1. An Introduction to Sacramental Theology
What is a Sacrament?
An Introduction to Sacramental Theology

2. Challenge:
What makes frogs cool?

3. Humans are amphibians. half spirit and half animal
Humans are amphibians...half spirit and half animal...as spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
- C.S. Lewis

4. Sacraments are that bridge between the material and the spiritual, the “animal” and the spirit

5. Mass on the Grass

7. Definitions of a Sacrament
Definition #1: the 7 rites or rituals of the Catholic Church through which Catholics personally encounter and unite their lives to Christ (pg. 23 in textbook)

9. Definitions of a Sacrament
Definition #1: the 7 rites or rituals of the Catholic Church through which Catholics personally encounter and unite their lives to Christ (pg. 23 in textbook)

10. Sacraments - CCC 1131
Definition #2 (THE definition):
“An efficacious sign of grace, instituted by Christ and entrusted to the Church, by which divine life is dispensed to us.”

11. Partner Reading Directions: CCC Passages
Efficacious signs of grace CCC 1127, 1128
Instituted by Christ CCC 1114, 1115
Entrusted to the Church CCC 1117, 1118
Divine life dispensed to us by the Holy Spirit CCC 1116, 1129
Directions:
Partner A reads two sentences out loud
Partner B, in one or two bullet points, summarizes those two sentences in his/her own words
BOTH partners write those bullet points in their own notes
Partners switch roles and repeat until the whole text has been summarized

12. “Efficacious Signs of Grace”

15. Materialism -
Philosophical claim that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all phenomena, including mental phenomena and consciousness, are results of material interactions
(Source: wikipedia. I’m so sorry.)
Related to Functionalism: idea that all “things are merely things” to be used according to their function

16. What is a Sign?

17. What is a Sign?
A tangible reality that expresses or communicates an intangible reality

18. What is a Sign? Conventional Sign -
Agreed upon by community or culture

19. What is a Sign? Conventional Sign -
Agreed upon by community or culture

20. What is a Sign? Natural Sign -
Universal (do not need to be communicated or agreed upon)

21. Looking at a Meal Vs. Looking along a Meal

22. “Efficacious Sign”
“Things are more than things they are signs whose meaning extends beyond their immediate sensorial power.” - Ratzinger
Signs point beyond themselves
Natural Sacraments - moments or experiences through which human beings encounter something greater than themselves (meals, marriage, birth/death)
Efficacious = “effective”
Ex: A meal doesn’t just show us community, it actually forms community.
In the Church’s sacraments, these natural sacraments are elevated and “effect” or cause grace in us

23. Dualism
Philosophical claim that all matter, including the body (material), and the mind (immaterial) are two separate entities that only interact causally
Mostly important related to identity and experience
“I am not my body”

25. Incarnation - “Embodied Love”
For Christians, it seems incorrect to separate the mind and the body
God, who is intangible, reveals Himself to us through tangible things (sacrament)
We encounter God through the material world, through our bodies

26. Incarnation - “Embodied Love”
Christ is the primordial sacrament
God “made flesh” - the Incarnation
Through Christ, we encounter the Father
By encountering Christ, the earliest Christians were actually encountering God.
The 7 Sacraments are extensions of this encounter with Christ

27. Encounters with Christ
What is the physical encounter that is happening in this story? What is the spiritual encounter?
(Remember to provide textual evidence!)
Luke 8: Hemorrhaging Woman
John 9: Blind Man
Luke 5: Levi the Tax Collector

28. Efficacious Sign of GRACE

29. CHALLENGE: What are different uses of the word “grace”?

30. Grace CCC
“Grace is favor, the free and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to his call to become children of God, adoptive daughters and sons, partakers of the divine nature and of eternal life.” - CCC 1996
Rewrite this definition in your own words.
This did NOT work well… Would need to be more scaffolded. Otherwise, bored out of their minds and hard to come up with a common definition… Would posssibly work better to simply go through it together, or even just give them the chewed-up definition alone and use examples to clarify

31. Grace CCC
“Grace is favor, the free and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to his call to become children of God, adoptive daughters and sons, partakers of the divine nature and of eternal life.” - CCC 1996
Grace is an unearned gift of God’s “help” given to make us more holy, more like God, so that we can one day share fully in God’s love (heaven)
Grace is a free gift of God, from God, in order to help us return to God (and therefore to love God more perfectly)

32. A Good Man is Hard to Find
Narrator (x3)
The Grandmother
Mother
Bailey (Father)
John Wesley (Son)
June Star (Daughter)
Red Sam
Red Sam’s Wife
The Misfit
Bobby Lee

33. Let’s talk about Grandma . . .

34. What about the Misfit?

35. The Misfit
Pg. 8 - “I forget what I done, lady. I set there and set there, trying to remember what it was I done and I ain’t recalled it to this day.”
Pg. 8 - “I found out the crime don’t matter. You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later you’re going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it.”
Pg. 9 - “I call myself the Misfit because I can’t make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment. . . Does it seem right to you, lady, that one is punished a heap and another ain’t punished at all?”

36. Grace is dynamic and violent
Changes us

37. Grace leads to Conversion

38. Conversion -
constant process of conforming our lives more and more closely to Christ

39. “Stories of Grace” Reflection: (2-3 thoughtful sentences each)
How does the appearance of a whale (or absence thereof) become a reminder of God’s presence for this speaker? How does this moment of grace change her perspective on other aspects of her life?
We say that grace is something supernatural (“beyond nature”), and yet in this instance, grace comes through something completely natural. How is this moment of grace still supernatural?
At one point, the speaker describes grace as “potentially unnoticed gifts that are beautiful and abundantly loving, precisely because they are larger than and different from what we would have foolishly thought to demand for ourselves.” Why does this description tell us about grace?
Describe a time in your own life where you had a “moment of grace.” Think about this term broadly - when was a time you felt something unexpected touch you deeply or change your perspective?