To be Church also means to consider ourselves as the People of God. Like the people of Israel, we must come to think of ourselves as the People of God. When we do this, it changes how we think about ourselves and about life.

The Fathers of the Church first presented this image of the Church as the People of God. We can guess, however, that since Israel thought of itself in this same manner, it was only natural that the Church began to think of itself in this same way. The Father, according to the thinking of the Fathers, began this formation process with the Israelites and brought it to fulfillment in the Church, the followers of the Jesus Way (we do well to remember that in the early Church the Jesus movement was considered the “Way”).

As we know, a person is not initiated into God’s people by physical birth but by a spiritual birth through the Initiation Rites: Baptism, Chrismation and Holy Eucharist. These three rituals recognize and celebrate three of life’s Mysteries: Birth, Life and the Positive Powers we have as humans to love, think and forgive.

Universal Call to Holiness

In the Eastern Church the celebration of these Mysteries have a different understanding that in the Western Church. Baptism is a ritual which recognizes that the life-force which brings a new person intoexistence is none-other-than God Himself. Human life is a sharing in Divine Life. Water is the ultimate symbol of life. Through immersion (i.e., the traditional way of celebrating Baptism) we symbolically represent that it is through Christ’s death and resurrection that we come to this awareness about life. When the Church first came up with the ritual for Baptism, she recognized that John the Baptizer used the ritual of immersion to signify death to an old way of living and birth to a new way (metanoia). The immersion into water therefore came to signify burial to an old way of thinking which results in resurrection to a new way of thinking about life and God. (In the West, after Augustine’s development of the idea of Original Sin, Baptism took on the symbolism of “washing away” the stain which is the sin of Adam. This is not how the Eastern Church interprets Baptism).

Chrismation is the ritual we perform to help us understand that God’s Spirit is within us, giving us the wonderful powers that we have as human beings. It is critical that we come to an understanding that God’s Spirit is within us.

Holy Eucharist is given since we need the Heavenly Food (i.e., Eucharist) given to us by Jesus, in order to grow in our understanding of the meaning of life