BREAKING OF BREAD AND THE PRAYERS DEVOTIONAL 1
Will you continue in the apostles' teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of the bread, and in the prayers?
I will, with God's help.
Every time we witness a baptism in our churches, and every time we renew our Baptismal Covenant at occasions throughout the year, we are asked this question. Our response, as it is to each question of the Baptismal Covenant, is “I will, with God’s help.” As I’ve recently reflected on what it means to do this, and what it means to do it with God’s help, I’ve been struck by the two senses in which the word continue works in this question.
We continue in the apostolic faith and the sacraments in the sense that we are taking part in something that has been here for thousands of years, and that will continue long after we have left this mortal life. Tradition, as Jaroslav Pelikan writes, is the living faith of the dead. It is the blessing of knowing that we are not burdened with making it all up for ourselves, having instead been given a gift that began with the apostles and continues to this day. We continue in the life of prayer and sacrament that stretches across both time and geography, as we live in that space between our Baptism and the Communion that is always yet to come.
With God’s help, we continue in the breaking of bread and in the prayers when continuing seems too hard to countenance. Sometimes we feel distant from God, sometimes we fall out of the habits of worship, sometimes doubt or despair wraps its tentacles around us and won’t let go. But with God’s help, we continue. My former Duke colleague Lauren Winner writes about a time after her marriage ended, when all she could do was sit in church and let the prayers of others carry her. I think perhaps we have all had those times of hard-won continuing – because they are perfectly normal.
In the end, this practice of continuing in the teaching, life, prayers, and sacraments of the Church is a matter of mutual carrying and being carried. We carry each other when we can’t do it alone, we carry the faith to those around us, and we are sustained above all by the grace of God and by the examples of that great cloud of witnesses who have gone before.
