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The term sacrament is used in Christian traditions to refer to a religious practice or rite that confers grace upon an individual. It can be an outward expression of an inward experience. A religion is practiced when a person performs rituals in the belief that the ritual itself is a means of grace, connection or obedience to God. In the Catholic or Orthodox Church, there are seven such sacraments or rituals to be performed. In the protestant tradition, there are only two sacraments, baptism and communion. While other religions do not hold to the term “sacrament”, they do employ rites and rituals which signal obedience and fidelity to the tradition, and keep a person in good standing with their religion.

Today, I’m asking you to question any and all religious rituals as the means of grace, or as proof of your good standing or obedience. I ask this because I’m convinced that Paul’s message to Colossae has been trapped inside the cocoon of two-thousand years of Church history, whereby people perform perfunctory rituals almost entirely due to cultural conditioning, and derive comfort and validation from the rituals and the institutions which enshrine them in tradition and pomp. This is not spirituality, it is idolatry. Healing comes by surrendering our need for institutionalized sacraments, rites, or rituals, and gaining Paul’s framework of the embodied Christ as our sole means of grace. There is no ritual that can get us to God, God exists in the midst of us already. To paraphrase Merton: “A person setting out on spiritual journey denies that endeavor with their first step.”

You don’t need any ritual. None. Zero. Zilch. What we feel when we think we need them is our affinity or addiction to the cultural conditioning of religion.

Last week we saw Paul command the Church to “not be taken captive by philosophy and tradition.” Today Paul uses two rituals or traditions (circumcision and baptism) to prove they are “emblematic” of an inner experience. For Paul, this inner experience is not a result of the ritual, and thus he warns the Church not to get caught up perfunctory religion.

¹¹ In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision not made by human hands, by stripping off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, ¹² having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead. ¹³ Indeed you, being dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God raised you to life together with him, having forgiven us all our transgressions, ¹⁴ having wiped out the record of debts against according to the laws. This he destroyed it from our midst, nailing it to the cross.¹⁵ He stripped off the rulers and the authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him.” (Colossians 2:11-15)

It may take you several contemplative readings for Paul’s thesis to overwrite your programming. We know Paul is not commanding a literal circumcision. If he were, this message would only apply to men and that would make no sense. Furthermore, he clearly indicates that he’s using the ritual as a symbol of the work God has done through Christ in freeing us from living helplessly enshrouded by sin. For Paul, circumcision is a metaphor for the grace already conferred upon us all by Christ, it is not a means of grace. Paul even had a big disagreement with Peter over this issue (Galatians 2:7-14).

Once circumcision is understood as a metaphor in this context, we must also conclude the same for baptism. Once again, the ritual of baptism is a metaphor Paul employs to illuminate the power/force/ of God raising us from our spiritual deadness. Baptism has always been the means of ritual purification, but Paul is in no way suggesting that it is required for our faith. He’s drawing parallels from the ritual to what has already transpired by God’s work in Christ.

Some will argue that Jesus commands baptism in Matthew 28:19, but a closer look reveals that disciples aren’t made by a literal baptism, but by being purified, made whole by re-identifying with or becoming a student/learner (disciple) in the name or family of the triune God. Thus, even in Jesus’ great commission, He isn’t prescribing a ritual or a grace conferring sacrament, but commanding us to “get all in” to become submersed or enshrouded in a new identity found in God.

Salvation is the discovery of our true name hidden in God, not conversion to a religion followed by or ratified by rituals. If we miss this, we miss the Gospel.

Thus, if grace isn’t conferred by any sacrament, then why have Christ followers embraced them as possessing soteriological significance? This goes entirely against Paul’s warning. Paul goes on to explain how all rites and rituals, which belong to religion, are worthless endeavors for the Church. There aren’t seven sacraments, nor even two, but only One, and that is Christ himself. Christ alone is the only grace conferring sacrament, who died once for all and therefore, as we are raised to life in Him in our faith, all religious behavior is completely superfluous. We don’t need anything to get us to God, or any thing to get God to us, for in Christ this has already been done, completely…for all. As Paul said, “He wiped out our record of debt according to the law and nailed it to the cross, triumphing over all institutional rulers and authorities.” We are free, unaffiliated, and don’t need to look any to a religion to save us, because none of them can. We need only look as far as our own life, which is Christ living in all of us.

Paul is completely dismantling religion in the same way Jesus and John the Baptist did. This proves the fidelity of the Gospel is not unto a religion, but unto freedom from all religious overreach. This eliminates innies from outies, and thus our work of evangelism is merely to awaken all others to the realization that the means of Grace has come to all people, as evidenced by their very lives. How could we consider anything, other than Christ, as a sacrament?