"We Won't Need No Sacraments!" - Sermon for 22 Pentecost, 11-9-25

When I was a hospice chaplain I often worked with couples. Some were facing the end of a long, happy marriage as one spouse was soon to die. Among my charges were devout Christians who knew their Bible. They wondered about today’s gospel passage, in which Jesus says there is no marriage in heaven. “Does this mean our marriage will be over?” they said. “Will we even recognize each other? I’m already starting to miss him, to miss her!”

These questions, and the anxiety, grief, and pain that prompts them, require pastoral sensitivity – a helpful answer for one might not be the best approach for another. One size usually doesn’t fit all. But there is a firm theological foundation on which to begin.

Our theme today is the resurrection – what happens at the end of the age and the end of our lives. One way to explore this theme is by way of the sacraments – Holy Matrimony, marriage – being one of the seven.

It would be anachronistic to consider marriage in Jesus’s day as a sacrament. Sacraments are Christ’s gift to the Church, and the Church was still yet to become. Holy Matrimony wouldn’t be named a sacrament for several hundred years, and it was several hundred years after that that the Church agreed on the seven sacraments we list today.

But Jesus’s opponents, using marriage as a test to trip Jesus, and Jesus’s answer, opens the door for us to consider how the sacraments relate to the living and the dead, to heaven and earth.

A quick refresher: “sacraments are outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace, given by Christ as sure and certain means by which we receive that grace” (BCP 857).

And “grace is God’s favor towards us, unearned and undeserved; by grace God forgives our sins, enlightens our minds, stirs our hearts, and strengthens our wills” (BCP 858).

God’s grace falls upon anyone God chooses; one needn’t be a Christian or any kind of believer at all. God’s love is not limited to members of the Church. Nor is God’s grace fenced in by the administration of the sacraments.

Yet it is the members of the Church who partake of the sacraments – these material, tangible signs – who receive the assurance of God’s love and favor.

Water, chrism, and fire at Holy Baptism. Bread and wine at Holy Communion. These are the two necessary sacraments for all members of the Church.  

And the other five sacraments are means of grace, available to those who are called to receive them: Oil and laying on of a priest’s hands at Holy Unction of the Sick and Dying. The priest’s words of absolution at Confession. The laying on of a bishop’s hands at Confirmation and Holy Orders. The exchange of vows and rings in the presence of the clergy at Holy Matrimony.

To put it bluntly: we – who are counted among the living on this earth – we need God’s grace. Without it, our lives would be empty; null and void. Grace is that which impels us to do the good, and strengthens us to withstand the bad. And the sacraments help us find that grace, for “now we see in a mirror, dimly.”

Heaven, where “we will see face to face,” heaven is another story altogether.

The afterlife we hope for and call heaven, by definition, is all grace, all goodness, all love, all God. How can heaven be anything but? And we, God willing, will get to enjoy it for eternity.

Therefore, there is no need for the sacraments in heaven. We won’t need outward and visible signs for what will be fantastically apparent all around us.

A great hymn of the Church says it thus:

“So, Lord, at length when sacraments shall cease / may we be one with all thy Church above / one with thy saints in one unbroken peace / one with thy saints in one unbounded love / more blessed still, in peace and love to be / one with the Trinity in Unity” (H 315).

So, yes, we will recognize the saints; Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob among them. We will recognize our beloved dead, including our spouses. And I expect we will even be reconciled with spouses from marriages that failed. The sacraments are received and lived by imperfect humans, after all. In this life we sinners don’t always use God’s gifts well.

But when we “cannot die anymore,” we won’t need the grace that the sacraments provide. We won’t need the grace of Holy Matrimony to live in love. We won’t need the grace of Holy Communion to feed us and forgive us, for we will be forever nourished at God’s eternal table.

Hospice couples: let your hearts be stirred. Sadducees: let your minds be enlightened. And the rest of us: let God’s grace in this life “comfort your hearts and strengthen them in every good work and word.”

For we know that our Redeemer lives.

Father Daniel S.J. Scheid, SCP

22^nd after Pentecost, Proper 27

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco

“We won’t need no sacraments!”