Let everyone whose heart is willing bring this as the Lord’s offering: gold, silver, and bronze; blue, purple, and scarlet yarn [etc]…

Exodus 35:5b–9

This the people did,

Both men and women came; all who had willing hearts brought brooches, earrings, rings, necklaces, and all kinds of gold jewellery…

Exodus 35:22a

Bezalel was a wonderful model of the Incarnational Tradition. He was a person of skill, intelligence, and knowledge in every kind of craft. He was able to work artistically with gold, silver, bronze, stone, and wood. Most of all, Bezalel was a person filled with the Spirit of God. And what he produced gave the people a continual vision of God throughout their wanderings in the wilderness.

Accomplishing the construction of the Tabernacle took not only special skills in craftsmanship, but personality qualities as well. First, Bezalel was imaginative. He caught the vision of what this project could be.

Second, Bezalel was articulate. He had to communicate this vision to his subcontractors. They had to see what he saw so that they could work at the project with the same kind of imagination and skill.

Third, Bezalel was an effective administrator. He had to choose the right workers and organise them. He had to set priorities and make sure the work was done in the right order. Bezalel had to delegate well because any worker who did poorly reflected on the entire project.

All of Bezalel’s qualities and skills gave him the ability to not just oversee the construction of the Tabernacle but to make sure the project made present and visible the realm of the invisible spirit.

Consider these three examples together: because of Bezalel’s skill and faith the Tabernacle “housed” the glory of God; Mary’s womb became the dwelling place, the “tabernacle” of God; and, ultimately, in Christ Jesus God has truly “tabernacle” among us.

Don’t you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God?

1 Corinthians 6:19a

It is now the call of the Church and all its members to be the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, making the glory of God visible and manifest everywhere we go and in everything we do.

Historical Examples

Seeking to follow a sacramental life has created within the Church an Incarnational Tradition—the sixth and final historical movement I am describing for you in this sermon series. For this series, I have been relying on the writings of Richard Foster, most especially his book Streams of Living Water.[2]

From its very earliest days, there have been many individuals and movements within the Church that have experienced God as truly manifest and notoriously active in their daily lives. In the pages of history we find many examples following the Incarnational Tradition:

• James Hudson Taylor (1832-1905) indicated an interest in being a missionary to China at age 5 and, though frail, he studied medicine, theology, Latin, and Greek as a young man. Upon arrival in China he adopted local customs and dress and worked tirelessly to enculturate the Gospel into Chinese life. When he discovered his sponsoring mission organisation was operating on borrowed money, he founded the interdenominational China Inland Mission.
• Stephen of Hungary (ca. 970-1038) was the son of Geza, Duke of the Magyars. He was baptised with the rest of his family and became governor when his father died. As Hungary’s first king, he consolidated his rule and gradually established sees with churches and monasteries at their centres. He exercised his kingly rights, commending that people pay tithes to support a church and priest in every 10th town, repressing public crimes such as blasphemy and murder, abolishing tribal divisions, dividing the land into “counties”, and limiting the accumulation of wealth by nobility. The architect of an independent Hungary, Stephen’s example of virtue inspired the people under his rule.
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was a novelist whose writings played a significant role in undermining Communism’s moral authority in Soviet Russia. While serving in the Soviet army, Solzhenitsyn was falsely accused of a political crime and imprisoned. His first novel describes that prison life and another takes place in a hospital. The stories contrast revolutionary ideals with harsh political reality and describe heroes whose human dignity triumphs over tyranny and suffering. His most famous work, The Gulag Archipelago, exposed the Soviet prison-camp system. In response, the Soviet union revoked Solzhenitsyns citizenship and deported him. After the collapse of Communism he returned to his beloved Russia.[3]
• Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606-1669) was The Netherlands’ greatest artist and is known worldwide for dramatic pieces that use light and shadow to heighten the drama of his subject. Rembrandt’s range included portraits, landscapes, nudes, stories from the Old and New Testaments, and more. The biblical pictures created during the last years of his life seem to glow from within, the shadows intense and vibrant. Christians are especially familiar with his painting Christ at Emmaus.
• Aurelius Prudentius Clemens (348-ca. 410) was trained in law and served in the Spanish civil service until he quit at age 57. Devoting the rest of his life to Christ, he published his Latin writings, which greatly influenced Christian poetry and hymnology. His work Psychomachia, the story of a soul’s spiritual warfare, was the first Christian allegorical epic, and his hymns are still sung today.
• Professional Christian Societies (20th century to the present). Since World War II, Christians in the marketplace have felt a special burden to bring the life of God into their life at work. To help each other in this task, philosophers, writers, dentists, doctors, lawyers, and more have joined together and formed professional organisations that meet regularly for encouragement, worship, and training. The Christian Medical and Dental Fellowship of Australia and Christians in Science and Technology are two such Australian groups.

And there are many more examples of spiritual giants and ordinary saints who discovered, in many and varied ways, a life that makes present and visible the realm of the invisible spirit. The overflow of their sacramental lives was loving action for their neighbours and changing the systems around them.

What Is the Incarnational Tradition?

The Incarnational Tradition concerns itself with the relationship between spirit and matter. In short, God is manifest to us through material means.

The spiritual and the material are not in opposition to one another, but are complementary. Far from being evil, the physical is meant to be inhabited by the spiritual. We are created so as to receive life from God, who is Spirit, and to express that life through our bodies and in the physical world in which we live. The material world is created, in part, so as to make visible and manifest the realm of the invisible spirit.

God loves matter. In his original creative acts God affirmed matter again and again, declaring it “good” at every point along the way (Gen 1-2:3). The material world is intended to enhance human life. We have been giving all things to enjoy, yet instructed to avoid the things that will harm us (Gen 2:15–17; 1 Cor 10:23; 6:12–20).

One of the main functions of matter is to mediate the presence of an infinite God to finite minds. The Ark of the Covenant and the Tabernacle were divinely appointed arrangements so that God could be with human beings without destroying them. The same is true of the coming of the Messiah as a baby in a manger. These realities allow God to come to us and we, in turn, can go to God.

There are fundamentally two arenas or dimensions of sacramental life.

The Religious Dimension

The specifically religious dimension is most fully expressed in our corporate worship. Here we utilise the physical and the material to express and manifest the spiritual. We have a choice of liturgy, but we do not have a choice of whether to use liturgy. As long as we are finite human beings, we must use liturgy; we must express ourselves through forms of worship.

Liturgy simply means “the people’s work”. Our task in liturgy is to glorify God in the various aspects of our worship life. This is true whether we are singing hymns or burning candles, dancing in ecstatic praise or bowing in speechless adoration.

For God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Jesus Christ. Now we have this treasure in clay jars, so that this extraordinary power may be from God and not from us.

2 Corinthians 4:6–7

The imagery of Paul the apostle describing “treasure in clay jars” is useful here. The treasure is “God’s glory in the face of Jesus Christ”. The “clay jar” is the human body, along with the various cultural forms we use to manifest the treasure. We must always remember that the form itself is not the treasure; we worship God, never the form.

Understanding this imagery helps us appreciate others who do not worship in our way. We can recognise the treasure they are showing forth even though they worship in a different “clay jar” from us.

All worship becomes a magnificent, all-encompassing aesthetic experience. We see, we smell, we touch, we taste, we hear. We absorb the faith by reliving the Gospel and the Passion in the liturgy. God is manifest to us through material means.

The Sacraments of the Church most completely demonstrate God’s use of matter to make present and visible the invisible realm of the Spirit. They are often called, “visible means of an invisible grace”.

Sacraments are concrete actions by which we are marked and fed in such a way that the reality of God becomes embedded in our body, mind, our spirit. The Holy Spirit grafts us into the community of faith by burying and then raising us up in Baptism and the Holy Spirit continually feeds us when we enact the death and resurrection of Christ in The Lord’s Supper.

The Arena of Everyday Life

The religious dimension is the beginning, not the end. We are to take this life and incorporate it into all we are and all we do. We bring the religious dimension into daily life: into our homes, into our work, into our relationships with children and spouse and friends and neighbours and, yes, even enemies. This then is the most fundamental arena for the Incarnational Tradition: the arena of everyday life.

The most basic place of our sacramental living is in our marriages and homes and families. Here we live together in well-reasoned love for everyone around us. Here we experience “the sacrament of the present moment” (Jean Pierre de Caussade).

Work is another everyday place for sacramental living. “Work” does not refer merely to our job, but to what we do to we produce good in our world.

Sacramental living at work does not mean retreating during lunch for a quick Bible reading and prayer. The real issue is how we live and act and react in the midst of the dog-eat-dog world of power lunches and business dealings and board meetings. Or the dog-eat-dog world of restaurant managers and servers, of contractors and subcontractors, of middle management and office staff. Or the world of law and education and entrepreneurship. These are the places where people desperately need to see the reality of God made visible and manifest. This is where we learn to do our work as Jesus would do our work if he were in our place.

The third place we live sacramentally is in society at large. We are to bring the reality of God to bear upon cultural, political, and institutional life. We work to lift our culture, not just through the commonsense moral standards of decency and honesty, but through art and literature and drama, justice and beauty and shalom. We nurture the good, the true, and the beautiful throughout society — through the person-centred caring of the schools we run, through the beauty of the products we build, through the entrepreneurial empowerment we offer the poor, through the imaginative and redeeming literature we write, through the ecological sensitivity we bring to land use and development, and so much more.

Family, work, and society comprise the arena of everyday life. It is of utmost importance that we keep a constant and intimate link between the specifically religious dimension and the arena of everyday life. This is what it means to live sacramentally, to follow in the Incarnational Tradition.

Practices For Today

We engage the Incarnational Tradition in many different ways and through many different venues. The first action in practising the Incarnational Tradition is the invocation of God’s manifest presence into this material world of ours. We invite God to enter every experience of life. We invite God to set our spirit free for worship and adoration. We invite God to animate our preaching and singing and praying. We invite God to transform the sacraments. We invite God to heal our bodies. We invite God to inform our minds with creative ideas for a business enterprises. We invite God to touch broken relationships and resolve conflicts at work or home. We invite God to make our homes holy places of worship and study and work and play and love-making. The grace of God will come in loving response to our invocation.

A second action comes as we recover a Christian spirituality of work. Special emphasis needs to be placed upon the sacredness of the work of our hands and of our mind. If ours is God’s world, any true work for the improvement of human life is a sacred undertaking.

So what does a Christian spirituality of work look like? We have a sense of calling, a God-given ability to do a job linked with a God-given enjoyment in doing it. We have a sense of responsibility to do something in our own time that has value. We have a sense of freedom from the burden of the workaholic, for we are not asked to do more than we can. We have a sense of creativity that enables us to place the autograph of our souls on the work of our hands. We have a sense of dignity, for we value people over efficiency. We have a sense of community, for we know our life together is more important than the end product. We have a sense of solidarity with the poor to empower them to do what they cannot do by themselves. And we have a sense of meaning and purpose, for we know we are working in cooperation with God to bring the world one step closer to completion.

A third action comes through the recovery of marriage and family life. Marriage is covenantal. It involves an uncalculating abandon, an utter and mutual outpouring of love and loyalty. And so a home is formed and children must normally follow.

Family life is the place where the specifically religious dimension and everyday life meet. The home is intrinsically a religious institution and the family table is the centre of the home.

Common labour too should be found in the home. Floors need cleaning and windows need washing. It is worth our best thinking and most creative efforts to make the home not just a rooming house, but the centre of family life, the place for work and worship and play and love-making.

In these and many other ways, the arena of everyday life and the religious dimension come together and make all-of-life a sacrament.

Conclusion

The Incarnational Tradition leads to a life that makes present and visible the realm of the invisible spirit. We explore it because through it we experience God as truly manifest and notoriously active in daily life.

All of us are called to sacramental living. Redeemed by God through Christ, we are indwelt by the Holy Spirit and experience a growing transformation of character as our bodies come into a working harmony with our spirit. Hence our embodied self becomes a habitation of the holy —a tabernacle— where we learn throughout our daily activities to function in cooperation with and dependence upon God. Through time and experience we discover that everywhere we go is “holy ground” and everything we do is “sanctified action”. The jagged line dividing the sacred and the secular becomes very dim indeed, for we know that nothing is outside the realm of God’s purview and loving care.

Let us, therefore, follow the example of Jesus, Mary, and Bezalel, and the example of ordinary saints that have gone before us in the Incarnational Tradition, that the Holy Spirit might make us more like Christ —to will and to act in accordance with God’s will for us (Php 2:12-13).

And may we always remember Jesus said, “The one who believes in me, as the Scripture has said, will have streams of living water flow from deep within him” (Jn 7:38). The sacramental life of the Incarnational Tradition overflows.

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[1]Unless otherwise noted, all scripture quotations are taken from The Christian Standard Bible (Nashville, TN, USA: Holman Bible Publishers, 2017).

[2]Richard J. Foster, Streams of Living Water: Essential Practices From the Six Great Traditions of Christian Faith (Zondervan, 2001); other relevant resources include Richard J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth (Harper San Francisco, 1998) and A.A. Calhoun, Spiritual Disciplines Handbook: Practices that transform us (InterVarsity Press, 2015).

[3]Of course, we cannot forget Solzhenitsyn’s 19th century predecessors in literature and Christian faith. Count Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky are among Russia’s greatest novelists. They wrote during the age of realism, focussing on the human condition. In War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Tolstoy explored such universal themes as birth, love, marriage, moral duty, and death. Dostoevsky’s characters in Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov experience violent spiritual struggles between their pride and self-centredness and their belief in God.