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Orthodox Worship: The Sacraments |
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Written by Bishop Kallistos Ware
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The following excerpt is taken from The Orthodox Church, Bishop Kallistos Ware's
famous introduction to the faith, originally published in 1963.
"He who was visible as our Redeemer has now passed into the sacraments."-St.
Leo the Great
The chief place in Christian worship belongs to the sacraments or, as they are
called in Greek, the mysteries. "It is called a mystery," writes St.
John Chrysostom of the Eucharist, "because what we believe is not the same as
what we see, but we see one thing and believe another. . . . When I hear the
Body of Christ mentioned, I understand what is said in one sense, the
unbeliever in another."
This double character, at once outward and inward, is the distinctive feature
of a sacrament: the sacraments, like the Church, are both visible and
invisible; in every sacrament there is the combination of an outward visible
sign with an inward spiritual grace. At Baptism the Christian undergoes an
outward washing in water, and he is at the same time cleansed inwardly from his
sins; at the Eucharist he receives what appears from the visible point of view
to be bread and wine, but in reality he eats the Body and Blood of Christ.
In most of the sacraments the Church takes material things-water, bread, wine,
oil-and makes them a vehicle of the Spirit. In this way the sacraments look
back to the Incarnation, when Christ took material flesh and made it a vehicle
of the Spirit; and they look forward to, or rather they anticipate, the apocatastasis
and the final redemption of matter at the Last Day.
The Orthodox Church speaks customarily of seven sacraments, basically the same
seven as in Roman Catholic theology:
1: Baptism
2: Chrismation (equivalent to Confirmation in the west)
3: The Eucharist
4: Repentance or Confession
5: Holy Orders
6: Marriage or Holy Matrimony
7: The Anointing of the Sice (corresponding to Extreme Unction in the Roman
Catholic Church)
. . .
The sacraments are personal: they are the means whereby God's grace is
appropriated to every Christian individually. For this reason, in most
of the sacraments of the Orthodox Church, the priest mentions the Christian
name of each person as he administers the sacrament. When giving Holy
Communion, for example, he says: "The servant of God . . . [name] partakes of
the holy, precious Body and Blood of our Lord"; at the Anointing of the Sick he
says: "O Father, heal Thy servant [name] from his sickness both of body and
soul."
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