The Jimmy Olsen Radio Network. Spinal adjustments provided by Dr. Chad Ralston. The Spinal Tuning Chiropractic Center is a Des Moines area low flat fee per month unlimited chiropractic care practice.
When life happens, just adjust. Schedule today at SpinalTuning.com. Welcome to the Daily Planet. I am Jimmy Olsen and joining me today, I don't really know the right way of saying this because I want to be fun with it, but if I was too fun with it, then, you know, I might get chastised by many people.
So I guess we're just going to go out. I have another father with me today. I mean, a few weeks ago, I'm sure you saw my conversation or heard my conversation with Father John Ricardo. I have a father, PJ McManus, who is the pastor of Christ the King Church in Des Moines, but he's also co-host of Be Not Afraid, which is on Iowa Catholic Radio, and you can also hear the podcast pretty much anywhere that you listen to your favorite podcast.
Father PJ, how are you? I'm Wilson. How are you? You know what?
That's a dangerous question today, but we're going to go with good. We're going to go with good. Fair enough, fair enough. Yeah, it was an interesting day, and I'm not going to bore people with all this.
Maybe that could be another podcast altogether that we can have conversations about. How do you deal with this? Right, right. Who wants a phone call?
How do that? Yeah, we'll go with that. You know, again, let's get that out there. You know, when someone calls you on the phone, and we hear about this a lot, especially right now, with the stimulus checks that are coming out, you've heard about it, when it comes to, you know, credit card information, when it comes to, you know, Medicare, whatever it is, when they call you, it is most likely false, because they do not call.
They either send you something in the mail, most likely, or you might get an email, but that's still kind of nifty. But basically, if someone calls you and asks you for information, do not provide it. Period. There's an announcement from the Daily Planet, and Jimmy Olsen, and Father PJ.
So, all right. So, Father, here's the conversation I'm kind of like leaning towards, and we've been chatting about this for a while, and I mean, I even talked about it on, or I talked about it with Father Ricardo, that the idea that I had, he goes, that's just a wild idea. So, you're Catholic. I am not.
And, of course, growing up, and both growing up Catholic, I'm sure, and then even growing up, me growing up, Pentecostal charismatic, there's always the stories that you hear about how, well, you know, if they don't go to this church, or they're not in this denomination, they're going to hell. They're wrong. Everything they do is incorrect. That's what's pretty much beat in your head growing up.
At least it was for me. So, everyone was wrong, no matter what. And then we get older, hopefully you get wiser, and then you start asking questions. And you start learning different things that go, well, wait a minute, this isn't as whacked out as it is.
And it's not just the religion thing, because right now, when you look here in America, and what's right questions, you know, are you asking the right question? And I find that, and you can tell me if I'm wrong, but I find that that really is a problem. People are not asking the right questions, or at least not listening if they're asking. Yeah, we're both, right?
So, people certainly fail to ask the right questions. I think a lot of it has to do with the way that we teach children any longer. You know, children are taught from very early on, like, the goal of the school is to just get the right answer. And so, this filters itself out into every sort of facet of life and living, right?
So, there's a right answer for the right kind of diet, a right answer for the right kind of exercise, a right answer for the right kind of church. And it would seem that human life doesn't always work like that, and there are more different kind of variables that attach to that, and that, you know, life and experience tell us that very often the best learning, the most important lessons that we learn, come from a failure or a mistake. I got the wrong answer first, but without getting the wrong answer here, I can never have arrived to the place that I think is now actually the right answer, right? And so, it's not simply about sort of this or that.
Accuracy is important. So, the thing you're talking about with, like, especially as you describe the people, right? So, oh, well, you know, they're all going to hell because they, and then when you finally talk to them, they're like, no, we don't do or think that at all. That's just a weird, somebody from the outside about that, right?
And so, that's fair enough. I'm not thinking if there's something that's true, right? But most things in life are not quite as this or that as we're often going to believe as small children. Well, I mean, a lot of times there's a little more gray.
It's not that straight black and white like they try to separate it, just because there's a lot of things that are agreed upon, but maybe in a different way of agreement. Is that excellent? Does that really make sense? So, here's the idea.
So, actually, PJ and I, Father PJ and I, we work together. Those of you that know that I do this, I work at the Catholic radio station, and I'm not Catholic, and of course, now someone's going to listen to those, and he's like, he's not? Oh, my gosh. Anyway, we won't be on that road at this point.
I might have to be here in a couple weeks, but that's the story I'll get over there. But, I mean, and I'm going on over, I'm going on my third year. So, you know, I've been there a couple years, and there's been a lot of fantastic conversations that I've had, and one of the things that always gets brought up is telling me how I do not know the truth, or I am, well, and it comes down to the sacraments. I do not know all of the sacraments.
You do not, I mean, literally, and this was said to me, you do not believe all the sacraments. And this happened a while ago, and I know I've already told you this word, but I'll share it with those listeners. I'm going, so, okay, what are these sacraments? So, I work with a deacon, and I asked him, and I even went to our general manager, and I asked him, and we kind of went through, and they walked through the sacraments, which we'll do that here in a moment, and I'll go, well, check, check.
The seven sacraments, I believe in all seven of them. Now, do we believe in them the same? We have different definitions, which is what we're going to get into today. But I think it really comes down to have a conversation with other people, listen to what they have to say, and don't come up with an assumption about them before you know, because I have many friends, and I do not take either side when it comes to politics.
As a friend of mine describes me, I am an equal opportunity offender on both sides, because they both irritate the fire out of me. But I have friends that are Republicans, and I have friends that are Democrats. In fact, some of my better friends are Democrats, because we see so eye-to-eye on so many things. But that's kind of the idea.
I think you and I have had a conversation before. There's the two things that we teach children. What was the meme that you were telling me that's been flying around Facebook lately, or on social? Right.
It's kind of a riff on a quote from Juliana Baggett, who has been, she's a novelist. But what she says is basically is, we've taught people from the dinner table not to talk about politics or religion, and then we wonder why as adults, they're unable to talk intelligently about religion or politics. Which is interesting, because really, if you think about it, and it doesn't matter what side of the fence you're on or what you believe, those are two very important topics in a person's life. Yeah, no, it's really destructive.
I mean, what's ironic about this, right, is that in what would probably be thought of as much more religious societies, theocratic-type societies, like in Saudi Arabia or something, you're much more likely to hear the dinner table conversation about this. But what's ironic about it is, not talking about those most important things is really destructive of democracy. Because the way the process is supposed to work is by people arguing with each other. And they can't do that if they're not taught to have respectful, intelligent, both affirming and challenging discussions with each other.
But many of us were taught, you know, as very young children, don't talk about these things in polite company or don't talk about them unless you're 100% certain that the people that you're worth are going to agree in it is like the great evil. Or you're not talking about something unless you know what you're talking about. You know, you know, I just repeated that. That you know what you're talking about 100% that you have the answer.
Of course, I don't know. Right, right, right. And I'll be honest, I talk about things that I have no clue anything about all the time. But I have that conversation because I'm willing to listen to find out.
I want to know more. You know, I was the nerdy child. This is back before there was a Discovery Channel or Smithsonian or anything. All of the documentaries were on HBO.
And I happened to grow up in a home that we had cable. My dad had cable, so we had HBO. So I'm watching all these documentaries, either being on politics, religion, history. I mean, I'm an eight-year-old watching this stuff.
I know. I'm a nerd. I get it. But it just really, I think, gets it to where you ask.
It kind of really forms you to ask questions and find out how things work. So, but let's go ahead and start growing into the meat of these things. And is there a specific order I need to do these, one through seven? Well, why don't you listen to them?
And then we can, I'll help you order them in a way that kind of makes sense. But before we do that, can I talk a little bit just about the word? What word is that? Sacrament.
Yes. So what, Jimmy, from your sense, not necessarily what Catholics would think, but what is your sense of the word sacrament? What does that mean to me? I mean, I guess when, you know, that's interesting because it's a word that I never really grew up with.
But I think when it comes to the sacrament, it is something, it's part of that belief system. That, you know, what you believe and hear are, so it starts, it's like a bullet point piece when you're doing your outline. Sacraments is the headline, and then you bullet point or outline the sacraments then underneath that, which then creates your belief system, your philosophy, your ideals on, you know, what you grew up in or what your beliefs are. How far off am I?
Not terribly. So the word sacraments is an English form of a Latin word, which is just sacramentum. But the Latin, of course, is a translation of Greek because the New Testament was written in Greek. Right.
That's why I love you, PJ, because the history that you know is. I eat this up, like, terribly. Anyway, sorry, go on. That's all right.
So the word is being translated into Latin, the sacraments, and the English sacrament. The word sacrament really is better translated as mystery. Okay. And that word mystery comes from, it's a compound in Greek.
It's mu, which is where we get the word mute from, and then seres, which is like a happening or an event. So a muserion, or a mystery, is an event before which we fall silent. The Greeks, prior to the coming of Christ, had what were called mystery religions. They were religions that were sort of ritually based, and these were often specified forms of sort of ordinary Greek paganism, but they were very, they were ritually focused, and the rituals were intended to sort of initiate the person, the practitioner, into some greater understanding of what the gods were doing in their lives.
So the Pythagorean school was the most famous of these sort of mystery things. Well, what happens is when the Old Testament first is translated into Greek, what we call the Septuagint, which is where the Catholics get their version of the Old Testament, the word muserion is used for the ceremonies that happen at the temple, right? Sure. So the sacrifices and the observances of the old law.
And then in the New Testament, it only gets used once, which is very interesting, because St. Paul's own driving it. So he knows it's Septuagint. He knows the way that it gets used in the Greek Old Testament, but he only uses it in that chapter from Ephesians that people don't like anymore, because it begins, right, with wives be submissive to your husbands.
Oh, man. Yeah. You know where we're going? Right.
So what he does is, it's in Ephesians 5, and he's kind of riffing on marriage, right? So he says, wives be submissive to your husbands. Husbands, love your wives. Even as Christ is on the church.
He who laid himself down for her. And then he kind of does this dance back and forth for Isaac's verses. And then at the end of it, he says, this is a mega mysterion, a great mystery, the mystery of Christ in this church. So one of the great ironies around the language of mystery or sacrament is that later on, when Protestants and Catholics have fights over which things count as sacraments and which ones don't, the Protestants at the time, at the time of the Reformation, Lutheran, Calvinism, they're very insistent that marriage is definitely not a sacrament.
We'll say why in a minute. But the irony is the only time the word is used in the Bible is around marriage. It's not used around baptism or Eucharist or anything else. It's pointing to that relationship between women and women.
A different word is chosen because the word mysterium, which is a Latin form of mysterium, has more than one meaning. So they feel like they need to specify it. So the word sacrament is chosen. And I say chosen rather than invented because it already existed.
And the word sacramentum literally means, so the sacra is like where we get the word sacred from. It means literally to make holy or to set aside. And in its origin, a sacramentum was an oath that a soldier would take to his commanding officer in the Roman legion. And it was an oath that bound him for life.
It was much like a covenant in Jewish sense that bound your life to this other person. So those two words, mystery and sacrament, really in the tradition, come to play up and against each other very, very much. And they have these kind of dual meanings, both of a thing that's so powerful that I can't help but, I have it take my breath away. And at the same time, something which calls something out of me, that demands something of me, that demands my head and my heart, my will and my intellect to move forward something, to a sense of something.
And so the church lines of using these ultimately for these kind of key moments in the Christian life, maybe milestone moments or significant moments that mark important periods in the life of faith. Which is interesting because, you know, when you talk about sacraments, I've heard the sacrament of marriage over and over. I mean, I've heard that many times in many different ways. And that's probably where I've heard the word sacrament in my entire life most was when it was also always tied to marriage, you know, even growing up.
So that's where I would have heard that piece. Sure, sure. Yeah. Well, I mean, again, this, I mean, man, just in that conversation there, it also goes into the leading of different ways.
So you grow up learning about mysteries. You're calling them mysteries. And me, mysteries are bad. Right.
You don't say that. You know, it's kind of like using the, I mean, even when you read the Bible and they talk about the seers. Or, of course, I have another one that is escaping my mind. It was another term that they used to call, like, the religious leaders and things like that.
But it's like, you can't call them that because they're trying to use that. Like, say, see, well, and we'll stick with the seer one because that's the one that's popping in my head. Because that is tied to witchcraft or it's tied to, you know, something pagan. Even though it's scriptural, that's what they were called.
Well, so even something like the magi, the three wise men from Epiphany, right? So that word magi is where we get the word magician from. So they're not like, you know, Ethiopian Jewish holy men or something. Right?
They're pagan magicians. And in all of the English translations of the Bible, the oldest versions of the King James or the Dewey Reams for the Catholics, they're called magicians or sorcerers. They're actually called sorcerers. They're the ones who come to see the baby.
Now, of course, later on, in the Acts of the Apostles, Simon Magus, who's the same thing, he's a magician, is called that. And by that point, it's clearly that same way. We don't want anything to do with that, right? Right.
But the words change over time. I think it's really important, both Catholics and Protestants, to kind of remember this piece, that much of the language that we receive today, 2,000 years later, was originally ordinary speech that became specialized later on. So you work with Deacon Tony at the radio station. And that word deacon, while it has different connotations and different denominational traditions, always means somebody who does something at church.
Like, it's not, you don't use that as a random word for the janitor or something, right? Right. But in origin, right, a diakonos is literally like the butler. So Deacon Tony is just like butler Tony.
Right. Or servant Tony, right? And so you can tell them that when you go to the radio station tomorrow. I will.
Trust me. I'm going to say that to you. And then likewise, presbiteros, the word for priest or elder, literally just means like older person, revered, respected person. That word gets paired with another one, which has sacrificial meaning, which is why Catholics and Orthodox Christians really insist on the word priest.
But in origin, that's all that means. And the big one, right, is AP Scalpons, Bishop. like where we get Episcopalian from. Epi, like an Epi pen, means over.
And scopos, like to scope out, means to look over. So Episcopos is really just a manager. He's an overseer, like at a job site. And so, you know, when you see Bishop Johnson, he's really just like the, he's like the head grunt on the line because what is your office?
Right, right. He's leading the rest, but he's still doing the same thing as you, basically. Did I lose you? Jimmy?
Hey, there you are. I am so sorry. We had a technical difficulty there. A word that I said, apparently, Chip Alexis.
I guess, well, everything, I heard everything that you said up until that last second. So I think when you thought you lost me, but we were good because it actually goes into the next question. Not a question, but it brings up something else, which again, I'm sure very deep, you know, not for this particular episode, but I mean, like for me growing up, you had the pastor, but then you had the elder and then you had the deacon. So it was like a level.
So pastor, elder, the deacon, where I mean, you're just talking about elder and priest. And that's so interesting. I mean, again. Well, the main point there, I think is less, it is important how different denominations wind up pairing this up out.
But the more important thing is for us to all recognize that these words were originally common words that came to have specialized meaning. So when we say things like, you know, the word deacon means servants, because the word deacon for us means like churchy person. We think, you know, it's like the thing that happens in gift shops where you see your name on a card or something. Sure.
My name is Patrick. Patrick means noble or father. Oh, that's sweet. My name has a meaning.
No, it's not like that. Like, Patricius literally means father. It's the father of a household. It doesn't like, it's not a name.
It's just a word. And some guys didn't have a name. The Latins were especially mad at this. They were notorious for naming their kids, like primus, secundus, and tertius.
They would literally just name their kid first, second, and third. Right. And you're one, you're two, and you're three. Right.
And so it sounds real sort of suave today or sophisticated at the time. It was the most basic thing it could be. So basically what you're saying is parents should be naming their kids thing one, thing two, we just need to go full Dr. Seuss on this.
You got it. You see the meaning of my name, which is actually James, even though I use Jimmy in radio, but I'm a liar. So, you know, talk to my exes about that one. So as we get into the sacraments, sorry, you're fine.
No, you were just fine. Hey, it's all, it's all about, it's all fun and games until, you know, the truth comes out. So we're going to go with the, so, so again, the biggest conversation, like I said, we've been chatting about this for a while and it was going through the sacraments just because I'm being told I am so wrong and I don't believe. And then that's where my automatic response is, what do I not believe?
Tell me what I don't know. Tell me what I'm not believing. And of course, nine times out of ten, you ask that question and they of course can't say because they, they don't know. But, so the sacraments are, they're paired properly.
The order is not really important except maybe the first three, but it's that the sacraments have a relationship to each other and because of the relationship to each other, they're kind of paired together. But I think the very first thing, like, so we've established that this word sacrament or mystery originally had a common meaning and then came to have a more specialized meaning. Sure. Now today in the Catholic church and in general, the Orthodox churches and the Anglican tradition, it's going to mean these seven things.
Okay. But over, but that didn't happen like all at once. Like somebody didn't just flip a switch and say this is not what this word means. That happened over a period of time so that the fathers and really as late as the 19th century, the word sacrament was fluid enough that it's not like it meant any old thing, right?
But there were other things that would be attached to a list like this. So Hugh of St. Victor, who's a very famous medieval theologian, he names 30 sacraments and he includes things like the funeral, not that it's a sacrament for the dead person but for those that are alive, the consecration of the church, the blessing of an abbot or an abbess, which is not normally considered part of everything. One big one in the Middle Ages was the coronation of a king or a queen.
That was definitely understood to be a sacrament until very late to the point where if you go back and watch the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, what we think of as her coronation robes, they're just deacon vestments. She's vested as a deacon at her coronation because it's kind of a memory of the king or the queen is the servant of the whole country, right? And so they're vested in servant's clothes, the clothes of the deacon. And so the word sort of morphs over time to mean like ritually or churchy things that have significant meaning and then it becomes more specialized by about the 12th century where there's these seven sort of super special ones, ones that the church really wants to land on and say these are significant in a very particular way and they're necessary if not to the life of the individual, to the life of the church, right?
They're part of what makes a church a church. Okay. And so like, you know, most priests in the West are celibate so they're not married. So it's not like each person receives all seven but in the church you need to have people that both receive the sacrament of orders, priesthood, and also other people who receive the sacrament of marriage.
If you only had people who receive the sacrament of marriage, you wouldn't have ministers who would minister to sacraments. If you only had people who receive the sacrament of orders, you wouldn't have anybody having babies to receive the sacraments. And so it's not that very few people in life go through and receive all seven sacraments but the church celebrates all seven sacraments and it's a sign of the life and vitality of the local church more than the individual. Right.
And you were saying that the priests of the West are single, celibate. But so what about the priests of, we'll say, the East? The East of the West. So does that mean the Eastern priests do get married?
Eastern Catholic priests and Eastern Orthodox priests are mostly married. But the tradition, and this goes very, very far back and is universally held between the Catholic and the Orthodox churches, we don't allow ordained men to marry. Rather, we ordain already married men, whether that is decons or as priests. Sure.
And the idea there is you want to make sure that the guy is stabilized in the relationship that he's going to have that sort of defines his life before you entrust him with the office of pastoring. In the West, because of the unique role that celibacy has, that would be a whole separate other podcast fit, because the unique role that celibacy has, more of us, the bulk of us, are ordained to the priesthood as unmarried men and so we remain unmarried. But there are exceptions. The parish I was at before I came to my present assignment was a community of ex-Anglicans and so the priest there at the time was married.
I'm one of the few regular Catholic priests that has served under a married priest. We do have a married priest here in the morning, Father Livingston, who was an Anglican priest before he converted to Catholicism and so there are exceptions to it. But for the most part, Western priests are unmarried and Eastern priests are married. But Easterners do have unmarried priests.
They're mostly monks and they take their bishops only from amongst the unmarried, either from the monks or from litterers, with the idea that the bishop needs to be so wholly dedicated to the life of the church that he needs to not presently have a life for kids that he's responsible for because of the demands on his attention. Right, the attention, the time and things like that, nothing else that's fighting for them. So out of all that, talk about the buildup to the actual conversation. Sorry.
No, you know, there's no reason to apologize at all. I'm just, you know, letting everyone know this is now the time. So we're going to go through these and we're going to start with baptism because baptism, depending on your belief, is a little different because so like with Catholics, baptism comes in when you are a baby, where for me, it is something that happens a little more later. So let's look at the baptism one first.
So on the Catholics believe baptism is go. So baptism is the primal sacraments, both in the sense that it's first, so primarily, but also in the, it's what enables the rest of this to happen. So from the Catholic perspective, Orthodox Christians would hope the same thing. A lot of liturgical Protestants, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Methodists would say the same kind of thing here.
The rest of the sacraments can't do what they're supposed to do if you're not already united to Christ in the church through baptism. So baptism comes at the beginning, whether that is the beginning of your biological life as a baby or your life of faith as an adult. And it's what initially and uniquely conforms you to Christ. It, you know, in our traditional language would say it forgives sins, all sins, both personal sin and our notion of original sin or the sins that we've inherited from our parents.
It gives grace, it confers grace. And this is what comes to really define sacraments in Catholic tradition. It's an outward sign of an interior grace. And it regenerates or renews or gives new life to the person in Christ, which makes an adopted son or daughter of God.
And so the church in its language, the church in its practice does, we draw a pretty hard line in important ways between baptized persons and unbaptized persons, between what we would understand as Christians and non-Christians. But we're much, if you will, softer between other Christians, so Protestants, Orthodox, and Catholics, than we would be between Christians and non-Christians. And so that language of brother and sister really does get reserved to other Christians, not because we don't think we share a common humanity with Jews or Muslims or pagans or whatever, but because the sonship that we have in God comes to us from our relationship with Christ. And for us, that really is tied sort of essentially to baptism.
So for Catholics, baptism comes when the child is born. It's within like a few weeks after the birth of a child. Right, right. If a child is born into a Catholic family, then the expectation is that the parent had a child baptized within the first few weeks after birth.
For most of our history, that's really been literally the Sunday after birth. So the reason Godparents is such a big thing in the Catholic tradition and the reason today this is especially clear with Latino communities like the one that I served, the padrinos, the godparents are a big deal is because for most of the church's history, mothers were not present at their baby's baptism. And that's because the baby was typically baptized the Sunday after birth or maybe the second Sunday if the kid was born on Friday or Saturday. But the mother was typically still on bed rest.
And so that's not the way we do things now, but for more of our history, that was real common was that women would stay confined for about a month after the baby was born. And so as a result, the godmother was called that because she was the woman who kind of acted in the mommy role at the baptism. She would cuddle and cuddle with the baby so it would be quiet except for the moment when it was actually getting water poured on it. And then she would be the one who kind of comforted the baby when it was freaked out because mom wasn't around.
And in a lot of places, frankly, the godmothers were also veterans, so they needed to. They'd feed the kid, right? Because the kid would be out of sorts. And so godparents originally have an important role not because they're the ones who take your kid if you happen to die or something, which is the way it kind of gets handed down now.
That's the whole kind of the godfather thing. It's more because of their role in baptism. They're the ones that stand in the place of the mother or the father at the moment the child was baptized. So in the comparison piece, so again, so with Catholicism, the baptism comes when the child comes after birth.
The child is born. So for me, it is dedication. So I grew up with dedication. So they dedicated the child.
So for you, for Catholics, what it is when you have that baptizing, it's not like you're dumping the baby in a big pail of water, but it's either you're sprinkling them or you are pouring water over their head depending on the belief for the denomination that you are in. Or, I mean, like for us, it's the dedication of the child dedicating your child to God, that you're going to raise him or her, you know, under the, you know, the hand of God, but then we anoint their head with oil. So you have an anointed of oil with that dedication when we bring them in. So that's, again, we think, we believe the same just kind of in a different way or different words.
So what you're pointing to with this, which is really important and both Catholics and Protestants could do to remember this or to relearn it or whatever, right, is that, again, these words have meanings originally that become specialized. So the word baptism really does originally mean like bath or immersion. Sure. And so the question of the method becomes very important later when there are other arguments going on between the Catholic and Protestant communities.
But the method piece is in some ways far less important for us. And the sprinkling thing, frankly, is extraordinarily rare. I've never seen a baby sprinkled. Like, I've never seen a person sprinkled for baptism in my entire life.
I have, but usually with a sword gun, but that's a completely different thing. Yeah, it's a different thing. The soups of 5,000. But no, the question was at one point whether the person had to have their whole bodies emerge or just part of their body or their head or not their head.
And the sprinkling thing really only came into question later when the faith moved into North countries where there was less water and more ice and you could potentially endanger the person by submerging them in ice water or something. So that's not the big question. The question is, what does this bath do? That's the question.
What does this bath do? What does it mean? What does it mean for the person being bathed? What does it mean for the people bathing them and witnessing to it?
What does it do for the person being bathed and what does it do to or for the community witnessing to and assisting in it? Well, again, the other piece of the conversation is just, again, understanding it's a baptism for you, it's a dedication for me, but you're still doing the same. So, again, it's not we do things different. The ritual, we'll say, is different, but the underlying meaning is pretty much the same.
Right. So infant baptism and infant dedication in those Protestant communities that don't practice baptism but that do dedications instead are pointing to many of the same realities, right? They recognize the authenticity of the faith of the parents of the baby and that the parents want to give the baby the best gift that they have, which is their faith. And this ritual articulates that to the best of the knowledge or ability of the people that are involved, right?
So you're trying to give your best gift back is what happens. And it's not that when it comes to growing up, you know, the evangelical or how you're going to label the non-Catholic, but because baptism still plays a role, just not at that given time for some of these more traditional type of Protestants, it's the baptism is itself, it's going to do something. And that's really sort of what's at the heart of the question of sacrament. For us, the sacraments run, there's kind of technical language here, but I think it's helpful.
So the sacraments work ex operae operato. So what that means is the sacraments work by the work being done itself. Like there's a thing that happens simply by the performing of the ritual or the act with the intention to do it. Like this wouldn't happen if you were playing or in seminaries and you're practicing or something like that, right?
So like when I taught at seminary, we would practice baptisms with a cabbage patch doll. Well, no cabbage patch doll is actually baptized, right? Right. But when you do the thing with the intention of it, church intends that something actually happens with uh with a dedication piece in those communities that adopted that model it's not that nothing happens something definitely happens but because their understanding of how sin and um and development works and what what baptism and specifically believers baptism really means it can't mean the same thing that the catholics and sort of classical christians are going to think it means because because it wouldn't be possible for a baby to do that whereas for us it's possible not because of anything the baby does but because of something christ does right um and so and so we do think a very different thing happens but in terms of the life of the child it's very often the same kind of experience i'm raised in a church going family we go to we go to church mass service whatever every sunday or most sundays i run right from wrong when i do things bad once i'm old enough to know what that means i'm sorry like there's there's a lot that really is built in that's very very similar we just think that the starting point begins very different which is the perfect segue into the next one which is confirmation which again comes in two different ways so so so again baptism still comes in for me but it just came later so i was dedicated when i was born right and of course i you know my family uh one side of my family was methodist the other side of my family was lutheran so i i'm very familiar with confirmation which again comes a little later but for me so we'll start with how it started on how i was raised and then we can get into the confirmation explanation so for me it started at the dedication you're being dedicated to god god this is your child you know we are all children of god i'm going to raise them you know in as a god-fearing child so then i move on and i get to what we've all heard about the the age of accountability which the age of accountability is when i know the difference between right and wrong i know when i did something bad and i know i need to say i'm sorry or i realize that i've done something wrong so at that point when you reach that age of accountability so for us it's our time to now the word dedicate comes in because i'm going to dedicate my life to jesus christ i'm going to ask jesus into my heart by doing that of course he comes in to wash away my sins and then i'm going to now try and live my best life but i'm doing this on for lack of a better way of saying it on my terms i admitted to what i am going to do i have made that commitment to him which then from there now is when baptism comes in for me because once i've accepted jesus now it is that public baptism to say which you had mentioned earlier about washing the sins and you know the ritual of here's what happens the old man dies the new you know comes alive right comes alive when you're submerged and coming out of the water so that happens for me around that seven eight years seven eight nine that kind of went together right right right so that's again growing up pentecostal charismatic is how i learned and how it worked for me but now you have the confirmation which you are starting to kind of get into that the details on that a little bit too because that's like the formation classes where you're being taught right wrong you're being taught as it's leading you to your next sacrament of confirmation so so when i said at the very beginning that these sacraments are connected to each other in a specific way baptism confirmation and eucharist or communion are tied together in a in a very primitive and in the like historical sense and kind of practical way so um so in the early church the the practice at least as far as anybody can tell um and even scholars in those communities that that don't practice into baptism sort of acknowledge this is a thing right um is it is that babies were everybody babies adolescents grown-ups that were that were baptized were baptized confirmed or they would probably say chrismated anointed and communicated all at the same time so if you were to go to any orthodox church in the country or in the world um and you were to be there for baptism the baby would be baptized confirmed and given a little drop of uh the consecrated wine all at the same time so they receive all three sacraments all at once um eastern catholics do the same thing and in many places uh the the order baptism confirmation eucharist has been retained the the situation that most catholics in this part of the world know today which is where you're baptized from the first few weeks after birth you receive first full communion at around that age of reason or age of what do you call it age of accountability which is the same thing um but you receive first full communion at around that time and then confirmation a bit later that's entirely enacted in history and there's a strong movement the catholic church and several bishops have already adjusted it because um the confirmation piece what happened was it's a good kind of window in church history and how things can go very wrong so so theologians typically are only this is catholic protest orthodox whatever right they're only able to reflect on that which they know we're able to read out so by the time martin luther comes along in the 1520s and 30s all he knows is what western christians are doing in europe in the middle of 1500s right sure so what he sees is that babies are baptized shortly after birth confirmation takes place at some point later and that can vary anywhere from about six months of age to about 15 and then what's the most common because at least from what i knew even from growing up and knowing people that were confirmed that was almost like it happened about that time of going into say junior becoming a high school yeah so it's like that so well 13 year old you know your your age that's really and i don't mean this in a pejorative or insulting sense it's just descriptive right sure this is really a kind of a protest practice that catholics adopted later and um and i think for the sake of clarity it probably wasn't a great idea because it confuses what the different groups think are happening sure well and again this is why i said it's asking the questions and actually sitting down like what we're doing right now and going look here's what it is here's how we were raised here's how i believe and again it's not saying that we do not agree or believe the same thing to an extent it's just in a different way because as you were saying no no no and you're not at all i'm just you know just kind of clarifying for those listening that you know again like for me really if you think about because like i said i talked about dedication and that happened when you're a baby now you you know you become saved or born again at that age of accountability you ask jesus in your heart which at that point for me that would be like my confirmation you could say that's right which at the same time i am then because you made the comment how the three things happen together so then i was also baptized to give my public display of what i have done my public decision but then also that's about the time i would start taking communion so so what happens for us in the catholic church and specifically in the west i'm going to say from like italy west so italy france spain portugal ireland the whole kit right america the issue the issue was that marka um the issue was that the confirmation was reserved to the bishop and this didn't have anything to do with the sacrament it had everything it did not at least mostly have anything to do with the bishop sure it had or with the sacrament it had everything to do with the bishop so you have these problems where the church was getting so large that bishops were in charge of parishes they never visited and by insisting that the bishop got to every parish every couple of years to administer confirmation you you held him accountable to visit all these people right so for instance when i was in doctoral studies i knew a guy who found saint francis of assisi's uh name in the baptismal church seriously yeah wow okay and and so this is like 1170 or 71 something like that right so the custom in italy in the 1170s i can't say this for the whole of western europe or anything like that the custom in italy in the 1170s was that the baby would be baptized either that first sunday after birth or maybe if the baby was born on saturday maybe the second sunday right and all the babies that were born in the last year would be taken to the cathedral on pentecost the peace of the holy spirit and be confirmed on sunday so babies were still being confirmed but they were being confirmed by the bishop not by the local priest sure it forced the bishop to sort of encounter everybody in his diocese but it didn't um it didn't require they become much older in different places that tended further out and what really confused things for the catholics was in the early 1900s st pius x whom st pius church here in des moines is named for he was deeply distressed by the fact that people might be going until they were 16 or 18 without receiving holy communion because you couldn't receive communion until you were confirmed so he switched the order and said priests can go ahead and admit children or people to communion as soon as they can tell the difference between this and ordinary bread so once they recognize there's something special happening to the bread at church sure but the confirmation might have to wait until the bishop is able to get out there now the irony is today i routinely confirm people in a way that most catholic priests for a lot of history would never been permitted to so every time i admit i receive someone in the church every time i receive a protest in the church i confirm them and you know in the last year because of covid i confirmed all of our teenagers too that were on schedule but but the teenager thing really comes much later that's a that's a fruit of reflecting on practice rather than on history or theology and that's where if we're having this conversation about sacraments in general i think it's really important to not only look at what's happening now which might be the fruit of all kinds of very particular circumstances but to look at history and say oh well this is what the church meant by this so a good example when i was in graduate studies for this stuff um one of the things i talked about was in parts of russia it was very common for a long time to communicate that is give holy communion and give a consecrated host to to dead people now the next question is how does that work not well is the answer right so so this is clearly forbidden right from the earliest days it's been forbidden to give sacraments to dead people because they're dead right do you open the mouth and do you like you know then work it like a puppet no sorry anyway no you're exactly right jenny so so in the places where this was common what they would do is they would put the host which by this point is a round circle right okay into the into the mouth of the corpse and it's a memory of when when coins would be put in the mouths of the dead to give to charon to carry them across the river six sure problem was we didn't believe any of that like it was an accident that the host was around the coin was around the host should be swear or broken off piece of bread in any shape right right right right but because it resonated in memory with people they kept doing it well the problem is what we do do this is 100 percent part of the catholic tradition is that what we call viaticum or food for the journey like lemdes in the lord of the rings is one's last communion so we make a big deal about first holy communion when a child or an adult receives communion for the first time sure we also make a big deal about last communion with the idea that this is the last time you're candidly corporeally connected to the christ to the sacraments before meeting him face to face sure but but the things got like confused or messed up together and and so it resulted in an abuse the problem is like if you wrote a doctoral dissertation based on your experience of well grandma received communion after she was dead and grandpa did too and my mom and my dad this is all i know you're gonna wind up with a real distorted understanding of what the church catholic protestant or orthodox has ever really thought about the sacraments right which i mean i guess so and we're having the the whole eucharist or communion conversation from confirmation let's just go right into that one so now this is and i think this is really the i don't know that i want to say disconnect but i can't think of the better word to use for this between the the catholic the protestant the evangelical on the belief in this because again it's how you were raised or how you believe and and i know even when it comes to catholics not all catholics kind of the same well not raised the same or are not able to kind of wrap their mind around the whole thing either you know of what the belief is or you know how it all comes to say but so the so for catholics you call it when you have your communion the eucharist i grew up and it was it was communion and so the definition for me is it was communion because it was my time for my personal communion with god to have a conversation with god it's like you know it's kind of like you hear a lot of people talking about your prayer closet well you're not in a closet you're you know in a sanctuary of other people but you take your sacrament you take your of course for me there wasn't wine it was grape juice but you take your wafer or your piece of bread and your grape juice and then once you then take the communion you're now to basically be quiet and focus and just have that one-on-one communication with god that was my experience that's for me that's what it means to me so it's very personal it means very much something to me um though i've been told that i'm wrong and it can't mean anything which you know this is where the thing is have the conversation don't just assume right because now on the catholic side it's a completely different conversation let me let me first of all say jimmy because i think this is important no not not not primarily for you but i mean also for you but primarily for those listening who have had the same kind of experience um i would never want in any way to diminish the experience of christ that my protestant brothers and sisters had in their experience of holy communion it's true that we understand what happens differently and i'm not gonna catch on that we do think different things are happening but that doesn't mean that the experience which you have had in holy communion is any lesser unmeaningful or anything like that and i certainly wouldn't say by the fact of you having had the experience that that you're less right right um and so i'm sorry if and i think you have but if you've experienced that or if anybody listening has experienced that with catholics i'm sorry that shouldn't happen um the the thing for us it's true the the the accents you might say is not uh so much on the personal there is obviously a very personal thing that happens because you're taking a thing into your body and that thing you take in your body is meant to facilitate a personal encounter with christ which has to kind of leave a mark as a word right um but but it's not uh for us precisely because the experience happens in common with other people there's a communal dimension every time you receive communion even if we're by ourselves so i take communion to the sick right and the communion that i take to the sick comes i don't re-celebrate the eucharist or re-consecrate the host running there i bring holy communion from the celebration of the eucharist that we had on sunday to the people that i visit during the week and that at least in principle ties them to the community's experience of eucharist on sunday even if their only experience of that is to see it on tv or youtube or whatever or or just know factually that happened right and so there's a communal dimension that's a real important part of this for us that is not necessarily of all other communities what most catholics tend to land on with the experience of eucharist they'll they'll really pass hard the question of real presence you I'll be very honest.
I'm not I'm not especially interested in that question. I believe that 150 percent. That's the issue. But but I'm not especially concerned with how anybody explains it.
The thing that really distinguishes the Catholic and I would also say the Orthodox understanding of of Eucharist is that not not the receiving of the consecrated elements, but the celebration itself, the gathering of community around the table whereby the person says, this is my body, this is my blood. That for us and for the Orthodox and historic classically minded Christians itself constitutes a share in Christ sacrifice. The language, the language of sacrifice is what really distinguishes the Catholic tradition. It's not real presence.
There are plenty of Christians that believe in real presence, but that are not very comfortable with the language of sacrifice. But there are but but there are not that many Christians that are uncomfortable with the notion of real presence, but that who like the language of sacrifice for what happens at the altar. Right. And so and so that's the thing that for us.
And the way you can tell this. Right. Is that when Catholics talk about who can and can't receive communion, what they'll say is, well, the reason they can't receive is because they don't believe in the presence. It's not true.
Most Lutherans, all Episcopalians, most Presbyterians believe in some version of real presence. They don't think you're just imagining Jesus. They really do think Jesus does something to make himself present. But they but they explicitly reject the notion of sacrifice because what they're concerned with, which is entirely understandable.
Is a kind of an evil, what they understand to be an evil sense that we're re-sacrificing Christ every time the community gathers around the altar. Now, the church has never held that. And it was explicitly condemned during the Reformation. But that didn't that didn't stop other people from saying it.
And this is a shame on my community, but it didn't stop other people from charging money for it. And so. No, really. Right.
Yeah. So this causes real like. And the early on. Yeah.
No, we were the first ones. We charged money for a little bit of dirt, a little bit of oil and a little bit of Jesus that you got in the consecrated bread. And so. So.
So what it's saying, right, was it it left a deep sense of scandal in different communities for several hundred years. And and there's no excuse for that. I'm not going to try and offer one because it would be true. I just have to say, honestly, that those people who did that did not represent the best of our tradition.
We articulated much more clearly what we think is really happening. I do think the language of sacrifice is appropriate for the celebration of the Lord's Supper. But but it's got to be understood within the context. And and that when it's understood within context, it can make the celebration of the Lord's Supper much more meaningful, even for those who can't receive communion.
So almost every week I have a funeral where I have to say to people. So in the Catholic Church, sacrament of communion, both means like symbolizes and affects communion, not only with Christ in the church. And so for that reason, from our perspective, only Catholics and Orthodox Christians that are not conscious of grace and are welcome to receive communion. That's true.
However, everybody needs in this moment to really be thinking about. And of course, this is happening primarily at funerals, right? Our communion or connection with the person who has died. And I've had more people who can't receive communion at the funeral come up to me afterwards and tell me, I've been alive at the funeral where I couldn't receive communion.
And I always felt shut out. That's the first time I really felt connected because the ritual action, it was important. It's not like they all were happy they couldn't receive communion, right? But but they got there was a different thing happening and that their connection to it was more profound than the particular action that they took in the course of the ritual.
And I think that that matters a great deal. It can go a long way to healing some of the hurts that we've built with each other around communion or non-communion, because it's not something about what I can or can't do. That puts all the onus on me. The real question is on what God can and can't do.
So and that and that forces all of us, Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox to rely on God. Right. Well, and that's one thing for me when it comes to communion. And we were not one to ever shy away from sacrifice, because the one thing that always was talked about is how Jesus was the ultimate sacrifice because he died for me.
He died for us. And again, where that person was like, he died for me. You need and you're doing this. You need to remember that.
And it's again, that conversation of what he did for us. Yeah. I mean, I'll be honest, growing up, I was almost waiting some Sundays for the altar to come out in the big old board or whatever. That's a different story.
But just start cutting them up. But no, I mean, that's very important. And I think that this rolls into that the next one. So the penance.
So that's the confessing of the sin. Correct. Right. So so so for Catholics, the and this is the order that was listed is not always the order in which things are received.
Right. Sure. So so for most Catholics, the practical order of the sacraments goes like this. Baptism at or under, you know, six months of age, confession at or around six or seven years of age, communion at or around seven or eight years of age, usually fall and spring.
So confession typically happens in the fall and communion spring and then confirmation anywhere from eight or nine to 17 or 18. And then if you're going to be married or receive orders, that happens typically in the 20s or 30s. And then unction or anointing happens later. Confession, right, is, as you were speaking before, the stage of accountability or age of reason.
It's what happens once a person realizes in a meaningful way that they have done something wrong for which they need forgiveness. And that can happen. I've had little ones come to me as young as four who clearly understood I screwed up and I screwed up big. Right.
And I've had people come to me as old as eight who only at that point really realized, hey, my actions have an effect on other people. I should probably do something about that. Right. And most of us are somewhere in between that, obviously.
What confession is intended to do is twofold. The fathers of the church, those guys in the second, third and fourth centuries, talk about it as the second plank. So it's like an image here is like walking the plank like for a pirate. The plank is meant to give you a bridge to tomorrow, a bridge to salvation.
Baptism is the first because it forgives all your sins and it's supposed to make you right. But very early on, they realized, hey, it turned out people get baptized and still sin. What do we do about that? And because Christ had said before he died, who since you forgive, forgiven them, who since you retain, retains.
The understanding was that the apostles. So for us, the bishops and their successors retain the power to forgive and retain sins. And that what confession does is it best prepares one for the reception of Holy Communion. This often gets cast in terms much like Jewish sort of purification rituals.
Right. So you go make yourself ready so that you can receive the fruits of the sacrifice. And there's an element of that that's there. But it would be foolish to deny it.
But it's not simply that we're not just like Jews with Jesus. Because the move here really is that my sins, especially my serious sins, not only separate me or divide me from God, but from everybody else. And so I need not only God in my private prayer, but someone representing the community to absolve me or forgive me and restore me to life in the community. And so so in the early church, this was often done publicly.
So so if you would screw up big, not like I was mean to my brother or I said a naughty word or something like that. Right. Sure. But like I slept with somebody's wife or I offered incense to the emperor or something like that.
Then you would be permitted to confess publicly. And then a penance or a homework assignment would be given you. But the penances in the early church were severe. They were hardcore.
You would be put on bread and water for a year or two. Right. And so then you couldn't be admitted to communion. That is the sacrament communion.
Sure. Until after you had completed your penance, which was a kind of sign of good faith on your part that like I'm going to do better this time. The reason that matters is because today the penances we give are typically pretty minimal. Pray some or do a good work or whatever that kind of thing.
But the idea is exactly the same. You need to prepare yourself before you go to receive this great gift. And so while we encourage people to confess as often as they can before receiving communion, we insist on it like before marriage and before being ordained and especially at the end of life before death. Like somebody talk to somebody and and really try and put away whatever has gotten in the way over the course of the last several years.
Right. Sure. So that you can be as committed and present to as you possibly can. Right.
So that brings us to the next one. I mean, again, as we're going through all these. So for me, the confession that kind of falls back to where I was having earlier conversation of the confirmation with that that age of accountability when I asked this into my heart. I mean, I guess the biggest difference, depending on what you grew up in, is I'm not going to a priest to do it.
I just go straight to God. Right. You know, I confess it. You know, I confess that to him daily.
You know, here's you know, here's what I did. You know, God, please forgive me. I mean. And this is a conversation that would be a lot deeper of, you know, right, wrong.
I mean, so, again, it's we're believing it's just in a different. I guess I want to use ritual on this, but we do it in different ways. Right. Is that a good way to say that?
No, no, no. I think what the ritual does is it expresses different understandings of what's happening. So the fundamental thing, right, is that is the Catholics and Orthodox Christians insist on the language of priests to talk about their ministers in a way that most at all. But most Protestants are very uncomfortable with because we genuinely see our priests as sort of inheritors of the historic priesthood of the temple, which means that our primary job is to forgive sins and make sacrifice.
Right. But the sacrifice that we offer, the forgiveness of sins is not in some ways a lot different because we no longer slaughter livestock to do it. Right. Right.
Yeah. You don't have the altar sitting up front with the ram there. With a bowler. Yeah, exactly.
Like I said, that was one of the things I was always waiting for growing up. You know, they pulled the ram out and slid his throat. And never happened. Yeah.
I was disappointed. I was like, come on, wait a minute. I need some blood here. Blood and guts.
I was a weird child. I'm a weird adult. I mean, it just kind of happens that way. You're not that weird a child.
But the Catholic and Orthodox understanding of priesthood really is that what priesthood does is it establishes someone in the community whose purpose in the community is to forgive sins and offer sacrifice. Right. And he's set aside or set apart in the community for this purpose. In the West, that happens with jealousy.
In the East, it happens primarily with sacrifice. And so a big difference between the East and the West on this score is that in the West, very early on, very early on, the first or first centuries, Mass or Eucharist began to be celebrated daily. In the East, much as in Protestant communities, it's typically only celebrated on Sundays and or what we would think of as like major feasts, special days like Christmas or Easter or that kind of thing. Right.
And for me, growing up, we did communion once a month. It was like the first Sunday of the month. Right. I don't know why.
That's just the way it worked. Well, that tradition, and this is not a slight or a critique. It's just honest. Right.
Right. That tradition came out of post-reformation traditions who were trying to accent the importance of the action of the believer and especially the study of Scripture over and against the celebration of sacraments. Not that you did away with celebration of sacrament, but that it wasn't as frequent, and that way you didn't get kind of, we'll say, hopped on it in the same way. And you can almost say that it almost makes it a little more reverent because it happened.
Right. So familiarity breeds contempt, right? So to do something too often, the temptation is to take it not seriously enough. Right.
And so those Protestant communities that have retained infrequent communion, ironically, oftentimes have more reverent communions than those of us who do every day. I don't think there's a serious doubt about that. But the question is what you think this is or does. And we clearly do have different understandings of what this is or does, because those communities that rejected the notion of sacrifice were very concerned that you created a kind of priestly caste, me, who are able to do things that other people can't do, you, that make me better than you.
And the thing is, like, I don't actually think I'm better than you or can do, I'm putting some sneer quotes that you can't see, right? Well, yeah, at least during this podcast, you don't think that you're better than me. But outside of this. Well, maybe.
No, no, but the move really here is, like, it's not about a caste system in the church. It's simply about recognizing different relationships between different people. Sure. I marry all kinds of people.
I don't expect to be able to sleep with their wives. That's a thing that belongs to the husband, right? Right. He's not in a special caste because he gets to sleep with his wife.
That's just their job, right? That's their mission together is to be intimate in that way. My job is to not be intimate in that way so that I can be present to and aware of four other things. And you get a very reasonable argument so that that's a good idea or not.
That's a different kind of question, right? But in the same way, but, like, we don't have just anybody come up and celebrate communion on Sunday. Okay, you don't just have anybody come over and sleep with your wife on Wednesday, right? But it's a different thing.
Right. And it means different things. And I recognize that using that language might be offensive or striking. I am offended, and I cannot believe you.
But what I think is important about this is that, like, the offense that somebody would feel at the notion that you would think the ability to sleep with their wife is probably the closest that Catholics or Orthodox Christians come to how they would feel about having somebody else celebrate communion for them. Sure. Like, the priest occupies that kind of a role in the community. That's his job.
He's married to the church. His job is to do this thing and not that other thing. But to such an extent, right, that married clergy, both in the Catholic and Orthodox churches, refrain from sex with their wives the night before they celebrate Eucharist. Much like the Jewish priest did, to sort of say, no, this thing that I'm doing tomorrow, that's really dedicated.
Like, I'm not going to be distracted by body things then. And there's a fair question why that's a good idea. But the move is right, right, that we're trying to put something all the way over. Sure.
For him. Absolutely. And I think the first one, I mean, when it comes to the seven sacraments, the first four that we hit, and I'm sure each one of those probably could have been a podcast just on its own. Yeah.
Because we're very long. No, and you're fine. I mean, again, it's a deep conversation. But, again, the bottom line when we come to this is there's nothing out of the four out of us looking at it or doing it in a different manner or form that I disagreed with.
I mean, I agree with every single one of that. So for a person to tell me that, well, you don't believe in them, well, again, you're wrong. It's asking the right questions. Don't just assume because we know what happens when you assume.
So the next one is the anointing of the sick, which I totally believe in this. And, again, I mean, speaking of having, you're talking about having, you know, the Eucharist or communion every day or, you know, however, that, you know, a very common thing. It was nothing for us that after every service, every Sunday, well, didn't matter if it was Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, we had basically a service. Right.
I mean, you come down front now and we're going to pray with you, whatever that ailment is. Or, you know, of course, and we all are very common with this. You've been at a hospital of, you know, a priest or pastor coming in and praying for the person at the hospital. So, I mean, really, I mean, what is the difference with it?
I mean, so for you, I mean, because you actually have a healing service the first Friday of every month. Right. So here at Christ the King, we have a very kind of dedicated ministry to the sick. And so we do something every month on the first Friday.
Other places have it organized slightly differently. The date and the time is not especially important. Like that would really just be reflective, frankly, like the priest's schedule or something like that. But the move that we pray for and make ourselves present to the sick, the bereaved, the otherwise injured, that kind of situation, right?
That is just typical of the Christian tradition in almost every form sort of across the board, right? We tend to those that are hurt. Right. And for us, what we think of the sacrament of anointing or that older name that you used when you were initially rattle on stuff off of unction, which is an old-timey English word for anointing.
It's called extreme unction or last unction on the idea that there was a first or original unction. And that first or original unction is, for us, confirmation. So the idea is that in the early church, people were anointed, that is, rubbed down with oil, like lotion today, at baptism slash confirmation, which always happens simultaneously. So confirmation was just the rubbing down part of baptism.
And they were typically rubbed down. The same shocks and listeners. We're not trying to scandalize anybody. It's just very honest.
Baptisms in the early church were most typically done in the nude. And so they were done in single-sex communities. So you would have some kind of a barrier between the men and the women, and you would have a woman on the women's side and a man on the man's side doing the physical baptism. And then they would be rubbed down with oil, and this oil would cover the whole body.
And very specifically, the senses. So the eyes, the ears, the mouth, the nose, the hands, and the feet. And in some places, since it's not meant to creep people out or freak them out, which is part of our history, the groin. And the reason for that was because the idea was you wanted to sanctify or make holy all of those places where we do the most important things.
And so, now, there was always other people around. So you wouldn't just have somebody fiddling with somebody else's bits, right? That was not the idea. But in order to ensure propriety, you would make sure that women were the ones rubbing oil on women and men were the people rubbing oil on men.
This was, of course, a heteronormative world and all the things. But the idea here is that the anointings were done at the beginning to set aside or set up heart for permission, much as David is anointed by Saul to mark him off as the king. Later on, the anointings are done for healing, much like lotion is used today. So you rub lotion on dry skin.
You rub lotion on storage. You put icy hot on your muscles when they hurt. And the idea there is that the lotion is coming for healing. The third use, which we do still use today, though people notice it less and it's less obvious, is before a person is baptized, whether it's an infant or a grown-up, they're anointed.
If it's a baby, it's on their chest. We don't anoint grown-ups on their chest anymore because we don't want a suit. But the idea is a memory of rubbing athletes down with oil. So athletes still rub themselves down with oil to look tough and strong.
In the old days, the idea was that you would make yourself slippery so that your enemy couldn't hold on to you. And the idea is, the prayer that said when you do this is an exorcism. You want to make the child or the grown-up slippery so the devil can't hold on to them. I thought it was just the icy hot so it would make an angle away.
Right. What was your experience of anointing growing up? How was oil using? So, well, I mean, and again, oil was a very common thing.
I mean, usually when it came to the anointing of oil, it was always whenever they were being prayed for. So when we were going down to be prayed for, whatever that is, either being sick or just needing prayer for something during that prayer service, I guess you could say at the end of it. You know, they'd anoint our – and it was always anointing your head. Not much different, I guess, when you'll be having Ash Wednesday coming up soon where they do the ashes and the cross on your forehead.
It was the same for us of using the oil and the sign of a cross on your forehead when they're praying and then laying their hands on you. Because for me, a lot of that was the whole laying on of hands. It's when they prayed for you, you know, your arm hurt. So they would, you know, touch your arm hurt and actually put their hands on us.
They're praying for the healing from God. So, I mean, you know, the oil was a very common thing used for different things. Even to the point of, you know, I know we were together a few months ago now when you had a person come over and they wanted their car blessed. So it also used for blessings.
I mean, I know my dad drove a truck for 30 years. And if he was in town and he was getting ready to go out, you know, to do a run, after church, the semi would be out there and he would have the pastor come out and basically anoint the truck, you know, for safe travels. So, I mean, using the whole oil anointing was a very common practice, very common use, not just for healing, but also for different blessings and even for prayer when you were being prayed for. So, I mean, again, I think a lot of ways we're seeing a lot of similarities, again, maybe in different ways on how it is done, because for us, it wasn't like a full ritual being done.
It was more of like an anointing and a prayer. But, again, asking the questions and really learning what that person did, kind of like what you said earlier of not being presumptuous and not assuming and you're not like me, so you're wrong. Have that conversation, but be respectful and be reverent on what it was that they had when they grew up. Because, again, we believe in God.
We believe in Jesus Christ. And, you know, it's not like we're in a completely other form of religion that doesn't even bring that into play. Right. But, you know, again, look at the commonalities between the two to be able to have those conversations.
You know, where is it that you and I can have a discussion? We might not agree on everything, but what is that underlying piece of it? You know, we do agree on this, and we're pretty right on where it comes to here, so, you know, we're not that far apart in the whole scheme of things. So, going from the anointing of the sick, now we roll into the last two, which I think now are these kind of a paired thing, depending on, at least with the Catholics, marriage and holy orders.
So, either you're going to take the sacrament of marriage or you're going to take the sacrament of holy orders, which for you, if I get this right, holy orders for you is priest. You're going to become a priest. Is that kind of how it is, you know, how you guys work? Okay.
So, in some ways... I mean, it could be like none, it could be whatever it is, but you know what... No, no, no, no, no, so this is where the distinction comes in. Okay.
So, the sacrament of orders, in some ways it's better called the sacrament of order, by which I mean, like, direction or organization. Sure. So, the sacrament of orders, as far as the church understands it today, consists of bishops, so the overseers, the heads of, like, a regional or diocesan church, right? Mm-hmm.
Priests, which would be more or less equivalent to most Protestant communities ministers, and then deacons, which may or may not be equivalent to most Protestant communities versions of deacon because deacon can be in a different thing in different places, right? Right. So, bishops, priest, deacons, it's that threefold ministry, and the reason for that is because it comes to us from the Acts of the Apostles, I think it's also St. Paul, but this is how the church organized itself in the very earliest days, and that you're 100% right in this sense.
For the most part, our experience with this is a person is either married or ordained, not typically both at the same time. There are, of course, exceptions where, so, like, today I gave an interview to a seminarian, so a guy studying for priesthood, who was a widower, so he was married for 25 years, and then after his wife died, decided to go back to pursue orders. So that's, he, assuming he's ordained, would have been married first, and then after his wife died, gone back. The other version of this is, in the last 40 years or so, the permanent or perpetual deacons, like he and Tony, whom you work with, is presently married, but then later, usually significantly later after the marriage, is then ordained.
Nuns, or monks, religious brothers, the word order is used for the group they belong to, but not to what they do. That's not holy orders in the same sense. And the reason is, they kind of operate based on what we would call kind of a Jones Agreement around their life together, whereas the bishop, the priest, and the deacon, from our perspective, are permanently associated to the church in this particular way. And the only way to sort of get out of it is for the church to permanently disassociate you in that way.
Gotcha. So for you, when it comes to... No, it does. So, and I guess we kind of skip over marriage a little bit, but not too much, because marriage is marriage.