Foundations of Faith: Sacrament

Friday February 17th students from all the Catholic high schools in the metro area had the day off while their teachers gathered at Gross High School for the 3rd annual installment of “Foundations of Faith”. The purpose of this program is to help the staff of our Catholic schools refresh and update their understanding of the teachings of the Catholic Church. Longtime Creighton University Professor, Dr. Michael Lawler, presented this year’s theme of “Sacrament”. Dr. Lawler has authored over a dozen books among which was “Symbol and Sacrament”.

In Lawler’s presentation the gathering came to understand that it is only through symbols that we as humans are able to communicate reality and meaning. Symbol is reality. We furthermore learned the significance of sacrament as the symbolic representations of the reality of our relationship to God.

Dr. Lawler Explained that baptism draws its roots from the Jewish water ritual of “Tebilah” which literally means bath. Tebilah was used in the transformation of a non-Jewish person in to a Jew. In this ritual a person would descend into the water representing death and then rise from the bath as a new person with a new life as a Jew. The early Christians (The Jesus Movement) rooted in our Jewish traditions, transformed this ritual into the rite of initiation in which Christians are Baptized into the death and resurrection of Christ and raised to a new life. In baptism we “promise to live a life like Christ”, it is not just a remembrance.

Since Catholics are generally baptized as infants our godparents make the promise of living a “Christ like life” for us. Lawler pointed out the fact that there are many “baptized non-believers” who while they were baptized they have never made that decision of commitment to living a life like Christ. For ones faith to become real we must sometime in our life “buy into” that baptismal promise. Our faith must be an unconditional “Yes” to God. This faith is the beginning of salvation, which we must then follow through with by living it, which is evident in our actions.

Sacrament is not a thing you "get". It is something you embrace and make it reality.