Pages

Saturday 26 July 2014

What's Bread and Wine got to do with it? (Being a Eucharistic Community)

Today, as some of you may be relieved to hear(!) we reach the last in our Sermon Series on 'Marks of an Authentic Church'.  We have ranged over a wide area of thinking, which has included Jesus' priority for the poor and sick, the generosity of God's grace, and the notion of sin as the absence of love.  We have thought about our calling to be producers, not consumers, and how we need to have an intelligent understanding of Scripture.  We've wondered about how to blend the mystical with the scientific, and how we can be tolerant and open to all.  We've thought about how to embrace tradition while being open to the contemporary.  And last week, we we challenged to understand that forgiveness is how the world is set right.

Today, I want to wrap up this series by talking about something that we do, every week, year in and year out, which I believe crystallises all these ideas.  It's something that takes so much of the thinking we've been doing, and wraps it all up in a beautiful little parcel.  I'm speaking of course, about the Mass, or the Holy Communion, or the Lord's Supper, or the Eucharist....whatever your favourite name for this service is!

Actually, all these different names are important...because they spring out of the ongoing debates in the church, all around the world, about the primary meaning of this liturgy.  Those who use the word 'Eucharist' are drawing from the Greek word 'eucharistia' which means 'thanksgiving'.  For them, the key moment of this service is the eucharistic, or thanksgiving prayer, during which the people of God are reminded of God's actions in the world and in their lives through Christ and the Holy Spirit.  The Eucharist is where we give thanks to God for the sacrificial death of Christ, and commit ourselves to live new lives following his example.

For those who prefer the term Holy Communion, it is the more 'communal' aspects of the service which are important.  Through the liturgy, the 'community' comes together, and communes with God and one another, before going out to love and serve the Lord in the community.  It is that 'communal' emphasis that has led the Church of England to mainly prefer the title 'Holy Communion' than some of the other options.  We are a parish church, called to serve a certain parish, in a certain community.  We invite others to an ever more Holy Way of being in communion, and in community.

The Lord's Supper is a term mainly used by what we call 'non-conformist' churches - those who do not conform to the teachings of the historical orthodox and catholic versions of Christianity.  Most Lord's Suppers are, to most traditional Christians, a very stripped-back, bare version of the liturgy.  The main focus of a Lord's Supper is the meal of bread and wine, which is consumed (mainly) as a memorial of Christ's death.  A Lord's Supper tends to focus on the meal as a historical event, rather than (as the traditional churches teach) something which is still happening today.  The bread and the wine are tokens, rather than something which by the Holy Spirit, is mysteriously transformed into the body and blood of Jesus - whether that is meant spiritually or literally.  The piece of furniture on which this happens is called the Lord's Table, rather than an Altar - because non-conformists prefer to believe that what happened once cannot be repeated again.  For them, the sacrifice of Christ was made once for all, and cannot be repeated.  Those who prefer the term Altar claim that in some spiritual sense Christ continues to sacrifice himself again and again for the life of the world...and therefore, the place on which this Sacrifice is made present would be called an Altar.

There are many, many other names for this central feast of the Christian Church, and many many ways of interpreting all the different elements that it includes.  For example, some Christians call this 'The Table of the Lord' - the 'Mensa Domini'.  Some call it 'the Lord's Body' - the Corpus Domini.  Some call it the 'Holy of Holies' - the 'Sanctissimum', or the 'Eulogia' (the Blessing) or the Synaxis (the Assembly).  And there are others!  The main alternative that I suspect you have all heard is of course The Mass.  There are debates around where that particular title came from.  One idea is that the word comes from the same root as the word 'Mess' - as is used on ships all over the world.  Its the place of 'the Meal' - so the The Mass is The Meal.  Another discussion is around the Latin words of dismissal, at the end of the service:  "Ite, Missa Est', which directly translates as 'Go, the dismissal is made'.  Some scholars believe the word Missa is form of the Latin verb 'to send' - so would translate the phrase as 'You are sent' - emphasising that having received the spiritual nourishment of the Eucharist, we are sent out into the world 'to love and serve the Lord'.

And all of this is very interesting...especially to a geek like me!  But of course, the real question is this:  what is the Service for?!  What's is its fundamental purpose?  Why do we do it, and why should we continue doing it?

Surprisingly, one of the most profound answers that I've found to these questions comes from an Atheist.  The philosopher Alain de Botton has written a description of what he calls 'the Mass', which is well worth hearing (in his stimulating and challenging book "Religion for Athiests: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion").  For him, the Mass is an antedote to so much of the loneliness and self-absorption of modern society - and he argues that Atheists need to learn from the Church.   For example, he praises the Mass for the way that it brings people together in community around a meal.  He points out that with declining church attendance we have seen an exponential rise in Restaurants - because people have an inbuilt human need to congregate around a table.  But, he points out, "contemporary restaurants pay lip service to the notion of companionability'.  They fail to "introduce patrons to one another, to dispel their mutual suspicions, to break up the clans into which people chronically segregate themselves or to get them to open up their hearts and share their vulnerabilities with others.  The focus is on the food and the decor, never on opportunities for extending and deepening affections.  ...When the meal itself - the texture of the escalopes or the moistness of the courgettes - has become the main attraction, we can be sure that something has gone awry.  Patrons will tend to leave restaurants much as they entered them, the experience having merely affirmed existing tribal divisions.  ....Restaurants are adept at gathering people into the same space [like churches] and yet Restaurants lack any means of encouraging them to make meaningful contact with one another once they are there."  (Minor editing and contraction is mine).

In contrast, de Botton says these things about the Mass...

"The composition of the congregation feels significant.  Those in attendance tend not to be uniformly of the same age, race, profession or educational or income level; they are a random sampling of souls united only by their shared commitment to certain values"

"The Mass actively breaks down the economic and status subgroups within which we normally operate, casting us into a wider sea of humanity."

"If there are so many reference in the Mass to poverty, sadness, failure and loss, it is because the Church views the ill, the frail of mind, the desperate and the elderly as representing aspects of humanity and (even more meaningfully) of ourselves which we are tempted to deny, but which bring us, when we can acknowledge them, closer to our need for one another."

The Mass "should inspire visitors to suspend their customary frightened egoism in favour of joyful immersion in a collective spirit - an unlikely scenario in the majority of modern community centres"

These are all brilliant observations, I think.  de Botton uses them as the basis for designing a new kind of Restaurant - and Agape Restaurant - where guests would be coaxed away "from customary expressions of superbia ('What do you do?, 'Where do your children go to school?) and towards a more sincere revelation of themselves ('What do you regret?' 'Whom can you not forgive?' 'What do you fear?')."  The liturgy of such a Restaurant, argues de Botton, would "as in the Mass, inspire charity in the deepest sense, a capacity to respond with complexity and compassion to the existence of our fellow creatures."

I rather like the idea of de Botton's Agape Restaurant.  In fact, if he did but know it, such restaurants already exist in many churches.  We have one, just like that, in our Community Cafe, and so does the Portsmouth Family Church, the Wesley Methodist Centre, and the Pastoral Centre in Emsworth.  This is what Authentic Christians do - we take a simple idea from the normal plane of modern existence...in our case, the idea of eating together.  Then we transform it, with God's help, into something holy, by introducing the idea of community - teaching people to love their neighbour as they love themselves.  We give every visitor a warm welcome, and the chance, if they wish, to think about the deep questions of existence.

And that is what the Mass, or the Holy Communion, is about too.  It's the place where people from all walks of life can come together, united by a common Vision of what the world could be like.  We are united by a common love for God and the things of God.  We are united by a common understanding that none of us is free of sin, and we all need to give and receive forgiveness...from God and each other.  We are united by a common meal, in which we take into ourselves the very stuff of God, in bread and wine; so that he may give us sustenance for the next stage of our life...whether that be the next day, or the next month.  Together, we recite historic words of faith, like the Creed.  Many of us might struggle with the accuracy of some of the words we recite, but nevertheless they tie us to the previous generations who have believed before us. Together we offer up the world, in all its chaos and pain, and challenge ourselves to be part of the solution to the world's problems.  We share peace with each other...even with people who we would normally not think of as friends.  And together, we commit ourselves to going out in the name of Christ, to love and serve the world.

What could be a more appropriate and magnificent thing for Christians - let alone Athiests! - to do?

Amen.

Sermons in this series:

1) Introduction

1a) Reflecting Jesus' priority for the poor and the sick.

2) Having a wide and generous understanding of God's grace - Jesus poured out grace and forgiveness to everyone he met.  Are we the same?

3) Understanding Sin as the absence of Love - How should we understand Sin?  Breaking Rules?  Who decides what is Sin anyway?

4) Encouraging Christ-ians to be producers, not consumers - We live in a consumer society. Is there a danger that some of us ‘consume’ Christianity?

5) Having an intelligent understanding of Scripture - How do we approach the Bible?  A hand-written text from God?

6) Blending the scientific with the mystical - Was the world created in six days?  How did Noah get all those animals onto the Ark?!

7) Being tolerant and open to all - How do we connect with other human beings?

8) Embracing tradition while being open to the contemporary - How can we honour the old and embrace the new?

9) Understanding that forgiveness is How the World is Set Right - Is forgiveness the answer to the World’s problems?

10) Being a Eucharistic Community - How does taking Jesus into ourselves help us?












No comments:

Post a Comment