What are the Church's responsibilities in the Sacraments?


{In this post the word "Church" means "The mystical Body of Christ, which is the blessed company of all faithful people" -- that is to say, you, me, and the guy at the end of the pew who looks funny (and also the Church Triumphant, i.e. the risen saints, but in this post I'm targetting the Church Militant).}

When my darling daughters were baptized, the congregation stood up in church, listened to the priest's question "will you who witness these vows do all that is in your power to support these people in their new life in Christ?", and answered aloud, "We will!"

The next week, and for the next 250 weeks, give or take, one or another of the ACW ladies would discretely suggest to me that actually bringing my baby/toddler(s) into Church was inappropriate behaviour and that everyone would be better off if I conformed to the norms and left my children with the child-minder in the church basement like all the other young mothers. Having a strong paedagogical foundation myself, I ignored this bad advice and kept on bringing my children where they could hear the Liturgy, see and touch the iconography, smell the incense, and taste and see that the Lord is good. The good ladies responded with harassment that ended in us worshipping elsewhere for the sake of the children.

The ironic part is that most of those ladies were there, and opened their mouths, and apparently voiced that ringing "We Will" along with every other member of the congregation.

We have seven sacraments. Although many of them seem personal or individual -- unction, reconciliation, and marriage in particular -- all the sacraments are given to the Church and intended for building up of the Church.

I recently heard a suggestion on the role that a divorce liturgy could play for the Church: that a divorce liturgy is needed as a way for the community of faith to acknowledge its own responsibility for a marriage that failed; that though the church is 100% responsible, it shares responsibility. The refusal of churches to acknowledge this is a major contributing factor to the high divorce rate among Christians.

We similarly have the occasional rite for reaffirmation of baptismal vows by adults who are returning to the church after having "fallen away". In most Anglican jurisdictions, very little emphasis if any is placed on the "penitence" of the returning believer. But in those jurisdictions that do frame this rite as "Reception of a Penitent", commentors have similarly remarked on the need for the Church to express its penitence over the alienation or lack of nurture that caused the "lost sheep" to get lost in the first place. Whatever it was, was it not a violation of that mutual responsibility we have in Baptism, to do all that is in our power to support one another in our new life in Christ?

That both Matrimony and Baptism offer us examples of the Church's failing to fulfil our sacramental calling, begs the question of how we may be failing in our responsibility regarding the other sacraments. Certainly we can all think of examples where we have failed to support the Sacrament of Ordination, by undermining our own Priests and Bishops.

But the more important question is not, how have we failed to live up to our responsibilities; but rather, what are we called to do in order to fulfill our responsibilities to one another in the Sacraments?