My latest post on the sacraments and vocation is live at TGR:

Now, what does all this have to do with the sacraments? It is essential to the nature of a sacrament that material objects and actions are used as signs of spiritual realities. The sacraments provide a model of how spirit conquers and reorganizes the material world for righteousness. In the sacraments, the righteous indwelling of the material world by the spiritual world is so complete that powerful effects are promised from their right use and powerful dangers threatened from their wrong use. (It is the nature of these effects that drives many of our debates over the sacraments. Those debates are so important because they express what we believe about how the spiritual world indwells the material.)

The sacraments are therefore a model of what our daily work is to do – use the material world to manifest the spiritual.

I ride one of my hobbyhorses, but only for a moment:

One more word before I’m done. The essential importance of this daily encounter between the material and spiritual worlds is why I am so alarmed at the movement among many postmodern theologians to deny that there is any distinction between nature and the supernatural. Granted, both come from God and are constantly in God’s presence and under God’s care, so it is important not to overdraw the distinction and try to keep them in hermetically sealed containers with no interaction. But the attempt to bring them closer together by erasing the line between them is fatal. We cannot bring body and spirit into an encounter with one another if they are not distinct things. This is one major reason why “pomo” theologians, who always set out with a ferocious call to arms, always conclude in the dead end of irresolvable ambiguities. Spirit cannot conquer flesh if flesh is spirit.

Use your fingers to tell my eyes how to tell my mind what your mind thinks of this!