The Meaning of Baptism

A homily on the occasion of the baptism of Otto and Axel String

       Let’s be honest. Most people today, even those who attend church regularly and call themselves “Christian,” don’t really believe in God. Many believe in “a higher power,” however vaguely defined, and in the power of prayer. Many believe in being good and discover in love a power that imitates transcendence. Many, perhaps most, believe that after death we go to a better place, even if they know not who guides us to Peter’s Gate or how we qualify for "eternal advancement." But you know as well as I do that in the modern age, very few believe that the gospel is an actual revelation of the divine will. This erosion of faith has occurred gradually over the past four centuries as Christendom steadily succumbed to the rise of secularism, which in turn gave rise to the modern liberal society for whom the proposition is axiomatic that there is no power in the universe greater than human reason. In the modern mind, God may exist at a distance from creation much as a watchmaker does to his watch. But the idea of the incarnation, that God descended to earth and worked miracles among us before dying on a cross, after which he worked the greatest of all miracles by rising from the tomb body and soul, is an absurd contradiction of reason. The dead by definition don’t rise. The gospel, therefore, has to be a myth, a compelling but wholly imaginative story. Only credulous simpletons think otherwise.

       Well, ok, call me a credulous simpleton, but I believe the gospel, every bit of it. I know what I believe and why. And I know that Christian faith is not blind or superstitious but is grounded in reason and revelation. Every Sunday for almost 25 years I’ve offered you many and various reasons why we may have absolute confidence in the truth of the gospel. Allow me this morning to give you one more. About 37 years ago, I witnessed a miracle. My son, whom I adore, was born with an abnormal growth on his behind, about the size of a 50-cent piece, something that looked like a piece of pepperoni. The doctors said that it would perhaps fade away by the time he was 18, but that until then it would remain a deforming mark that would cause him some discomfort. There was nothing they could do for him, they said. At Christmas that year, his mother and I took him to church, where Fr. Arthur Lynch, our parish priest at the time, anointed him and prayed for his healing. The next day, the deforming mark was gone, vanished. Coincidence? I don’t think so. I think that answer to prayer was a sign of God’s grace. I was in my second year of seminary training for the Episcopal priesthood. I was unhappy and close to quitting. That answer to prayer changed my life. And so I’m here today to proclaim good news. God is everything the Gospels say he is and as much as we depend on human reason, we ultimately depend on God’s grace even more.

     Baptism, which is what brings us together today, is no less of a real and dramatic miracle than what I saw happen to my son for its being so common. You might say, “I’ve seen many baptisms before but in not one of them did I see a miracle.” But look again. In baptism God cleanses the soul of the one being baptized of original sin and so welcomes him or her into the Church, the visible institution on earth of the Kingdom of Heaven. In the act of baptism, it may look like a man is pouring water over a baby’s head, that’s all. But the water is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. It’s what we can’t see except through the lens of faith that matters most; grace abounds in baptism. But one is tempted again to say, “If you can’t see something, in this case the action of the Spirit, weigh it or measure it, how can you be sure of it?” The modern age, obsessed with reason and science, thinks it’s so smart. But the modern age, for all its higher learning, is seriously dumbing us down. Solomon, whose wisdom has stood the test of time, said, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is insight” (Proverbs 9:10). In other words, we have forgotten what the ancients knew: It takes faith to see the world for what it really is, the property and province of God.

       But don’t take my word for it, listen to Saint Paul. In the Acts of the Apostles, Saint Luke records the dramatic story of Paul’s conversion. About a year after Jesus’ death and resurrection, while traveling to Damascus with the intent of persecuting the church there, Paul was struck blind by Christ, who appeared to him in pure light. The Lord spoke to Paul and commanded him not to persecute the church but to join it and to lead its evangelistic mission. Paul remained blind for three days. After three days, the Lord then sent a saint named Ananias to pray for Paul. Ananias laid hands on him and prayed, and then Luke said that immediately “something like scales fell from his eyes and he (Paul) regained his sight. Then he rose and was baptized” (Acts 9:18). And the rest, as they say, is history.

       Luke also tells the story of Saint Phillip, who met an Ethiopian man on his way home from having visited Jerusalem. The Ethiopian was reading from the prophet Isaiah, chapter 53, which speaks of a righteous servant of God whose unjust suffering and death redeems humanity from sin. The Ethiopian did not understand what he was reading. Phillip explained to him that Jesus of Nazareth was the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke and that by his suffering, death, and resurrection, he had fulfilled the promise of the scriptures and accomplished our redemption, fully reconciling sinners to the one and only Holy God. The Ethiopian was moved in his heart by what Phillip said and asked to be baptized. Without delay, seeing the sincerity of his faith, Phillip baptized him in a nearby river (Acts 8:26-38).

        Neither Paul nor the Ethiopian was baptized after a lengthy pre-baptismal class. It soon became the custom among the early Christians to baptize new members into the Church on Easter Sunday, following 40 days of study and prayer. Lent became the season to prepare for baptism. Although today we baptize people throughout the year, it is still the norm for adult candidates for baptism and for parents wishing to have their children baptized to take a pre-baptismal class to learn the basics of the Faith: the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostles’ Creed.  But some are baptized with almost no preparation. Once, in a hospital, I baptized a child who was born prematurely and was expected to die. Why do that? We baptize with confidence that God’s grace is bestowed on our souls through the sacrament, because baptism is not something we do for God. Baptism is something God does to us. In baptism, the Son of God, who alone has the right to call God “my Father,” makes us his own. By sharing the divine nature with us (2 Peter 1:4), Christ gives us the right to call God “Our Father” (Galatians 4:4-7). We who were children of Adam and Eve crawling in the poverty of sin to our mortal graves become through baptism children of God and heirs of his eternal Kingdom (John 1:12). We who were dead because of sin are reborn, through baptism, to eternal life (John 3:7).

        “You cannot enter the kingdom of God,” Jesus said, “unless you are born of water and the Spirit” (John 3:5). Baptism is not just a little ritual of initiation into the church that may be required of some but not others (Acts 2:38). Baptism is the necessary precondition of our salvation (Mark 16:16). Christ went all the way to the cross to secure it for us. God announced through the prophets that he would reverse the curse brought upon us by Adam’s sin. “I will sprinkle clean water on you and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses. A new heart I will give you and a new spirit I will put within you. I will take out your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you” (Ezekiel 36:25-28). Baptism is the fulfillment of Ezekiel’s prophecy. In baptism, by an act of grace, we are cleansed of sin and given the Holy Spirit as a pledge of our inheritance of even greater things to come (1 Corinthians 12:13; Ephesians 1:13-14). All of this is a gift to us from the Son of God, who takes us to himself in baptism, bestowing on us by grace the holiness that is his by nature. All who are baptized into Christ and in whom the Spirit comes to dwell have been given the hope of heaven. As Saint Paul said in his letter to the Romans, “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you (through baptism), he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through the spirit which dwells in you.” (Romans 8:11).

       We may be tempted to think that baptism, especially of an infant, is just an ancient ceremony we maintain for tradition’s sake, a little “christening” we keep to please the grandparents. The grandparents are very pleased, but look. You could say the same of marriage. Why not just live together? What’s the difference? The difference is that when a king makes a vow in public and puts a ring on the finger of his bride, even if she was a peasant beforehand, she becomes in that moment a queen. In baptism, the King of kings gives us his name and we become royalty. The name of each and every baptized soul is written in the book of heaven (Revelation 3:5; Philippians 4:3). Nothing could be more important than baptism. It is not a guarantee of salvation—we still have to take up the cross, follow Jesus, and keep the faith—but it is a necessary first step (Romans 8:14-18).

      If you take only one thing away from this homily, I hope it will be the conviction that all who have been baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit belong to God in a way that the unbaptized do not. I’m not saying that the baptized are better people than the unbaptized. That’s obviously not always the case. I am saying that the baptized have been given something by grace that the unbaptized have yet to receive: a divine pledge and promise of glory. Saint Paul put it like this when he wrote to the church in Rome: “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Romans 6:4-5). Baptism puts our past sins behind us and orients us to the future, where Christ is all in all and the love of God is perfected among the angels and saints in heaven. The task of all the baptized is to li:17-19; Galatians 6:7-8).

        In a secular age in which people roll their eyes at the mention of God and relegate all mention of the divine to the realm of superstition, it’s a challenge to live by faith in Christ. It takes courage to keep your faith as a bedrock conviction of absolute truth in a world that denies that there is such a thing as absolute truth. But we have the revelation of God in Christ to enlighten our minds and the witness of all the saints to strengthen our hearts. It’s humbling to believe the gospel, because recognition of the divine self-sacrifice needed to accomplish the redemption of sinners evokes in those same sinners who comprehend it an almost incomprehensible awe at what God has done for us and the excruciating lengths to which he went to share the divine nature with us. I’m moved by the words of one of my heroes, William F. Buckley Jr., who with his typical eloquence expressed his faith in these words: “To praise the asceticism of St. Francis of Assisi is to focus attention on the difference between his and your and my lifestyle. To ponder the glory of God is to worship a transcendence that gives us a measure of man, near infinitely small on the scale of things, but infinitely great, as the complement of divine love. Who are you, buster? I am the man Christ-God died for.” (Nearer, My God, Harcourt Brace, 1997, p. 168) That impossibly humbling boast of the sinner, “I am the man Christ-God died for,” says it all. We owe everything to him who has come to us in our poverty and set us up to rule with him as kings. He has not given us the level of total comfort, prosperity, success, and security we would like to have here and now. He has not given us a world free from sorrow, pain, evil, and death. But he has borne our sorrows and worn a crown of thorns for us. He has faced evil for us and gloriously defeated it by rising above death. Maybe he hasn’t given us everything we want or answered every question we may have of him, but he has secured for us everything we need to enter heaven. And for that the baptized are eternally thankful.

Greeting to the Class of 2018

       Let me tell you a story of what happened to me yesterday that I’m sure you won’t believe, even though the heart of it is absolutely true.

       Last week, by a fortuitous turn of events, I was invited to give the commencement address at a major secular state university. At the last minute, the director of the FBI, who was going to deliver the address on the theme of moral righteousness in the modern age, was called before Congress for further questioning and couldn’t make it. In a panic, the board of regents met to discuss what to do. One of the members, an Episcopalian, said that he was very impressed by the wonderfully long and vacuous sermon that Presiding Bishop Michael Curry gave recently at the royal wedding. Since the regents were looking for someone who could talk at great length without saying anything controversial, they called him, but he was in Washington leading a protest against the NRA and couldn’t make it. But, he said, “I was cruising the internet last week and stumbled upon the website of St. George and St Matthew’s, Dundalk, and I’ll tell you, the preacher has posted there some of the best sermons I’ve ever read. He’s probably doing nothing—call him.” So they called me and I said I’d be happy to give the commencement address. They asked what my fee would be. I said, “Well, I heard that Hillary Clinton got $10,000 for her most recent speech.” They laughed and offered to pay my expenses.  

       So there I was, standing before an audience of almost 4,000 receptive young minds eager for me to finish speaking so that they could get to the drunken beach bacchanal to which they were going after receiving their diplomas. I could see from the quizzical expressions on the faces of the faculty (some of whom who were clearly wondering “Who is this guy? Does he even have a degree?”) that I needed to start talking fast. So I wasted no time and got right to it.

       “Women, men, straight, lesbian, gays, bis, transgenders, those who have yet to determine what gender you are: Thank you, “I said, “for inviting me to address you on this august occasion. Today is, you may know, the 35th anniversary of the controversial commencement speech that Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave at Harvard in June of 1983. That speech, titled “A World Split Apart,” addressed what this great man of the Orthodox faith called “the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness” that he said was bringing both East and West to moral and spiritual ruin. “On the way from the Renaissance to our days,” he said, “we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity, which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life.” It took courage for him to say that to the Harvard faculty, of all people. Harvard was founded by Christians for the purpose of training Protestant clergy, who at the time were considered the most important teachers and leaders in American society. No one at Harvard, not even the faculty of what is now a thoroughly agnostic divinity school, believes that today. Let’s be honest. Almost no one on a college campus goes to church on Sundays. Am I wrong? So give Solzhenitsyn credit. For him to say that the West has lost faith in God and has lost its spiritual life, what he called “our most precious possession,” and to say that to an historic educational institution that was founded to protect and transmit from one generation to the next that very thing, was to accuse the institution of failure. That took some guts.

        Furthermore, remember in June of 1983, the Iron Curtain, as Churchill called it, was still a physical barrier marking off the communist empire in Eastern Europe from the capitalist democracies in the West. The cold war was at its hottest. Everyone feared mutual assured destruction. It seemed in this battle for control of the future of the world that America and its European allies, the West, were the good guys and the Soviet communists, architects of the gulag archipelago, the East, were more than just bad guys; they were evil. Solzhenitsyn, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature for his great novel, The First Circle, which exposed the horrors and hypocrisy of Stalin’s police state with its gruesome politicized prison system, gave witness to that. He sought asylum in this country in order to finish his writing without interference from the communists who hated him and were trying to destroy his work and silence him. In those dark days, Christians were trying to smuggle Bibles into Russia. The Nobel laureate was trying to smuggle his novels out. By 1983, he had been residing in Vermont for four years. He had become to the free world a living icon of anti-communist virtue, a genuine hero who had suffered for the sake of his literary art and had endured torture rather than stop speaking out against atheistic dictatorship, which is why the theme of his speech, that the West had become as degenerate as the East, shocked almost everyone. The Harvard faculty did not appreciate his criticism. There was no chance he’d be invited back.

       But that’s the prophet’s fate. Jeremiah was thrown down a well for speaking truth to power. Elijah was exiled and hunted down like a criminal for doing nothing more than reminding his generation that the commandment “Thou shalt not worship an idol” was a divine commandment, an absolute moral imperative that humans have no personal right to ignore. People living in a pagan, pluralistic society then, as we do today, are inclined to take offense at that. You could say Elijah brought it on himself. His doctrine was not inclusive. You could say to him, “Hey, I’m sorry but when you cross the boundaries of a person’s safe space you have to expect consequences. Liberalism is tolerant but not unconditionally. You can’t push God on people.” But that’s what prophets do, they give offense by speaking the truth and they suffer the consequences, in the hope that truth will prevail over popular opinion. It sometimes does. We all love the truth or say we do until the light of truth shines on our corruption. Then we get defensive.  In any age, the establishment does not like to be told it’s sinning.

       So, what strikes me looking back on it is how prophetic Solzhenitsyn’s speech was. All the problems he saw in the West have only intensified in the three decades since then. “Two hundred or even fifty years ago,” he said, “it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual be granted boundless freedom with no purpose, simply for the satisfaction of his whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were eroded everywhere in the West; a total emancipation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. ..The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even to excess, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer.” “Man’s sense of responsibility to God… has grown dimmer and dimmer.” Isn’t that the truth? We talk today constantly about our rights, the respect and service that others owe us but never about our responsibly to God. And that is the nexus of the problem because our responsibilities to God, which are grounded in natural law and are therefore universal and eternal, precede our rights, which are temporal and local. We have, in effect, as Solzhenitsyn said, jettisoned “the moral heritage of Christian centuries.” We are not living behind the Iron Curtain, where atheism was institutionalized and religion forced underground, but we have become essentially an agnostic society, serving no higher moral purpose than the pursuit of ever-increasing GDP and economic justice for all. Winning the war against poverty is important. But what does America stand for today?  We stand for liberty and freedom to be sure. But we have defined liberty as freedom from responsibly to God, which is false liberty; the founders did not see it so. As Solzhenitsyn said, “the moral heritage” that guided us for centuries is now gone and we consider this to be “emancipation,” as though a ship having lost its rudder is set free from an obstruction, when in fact, by losing its rudder, that ship becomes directionless.

        If the West is going to survive and thrive, we have to know what we are for and we have to be for something more than single payer health care, free college tuition for all, same sex marriage, and abortion rights. Success on those fronts may advance a progressive ideological agenda, but there is no heroism it. Heroes are those who know their responsibilities to God and keep them. We used to have a word for those heroes; they were called saints. “There is only one misery,” wrote French novelist Léon Bloy, “not to be Saints.” The most urgent task in the West today is the recovery of what Solzhenitsyn called “our most precious possession: the spiritual life;” we are miserable without it. We need to recover the idealism that guided the generations before us, to aspire to live a heroic life in humble obedience to God’s natural law, which is the great battle we lost on our way to winning the Cold War.

        You students are going out in the world today to do what? Many of you will search for a job or begin a career. This institution has equipped you well for that endeavor. But what are you really living for? It has to be something more than just material success, social status, and sexual fulfillment. Solzhenitsyn put it like this: “It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life journey may become above all an experience of moral growth: to leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to reappraise the scale of the usual human values; its present incorrectness is astounding.” In other words, he said, if you are not living for God you are cheating yourself. Without God, your life will come up empty wanting more.

        One day the intoxicating effects of this false freedom will wear off, I promise you, and you will find yourself wanting more. Where will you turn to find it? I will leave you with a clue.  How many of you know about the supernatural events at Fatima in 1917? (No hands were raised). It was the most important event of the last century. The Virgin Mary appeared to three children with a message from heaven warning that if the human race continues to ignore its responsibilities to God, to obey the commandments and avoid sin, that God would punish us all. Do you know what she said that punishment would be? She said that God would allow the errors of Russia to spread around the world. This prophecy was given to us a year before Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power. And do you know what the error is that Russia spread around the world? It is communism. I do not mean dialectical materialism, state ownership of the major means of production, failed five-year plans, Karl Marx, and the KGB. I mean the systematic repression of religion, institutionalized atheism, the denial of God, and the abolition of our sense of responsibility to God. And with that comes indifference to religion, the abandonment of natural law in favor of moral relativism, and the ideological conviction, completely false, that there is no supernatural grace available to us, reason is all we’ve got—the false conviction that there is no Spirit, that the material realm is all there is, was, or ever will be. That this evil philosophy has infected us is tragic. That we must rid ourselves of it and rise above it is urgent.  We won the Cold War militarily and economically, but we lost it spiritually. The materialist philosophy, the soulless core of communist ideology, has infected Western civilization, leaving us like a patient fighting congestive heart failure, drowning in false agnosticism, feigning respect for all religions while actually believing in none. But there is hope and a way forward.  Our Lady of Fatima revealed that also.

       So these are your marching orders as you exit this ivory tower and enter the real world: Ask yourself one simple question, “Why has no one ever told me about Fatima before?” The answer is as obvious as the air we breathe. Since the day you entered pre-school, you’ve been indoctrinated into a liberal philosophy that relegates the supernatural to the realm of superstition and denies the natural law. You need to unlearn all that. No one will do this for you. You need to get a real education. Truth is out there. It’s up to you to find it.  Whatever you do, don’t be afraid of the truth. Saint Thomas Aquinas, another philosopher I’m sure you have never read but ought to, said that “the universe was made for truth.” The human soul needs truth like a plant needs water. That is why the recovery of our Judeo-Christian heritage, of faith in God and obedience to natural law, is so important; we wither without it. But hope springs eternal. As Jesus said to an establishment that crucified him on his way to the resurrection, “You will know the truth and the truth will set you free.”

       At this point, I was just warming up and about to get into the heart of the speech when suddenly, a SWAT team rushed the stage and quickly put me in handcuffs and read me my rights, after charging me with a number of hate crimes. Apparently, I had struck a raw nerve with the university community. Counselors were called in by the hundreds to help console the students who were offended by my oration. Pillows were handed out to all who needed a hug.  For a moment, I feared for my life. But God is good. For although I languish in prison now, one brave student took the manuscript of my speech from the podium and put it on the internet, where it has gone viral. There are rumors that at the urging of Kanye West, President Trump is about to grant me a pardon. But God’s blessings on those who dare to keep the faith are greater even than we can imagine. When I found myself in prison last night, I prayed to the Lord, reminding him that I needed to be in church today. So early this morning, the Lord did for me what he once did for Saint Alphonsus Liguori. Alphonsus, the great bishop of Florence, fell asleep in his office chair after mass one Sunday. Twenty-four hours later, he finally woke up. When his fellow priests, who were worried for him, asked what had happened, he said not to worry, that he had gone to Rome to give last rites to the Pope, who had died early that same morning. In other words, by God’s grace, he had been in two places at once. By a similar miracle of bi-location, God has allowed me to be here with you today, in order to bring you this simple message. Keep your faith in God no matter what. Even if the whole world turns against you, God will always be with you. As Saint Paul said, “Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through Our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Why Is Our Altar Against The Wall?

         Sacrifice, priesthood, and the cause of the decline of the modern church

       When  people enter the sanctuary of the St. George’s and St. Matthew’s church,  I’m sure that many, if not all who have no memory of what Anglican (Episcopal) and Catholic churches were like before the 1960s, wonder why the altar is against the wall when practically every other church has a “free–standing” altar? And when the service begins, I’m sure that many also wonder, “Why does the priest turn his back towards us? Why doesn’t he face the congregation like most other priests and practically all protestant ministers do?“

        That such questions are even asked reveals the depth of the crisis facing a religion that is in danger of severing all links to its history and orthodoxy.  Henry James once compared modern men and women entering a gothic cathedral to cats and dogs in a library looking up at stacks of books, having no idea what a library is or what to do with a book. And he made that observation over a hundred years ago. The reasons for this vast ignorance among Christians in the basic dogmas of their religion and the relation of those dogmas to church architecture, are too numerous to mention. Suffice it to say that all of us who have grown up in the age of secularism are suffering because of it.  

       The triumph of secularism accounts, in part, for the crisis of faith afflicting the church today. But the greater fault lies with the “free-standing “altar itself. Beginning in the 1960s the Catholic churches and the Anglican (Episcopal) churches began introducing free-standing altars. Today almost every church uses one. Therefore, all who are under age fifty have only known the free-standing altar. It seems” traditional” to them and normal. They cannot see what a novelty the free-standing altar is and how destructive of the faith it is. So, when you combine the influence of the free-standing altar with the indifference towards Christian orthodoxy pervasive in the secular society you have a recipe for disaster, a disaster that has now come upon the churches in America in full force.

        Let’s begin our discussion of the altar by observing something; a detail that is not unimportant. The altar in our church is not positioned on just any wall. It is on the east wall. It is positioned on the east wall for a reason; the reason being that Christians, from the beginning, have always turned to face east for prayer. The Jews turn to face Jerusalem. Moslems bow in the direction of Mecca. Christians traditionally turn to the east for prayer. Why is that? There are several reasons for this. The sun rises in the east; the sunrise is symbolic of Christ’s resurrection on Easter morning. By facing eastward for prayer, we put our attention where it belongs: on the triumph of Christ over the grave and on the great hope He brings to all humankind.  Christ has brought hope to the earth; in Him it is always a new day.  The procession, which begins the liturgy, moves from west to east. This is reminiscent of Moses leading the Hebrews from Egypt to the Promised Land in the east. But more so it represents Christ leading His church to Heaven’s gate which is to the east of Eden (Gen3.24), a gate that was closed to all because of Adam’s sin but now is open to us because of Christ’s perfect sacrifice.  The Lord who ascended to the east (Ps. 67.34; Zech 14.4), will come again in glory from the east (Ezek. 43.4; Mt.24.27; Acts 1.11). Therefore, Christians normally turn east to pray in faithful anticipation of Christ’s return in glory. It can easily be established by multiple references in the literature of the early church and in early Christian art and architecture that this was the custom from the beginning. And thus, as soon as Christians were allowed to build churches, it became the norm for churches to be built with the apse at the east end and the high altar, the altar used for the Sunday mass or liturgy, to be set against the east wall.   

          That is an important detail, but it does not fully answer our question. “Why is the altar against the wall and why does the priest turn his back to us? Or, why is the altar not free-standing, and why doesn’t the priest stand behind it facing the congregation? In that case the congregation would still be facing east even if the priest isn’t. What’s wrong with that?”

        I’ll answer that question with another question: “What is an altar and what is it used for?” An altar is a sacred object on which a sacrifice is made. Worship in ancient religions, pagan and Jewish alike, involved the priest offering various sacrifices to God on an altar. In ancient Israel those sacrifices could be of animals or birds slaughtered and burned or of grains and fruits burned (Lev. 1-9). The sacrificial victim would be immolated on the altar, totally destroyed as a symbolic way of offering something precious to the worshipper to God. The thing offered to God would be determined by the occasion; a dove might be required on one occasion a bull on another (Lk. 2.23-24; Lev. 16-17.11). But always the priest, standing before the altar, would offer up the sacrifice to God on behalf of the people. The offering was made to God, facing God. The priest and people alike would face God when offering a sacrifice. They would together do this out of respect for God since God is the one to whom worship is due, the one to whom the sacrifice was being made.

        In worship symbolism is important. The position of the altar against the wall speaks volumes about what we believe about God and what we believe worship is. When the priest stands before the altar offering a sacrifice, his back is turned to the congregation because he and the congregation are together facing God. Their worship is directed not to the congregation, but to God who is in Heaven beyond, over, and above us. The priest and people alike are joined in looking up to God who is transcendent and infinitely greater than we are. Like Moses climbing up Mt. Sinai to meet God as the people looked on in fear and trembling unable to approach the holy mountain ( Ex.19. 7-25), so the congregation in worship comes  humbly into the presence of Almighty God who is looking down on us from above. The priest leads the congregation in approaching God and, therefore, his back is turned to the congregation only incidentally as the leader of a delegation petitioning a king and pleading for clemency would necessarily have his back turned to the rest of the delegation. The symbolic point is that the priest and people alike are all humbly facing God on his throne, God who is infinitely greater than we are. So the altar is “against the wall” because there is no reason whatsoever for the priest to be behind it.     

        Now, with all due respect, those who prefer a free-standing altar with the priest standing behind it facing the people do so with only the loftiest of motives. They believe that the free-standing altar is a restoration of an ancient custom that was lost in the dark ages; that originally Christians gathered around a table as the disciples did, or so they imagine, at the last supper, with Christ in the middle, to have a “love feast” (Jude 12) or “the Lord’s super” (1Cor. 11.20) as it was called. This meal, which was a memorial to Christ’s death (1Cor. 11.26), put the focus on the community in which the Holy Spirit is present and manifest in love. The free- standing altar that allows the priest to stand behind it facing the people emphasizes Christ’s promise “where two or more are gathered in my name there am I in the midst of them” (Mt.18.20). In this case, the celebrant stands within the congregation offering up to God a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving in memory of Jesus who is present in the midst of his church manifesting his love among the members of the congregation.  That sounds good. Love is important. Community is important and Christ dwells in his church. All of that is true. There’s only one problem with it. The free-standing altar was never the ancient custom. Christian priests have always stood before the altar offering up a sacrifice to God on behalf of the people. They were never mere “celebrants” at a meal standing behind a table.   

       That is why Catholic, Anglican (Episcopal), and Orthodox clergy are called “priests” and not just “ministers,” “preachers” or “pastors.”  Catholics, Anglicans, and Orthodox are ordained to the priesthood. They function as pastors and preachers but they are priests whose first duty is to offer up the perfect sacrifice of Christ on the altar. They are “priests” because they are ordained to share in Christ’s eternal priesthood. It was established by prophecy that Christ would be “a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek” (Ps.110.4; Heb.5.5–6; 7.17). Melchizedek was a priest of divine origin who blessed Abraham by offering  a sacrifice of bread and wine (Gen.14.18). By taking the bread and wine at the last supper and offering them up to God, Christ identified himself completely with Melchizedek, thereby fulfilling that prophecy from the Psalm. By commanding his disciples to “do this in remembrance of me,” he ordained them to the same priesthood as himself. Christians have continued the priesthood of Melchizedek ever since, and the Christian priests have as their first duty to offer up the bread and the wine, which become by their consecration on the altar the visible signs of Christ’s perfect sacrifice.

      Christ’s perfect sacrifice was a singular event that once and for all reconciled sinful humanity to the Holy God opening the way for mortal men and women to be reunited to their Heavenly Father. The sacrifice of Christ cannot be repeated. But God has enabled us to share directly in the benefits of His perfect sacrifice. The sacrifice Christ made on the cross was bloody and gruesome. The sacrifice that he enables his priests to make on the altar is the same sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins, but it is clean. In this manner the prophecy of Malachi is fulfilled. Malachi foresaw the day when Christ’s perfect sacrifice would be offered daily all around the world, not only in Jerusalem where Christ died, but in all nations: “For from the rising of the sun even to the going down, my name is great among the Gentiles, and in every place there is sacrifice, and there is offered to my name a clean oblation” (Mal. 1.11.) The Holy Eucharist is that “clean oblation.” It is the sacrifice of Christ on the cross “offered once for all, for the sins of the whole world” (Heb.7.27; 1 John 2.2), but because it is made of the bread and wine it is “clean.” It is not merely symbolic. It is a sacrament: a symbol, in this case bread and wine that conveys the very thing it signifies: the body and blood of Christ offered on the cross for our sins. In this way Christ’s promise is fulfilled: “Unless you eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood you have no life in you” (Jn.6.53). The bread and wine offered by the priest on the altar become what Christ made them at the last supper: his actual flesh and blood, the food and drink of eternal life. In this way we literally share in Christ’s eternal life; having been united with him in his death on the cross we are assured of sharing in his glorious resurrection.

       That explains why the priest stands before the altar, facing east, facing God to whom the perfect sacrifice is offered and that further explains why incidentally his back is to the congregation. (Let me just add that in the Divine Liturgy of the Eastern Orthodox churches, the consecration is done by the priests behind a screen (an iconostasis). The congregation is not permitted to even see the sacred event, nor hear the prayers of the priests at the altar. The Orthodox will never change the Divine Liturgy that has been in use with little change from the start). But that begs the question: why have almost all the churches in the West abandoned their traditional altars in favor of a free-standing altar? Why have priests stopped offering the sacrifice to God and offered it instead to the people? Well, God is transcendent and beyond us but God in Christ is also immanent and among us. “The kingdom of God is among you “(Lk.17.20-21) Jesus said, in reference to himself. And again he promised, “I am with you always even to the end of the age” (Mt.28.20). By standing behind the altar and facing the people, the priest draws attention to Christ who is among us. So, the free-standing altar also has powerful symbolic value that sends an important message: we need to care about the other people in the congregation. Our salvation depends not just on our humble devotion to our transcendent Lord but also on our devotion to the incarnate Lord whom we encounter here and now in our fellow baptized Christians: “Whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones because he is my disciple, truly, I say to you, he shall not lose his reward” (Mt.10. 42). So the free-standing altar with the priest behind it facing the people sends a powerful message: God is among us here and now and we honor him by the love we show for one another.

       There’s no arguing with that message. That is the gospel. But, and this is a big “but," it is not the tradition of the church to have a free-standing altar. Why? Because the work of the priest is to offer up the perfect sacrifice which is “the real presence” of the crucified Lord who offers his body and blood to us in the Blessed Sacrament as real food and drink for our soul’s salvation. The real presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament is the greatest gift that Christ has given his church to which nothing on earth compares; “the pearl of inestimable value” (Mt.13.44-45) that Christ taught us to seek. The most important thing in life is to find it and keep it. Having found it the church has labored from the beginning to keep it and to pass it on from one generation to the next as a priceless inheritance.

       The real presence of Christ, I would add, is what the red lamp, called the sanctuary candle, set beside the altar signifies. This custom has its origin in the lamp that God ordered Moses to set by the altar in the tent of meeting to signify the presence of the manna kept there (Ex.25.30). It alerts us that the consecrated host,  “the living bread come down from heaven” (John 6.51) as Jesus called himself, is kept or reserved in the tabernacle, that is the box on the altar. We bow or genuflect towards the altar because Christ crucified for us is really present there in the consecrated host in the tabernacle. That is another reason why the priest and people alike traditionally face the altar when offering the sacrifice. It is both irreverent and contradictory of what we believe the sacrament is to do otherwise.

       Those who argue for a free-standing altar may object to this criticism by saying that Christ’s real presence among us does not depend on the position of the altar or on whether the priest stands before it or behind it. But it does. Leonardo DaVinci’s painting of the Last Supper shows Jesus seated in the middle of the table as was the custom at Italian festivals during the Renaissance. The most important person in those days sat in the middle. But DaVinci was an artistic genius doing something imaginative for his Renaissance audience. He wasn’t seeking historical accuracy. Whereas, all of the earliest works depicting the last supper show Jesus seated at the far left of the table, with the disciples behind him looking on as he elevates the host. That was the custom in Jerusalem at the time Jesus lived. The most important person sat at the far left of the table. In other words, the tradition of the priest elevating the host while the congregation looks on behind him began with Christ himself. Who are we to change that? Who would want to?

       The person who wanted to and first did change that was an angry German monk named Martin Luther. The fact that many followed him in this rebellion and that those who prefer a free-standing altar have become the majority, does not change the fact that those who adopt the free-standing altar with the priest standing facing the people are rejecting a tradition established by Christ and cherished by his apostles for a novelty invented by an unhappy 16th-century German monk.

       Is God pleased with us for doing this? Well, since the Catholic and Anglican (Episcopal) churches began using the free-standing altar in the 1960’s church attendance has declined dramatically across the board while atheism grows. And remember, we have seen atheism up close in the Nazi movement and in the Communist world revolution. Modern atheism is directly responsible for the worst evils in human history. And still it grows? What kind of madness it that? Is God trying to tell us something? I think that the facts speak for themselves. The day that the church returns to using an altar against the east wall with the priest standing before it is the day that the advance of atheism will stop. (Our Lady of Fatima told us as much).  Christianity will then begin to do for our liberal and secular culture what it did to ancient Rome, transform this neo-pagan rabble of confused and sex-obsessed lost souls into a God-fearing civilization. The real presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament will do it. But for that to happen, the church must reclaim its most sacred tradition.

Fr. Jansen String

The Feast of Pentecost 2018

                                               Suggested Reading:

The Mass of the Early Christians by Mike Aquillina

Pope Paul’s New Mass by Michael Davies

The Reform of the Roman Liturgy by Klaus Gamber

The Latin Mass Explained by George Moorman